20th century

The book treats the 20th century as a period in which rival projects of modernity and the unresolved legacy of revolution expose the antagonisms beneath apparently distinct political systems. Its account links the century’s competing modernizations to worldwide capitalism, then follows how the October Revolution’s outward revolutionary ambitions were redirected into a violent transformation of Soviet society. The result is neither a simple story of betrayed revolution nor an account that treats the Communist project as totalitarian from its beginning, but an effort to hold revolutionary potential and Stalinist outcome together.

Competing Modernities

In discussing the first half of the 20th century, the book identifies Fascism and Communism as major projects of “alternate modernity.” Fascism presented itself as a way to preserve the core of capitalist modernity while attributing its distortions to a supposedly contingent Jewish, individualist, profiteering element. The rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and 1930s offered a different model of modernization from the Western-capitalist one. These projects differed politically, but both made the question of what modernity could become central to their claims.

The book’s critique is directed at the idea that modernity can be divided into separate, culturally specific versions without confronting the capitalist system that structures it. Multiplying modernities can make the antagonism internal to modernity appear to be only one historical variation among many. In this reading, particular models do not resolve the problem lodged in the universal concept of modernity; they are attempted answers to it, capable of obscuring rather than mastering its conflict.

Revolution and Social Transformation

The account distinguishes the difficult but enthusiastic revolutionary years of 1917 to 1921 from the period of the New Economic Policy, which consolidated Soviet state power while leaving much of social life comparatively intact. The decisive break came with the thrust beginning in 1928. Forced collectivization sought to eliminate peasants as a class of individual owners, while a new intelligentsia displaced the old one, including teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians. The aim was not simply to change political leadership but to remake the composition of society and establish a new state, intelligentsia, and legal system.

The scale of that change is conveyed through a comparison of Moscow across two returns. Someone who had left in 1914 and came back in 1924 would still have recognized the city’s shops, offices, theaters, and, in most cases, people in charge. Returning in 1934, after another decade, that person would no longer have recognized the texture of social life. The comparison makes the years after 1929 legible as a comprehensive social upheaval: the violence and horror accompanied a sincere, enthusiastic drive toward revolutionary transformation.

Stalinism and the Revolutionary Inheritance

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s interpretation, as presented in the book, places collectivization and rapid industrialization within the October Revolution’s own dynamic. On this account, the revolutionary sequence proper continued until 1937. Its true Thermidor came when the great purges were curtailed to prevent what Getty and Naumov describe as the complete “suicide of the party,” allowing the Party nomenklatura to stabilize as a new class. The termination of the purges thus marks not simply a restoration of order but a turning point at which revolutionary upheaval gave way to a settled ruling structure.

The book accordingly rejects two opposing simplifications: the Trotskyist view that Stalinism was ultimately a contingent deviation, and the view that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. Its proposed task is to recognize both the October Revolution’s distinctive emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. This formulation keeps the tragedy in view: the later regime is neither detached from the revolution nor an adequate fulfillment of its promise.

Revolution Turned Inward

Isaac Deutscher’s account of forced collectivization supplies a mechanism for the transition. Once the revolutionary dynamic failed to expand beyond the Soviet Union and became compressed within it, it turned inward and violently reshaped Soviet society. Industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for the spread of revolution; the liquidation of the Russian kulaks became, in this account, a substitute for overthrowing bourgeois rule abroad.

The comparison with Napoleon clarifies the reversal. Marx described the Napoleonic Wars as an outward displacement of revolutionary activity after Thermidor had quenched internal agitation. The Soviet experience is presented as the reverse movement: a revolution that had understood itself under Lenin as the beginning of a pan-European process remained confined to one country, and its energy was released against the society within. The book therefore distinguishes the failed attempt to export revolution by military means at the end of the civil war in 1920, which ended with the Red Army’s defeat in Poland, from the later inward thrust of collectivization. In this interpretation, the latter was not merely a pause or detour in the history of revolution; it was the means by which revolutionary force continued to act after its outward expansion had failed.