In the centenary year of the Russian Revolution, Paul Berman looks at the disastrous and bloody history of Marxist-Leninism in the hundred years since the Bolsheviks seized power. How on earth did Communism manage to be so extraordinarily successful?
What was Bolshevism’s mystique, then? It was the mystique of transubstantiation. It was the mystery that allowed for one thing to be transformed into something else—the chance event in St. Petersburg that was transformed into an inevitable event on a world scale; the unpredicted event that became the fulfillment of a scientific prediction; the many that were transformed into the one; the leap into the future that reinstituted the labor system of the pharaohs. Bolshevism was a social science that, through the workings of a doctrine called dialectical materialism that no one could understand, became a mysticism. To become a Bolshevik, then, was appealing in every way and its opposite. Bolshevism offered the appeal of democracy that was also the appeal of cult followership; the appeal of rebellion that was also the appeal of obedience; the appeal of generosity that was also the appeal of cruelty; the appeal of humility that was also the appeal of superiority. Bolshevism’s appeal was the cult of reason that was, at the same time, a madness. And the power of this appeal turned out be, for a substantial period of the 20th century, greater than anything the world had ever seen. Within 30 years or so, Communism commanded the loyalty, or at least the obedience, of a quarter of the world’s land mass and more than a third of the world’s population, with enthusiastic and disciplined supporters in every country on Earth and reason to suppose that it was going to triumph universally. Not even Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries enjoyed successes with such speed and on such a scale.
Many people would of course argue that, in disparate parts of the world, Communism’s appeal during the 20th century was much more straightforward, and the logical absurdities of Bolshevik theory and the mystical cult of obedience had nothing to do with it. Many people would argue, above all, that workers in the labor movement in one country after another ended up supporting the Communist Party out of a principle of labor solidarity, and nothing else. The workers wished to see a stronger working class, and the Communists offered strength. Or, at least, a great many people used to say so.
But was it true? The first achievement of Lenin’s Bolsheviks in Russia was to attack and destroy the Mensheviks, together with all of the other non-Communist institutions and organizations of the Russian working class, and this became Communism’s goal in every other country, too. Everywhere in the industrial world, the first and most lasting political achievement of the Communist Party was to create a split in the labor movement.... Wherever a labor party or a socialist party existed, the Communists broke it up in order to create their own party. Wherever a trade-union movement was reasonably strong, the Communists split the unions. The splits tended to endure. Everywhere those splits weakened the working class, instead of strengthening it. And the splits proved to be fatal. Germany in the 1930s was the principal and most terrible example, from which civilization has never recovered. And yet, a great many people continued and still continue to think of Communism as a force for strengthening the working class. Here, then, is another absurdity.
In other parts of the world, a great many people over the course of the 20th century would have insisted that support for Communism rested on a different aspiration, which was national and anti-colonial, instead of proletarian—on the desire to fend off the Western empires and find a proper road for national development in the Third World. Communism, from this standpoint, was not so much a working-class movement as a modernization movement, intended to rescue the countries of the Third World from cultural stagnation and pre-modern economies, and, by defeating the imperialists, to usher those countries into the benefits of modern civilization.
But is this argument any more convincing than the one about working-class strength? The longest and most violent struggle in the history of the Communist movement was the struggle in East Asia—first in Korea, then in Vietnam—to destroy the governments that called themselves “nationalist” and were backed by the United States and its allies, with the goal of replacing those governments with Communist republics. All over the world, people who observed the struggles in East Asia regarded the Communist efforts as noble and inspiring, and supported those struggles, as best they could. And yet, what was the result?
In the Korean peninsula, living standards at the end of the 1940s were at African levels, and, in what became the Communist half of the peninsula, living standards remained at dreadful levels. A degree of starvation exists in the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea even today (the Democratic People’s Republic being, of course, in the Communist style, a dictatorial monarchy). South Korea under nationalist rule, on the other hand, demonstrated over the decades that an extremely poor country of the Third World can, in fact, lift itself out of poverty, and can do so by building an economy partly based on industrial manufacturing, and can generate an impressive degree of wealth, and can create a democratic political system, too. South Korea was the first country to show this possibility. The search for national development, then—was this really the cause of the Korean Communists? The people around the world who preferred the Korean Communists to the American-backed regime in South Korea: Were they really the supporters of economic progress and Third World liberation and political freedom?
The Vietnamese example poses the same question in a different manner. The Communists in Vietnam achieved their successes north and south, and everywhere their successes were disasters. Even before they had defeated the French imperialists, the Communists massacred the Vietnamese Trotskyists. Their first achievement in North Vietnam, once the French had departed, was to drive upwards of 900,000 people into the South, and to institute a famine. Two decades later the Communists succeeded in South Vietnam, too, and replicated their North Vietnamese achievements by driving 1.5 million people into the South China Sea, by inaugurating labor camps, and by instituting still another agricultural catastrophe. It is true that, in the reunited Vietnam, unlike in North Korea, the Communists eventually came to their senses and corrected their economic policies. But to what effect? They instituted a market capitalism, as in South Korea, except without any hint of South Korea’s democracy. Even so, the cause of Vietnamese Communism proved to be, during the second half of the 20th century, the world’s single most popular and passionately-supported political cause.
The heritage of the Bolshevik Revolution of 100 years ago, then—what was it, finally? Catastrophe, of course. Everyone knows that, by now. And the appeal of Bolshevism—what was that appeal, finally? People will be asking that question centuries from now. It will be an inquiry into human nature.
Update: on the other hand, leading Corbynista Paul Mason in the Guardian celebrates the sacred memory -Those who lived through the Russian Revolution understood history – unlike us. And gets a good kicking from the Guardian commentariat for his troubles.