Pub Date : 2019-08-08DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842705.003.0006
Jay Bergman
Chapter 6 shows in detail the degree to which concepts and categories particular to the French Revolution permeated political debate in Russia in 1917 between the February and the October Revolutions. It also shows Lenin relying on what he understood (or misunderstood) to be the essence of Jacobinism in advocating an armed insurrection in Petrograd before the preconditions for a proletarian revolution, as Marx and Engels had described them, existed. This was a dilemma that Lenin, by 1917, had wrestled with for well over a decade; that the Jacobins, in 1792–3, provided a scenario for taking power successfully after a revolution in their own country had begun helps to explain the Bolsheviks’ decision in October 1917 to carry out an armed insurrection in Petrograd that would supersede the revolution that had occurred in February.
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Pub Date : 2019-08-08DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842705.003.0008
Jay Bergman
Chapter 8 describes the origins of the debate over Thermidor—the phase in the French Revolution following the Jacobin Terror—in the New Economic Policy Lenin initiated in 1921. It also shows the role the concept played in the struggle for power to succeed Lenin. The debate over what its realization in the Soviet Union would entail reflected the very real fear among the Bolsheviks that their revolution might end before the construction of socialism had even begun. To them, Thermidor was virtually a synonym for counter-revolution. For mostly political purposes—but also because their fear of it was real—Stalin and Bukharin, in the mid-1920s, argued that to evoke the danger of a Soviet Thermidor was tantamount to advocating it. Trotsky, who always considered analogies with French revolutions instructive, in the 1920s defined Thermidor as a form of counter-revolution. But since, in his opinion, it had not yet occurred in the Soviet Union, there was reason to believe it could be avoided altogether.
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Pub Date : 2019-08-08DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842705.003.0016
Jay Bergman
Notwithstanding the inspiration, the legitimacy, and the fodder for political polemics France’s revolutions provided, the Bolsheviks would have been better off had they known nothing of the French Revolution, and of the revolutions in France that followed it in 1830, 1848, and 1871. The analogies they drew with these revolutions—even those they rejected to show how distinctive their own proletarian revolution would be—obfuscated and obscured more than they clarified. Indeed, the Bolsheviks’ unfortunate infatuation with French revolutions from 1789 to 1871 lends credence to James Bryce’s assertion in 1908 in The American Commonwealth that ‘the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies’.
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"Jay Bergman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198842705.003.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198842705.003.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Notwithstanding the inspiration, the legitimacy, and the fodder for political polemics France’s revolutions provided, the Bolsheviks would have been better off had they known nothing of the French Revolution, and of the revolutions in France that followed it in 1830, 1848, and 1871. The analogies they drew with these revolutions—even those they rejected to show how distinctive their own proletarian revolution would be—obfuscated and obscured more than they clarified. Indeed, the Bolsheviks’ unfortunate infatuation with French revolutions from 1789 to 1871 lends credence to James Bryce’s assertion in 1908 in The American Commonwealth that ‘the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies’.","PeriodicalId":412145,"journal":{"name":"The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture","volume":"131 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128463791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-08-08DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842705.003.0012
Jay Bergman
Neither Marx nor Lenin wrote much about the Revolution of 1830. This was largely because the revolution stopped too soon, thereby merely ratifying changes within the bourgeoisie instead of replacing the capitalist system (that existed to benefit the bourgeoisie) with a proletarian one. In the way the Bolsheviks explained it, the bourgeoisie split in the 1820s into more prosperous elements favouring the continuation of the Bourbon Restoration and less affluent ones that in 1830 were able to install the so-called Orléanists in power. This split, which continued, ensured the latter’s quick demise. But the proletariat was still too small and too weak and insufficiently radical politically to succeed it. However, despite its limited consequences, the Revolution of 1830 served the enormously important purpose of showing that the French Revolution, while sui generis in many ways, was also the first in a series of revolutions in the history of France that together constituted a genuine tradition of revolution.
{"title":"The Revolution That Stopped Too Soon","authors":"Jay Bergman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198842705.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198842705.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Neither Marx nor Lenin wrote much about the Revolution of 1830. This was largely because the revolution stopped too soon, thereby merely ratifying changes within the bourgeoisie instead of replacing the capitalist system (that existed to benefit the bourgeoisie) with a proletarian one. In the way the Bolsheviks explained it, the bourgeoisie split in the 1820s into more prosperous elements favouring the continuation of the Bourbon Restoration and less affluent ones that in 1830 were able to install the so-called Orléanists in power. This split, which continued, ensured the latter’s quick demise. But the proletariat was still too small and too weak and insufficiently radical politically to succeed it. However, despite its limited consequences, the Revolution of 1830 served the enormously important purpose of showing that the French Revolution, while sui generis in many ways, was also the first in a series of revolutions in the history of France that together constituted a genuine tradition of revolution.","PeriodicalId":412145,"journal":{"name":"The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127348701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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