CHRISTOPHER LASCH
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elsewhere, that "the Marxist teaching is not exempt from censure for
the consequences of the Revolution." He conlinued to accuse Stalin,
moreover, of having "betrayed the revolution, " and further diluted his
criticism of Lenin by insisting that Stalinism could not be "deduced"
from the "classic texts of socialism." Had any serious critic even
maintained that it could? Qmfronling anticommunist ideology in its
crude t form, the "ideational fallacy" according to which Leninism led
directly and automatically to Stalinism, Rahv argued, convincingly
enough, that "ideas and movements have no reality except insofar as
they derive it from living men. " But the " living men" immediately
preceding talin remained hadowy figures in Rahv's account of the
"betrayal" of the revolution.
It
would be difficult to quarrel with Rahv's somewhat abstract
formulation that Stalinism grew out of a specific historical situation in
which Leninism represented only one of several ingredients, including
the "backwardness of Russia 's economy and culture," the "failure of
the revolution in the West and the consequently relentless pressure of
world imperialism on the isolated Soviet state." But note what Rahv's
account passed over in silence: Trotsky's suppression of the Kronstadt
revolt, Lenin's enthusiastic adoption of Taylorism as a means of
industrial labor discipline, his insistence on the primacy of the state
over the worker, and the doctrine of "socialism in one country," which
justified these dictatorial policies and tended, as Rosa Luxemburg
observed, " to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics
forced upon [Lenin and Trotsky] by the fatal circumstances" urround–
ing the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the failure of the revolution
elsewhere.
In a 1953 essay on Whittaker Chambers, Rahv argued persuasively
that Marxism, "Western in its main origins and holding a heavy charge
of Judaeo-Christian ethics, ha suffered a strange metamorphosis in its
Muscovite captivity. And now, in its movement deeper inlo the East, it
i seized upon, with all the fervor of native absolutism, by the back-
ward, semimendicanl inlelligenlsia of the Asian countries ... un-
formed in the traditions of humanist and rationalist thought. ... Its
detachmenl from the West is virtually complete." But Rahv still
stopped short of the conclu ion that Lenin himself was in many ways
the first of the Orientalizers of Marx. Lenin may have been a Western–
izer in his initial commitment to Marxism, and to the belief that a
"widespread and rapid European, and not Asiatic, development of
capitalism" was the precondition of socialism in Russia, but he broke
with Marxism in this growing emphasis on Russian exceptiona lism
