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Contrary to Lenin’s
expectations, the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia failed to
ignite the world proletarian revolution. It did, however,
produce earth-shaking ramifications which have dominated world
history ever since. It had also, inevitably, like any other
event of such a historic magnitude, given rise to major
controversies among historians, politicians and others about the
nature and aims of the Russian Revolution.
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Much of the
discussion turns on the question of the inevitability of Bolshevism.
Was the Bolshevik path the only possible way forward for Russia
after the collapse of the monarchy in February 1917? Was there any
realistic alternative to Bolshevism? What were, for example, the
chances for the establishment in Russia of parliamentary democracy
on the Western European model? Alternatively, were there inherent
factors in the structure of Russian society which ruled out the
possibility of her following the capitalist path of development of
Western Europe?
This is one
set of questions which fuel controversies about the ‘October
Socialist Revolution’. The diversity of answers to these questions
can be reduced to two diametrically opposed approaches:
determinist versus
non-determinist. The most
obvious example of a determinist explanation of the Russian
revolution is the view based on the Marxist interpretation of
history which was promulgated by official Soviet historiography till
the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this view, both the
‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution of February and the
‘proletarian-socialist’ revolution of October were preconditioned by
the whole course of Russian, indeed world, history. The Russian
people simply had no option, no alternative to socialist revolution
in 1917.
Non-determinist historians do not accept that the Russian Revolution
was inevitable. They tend to stress the small scale of the Bolshevik
rising. They do not deny that it was highly significant, but
question whether it was truly a mass movement and point to the fact
that the Bolshevik government could sustain itself in power only by
adopting a policy of state terror. The non-determinist view is
associated with such writers as the American scholar Richard Pipes.
In 1990 he expressed his basic view of the origins of the Revolution
and its importance in these words:
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The Russia Revolution was made neither by the forces of nature nor
by anonymous masses but by identifiable men pursing their own
advantages. Although it had spontaneous aspects, in the main it was
result of deliberate action. As such it is very properly subject to
value judgment.
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Between the
poles of this basic ‘determinist versus non-determinist’ dichotomy
there is a wide variety of interpretations spanning the entire
ideological, political and intellectual spectrum. Some of the more
influential, or insightful, interpretations and argumentations are
discussed on these pages.
