Lessons from revolutions: development takes time.

• Author: Hough, Jerry F.
• Position: Essay

A scholar of the Bolshevik Revolution and the evolution of the Soviet Communist regime must be extremely selective in choosing a focus when considering their implications, and so my essay reflects the law of comparative advantage. I studied the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1961 at a university where the intellectual atmosphere was dominated by development thinkers such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Gerschenkron, Samuel Huntington, Barrington Moore, and Talcott Parsons, and so, not surprisingly, this essay focuses on the Bolshevik Revolution as the product of Russia's development process and its implications for development theory.

The Bolshevik Revolution certainly needs to be analyzed in development terms, but there are different time frameworks for which this can be done. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Russian Revolution from 1904 to 1917 (really to 1921) was traditionally seen as one of the "great" European revolutions: the English of the 1640s, the French of the 1780s and 1790s, and the German-central European of 1848 and 1849. The sequence of these revolutions corresponds to the order in which the countries began to industrialize. Although the Italian revolution of the early 1920s and the Spanish Civil War of the mid-1930s also fit within this pattern, they were seldom included in the discussion in this period of scholarship.

During the late 1930s, Western scholars and especially American scholars began to describe the Bolshevik Revolution in different terms. To say that the Russian Revolution was one in a series of European "great revolutions" was to imply, the new argument went, that the leaders who eventually emerged from all those revolutions were similar. The other revolutions eventually produced relatively moderate dictators--what came to be known as traditional dictators. Vladimir Lenin and especially Joseph Stalin did not correspond to this pattern.

The traditional dictators just wanted to consolidate their power in countries where rising new elites were beginning to promote commercial and industrial development. They rested on the support of such elites. By contrast, the Bolsheviks wanted to destroy the rising new elites and to use the state to promote industrialization. The mainline scholars of the 1940s and 1950s argued that Lenin and Stalin were totalitarian dictators and fundamentally different from the traditional ones.

The theorists of totalitarianism went one step further. They argued that Lenin and Stalin were not unique in one respect but were quite similar to another dictator of the time, Adolf Hitler. The prevailing image of political parties put the Communists on the extreme left of the political spectrum and the Nazis on the extreme right. The theorists of totalitarianism said that the extreme left and the extreme right were essentially the same.

Although the point was not expressed formally, the theory of totalitarianism was developed at least in part as a political answer to the conservative Republicans of the 1930s and then to Friedrich Hayek in 1944. The conservatives insisted that communism was the natural consequence of the inevitable evolution of moderate socialists leftward on the political spectrum to the extreme left. But if the Communists were not on the extreme left but were in the same class as those on the so- called extreme right, why should moderate socialists evolve to communism? How could the conservatives be correct if communism was not even on the extreme left?

The original theorists of totalitarianism were interested primarily in what made totalitarian regimes distinctive and what drove the totalitarian leaders to follow the path of extreme oppression. How did the totalitarian leaders achieve a level of oppression qualitatively different from the level achieved by the traditional dictatorships of the past and present?

The major explanation for the unusual level of repression was that the rulers had an ideological drive to transform society in an "unnatural" way. If rulers had an obsession with creating a racially pure society or with transforming human nature so that people would act in the way assumed by Karl Marx's goal of a Communist society, then their control had to be far more intrusive than that needed by a traditional status quo dictator. It had to extend to the level of the individual citizen. If the ideology insisted that a perfect society was possible, then this possibility justified the payment of an extremely high price to achieve that society. The deaths of millions of Jews or peasants in collectivization were an example of such a price. (1)

The scholars of totalitarianism answered the "how" question in ways that were both simple and complex. One answer was that the leaders had mechanisms of technological, educational, and media control that earlier dictators had not possessed. Although the point was seldom made in these terms, the Russian state in 1520 was already much stronger than the English state of Henry V. The Prussian state of 1933 was still stronger than the Russian state of 1917.

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