I am sitting here, reading Richard Pipes (1995), Three "Whys" of the Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage: 067977646X). I am getting increasingly annoyed--not at Pipes's desire to convince me that Lenin was a really evil man (he was), but at how many corners Pipes cuts in the process of laying on his message:
On pp. 37-38, Pipes writes:
Lenin... novel political power... seizure of power at the opportune moment. this moment was linked in his mind with a general European war.... postcard... sent in July 1914... wrote... "Best greeting for the commencing revolution in Russia." Apparently he concluded... that the carnage would radicalize the masses... and make revolution all but inevitable...
But back on pp. 11-12, Pipes wrote:
hardly anybody expected the downfall of tsarism... people believed that tsarism would survive for a long time to come.... Suffice it to say that as late as January 1917, when he was an exile in Switzerland, Lenin predicted that he and his generation would not live to see a revolution in Russia...
On pp. 37-38, it is important to establish that Lenin believes that war and chaos and blood and death were his friends. On pp. 11-12, it is important to establish that tsarism was not rotten to the core but rather a system of government that could have endured for decades if not generations. In both cases Pipes ignores the fact that Lenin said lots of contradictory things and that no one quote can be taken to accurately and unambiguously reveal his settled, sober judgment. And Pipes ignores that his proof-text from Lenin on pp. 37-38 contradicts his proof-text from Lenin on pp. 11-12.
On p. 36 Pipes writes that Lenin's observations on revolution:
No single class in history has ever attained mastery unless it has produced political leaders... capable of organizing the movement and leading it.... It is necessary to prepare men who devote to the revolution not only their free evenings, but their entire lives.
has "to the modern ear... a remarkably 'fascist' ring." But has Richard Pipes thought about whether this passage:
...And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
also has a 'fascist' ring to the modern ear? And for extra credit consider:
The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.... There is no retreat but in submission and slavery!... The war is inevitable--and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.... Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace--but there is no peace.... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Last, consider the paragraph on page 27:
It is a mistake to attribute the February [1917 Russian] Revolution to fatigue with [World War I]. The contrary is true. Russians wanted to pursue the war more effectively, and they felt that the existing government was not capable of doing it, that existing political structures were in need of a major overhaul: remove the disloyal tsarina and let the Duma appoint ministers, whereupon Russia will really be able to fight properly and win. Fatigue with the war set in only after the unsuccessful June 1917 offensive launched by the Provisional Government to bolster its prestige and lift national morale....
Followed immediately by (on pp. 27-28):
The tsar, of course, could have saved his throne if that were his supreme objective. All he had to do was to sign a separate peace, exactly as Lenin would do in March 1918.... Had he done so... the Germans might well have crushed the Allies.... But being a devoted Russian patriot and loyal ally, he would not even contemplate such action. And when told... that the hostility towards him and his wife had reached such a pitch of intensity that, for Russia to stay in the war, he had to abdicate, he abdicated. He took this step ou tof patriotism...
In the first of these two paragraphs, we are told that the reason the tsar was overthrown was because he was not pursuing the war aggressively and effectively enough. In the second of these paragraphs, we are told that if Tsar Nicholas had been less aggressive and effective in pursuing the war--if he had surrendered to Ludendorff--he would have kept his thrown. This makes no sense. Those who forced the tsar to abdicate did do so because they wanted a stronger and more effective government and war effort; but by that very token they would have been more upset at and rebelled more fiercely against a tsar who tried to make a full and separate peace. If you are going to follow--as Pipes does--a paragraph that says X with a paragraph that says not-X, you need at the very least to explain why the contradiction is not really a contradiction. Pipes doesn't.
These are the three things that I am most annoyed at right now--and I am only halfway through the book. I daresay that I could find a dozen similar examples, and the book is only 84 pages long. I have no brief for Lenin--a vicious and brutal man; an idiot, who had no constructive thoughts at all about how to build or operate a regime any better than the tsarist tyranny his regime replaced; a man who raised up Stalin to power; a man whose actions made it no accident that his successor was a Stalin. But what Pipes is committing here is not history but ideology. Pipes erases the distinctions--important distinctions--between fascism on the one hand and the commitment to a revolutionary cause shown by people like Washington, Jefferson, and Henry. Pipes switches field in an eyeblink as in one paragraph he assumes that the Russian people at the beginning of 1917 wanted war and in the next that they wanted peace. And Pipes suffers from the Marxist disease of proof-texting: Pipes at one point trots out a postcard and says Lenin believed that World War I made the Russian Revolution inevitable and at another point asserts that Lenin believed that tsarism would last for at least a generation.
I do need a balancing item to offset the heavy--though opposed--ideological load of Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. But Wilson's coat of ideology is a veneer through which the reader can get a glimpse (even if dimly) of Lenin and Trotsky. In Pipes's book the ideology is painted on with a very broad brush: the coat is just too thick.
Posted by DeLong at April 28, 2004 08:35 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postThe Patrick Henry speech is a poor one to quote, since it's quite possible he never actually gave it. The earliest source for the speech is a biography of Henry by William Wirt that was so full of made-up "facts" that 19th-century historians had a saying, "Is it fact, or is it Wirt?". No contemporary account of the speech has ever been discovered.
Posted by: Leszek Pawlowicz on April 28, 2004 08:45 PMYou launch me on nostalgic recollections of taking Pipes' class on the Russian Revolution as an undergraduate. I got so mad at one point that I began a midterm essay with the words "I will discuss Pipes' views, Kolakowski's views, and the truth." I didn't do very well on that exam, despite a sympathetic TA. My anti-Pipes screed on the final was less aggressively phrased and better argued so it all came out ok.
One of the fundamental skills of the historian is to achieve an empathic understanding of what his/her subjects, even the evil ones, were thinking. Pipes' complete inability to do this for the Bolsheviks is a big part of the reason his project is such a wretched failure.
Posted by: David W on April 28, 2004 09:09 PMYou! DeLong! I am outraged at how easy you go on the US founders! What are you, some kind of subversive fifth columnist apologist fellow traveler? Huh? I asked you a question! You disgust me! I will never read your blog again you... you... you cannot redeem yourself, ever!
How about this quote from a founder?
"A first attempt to recover the right of self-government may fail... But as a younger and more instructed race comes on, ... some subsequent one of the ever renewed attempts will ultimately succeed... To attain all this, however, rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over; yet the object is worth rivers of blood and years of desolation" Jefferson to Adams, 1823
"Rivers of blood" huh? And what does he mean by "race"? The roots of the blackest fascism go far back, far back indeed.
There is also a quote from John Adams in which he says that the more he thinks about, society should operate on regular prinicples, like a machine or the military -I forget which. I can't lay my hands on it now.
Anyway, shades of Mussolini. I mean, what good is a part -er- individual apart from the whole machine anyway?
My favorit quote:
"Russians wanted to pursue the war more effectively"
"More effectively" that is very polite way to put it. I thought there was some issue of complete collapse of the army. But I am rusty on this stuff. I read Russian history a long time ago and by the time I got the 20th century, I was shocked and disoriented. Happened sometime around the Strelzy (Streltsy? Streltzy?) See, I can't even remember the name.
Lenin was awful. Russian society was so nice and mild, and then HE came along.
And another thing lemme tell you, "instructed" obviously means "brainwashed." Irrational brainwashed zombies were hiding behind Jefferson's thin facade of self-rule... popular rule... mob rule... atheist anarchy... dictatory of the proletariat, which did he really mean? Then there was the embargo... (Heck dang, maybe Pickering can find a little situation for me.)
And now we have the Federalist Society.
Case closed.
Posted by: jml on April 28, 2004 09:58 PMMmm... Methinks thou dost protest too much.
Well, on one hand, that Pipes is an ideologue is nothing new (though I like his books; one only has to remember that they're also ideological... you can't get all your history from Howard Zinn, after all.) So I agree with you here, though the issue is trivial (too well known, that is -- it goes w/o saying.)
Otoh, I don't see any contradiction in Grandpa Lenin's thinking that he wouldn't live to see a revolution at one time, and then, when he saw WWI start, changing his mind. I even remember his saying something like "no, they [bloody capitalist pigs, that is] wouldn't give us this gift..." (meaning war). But they did, and so he changed his mind. Why do you see a problem with that? He frequently changed his mind... if I remember it right, in his April Theses (in April 1917) he said, the Provisional Government needed to be kicked out, because (among other things), they (the PG) were slow to call the Constutuent Assembly. Now, we know what Grandpa did with the Assembly when he did kick the PG in the butt and grabbed the "reins of power" himself.
Am I missing something ?
Posted by: Ivan Petrov on April 28, 2004 11:29 PMTransalting from Russian edition of his "Russia under the old regime" (http://www.lib.ru/HISTORY/PAJPS/oldrussia.txt): "As mentioned above, the 1926 Penal Code had the sanctions for the political crimes that were not very different from Tsar's laws in either breadth or severity of the punishment."
" ...And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."
"also has a 'fascist' ring to the modern ear?"
I deduce I shall have to buy one of these new-fangled modern ears. Damn, Sir. And mine old one seemed yet not ripened into disusability.
I realise it's only one smallish part of a book that wanders hither and yon, rather than a treatment devoted solely to Lenin, but I thought James Scott's analysis of the man in _Seeing Like a State_ very perceptive - nuanced yet ultimately condemnatory - and especially interesting in counterpose to his account of Rosa Luxemburg.
Posted by: Mrs Tilton on April 29, 2004 01:50 AMDo not read Pipes! Do not read Pipes!
"The People's Tragedy" by Orlando Figes is a much better book. Also try "The Russian Revolution" by Sheila Fitzpatrick, if you are looking for something not too long.
But, please, do not read Pipes. His early "Russia Under The Old Regime" is good, but it all went downhill from there.
Posted by: Seva Rostovtsev on April 29, 2004 02:34 AMSpelling Police: it's throne not thrown.
"In the second of these paragraphs, we are told that if Tsar Nicholas had been less aggressive and effective in pursuing the war--if he had surrendered to Ludendorff--he would have kept his thrown."
Sorry
Posted by: JIm on April 29, 2004 05:40 AMThis post seems to have generated more heat than usual. Oh well...
Concerning:
I have no brief for Lenin--a vicious and brutal man; an idiot, who had no constructive thoughts at all about how to build or operate a regime any better than the tsarist tyranny his regime replaced; a man who raised up Stalin to power; a man whose actions made it no accident that his successor was a Stalin.
I have little problem with this except for the "an idiot." For worse, Lenin was not an idiot. He was an extremely intelligent man; that was what made him so dangerous (along with fanaticism, lust for power, an ideology based on an analysis of history with only a slight connection to reality, ruthlessness...).
It's a little known fact that, in a flirtation with "scientific methods" in education, the top echelon of the Communist Party and the Army General Staff took IQ tests in the early 1920s, before Lenin's death. As of when I heard this individual scores were not available, but the Party group scored very high.
Also, while not exculpating Lenin, it's possible that other things than his policies (such as Russian history, and the state of society at that time, and the organization of the Party) contributed to the high likelihood that Russia would come under the sway of a Stalin.
Posted by: Jonathan Goldberg on April 29, 2004 06:10 AMIvan Petrov -- you're missing what Brad clearly wrote: that when there's an apparent contradiction between two arguments one makes, or successive quotes from the same person, a serious scholar seeks to explain the apparent contradiction. And does so with analysis and material drawn specifically from the context or life being explained, not simply from easy or universal generalizations like "he thought better of this view as time went on events proceeded."
Brad, your basic concern about the problem with Pipes writing ideology rather than history goes to the fundamental point that writing the former illuminates the writer and not the history. I'd contrast that with a great historian like Christopher Hill, the leading scholar of the English Revolution and 17th century English history overall. While he is a Marxist, at most in his writing he allows that to influence only the questions he asks rather than the answers he finds, and never in contradiction to the evidence he proffers (and his credibility and open-mindedness here is clear from his frequent willingness to go with evidence that would cut against ideologically-driven interpretations). As someone who has a somewhat visceral revulsion to the use of the word "dialectics" in historical writing, I couldn't have tolerated reading him otherwise.
Hill's importance as a historian is even greater given his illumination of critical antecedents of US history. Perhaps the most striking illustration of the (hopefully only temporary) advantage of ideology over history is the lack of serious scholarship about constitutional "original intent" by its supposed proponents. Scalia is content to throw a few historical anecdotes into an opinion, as if that proved anything, and at least at the time of his Supreme Court nomination, Bork had written or publicly stated (in speeches) exactly one paragraph of sloppy secondary source "analysis" (misintepreting Leonard Levy) about "original intent" in his life. (As a staff lawyer on Senate Judiciary at the time, I read every written word Bork submitted to the committee.)
Hill, on the other hand gives a powerful picture of what historical experiences were really on the minds of the Constitution's framers. And without the deceitful overlay imposed by Whig historians about how Puritans were repressive and fun-hating. In fact, freedom of expression was freer in the 1640s and early 1650s in England than at any later time until the 20th century. And Milton was a free-sex libertine during that period. The Whig historians wanted to establish the legitimacy of the 1688 ousting of James II without seeming to run down Charles II, so they picked on the Puritans and Cromwell instead. Cromwell was a moderate reformer (read the Putney debates) and in many ways the model for the framers' thinking -- though it was to the framers' lasting credit that they provided for greater liberalization in the Constitution rather than freezing the politico-social status quo in place.
Posted by: Steady Eddie on April 29, 2004 06:27 AMIs it morning?
Is this an instance of Historical narrative or an article that could just have gone in a somewhat scruffy version of PEOPLE magazine "What Lenin really thought". Who cares? Is this introspective historical narrative any more useful than say a novel? If we are interested in why events happened then we need something more elaborate than a linear description of events or even worse feeble descriptions of electronic fluctuations in people's heads. Most of it is irrelevant anyway "I'm hungry" "I got a take a piss" "I'm horny".
Do I see any wisdom in historians? Wouldn't you be a lot off reading a book on mathematical statisitics?
Yuck. It must be morning.
It's hard to see 84 pages about history as more than a pamphlet. It seems plain from the segments quoted that Pipes has somehow avoided giving any serious thought to his subject.
One of the best- and also one of the funniest- books written about late-Czarist Russia was Gogol's DEAD SOULS. This book will leave a much better taste in your mind than anything written by Pipes.
Posted by: serial catowner on April 29, 2004 07:05 AMFurther reading:
The NY Review of Books has Ian Buruma review a new book on Stalin this week.
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Knopf, 785 pp., $30.00
It's an interesting read on Stalin and those who surrounded him. Turns out dictators and their courtiers often suffer stomach cramps, because they live their lives in fear.
This is the only part of the review available on line. It seems like a very good book.
"Dictators come in many forms. Some are religious maniacs, and some total cynics; some are mama's boys with a lust to dominate, and some are compelled by a higher cause or mission; some wish to be worshiped as gods, some just want to be feared, and most are probably a mixture of all these things. But they all have one quality in common: striving for absolute power consigns them to a world of lies. And one is tempted to assume that if a dictator such as, say, Mao Zedong really believed his own press—that he was the greatest genius who ever lived, the greatest statesman, general, scientist, poet, or whatnot—he would surely be a madman. "
Posted by: KevinNYC on April 29, 2004 07:47 AMWhat sounds fascist about this quote: "No single class in history has ever attained mastery unless it has produced political leaders... capable of organizing the movement and leading it.... It is necessary to prepare men who devote to the revolution not only their free evenings, but their entire lives" is the emphasis on leaders who are essential to organizing the masses and pushing them in the right direction.
The quote about the Revolution -- "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" -- has nothing similar in it. The idea of a "band of brothers" committed to a noble goal has nothing fascist about it, not even to a modern ear. Brad's undoubtedly right about Pipes' take on Lenin, but this particular criticism was peculiarly off-base.
Posted by: Steve Carr on April 29, 2004 08:30 AMpatrick henry not particularly fascist:
The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave, to those who stand in the vanguard of their people as an example to those people, to the overmen.... There is no retreat but in submission and enslavement by undermen!... The war is inevitable--and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.... the racially weak and culturally degenerate may cry, Peace, Peace, but the racially pure never cry peace for there is no peace, there is no peace for the world is formed as the soul of the great man, in struggle.... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and sullying of our national soul? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me a strong and pure nation, united beneath one strong and purposeful leader, or give me death!
Posted by: bryan on April 29, 2004 10:28 AMAbout Jefferson and the "river of blood" quote: Jefferson will forever be famous (and rightly so) for penning the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. In this case, I say thank God for youthful idealism. However, the contradictions in his personal life -- addicted to the comforts and status of a lifestyle founded on slavery -- undid him in the end, and give real point to the quote about not counting yourself happy until the day you die. Jefferson's final years were a living nightmare, with creditors closing in, and much speechifying on his part in favor of states rights and against abolition of slavery -- as he tries to curry favor with a Virginia legislature, hoping they will let him organize a lottery to save his estate. See American Sphinx by Joseph Ellis for a good account. Bottom line: the Founding Fathers were all flawed human beings, but together they managed to create something truly magnificent and timeless. You don't have to be perfect or a saint to do good in this world.
Posted by: Luke Lea on April 29, 2004 10:44 AMSteady Eddie:
> you're missing what Brad clearly wrote: that when
> there's an apparent contradiction between two
> arguments one makes
OK, but what contradiction would that be? Brad writes:
"On pp. 37-38, it is important to establish that Lenin believes that war and chaos and blood and death were his friends. On pp. 11-12, it is important to establish that tsarism was not rotten to the core but rather a system of government that could have endured for decades if not generations. ...Pipes ignores that his proof-text from Lenin on pp. 37-38 contradicts his proof-text from Lenin on pp. 11-12."
It doesn't!
Lenin thought (p.38) that a war -- should it happen -- would radicalize the population.
Where does this conflict with (p.12) "...tsarism was not rotten to the core but rather a system of government that could have endured for decades if not generations"? Indeed it could...
Posted by: Ivan Petrov on April 29, 2004 01:29 PMBetter yet: "...Pipes suffers from the Marxist disease of proof-texting: Pipes at one point trots out a postcard and says Lenin believed
[a.] that World War I made the Russian Revolution inevitable
and at another point asserts that Lenin believed
[b.] that tsarism would last for at least a generation."
Eh? Where's the contradiction between a. and b.? WWI was not a given.
Posted by: Ivan Petrov on April 29, 2004 01:50 PMBetter yet: "...Pipes suffers from the Marxist disease of proof-texting: Pipes at one point trots out a postcard and says Lenin believed
[a.] that World War I made the Russian Revolution inevitable
and at another point asserts that Lenin believed
[b.] that tsarism would last for at least a generation."
Eh? Where's the contradiction between a. and b.? WWI was not a given.
Posted by: Ivan Petrov on April 29, 2004 01:51 PMBetter yet: "...Pipes suffers from the Marxist disease of proof-texting: Pipes at one point trots out a postcard and says Lenin believed
[a.] that World War I made the Russian Revolution inevitable
and at another point asserts that Lenin believed
[b.] that tsarism would last for at least a generation."
Eh? Where's the contradiction between a. and b.? WWI was not a given.
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