Write a short note on the Legacy of Russian Revolution.
The Legacy of Russian Revolution:
The Russian Revolution opened up a new historical epoch, and was greeted with enthusiasm by workers around the world. Now the revolution was an actuality, not simply a hope or a threat, as a huge country broke from international capitalism. Serge recalled that revolutionaries from all over the world flocked to the new Russia, “leaving the void, and entering the kingdom of will where life is beginning a new, where conscious will, intelligence, and an inexorable love of mankind are in action.”
What set the Bolsheviks apart from the other socialist tendencies of the time was that they put their words into action they represented the unity of word and deed-which made them far more threatening than resolution-passing social democrats.
This didn’t mean they made the revolution in place of the masses, as in the persistent myth of the violent coup carried out by the despotic, conspiratorial Bolsheviks who did not enjoy popular support, and whose action destroyed a nascent democracy. The strength of that myth is that it is required for the October 1917 Revolution to be discredited.
The Bolsheviks adopted authoritarian practices in the Civil War that undermined their democratic goals. They did so because of the need to preserve the revolution In the face of reaction and the fear of annihilation because they trusted only themselves in power; and because of their international vision that the German revolution was more important than their own-since it had a better chance of advancing socialism in the world (Lenin, 1918).
From 1918-1920 revolutionary crises rocked Bumpers capitals. The German revolution, the Finnish and Hungarian Communes, all the insurrectionary general strikes went down to defeat. These defeats showed that the world bourgeoisie learned more from the Russian revolution than the world working class. Afterwards Stalin actively aided the defeats of subsequent revolutionary crises.
The mentality of the Bolsheviks changed in power and they valued political pluralism less than survival. They adopted a state of siege stance against their internal opponents and were not only isolated in the world, but in the Soviet Union itself. The post-Civil War reality was that the advanced revolutionary workers had been killed in the Civil War, Bolshevism now governed a mass of war weary, semi-literate peasants in a world in which the revolutionary advance had been halted.
