1917 and the revisionists

National Interest, The, Spring, 1993 by Richard Pipes

This failure of revisionist historiography invalidates its entire image of October 1917. For it is inconceivable that in a matter of weeks, or at most months, the masses, had they really been the force behind October, would have meekly surrendered power to a party that, judging by the elections to the Constituent Assembly, represented less than one-quarter of the nation. The only explanation that makes sense is that the masses were, as the traditionalists would have it, only marginally involved, mainly as a destructive force, and that October was, indeed, a putsch by a party bent on monopolizing authority.

The reason for the one-party dictatorship lay not in the exigencies of the Civil War but in Lenin's openly stated determination to make a revolution from above, that is, for the people but not by the people, and then to monopolize in his hands legislative, executive and judiciary authority. In essence he followed the political strategy of Louis August Blanqui, the mid-nineteenth-century French radical, the leading proponent of power seizure by conspiracy. The inevitable consequences of a revolution made in this manner were evident already to Engels, who wrote in the 1870s:

From the fact that Blanqui conceives every

revolution as a coup of a small revolutionary

minority follows the necessity of a dictatorship

after success has been attained: obviously not

the dictatorship of the entire revolutionary

class, the proletariat, but of a small number of

those who had carried out the coup...(16)

The revisionists seem as unfamiliar with these ideas as they are with those of anarchosyndicalism and for the same reason, namely neglect of ideology and intellectual history.

But even thus handicapped there is no reason why they should be puzzled by the outcome of October, since documents from the time of the Revolution carry predictions to this effect. There are the numerous warnings of liberals and socialists that Lenin was bent on becoming a dictator. Some of Lenin's own associates realized that as well. When, on November 4, barely one week after the successful coup, Lenin refused to admit Mensheviks and Socialists-Revolutionaries into his government, four Bolshevik commissars resigned their cabinet posts. They explained their action in an Open Letter in which they stated that a government composed exclusively of Bolsheviks could maintain itself in power only by means of "political terror" which would result in "the removal of mass proletarian organizations from the management of political life, the establishment of an irresponsible regime, and the destruction of the Revolution and the country."(17)

By insisting that politics do not matter, the revisionists have managed to lose sight of this simple reality.

THE REVISIONISTS, viewing themselves as a community, like to "interact." This they accomplish by consulting one another on work in progress, commenting on each other's writings, as well as consorting at colloquia, seminars, and conferences to which they invite exclusively those of a similar persuasion or, at least, neutrally disposed. Their mutual admiration occasionally assumes mawkish forms as illustrated by the following passage, more appropriate to a high school yearbook than a scholarly monograph, from the introduction to a book jointly written by two prominent revisionists, Diane Koenker and William Rosenberg: