The Red Robespierre
Stalinism as Marxism-Jacobinism
Read Part 1 First:
In his excellent analysis of Stalin's political thought, the historian Erik van Ree (2002, 283) situates the Soviet leader in close ideological proximity to Robespierre and the Jacobins, characterizing his political worldview as “Marxist Jacobinism.” To what extent is this provocative characterization true? The relation between Soviet socialism and Jacobinism was not always straightforward. To understand Stalin’s relation to Jacobinism, we must first briefly survey the history of Bolshevik and early Soviet engagement with French revolutionary thought. A range of opinions on the Jacobins was expressed by different prominent historical figures associated with twentieth-century Marxism and Bolshevism, and it was fairly common to see these figures shift their views as ongoing political developments recast the meaning of the past, which, in turn, shaped how they conceptualized revolutionary strategy for changing the future. The indecisiveness around the meaning of the French Revolution in the early Russian Marxist tradition is perhaps best exemplified by Plekhanov:
[Plekhanov’s] activist impulses, when they were triggered for one reason or another, would cause him to praise the Jacobins lavishly. But on other occasions, when for whatever reason he was calmer, he would condemn them for their excessive activism and voluntarism, for their unfortunate penchant for getting ahead of themselves ideologically and politically (Bergman 2019, 82)
Much of this debate came to centre around Lenin himself, who, as the dominant figure of the Russian Revolution, was frequently analogized with Robespierre. For some, the comparison was a mark of praise, highlighting Lenin's revolutionary vigour and bold leadership; for others, it was a condemnation, casting him as the initiator of ruthless terror and centralization. Trotsky, for instance, critiqued Lenin in 1903 as “a Robespierre [who] transformed the modest [Party] Council into an all-powerful Committee of Public Safety” (Bergman 2019, 91). He was concerned about what he saw as authoritarian tendencies in Lenin, which could very well lead the future Soviet leader down a path of violence and destruction, as Robespierre had.
It is clear, then, that Robespierre did not have a positive connotation for Trotsky at this time, yet a few years later, he seemingly reversed this view, suggesting that, in the words of Bergman (2019, 95), a Russian Robespierre may be “a good thing for Russian democracy” after all. The Soviet economist, Vladimir Akimov, had “declared that the authoritarianism Lenin … had revealed at the congress smacked of Jacobinism, and that, if unchecked, could lead to the application of terror” (Bergman 2019, 89). Akimov believed that individual leaders with authoritarian tendencies could bring the revolution to ruins, and it was thus paramount for the socialist movement to identify its “Robespierres” and remove them from power. Martov critiqued Lenin along similar lines, although he had his own trajectory of evolving views on the issue, initially believing “that only through ‘a Jacobin revolution’ could socialism be achieved” (Bergman 2019, 89). This positive association would not last. By 1900, he had changed his position entirely, turning the comparison against Lenin, and concluding that a Jacobin-style dictatorship would be “the worst possible outcome for Russia” (Bergman 2019, 90). Martov feared that excessive centralism would cause the party to degenerate into a “bureaucratic putschist organisation run by a leader and divorced from the masses,” and used the Jacobin analogy to express this anxiety (Cliff 1989). Stepping outside Russia, Rosa Luxemburg similarly criticized Lenin, detecting the Robespierrean legacy in the perceived centralizing tendencies of Lenin. Like Martov, she viewed the Jacobin leadership as an elitist group whose interests were separate from those they claimed to lead. If anything, all this goes to show the immense importance of the French Revolution to the twentieth-century Russian and Marxist worldview; as the closest and most studied historical precedent for their own revolution, it provided these radicals with a reference point and framework to interpret and solve their own political dilemmas.
Of course, it's worth noting how Lenin (1917) responded to those who derided Jacobinism:
Bourgeois historians see Jacobinism as a fall (”to stoop”). Proletarian historians see Jacobinism as one of the highest peaks in the emancipation struggle of an oppressed class. The Jacobins gave France the best models of a democratic revolution and of resistance to a coalition of monarchs against a republic … “Jacobinism” in Europe or on the boundary line between Europe and Asia in the twentieth century would be the rule of the revolutionary class, of the proletariat, which, supported by the peasant poor and taking advantage of the existing material basis for advancing to socialism, could not only provide all the great, ineradicable, unforgettable things provided by the Jacobins in the eighteenth century, but bring about a lasting world-wide victory for the working people.
For Lenin, as a revolutionary, there could be no greater praise than to compare him with the man who had steered the first great modern revolution through its most desperate and decisive hour. Robespierre's revolutionary intransigence and unflinching willingness to deploy terror in defence of the revolution only demonstrated his whole-hearted devotion to the cause, a temperament that, Lenin believed, was vital for the 20th century revolutionaries aiming to complete what the Jacobins had started, but ultimately could not. They were constrained by the material and historical conditions of their pre-capitalist age; it was up to the Bolsheviks to finish the job. The revolutionary leader had stated that:
The Jacobins of 1793 have gone down in history for their great example of a truly revolutionary struggle against the class of the exploiters by the class of the working people and the oppressed who had taken all state power into their own hands. (Lenin 1917)
Lenin (1917) had referred to the Bolsheviks as the “Jacobins” of the 20th century, and placed both groups, the Bolsheviks and Jacobins, under a single umbrella of revolutionary struggle against class exploitation and oppression. In this way, 1917 was not a fundamentally new project, but one that picked up from 1793, fulfilling the mandate of revolution now that the historical moment was finally ripe for it. Indeed, Lenin seemed to suggest that Bolshevik-Jacobinism embodied a kind of “veritable Platonic ideal of Revolutionary Virtue” that transcended any particular historical moment or place, a universal truth, but only partially revealed, that emerged from the crucible of revolution and awaited its full realization with the communist movement (Bergman 2019, 160).
For Lenin, the personal attributes and heroism of the Jacobins played a large part in his high esteem of them. As a great admirer of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, author of the original What Is to Be Done?, a novel whose ascetic revolutionary hero Rakhmetov embodied the ideal of total dedication to the cause, it was clear that Lenin was drawn to revolutionary Great Men, and, as Bergman notes, the Jacobins seemed to represent the real, flesh-and-blood versions of these fictional characters. Lenin was accordingly dismissive of those Russian Marxist critiques of Robespierre which warned of the bureaucratizing and degenerating effects of his policies of terror. His faith in a Marxist conception of the unfolding of history led him to attribute the Jacobins' failures to the different historical circumstances of eighteenth-century France rather than to any inherent flaw or error of the revolutionary leadership in France.
The excesses of terror could be avoided because the Bolsheviks, Lenin had written in 1917, could simply arrest their opponents; their enemies were allegedly not as entrenched or implacable as the foes of Jacobinism. On the other hand, the bold and decisive use of repression to crush enemies and consolidate power was praised, and he refused to let the former overshadow the latter. Lenin claimed that “a government of the proletariat which had its historical parallel in 1792” was not realizable by the Mensheviks, whose aversion to violence and political timidity meant they could never be the next iteration of Jacobins (Price 1921, 45). Lenin desired the revolutionary prestige and historical legitimacy that came with the Jacobin comparison, situating the Bolsheviks as part of a grand world-historical tradition of radical transformation, while reserving the right to disavow the parts that were politically inconvenient—written off as historically irrelevant to the Bolshevik’s current situation. His pick-and-choose approach to Jacobinism made sense in the short term, as he did not want to validate the critiques of his critics, and the muscular legacy of the French Revolution was too compelling and relevant to not take up. However, the romanticization of terror as a form of heroic leadership with the courage and ferocity to do what others could not failed to grasp what terror entails. In actuality, terror emerges from a kind of revolutionary fanaticism that is not easily constrained or channelled in a purposeful way. Terror is not simply the might of revolutionary heroes in command, but a chaotic form of repressive governance that easily slips into collective self-destruction. The notion that Lenin could kill Trotsky or Stalin in the way Robespierre had done to Danton would have struck him as absurd and far-fetched, yet this exact kind of thing did happen after his passing, as a new surge of revolutionary suspicion was activated by the looming threat of Nazism, war, and the post-NEP agrarian crisis, among others issues beyond the scope of this writing. Lenin’s Cheka carried out mass repression and terror against actual class enemies, but once those threats were largely liquidated, it’s not surprising that the same machinery of terror was pointed inwards once the leadership perceived a new wave of threats. In this way, Stalinism was not a “betrayal” of Leninism, but a radicalization of its existing tendencies, following along the same course of self-destruction already laid out by Robespierre.
Lenin also suggests that Jacobin-style hyper-violence, though unnecessary for the Bolshevik context, was still a proportional response to the legitimate threats specific to the Jacobin moment. The excesses of terror are indeed the product of particular political and military circumstances, but such circumstances have a habit of recurring across historical contexts. Revolutions tend to generate similar pressures and configurations of crisis across, which makes the recurrence of self-destructive revolutionary fanaticism a strong possibility rather than an isolated Robespierrean aberration. For these reasons, the self-destructive endpoint of Jacobin terror was not an anomalous defect of that specific period (Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolutions draws out these commonalities across the English, French, and Russian Revolutions and their respective reigns of terror). In explaining the process of Jacobin Terror, specifically, Linton (2013, 24) writes:
