Discuss the lagacy of the Russian Revolution
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Legacies of the Russian Revolution
Ishtiaq Ahmed
Lest we forget, the Russian Revolution led by the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Ilywich Lenin was one of the greatest events of the last century. Yet far more attention has been paid to the French Revolution (1789) which transformed the world and set in motion processes that to this day inform common notions of citizenship and individual rights. Out of it has grown a long tradition of theorizing on democracy and human rights.
On the other hand, the Russian Revolution, also known as the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, was a turning point in history when more than 2000 years of philosophy, history, religion, and culture based on the notion of natural inequality among human beings was definitively called into question. Inspired and informed by the teachings of Marx and Engels, Russian communism set in motion a movement aiming to challenge all social and political orders built upon the presumed right of the privileged to rule over others.
The origins of the Russian Revolution, its connection with Marxism and its state practices are subjects of ongoing controversy. Did Lenin and his comrades correctly interpret Marx and Engels in launching a revolution in Czarist Russia on the periphery of Western capitalism? Was the state that Lenin established and Stalin consolidated a correct application of Marxist theory? Would the Russian Revolution have fared better if Trotsky had succeeded Lenin? Why did Communism fail in Russia? I shall not go into these questions but only note what I think has been the historical impact of the Russian Revolution.
The revolution carried out by Lenin and consolidated by Stalin transformed Russia from a largely bureaucratic empire of peasants into an industrial giant, and became the fulcrum of an international movement against colonialism and unbridled capitalism. That it caused great social upheaval and concomitant distress to significant segments of society cannot be denied, but this was history’s first experiment with breaking free from the fetters of class society and the multiple social orders it sustained.
It is widely noted that in Western Europe conservative and other governments started welfare initiatives to forestall their workers opting for revolution. In Marx’s writings, the major argument advanced is about the inevitability of socialism superseding capitalism through a mass revolution driven by unresolvable contradictions emerging in the form of capitalism in advanced industrial societies such as Great Britain and Germany. In the Communist Manifesto (1848) he and Engels theorized that the mass of workers and failed middle class would become a large army of impoverished and unemployed which would rise up to overthrow the monopolistic practices of a small capitalist class.1 Lenin took his cue from that tradition but revised Marx’s theory of revolution to apply to Czarist Russia. However, a minor argument that Marx also proffered was the possibility of a path to socialism through democratic means and methods. The German Marxist Eduard Bernstein and his followers invested their faith in this democratic and parliamentary path to build a welfare state. In Scandinavia, especially Sweden, the latter type of socialist movement emerged, leading to the creation of Social-Democratic welfare states that combined substantive equality with substantive freedom.
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