Volume 9, Number 8 · November 9, 1967
Happy Birthday
By George Lichtheim
The Impact of the Russian Revolution 1917-1967: The Influence of Bolshevism on the World outside Russia Affairs
issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International
Oxford, 357 pp., $7.50
The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-1967
by Isaac Deutscher
Oxford, 115 pp., $3.75
Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat
by Israel Getzler
Cambridge and Melbourne, 246 pp., $12.50
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
by Eva Broido, translated and edited by Vera Broido
Oxford, 150 pp., $11.50
History of the International 1864-1914
by Julius Braunthal, translated by Henry Collins, translated by Kenneth Mitchell
Thomas Nelson, 393 pp., 95s.
Cast your mind back half a century ago, if you can, and try to recapture the mood—a mixture of bewilderment and exaltation—stirred in millions of people all over the world by the news from Petrograd (soon to be called Leningrad) in the late autumn of 1917. Then try to imagine the enthusiasm which the fall of the Bastille in 1789 evoked in an earlier generation of bystanders soon to be appalled by news of the Terror. If you are historically minded, compare the Jacobin record with that of the Bolsheviks. Note the differences: the Jacobins were a club, the Bolsheviks a disciplined and centralized party. Note too the similarities (in outlook and temper, if not in doctrine). Bear in mind that Lenin's predecessors among the Russian radicals of the 1870s were proud to style themselves 'Jacobins.' Recall that this nomenclature had been rendered plausible by the resemblance which the last of the Romanovs bore to the least fortunate of the Bourbons. The fall of the autocracy in March 1917 (February according to the old Russian calendar) closely paralleled the demise of the ancien régime in 1789). But in France it took three years before liberalism and constitutionalism yielded to civil war and dictatorship. In Russia the corresponding historical space was traversed in eight months. Moreover, the Bolsheviks, unlike the Jacobins, retained power (and wrote the history books). There was violence and terror in plenty, and for three dreadful decades the rule of a savage despot; but no restoration.
Review, 4965 words
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