Reclaiming Actually-Existing Revolutionary Pasts 

by Ynker Ashkhadavoruhi 

We all have a critique of capitalism. In fact, it is becoming more obvious that even liberals today have some critique of capitalism. Critique has been an important framework through which to make sense of, understand, and see sites of the contradictions of capitalism – areas where organizing can happen, nuances to how this organizing should happen, as well as how to approach organizing so as to widen anti-capitalist action rather than narrow it. Critique is immensely necessary and it is a powerful site of rejection – rejecting what is, unearthing it, discovering its operations, and pointing to the ways in which capital produces realities far outside of the scope of the “economic.” It is careful and meticulous critique, for instance, that has guided us toward seeing how everyday life – not just production and reproduction – is caught up in capital’s net of extraction. It is critique that has led to the widening of “the working class” to include working class culture, social organizing, kin-work, and of course reproductive labor. Critique has allowed us to understand the nuanced gendered and raced dynamics of exploitation and extractive economies as well as how the working class in the imperialist center is produced by and maintained by colonial exploitation and extraction in the periphery. 

Critique, while necessary, has also produced some problems. In a 2017 essay, Jodi Dean she tells us that the U.S. needs a leftist party, but that this formation of a party has come under fire from a “Left realism,” as she calls it, which “has taken hold of a certain northern, western, US-European left. At the site of a re-thought humanist, culturalist, post-structuralist post-Marxism is the foreclosure of revolution and the reduction of politics to critique, resignification, subversion, reform, resistance, and work on the self.” Part of this dimension of critique is a marking of the Western working class as a privileged class – a class that benefits from imperialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia – and which prevents it from being truly radical. Furthermore, critique within this Western leftist thought pushes back against the viability of party politics – indeed a rejection of communist parties and any party – at the very moment when neoliberalism takes root in the West. An immense part of this project of rejecting revolution and a revolutionary party has also been identity politics, grounded in a rejection of any political claim, organization, party, or slogan that is universal as the universal, it is said, ignores important differences in race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on. We see this clearly today as liberals, including those who might consider themselves the left, tell us that it was because of our racism and sexism that we did not vote for Kamala Harris and thus we are left with the Trump fascist regime, completely ignoring the many continuities between the various Democratic regimes of the recent past, especially on the question of Palestine. 

A critique of party formation is deeply tied to assumptions and nightmarish fantasies, that have been intentionally manufactured, about historical revolutions – not just their failures (already a fantasy) but also their evil. Liberal historians – the most extreme of which is perhaps Timothy Snyder, but this group includes many others and I would argue most U.S. and European historians of the Soviet Union – have produced a colloquial understanding of the Soviet Union that seems to completely ignore the ways in which the Soviet Union fought and defeated the Nazis in WWII. Discussions of Germany’s or Italy’s atrocities during WWII by U.S. and European historians almost always includes a discussion of “Russian atrocities.” Stalin becomes a figure of horror and hate alongside Hitler. See, for instance, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, which skips no beat between Hitler’s genocides and Communist rule, which according to Synder did not differ at all from Nazi expansionist projects, or at least he makes no attempt to distinguish these. Readers are, thus, left with a monolith anti-civilization assemblage that includes fascists and communists with no complex relation to one another or to ideology. Indeed, for an extreme liberal like Snyder, communist ideology is always suspect as a “monopoly on reason.” Walter Rodney once pointed out the deeply subjectivist language and framework with which histories of the Russian Revolution were depicted within Western bourgeois history, with the regular use of language like “mob,” “violent,” “anarchists,” “dictatorship” and “terror” to characterize the Bolsheviks against a backdrop of vague notions that the Russian Revolution cast aside, like “democracy” and even “the Russian people.” Even beyond the Soviet Union as a site of revolution gone completely wrong, Cuba, China, and perhaps especially North Korea are colored in extremely subjectivist language – “nefarious,” “wicked,” “uncouth,” etc. The Revolutions of the 20^th century, within this hypernormalized rhetoric, are filled with pure terror. Communists, and any Communist Party, have never desired anything other than tyranny, hate, and violence. As a scholar of the post-Soviet region, I have rarely ever picked up any text written in the English language about this region that has not embodied this sensibility in some form or another. Even some more forgiving authors of Soviet history – Sheila Fitzpatrick, Ronald Suny, Mary Matossian – at times fall prey to the characterization of the Russian Revolution, Bolshevism, and the decades of development that the USSR underwent in subjectivist language that is uncharacteristic of scholarship writ large. 

Now, readers here might object that if all scholars agree on the content of this history, perhaps it is because this is how it really happened. Here I will respond with two points. First, as Michel-Rolph Troiullot has pointed out, history is not just made up of events as they really happened and/or what is said to have happened. There is a third element in history: the production of history itself is also a part of history – pointing to production as a political-economic process that is tied up in relations of power. Here, we can return to Rodney’s analysis of bourgeois histories of the Russian Revolution, which includes the linking of these subjectivist conceptualizations within bourgeois history to the actual structures of funding in which centers of Russian studies are embedded – the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations, connected to capital – as well as with established ties to émigrés from the Soviet Union from whom Western historians learn about the evils of the Revolution. Today’s postsocialist equivalence lies in late-Soviet “dissidents” who romanticized liberalism, weaponizing it against Soviet political-economic reality. In other words, much of what is written about the Soviet Union as well as other actually-existing socialist worlds is funded and organized by anti-Soviet and anti-communist forces. A very far cry from objective history. 

Second, it becomes clear within much of this ink spilled on the Soviet Union – often with the intention to discredit it – that the facts and the analysis seem mismatched – in other words, that while there seems to be a desire to discredit revolutionary accomplishments, the facts indicate realities that deserve great credit. Take, for instance, Mary Matossian’s book, The Impact of Soviet Policies on Armenia, which carefully details the first four decades of Communist Party rule in the Soviet Republic of Armenia. While Matossian lays out the clear social benefits of Soviet policies on the Republic in the South Caucasus – massive development which led to the improvement of everyday life; full employment; near complete literacy rates, including for women; the education of the masses; and egalitarian structures that did lead to the disintegration of the classes that held privilege and power through land tenure – she ultimately leads to various other conclusions that represent Soviet policy as the “Communist assault” on the traditional family, village, and Church. While she lays out these clear benefits to the population of Soviet Armenia, she concludes that this meant that the masses were now under “Communist manipulation.” While she concedes that the levels of education, specialization, and complete literacy were “remarkable achievements”, she ends up arguing that this process meant that “the leadership of Armenian society was passing into the hands of young Armenians who had been subjected from early childhood to Soviet indoctrination and were familiar only with Soviet life.” When it came to the question of Armenian nationalism and Soviet policies that both worked with and against nationalist fervor, Matossian concludes that “both the encouragement and repression of Armenian nationalism were but differing means of manipulating the Armenian people to work for Communist goals.” Missing entirely from this unhinged analysis – stating facts then doing some bizarre things with them – is credit those actual Communist goals that led to such profound achievements. 

The achievements that Matossian describes are quite remarkable and deserve leftist attention worldwide. Indeed, anti-colonial movements and postcolonial states looked toward the Soviet Union as a model to emulate – how it was, in other words, that a conglomerate of largely peasant societies were, in just a few short decades, to become the most developed and educated internationalist society in the world as well as the nearest to social equality that modernity has ever seen. Walter Rodney, for instance, was invested in studying and understanding the Russian Revolution as an event that might teach African decolonizing nations lessons in revolutionary party-building, how to structure a revolutionary society, and how to deal with critical debates regarding urban development and urban parties in addressing peasant claims. The Soviet Union’s political-economic technicians were in high-demand in the postcolonial world, sending out economic experts to various postcolonial countries to give consultation and advice on how to structure a revolutionary and anti-imperialist society, and advice on how to advocate and construct institutions that would provide critical social reproductive mechanisms toward women’s equality. Actors in the decolonizing world, like Kwame Nkrumah or Amilcar Cabral, sought to emulate socialist policies of the Soviet Union toward building anti-imperialism and socialist policies in the Third World.

While the decolonizing Third World regularly looked at the Soviet Union as a model of possibility for building a better and more just life, bourgeois politics as well as history have barred such imaginaries as well as any knowledge of this world from our vision. Today, save for a few pockets of leftists in the U.S. who are themselves gaslighted for being “Stalinist” in orientation or for romanticizing the Russian Revolution, this memory of achievement has all but been forgotten. Certainly, we can critique these pasts. We can analyze and we can locate pitfalls and problems. But none of this should mean throwing out all potential insight and possibility. 

I join Jodi Dean in her call for a leftist militant party in the U.S. And I call on this history of the Soviet Union to provide a possible model for what a society for which we advocate can look like.