Because You Never Asked

     (This is the second in the series starting with “The Russian Revolution”, and followed by “Joseph Stalin” and “The Revolution and Capitalism”. It was written around 1993).

     Perhaps it is no accident that the direct descendant of the French Revolution had a signature moment etched in history quite similar to the unforgettable “storming of the Bastille”. This moment occurred in St. Petersburg on the night of October 25^th, 1917, when a mob similar to that at the Bastille burst into and sacked the Czar’s Winter Palace. The invasion of this holy refuge of the “divine” right to rule broke the spell of a privileged few over the suffering many that had gone on for centuries. Undoubtedly, the emotional feeling on that fateful night was identical to the now romanticized events of the Parisian summer of 1789. Such feeling has to be the ultimate in socio-political orgasms.

     By 1917 the leaders of the people carrying out these events had reached a point of self awareness and maturation to fill the void left by the Czarist defeat. For the first time in history, the lowest rung of the human social ladder took a reasonably stable control of their own destiny. This is a monumental accomplishment and is irreversibly intact today, even if the revolution’s economic policies are not.

     In assessing what happened in 1917, the truly important point is this: the people for whom the revolution was fought are still in control of it and have access to whatever good can be taken from it. In this most important sense, the Russian Revolution is still functioning and has been a great success. The task that lies ahead is to provide more good that can be taken from it.

     Some people might say (probably almost all people in the United States of Apple Pie), “don’t give me that glorious revolution crap, the Russian people would have been better off without their revolution. Look how much better the working class has done in western Europe”.

     This is a point well taken that ignores some fundamental differences of historical context. One must remember that the liberal, more inclusive societies that developed in the west were the result of a slow, steady march forward through rugged terrain and stormy weather. It was a tedious, evolutionary (not revolutionary) process over the course of centuries, spurred on by the increased wealth and new social classes created

by the Industrial Revolution.

     In the Russia of 1917, such conditions were barely perceptible. It was an almost feudal society ruled by a stubborn oligarchy dominating a massive peasantry not even deemed worthy of a more enlightened, fulfilling existence. Given these circumstances, the Bolshevik solution was not an irrational one then, and, at least in some upgraded, contemporized form, could still be in what we now call the Third World. (I must congratulate myself for such a comment in a world where The Wall has fallen, the Soviet Union has disintegrated, and the Thatcher-Newts are triumphantly strolling the Earth. In spite of all this, I will be the “someone who has to do it” by proclaiming my belief that somewhere along the line where the future becomes history, a more cooperative society will someday be humanity’s ticket to a more satisfying realization of life --- when we are ready).

     Boris Yeltsin, with his Jimmy Hoffa, teamster boss face, would never have had a chance for anything more than mule labor without the Russian Revolution. If Lenin is now considered a negative force in Russian history, this is due to a broken historical compass struggling to find its north all over again. The Russians are a very confused people at this moment.

     Viewed against this historical backdrop, the events currently taking place in the old Soviet Union should be seen as part of the evolutionary process begun on that fateful night in St. Petersburg, and not as a new revolution.

     What has been said above is not meant to minimize the importance of what is now under way in Russia, for it is one of the most clinical exercises in human endeavor currently taking place on the planet. The Cold War had created a situation where both sides had become hopelessly stagnated in their rhetoric and propaganda. This stagnation has now been broken. At first glance this might seem a complete capitulation to the “Action News” model for life on this planet, and it is probable that the Russians see it just that way. But the western mentality has become just as extreme in its free handed, competitive, every man for himself individualism, as the Communists had become with their communal, egalitarian approach. Somewhere out there is a hybrid ready to take shape that the end of the Cold War could allow to happen. Now that the world is a less paranoid place and this Capitalist-Communist dichotomy is not fouling our objectivity, we have a better opportunity to be honest with ourselves. Perhaps we can now admit that not all is well with us either. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a beautiful thing.

     But let’s not paint the Russian Revolution with too rosy a color. The people of the old Soviet Union have had to pay a high price in brutality and terror in exchange for their chance to control their own destiny. Which brings me to --- (see essay “Joseph Stalin”)    

     (Post Script, 11/08 - As I ready this essay for my website, the financial crash of 2008 has become a reality. The vast majority of people were buying things with money they did not have, lent to them by lenders who did not have it either. In a sense, the whole system was a mirage and everyone was just faking it --- and the collective bill has now become due. Being that those at the top who crafted this system do not fancy foreclosing on themselves, they are frantically trying to come up with a modified version of THEIR game, one that supposedly saves us all, but mainly saves them. However, if I may grant myself a moment of idiotic optimism, perhaps this financial turmoil can lead to at least a timid first step towards that hybrid system I mention in this essay and expound upon more fully in the essay “Post Consumer Man”).