The Russian revolution may perhaps in a sense be still going on. The Trotskyites hold that Stalin and his crowd are Thermidoreans, and that _this_ Russian revolution, at any rate, is pretty well over. Complete detachment in such matters is certainly difficult at this moment. But it does seem clear that the crisis period in Russia is over, that at most Russia is now in a rather long and disturbed convalescence from the fever of revolution. We may perhaps regard the period of war communism, 1917-21, as the first and main crisis of the Russian revolution. With the New Economic Policy of 1921 began Russia’s Thermidor. Lenin’s death and the subsequent rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky led up to a second crisis, or rather relapse during convalescence, which we may date at the more acute periods of violent enforcement of the first Five Year Plan. But as many an observer has noted, this secondary crisis lacked the hopeful idealism of the first, lacked its improvisations and its adventures, lacked its active foreign and White Guard enemies, and looks from even our brief historical perspective much like characteristic acts of the “tyrants” who came to power during other Thermidors--the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, for instance, or the Napoleonic enforcement of the Continental System. Since 1933, this second crisis has been rapidly abating, and at present evidences of reaction in Russia abound.
_II. Amnesty and Repression_
Politically the most striking uniformity to be noted in the period of convalescence is the ultimate establishment of a “tyrant” in something like the old Greek sense of the word, an unconstitutional ruler brought to power by revolution or _stasis_. This uniformity has been frequently noted: Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin, all seem to confirm it. Indeed, in the Federalist period in the United States there were Jeffersonians ungrateful enough to suggest that Washington was a perfectly good example of the tyrant born of revolution. There is nothing very puzzling about the phenomenon. After a revolution has undergone the crisis and the accompanying centralization of power, some strong leader must handle that centralized power when the mad religious energy of the crisis period has burned itself out. Dictatorships and revolutions are inevitably closely associated, because revolutions to a certain extent break down, or at least weaken, laws, customs, habits, beliefs which bind men together in society; and when laws, customs, habits, beliefs tie men together insufficiently, force must be used to remedy that insufficiency. Military force is for short terms the most efficient kind of force available for social and political uses, and military force demands a hierarchy of obedience culminating in a generalissimo. Polybius has here some appropriate remarks about the military virtues of Republican Rome. All this, however, is pretty much a commonplace of our times.
The rule of one man does not come immediately with the Thermidorean reaction. Even Cromwell, the earliest established of the three, did not become uncontested ruler with the dissolution of the Rump. The reaction to the crisis is at first slow and uncertain. The habit of violence is by now thoroughly established. There is left from the crisis a tendency to dramatic steps and whole-hog measures. Even sober and peace-loving men have moments of excited relapses to the jitters of the Terror. Seen in this light, the recent Moscow purges and trials are no indication that the Russian revolution has had an unusually long life, that it fails to fit our pattern. These melodramatic displays are no more than the expected aftermath of revolution in a land and among peoples unblessed with Magna Carta, Blackstone, and Gilbert and Sullivan.
As time goes on, the pressures the Terror applied to ordinary men are relaxed: the special tribunals give place to more regular ones, the revolutionary police are absorbed into the regular police--which are not necessarily the equivalent of London bobbies; they may be agents of the OGPU--and the block, guillotine or firing-squad are reserved for the more dramatic criminals. It is not, of course, that political life shortly assumes the idyllic stability some of our own contemporaries like to describe as the Rule of Law, and which, one suspects, was never quite as nice as appears in their books--not even in staid nineteenth-century England, or in the thirteenth century where St. Thomas lived so pleasantly. The taste and habit of political violence lives on in _coups d’état_, in purges, in well-staged trials. But John Jones, Jacques Duval, Ivan Ivanovich, the man in the street, is no longer included in the cast--he is now left to his normal role of spectator or supernumerary.
Gradually, too, the politically proscribed are amnestied, and come back, sometimes to be caught up again in the scramble of competitive politics; sometimes to become part of that staff of modern life, the bureaucracy; sometimes to live quietly as private citizens. The process is naturally the reverse of the process in which these men and women had been driven out. They go from Right to Left, and come back from Left to Right--first the almost pure radicals, then the moderates, then moderate conservatives, until the final restoration brings back remnants of the old gang. Such at least was the process in France and in England. After 1653, the Presbyterians took heart and began to emerge into politics, followed by the more moderate Episcopalians and Royalists, until in 1660 the Stuarts and their courtiers returned. In France the succession was very exact and ratified by formal bills of amnesty: first the Girondins--those who had survived--came back, while tears were shed over, and monuments erected to, the innocent victims of the bloodthirsty tiger Robespierre; then the Feuillants, the Lafayette-Lameth crowd; then the out-and-out Royalists and such-like _émigrés_, whom Napoleon, however, was able to control fairly well; then finally, in 1814, the Bourbons themselves.
So far the Romanovs have not returned to Russia, and only a very rash prophet would prophesy their ultimate return, or indeed any kind of formal restoration of hereditary monarchy. We must not ask our revolutions to make too neat a picture. It is clear, however, that save for the final monarchical restoration, the process we have outlined above has been going on slowly in Russia, at least since Lenin’s death. Even the aristocrats can go back if they make the proper submission and get the proper publicity--which was true of Napoleonic France. As for the numerous variants of revolutionary belief, it is clear that gathered around Stalin today are many men who were far from orthodox in 1917. Even the sainted Gorki was what in France would be called a _rallié_, a man who rallied to the Communist regime only after the worst of the Terror was safely over. On the other hand, almost all the old Bolsheviks, the men who ruled Russia in the period of crisis, have by now been liquidated. Stalin in 1938 can hardly make any direct human contact with his revolutionary past.
The personnel of government in the Thermidorean period and in the new-old regime that finally emerges from the revolution is likely to be varied in origin. Napoleon was served by old aristocrats of the _noblesse d’épée_, by bureaucrats trained in the old regime, by Fayettists, by Girondins and even by a few once-violent Jacobins. Of men like Albemarle, Shaftesbury, and Downing, who stood high in the government of Charles II after his restoration, it has been written: “They were of the same school as Blake and Vane; they represented the most solid political attainments of the Cromwellian party.” Downing’s career is an especially good example of how men of ability and a certain moral elasticity can traverse revolutions. He was graduated from Harvard in 1642, and went to England at the happy moment of Puritan supremacy. He soon rose high in the ranks of the Cromwellians, devoting his talents especially to diplomacy. He contrived to turn his coat at just the right time, and was accepted in the service of the new king. It is from this early and somewhat atypical Harvard man that Downing Street in London takes its name. Even in Russia, though by now old Bolsheviks are almost completely weeded out of the very highest councils, there are undoubtedly many of them, their fires well banked, in the great new bureaucracy.
The new governing classes in all our societies are then a very miscellaneous lot, with very little in common as regards social origins, education, and earlier party affiliations. They have in common a certain adaptability. They have survived a rigorous if somewhat arbitrary selection. They seem, after the heroes of the Terror, tame and unenterprising in many ways. But they usually do a pretty good job in getting institutions, laws, routines, all the necessary standard ways of doing things, once more working.
Along with amnesty to former moderates there goes on a reverse process of repression and persecution of unrepentant revolutionists of all sorts. The further the reaction moves to the Right, the wider its definition of revolutionists to be duly restrained as suitable reaction against the honors of the Reign of Terror. The Thermidoreans themselves are by no means unwilling to apply terroristic methods in the proper direction. The White Terrors are as real as the Red. Even in England, the well-known Clarendon Code of the Restoration conforms closely enough to the general pattern of repression later carried out in France and in Russia. The clever and unprincipled extremist is almost always able to weather the White Terror--witness Fouché again. It is only the convinced and persistent extremists who suffer.