ex-Communists who contributed to the book
Especially significant, therefore, might be the link between Marxism-Leninism on the one hand and alienation and protest on the other. Communism has become the vehicle for almost every kind of criticism of the established order, and it has profited from a wide variety of weaknesses
and mistakes of noncommunist societies. Indeed, communists seized power not, as predicted, in the advanced industrial countries of the West, but in Russia and in China where relatively backward economic conditions - very different in degree in the two instances - were combined with misery and great tensions and crises. And in both countries the rising class of intellectuals refused to identify itself with the existing system and led the struggle against it. However, even if we allow much for alienation and protest as factors in the rise of communism, we are faced with the question as to why it is communism, rather than some other teaching, that has attracted so many sensitive or dissatisfied people.
To suggest one answer among many, one might mention the four reasons for the appeal of Marxism emphasized by Isaiah Berlin. These include, to begin with, its comprehensiveness and its claim to be the key to knowing everything in the present, the past, and the future. Moreover, the doctrine itself and the knowledge that it gives are allegedly scientific: many social teachings in the nineteenth century, such as Fourier's peculiar Utopian socialism or Comte's positivism, claimed scientific validity, but Marxism managed to identify itself more successfully with science than any other. Comprehensiveness and scientific authority become especially attractive with the abandonment of religion and other secure moorings. In the third place, Marxism, in spite of its deterministic aspect, is an activist and optimistic teaching: history is moving in the right direction, and every true believer can have a useful role in furthering its progress. Finally, Marxism possessed from the start a ready-made audience so to speak, the working class, which was invited to take over the world. Later Lenin tried his best to extend the audience to the poor peasants and to colonial peoples.
To move from Berlin's 'semirational' reasons for the appeal of Marxism, Lasswell might serve as a representative guide to the slippery area of the irrational appeal. In the language of social psychology and psychoanalysis, he selected such qualities of Marxism-Leninism as its stress on the transitory nature of the present social order, which leads to a redefinition of expectancies about the future and encourages projection. Marxism condemns the capitalist system in clearly moral terms, accusing it in particular of denying affectionate care and attention to the individual and of giving unfair advantage to some over others. The doctrine gains from its prestigious 'scientific' form and from its alleged objective quality as well as from specificity, i.e., in analyzing the unjust capitalist society, Marxists point to 'surplus value' and 'profits' rather than merely to such general factors as human greed or corruption. The extremely vague Marxist Utopia, too, serves valuable purposes: it gives free rein to every individual's choice and his craving for omnipotence, and it protects the Marxist ideal from being tied to unpopular or transitory social phenomena.
Doctrines, it should be added, are held no less firmly when they are held irrationally; in fact, it can be argued that they are held more firmly if irrationally.
When Communists seized power in Russia in 1917 they had to face an unforeseen situation: revolution erupted in Russia rather than in the industrial West, and it came to one country only rather than to the entire capitalist world. While Lenin and his associates tried to adjust to these facts, they had also to deal with countless other problems, some of them of utmost urgency. After the first hectic months, and years too, Soviet history has continued to be a story of great pressures, crises, and conflicts. Under these difficult, and at times desperate, circumstances it is remarkable not how little but how much Russian Communist leaders adhered to the pursuit of their ideological goals - from Lenin's determination to build socialism on the morrow of the Revolution, to Stalin's fantastic five-year plans, and to Khrushchev's efforts to speed the establishment of a truly communist society. An account of this pursuit belongs to the following chapters.
XXXVI
WAR COMMUNISM, 1917-21, AND THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY, 1921-28
You will never be alive again,
Never rise from the snow:
Twenty-eight bayonet,
Five fire wounds.
A bitter new garment
I sewed for my friend.
It does love, does love blood-
The Russian earth.
Where are the swans? And the swans have left. And the ravens? And the ravens have remained.
Of all the Governments which were set up in Russia to combat revolutionary rule, only one, that of the Social Revolutionaries at Samara, had the wisdom to assure the peasants that the counterrevolution did not mean the restoration of the land to the landlords. All the rest, in greater or less degree, made plain their policy of reestablishing or compensating them. It was this, and no transcendent virtue in the Bolsheviks, which decided the issue of the three years' struggle, in despite of British tanks and French munitions and Japanese rifles and bayonets.
Although the Bolsheviks seized power easily in Russia in November 1917, they managed to consolidate their new position only after several years of bitter struggle. In addition to waging a major and many-faceted civil war, the Soviet government had to fight Poland and deal with the Allied intervention. The Bolsheviks, in a desperate effort to survive, mobilized the population and resources in the area that they controlled and instituted a drastic regime which came to be known as 'War Communism.' Communist rule did survive, although at a tremendous price. To revive an utterly exhausted, devastated, and starving country, the so-called 'New Economic Policy' replaced War Communism and lasted from 1921 to 1928, until the beginning of Stalin's First Five-Year Plan. The period of the New Economic Policy has been rightly contrasted with that of War Communism as a time of relaxation and compromise. Yet, on
the whole the Soviet government showed more continuity than change in its policies and pursued its set goals with intelligence and determination - as a brief treatment of the first decade of Communist rule should indicate.
