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PARTISAN REVIEW
any intelligence at all, it will do what the West has done and give these
people opportunities. Once scientists are provided with laboratories,
once doctors are given facilities for research and hospitals, once engi–
neers are able to build dams and roads and bridges to their hearts'
content, once agricultural experts are given opportunities to realize
their talents, they will cease to be revolutionary, the protest will disap–
pear and we shall become something like the capitalist Third Republic
in France. And this is a betrayal of the true goals of man, of equality,
of social justice, of the emancipation of labor.
To which Lavrov replied:
If
we impose our rule by force , we shall
get the situation of the Terror in the French Revolution, created to
resist counterrevolution-if we make a successful
Putsch,
then , in the
course of resisting our enemies-the majority-we will militarize our–
selves, and inevitably will ourselves become oppressors and tyrants.
For it is clear that the only effective weapons against the counterrevo–
lution are themselves dictatorial, otherwise it will succeed in breaking
the revolutionaries. And these dictatorial methods will then be very
difficult to remove. The new elite will seek to perpetuate itself, the
consequence of which will be the substitution of one yoke for another.
There is only one way out: to educate the working class and the intelli–
gentsia into understanding their objective position in history; not until
you have transformed their education, their minds, their outlook can
you hope to create a democratic society. But to impose this kind of rule
upon people who don't understand why this is being done must lead
to widespread resistance, and in the end to despotism.
I mention this only to convey that the argument between
Putschism
and gradualism was conducted in historicist terms. In one
case the French Revolution is invoked; in the other case the bourgeois
revolution, the industrial revolutions in England and France, and the
resultant bourgeois regimes. People who are as intoxicated by the idea
of the objective march of history as were some of the Russians consti–
tute a very receptive soil for Marxism. So that when Marxism came to
Russia, opinion was ready-at least, portions of the intellectuals were
ready-for it; and they believed in it, they believed in it passionately:
for where else could salvation-in Russian conditions-be looked for?
The Russians seem to me to have a capacity for faith in ideas
that is greater than that of the West. In the West many notions tend to
circulate at one and the same time, and this amalgam creates what is
called a
climate
of
opinion.
In Paris before and during 1848, for instance,
a number of ideologies collided, overlapped, and mingled with each
