For the historian Eric Hobsbawm, not only was the Russian Revolution the central event of the 20th century, just as the French Revolution was to the previous century, but its impact was ‘far more profound’ and the ‘global repercussions’ much greater. Of course, it failed, disastrously, but even so it is hard to argue with this assessment. one hundred years later, however, as many commentators have noticed, there is little acknowledgement let alone celebration of those 10 days that shook the world.
‘It’s odd to find’, writes historian Sheila Fitzpatrick (no relation), ‘that our collective assessment of the Russian Revolution should now be more negative than it was during the Cold War’. Noting that even exhibitions of the art and culture of the revolution seem to attract condescension and condemnation, she asks: ‘Has sanctimoniousness become endemic in the world of Anglophone public intellectuals?’
It is welcome, therefore, that in his excellent October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, China Mieville has captured the way in which an anarchic popular upsurge was transformed into the successful seizure of state power by a revolutionary working-class party. As Mieville makes clear, there was nothing accidental or fortuitous about it. Although tumultuous events threw up the opening, it was a revolution that had been a long time in the pipeline. Unlike the French Revolution, it was planned, and not only did it succeed, but the Bolshevik party pioneered a model that was readily adaptable to other countries, even in the most backward regions. Just as the Bolsheviks inspired the masses around the world, they struck terror into the hearts of the ruling elites.
Nor has there been much celebration of the final implosion of the revolution’s successor, the Soviet Union, in the years between the breaching of the Berlin Wall in December 1989 and the tragi-comic events of 1991. In his study of ‘the short 20th century’, Hobsbawm concludes that ‘one of the ironies of this strange century’ was that the revolution not only failed to overthrow capitalism but actually saved it (1). It provided the West with an incentive to reform itself and, from the late 1920s and through the Cold War years, a vivid disincentive to advocates of state socialism in other countries.
Given the crisis of confidence afflicting today's capitalist elites, there is no stomach for gloating about how 1917 turned out
The revolution took place in the weakest of the old European empires at the moment when the catastrophic impact of the First World War had pushed it to the brink of collapse. Emerging in a period of extreme crisis for the global capitalist order, the Soviet Union survived through most of the 20th century because of the continuing frailties and conflicts among the major Western powers.
As it turned out, this weakness of the system meant that the triumphalist mood among Western leaders after 1991 would be shortlived. Losing the negative example of the Soviet Union sharply exposed the difficulties of securing popular approval for the prevailing order, particularly after the financial crash of 2007/08. Now that the capitalist system’s ‘crisis of legitimacy’ has been officially acknowledged by both Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May in this year’s party-conference season, there can be no mistaking the scale of the loss of confidence afflicting our political leaders. There is no stomach for gloating about how 1917 turned out.
As for what remains of the left in the West, it, too, has little appetite for the landmark event of the forward march of labour. And as for the Moscow regime of Vladimir Putin, it regards the Bolsheviks as an embarrassment.
Writing in the mid-1990s, Mick Hume, then editor of Living Marxism (the forerunner of spiked), appraised the consequences of the West’s victory in the Cold War. He described how this victory, achieved after several decades of often bitter conflict, at home as well as abroad, had been achieved at a heavy cost. He noted then that the crusade against socialism meant invalidating many of the ideas associated with any conception of human advance or social progress: ‘It is as though the difficulty of containing the subversive potential of the Russian Revolution of 1917 required the Western elites also to question retrospectively the values of the French Revolution of 1789.’ (2)