Melberg, Hans O., Interpreting history (review of Aa. Egge: Fra Aleksander II til Boris Yeltsin)

_{[Note for bibliographic reference: Melberg, Hans O. (1996), Interpreting history
(Review of Aa. Egge, Fra Aleksander II til Boris Yeltsin), http://www.oocities.org/hmelberg/papers/960509.htm]

Interpreting history

by Hans O. Melberg

Aasmund Egge: Fra Aleksander II til Boris Yeltsin (in Norwegian)

Oslo, Universitetsforlaget, 1993

ISBN 82 00 21213 0

318 pages

Introduction

Writing a textbook of more than one hundred years of Russian history in about 300 pages is
a not an enviable task. One is bound to receive criticism for leaving out certain
questions, for not going into enough detail and in general for being superficial. The book
under review, Aasmund Egge's From Alexander II to Boris Yeltsin succeeds reasonably
well in giving the reader a factual overview of events. However, it is also a seriously
flawed book because of mistakes of interpretation. I shall give two examples. First,
Egge's discussion of whether October 1917 represented a coup or a revolution. Second,
whether the nature of the Bolshevik regime was mainly caused by circumstances or ideology.

A coup or a revolution?

One difference between a coup and a revolution is the level of mass support behind those
who take power. Mass support can take two forms: Active participation and passive
cooperation (meaning agreement, not only lack of active opposition). The question is then
how much mass support the Bolsheviks had in October 1917.

Egge does not want to call the events of October 1917 a coup (p. 103). He gives three
reasons. First, the Bolsheviks were supported by a majority of the workers. Second, the
Bolshevik support among the peasants was growing. Third, the Provisional Government did
not have mass support. To support these claims he uses the election result to the
Constituent Assembly (without citing the actual number of representatives each party
received).

My first objection is that even if the Bolsheviks had majority support among the workers
(which is debatable) the point is that they did not have a majority in the people as a
whole. The workers were only a very small part of a largely peasant population. The
election to the Constituent Assembly showed precisely that the Bolsheviks did not
have a majority. They got 175 seats, while the Social Revolutionary Party (peasant
oriented) got 370 seats.1 True, the left Social Revolutionaries (40
representatives) supported the Bolsheviks, but this did not create a majority.

Moreover, the Bolsheviks got elected by making false promises. Their slogans of peace,
land and power to the Soviets were nothing but tactical devices which they had no
intention of keeping. They promised the peasants land, but gave them collectivization.
They promised peace, but started a war on society to reshape it the way they wanted. They
preached the withering away of the State, but in reality the power of the Party and the
State was greatly increased while the Soviets were reduced to a ceremonial formality. One
might argue that all politicians promise more than they keep. This is true but, as Richard
Pipes has noted, the Bolsheviks promised the voters the opposite of what they would
do. Thus, the election result should not be interpreted as an indicator of support for the
true Bolsheviks or the policies they actually followed.

Third, the lack of support for the Provisional Government is largely irrelevant. The
question is whether the Bolsheviks were supported by a majority. A lack of support for the
Provisional Government does not imply a corresponding high level of support for the
Bolsheviks. People may be against both alternatives and in favour of a third alternative
such as a (real) coalition government. Hence, I do not think the lack of support for the
Provisional Government makes a difference as to whether the Bolsheviks led a coup or a
revolution.

Lastly, one may note that events of October lack the characteristic trademark of a
revolution: popular uprisings on a mass scale. In contrast to the February revolution,
there were no large demonstrations or uprisings in October. In the words of A. J. P
Taylor: " Most people in Petrograd did not even know that a revolution was taking
place. The trams were running, the fashionable restaurants were crowded, the theatres were
crowded and the Chaliapin was singing in the Opera." 1 There was
no mass uprising, the Bolsheviks simply found power laying in the streets and picked it
up.

One may go on to debate the definitions of a coup and a real revolution in order prove
that October 1917 was one of the two. In the above I have used two criteria: the level of
mass support (passive) and the level of mass involvement (active). On both accounts the
Bolsheviks were far away from a majority. For the sake of fairness I should mention that
Egge and I largely agree on what actually happened - that a minority group took power. We
may then disagree on the definition of a coup (as opposed to a revolution). One may then
question whether this is a debate which is worth pursuing. Is it not a petty quibble about
words and definitions?

To some extent it may be an academic quarrel, but the label we put on October 1917 is
important in one respect: The legitimacy of the Bolshevik regime. If they came to power by
what we call a revolution then we are more inclined to view their rule as legitimate. If
they came to power by a coup then the very origin of their rule was illegitimate. This
classification, in turn, had real policy implications such as whether to support the
Whites in the civil war. Thus, it whether October 1917 was a coup or a revolution was not
a purely academic question.

Ideology or Circumstances as causal factors

The second flaw in Egge's book is his emphasis on circumstances above ideology as a causal
factor in the formation of policies. Three example should suffice:

First, Egge argues that War Communism was the result of the situation created by the Civil
War (p. 116). He qualifies this by arguing ideology played a part later, since Lenin came
to believe that War Communism could shorten the transformation to Communism. Against this
I would argue that Lenin believed in War Communism long before it actually started.
Lenin had studied and praised the economic organization of Germany during World War I
which was very similar to War Communism. (For more on this see chapter 4 in M. Malia's The
Soviet Tragedy ).

Second, Egge argues that the erosion of the distinction between the Party and the State
was not an obvious or intended development (p. 125). On the contrary he takes the
Bolshevik slogan of "All power to the Soviets" as a sign that the Bolsheviks did
not want to fuse the State and the Party. In my opinion this is a gross mistake. Egge uses
the slogan of the Bolsheviks at face value without examining whether it was used for
tactical purposes. Several other historians, such as R. Pipes and M. Malia have argued -
convincingly in my opinion - that the slogan was not an expression of the real intentions
of the Bolsheviks. Instead it was a tactical move, used as long as it supported the
Bolshevik cause and abandoned as soon as it did not. This may sound conspiratorial, but
there is plenty of historical examples to support the belief that the Bolsheviks used this
strategy. To give one example, the Bolsheviks promised to give the nationalities the right
to free self-determination in order to get their support to bring the Tsar down. Having
accomplished this, they broke their promise and used force to keep the nationalities -
such as Georgia - within the Russian empire.

Third, Egge writes that "nothing before the revolution indicated that the Bolsheviks
were supporters of a one-party state." (p. 121 - my translation). The resulting
one-party state was thus, in Egge's opinion, the result of the demands of the civil war
and a reaction to the terror of the anti-Bolshevik forces. In my opinion this is another
seriously mistaken interpretation. I believe there was plenty of evidence - explicit in
writings and actions and implicit in their views - that the Bolsheviks aimed at total
control.

The theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat is often used as evidence that the
Bolsheviks wanted a one party state. It may be possible - as Egge does - to interpret the
phrase "the dictatorship of the proletariat" so as to avoid a one-party state.
Lenin himself wrote that "dictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of
democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over the other classes." 3 However, he also wrote that "The elite must be organized like a
miniature army, disciplined and loyal to the commander" 4.
According to Lenin, the workers alone would only develop a trade-union consciousness (i.e.
only seek economic benefits, not major political change), hence the Party needed to lead
the workers. On this theory there can be no elections since Lenin implicitly argues that
the electors are not "mature" enough to elect the correct party i.e. the
Bolshevik Party. Thus, although one can interpret the dictatorship of the proletariat to
be compatible with some sort of democracy, it is difficult to reconcile Lenin's theory of
the vanguard Party with a multi-party state

More important than words, the Bolsheviks had demonstrated by their actions that they did
not want to share power. In fact, when the party split in 1903, it did so precisely
because of Lenin's insistence on conducting a revolution through a tightly and
hierarchically organized force. Moreover, the Bolsheviks had tried to take power even
before October 1917 (in July). Lastly, they had stacked the Military Revolutionary
Committees with their own supporters - a sign that they wanted exclusive control over the
revolution. These, and other actions, should count for more than words when we want to
examine the true intentions of the Bolsheviks. For historians it is inexcusable to take
words as sign of intentions when there are actions which contradict the words. The
Bolshevik history demonstrates this as exemplified by the mentioned falsity of their
slogan "All power to the Soviets" or their promise of land to the peasants.

Finally, it was implicit in their political views that the Bolsheviks were going to create
a one-party state. At the core of their ideology was the belief that they had discovered
the scientific laws of society. There would be no more conflicts or competing
value-systems. Politics was to become the administration of things according to scientific
criteria, a mere matter of simple calculation - not a debate over which ends should be
chosen. In this remarkably naive view of politics (since it ignores the problems created
by bureaucracies), there was no room for parties. In the West we like to think that
parties ultimately represent different conceptions of the good society. People are then
allowed to choose the party with the view that is closest to their own. The role of
parties is thus to represent competing conceptions of the good society. If there is no
disagreement on what the good society is - as the Bolsheviks believed - there is no role
for parties or politics. In this way I believe it was implicit in the views of the
Bolsheviks that they were going to create a one-party state.

Based on the above arguments I disagree with Egge that there were no signs that the
Bolsheviks were going to establish a one-party state before 1917. On the more general
question of the relative importance of circumstances as compared to ideology in the
formation of Communist policies, I also maintain the relative importance of ideology. That
is not to say that circumstances were unimportant. We may have a case of causal
overdetermination in which both ideology and circumstances point in the same direction. My
reason for maintaining the relative primacy of ideology would then be the counterfactual
statement that even if the circumstances were not present (i.e.. there was no civil war),
the Bolsheviks would still try to implement their ideology and create a centralized,
one-party state.

Conclusion

I have presented several arguments against Egge's interpretation of important events in
the Soviet Union. Taken together these are serious enough to make me reluctant to
recommend the book. This is unfortunate because it also contains a clear and useful
factual overview of the history of Russia.

NOTES

1. L. Kohan and R. Abraham (1983), p. 309

2. J. Reed (1977), p xvi. (Taylor's Introduction to Reed's book)

3. V. I. Lenin - Selected Works (here: The proletarian revolution and the renegade
Kautsky), p. 40

4. T. H. von Laue (1971), p. 92

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Egge, �smund (1993), Fra Aleksander II til Boris Yeltsin, Oslo:
Universitetsforlaget

Kochan L. and Abraham R. (1983), The Making of Modern Russia, Middlesex: Penguin
Books Ltd.

Lenin, V. I. (1953), Selected Works Volume II, Part 2, London: Lawrence and Wishart
Ltd.

Laue von, Theodore H. (1971), Why Lenin? Why Stalin?, New York: J. B. Lippincot
Company

Malia, Martin (1994), The Sovet Tragedy, New York: The Free Press

Pipes, Richard (1994), Communism: The Vanished Specter, Oslo: Scandinavian
University Press

Reed, John (1977, first 1919), Ten Days that shook the world, Middlesex: Penguin
Books

_{[Note for bibliographic reference: Melberg, Hans O. (1996), Interpreting history
(Review of Aa. Egge, Fra Aleksander II til Boris Yeltsin), http://www.oocities.org/hmelberg/papers/960509.htm]}}