The Russian Revolution at 100: Sorting through the Interpretations

ABSTRACT

The Russian Revolution is being celebrated worldwide, at its 100th anniversary. There are, however, diverse interpretations of this historic event. Three of these are common among progressive scholars and activists: (1) “Dawn of a New Age,” which sees the Revolution as the beginning of a line of unbroken progress toward communism; (2) “Shangri-La,” the Revolution as an all-but-impossible dream of a working-class utopia, which may or may not ever reach fulfillment; and (3) “Inevitable Thermidor,” which views 1917 as a brief moment of working-class triumph that was then overturned and replaced by dictatorship and tragedy. Against all of these views, a fourth interpretation is possible: “October 1917 as Defining Moment.” The Revolution planted early socialist seeds, which bore fruit only much later. Despite the demise of the socialist states in 1989–1991, the early socialist system laid the foundations for the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the breakup of the old colonial systems worldwide, and for progressive gains yet to come. With due allowance for the failures and weaknesses of the Soviet experience, and for the retreats and complexities that occur along the path of social progress, the Russian Revolution still stands as a signal historic moment, with a direct link to the early socialist transformations of the twentieth century, and to the further steps toward human fulfillment that are yet to come.

KEYWORDS:

• Russian Revolution
• socialism
• Soviet economic system

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

David Laibman is Professor Emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College and the Graduate School of City University of New York, Editor of Science & Society, and the author of Deep History: A Study in Social Evolution and Human Potential (2007), Political Economy after Economics: Scientific Method and Radical Imagination (2011), and Passion and Patience (2015).

Notes

1 The claims in this paper are clearly controversial, and no attempt is made here to provide a full, let alone decisive, set of references. Representatives of the interpretations identified in this section are too numerous to count, and particular authors usually reveal these ideal types in distinctive combinations. For “Dawn of a New Age,” the official Soviet historiography (Kuusinen 1964) is an exemplar; see also Lawson (1967). The “Shangri-La” and “Inevitable Thermidor” interpretations appear, often together, in many Western Left accounts of the Revolution; recent instances, both from Verso Press, are Žižek (2017) and Miéville (2017). A classic reference is Trotsky (2004).

2 My own analysis of the evolution of the Soviet planning-and-management system, with additional sources cited, can be found in Laibman (1992, ch. 14); Laibman (2015a, ch. 8 and 9).