The revolution lives

'What the Bolsheviks learned from the French'

Daniel Beer reviewed The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture, by Jay Bergman, at The Times Literary Supplement.

"As Jay Bergman emphasizes, Marx himself had venerated the French Revolution for the same reason Edmund Burke reviled it: radicals had brought an entire country to reject the 'accumulated experiences, traditions and patterns of life that had existed for centuries'. But Marx also left Russian revolutionaries 'a diverse menu to choose from when it behoved them to invoke the French Revolution'. The more ideologically orthodox [Bolsheviks] stressed the iron laws of history and the dangers of political overreach before the conditions for successful revolutions had been fulfilled; others, of a more impatient disposition, insisted on the power of humans to force the pace of change."

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