The Russian revolution as a response to challenge from without: An appraisal with Hindsight

Like any other major event in history that caused a thorough transformation of the state and society, the Russian revolution cannot be properly understood as an isolated phenomenon. The objectives of the revolutionary movement in Russia were in many respects conditioned by contact with the European West, and the policy of the USSR was to a large extent dictated by a challenge — the wish to catch up, and if possible overtake, the West. But Russia was not alone in this respect. At the same epoch three other empires, the Ottoman, the Persian and the Chinese, also went through a revolutionary process of transformation, though with differing orientations and aims. Turkey opted for a complete Europeanization, Iran eventually turned for inspiration to its own tradition. Russia and China opted for something entirely new that would marry together two objectives: appropriation of Western technology and knowhow, and the preservation of the country's identity as a particular civilization. Marxism, as an heretical school of thought in the West, was found adaptable to the respective domestic traditions — to such an extent that it could provide, in various versions, the ideological guideline for a complex societal reconstruction. However, in contrast to the original objectives of Marxism, in the Soviet Union it was mainly the power of the state that benefited from the post‐revolutionary transformation, whilst civil society was left behind. Here the challenge of the West lives on unabated; here also are to be found the roots of the new quest for a perestroika.