Appendix IV: A Bloody Utopia and the Lessons of the Red Empire — On the 100th Anniversary of the Russian October Revolution (Part 7)

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Because of the long and tragic record of failure of the Russian Revolution, the most famous slogan spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—“Workers of the world, unite!”—has completely lost its efficacy. The world’s proletariat did not unite under the banner of the Russian Revolution; it did not unite during the two world wars; it did not unite during the Cold War; nor did it unite after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even Russia’s own proletariat never truly united; it did not even come together to save the revolution at the moment of its demise. The greatest historical irony is that while the world’s proletariat failed to unite morally or idealistically, the global bourgeoisie carried out an unprecedented worldwide union in the name of capital, technology, markets, and freedom, democracy, and human rights. Not only did this push back and abolish the proletariat’s world union, it reduced it to a Menshevik minority on a global scale, while elevating itself to a Bolshevik majority of the world.

The unavoidable tragedy of the Russian Revolution lay in the unbridgeable chasm—material, spiritual, human, and institutional—between the historical conditions it possessed, the moral and spiritual forces it might have mobilized, and the ideals it set for itself. Yet when Russia undertook the great mission of liberating all humanity, the grandeur, power, and spiritual elevation it displayed endowed the revolution’s tragic course with a sense of heroism and martyrdom. By contributing the greatest utopian tragedy in human history, Russia occupies a special place in twentieth-century world history; owing to its geography and the human universality of its historical destiny, Russia’s lessons belong to the entire world.

A country like Soviet Russia, which took upon itself the mission of liberating humanity, and a society enchanted by utopian visions, nevertheless proved far shorter-lived than the Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or even the Tsarist Empire it replaced. A super-empire spanning Eurasia was not strangled in its cradle by the military intervention of fourteen capitalist countries; it did not collapse before the war machine of Nazi Germany; yet, when it faced no major crises in economic, military, political, cultural, or diplomatic spheres, it collapsed in dramatic fashion. Neither defenders nor subverters shed blood for it; there was no war—indeed, there were no longer defenders or subverters at all, only bystanders and suddenly unemployed Eastern and Western “Kremlinologists.” To destroy the world’s first socialist state, to shake such a solid people’s power based on the worker-peasant alliance and the dictatorship of the proletariat, to bring down a Communist Party proclaimed to be so glorious, great, and correct—if one were to overthrow and destroy such a state, only two possibilities seemed conceivable: a joint Western invasion of the Soviet Union, or a cataclysmic natural disaster.

As with the rise of the Soviet Union, its collapse was the result of the combined effect of countless causes. What force, after all, led this unprecedented experiment to sudden bankruptcy? This remains the Sphinx’s riddle of contemporary Russia. In politics, the military, the economy, diplomacy, society, and culture, Russia showed no irreversible signs of party or state collapse until the very moment of disintegration. One force—incalculable and resistant to rational analysis—was overlooked: the innate nature of the Russian people, who cannot endure enslavement and deception forever, and their spiritual quest for freedom, truth, and happiness. This was the invisible yet insurmountable force that brought the totalitarian communist Soviet Union crashing down.

At the critical historical moment of the party’s and the state’s demise, not a single Russian—not even a single CPSU member, not a single Red Army soldier—shed a drop of blood to save the Soviet Union. There is no rarer historical phenomenon that more clearly demonstrates the lesson of the Soviet Union’s repudiation by the Russian people: this red empire ultimately failed to conquer them because it lost their hearts; because the Russian people remained noble and continued to cherish ideals.

Owing to Russia’s particular traditions—tsarist autocracy, serfdom, the Third Section, secret police, populists, the People’s Will, the Bolsheviks—although Stalin at times and in limited spheres mobilized the masses to denounce, inform on, and condemn various “enemies,” his principal instruments for establishing a reign of terror were the NKVD, the courts, secret tribunals, concentration camps, forced-labor camps, and firing squads. His style was direct, clandestine, and massive physical annihilation. The Soviet people did not begin to learn partial truths about Stalin’s repression of the old Bolsheviks within the Party until 1956—three years after Stalin’s death—through Khrushchev’s secret report; not until the late 1970s did they glimpse the “Gulag Archipelago” spread across Russian lands through Solzhenitsyn; and not until the late 1980s did they learn still more horrifying history through Gorbachev’s “new thinking” reforms. The bitterness and strength of Russian history lie in this: precisely because the people had long been cut off from the truth, once they discovered the bloody crimes and tyrannical nature of Stalinism, their shock, disillusionment, and fury were sufficient to destroy any powerful despotism. A tyrant who deceived and enslaved generations of Russians; a blood-soaked “experiment” that utterly betrayed the Russian people; a tyranny that no longer represented them—these may coexist with a people whose hands remained clean and whose hearts remained noble, but they can never endure forever.

That the Russian Revolution ended in such an unexpected way has a reason that truly embodies historical dialectics. Its great, sacred, and ultimate goals, though betrayed, grotesquely deformed, and displaced by means, were not completely extinguished. On the contrary, as a solemn and lofty historical promise, they lay hidden within history itself, serving as the final monitor and breakwater as the revolution slid astray. The redemptive spirit and moral legacy salvaged from violence, lies, and bloodshed have already become—and continue to become—a new foundation for the revival of the Russian soul. Their retribution, though invisible, is of the greatest power; though relentless, it grants Russia and all humanity their most precious revelation.

In The Soviet Mind, Isaiah Berlin lavishly praised Andrei Sakharov: he wholly belonged to Russia’s noble tradition; his incredible courage and unwavering devotion to truth made him one of the purest and kindest exemplars of our age; he was supremely civilized and possessed immense moral charisma. Berlin emphasized that Sakharov “was not alone”: after a history of terror, the Russian intelligentsia to which he belonged survived amid rubble and ashes—nothing short of a miracle. Berlin pointed out that the ideas and actions of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia had not left the historical stage, a new revelation in itself. He concluded with a prediction: Russia is a great nation with boundless creativity; once they gain freedom, who knows what surprises they may yet bring to the world?