Fire in the Minds of Men by James H Billington

Author:James H Billington [Billington, James H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765804716
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

The Bomb:

Russian Violence

THE REVOLUTIONARY FLAME had been slow to ignite in Russia. The spark blown in from abroad by Decembrist officers died in the snows of Siberia. The flames lit later by student revolutionaries under Alexander II were also extinguished. But that fire continued to smolder underground, and burst out into three revolutionary conflagrations in the early twentieth century.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Russia and socialism replaced Poland and nationalism as the main revolutionary force in eastern Europe. Then, in 1917, the social revolutionary tradition was to come to power in Russia, producing the first decisive break in the ideological unity of European civilization since the Protestant Reformation.

How and why did Russia move from the conservative somnolence of the late years of Nicholas I in the early 1850s to the revolutionary turbulence that greeted Nicholas II forty years later? How was revolutionary socialism able to prevail in a land hitherto renowned for reactionary nationalism? No question is more important in the history of the revolutionary tradition than the origins and nature of the peculiarly Russian revolutionary tradition.

The tradition stands—like Russia itself—as the bridge between Europe and Asia. The Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century represented both a reprise on the Europeans of the early nineteenth century and an anticipation of the extra-European revolutionaries of the twentieth. The proper monument to the Russian revolutionary tradition should not be one of those healthy, heroic workers celebrated in Stalinist sculpture, but rather some simple, sickly student with the two heads of Janus: one looking back to European inspiration, the other forward to a global transformation.

The importance of Russia to the world lies not just in the material victory of the Bolshevik Revolution but also in the prior spiritual conquest within Russia of a highly cerebral and uniquely intense variant of the European revolutionary tradition. Indeed, the transformation of the old Russian Empire into the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics resembled in some respects the transformation of the Roman Empire from paganism into Christianity under Constantine the Great in the fourth century A.D. The imperatives for the change arose not just from the practical problems of an aging empire, but also, more deeply, from its loss of ideological legitimacy. The origins of the turn to a new belief by an old empire must, in both cases, be sought in the long years of preaching, martyrdom, and quiet conversion to the new faith within the realm of the old. Just as the Constantinian Revolution originated in the underground history of a previously illicit faith, so the Bolshevik Revolution "began" with the development within Russia of the most totalistic branch of the European revolutionary faith.

There was a dark side to this distinctiveness. For the Russians may be said to have unlocked the secrets of violence—just as the Germans uncovered those of organization. If the machine symbolized the German revolutionary movement, the bomb symbolized the Russian. The explosive implement was no less a product of the new industrial technology than was

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