REVOLUTION AND DICTATORSHIP
759
sider a proper approach to the solution of the "Russian enigma." Of
late, several attempts have been made to find a clue to the peculiarities
of the Soviet regime in such historical abstractions as "Byzantinism," the
"Mongol legacy," or the "Congregational spirit" of the Russian people,
with not too convincing results as far as I am concerned. In his intro–
ductory chapter, Mr. Wolfe too has indulged in broad historical general–
izations not all of which I am prepared to accept without reservations.
But the bulk of his study
is
.properly devoted to a detailed investigation
of the
immediate
revolutionary background in Russia, of the
specific
conditions under which the Bolshevik party was born and grew, and
it is
there that he
is
looking for the solution of the problem. In his case,
a concern with historic continuity has not led to a neglect of the element
of change, and he knows that the Bolshevik venture was a radically new
departure in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. Neither
does he embrace that fatalistic point of view according to which the
triumph of Bolshevism was predetermined by the whole course of Rus–
sian history. Even if the Three whose political biography he has written
did not
make
the revolution they certainly used the opportunity to im–
pose upon
it
their own designs and thus to shape its destinies. Herein lies
the justification of Mr. Wolfe's biographical approach.
With
great skill, Mr. Wolfe has woven into a convincing pattern
the various episodes in the career of his protagonists and the political
events of the period. What emerges is an amazing picture of the gradual
rise of a small but determined minority to a strategic position which
enabled them to seize power in the moment of a great national crisis.
"Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will turn Russia
upside down," said Lenin early in the century, and this was what he
proceeded to do in 1917. The present volume brings the story to the
outbreak of the war in 1914, and I understand that Mr. Wolfe is working
on its sequel. But one can anticipate some of his main findings from
what he tells us in
Three Who Made a R evolution.
One cannot read his
account without coming to the conclusion that the totalitarian nature of
the Soviet regime, with all its by now familiar features, had its seeds
in
Lenin's revolutionary design. Great as the changes have been from
1917 to the present, in its fundamentals Stalin's policy is a further de–
velopment of Leninism. Back in 1917 an attempt was made to impose
"socialism" on a materially and psychologically unprepared country, in
expectation of a social revolution in the West, and this original decision
has determined the nature and the policies of the Soviet regime up to
this day. A totalitarian dictatorship became the only means for the Rus–
sian Communists to maintain themselves in power, in the face of "hostile
