Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks are presented as a revolutionary organization whose political task extends beyond taking power: they are charged with transforming the population into a collective body conscious of a historical purpose. The book places this emancipatory ambition beside the severe discipline it demands, tracing how revolutionary commitment can be directed outward as military expansion or inward as the reshaping of society and the control of individual life. Its account resists both a simple story of Stalinism as an accidental deviation and the opposite claim that the Communist project was inherently totalitarian.

Revolutionary Organization and the Political Subject

The Bolsheviks’ duty, as the book formulates it, is to dissolve the existing people and elect another. This is not treated as a routine change of representatives. It means transforming an opportunistic, inert crowd—the empirical population—into a revolutionary body oriented toward historical truth. The formulation makes political organization a project of producing a new collective subject, not merely expressing preferences already held by individuals.

That transformation has an ethical counterpart. The account distinguishes the personal ego, understood as the organizing expression of an individual’s psychic forces, from the subject who serves an impersonal truth. In the latter role, authority does not derive from a person’s private qualities; it comes from accepting the continuing task of bearing witness to a cause larger than oneself. Applied to the Bolsheviks, this account explains both the force of revolutionary commitment and its demand that the individual subordinate personal interests to collective purpose. The party’s stated task is difficult precisely because it cannot simply take the existing population as a finished political subject: it must remake the basis on which collective identity is formed.

Revolutionary Ideals and Bodily Discipline

The novel How the Steel Was Tempered, identified as a classic of literary Stalinism, gives this ideal a stark personal form through Pavka Korchagin, a Bolshevik who takes part first in the Russian Civil War and later in the construction of steel mills during the 1920s. By the end of his life he is severely disabled and largely immobilized. He marries Taya, with the relationship described as companionship rather than sexual life, and her role is to care for him. His fate is read as an embodiment of the Stalinist ideal of the Happy New Man: a person who sacrifices bodily comfort and desire to the construction of socialism.

The book connects Pavka’s fictional fate with that of Nikolai Ostrovsky, who, after completing the novel, was himself dying, disabled, and blind. In the final two years of Ostrovsky’s life, he lived at a Black Sea resort as a celebrated public figure; his house became a destination for visitors and foreign journalists, and the street where it stood bore his name. Pavka and Ostrovsky thus appear within a shared image of political commitment surviving the collapse of ordinary bodily capacity. For Pavka, writing a novel about his life gives that severely diminished existence a renewed form: the body is rendered almost absent, while the act of narrating his life persists.

The Body as an Internal Political Conflict

A lodged piece of shrapnel that gradually blinds Pavka becomes the occasion for an unusual image in Ostrovsky’s otherwise plain style: an octopus that appears to attack and drain him. The book reads this figure not as the familiar image of capitalism strangling workers, but as a positive image of the self-control demanded of a Bolshevik revolutionary. The octopus represents an organ that acts as if autonomous from the ordinary body, an internal power that constrains bodily desires deemed potentially corrupting. In this interpretation, political discipline is not only imposed from outside; it is experienced as a struggle within the person against the body’s perceived disloyalty.

When Pavka reviews his life in despair, the moment is characterized as a meeting of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with his own self about the body’s treacherous behavior. The comparison brings party deliberation into the intimate register of self-judgment. It also exposes a tension inside the revolutionary ideal: the demand for collective commitment can be represented as mastery over the very body through which an individual lives. The novel’s ideology, in the book’s reading, does not simply conceal that tension. It discloses it indirectly, through a grotesque image and an episode of internal reckoning.

Revolution Confined and Turned Inward

The Bolshevik project is also situated within the history of the October Revolution and its isolation. The revolution had understood itself as the beginning of a wider European process, one that could survive and reach completion only through revolutionary expansion across Europe. When it remained confined to the Soviet Union, the book argues, revolutionary energy did not simply disappear; it was redirected inward. The late-1920s policies of forced collectivization and forcible industrialization are presented as substitutes for the spread of revolution abroad, while the liquidation of the Russian kulaks took the place of an overthrow of bourgeois rule outside the country.

This interpretation complicates the familiar comparison of Stalinism to a Napoleonic Thermidor. The book locates the more directly military attempt to export revolution in 1920, at the end of the civil war, when the Soviet Red Army was defeated in Poland. Mikhail Tukhachevsky is identified as the figure who might have embodied this military, outward-moving revolutionary role. The later inward turn is therefore not equated with that failed campaign: it is presented as a different response to the revolution’s confinement. The resulting tragedy lies in the relation between the revolution’s genuine emancipatory potential and the historical necessity attributed to its Stalinist outcome, rather than in an explanation that reduces one to a mere accident or treats the entire Communist project as totalitarian from the outset.