What do you do when you’re lost? Psychologists tell us that men and women react differently. Loathe to confess error or even admit to being lost, men typically forge ahead, hoping to eventually stumble upon the right path. Women retrace their steps to the wrong turn and set forth anew. While this seems more prudent, it requires you to identify the wrong turn.
Is the same true of history? If a society, or a civilization, has gotten lost, can it go back to its wrong turn and try a different path? One cannot, of course, reverse the course of events. But one can rethink a train of ideas that have led to an ideological dead end. One can go back to the point of error and take a different course of thought, and thus of action.
Were the events of a century ago in Russia and Ukraine a wrong turn in the ideological as well as the historical sense? The answer can help us decide whether we need to go back and start all over again in our socio-economic and political thinking. This is not because today’s wave of populist and nationalist revolts against the post-war edifice of Western liberal democracy (in Britain, France, Hungary, Poland, and now the U.S.A.) may bear some slight resemblance to the chain of revolutions that was sweeping the world from China to Mexico a century ago. It is rather because neither populism, nor neo-nationalism, nor neo-liberalism offers a satisfactory path. We have lost our way, and it may be useful to ask whether 1917 can help us identify our mistake.
There were, in fact, several epochal events in 1917. In March, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and ceded to a liberal democratic Provisional Government (which, some would say, might have led to the peaceful evolution of the Russian Empire into a federation of independent republics). But in November, the radical socialist Bolsheviks staged a coup d’état. In the following year they dissolved the Constituent Assembly, withdrew from the war, took over the country by force of arms and set Russia on a new political course. The real revolution, one can argue, took place in the late 1920s and 1930s, when Stalin turned a backwards agricultural society into a powerful modern industrial state, at the cost of millions of lives. In 1917-1918 a moderately socialist Ukraine moved gradually from autonomy to independence, and though the Bolsheviks crushed it by repeated invasions, Ukrainians were able to preserve a formal state structure until gaining freedom in 1991.
There are various theories about what really happened in 1917 and why it ultimately failed. Some note the continuity of Muscovite centralism and autocracy. Arnold Toynbee argued that in the USSR, as in its imperial predecessor, the Russians adopted the traditional Byzantine attitude toward the West, characterized by “orthodoxy” (“Byzantium is always right and the West is always wrong”) and a sense of their special destiny as the heirs of classical civilization. They had also created “a Russian version of the Byzantine totalitarian state” (“Civilization on Trial,” New York, 1948, pp. 171-72, 181-82). Russian nationalists, however, point out that Marxism was a West European, not a Russian, invention. Socialists stress that, despite their name, the Bolsheviks were a minority, uniting political fanatics untrammeled by moral constraints, who had distorted the teachings of Karl Marx. Economists criticize Communism as a system that failed to account for private incentive or satisfy growing consumer demand, while workers’ interests were better served by labor unions. Military analysts focus on the USSR’s defeat in the arms race by a stronger America. And, of course, Ukrainians, noting the persistence of Russian colonialism, see national oppression as the congenital contradiction that led inevitably to the break-up of 1991.
It seems fair to say that 1917 saw a toxic blend of a flawed Western idea in its most radical form with the worst of Russian political culture and traditions.
Philosophers find a fundamental flaw in Marxism itself, namely its materialist understanding of reality. But that misunderstanding is not unique to Marxism. George Weigel believes that while the Marxist tradition falsely sees economics as history’s prime mover, the Jacobin tradition arising from the French Revolution erroneously assigns that role to politics. Neither attributes due importance to culture (“Krakow’s Geography of Sanctity,” First Things, June-July 2016, pp. 30-31). Yet culture, including philosophy and religion, is determinative.
From a philosophical or religious perspective, Soviet Marxism was one of the 20th century’s post-Christian heresies, which also include fascism (the nation above all) and neo-liberal capitalism (individual freedom and affluence above all). Contrary to received opinion, some see the experiment of 1917 as just one stage of a misguided work in progress. Cardinal Robert Sarah recently said, “Today we are witnessing the next stage – and the consummation – of the efforts to build a utopian paradise on earth without God. It is the stage of denying sin and the fall altogether. But the death of God results in the burial of good, beauty, love and truth.” (speech at National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, Washington, May 17, 2016). Like their forebears, who thought in 1917 that they could combine Godless socialism with Ukrainian nationalism, the Ukrainians of 2017 who imagine that they can combine Ukrainian nationalism with Godless neo-liberalism may be disappointed.
Should we, in our present disorientation, take the wise women’s approach and retrace our steps? But how far back should we go? The Communist train that departed in 1917 ran parallel to a Western train that had taken off a couple of centuries earlier. Both were headed for an illusory future in which the greatest good would be available to the greatest number – with “good” defined as the least pain and the most pleasure – that is, material comfort and wealth. When the Communist train crashed in 1991, it was not difficult to switch the Ukrainian caboose to the Western express. But is it really headed for a “bright future”?
Andrew Sorokowski can be reached at [email protected].