(5) October Revolution: October Revolution as symbol and myth

For another left perspective on the larger psychological and political impact of the October Revolution, here is Diana Johnstone's The Western Left and the Russian Revolution Monthly Review 69:3 (July-August 2017):

It has become dogma to denigrate Western Communists (“Stalinists”) for their blind faith in the Soviet revolution. They are widely dismissed as useful idiots who helped uphold a tyrannical system of oppression. But both its enthusiastic admirers and its mortal enemies distorted the truth of the Russian Revolution. The errors of interpretation of its enemies do not encounter the same condemnation as those of its ardent supporters.

Fear in the West was exacerbated by misapprehension of the notion of “world revolution” in terms of military conquest. The facts indicated the exact opposite. The first international steps of the Bolshevik regime were to give up territory in their haste to make peace. The Bolsheviks never planned to export revolution by force. Rather, at first, they nursed the expectation that the West would come to them, thanks to the revolutionary action of the Western working classes. Western leaders and intellectuals preferred to interpret revolutionary rhetoric as the harbinger of physical attack, by violent subversion or even invasion. This confusion was exacerbated by illusions on all sides. In the United States, much was made of the expression “overthrow of the government by force and violence” - which never had the remotest relevance to reality.

The revolution took place in a vast, economically backward nation emerging from a lost war. The Bolshevik Revolution was a major social experiment in a country that needed one. Mass education, social welfare measures, and advancement of women were accomplishments that should be appreciated even by today’s uncertain standards. A realistic observer, such as Bertrand Russell, could distinguish the positive from the negative, and offer constructive criticism. But the West split between uncritical devotees (an isolated minority) and official demonization of Bolshevism as inherently evil and, moreover, a military and ideological threat to the West.

If it could not provide a model for Western socialism, the Soviet Union did indeed serve as a model for third world countries, especially in East Asia. For intellectuals like Ho Chi Minh, the search for the secret of Western power led ultimately to Marxism and the Soviet Union. And indeed, in Vietnam, communism represented at once a form of Westernization and a recovery of the nation’s independence—something the West was unable to grasp. [my emphasis]

A Russian Revolution ... zigsaw puzzle?!?

American liberals and conservatives had their own hopeful, utopian, even revolutionary hopes for Russia. Stephen Boykewich in Angels and Demons in the Cold War and Today a piece for the New York Times' Red Century series:

Russia was [seen by Americans as] a savage land ready to be remade by American ideals, prayers and products.

A Life magazine illustration marking the February 1917 Russian Revolution perfectly captured this vision. The Statue of Liberty was shown riding on the back of a bear, casting the light of liberty over awe-struck Russian peasants. A tablet in her hand bears two dates: 1776 and 1917. Americans celebrated the Russian Revolution as an extension of their own. In a speech to Congress in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson hailed the “naïve majesty” of the “great, generous Russian people,” who were “always in fact democratic at heart.”

Wilson, who had his own messianic streak, was talking here about the February Revolution. Not least of its attractions for Wilson was that Kerensky's regime intended to continue Russian participation in the world war. Which would not be the case of the Bolshevik regime that took power in October.

The rise of the Bolsheviks swung American opinion from irrational hopes to bitter, racially charged demonization. George A. Simons, a Methodist missionary, returned from Petrograd in 1919 to warn the Senate about a “cruel,” “hellish,” “diabolical” and “Antichrist” regime, dominated by “Yiddish” agitators with worrying ties to Jewish radicals in New York.

The pendulum swung back in the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks opened their doors to American famine relief workers and Protestant missionaries. The director of the American Relief Administration, a congressionally funded food aid mission, proclaimed that Russians saw his organization as “a miracle of God which came to them in their darkest hour under stars and stripes.” American evangelicals, whom the Bolsheviks found useful in undermining the Russian Orthodox Church, celebrated Russia as “the greatest missionary opportunity of our time,” where “millions of white people are waiting for the message of life.”