with the coming of the New Economic Policy in 1921. Private property
and private trading were once more permitted in Russia. The new class
of entrepreneurs who rose out of this situation, the Nepmen, remind
one forcibly of the similar class of profiteers who rose in France
out of the abandonment of price-fixing after the fall of Robespierre.
They were never quite sure of their status, and they carried over
into their now legal activities a good many of the habits they had
acquired in their bootlegging days under the Terror. As a class,
they were “exceptionally vulgar, profiteering, crude, and noisy.”
In the next few years prostitution, gambling, and other un-Marxist
pleasures returned so obviously to Moscow and Leningrad that only the
most convinced of “fellow-travelers” were unable to see them. Most
foreigners in Russia since 1917 have perhaps been prevented from what
we may hopefully call the normal use of their eyesight less by the
activities of Communist officials entrusted with the task of guiding
foreigners than by their own strong religious conviction that all
must be well in the Marxist heaven. Yet until the Five Year Plan was
initiated, the return of the bourgeois vices was so obvious, especially
in the middle twenties, that even foreign Communists noticed the fact.
Stalin’s apparent return to Communism in 1928-29 is really no more
significant than Napoleon’s apparent repudiation of the corruptness and
moral looseness of the Directory once he had achieved secure power by
the _coup d’état_ of the 18th Brumaire. There seems to be in all our
societies a certain reaction to the Thermidorean reaction, notably in
this matter of the public pursuit of pleasure. Men in great numbers can
no more devote themselves heroically and permanently to sin than to
holiness. The thousand dance halls said to have been opened up in Paris
immediately after the Terror could have kept going profitably only if
most of the population of Paris wanted to dance most of the time. And
in spite of Anglo-Saxon ideas to the contrary, Parisians are really not
built that way.
What happens in the years following the crisis of the Terror is a kind
of seesaw between moral restraint and moral looseness, at the end of
which a kind of equilibrium is arrived at in which most men and women
behave in respect to such matters as gambling, drinking, love-making,
the adornment of their persons, and the use of leisure, about the way
their grandfathers and grandmothers had behaved. If we look at Stalin’s
Russia and ask ourselves how far there seems to be opportunity for the
old Adam and the old Eve to come out in the lives of Russians we shall
get a more accurate measure of the reality of Thermidor in Russia than
we could get from any amount of Marxist or anti-Marxist theorizing.
Mr. Eugene Lyons tells with malicious delight the story of the
bafflement and anger of a correspondent of the New York Jewish
_Freiheit_, a Communist paper, when he was excluded from a government
reception in Russia because he did not have a dinner jacket. Dinner
jackets a part of the dictatorship of the proletariat! Nothing could be
more absurd, illogical and wholly natural. The dinner jacket satisfies
a number of human needs--the anthropologist could analyze most of them
for you--and there seems to be no evidence that any of our revolutions
had much long-run effect on these needs. A commissar needs a dinner
jacket at least as much as a Congressman or a D.A.R. lecturer.
Detail after detail might be brought forward to show how the
dictatorship of the proletariat in contemporary Russia is by no means
the dictatorship of virtue we have seen prevailing in the crisis
periods of our revolutions. Jazz, for instance, was long prohibited
in Russia. Jazz was clearly the product of a decadent bourgeois
civilization, an indecent way of stimulating what no good Marxist would
want, or need, to have stimulated, one of the protean forms of “opium
for the people” in capitalistic countries. Communists would dance
from sheer joy to innocent, spring-like music. In the late twenties,
however, the fox-trot and similar dances began to seep into Communist
Russia, and nowadays we are told that American dance music is played as
frequently and as badly in Russia as in the rest of Europe.
No one dramatic event like the fall of Robespierre can be used to date
Thermidor in Russia. But a whole series of little matters of daily
life combine to make an impressive case for the reality of the Russian
reaction. A youth leader appears at a national youth congress in a
necktie, a step which when first taken must have been as shocking as
would be in this country the appearance of a Commencement speaker in
overalls. A fashion show is held in Moscow, and mannequins actually
parade, gliding and smiling with conventional lack of abandon, almost
as if they were poor little wage-slaves in Paris or New York. Lipsticks
and other cosmetics begin to appear even in the shops patronized by
working girls. Stories of crime, “human interest” stories, begin
to appear in the pages of newspapers hitherto superior to such
capitalistic drivel, and hitherto consecrated to the pure heights of
politics. Movies are made in which are to be seen recognizable human
beings, insignificant, comic, stupid, jealous, even Russian, rather
than bloodless abstractions representing Capitalism, the Landlord,
Communism, the Proletariat, Man in Revolt.
The Bolsheviks had been very superior about the family. It was an
institution of the old regime, interwoven with all sorts of religious
elements, inevitably conservative in its social action. The family was
a stuffy little nest breeding selfishness, jealousy, love of property,
indifference towards the great needs of society. The family kept the
young indoctrinated with the stupidities of the old. The Bolsheviks
would break up the family, encourage divorce, educate the children
to the true selflessness of Communism, get them used to collective
enterprises and collective social life, get rid of the influence of
the church in family relations. Now there seems to be no doubt that in
contemporary Russia Stalin’s government is deliberately attempting to
inculcate the old family virtues. Movies, plays, novels have restored
respect for parents, the old family ties, to honor again. Gallantry
towards women seems to be coming back; and gallantry towards women is
a shocking survival of feudalism, a symbol of their inferior position
in society. Divorce, once about as easy and inexpensive as it could
possibly be, has now been made more expensive and more difficult.
More important, the government seems to be encouraging the spread
of a sentiment that marriage is a serious and permanent affair,
something made in heaven as heaven now seems understood in Russia.
Abortion, which the old Bolsheviks proudly made as legal and as easy as
appendectomy in America, and almost as frequent, has now been forbidden
by law save where it can be certified as necessary to preserve the
woman’s life. Stalin is actually taking measures to encourage large
families. And underlying these various measures, and much more
important as a general indication of what is going on in Russia than
any one of them, is an atmosphere we should almost call Victorian. The
present rulers of Russia seem to be trying deliberately to cultivate
the kind of sentiments characteristic of societies in equilibrium--the
domestic affections, simple patriotism, love of work and routine,
obedience to those in power, dislike for individual eccentricities, in
short, what Pareto called the “persistent aggregates.”
Pursuing these ends, Stalin has recently decreed that Marxist debunking
of Russian history is to cease, that Russians are once more to learn
of the glories of the Russian past. The Byzantine missionaries who
brought Christianity to Russia are no longer to be painted as fools and
villains, agents of what was clearly capitalistic imperialism, abject
persons like contemporary missionaries bringing Bible, rum and syphilis
to the South Seas. On the contrary, Christianity in Russia is to be
seen as an essential step in preparing the barbarous Slavs for higher
things. Peter the Great and Catherine are no longer to be made cruel
despots. They, too, were great architects of Russia’s destiny, without
whom millions of other Slavs and Asiatics might not now enjoy the
blessings of Communism. Perhaps Stalin hopes that his people will love
him the more, once they learn how many other Stalins have in the past
ruled over them as Czars.
_V. Summary_
Thermidor is then not by any means something unique, limited to the
French revolution from which it takes its name. We have found in all
three of our societies which underwent the full cycle of revolution a
similar moral let-down, a similar process of concentration of power
in the hands of a “tyrant” or “dictator,” a similar seeping back of
exiles, a similar revulsion against the men who had made the Terror, a
similar return to old habits in daily life.
Even in the United States, which did not undergo quite the same sort
of crisis as the other countries, which did not have a real Reign of
Terror and Virtue, the decade of the 1780’s displays in incomplete
forms some of the marks of Thermidor. There were a relaxation of war
discipline and war tension and a grand renewed scramble for wealth
and pleasure. There were much financial speculation and much sheer
suffering. Shays’s Rebellion, a most ineffectual gesture, reminds one
of the feeble attempts of suffering Frenchmen and Russians to protest
against the newly rich of their Thermidors. There was even a moral
let-down in this country. “Sober Americans of 1784,” writes Jameson,
“lamented the spirit of speculation which war and its attendant
disturbances had generated, the restlessness of the young, disrespect
for tradition and authority, increase of crime, the frivolity and
extravagance of society.” All this sounds very like the original
Thermidor in France.
In some sense the phenomenon of reaction and restoration seems almost
inevitably a part of the process of revolution. At any rate it seems
hard for the most optimistic lover of revolution to deny that we have
found such a phenomenon in all of the four societies we have chosen
to study. The very, very faithful may still maintain that the great
revolution in Russia has proved itself exempt from this reaction, that
in Russia the noble aims of revolutionists in Western society have
at last achieved an unsullied reality. We ourselves cannot fit the
facts of Stalin’s regime to any such interpretation. Yet the fact of
Thermidor, even the fact of formal restoration as in 1660 and 1814,
does not mean that revolution has changed nothing. We shall in the
next chapter attempt to answer the very difficult question: Just what
changes did these revolutions effect?
_Chapter_ NINE A SUMMARY OF THE WORK OF REVOLUTIONS
_I. Changes in Institutions and Ideas_
With that tendency to absolutism which common sense shares with
some more formal metaphysics, we are likely to think of the kind of
revolution we have been studying as a cataclysmic break with the past.
The revolution “marks a new era” or “ends forever the abuses of the old
regime” or “digs a gulf between the old X and the new.” On the other
hand, when disillusioned liberals like Mr. E. D. Martin come to turn
against the revolutionary tradition, they conclude as sweepingly that
in effect revolutions change nothing of importance--except perhaps
for the worse--that revolutions are unpleasant and perhaps avoidable
interludes in a nation’s history. Now it should be clear that our
present study of the English, American, French and Russian revolutions
can hardly permit any such absolute answers to the question: What
did these revolutions really change? Some institutions, some laws,
even some human habits, they clearly changed in very important ways;
other institutions, laws and habits they changed in the long run but
slightly, if at all. It may be that what they changed is more--or
less--significant for the sociologist than what they did not change.
But we cannot begin to decide this last matter until we have got the
actual changes straight. We are considering here, of course, those
changes which are apparent at the end of the revolutionary fever, those
changes which the history books are likely to catalogue as “permanent.”
With the changes promised but not achieved by the extremists, as with
the many dramatic changes in the lives of the individual actors in the
revolution, we are not here directly concerned at the moment.
Politically the revolution ends the worst abuses, the worst
inefficiencies of the old regime. It settles for a time at least the
kind of internal conflict out of which the “dual sovereignty” arose.
The machinery of government works more smoothly after than immediately
before the revolution. France is here a typical case. The old
overlapping jurisdictions, the confusions and the compromises inherited
from the thousand-year struggle between the centripetal forces of the
Crown and the centrifugal forces of the feudal nobility, the welter of
accumulated precedents, were all replaced by the work of the French
revolution. An able bureaucracy operating within neatly subordinated
administrative areas, a legal system efficiently codified, an excellent
army well staffed and well provided for, enabled Napoleon to do much
that his Bourbon predecessors could not possibly have done. Tocqueville
long ago pointed out that the French revolution came to complete the
work of a long line of French monarchs, to make centralized power in
France effective and complete.
Here is one detail among many. In the old France, weights and measures
varied from region to region, indeed from town to town. A bushel at
Toulouse might be much more than a bushel at neighboring Montauban.
Worse yet, the very names of measures might be wholly different words.
The coinage was, like the present English coinage, partly duodecimal,
and very hard to handle by long division. What the revolution did about
all this is familiar to every schoolboy. It substituted the uniform
system of weights and measures known as the metric system, a system
which has made its way without benefit of revolution through most of
the world outside the British Empire and the United States.
This achievement of governmental efficiency is really the most striking
uniformity we can note in estimating the political changes effected
by our revolutions. With suitable allowances for local differences,
for accidents and for the inevitable residue of the unique with which
all history and sociology must deal, England, America, and Russia also
emerged from their revolutions with more efficient and more centralized
governments. The process is less clear in England, partly because it
took place before the full maturing of economic and cultural forces
tending to promote such forms of efficiency as the metric system
or the _Code Napoléon_. But, for all its complexities, the English
government after 1660 was much better geared to the needs of the nation
of shopkeepers than was the England of 1620, with knights’ fees, ship
money, benevolences, Star Chamber, Court of High Commission, and the
other appurtenances of the immature Stuart despotism. Parliament after
1660 was more completely master of England than the first two Stuarts
had been.
Russia is in this respect as in so many still a subject for dispute.
Violent opponents of Stalin insist that the new bureaucrats are just as
inefficient, pettily tyrannical and stupid as they were said to have
been under the Czars. Some of the sentiments involved in statements of
this sort would seem to be more or less a constant of Russian life, and
to a certain extent of life under any government. Gogol’s admirable
comedy, _The Inspector-General_, deals as certainly with uniformities
as any scientist could. Yet all in all future historians will probably
have to admit that as a piece of political machinery the soviet system
worked better than did that of the Czars, that the soviet bureaucracy
was on the whole a more capable one than that of the Czars. You may
not like the first Five Year Plan, but you must admit that beneath its
parade of statistics lies a concrete economic achievement greater than
anything the old regime could show for a similar period.
These revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all
directed against the tyranny of the few and towards the rule of the
many. This whole phase of revolutions is peculiarly involved with the
existence of certain sentiments in human beings which make it very hard
to apply the methods of science to the study of men in society. Yet
it would seem that the full importance of such matters as democracy,
civil rights, written constitutions, and indeed the whole apparatus
of popular government lies rather within that vague and important
field the Marxists like to call ideology than in the field of concrete
political agencies which we are now studying. Certainly one is struck
by the fact that all our revolutions promoted the efficiency of the
government rather than the “right” of the individual to a romantic
freedom to be himself. Even the traditional apparatus of popular
government can be analyzed as an instrument to get things done in a
particular situation, however strange such an analysis might seem to
conventionally minded contemporaries of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin.
Bills of Rights, codes, and constitutions were in effect charters of
the new ruling classes. Liberty as an ideal was one thing; liberty in
politics was another and less exalted matter.
These revolutions all saw much transfer of property by confiscation or
forced sale. They saw the fall of one ruling class and its succession
by another ruling class recruited in part, at least, from individuals
who were before the revolution outside the ruling class. They were
accompanied by a definite and concrete demand for the abolition of
poverty, for the equal sharing of wealth; the men who guided the
Russian revolution continued long after its crisis period to insist
that they were economic egalitarians, that Russia would not recognize
private property in land and in capital goods. Marxist thought still
separates our four revolutions into two different classes: the English,
French, and American, all of which it considers to have been in their
final results “bourgeois” revolutions, inevitable victories of business
and industry over landed aristocracy; and the Russian revolution, in
its final phases a true “proletarian” revolution. We may nevertheless
be more impressed with the fact that in all four revolutions economic
power changed hands, and that a newly amalgamated “ruling class” in the
new Russia as in the new France directed the economic as well as the
political life of the society.
In more detail, the English revolution took land from the more devoted
Cavaliers and ecclesiastical property from the more unyielding
Episcopalians and Presbyterians and gave it to typical Puritans,
business men and clergymen alike. The church livings came back at the
Restoration of 1660 into Anglican hands, but save for the property
of a few great lords very close to Charles II, confiscated Royalist
lands remained in the possession of their new owners. Most of these
owners made their peace with the Stuart government, and thus was laid
the foundation for the ruling class under which England won an empire
in the next two centuries, a ruling class in which landed wealth and
industrial wealth were almost inextricably mixed, and which proved to
be a very good ruling class.
The concrete economic changes in France follow a similar pattern.
Lands confiscated from clergy and _émigré_ nobles were acquired by
revolutionists, and for the most part remained in the possession of the
purchasers even after the Restoration of 1814. Much of this land no
doubt finally ended up in the possession of small independent peasants,
and helped to put the final touches on the establishment of that very
French class, universally regarded among writers and politicians as
the core of modern France. But much of this transaction also benefited
the middle class, and certainly the French ruling class _after_ the
revolution represents as striking a mixture of old wealth and new, of
land and trade, as did the English.
In Russia the differences are not as great as they ought to be
according to Marxist theory. There has been a transfer of economic
power from one group to another rather than an equal sharing of
economic power, an equal distribution of consumers’ goods, an end
of struggle over economic goods or power--but you may put the
Marxist formula as you like. The new Russian bureaucracy seems to
be a privileged class which enjoys wealth in the form of consumers’
goods without yet possessing it in the forms we conventionally call
“property.” At any rate, almost all reporters are agreed that in Russia
in 1938 there is nothing like an equal distribution of consumers’
goods. What seems to have taken place is a development of the lines of
movement of Russian economic history. Just as the French revolution
put the finishing touches on the position of the peasantry, but by no
means “gave” them the land suddenly, so the present status of Russian
agriculture and industry seems to be a development of slavophile and
other elements favoring collective farming over the _kulaks_, and of
almost world-wide tendencies favoring large-scale bureaucratically
managed industry over small independent competitive concerns. Here as
in other countries the revolution certainly does not draw institutions
out of a hat--nor out of a book, not even out of so impressive a book
as _Das Kapital_.
None of these revolutions quite substituted a brand-new ruling class
for the old one, at least not unless one thinks of a “class” without
bothering about the human beings who make up the class, which is a
favorite procedure of the Marxists. What happens is that by the end of
the convalescent period there is well begun a kind of amalgamation,
in which the enterprising, adaptable, or lucky individuals of the old
privileged classes are for most practical purposes tied up with those
individuals of the old suppressed classes who, probably through the
same gifts, were able to rise. This _amalgame_ is especially noticeable
in the army and the civil service, but it is almost as conspicuous in
business and industry, and higher politics. A detailed study of the
social origins of Bonaparte’s officers, or the officers in the present
Red Army, or of the men who actually ran the government of England in
1670, France in 1810, Russia in 1938, would certainly confirm this
analysis. Moreover, the new men in the post-revolutionary ruling
classes have made distinct compromises with the older ones, with that
old world from which the crisis period of the revolution is so extreme
a revulsion. Your Downings, Fouchés and Kalinins have no longer the
fine freedom a Trotsky can enjoy. They are no longer revolutionaries,
but rulers, and as such they are in some respects bound to “learn” from
their predecessors.
It is in the social arrangements that most intimately and immediately
touch the average man that the actual changes effected by our
revolutions seem slightest. The grand attempts at reform during the
crisis period try to alter John Jones’s relations with his wife, his
children, try to give him a new religion, new personal habits. The
Thermidoreans abandon most of this attempt, and in the end John Jones
stands on certain matters about where he stood when the revolution
began. Our study of revolutions should confirm something that sensible
men have always known and that exasperated reformers have occasionally
come to admit, at least to themselves--that in some very important ways
the behavior of men changes with a slowness almost comparable to the
kind of change the geologist studies.