> --- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> For anyone who directly experienced the Soviet system
> and retained
> reasonably open mind about it, it is virtually
> impossible to miss that
> the
> Soviet ideology was above all Russian peasant populism
> writ large.
>
> ---
>
> Man, this is so true.
------------------------------------
More generally, of course, despite Marx's predictions and the development of
mass proletarian parties pledged to socialism, all of the great revolutions
of modern times (French, Russian, Chinese) occured in rural societies and
were in the main peasant insurrections aimed at the breakup of the large
landed estates. These revolutions all accomplished what Marxists described
as the "bourgeois democratic" tasks of land reform and industrialization.
The 20th century Russian and Chinese revolutionaries bravely tried to
advance to the abolition of private property and the elimination of the
capitalists as a class, and briefly succeeded, but recent Russian and
Chinese history, as we know, appears to have put paid to that attempt - at
least in this historical period.
MG