Graham’s Reviews > Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution > Status Update

"Fortunately, (the French Revolution) is still alive. For Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and the values of reason and the Enlightenment - the values on which modern civilisation has been built, from the days of the American Revolution - are more needed than ever, as irrationalism, fundamentalist religion, obscurantism, and barbarity are once again gaining on us."

"But why should the French Revolution be retrospectively made into the scapegoat [through revisionism] for our inability to understand the present?"

"Thus, the struggle of the 1920s in the Soviet Union was conducted with mutual accusations taken from the French Revolution." ( That of Thermidor and Bonapartism). "It is, incidentally, a warning against an excessive tendency to look for history to repeat itself... Insofar as those who made (those accusations) actually took their analogies with 1789-1799 seriously, they were far more often than not misled by them. "

"The struggle for the future of the Soviet Union, and perhaps for world socialism, were fought out by small groups and factions of politicians amid the massive indifference of an ignorant peasantry and terrible apathy of the working class in whose name the Bolsheviks claimed to act. Here, for the connoisseurs of the French Revolution, was the most obvious parallel with Thermidor. "

... the hope of a socialist economy turned out to be just the old Russia... "The Bolshevik of 1917 would hardly recognize himself in the Bolshevik of 1928," wrote Christian Rakovsky. "

"Although, in retrospect, the 1920s seem to Soviet observers of the 1980s a brief era of economic hope and cultural liveliness before Russia's iron age of Stalin, to Old Bolsheviks at the time it was a nightmare of sorts, in which familiar things became strange and menacing: ...

"Thermidor was the obvious term used to describe any development that marked a political retreat of revolutionaries from radical to moderate positions, which revolutionaries usually (but wrongly) identified with a betrayal of the revolution. "

"It is perhaps more interesting to see how French revolutionary parallels were used by various people to assess, and increasingly to criticise, developments in Russia. Let us remind ourselves, once again, of the historical prototype derived from the French Revolution. It consisted of six phases: ... "