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Vanguard
of the Revolution is an impressive synthesis, useful to
anyone pondering the evolution of the world communist movement in the twentieth
century. It has a specific focus: the
relationship between consciously revolutionary parties and the states they
founded and governed. Professor McAdams argues for a fundamental tension in
this relation rather than the traditional notion of monolithic "party-states";
indeed, "State against Party" might well have been this book's subtitle. Was
the latter's role to stand alongside, deploying its cadres to school society in
socialist values while respecting the autonomy of state institutions, or should
the party function as a meta-state standing above the administrative organs,
treating the latter as no more than vassals or tributaries of the class vanguard?
The latter premise, defining the party as the guiding force of a proletarian
state, was a core Leninist principle, according to Lenin himself. In practice, this
author argues, it went quite the other way, with the ruling parties subsumed
into the operations of an autarchic state.
Self-evidently, this history was complicated (or "deformed,"
as Trotsky put it) by the rise of dictatorships based on cults of personality,
violating basic Leninist norms of democratic centralism, e.g. that all cadres
of a party participate in setting its direction via open debate and voting and
then all collectively carry out its will. Stalin's complete control of the
world's leading Marxist-Leninist party for several decades, and his systematic
elimination of the majority of its original "Old Bolshevik" leadership,
fundamentally transformed both party and state. McAdams focuses on a particular
aspect of Stalin's rule, how he neutered not only the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (CPSU) but the Communist International, turning both into mere
instruments of his state. Indeed,
Stalin's overwhelming focus, as of the mid-1930s, was on building Russian state
power, what Lenin presciently called his "Great-Russian chauvinism." This
repudiation of core Leninist premises, e.g. the duties of internationalism, was
signaled with brutal clarity by the Comintern's summary
dissolution in 1943 as a gesture to the capitalist powers (the U.S. and the
United Kingdom) with which Stalin was then allied.
Other scholars' main point of contention with this narrative
will be its narrow focus on the two
largest Communist regimes, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China,
rather than the idiosyncratic, pluralistic world of parties professing
allegiance to Marxism-Leninism. It pays some attention to Eastern Europe's
quasi-colonial states post-1945, and episodically looks at other European
parties. All of these cases, however, from Poland to Portugal, are incorporated
to the extent that they complement, deviate from, or challenge the role of the ur-party, the
CPSU, as in the development of Eurocommunism in the 1970s and 80s. The most
egregious example of this teleological approach is the episodic insertion of Cuban
communism, which is of little value because of the author's unfamiliarity with Latin
America's revolutionary politics; he relies instead on stock evocations of
Castro's personalism. The powerful "national
Communist" parties of Vietnam, which inflicted military defeat on the United
States, and Indonesia, the world's largest non-ruling party until the 1965–1966
campaign of extermination backed by the CIA, are completely ignored, as is the
South African Communist Party, and many, many others in what used to be called
the Third World. Only Mao's China is studied on its own terms, in some of the
book's freshest chapters.
The author does make claims that will surprise conventional
historians: first, that the Great Terror of 1937–1938 was not "an inevitable
outgrowth of Leninism" (177); second, that the early leaders of Eastern Europe's
People's Democracies, like Matyas Rakosi in Hungary and Vulko Chervenkov, in Bulgaria would have been Stalinists with or without him, evincing a
deep-seated preference for repression; finally, that the early Brezhnev years
saw "notable, if unspectacular, tranquility" in the USSR, based on a "tacit
understanding" between party and people of "stable expectations and collective
rewards" (381). His most intriguing conclusions regard Maoism, which he rightly
sees as well outside both Stalinist and Leninist paths. Mao repeatedly sought to
mobilize China's masses to "save the idea of the revolutionary party idea from the
party organization" (365). Hinting at a Trotskyist perspective (another version
of Leninism ignored in this book), he asserts that Mao's
"permanent revolution" sought the "destruction of the organization, the party,
which he considered the greatest impediment to the realization of his goals"
(368).
It should be emphasized that a critical perspective on a
book of world history encompassing so many different states and political eras
is overdetermined by the specialization of the reviewer. It may be that
professional Sovietologists, as they used to be
called, or Sinologists for that matter, will have serious disagreements with
much of the history detailed herein. This reviewer approaches it as a historian
neither of Russia nor the world communist movement but as a historian of
American radicalism and its relation with other leftwing movements (including but
by no means limited to communists), especially in the Americas. From my perspective, a book like this reads
more like a version of political or historical sociology, concerned with
assessing models (the Leninist party-state) rather than pursuing the history of
how many different "communisms" related to each other, in and outside of
socialist states. Within the history of American communism, many historians now
stress the national rather than international context, and the considerable
autonomy of local activists and movements, regardless of the intent of a
Soviet-aligned national executive. If
correct, this "bottom-up" version of Communism would apply equally to other
parties, whether in El Salvador, East Bengal, or Iran—all the places where the
Soviet writ could not be enforced with military or police power. It may be,
however, that Vanguard of the Revolution operates as a necessary corrective, as it would be an illusion to think of the
world communist movement as organically decentered from the Comintern's founding in 1919 through the USSR's collapse.
Van Gosse is Professor of History at Franklin & Marshall
College. You may reach him at vgosse@fandm.edu. |
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