COMMUNISM IN PRACTICE - THE RED REVOLUTION AFTER FORTY YEARS By Harrison E. Salisbury As the ceremonial trumpets and the saluting artillery in Red Square . . . proclaim the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union is celebrating a triumph unique in human experience—the preliminary conquest of outer space. From Kamchatka to Calcutta, from Kansas to Krasnoyarsk the air resounds with plaudits. Geopoliticians proclaim a basic shift in the world balance of power. Minds long bemused by flying saucers quiver like tuning forks at the reality of Soviet earth satellites.
An epic moment in global history has arrived. Yet, when the last echo of the shouting dies away and the laurel wreaths wither the question inevitably will arise: What constitutes the victory of the revolution? And, indeed, has the Bolshevik coup d'etat, followed by the long years of blood and sorrow, finally attained the goals it sought? Were the founder of the revolution, Vladimir Lenin, alive today, his pride in Soviet achievement would be tempered in equal measure by disappointment—even disillusionment. For the brilliance of Soviet astrophysics and the genius of Soviet nuclear technology have not been matched by comparable attainment in human engineering. Nor, as the new Kremlin leadership crisis reveals, has the Soviet state achieved genuine political maturity.
There would be heaviness in Lenin's heart today as well as glory. He proclaimed the Bolshevik Revolution in the name of humanism, not technique—of men and not machines. He conceived dialectical materialism not as a means to its own end but as an instrument which men would use to create the material conditions necessary (in his view) for a better and happier life.
Russia's proud hour thus serves to emphasize the disparity between the capabilities of Soviet technology and the minimal improvement which that technology has effected in the lives of the Soviet people. This was not the intention of the founders of the revolution nor even of Stalin. But almost from the moment of its birth the revolution has plunged off in directions unanticipated by its makers. The revolution—not the revolutionaries—has been the master.
When the cannon of the old cruiser Aurora opened fire on the Winter Palace in Petrograd on Nov. 7, 1917, Lenin and his comrades thought that its guns were signaling the dawn of world revolution. This was the greatest of their delusions. They believed that Europe had arrived at the Apocalypse. They thought the shame of a hundred centuries of man's enslavement of man, of war and conquest, of barren dreams and broken lives was about to vanish in the crucible of the ultimate revolution.
Forty years later, as we try to assess the potentialities of the Soviet future, our minds again are drawn by apocalyptic visions. But it would be safer to consider the Soviet future in terms of the Soviet past.
Lenin thought it only a trick of history—and a bad trick at that— that the revolution had started in Petrograd instead of Berlin or Paris. He was comforted by the conviction that at any moment the situation would right itself and that word would come that the proletariat in Germany, in Austria, in France, in England and, perhaps, even in the dark continent of America had raised the red flag.
Lenin was monumentally wrong—as he was beginning to realize at the time of his death—but most thinking people of the world shared his misconceptions to some extent.
The basis of the confusion was this: For nearly three quarters of a century Karl Marx and his followers had been preaching that the end of the bourgeoisie was at hand; that capitalism had reached its zenith and would shortly be replaced by a new and higher social order—socialism or communism (the terms were used interchangeably). Thus, when Marxist Bolsheviks seized power in Russia they, as well as most of the world, naturally assumed that the predictions of Marx were being fulfilled.
History, however, has stubbornly refused to enter the channels marked out in the Communist Manifesto. The doom of capitalism pronounced in 1848 has not materialized, just as the world revolution confidently anticipated by Lenin in 1917 has never come to pass.