Blood Rites

I

“Violence is the midwife of history,” Marx famously proclaimed, and although most of his own century was disappointingly quiet, its successor became the age par excellence of revolution. To be sure, in their time the years 1640-1688 in England, 1776-1787 in America, and 1789-1799 in France were epochal affairs. (It is on the basis of these examples, especially the last, that Marx asserted the putatively universal principle that “revolutions are the locomotives of history.”) But it was only in the twentieth century, beginning in 1917 in Russia and culminating between 1949 and 1979 in East Asia, that this “law” seemed about to be vindicated.

In the 20th century, also, revolutions became incomparably more bloody. Although royal heads had rolled earlier, and terror had temporarilly flared, never before had there been anything like the massive and prolonged exterminations that were the hallmark of twentieth century upheavals. Nevertheless, revolution, as formerly, was widely accounted a progressive phenomenon, a liberation from all the evils of the past -- “human emancipation,” again in Marx’s terminology.

So what was the relation between that humane end and the violent means employed to achieve it? The answer is inescapable that, if revolution is progressive, then the relation must in some measure be positive. Such, indeed, was the famous verdict of the existentialist philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in “Humanism and Terror,” published in 1946 at the height of Stalinism: the only open question was the intensity and duration of the terror, and Merleau-Ponty opined that the world’s sole ongoing revolution would remain within tolerable bounds. A half century later, in quieter times and with far more evidence on twentieth-century horror available, three historians who once held varying degrees of hope for revolutionary change, return to the problem of its human cost.

II

Barrington Moore Jr.’s “Moral Purity and Persecution in History,” though the smallest in bulk of our three volumes is indirectly the most comprehensive since it builds on a lifetime’s reflection on modernity, particularly his neo-Marxist magnum opus of 1966, “Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.” This work starts with the proposition that modernity is about the revolutionary displacement of a lord-peasant society by capitalism, and its problem is to determine under what conditions this leads to democracy or instead ends in communism or fascism. And, although the method is the Marxist one of grounding these political outcomes in social classes, the conclusions are no longer Marx’s own -- for the good reason that the twentieth century had confounded his expectations of a proletarian, socialist end of history.

Briefly, Moore’s resolution of this conundrum is that modernization leads to democracy only when the bourgeoisie triumphs over the archaic world of lords and peasants. However, when capitalist development is captured by the aristocracy it yields fascism, as in Germany and Japan; and when it simply disrupts traditional society the result is a peasant upheaval leading to communism, as in Russia and China. In all three scenarios, however, massive violence is necessary to reach modernity, though democracy later permits peaceful progress towards some measure of social justice.

This ingenious adaptation of Marxism to un-Marxist reality, however, is vulnerable in the way all forms of Marxism are: it makes no allowance for the autonomy of politics and ideology in any historical mix. The short answer to Moore, then, is that fascism was nowhere created by an aristocracy anymore than Communism was by a peasantry: both were the handiwork of political ideologues, from Lenin and Trotsky to Mussolini and Hitler, who exploited national crises triggered by war (or war-induced Depression) to impose on society the unprecedented political phenomenon of a totalitarian Party state.

Eventually realizing he had short-changed the problem of revolutionary motivation, Moore later grappled with the ideological sources of social violence in a series of smaller works. His present study is a coda to this quest.

The book’s argument is that in the twentieth century secularized versions of religious ideas of “pollution” and “moral impurity” have fueled mass movements for the extermination of political enemies. This impulse was “central to Fascism, Communism, and the imperial patriotism of Japan” in World War II, and later it cropped up in the American Christian right and Islamic fundamentalism. The source of this lethal tradition is Western monotheism, a force usually regarded as progressive, even by confirmed secularists.

Moore examines monotheism’s role in three cases. The first is that of the ancient Hebrews, who launched the persecution of “pollution” with prohibitions against the idolatrous practices of the Canaanites in order to prevent absorption by their more numerous, conquered subjects. This fixation on moral purity was then transmitted to the Christians and directed against heretics, a case that Moore examines--with a gap of two millennia--through the 16th-century French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots. Militant monotheism then assumed secularized form, two centuries later, in the French Revolution (though the process of secularization is not explained) in which the demonized adversaries have become aristocrats and priests. And so on to the class and national ideologies animating Communism and fascism.

The only “demonstration” that Moore gives of monotheism’s pernicious effects is to contrast it with Eastern religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. True, these religions also developed ideas of impurity--such as the Hindu concept of caste. Yet, dehumanizing as such ideas are, they do not lead to the annihilation of the impure. Asia took to political extermination only when it was corrupted by the West in the twentieth century, thus generating Japanese fascism, Chinese communism, and most recently militant Hindu nationalism. So at present, all hopes for human emancipation are no more than “the grand illusion of the twentieth century.”

What are we to make of this jeremiad for the human race? Even granting that as a sociologist Moore can claim a broader latitude for generalization then would be permitted a historian using comparable data, the fallacies of his argumentation are fatally debilitating--from the sweeping monocausality of his use of monotheism, to the huge connective gaps between the episodes examined, to the thin analysis of each of them. At the very least, we must conclude he has failed to remedy the deficiencies of his original socio-economic scheme.

III

Arno J. Mayer’s “The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions,” by concentrating on the two pivotal instances of modern revolution, narrows the focus for Merleau-Ponty’s problem while attempting to give it greater historical depth. Based on lectures delivered in 1991 at the prestigious College de France, the book views its paired upheavals with unconcealed nostalgia. “The grand romance and the great fear of the French and Russian revolutions have given way to the celebration of essentially bloodless revolutions for human rights, private property, and market capitalism.” And Mayer finds such nostalgia in order, because “over 4 billion of the world’s 6 billion people . . . live at or below the level of poverty . . . the costs of this unjust and oppressive order . . . are ‘at least as atrocious as those of revolution.’ ” The suggestion is clear: the present world order is as unstable as the French Old Regime had been in 1789, with its absolute monarchy, legal hierarchy of hereditary “estates,” and all-encompassing Church.

For, in Mayer’s view, modernity is defined by a continuing revolution against a universal Old Regime. In fact, the present volume is a sequel to his work of 1981, “The Persistence of the Old Regime,” which profitably explored the survival of such an order down to World War I. Mayer’s two revolutions, therefore, are not so much separate and distinct upheavals, the one “bourgeois-democratic” and the other “proletarian-socialist,” as Marxist usage would have it; they are two stages of a permanent revolution for human emancipation from traditional society. And Mayer insists that, despite the gulf of “backwardness” separating the Russia of 1917 from the France of 1789, at the moment of explosion both were eighty-five percent rural, illiterate, and superstitious -- more or less like the Third World today.

Under such oppressive conditions violent revolution was as inevitable as it was necessary. And Mayer again insists that, contrary to such conservative scolds as Edmund Burke and Hannah Arendt, violence is not the product of ideological intoxication; it is an objective historical necessity in all politics. Citing an array of hard-headed thinkers from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Carl Schmitt (and the soft-headed Merleau-Ponty), Mayer affirms that violence has been indispensable to every “founding act” in history, even in such legalistic polities as our own--a proposition which it is difficult to dispute. But he then proceeds to argue a broader and more dubious point: violence will remain a continuing necessity so long as oppression also endures.

And injustice eternally cries out, not just for remedy but for vengeance. So the revolutionary spiral unfolds, with rebellion generating counterrevolutionary resistance, leading in turn to the self-defense of terror and the riposte of counter-terror. Since, moreover, the Old Regime is a sacred world, amidst the passion of revolt the old religion is answered by an over-heated “rationalism,” the surrogate faith, of rebellion. Finally, the internal war of revolution ignites an external conflict between the new order and foreign Old Regimes, which are inevitably in league with domestic counterrevolution.

In developing this barrage of arguments for violence and terror Mayer is eminently eclectic--in the French expression (he uses many himself),”hewing his arrows from all available wood” (il fait fle^che de tout bois). Thus he approvingly quotes the judgment of the conservative sociologist, Robert Nisbet, to the effect that Marxism is a counter-religion. And in defending Red revolution, he relies on the axiom of the National Socialist Schmitt that all politics comes down to the dichotomy “friend-enemy.” But why not? Another term for such universal antagonism is “class struggle.”

The body of Mayer’s book consists of paired chapters on France and Russia for each stage of their revolutionary trajectories. The opening “crescendo of violence” of 1789-1795 in France is thus compared with that of 1917-1921 in Russia. The action then shifts to the conflict between town and country in a juxtaposition of the Vendee in France with the Black Earth peasantry’s revolts of 1920-1922 in Russia. And so on through the struggle of both revolutions against religion, and then to the revolution’s “externalization” in Napoleon’s wars and its “internalization” in Stalin’s “building Socialism “ (in fact the real crescendo of violence in Russia, contrary to Mayer’s scheme).

In these narrative chapters, Mayer does not pretend to offer original material; but he does claim to give a “new” interpretation. And the key to his approach is the French case, the literature of which he knows intimately (unlike that for Russia).

The central problem in this literature is, of course, the Jacobins, who on the one hand pioneered the modern universal-suffrage Republic and on the other defended it with a Reign of Terror. As if this were not problem enough, after 1917, and especially after 1945, the Communists laid claim to Jacobinism as a trial run for Bolshevism, thus making the latter the “bourgeois” Republic’s legitimate successor. However, as Communism lost vitality under Leonid Brezhnev, this postwar orthodoxy of the French Left was challenged by the “revisionism” of the one time Communist, Francois Furet, who demoted the Jacobins in favor of more moderate moments of the Revolution, thereby also deflating Moscow. Simultaneously, Mitterrand’s Socialists de facto gave up on socialism. So by the bicentenary of 1989, Furet’s claim that “the French Revolution is finished” had become the new Tocquevillean orthodoxy.

Mayer’s purpose is to counter the theses of his late friend and to reanimate the Jacobin-Bolshevik mythos. He does this by refurbishing an argument going back to the Third Republic and known as “la these des circumstances”--as opposed to “la these du complot,” meaning not an actual “plot” but minority action by ideologues. This defense holds that the infant Republic of 1793-1794 was forced by internal revolt and foreign intervention to fight for its life, first by popular violence then by state terror. As Mayer puts it: “The Furies of revolution are fueled above all by the resistance of the forces and ideas opposed to it.” To cite only one example of this reasoning, in the notorious case of the noyades, or mass drownings, of “enemies of the people” by Jean-Baptiste Carrier at Nantes, the proximity of the peasant and royalist Vendee and the social chaos in Nantes itself left him with little possibility for mastering the situation without resorting to violence.

This reversal of responsibilities is Mayer’s leitmotif from the beginning to the end of his book. So in its culminating episode we are not surprised to find that Stalin could build “socialism in one country” only by mass terror, both because his backward nation was beleaguered by staggering internal difficulties and because a hostile world had cruelly boycotted the Soviet “experiment.”

The classic defense of the Jacobins is at least partially valid: they were indeed beset by ubiquitous dangers. But just as surely they resorted to “overkill” out of ideological intoxication -- surrogate religion, if you will -- to create a new world and a new man. The use of the argument from circumstances to explain Stalin, however, is totally incongruous. For communism was hardly the self-evident way to develop backward Russia: after all, Western capital had invested copiously in Tsarist industrialization. What made the difference under Stalin was the novelty of ideocratic communism. And given the its militant stance, does Mayer really expect us to believe that “imperialism” could have suspended the class struggle to rescue Soviet socialism?

Similar incongruities undermine Mayer’s other parallels. Particularly egregious is his pairing Napoleon with Stalin, something not even clear in Mayer’s own mind. On the one hand, he echoes Engels in viewing Napoleon as a “Robespierre on horseback” spreading revolution across Europe; on the other hand, he dwells on the obvious but seldom emphasized fact that Napoleon’s wars were far bloodier than Robespierre’s terror (as if this made the latter more benign). Even so, war is not the same as terror; it is war. And Stalin’s terror was not action against other armies; it was state terror against a civilian population, his own; and it was carried out on an incomparably greater scale than Robespierre’s. Similarly, as regards religion, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was a central factor radicalizing the French drama; the Bolshevik struggle against the Church, though cruel, played no comparably driving role.

But more important than such specific incongruities is the global fact that the French and Russian Revolutions are not symmetrical or commensurable phenomena. For, as should be glaringly obvious, the Russian Revolution knew no “Thermidorian reaction” against the dictatorship of zeal: it dug in its heels at its radical peak, October 1917, and stayed there for 74 years, with diminishing fanaticism after Stalin’s death, to be sure, but with the basic structures of Party-state and command economy intact until the end. (Transpose this back onto the French case, and you have the absurdity of “Jacobin power”, not for 16 months, but to the mid-1860’s.) In other words, Bolshevism was a permanent dictatorship with the long-term goal of a totalizing socialism. Jacobinism was an emergency improvisation, capable of no more than an ephemeral leap at civic egalitarianism; even Robespierre believed in private property and free markets, accepting price controls only for the emergency’s duration. Besides, the Jacobins had been elected and enjoyed a parliamentary majority.

But Mayer is hardly alone in failing to appreciate Soviet uniqueness. This is the besetting sin of the predominant literature on the subject. A corpus composed when communism was still an “experiment,” it treated Sovietism as something between a variant path to “development” and a partially successful socialism--a conceptual confusion that underlies all Mayer’s Russian chapters.

By comparison, Marx’s would-be distinction between two stages of modernity (capitalism and socialism), for all its utopianism, is closer to reality than Mayer’s amalgamated Franco-Russian, developmental-socialist revolution. For the Marxist perspective at least reflects the fact that the Bolsheviks’ intention was to trump its “bourgeois” predecessor with the higher, final revolution of socialism. As we now know, they failed. But their failure, just as much as their initial intent, is what separates 1917 from 1789.

The Jacobin project of a universal-suffrage, secular republic is a thoroughly feasible enterprise, and terror is not intrinsic to its operation. France, of course, did not succeed in its initial attempt at creating such a system. (Only America, which had no Old Regime to overthrow, was lucky enough to establish a modern Republic on the first try--though universal [manhood] suffrage did not come until 1864, with the Fourteenth Amendment.) And in Europe the true heirs of the Jacobins were not the Bolsheviks; they were the frock-coated gentlemen who built the Third Republic after 1870. (Furet went a bit far in his anti-Jacobin revisionism.)

The Bolshevik project of Socialism as full non-capitalism, by contrast, is an intrinsically unfeasible enterprise. For it means the complete suppression of private property and the market, and the absorption of civil society into the state--allegedly through the spontaneous action of the oppressed, in fact by an ideologically intoxicated “avant-garde.” Thus, in Russia, it is the “these du complot” that is the preponderant explanation. And terror is intrinsic to operating such a system.

The rub, of course, is that not only does “really-existing socialism” (Brezhnev’s phrase) fail to out-produce capitalism; after a brief spurt of basic industrialization, in the not-so-long run it simply doesn’t work. Thus by the end of the 20th century it had been annulled virtually everywhere, even when the husk of the Party-state was preserved, as in China. And so the world is now back to the horizon of 1789, since the universal-suffrage republic not only has the legitimacy of popular consent; it also permits that degree of welfare-state “socialism” that a market-based economy is able to finance.

For Mayer, however, this outcome is a setback for humanity. He therefore concludes by lamenting the “containment” policy of George Kennan’s famous “Mr. X” article of 1947: “the United States had the ‘power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate... and in this way promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.’ And so it turned out, for the better or for the worse, and at enormous expense on both sides, as well as in the world at large.” The Soviet quietus thus came not from within the system, but from without. The reader wonders: are we then free to try again?

IV

To find an answer, let us train a single focus on the crux of the humanism-terror debate, the spectre haunting most of the twentieth century: Communism and its supreme architect, Stalin. Here our text is the latest volume in Yale’s highly visible (though uneven) documentary series, ‘Annals of Communism,’ J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov’s, “The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939.”

Since this work has appeared almost a decade after communism’s fall and the opening of Soviet archives, we might expect it to announce a new historiography, free of the previous literature’s already noted misperceptions. In fact, however, Getty (like Moore and Mayer) builds on a predecessor volume, “Origins of the Great Purges, 1933-1938,” published in 1985 at the peak of the old, prelapsarian historiography, and without benefit of Moscow archives.

Launched in the 1970s, this then-new “revisionist” historiography rejected the “totalitarian model” of Soviet reality in favor of a more “pluralistic” view. With great fanfare, its proponents charged that the totalitarian thesis was unscholarly, mere Cold War ideology that caricatured its subject as a “monolith” in which everything was controlled from a single center. Be it noted, however, that the epithet “monolith” was itself a polemical caricature: No serious historian, even at the height of the Cold War, failed to take account of such evidence of Soviet “pluralism” as intra-Party opposition or peasant resistance to Stalin’s collectivization. (Truth to tell, what the revisionists bridled at most in the totalitarian model was the comparison with Nazism). So in common parlance the “T-word” has survived quite nicely, thank you, as the unavoidable shorthand for the all-encompassing structures of the Party-state.

Yet there does exist a more substantive difference between the revisionists and their adversaries. “Totalitarianism” emphasized regime politics and ideology acting undemocratically “from above,” thus tending to delegitimize the Soviet system. The “pluralists” emphasized social and economic forces putatively acting democratically “from below,” thereby tending to legitimize the system overall. But does this legitimation also extend to Stalin? Over this issue the pluralists divided into two camps: “soft” revisionists arguing that there had ex

isted a gradualist, semi-market “Bukharin alternative” to Stalin’s revolution from above (a solution to which some reformer, say Mikhail Gorbachev, might one day return); and “hard” revisionists emphasizing the “social mobility” and other progressive aspects of what Stalin had in fact accomplished (a perspective which left Brezhnev’s “developed socialism” satisfactory just as it stood). And although the two camps feuded mightily, both viewed the Soviet enterprise as, overall, a success.

Getty is a major luminary in the second camp, and his first book undertook the most delicate task of the entire revisionist enterprise: making the Great Terror look less terrible. His solution was a prodigy of ingenuity. He boldly put aside all memoir and emigre accounts as “biased” to rely instead on state records published by “participants.” And, mirabile dictu, Stalin’s purges were sanitized by a new mutant of the argument from circumstances. The forced collectivization and crash industrialization of 1930-1932 (“circumstances,” be it noted, entirely of the Bolsheviks’ own making) had thrown the country into turmoil and the Party nomenklatura into anxious insecurity. This threatening situation led the “center” to take drastic action to assert control over the “periphery” of regional Party bosses. In this contest, Stalin had no “master plan,” but was instead a “moderate” arbitrating between Party factions and potentates. Unfortunately, however, by 1937 matters had spun out of control, and “many thousands of innocent people were arrested, imprisoned, and sent to labor camps. Thousands were executed.”

These figures were prima facie ludicrous at the time; and for Getty to have advanced them in a purportedly scholarly work can only raise the gravest questions. These are perhaps best addressed by Tony Judt in his recent New York Times op-ed piece apropos of the David Irving affair: “For revisionists, witnesses are always the most unreliable of all sources--they don’t remember accurately, they are being exploited by others for political ends; at best they can only speak for themselves. This is what the Holocaust deniers assert when confronted with camp survivors, and it was what apologists for Stalinism asserted when faced with veterans of the gulag.” On the moral aspect of the matter, this says it all.

Just as aberrant is Getty’s central thesis of intra-bureaucratic class struggle. For he in effect asks us to believe that the Kremlin’s efforts to rein in its provincial subordinates resulted in a decade of mass executions and condemnations to the Gulag. But what government doesn’t have trouble with subordinates? Why, then, couldn’t the “center” have resorted to the normal solution of rotating personnel? And why didn’t the “peripheral” bosses resist Moscow? Instead, they were destroyed and replaced to a man. The answer to these questions, of course, is that the Soviet regime was not a normal state; it was the ideocratic Party-state already described.

Similarly, if the chaos in Soviet society was as threatening to the regime as Getty claims, why weren’t disaffected elements able to do it greater harm? In all Stalin’s reign, the regime suffered only one casualty, Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov, and even he might have been Stalin’s victim. But Getty needs chaos to show that the system was no “monolith,” so he again fails to notice the obvious: Not only did the Soviet regime control its population more closely than any Western constitutional government, but it controlled Russia far better than its Czarist predecessor, which, after all, lost an emperor, a prime minister, and numerous generals and ministers to revolutionary assassins. Widespread disorder indeed existed in Stalin’s Russia, and the Soviet regime at times had trouble mastering it. Still, the Party machine was “ineffective” only in comparison with its extravagant ambition to create a new world and a new man. Yet master the “chaos” it did. And socialism triumphed over all obstacles.

Yet rather than recognize this macabre utopian leap for what it was, Getty would have us believe that the Great Purge was only a spin-off from some bureaucratic turf war. So poor Merleau-Ponty had agonized in vain over Bukharin’s fate and the Revolution’s honor! Still, what a relief to know that the Soviet Union had political give-and-take and social pluralism after all!

Getty’s peers ought to have treated this exercise in denial-with-a-social-science-face as the preposterous fable it was. Instead, he was asked to edit the present volume of Purge documents for the enlightenment of non-specialist readers. The pity is all the greater since other publishers will now assume the job has already been done, and so not undertake to do it again.

Yet, in fact, Getty’s volume is not an edition of sources in any meaningful sense. As his opening sentence declares, it is the author’s second go at “writing a history of the Soviet terror of the 1930s,” this time with archival illustrations. Fully 60% of the text is devoted to the author’s introductory, intervening and concluding commentaries, and only 40% to documents, at that a mere selection of the myriad available. Most of this selection, moreover, has already been published, often in translation. Worse still, Getty’s sampling is organized primarily to salvage his theses of 1985.

The new facts, however, necessitate so many modifications of his scheme that it is now a very confused affair. Thus the number of executions in 1937-1938 alone rises to around 1 million, though this quantum leap from mere thousands prompts no reevaluation of the author’s position. Stalin is no longer a moderate or an arbiter, but, (as the book’s subtitle indicates), the purge’s prime instigator. Even so, Getty still insists that Stalin, though already clearly a dictator, had no “master plan”--again to show the system was no top-down monolith. And indeed, Stalin had no detailed blueprint. Still, purge records show him steadily edging toward life-and-death power over personnel since the minuscule M.N. Riutin and neo-Trotskyite “oppositions” of 1932.

On the main issues, however, Getty stands pat: The Party remains beleaguered in a chaotic society; the force driving the Purge remains intra-bureaucratic struggle (with several new bureaucratic levels added, and Stalin forging “alliances” with different levels at different times); and the delirium of 1937 is still due to loss of control by the center, resulting in the “Stalin-assisted suicide of the Party.”

Yet, crucial things are still absent from the revised model. As in Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” Getty’s purge touches only the Party; virtually nothing is said about terror in the country at large. Our author, it seems, is moved only by the self-destruction of old Bolsheviks, not by the Party’s destruction of old Russia. In any event, the Bolsheviks did not in fact self-destruct. Stalin simply replaced the existing Party membership with a new cohort of Communists--the Brezhnev generation--who would manage the system until the 1980s.

The most serious blind spot, however, is this: Treating the Purge only in the context of the Party, and at that only after 1932, distorts the very nature of Soviet terror by making it an isolated, closed episode in Soviet history. But terror, or its threat, was coterminous with the Soviet system’s existence and intrinsic to its nature. (It is of course legitimate to treat the Party purge of the 1930s apart, in a separate monograph; but it is not legitimate to ignore its roots in a broader process, especially in a synthetic work for a lay public.)

For the record is obvious: Soviet mass terror, publically proclaimed by Lenin, began in 1918; and it continued, with variable intensity, to Stalin’s death in 1953. This terror, moreover, was institutionalized in a not-so-secret police, an apparatus less active after 1953, to be sure, but to the end a genuine threat.

And this was “no accident,” as the Soviets used to say. It stemmed from the class-struggle, friend-enemy, logic of Marxism, as hypostatized and universalized from the French Revolutionary experience, and given operational form in Lenin’s “avant-garde” Party. Unsurprisingly, then, in 1918 this “conspiracy in power,” as it has often been called, outlawed the constitutional liberals as “bourgeois” foes. After the Civil War it suppressed or exiled those errant socialists, the Mensheviks and the peasant-oriented Social-Revolutionaries. And during the 1920s struggle for Lenin’s succession, the Party turned inward to eliminate Trotsky and the Left and then Bukharin and the Right as “deviations” from the one “correct” course.

Soviet terror reached its culmination, however, only after 1930 when the Party at last moved to realize its full socialist vocation. For this meant all-out “class war” against the kulak petty bourgeoisie--that is, most of the nation--an enterprise that claimed at least 5 to 7 million victims through deportation and famine. No wonder the Party felt “insecure,” and so heightened its “vigilance” against “class-alien” infiltrators and “wreckers” and tightened its “unity” around the “Leader.”

Major difficulties nonetheless continued to plague the jerry-built system. To the class-struggle mindset of both Leader and troops, this could only mean that concealed “enemies of the people” were still active; and, given the tense international situation of the day, they were conspiring with the exiled Trotsky and encircling fascist powers to “wreck” the economy, “assassinate the Leader,” and “restore capitalism.” As Stalin warned, “the nearer one gets to Socialism, the sharper becomes the class struggle”; indeed, the most dangerous enemy is one with “a Party card in his pocket.” So, as the campaign of vigilance filtered down to the troops, it inflated real though manageable problems to treasonous proportions, thus drawing ever-wider circles of the population into an orgy of denunciations and counter-denunciations. This, of course, was aggravated by bureaucratic and personal rivalries--yes, as has long been known, these indeed played an ancillary role in the Purge.

Yet the crucial factor, the sine qua non, in this pseudo-class struggle to defend the “conquests of socialism,” was ideological intoxication. Without it, the Party could not have mustered the permanent will-to-terror necessary to stave off Thermidor and maintain the system indefinitely.

Indeed, Getty’s evidence inadvertently bears this out. He has modernized his social science since his first book, and so now emphasizes that the Purge was a necessary articulation of Party “discourse” and an exercise in self-affirming “ritual.” Well, the old-fashioned term for “discourse” is ideology--in the Soviet case, Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Yet Getty never looks at the content of that doctrine for a key to the Purge. This is all the more amazing, since the most striking revelation of the archives is perhaps that all the participants--from Stalin down to his lowliest victims--discussed the non-existent “plot” in the class-struggle terms used here, even behind closed doors. In truth, the Great Terror was a unique case of ideology creating its own political reality. Which is to say that Getty’s evidence takes us back to the totalitarian model so demonized by the revisionists.

All the same, Getty defends to the end his thesis that the purges made political sense in a presumably viable system. How, then, account for its passing? This he achieves at the cost of further confusion. In Stalin’s system, Party unity was imperative not only for the cause of socialism; as Trotsky had pointed out, it also served to safeguard the nomenklatura’s corporate self-interest. And, since Trotsky’s hoped-for antidote, a workers’ revolution against that bureaucracy, had failed to materialize, the nomenklatura survived socialism itself. So, Getty sourly concludes: “Its cohesion, connections, and experience were sufficient to allow its members to become not only the ‘new’ governing elite of the 1990s but the legal owners of the country’s assets and property.” So much for the folly of “restoring capitalism” in Russia!

V

So what are we to make, overall, of our three laments for the last century’s failed revolutionary dreams? Alas, neither Moore’s despair at their savage results, Mayer’s sophisticated though oblique hope that they might yet revive and bear fruit, nor Getty’s attempt to embalm them in whitewash for posterity can compete with the verdict of common sense: creating a new world and a new man is impossible; so the ideological intoxication necessary to attempt it inevitably ends in burn-out and failure.

Indirectly, however, our authors’ arguments offer a valuable cautionary lesson: how thin can be the social science veneer on our ineradicable millenarian yearnings! And indeed, political utopianism springs eternal in our maladjusted world; nor will the failures of a mere century be enough to extinguish its allure.