20th century of revolution and political disaster

The twentieth century of revolution and political disaster is presented as a period in which emancipatory possibility and catastrophic violence remain entangled. The book resists both the claim that Stalinism was merely an accidental betrayal of the October Revolution and the claim that the Communist project was totalitarian from its beginning. Its account instead follows how revolutionary energies were redirected, institutionalized, and sometimes turned against the societies they sought to transform, while insisting that catastrophe cannot be made meaningful as a necessary instrument of historical progress.

Revolution and the remaking of society

The account distinguishes the unsettled years of 1917 to 1921 from the deeper social transformation that followed. During the first period, society was in a state of emergency, but much of its social texture remained intact. The New Economic Policy then consolidated Soviet state power without fundamentally remaking the lives of most peasants, artisans, and intellectuals. The decisive shift came with the drive begun in 1928: collectivization and rapid industrialization sought to alter the composition of society itself, rather than simply govern it under new political authorities.

That transformation had concrete targets. Individual peasant proprietors were to be liquidated as a class, while the old intelligentsia of teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians was to be replaced by a new one. The contrast between Moscow in 1924 and Moscow in 1934 makes the scale of change legible: a visitor returning after the first interval could still recognize the city’s shops, offices, theaters, and, in many cases, its people in charge; after the second, the texture of social life had changed so radically that the city would scarcely be recognizable. The book stresses that this upheaval involved real horrors, but also a sincere and enthusiastic will to create a new state, intelligentsia, and legal system.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s account places collectivization and industrialization within the dynamic of the October Revolution, extending the revolutionary sequence beyond the revolution’s initial years. In this interpretation, its decisive termination came only in 1937, when the purges were cut short before the Communist Party’s destruction and the party nomenklatura stabilized as a new class. The resulting order was not simply the survival of the revolution in its original form: it was a settlement haunted by what it had suppressed. Repeated purges of the established nomenklatura became, paradoxically, the means through which the betrayed revolutionary inheritance continued to return.

Revolution turned inward

The book links the inward violence of the late 1920s to the revolution’s failure to expand beyond the Soviet Union. Drawing on Isaac Deutscher’s account, it describes forcible industrialization and collectivization as substitutes for the spread of revolution abroad: the liquidation of the Russian kulaks took the place of overthrowing bourgeois rule in other countries. A political energy that had failed to move outward was redirected toward the violent reshaping of Soviet society.

This argument revises the familiar comparison between Stalinism and the Thermidorian reaction. The book locates the more directly Napoleonic attempt to export revolution in the military campaign at the end of the civil war in 1920, which ended with the Soviet Red Army’s defeat in Poland. Tukhachevsky, rather than Stalin, appears as the potential Bolshevik Napoleon in this account. The contrast matters: Stalinist collectivization was not simply a retreat from revolutionary action, but an inward displacement of a revolutionary project that had remained confined to one country.

The same tension shapes the book’s account of Stalinism itself. Its rulers sought a stable new order, yet the revolution’s unfulfilled legacy persisted within that order as a source of disturbance. The fantasy that Stalin might have lived long enough to complete a final purge and pacify the system exposes the contradiction: the imagined route to lasting stability depended on a further purge, one that would have intensified the very violence from which stability was supposed to rescue the regime. The purges thus register both the regime’s consolidation and its inability to settle its revolutionary inheritance once and for all.

Catastrophe without historical alibis

The book rejects attempts to treat Fascism and Stalinism as neutral equivalents in a comparison that makes Communism the original source of the twentieth century’s political crimes. That framing, it argues, privileges Fascism by reducing Nazism to a reaction against practices already present in Bolshevism and by assigning the original responsibility to Communism. Against both this approach and the opposing view that Stalinism was only a contingent deviation, the text asks readers to hold together the October Revolution’s distinctive emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome.

It also sets out three broad ways of interpreting modern catastrophe. One treats the Enlightenment as an unfinished emancipatory project, making completion the answer to its failures. Another sees totalitarian potential as inherent in the Enlightenment and reads the concentration camps and genocides of the twentieth century as the endpoint of a longer Western history. A third, associated with Étienne Balibar, treats modernity as opening new freedoms and new dangers without guaranteeing which will prevail. The book develops the force of this last position: violence cannot be smoothly converted into an instrument of historical reason, and atrocities cannot be accepted as stains that ultimately contribute to progress. Such a reading is ethically unacceptable and, the book argues, theoretically false.

Revolutionary impasse and its consequences

The Cultural Revolution provides a later test of whether revolutionary politics can escape the structures built in its name. It demonstrated the importance of mass action and organizational forms that could not be reduced to class representation, and it challenged the party-state’s claim to be the central producer of revolutionary activity. Yet its attempt to find a new political path, revive revolution, and create forms of workers’ struggle under socialism ended in failure. The general framework of the party-state remained in place, defended in the name of public order and the prevention of civil war.

Its significance therefore lies partly in what it could not accomplish. The episode exposed the difficulty of freeing politics from the party-state, even through a violent effort to relaunch revolution. The book also draws out a further consequence: the exhaustion of party-state politics does not automatically leave a viable alternative in direct, nonrepresentational self-organization. Presentation through mass self-organization and representation through political institutions prove interdependent; the end of the party-state form cannot simply be equated with the triumph of councils or direct democracy. Across these cases, the twentieth century appears not as a settled lesson about revolution, but as a history of blocked possibilities whose failures cannot be erased or converted into assurances of eventual progress.