Mythologizing the New Soviet Regime

Abstract

Chapter 7 begins by examining how the specific issue of the Jacobin Terror served as a relevant analogue, to be welcomed or rejected, as Lenin and Trotsky pondered the efficacy—and even, on occasion, the morality—of consolidating power after the October coup d’état through the application of terror. The narrative then widens to describe how the French Revolution informed the music, theatre, literature, and visual arts that were mobilized in the creation of a mythology the Bolsheviks needed both to justify the October Revolution retroactively, and prospectively to sanction the construction of socialism in a country that by Marxist criteria was not yet ready for it. Special attention is paid to the grandiose fêtes the Bolsheviks staged in Petrograd and Moscow, in deliberate imitation of those the Jacobins staged in the French Revolution, to generate the mass support they lacked.