How interesting that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the admirer and chronicler of the czarist aristocracy, should suddenly leave his seclusion in Vermont and surface in France to lend a hand to the Yeltsin counter-revolutionary forces in Russia. But he has to do it his own way, mutilating historical epochs to suit counter-revolutionary purposes.
Speaking in Lucs-sur-Boulogne, Solzhenitsyn said the French Revolution had been a mistake. He cited the violence of the revolution to prove his point. "It would be vain to hope that revolution can regenerate human nature," he said. He went on to lecture the French, "It's what your revolution, and particularly the Russian Revolution, had hoped for so much." (New York Times, Sept. 27)
Liberty, equality and fraternity, said the author of the much-touted book The Gulag Archipelago, are "intrinsically contradictory and unfeasible. Liberty destroys social equality. Equality restrains liberty."
Solzhenitsyn is a little late with his criticism. This theme has been raised many times since the French Revolution. It took Frederick Engels, however, to show that, to the bourgeoisie, these slogans symbolized freedom of trade, freedom for private property and freedom to exploit the workers. Law can never be higher than the social system that begets it.
It's fine to talk against violence. It meant one thing when such truly great people as the utopian socialist Saint-Simon abjured violence, because he drew the conclusion that industry and commerce should be in the hands of the people. Instead of prating about abjuring violence, he erected an economic program that favored the masses.
But Solzhenitsyn's program is that of the exploiting and oppressing bourgeoisie. Just talking about violence in the abstract conceals rather than reveals the nature of the bourgeois system of private ownership.
What French Revolution accomplished
Solzhenitsyn made his remarks while helping "a conservative lawmaker, Philippe de Villiers, and other officials unveil a plaque commemorating massacres in the Vendee Department on the Atlantic coast during the Reign of Terror of 1793-94," the Times said.
What was this Reign of Terror? It was the emergence of a revolutionary dictatorship of the petty-bourgeoisie in France in the struggle against the monarchy, the nobility, the landlords and the clergy--the so-called first estate.
What was the ultimate historic outcome that Solzhenitsyn and others of his ilk reject so much, supposedly because of its violence? The outcome of the revolutionary dictatorship was to sweep away the feudal system with a speed and thoroughness that to this very day mark the French Revolution as one of the most remarkable, epochal developments in history.
It took a revolutionary dictatorship to do what otherwise might have taken decades, if not centuries, to accomplish. It laid the basis for the growth and development of the French bourgeoisie. Without that great revolution, they might today be of no greater significance than their counterparts in either Portugal or Spain.
But the great French Revolution is not Solzhenitsyn's main target. His most venomous attacks are leveled at the Russian Revolution.
For that is the first revolution in history that swept away not only the remains of the feudal nobility and landlords--but also, in a great historic first, expropriated the bourgeoisie and elevated the working class and peasants to the status of the ruling class. This set in motion a train of events that to this day constitutes the focus of the world struggle.
While Solzhenitsyn was in France attacking the French Revolution, his fellow emigr� and close personal friend Mstislav Rostropovich was in Moscow conducting a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington in Red Square. According to the Times, this concert had been organized as "a free cultural offering to Russians who had neither the money nor the connections to get tickets for the orchestra's performances in the Conservatory." It was shown on television here as a large rally for Boris Yeltsin, who worked the crowd.
Even in its choice of music--Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" commemorating czarism's triumph over Napoleon--this cultural event was in sync with the counterrevolutionary themes so dear to Solzhenitsyn.
Yeltsin vs. parliament
The current struggle between the Yeltsin counterrevolution on the one hand and the parliament on the other reflects only in the most tenuous manner a struggle between the basic classes in Russian society today. What is the struggle's overall objective significance? What is it really about?
Is it about who shares the political plums in a new historical setting? Of course it is, but this is only a surface manifestation.
At bottom--and this is the main difficulty that confronts Yeltsin as well as his opponents in the parliament--are the forms of property ownership first established by the Russian Revolution of 1917: the socialized industries and collective and state farms. How can Yeltsin proceed to institute his bourgeois program, the program of establishing a capitalist state, when the social foundation on which his grouping rests is completely at variance with his political program?
It is now about seven years since the Gorbachev regime tentatively began the process of dismantling the socialist forms of property. Yeltsin promised to do it much faster and more thoroughly. Yet he finds it most difficult to do so.
First, there is the masses' inherent antagonism to such a program. Second is Yeltsin's inability to forthrightly state his program with clarity instead of hemming and hawing while conducting a political vendetta against the parliament.
The latter is the presumed supporter of socialist property. But it can't say so clearly and distinctly in a way the masses can understand so ways can be found to rally them in the struggle against the Yeltsin counterrevolution.
At the bottom of the struggle, discounting the many vicissitudes and the coverups between the contestants, lies the real issue: Shall Russia continue its economic and political development on the basis of retaining the socialist form of property in the basic industries and all their subsidiaries? Or shall it open up a giant offensive to dismantle them and bring back bourgeois private property?
U.S. unsure of the outcome
Bush's CIA director, Robert Gates, in an estimate of the current situation, says that this kind of struggle can go on for decades. Yes, perhaps so--but only on the utterly improbable condition that the masses, the tens of millions of workers in the vast industrial complex of Russia and in the collective farms, will continue to be passive. But this is taking an utterly unhistorical view of the situation.
A situation of the kind that prevails in Russia cannot but awaken the mass consciousness of the workers and dispose of the struggle between Yeltsin and the parliament as a relic of the past.
The cautiousness with which the U.S. deals with Yeltsin and the meagerness of the funds it lends or donates to his clique demonstrates its own uncertainty over the outcome of the struggle. They are talking now about speeding up a loan of $50 million to the Yeltsin group. For a vast country such as Russia, $50 million is really a piddling sum and can do nothing but help pay some of the Yeltsin administration's current bills.