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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 183 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Lenin’s tomb
David Remnick
Penguin £7.99
To look at the former Soviet Union today is to see a society lurching ever deeper into social and economic chaos as the artificial restraints of state capitalism give way to the full blown anarchy of the market. As if this is not enough, Zhirinovsky’s fascists are waiting in the wings, gratefully harvesting the sour fruit of shattered expectations.
Against this background, any book which can provide an intelligent analysis of the situation in the former Soviet Union and contribute to our understanding of its downfall is extremely welcome. Sadly, however, David Remnick has not written such a work. His is one of a number of recent books by Western journalists (Remnick worked for the Washington Post) describing the downfall of ‘Communism’ and the creation of a brave new society. Not surprisingly then, like so much of the journalism on the subject, Lenin’s Tomb is stuffed with cliché, anecdote and unsubstantiated myth.
This is not to say that it is completely without value. Much of the book relies on interviews with both victims and upholders of the Stalinist regime and provides a damning catalogue of its crimes. More importantly, despite Remnick’s wholly inadequate Jackanory history of the October Revolution and his obvious distaste for socialist ideas, he is frequently frustrated in his attempts to link Lenin and Stalin because of the overwhelming nature of the evidence which suggests a fundamental cleavage in Soviet history after 1928.
In addition to this, Remnick illustrates well the hypocrisy and repulsive extravagance of the Stalinists alongside the sheer degradation they inflicted upon ordinary working people.
Neither is Remnick afraid to expose the excesses of the free market currently wreaking havoc in the former Soviet Union, if only because of their terrible magnitude. Yet in a society where the old ruling class of apparatchiks has by and large remained in power, Remnick still holds firm to the assumption that the Soviet Union was in some way socialist. For him, its tragic history was an inevitable result of the Bolshevik revolution rather than a consequence of the counter-revolutionary measures brutally administered by Stalin which, nonetheless, Remnick has recorded.
Nowhere is Remnick’s analysis shown to be more painfully inadequate than when he is describing the magnificent miners’ strikes of 1989 which signalled the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here, he says, was a real ‘“working class” rebellion’ impatient with the revolution from above offered by Gorbachev. And then preposterously, ‘nothing so vividly illustrated the disintegration of the workers’ state’.
Despite these shortcomings, however, Lenin’s Tomb is worth reading for the insights provided by Remnick’s interviewees. The strike committee at one of the Ukrainian mines in 1989, for example, was able to clear up any confusion Remnick has left us with about the nature of the Soviet Union and provide us with a refrain as relevant now as it was then: ‘Let’s get rid of the bosses, we don’t need them.’
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