Appendix IV: A Bloody Utopia and the Lessons of the Red Empire — On the 100th Anniversary of the Russian October Revolution (Part 2)

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This is the Sphinx’s riddle of the modern world.

If the Russian October Revolution was the most significant event in world history at the beginning of the 20th century, fundamentally altering the fate of humanity (including guiding half of humanity, China included, along the path of “learning from Russia”), then the collapse of the Soviet Union once again reshaped the currents of world history. In the next fifty to a hundred years, any assessment of the consequences of the Soviet collapse cannot be considered exaggerated.

Meanwhile, the greatest example, trial, and trend of the 20th century—the international communist movement—has already passed away. What has replaced it: the unchallenged rule of Western capitalism, “the end of history,” or yet another, deeper, more perilous civilizational crisis? Or will humanity, learning from the century-long delusion of Russia and the U.S. “each governing half the world’s destiny,” find a new path of self-rescue? Thinkers such as Jacques Barzun, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and earlier pessimists like Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee, have already seen America’s “decline and disintegration” in the collapse of the Soviet Union. It goes without saying that for China, it is an urgent task, with a spirit of wide-ranging inquiry—“to understand the relation between heaven and humanity and to discern the transformations from past to present”—to clearly observe, examine, and interrogate the downfall of the USSR.

The October Revolution was conducted in the name, slogans, and theoretical framework of Marxism, and was directly linked to the “general crisis” of Western modern civilization and the First World War. Marx was the last great system-builder of the West, believing in the use of theory and historical dynamics to influence and determine the evolution of human society. In 1882, Marx and Engels wrote in the preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto:

“Bakunin’s translation of the first edition of the Communist Manifesto was published by the printing house Zvonk in the early 1860s. At that time, the West regarded it as a literary curiosity.”

They asserted that if the Russian revolution were to signal a Western proletarian revolution, with the two mutually reinforcing, then communal ownership of land in Russia could serve as a starting point for communist development. In the same year, the second Russian edition of the Manifesto was translated by Plekhanov and published in Geneva. Today, even the most devout Marxists find it hard to fully agree with Marx and Engels’ statements regarding the Russian revolution.

Solzhenitsyn pointed out that none of Marx’s predictions were historically fulfilled, yet Marx still became a tutor of the Russian revolution. Lenin regarded the Communist Manifesto as “the greatest programmatic document of scientific communism, whose spirit inspires and drives all organized and struggling proletarians in the civilized world.” On November 7, 1918, at the unveiling of a monument to Marx and Engels, Lenin declared that their historically significant achievements lay in scientifically proving the inevitable collapse of capitalism, and in showing proletarians worldwide their role, tasks, and mission. Russia was living in a fortunate era, in which the predictions of these two great socialists began to materialize. May every Marx-Engels monument remind millions of workers and peasants: through collective struggle, we will crush the oppression of capital and ultimately achieve socialism!

No matter how much Lenin later supplemented or revised Marxism to fit the post-revolutionary Russian reality, one thing is clear: without Marxism, communism, and the Communist Manifesto, the Russian revolution could not have occurred. Although Marxism and communism originated in Europe, Russia—only Russia—was the most natural laboratory for this Western social theory. One reason is that Russia was entering a modern transformation full of crises, in urgent need of an “advanced theory” that was both highly attractive and resonant with the souls of radical Russian activists. Marxism entered Russia largely because it aligned with Russia’s unique messianic and salvific tendencies.

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At the same time, without the Russian revolution and without Lenin, Marxism would have remained merely one of many radical and critical theories in 19th-century Western thought, and could never have risen in the 20th century to become a global ideology, encompassing half of humanity.

In fact, Marx and Engels not only conditioned Russia’s “entry” into revolutionary legitimacy on the outbreak of Western European social revolutions but also maintained a certain wariness regarding the nature and prospects of the Russian revolution. They repeatedly referred to Russia as a “semi-Asian” country, asserting that Russia, in its “traditions and institutions, character and condition,” belonged to “Oriental despotism” and completely lacked the modern social structures based on large-scale industrial production described in the Communist Manifesto. If a revolution aimed at the nationalization of land and all resources occurred in Russia, it might very well result in a “restoration of the Asiatic mode of production.”

Anarchists such as Bakunin repeatedly warned that if Western European communism were implemented in Russia (let alone in Asia), it would inevitably “on the one hand generate despotism, and on the other bring enslavement.” Communism would then become “a lie, behind which lurked the despotism of a few rulers—a lie all the more dangerous because it appeared to represent the will of the people.” Engels privately agreed that Bakunin had hit the mark. In his essay The History of the Communist League, Engels emphasized that the natural mission of the communist movement was the eradication of all despotism, and that dictatorship could never be tolerated. “The organization itself is fully democratic, its committees are elected and can be recalled at any time, which alone blocks the path of any conspiratorial tyrant seeking dictatorship.” Yet Engels also foresaw the rise of a “prophet claiming to be the liberator of the proletariat, demanding political and military dictatorship in that role—something like a Christian early-communism propagated by Weitling, or a certain ‘Islamic communism.’”

Plekhanov, known as the “father of Russian Marxism,” consistently opposed the idea of carrying out Western-style socialist revolution in a despotic society practicing “Asiatic servitude” like Russia. He warned that a Russian revolution would restore Tsarist despotism, potentially regressing to the mire of Genghis Khan’s “barrack communism.” Lenin, for a time following Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov, held sincere distaste and deep caution toward Russia’s Asiatic traditions. In 1902, he sharply criticized the first program of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party for calling Russia “feudal,” rejecting the equivalence of Prussian despotism with Russian despotism, calling the latter “a damned inheritance and shameful way of treating people”—a 240-year legacy of Genghis Khan’s Tatar military despotism, the most reactionary, backward, ignorant, and dark “universal slavery” in Europe. Like Plekhanov, Lenin vaguely foresaw another gloomy prospect for the Russian revolution: that the wheel of Russian history might turn powerfully backward.