After Marx’s death, however, and even more after that of Engelsin 1895, the inheritance began to be disputed. Almost immediatelyafter 1895, for example, Eduard Bernstein was to develop a theory
MARX AND REVOLUTIONARY ORDER67of ‘revisionism’, arguing that Marx’s predictions were not borneout by the evidence that he himself presented in Capital andelsewhere. To put the point simply, there was no sign of capitalismweakening, more that it was going from strength to strength. Andso Bernstein argued in his contribution on Karl Marx in the eleventhedition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1911 that the great scientificachievement of Marx was to be found not in such conclusions,‘but in the details and yet more in the method and principles of hisinvestigations in his philosophy of history’ (Bernstein’s emphases).Here, as was generally admitted, he had made an originalcontribution. Bernstein continued:Nobody before him had so clearly shown the role of theproductive agencies in historical evolution; nobody so mas-terfully exhibited their great determining influence on theforms and ideologies of social organisms. The passagesand chapters dealing with this subject form,notwithstanding occasional exaggerations, the crowningparts of his works. If he has been justly compared withDarwin, it is in these respects that he ranks with that greatgenius, not through his value theory, ingenious though itbe. With the great theorist of biological transformation hehad also in common the indefatigable way in which hemade painstak-ing studies of the minutest detailsconnected with his researches.It is almost as if Marx the scholar were the superior to Marx thepolitician. By implication, political analysis was better providedby Bernstein himself.While Bernstein developed his ‘revisionism’, a self-styleddefender of ‘orthodox’ Marxism emerged in the person of KarlKautsky. However, while insisting on revolutionary goals,Kautsky also believed that socialism could be, indeed shouldbe, realised through the agency of a mass movement operatingin the conditions of parliamentary democracy. He was thereforeopposed to violent action, especially by a minority, and couldonly look upon the Bolshevik Revolution as premature and as adistortion of Marxism. He also differed with Lenin on the subjectof imperialism, especially on the centrality of financial capital.Yet another view of imperialism was that of Rosa Luxemburg,who emphasised that the expansion of capitalism depended onthe exploitation of pre-capitalist societies. Like Kautsky,although more of a radical revolutionary than he, she wasopposed to the manner in which Lenin and the Bolsheviks hadforced the pace in 1917.32In Russia itself, a number of socialists looked upon October 1917and after as a jumping of the Marxist gun. Chief among them werethe Mensheviks, who looked upon the October Revolution aspremature, believing that it was necessary for capitalism to run itsfull course before it could be overthrown, and possibly alsodisagreeing with the late Marx himself. Then there were those whowere socialists but not Marxists, especially the SocialistRevolutionaries who stemmed from the populist tradition, and alsoanarchists of varying complexions, including the great Kropotkin,opposed to the new regime from the liber-tarian point of view. Ofcourse, the old regime still had its supporters, monarchists orconstitutional monarchists, while a further, fresh interpretation ofthe whole Russian Revolution came from the Eurasian orEuropasian school.33A good example of Russian liberal reactions to the successivestages of war and revolution may be found in the writings ofLenin’s former pet aversion Paul Vinogradoff, professor ofjurisprudence at Oxford University. In September 1914, he wrotea long letter to The Times of London, recounting how a friend, aliberal like himself, had written from Moscow: ‘It is a great,unforgettable time; we are happy to be all at one!’ In Vinogra-doff’s view, the intelligentsia, ‘imbued with current Europeanideas as to politics, economics and law’, would be able tocollaborate with the rest of the people in the pursuit of victory.And it should be recognised that the Russian people were notbackward in comparison with the German, and would be ableto show remarkable patience in the face of suffering. It was anadvantage at this time of crisis that the government was stronglycentralised, and that the tsar could now demonstrate his states-manship, which would include his recognition that there shouldbe further constitutional advances at the end of the war. DeclaredVinogradoff: ‘The Slavs must have their chance in the history ofthe world, and the date of their coming of age will mark a newdeparture in the growth of civilization.’ In 1915, after a visit tohis native land, he observed that ‘there is no more occasion todoubt of ultimate progress in the field of domestic politics thanthere is to be nervous as to the outcome of the struggle in the
field.’ Then, in 1917, although he wrote of the ‘catastrophe ofMarch’ and the manner in which the tsar had been brought downby the court camarilla, he was also happy to note that ‘Russiahas shaken off her fetters.’ The February or March Revolutionhad shaken the pyramid of society to its foundations, but couldnot overturn it. The future would bring the glory of a freecommonwealth justifying the faith of Russia in their ownpowers.But the October or November Revolution of 1917 did indeedoverturn the pyramid of Russian society, and undermine theconfidence of Vinogradoff in the immediate future. In 1919,he ventured still to remark: ‘This summer will, let us hope,decide the downfall of the criminal gang which has broughtruin to the country.’ Then, probably, a military dictatorshipwould have to be instituted as a necessary transitional stage.Certainly, ‘strong executive organisation will have to be keptup’, for ‘interdepen-dence between authority and right is theessence and the common trait of all constitutions.’ Two yearslater, in the summer of 1921, Vinogradoff’s hopes for thecollapse of Bolshevism were still unrealised as he commentedthat the new government had been trying to shape the wholeof Russia in the barrack mould associated with Arakcheev,responsible for military colonies in the nineteenth century. Hecould not now believe in the imminent demise of the Bolshevikregime, and lamented that ‘Salvation will not come from theemigrants or from the Allies. It can only be expected from anelemental crisis in an illness which is bound to be a protractedand an agonising one.’34In the twelfth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, publishedin 1922, Vinogradoff was able to give his extended views underthe entry ‘Russia’, observing:Altogether the ‘Constitution’ of the Federal Republic ofSoviets was clearly intended to be an instrument for theoppression of the formerly privileged classes and a meansof propaganda for the edification of people who want tobelieve in the benefits of Communist rule.However, Vinogradoff commented, ‘Pure Communism can beintroduced only when the people have been ground into uniformpulp: then Law and the State will disappear of themselves.’ He
quoted with scorn the claims of the Bolshevik theorist N.I.Bukharin that:The Soviets are direct organizations of the masses; theyare not impermeable, there is the right of recall.... Indemocratic commonwealths the supreme power belongsto par-liaments, that is, to talking-shops.... The real rulersare the members of a caste, —of a social bureaucracy.Vinogradoff sarcastically added, ‘One might think that the ruleof Soviets was free from all fictions and substitution of power.’ Inparticular, Bukharin and his comrades had sought to justify thedismissal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 with theclaim that it did not reflect the ‘will of the revolution’. This actuallymeant ‘simply the arbitrary sway of a gang of recklessadventurers’.35As for non-affiliated historians, many of them lived throughthe Revolution of 1917 to confront again the problems which hadpreoccupied them before the sequence of shattering events begunin 1914. Among the survivors was E.V.Tarle, who presented hisnew thinking in an article published in 1922 and entitled ‘The NextTask’, a piece of work deserving close scrutiny not only because ofits observations on 1922 but also because of its implications for the1990s.36Nobody, Tarle claimed at the outset, could claim acomprehensive grasp, but many questions were being posed: forexample, how did the Muscovite state grow, not according to thetwenty-nine volumes of S.M.Soloviev’s History of Russia from theEarliest Times published from 1851 to 1879, but in reality? Asatisfactory answer was elusive, for two main reasons: first, theincreasing multiplicity of facts, both from the archives and fromthe growth of new disciplines, especially economic history, whichwas threatening to overwhelm scholars from the beginning of thetwentieth century onwards; and second, the growing complicationsof psychology, which made necessary the broadening of horizons.Moreover, the more difficult the task of criticism, the more attractiveit became, and so critics and polemicists had become morenumerous than systematists and constructors.The recent great catastrophe had struck deep into the psychologyof that numerically insignificant group of people who had chosenas their life’s work the investigation of humanity’s past. What werethe consequences for them?
Declared Tarle:The question is at least not unimportant for this group ofpeople. It is time if not to investigate it, at least to pose it.One of the greatest virtues and duties of the historian ismistrustfulness. Must we, as we regain consciousness, withmistrustfulness turn first of all to address ourselves andattempt to establish: how has the apparatus of our thoughtchanged? Are we more or less capable of coping andunderstanding than before? The following argument maybe more natural, then: that we looked at the states, theirforces, the correlation between these forces, at thepsychology of the Russian people, at a multitude ofphenomena, in a different manner to how we look at themnow; and we know for certain that not only have thesephenomena changed, but that we simply did notunderstand them very much, that we looked at manythings in an unreal fashion and accepted phantoms asreality. If so, why should we think that our views of historywere without error? If we in 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916accepted, let us say, the Russian people as somebody else,then where is the guarantee that we know and understandbetter the Romans, the Greeks, the Franks, thecontemporaries of Charles V or Louis XVI or Napoleon?In death, asserted Turgenev, there is some kind of definitivetruth. Revolution is always first and foremost death, thenlife. That is why with each cataclysm there perish verymany old phantoms and lies. And immediately too, ofcourse, there are born new ones, but in each case, theprocess of recovery from old phantasmagorias is capableof shaking the strongest intellectual self-confidence.And just at this difficult period of the loss of faith incorrectness of a whole range of their former convictions,the historians who have undergone the cataclysm aresubjected to new and powerful temptations, their intellectis diverted from its direct scientific importance bypowerful, often uncertain influences.37Tarle went on to argue that history must be written notexclusively as narrative, but to establish the facts, and then toexplain them. Certainly, history must not be written as advocacy,a practice into which generations following cataclysms too easily
fell. The French Revolution could be discussed quietly only thirtyyears afterwards, and then only exceptionally. Robespierre stillquarrelled with Danton, but the first was impersonated byMathiez, the second by Aulard, and they were both professors ofhistory. There were many other such examples, even a centuryand a quarter on.Cataclysms also fogged vision, distorting the outlook of manyhistorians and leading them into pseudo-history, which Tarledefined as what ensues when historians address some subject,but set out in allegorical or cryptographic form another subject,the history of their own time or near to it, modernising motiv-ation. Such pseudo-history had been rare in Russia,38 but wasespecially attractive in epochs after storms. First, there was thesearch for analogies and antecedents, then the emergence ofallegory and cryptogram. French historiography of the firstquarter, even the first half of the nineteenth century had lookedfor a revolutionary bourgeoisie in the twelfth and thirteenthcenturies, for the outlook of 1789 in the States-General of thefifteenth century. The same tendency would soon appear amongRussian historians, in Tarle’s estimation—its chief disadvantagewas that it divided and thus weakened the understanding.Historians must remember that the situation ‘is not an advantagefor our generation, but, on the contrary, something capable ofseriously lowering the analytical capabilities of even the strongestintellect’.39However, there was a positive side to the present predicamentof 1922. Such epochs promoted understanding of what in othertimes would not be completely clear, an empty sound. Examplescould be found in the Renaissance writings of Machiavelli andGuicciardini, while the great Ranke drew extensively on the minorClarendon, his superior regarding the experience of the EnglishRevolution, although in other respects comparison would beludicrous. Similarly, Voltaire appeared superficial and insipidcompared to lesser figures who actually lived through the FrenchRevolution.The way forward must avoid several pitfalls. History must notsimply tell a story, nor relapse into advocacy. It must not becomepseudo-history, allowing a poetic rendering of ideas to take over,as tended to happen during cataclysms, for example the years 1789–99. The great catastrophe of the 1914 war, followed by the RussianRevolution, posed such a threat because it had first caused death
But then it produced new life, as the old gave way to the new. Onthe one hand, Tarle and his generation were faced by a situation‘capable of lowering the analytical capabilities of the strongestintellect’; on the other, there was the advantage of being in a positionto react to the immediacy of experience. Continued Tarle:Auguste Comte ascribed great methodological significanceto the study of revolutionary overtures; even greatersignificance in this connection is possessed by the personalexperience of such events. The old fabric is torn, ends andbeginnings are laid bare, and an element appears, whichat other times cannot be seen, and whose presence canonly be implied. The main point is that you observe theworthlessness of the historical significance of the rationalfoundation, all the particular, inhuman, but somehowdifferent boundless logic, which, to be sure, is dominanteven in ordinary times, but is overshadowed by the publicplatform and the press, in words, in gestures, in shouts,arguments, discussions, articles—in a word, by everythingwhich masks with such success and hides from our view—in normal epochs—the true motivating forces of thehistorical process. States, apparently eternal, fly into pieces,the state culture turns out to be a superficial covering,primeval chaos envelops and overwhelms the shell, whichhas only just seemed an unbreakable and majestic ark. Itseems to some nervous people caught up in such a cyclonethat they are going out of their minds and becomingdelirious. On the contrary, they were previously delirious,lulled by a false security, forgetting that not far under theelegant carpet of their cabin there is a dark and fathomlessabyss, and that this abyss is the age-old natural reality, andthat their cabin is a fragile and artificial invention; that theabyss existed before the cabin, and will remain after thecabin, and they themselves may study the abyss, if onlyimperfectly, but they may in no way control it. The mostthey can do is to try to delay the wreck of their ark.40In the view of Tarle, after such an experience, the intellect couldonly grow stronger or weaker; it could not stay still.Looking around him in 1922, Tarle could not find much causefor optimism. He gave his verdict, for example, on Outline of
History by H.G.Wells: an author who combined elements of JulesVerne and Jack London deluded himself into believing that hewas solving all the mysteries of world history with his gleaningsfrom secondary-level textbooks mixed with vulgar philosophyand paradoxes. Yet this work had been taken seriously by a wholegroup of British academics, and many other similar examplescould be given. Declared Tarle: ‘Whether there will appear thelong-awaited serious schemes and theories, or whether there willbe in this sphere the dilettante thinking aloud begun in 1914 andbecoming stronger in 1917, leading nowhere, and with no future—time alone will tell.’41Tarle believed that a growing academic exchange with Europeand America could and would have to be one source of fruitfulthought in conditions of continuing cataclysm. But fact gatheringmust not be abandoned: indeed, he asserted, ‘The more powerful,the more authentic the generalising thought, the more it needs theerudite and erudition.’ To put the matter simply, the seventeenthcentury had produced erudition, the eighteenth had producedphilosophy. For its part, the early nineteenth century had broughtforward theory along with some erudition and criticism, while inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, erudition andcriticism had grown, but so-called ‘philosophy’ had fallen to thelow level that might be found only in remote epochs. Moreover,‘philosophy’ in the eighteenth-century sense was no longer enough,because of the much higher level of erudition.Erudition should not be undervalued, Tarle observed:But never will our present architect, a builder by profession,begin to pour scorn and sarcasm on those who inexpectation of his arrival have collected and polished thestones and marble, inspected and thrown away unsuitablematerial—and sometimes even participated in the layingof the foundation.However, on the other hand, in Tarle’s estimation, erudition shouldnever be identified with science, nauka.42Some earlier attempts at schematisation had suffered from avariety of weaknesses. For example, the eighteenth-centuryPhysiocrats had explained Chinese and Egyptian history whileknowing little or nothing about it. With a similar handicap in thenineteenth century, Hegel had attempted to distil the spirit of Indian
history. But was Hegel disturbed when facts contra-dicted histheory? No, the worse for the facts, in Hegel’s view. Suchconstructors of systems had been close in their outlook to theCameralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who madethe interests of absolute rulers absolute. Wrote one of them: ‘Mayhe be damned who is predisposed to distinguish the interests ofthe sovereign from those of his subjects.’ Such servility was asunhelpful as disregard for facts. In conclusion, Tarle lookedforward:We will hope that the beginning of the twentieth centuryturns out to be similar to the beginning of the nineteenthnot only in destruction on an international scale of severalmillion people, but also with the appearance of a galaxyof synthesising minds and talents. The time for the harvesthas already arrived; perhaps the reapers are approaching.43We are all too familiar with what was actually approaching:reapers who were grim indeed, a servility before absolute rulersthat would outstrip that of the Cameralists, and thesuperimposition on events of a crude schema. After a period in theGulag, Tarle himself, if without losing all his scholarly attributes,was to become one of the leading Stalinist historians, as we shallsee in Chapter 4. But I have not devoted such close attention to hisattitude in 1922 to the question of ‘The Next Task’ in order to spinout a cautionary tale, but rather to throw light on the problemsfaced by Tarle’s successors seventy years on, in the 1990s, as theytoo confront revolution.To give too much emphasis to the parallel would be to fall intothe trap of the search for analogy and antecedent, which Tarleadvises us to avoid, seeing it as a step towards allegory andcryptogram. Nevertheless, the following comments appearpertinent to any discussion of writing on history in the 1990s. First,seventy years ago, Tarle wrote in a language rarely found amonghis successors today, rich in vocabulary and subtlety of expression.Second, Tarle showed himself to be a scholar of broad education,familiar with classical and more recent culture, if mostlyEurocentric. Here, no doubt, Tarle would reflect the normalstandards of his time, especially for specialists in general,vseobshchaia, history. For similar reasons and also, third, becausehe was a specialist in this area, Tarle made an inordinate number
of references to French history, in particular the French Revolution,although we should not neglect the obvious point that the FrenchRevolution was the antecedent and analogy for the Russian, andallow Tarle to fall at least some way into his own trap. It certainlyis striking how frequently Annaly: zhurnal vseobshchei istorii, 1922–4 (published in Petersburg by Petrograd Publishers in which Tarle’sarticle on ‘The Next Task’ first appeared), refers to the FrenchRevolution as the Great Revolu-tion.44 Equally, and fourth, like thejournal of which he was co-editor, Tarle makes little reference tothe Russian Revolution, and, perhaps more surprisingly, not onemention of Karl Marx, let alone V.I.Lenin.Even after the turbulent years 1917–21, then, the Russianhistoriographical tradition from Karamzin through Soloviev toKliuchevsky was still alive. Quite possibly in 1922, Tarle alsoharboured thoughts about constitutional development similar tothose of Kovalevsky and Vinogradoff, along lines advocated bythe American President Woodrow Wilson. Even Lenin, as we haveseen, found it necessary to consider both theoretical and practicalproblems of constitutionalism as he moved from Russian Republictowards Soviet Union. On the whole, however, Trotsky wasprobably accurate in his observation that Lenin’s ‘thoughts neverceased to labour at the task of freeing the workers’. After Lenin’sdeath, Trotsky kept the banner of proletarian revolution flyingwhile Stalin moved further in the direction of constitutionalism(however distorted or even perverted). The original thoughts ofMarx were by now far from the minds of the Soviet establishment,however much they used ‘Marxism-Leninism’ as an ideologicalunderpinning for their own power.But we are running ahead of ourselves. Before moving on, wemust return to our promised second pH test and confess that ourattention in this chapter has focused much more on Russian ‘acid’than on American ‘alkali’. Here, the reading for Russia would betowards the extreme, while that for the USA would barely register.The reason for this imbalance, as already indicated, is thatrevolutionary Marxism made little immediate impact in the USA.As Marx himself had indicated in Capital, this was partly becauseof the lack of American communal and feudal development, partlybecause of the USA’s possession to an unprecedented level of ‘thefluidity of capital, the versatility of labour and the indifference ofthe worker to the content of his work’ (see p. 55 above). As we turnour attention to the views of world order put forward from the
beginning of the twentieth century by a selection of E.V.Tarle’sEuropean colleagues, we shall clearly see that the Atlantic remaineda broad divide and that the USA was still not quite accepted as afully mature member of the Western world, even if without doubtpoised for rapid emergence to leadership of that world. At the sametime, the kind of constitutional order asserted by Woodrow Wilsonin his academic publications was soon to be proclaimed by him onthe wider global stage
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