Appendix IV: A Bloody Utopia and the Lessons of the Red Empire — On the 100th Anniversary of the Russian October Revolution (Part 3)

IV

Yet Russia’s historical environment and concrete realities exerted a far more decisive force than Western currents of thought and social movements, Marxism included. The October Revolution may not be described as a revolution grounded in classical Marxism or in the social foundations of Western capitalist society, but it was a product of Russia’s own historical culture and social evolution—a great revolution of a different kind, distinct from those of Western Europe and endowed with an alternative significance. Almost simultaneously with Western colonial powers expanding across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, the Russians embarked on the process of building a unified state and advancing eastward. Over nearly five centuries, they crossed the Ural and Carpathian Mountains, followed the Volga River, traversed the Ob and Yenisei, penetrated deep into the Asian heartland of the Lena basin and the Tungus Plateau, and finally reached the Chukchi Peninsula facing North America across the Bering Strait and the Kamchatka Peninsula overlooking Northeast Asia, conquering all of Siberia. When night fell in St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea, dawn was only just breaking in Vladivostok (Haishenwai) on the western shore of the Pacific.

The histories of all nations are profoundly shaped by geography, but Russia’s geographical conditions are uniquely distinctive. Spanning Eurasia and occupying one-sixth of the Earth’s land surface, Russia nonetheless lacks natural barriers such as oceans, high mountains, or deserts. As Russia stretched eastward across geopolitical space, a vast contrast and historical rupture emerged between it and the successive Western experiences of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the modern scientific and technological waves.

Historical evolution and geographical characteristics coincided in an almost accidental yet cumulative manner, jointly advancing the Russian Empire’s sense of destiny and messianic mission. From the moment in 988 CE when Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus allied with Byzantium through marriage and converted to Christianity, Russia came to be enveloped in a certain aura of divine destiny. Russians began to view East and West through a new cosmology and global consciousness, launching “holy wars” in the name of Christ under the banner of the Cross. Whether Ivan III’s annexation of the Novgorod Republic, the Principality of Tver, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; Ivan IV’s conquest of the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan; the seizure of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea; or the advance into the Caucasus and partition of Poland—Russians carried icons aloft, believing these acts fulfilled the will of God.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the end of the Byzantine Empire, Moscow began to see itself as the new City of God, the heir to Rome and Constantinople, the new Christian empire. In 1510, Abbot Philotheus wrote to Vasily III, proclaiming that God’s will clearly pointed to Moscow, declaring it the “heir to the spiritual and material legacy of Rome and Byzantium,” that the Muscovite prince was “the direct descendant of the Roman emperors, carrying out God’s absolute will,” and that Moscow was “destined to lead the Christian empire.” From then on, Muscovite princes and nobles, clergy, diplomats, and ordinary people alike came to regard Russia as the new center of the Christian world. In 1473, Ivan began using the title of Tsar. Henceforth, Russia’s rulers advanced westward as the sacred heirs of the Roman and Byzantine emperors and expanded eastward as the sacred heirs of the Mongol emperors—this dual destiny embodied in the double-headed eagle of the imperial coat of arms. Russia began to call itself “Holy Russia.” Yet the gap between Russia and the West did not narrow with this evolution of historical destiny. Rather, the “historical tension” between Russia’s self-ascribed messianic consciousness and the rapid development of Western capitalism intensified Russia’s deep social crisis. Alexander I’s conquest of Paris at the head of the anti-French coalition instead stimulated the awakening and uprising of the Decembrists, dramatically and starkly exposing the internal contradictions of the Tsarist Empire. Thereafter, Russia’s progressive figures embarked on a century-long spiritual resistance and social revolution—from Pestel, Muravyov, and Ryleyev of the Decembrists to Chaadayev, Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Nechayev, Tkachev … and Lenin. Whether Slavophiles or Westernizers, aristocrats or commoner intellectuals, Populists or Social Democrats, Constitutionalists or Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks or Bolsheviks, all confronted with anguish and fury a single overriding reality that transcended the 19th century’s elite debates: an empire propped up by Tsarist autocracy, serfdom, and a state-controlled Orthodox Church had never embodied Christian truth. Russia’s gallows, floggings, penal servitude, the Third Section’s secret police, censorship, and the entire bureaucratic apparatus—its evil, guilt, and all “shameful and accursed” realities—stood in stark contradiction to the sacred mission Russia had proclaimed for centuries. All hope came to rest on a revolution of ultimate significance.

Despair toward the Tsarist system and resistance to the West converged into Russia’s distinctive nihilism and radicalism. In fact, from Peter the Great onward, the speed and scale of reforms under successive Tsars were far from sufficient to fill the sense of disillusionment felt by Russia’s intellectual elite and the masses regarding reality and the nation’s historical path.

In 1881, the assassination of Alexander II—the “Liberator”—signaled that the Tsarist system could no longer coexist with Russia itself. Meanwhile, the failures of the 1848 revolutions in the West and of the Paris Commune transmitted to Russia a distinctly Russian nihilism toward the West. Fueled by the First World War and the February Revolution, this nihilism ultimately evolved into the uniquely eschatological October Revolution.

The October Revolution was both the cumulative historical outcome of all social relations, ideologies, and events unleashed by Russia’s post–Peter the Great efforts to emulate and surpass the West, and a response elicited within Russia by the Western European Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment. To denounce the October Revolution as a distortion or abuse of Marxism and classical communism, or to argue that it was merely an armed coup or even a restoration of Eastern Asiatic despotism, is to overlook Russia’s unique geo-historical and institutional traditions. In this revolution, Marxism bore a dual significance. For Westernizers, a revolution conducted in the name of Marxism represented an advanced industrial civilization originating in the West and historically elevated above Russia’s past, thereby conferring upon the revolution a kind of global legitimacy analogous to Christianity’s legitimation of the Roman Empire. For Slavophiles, Marxism’s principal significance lay in its representation of a universal truth that both arose from the West and challenged and negated Western capitalist civilization, thus affirming certain unique and superior elements within Russian society and history. For the leaders of the October Revolution—Lenin and Trotsky among them—as John Reed directly observed in his classic Ten Days That Shook the World, “It was an adventure, and one of the most thrilling adventures ever undertaken by mankind. The Bolsheviks led the working people in a storm that swept away the remnants of the past, staking everything on their urgent and magnificent hopes. Whatever one’s view of Bolshevism, this is undeniable: the Russian Revolution was one of the great events in human history, and the rise of the Bolsheviks a phenomenon of world significance.”

Just as the advent of Christianity more than a thousand years ago and the messianism of the “Third Rome” over five centuries ago constituted the basic framework of Russian history, so too did the fusion of Western-born Marxism with Russia’s destiny once again alter Russia’s fate and produce far-reaching global transformations. Russia reversed an image and mindset that had endured for centuries in comparison with Western Europe—autocratic, ignorant, dark, backward. Through war, the Russian Revolution completed a historic transformation: Russia was no longer an imitator of Western European capitalism but the leader of a new world history. “Under Bolshevik leadership … to eliminate the tragedy of mankind’s cyclical bouts of manic madness and to lay the foundation for the highest human civilization” (Trotsky). The Bolsheviks moved the capital from Petrograd back to Moscow; the ancient fantasy of Russian Slavism was realized through red communism. From then on, the light of historical truth radiated from the Kremlin, illuminating the dark corners of Western capitalism in Paris, London, and Berlin.

Russia’s millennia-old messianism, intermittently visible across history, finally assumed an apocalyptic form through revolution. The “Third International” and the “Third Rome” shared not only a striking numerical coincidence but also several common features. At a French Communist Party congress, it was rumored that Marx had said workers have no fatherland—but now the world’s proletariat had its own fatherland and capital: Russia and Moscow. Thus Russia’s ancient messiah was reborn; Russian workers and peasants, together with workers and peasants worldwide, belonged to one class, a new chosen people. Russian nationalism was transformed into a new internationalism, and the threats and containment posed by Germany and Japan, and later by British and American capitalism, became tangible worldly evidence of Soviet Russia’s salvational mission.