Brad’s Reviews > The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. > Status Update

"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."