On a People's Tragedy

In this work, Figes makes two arguments that are not fully apparent until the conclusion: First, the Russian people were not “betrayed” by the Revolution. Instead, the devolution of the Revolution was, in Figes’s view, the result of the inability of the Russian people to come to terms with democratic institutions. He finds that the period between 1905-1914 represented Russia’s “liberal democratic” revolution, but it did not produce the reforms necessary to instill confidence in the Russian people. Indeed, the Bolsheviks were a veritable product of the Russian messianic tradition. Second, it was not the leaders of the Revolution who were necessarily at fault. Figes admits that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kerensky, and numerous others arrived in 1917 with truly high-minded, noble goals. Instead, Figes argues that the goals of revolutionary leaders were outright unattainable and were doomed to fail.

Perhaps Figes is right, but I disagree with him on both accounts. To me, the first argument reeks of Western chauvinism with the implication that “we Westerners could properly democratize due to our democratic heritage” (ignoring Germany’s failures with democracy before 1945 and utter success after, the development of fascism and authoritarianism in Spain and Italy, France’s difficult relationship with liberal democracy, etc.). On his second point, no pathway was a fait accompli for the Revolution. Instead, there were numerous decisions made, some of which would have led to greater democratization, some to more authoritarianism than we saw even in the Stalinist period. Perhaps the ideals of the Revolution were too great to be implemented in reality, but Revolutionaries could have adopted policies that brought the Russian state closer to their ideals without abandoning them outright. I think that the Russian Revolution was necessary, and that it was not innately bad, but I think Figes downplays the decisions that were made in his conclusion.

The last paragraph of the book, however, seems almost prophetic (being written even before Putin took power):

Perhaps even more worrying, authoritarian nationalism has begun to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Communism, and in a way has reinvented it, not just in the sense that today’s nationalists are, for the most part, reformed Communists, but also in the sense that their violent rhetoric, with its calls for discipline and order, its angry condemnation of the inequalities produced by the growth of capitalism, and its xenophobic reject of the West, is itself adapted from the Bolshevik tradition. The ghosts of 1917 have not been laid to rest.

Today, as we are well aware, nationalism is the guiding ideology of the modern Russian state, and it is rather authoritarian. This fits further in Figes’s view that “Russians have not learned to be good liberals,” but I think it says more about global patterns than something specifically Russian. Although former Soviet states held the vanguard of resurgent nationalism, it is now a global phenomenon—ranging from Poland’s Law and Justice to Turkey’s AKP and India’s BJP. Even the American GOP and British Conservative Party have, in many ways, turned to authoritarian nationalism. Yet, there is nothing inevitable about this turn. I find it unequivocally bad, but it is, as we should be well aware, not intrinsic to the Russian people.