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.