Status Updates From The Furies: Violence and Te...

"The provisional governments which were put in place under Moscow’s control were left-leaning but not Communist-dominated coalitions. Depending on the country, they were validated by more or less free elections [and] considerable civil and cultural freedom...And yet, almost overnight, in the Western world critics cried out against Moscow’s...drive to turn Eastern Europe into a captive and closed sphere of influence."

"It seems most doubtful that Stalin willfully mounted a genocidal war against, in particular, the peasantry of Ukraine with a view to abort the embryo of Ukrainian nationalism. Indeed, the Irish famine of the second half of the 1840s, in which over a million out of 8 million people perished, is a much closer parallel than the Judeocide of the 1940s."

"Stalin’s impatience with the unbending peasant was peculiar neither to him nor to most Marxists far and near. As we have seen, it was rooted in the Enlightenment."

"ritualized demonization of Stalin...hinders rather than advances the critical study and understanding of the Soviet regime during his close to thirty-year rule."

Onto the provocatively titled final chapter:

"Internalization of the Russian Revolution: Terror in One Country"

1800, after an attempted assassination of Napoleon:

"The Council decided to summarily deport 129 presumed Jacobins to the Seychelles and to Cayenne...Within two weeks Joseph Fouche ́ provided Napoleon with conclusive evidence that ultraroyalists, not neo-Jacobins, were responsible. But the First Consul stood fast, and so did the Council and the Senate."

Targeted by more hardline reactionaries, they blame the left.

"In [the 'pathos of novelty',] the issue was less the 'real' circumstances than the perception and construction of them by the chief actors...issues of principle were crowded out by questions of political strategy, to be resolved in an atmosphere of utmost urgency."

Through this book, applying 'symbolic interactionism' to revolutions adds a crucial dimension and grounding to the chaos of ever-shifting ambiguities.

Bonaparte had “perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution.” In so doing he had “fed the egoism of the French nation” at the same time that he demanded the “sacrifice of bourgeois [interests]” whenever necessary “to advance the political aim of conquest.”

- Marx/Engels, "The Holy Family"

In short, militarist export of 'progress' act as a means to consolidate an internal ruling class.

"Revolution is a peerless forcing house for the primacy of domestic politics."

"Of all the peripheries of the [Russian] empire, Ukraine was the most completely consumed by the creeping anomie accompanying the wreck of political and legal sovereignty. [There} was a resurgent and insurgent nationalism which aspired to autonomy or secession...above all driven by a burgeoning jacquerie of peasants whose latent animus against Russians, Poles, Jews, and cities was easily inflamed and manipulated."

"The escalation of indeterminate and erratic terror into specifically and intentionally political terror was closely correlated with the escalation of the civil war".

The geospatial tracking and timeline of the Terror in tandem with the movements of Denikin, Kolchak, foreign actors and the Bolsheviks respectively has me more convinced than ever of the brilliance of Albert Szymanski's "Human Rights in the USSR".

"The harshness of the terms imposed on the ex-tsarist empire was unprecedented in the relations between great powers."

Even retrospectively, Western narratives tend to give German state actions the benefit of nuance due to the Treaty of Versailles. The Soviets in the wake of Brest-Litovsk get no such caveats.

On the other hand...

"Lenin was wary of the nostrum of a revolutionary war, not least because of his gnawing skepticism about near-term prospects for revolution in Europe, notably in Germany. He was supported by Sokolnikov, Stalin, and Zinoviev, who also shared his concern that to keep stalling [at Brest-Litovsk was to risk the enemy setting even stiffer terms [for peace]."

"When the new regime’s harsh security measures were challenged in the Soviet Executive, Trotsky rejoined that 'demands to forgo all repression in time of civil war were demands to abandon the civil war.'"

The man had his moments.

"the Bolsheviks’ readiness to use the labor of camp inmates in the emergency of 1917 to 1921 was conditioned by Russia’s past experience with [forced labour], just as the harsh living and working conditions in [camps] were due to the extreme rigors of war and civil war rather than to a blueprint for systematic punishment or exploitation, let alone extermination, 'there being no Soviet Treblinka.'"

"Presently the issue of vengeance became an important touchstone of revolutionary politics: a struggle between, on the one hand, the zealots of wild popular vengeance and, on the other, the advocates of legally grounded retribution, with the latter raising the spectre of rampant avenging Furies to advance their position."

History is littered with fruitful analogues beyond the book's titular duality.

Robespierre conceded that it was natural 'to weep for the victims, including those among them who were guilty.' But he also wanted France’s citizens 'to save some tears for [the victims of] other, nay greater calamities,' particularly the countless millions who through the ages had suffered the torments of political and social oppression.

"But there is also one striking difference between the believers of secular and revealed religion: the former are much more readily and rapidly disabused and disenchanted than the latter. Everyday experience shows doctrine and cause to be flawed and compromised, with the result that disenchanted revolutionaries defect or rebel."

realizing that they were playing the role of sorcerer’s apprentice, not a few of the reformers began to disavow popular violence as it found political champions, even instigators. In like manner, with time the intelligentsia’s 'enthusiastic approbation of the glorious [if violent] dawn of 1789 metamorphosed into a mortifying rejection of the horrors of 1793–1794.'

"Pressed by unsuspected and perplexing events, would-be leaders of the French and Russian revolutions had no choice but to make grave and perilous decisions without the benefit of a 'science of the future'—decisions for which there were no rational criteria...

Jacobin and Bolshevik ideologies...were fluid and flexible, not rigid, and they limited or facilitated rather than determined the actors’ choices."