Discussions about Russian History > Imperial Russian History

The French and Russian Revolutions

(1/7) > >>

Elisabeth:
Let's contrast and compare the French and Russian Revolutions. What were the similarities? What were the differences? Is this a useful comparison to make?

Tsarfan:
Well, I am glad we finally agree on something, RichC.

However, my post might have been worded too ambiguously.  I was suggesting that if the Bolsheviks had been overturned even after they murdered the imperial family, we would not be so obsessed with Nicholas and Alexandra today.

And thanks for the new thread, Elisabeth.

Elisabeth:

--- Quote --- I was suggesting that if the Bolsheviks had been overturned even after they murdered the imperial family, we would not be so obsessed with Nicholas and Alexandra today.
--- End quote ---


You make an interesting point, Tsarfan. As I said before, I think the canonization of the imperial family had a lot to do not only with the need for a new national myth but also with the lasting psychic damage done to the Russian people by the communist regime. One of the major differences between the French and Russian Revolutions was in the length of their respective periods of Terror – the French Terror was over within a relatively brief amount of time, whereas the Russian Terror endured, with varying degrees of intensity, for some 35 years (1918-1953). Also, the Russian Terror is fairly recent in memory, and survivors of the Gulag and their children are still among us. For these reasons I think the Russian – or should I say, the Bolshevik Terror – remains a more immediate and traumatic presence for Russians living today, whereas the memory of the French Terror has faded for the French and become something one only reads about in books or sees in films.

So I agree with you: if the Bolshevik Terror had only lasted from 1918-1921, and instead of triumphing, the Bolsheviks had been thrown from power and replaced with some kind of representative government, it does seem rather unlikely that the imperial family would have become such symbols of national suffering that they would eventually have been canonized as saints. Nicholas II, like Charles I or Louis XVI, would probably still be viewed ambivalently, as a somewhat pitiable figure, but not as a martyr. More importantly, Russia would have a Romanov-free national myth because the March Revolution would no longer be linked to the October Revolution in the popular consciousness (the Bolshevik Terror would be remembered as just an unpleasant detour, as the French Terror was). In fact, the anniversary of the March Revolution would no doubt be celebrated to this day as a glorious event of transcendent national importance.  

On the other hand, a sentimental cult would probably still attach to certain members of the imperial family, such as the children. And there would still be a lot of interest in the IF’s terrible fate, since IMO the murder of the imperial family stirs a deeply primal fear of sudden, violent loss in most people – indeed, it’s always reminded me of the cult of interest surrounding the murder of the Clutter family in 1950s Kansas, as depicted in Truman Capote’s classic, In Cold Blood. On some level this interest is prurient and voyeuristic, but on another it’s reflective of the close identification many people feel for certain historical figures who suffered violent deaths despite their obvious innocence (the Princes in the Tower, Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, etc.).  

Tsarfan:

--- Quote ---(the Bolshevik Terror would be remembered as just an unpleasant detour, as the French Terror was).

--- End quote ---


We are in general agreement here.  I would contest one point, though.

While brief in time, the Terror so discredited some of the ideas of the Enlightenment in many minds that reactionary forces, especially in central and eastern Europe, were given an additional lease on life that lasted into the 20th century.  Metternich, for instance, had a much easier row to hoe with the spectre of the "French Revolution gone wrong" hanging over Europe.

Elisabeth:

--- Quote --- While brief in time, the Terror so discredited some of the ideas of the Enlightenment in many minds that reactionary forces, especially in central and eastern Europe, were given an additional lease on life that lasted into the 20th century.  Metternich, for instance, had a much easier row to hoe with the spectre of the "French Revolution gone wrong" hanging over Europe.
--- End quote ---


Very true. I find it interesting that the Bolshevik/Stalinist Terror seems to have been far less publicized at the time than the Jacobin one was when it was occurring. Of course there were contemporaries who saw the Bolsheviks for what they were and were not afraid to say so: Churchill called them "hyenas laughing over the ruins of civilization" (I am paraphrasing). Bertrand Russell met Lenin and said that he had never encountered anyone with such dead eyes before; he looked into Lenin's eyes, he said, and saw "gallows in them." Nevertheless there were Western observers like John Reed who glamorized the October Revolution for the Western audience from the very outset. And throughout the 1920s and 1930s not only the left but even moderate liberals refused to believe the terrible stories emerging from the Soviet Union about the concentration camps and famine. The Webbs, highly influential, seem to have deliberately lied, saying the famine was all capitalist propaganda, rather than admit the truth that the socialist paradise had turned into a hell on earth. Alexandra Tolstoy, when she emigrated to the West, was met with general disbelief when she tried to relate the terrible suffering the communists had inflicted on her native land. Even Jane Addams of Hull House, a great admirer of both Tolstoy and his daughter, could not countenance the idea that the socialists in the Soviet Union were deliberately starving and terrorizing the peasantry.  

Even today I wonder if there are more people who are aware of the French Terror than there are people - at least those of us in the West - who are aware of the horrors of the Gulag and the Great Famine. This is yet another apparent contrast between the Russian and French Revolutions. The Jacobin Terror seems to have aroused all but universal disgust and dismay - whereas the Bolshevik Terror of the Civil War period faded quickly in the public's memory, perhaps balanced by the atrocities perpetrated by the White Army. But what followed under Stalin was obfuscated to such an extent by Soviet propagandists and Western journalists that when Alexander Solzhenitsyn published Gulag Archipelago in the early 1970s it was such a bombshell in the West that, just to give one example, it is credited with having destroyed the French Communist Party virtually overnight! And this was a party which until then had been a very powerful force in French politics.  

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page