The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution by Alexander Riley

Author:Alexander Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Richard Pipes was among those who stressed the continuity between the Tsarist past and the Soviet present: “The Communist bureaucracy . . . quite naturally slipped into the ways of its tsarist predecessor . . . the new regime in so many respects continued old habits.”[20]

The second explanation proposes that the essential long-term goals of this revolutionary undertaking, notably a “classless society,” the “withering away of the state” and a democratic one-party system, were unattainable, or utopian. The gap between theory and ideals on the one hand, and practice and reality on the other, could not be bridged, but the failed attempts to accomplish this required a great deal of coercion and regimentation. However, it does not follow that Marxism had no influence on the system and the thinking of its founders and leaders. Peter Kenez wrote:

It is obvious that the Soviet state never at any point approximated the Marxist egalitarian utopia, that the state was not in the process of withering away, that labor remained alienated . . . But recognizing that . . . the Marxist utopia never came close to being realized is not the same as arguing that Marxism as an ideology did not have great significance in Soviet history. Marxist thought provided a prism through which the revolutionaries saw the world . . . The new order was built on a utopian scheme, one that by its very nature could not possibly be realized; there was always a gap between what the world should been according to theory and what the world really was.[21]

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