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11 - The Russian Revolution: an ideology in power

from Part II - Varieties of Marxism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Neil Harding
Edited by
Terence Ball  and
Richard Bellamy
Terence Ball
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
Richard Bellamy
Affiliation:
University College London
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Summary

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 marked the beginning of the global conflict between communism and capitalism that was to dominate the politics of the twentieth century and redraw the map of modern ideologies. On the mainstream left a bitter schism developed between gradualist ‘Western’ social democracy and revolutionary ‘Eastern’ communism. On the peripheries a host of splinter groupings emerged whose identities revolved around their conflicting interpretations of the Soviet experience. Socialism was, hereafter, organisationally and ideologically fractured: at war with itself.

The revolution and the Soviet experience also became, of course, the Other for many ideologies of the right and a cautionary tale for their seminal thinkers. The lapse into authoritarian or totalitarian practices was variously attributed to the pretensions of socialist states to eliminate the free market economy (Hayek 1976), their contempt for the civilising restraints of the rule of law (Friedrich 1954; Schapiro 1972) or their reckless pursuit of messianic patterns of thought that lie deep within the Western intellectual tradition (Talmon 1961; Popper 1980; Walicki, 1995).

It is clear that for both left and right the fate of revolutionary Marxism and that of the Russian Revolution were closely entwined. This chapter concerns itself with the manner in which the Bolsheviks redefined revolutionary Marxism in the twentieth century. It examines some of the disputations that surrounded the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 and the theories that were developed to justify the state-building process that then ensued.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought , pp. 239 - 266
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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