They Dared: The Legacy of the October Revolution
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1504 .... October 31, 2017
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They Dared: The Legacy of the October Revolution
David Mandel
A hundred years later, the question of the historical legacy of the October Revolution is not an easy one for socialists, given that Stalinism took root within less than a decade after that revolution and the restoration of capitalism seventy years later met little popular resistance. One can, of course, point to the central role of the Red Army in the victory over fascism, or to the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world that broadened the space for anti-imperialist struggles, or to the moderating effect on capitalist appetites of the existence of a major nationalized, planned economy. Yet, even in these areas, the legacy is far from unambiguous.
But the main... legacy of the October Revolution for the left today is, in fact, the least ambiguous. It can be summed up in two words: "They dared." By that, I mean that the Bolsheviks, in organizing the revolutionary seizure of political and economic power and its defence from the propertied classes, were true to their mission as a workers’ party: they provided the workers -- and peasants too -- with the leadership that they needed and wanted.
It is more than ironic, therefore, that many historians, and following them, popular opinion, have viewed October as a terrible crime, motivated by the ideologically-inspired project to build a socialist utopia. According to this view, October was an arbitrary act that diverted Russia from its normal path of development toward a capitalist democracy. October was, moreover, the cause of the civil war that devastated Russia for almost three years.
A modified version of that view is espoused even by some on the left, who reject "Leninism" (or what they believe to have been Lenin’s strategy), because of the authoritarian dynamic that a revolutionary seizure of power and a civil war unleash.
