76
PARTISAN REVIEW
transition but is developing into a totalitarian, bureaucratic slave-state
with a ruling group not exactly comparable to the class or caste of earlier
societies, something historically new in which all traces of workers state
and socialism have been eliminated or turned into their opposites, into
instruments of oppression, terrorization, corruption of the few and
exploitation of the many.
The two successive collapses of the world revolutionary movement
within an interval of less than a generation; the slow, then more rapid,
and at last landslide decay of the first great experiment in working class
rule; the simultaneous visible breakdown of the old social order and ever
more visible degeneration of the first efforts at the construction of the
new, oblige us to test all theories, question all dogmas, challenge all infal·
libilities, reexamine all problems in the light of what has happened
and
what is even now happening. Souvarine's book does much to clear away
old rubbish which obstructs the painful and urgent task of reconstruction.
If
it
has a fault, it is rather that it clears away too much-even stout beams
and solid foundations that might be used in the new edifice. Yet the service
it performs is a sanative one, and so necessary that it is better t{) clear
away too much, as it seems to me Souvarine does, than to attempt to rescue
and utilize rotten timbers or faulty structures and incorporate them into
that which must so largely he built aiJew.
Only at the end of his work does Souvarine seem to become conscious
of the larger problems involved, and then he raises them in the following
indecisive terms:
"The force of things and the behavior of men have contradicted
all Lenin's optimistic forecasts, his hopes in a superior democracy as
much as his semi-libertarian ideas.... Nothing in the individual
theses of Trotsky has stood the test any better.... Lenin died too soon
to write the epilogue to the miscarriage of Bolshevism. Trotsky has
not availed himself of the leisure afforded by exile to make a true
and
conscientious examination ... his articles and pamphlets vainly par•
phrase a hackneyed argument without throwing light on a single prob–
lem. The miscarriage of Bolshevism in Russia coupled with the irre–
mediable failure of the International, and the lessons of experience,
go far beyond the sphere of civil war.... The death agony of socialist
hope in the world thus opens up an immeasurable ideological crisis.
It will be the part of the epigones of a powerless generation to make
out the balance-sheet of national Bolshevism, of international com·
munism and of traditional socialism. . •. And this should logically
lead them to examine what is still alive and what is dead in the parent
doctrine, Marxism."
Thus the work closes with a question mark, to which it suggests no
answer. Naturally, we cannot count it as a deficiency of a book which
seb
out to
be
a biography that it does not undertake this overpowering task.
But when it also calls itself "A Critical Survey of Bolshevism," then
we
have some reason to expect that the author should outline, at least for
