In a well-known passage in What is History?, E.H. Carr addresses the perennially perplexing issue of historical inevitability. Seeking to ridicule the ‘“might-have-been” school of thought—or rather of emotion’, Carr contrasts the treatment of more chronologically distant events from the more recent. ‘The historian,’ he tells us, ‘writes of the Norman Conquest or the American War of Independence as if what happened was in fact bound to happen, and as if it was his business simply to explain what happened and why. . .When, however, I write about the Russian revolution of 1917 in precisely this way—the only proper way to the historian—I find myself under attack from my critics for having by implication depicted what happened as something that was bound to happen, and failed to examine all the other things that might have happened.’

Carr was well aware of why his treatment of the Russian Revolution as a ‘closed chapter’ provoked such a response. As he put it, ‘plenty of people, who have suffered directly or vicariously from the results of the Bolshevik victory, or still fear its remoter consequences, desire to register their protest against it.’ They thus let ‘their imagination run riot on all the more agreeable things that might have happened.’ Writing in the early 1960s, Carr undoubtedly had in mind the then dominant Cold War historiography which favoured almost any outcome other than a Bolshevik victory and still reflected the hope of its reversal. But his complaint would apply equally to other versions of Soviet history. Thus, a decade later, he could be quite critical of Stephen Cohen’s biography of Bukharin, on the grounds that its attempt to rescue the kinder and gentler version of socialist construction articulated by one of Stalin’s chief victims was excessively imaginative.

Samuel Farber’s Before Stalinism footnote1 will probably evoke a similar or perhaps even more dismissive response from professional historians. It is not so much a work of history as ‘a political reflection on history, an inquiry into what alternatives existed and might have worked at the time, as well as what can we learn for today.’ Thus, while acknowledging that the past is immutable—Carr’s ‘closed chapter’—Farber insists that it is usable. To ponder what might have been, he would argue, is not to rewrite history, and still less the past, but it can be a powerful means of rethinking the present.

Vladimir Brovkin’s The Mensheviks After October footnote2 is a much more conventionally historical inquiry into the tribulations of the party that Trotsky, in the midst of the October Revolution, notoriously consigned to the ‘rubbish heap of history’. A revised Princeton Ph.D. dissertation, the book reconstructs the Mensheviks’ disarray in the immediate aftermath of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, their ‘political comeback’ in the spring of 1918, and their (divided) response to the rigging of local soviet elections and the onset of full-scale civil war up to October 1918.

Thoroughly researched, and densely empirical, the book scrupulously avoids the kind of counter-factualism in which Farber indulges. Its thesis is elegant in its simplicity. It is that the Mensheviks were Abel to the Bolsheviks’ Cain (see the Biblical epigraph), a Doppelgänger of the democratic socialist aspirations for which the Bolsheviks claimed—and may have believed—they stood. They thus were ‘dangerous because they belied the Bolsheviks’ image of themselves. It was hard for the Bolsheviks to admit that the party of the proletarian revolution, the party of Red October, was losing support. It was much easier to destroy the evidence.’ (p. 295—I have reworked the order of the sentences.) As the uninvited guests at the post-October feast, they were a constant reminder of the Bolsheviks’ betrayal of soviet democracy, and paid dearly for their insistence on staying around. Nor were they the only ones. Brovkin convincingly demonstrates how the Bolsheviks employed ‘Menshevik (or Socialist-Revolutionary) agitation’ as an excuse for the disintegration of their support among workers and a means of legitimizing repression against both their political opponents and workers themselves.

Of the two books, Farber’s is the one that aims to extend the quarrel that the Western Left has had with Soviet Communism ever since Rosa Luxemburg crossed swords with Lenin. Luxemburg, it will be recalled, protested against both the Soviet government’s Land Decree, which legalized the parcellization of landlords’ estates among the peasantry, and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. (The Mensheviks, who had even less sympathy for peasant aspirations and had received a meagre 3 per cent of the votes in the elections to the Constituent Assembly—a figure unmentioned by Brovkin—protested as well, though on quite different grounds.) She thus prefigured two subsequently disparate lines of critique, one associated with the militant Left and the other reflecting a more moderate or reformist position. The former focused on what was perceived as the Communist Party’s betrayal of proletarian democracy and revolutionary internationalism. It would encompass council-communist and syndicalist indictments, Trotskyist analyses of bureaucratic degeneration, and Maoist- or Third World-inspired revolutionism. The latter was from the anti-authoritarian or democratic socialist standpoint, historically rooted in social democracy and, latterly, Eurocommunism.

Focusing on the years 1917 to 1923, Farber centres his study around the problematic relationship between revolution and democracy. This is reminiscent of Carmen Sirianni’s Workers Control and Socialist Democracy(1982). Indeed, the two books have much in common, including, their authors’ dependence on the abundant English-language historiography of the Russian Revolution—neither reads Russian. Both are relentless in their criticism of what Farber calls ‘mainstream Bolshevism’, by which he means Lenin. But whereas Sirianni situated the struggle for democracy in the factory committees and, to a lesser extent, the soviets, Farber’s book is both more broadly and more narrowly conceived. It includes not only the issue of soviet and tradeunion autonomy, but freedom of the press, the exercise of state repression, and socialist legality. Much of it is organized around such questions as ‘Was “War Communism” Justified?’; ‘Was Repression Practical?’; ‘What is “Class Justice?”’; and are there ‘Inalienable Rights under Socialism?’ The answers, informed by a good deal of hindsight and mainstream Anglo-American jurisprudential theory, are: no, no, affirmative action, and yes.