Disaster and pseudo-event

Disaster and pseudo-event distinguishes a revolution’s catastrophic historical realization from a political spectacle that imitates revolutionary change without sharing its emancipatory substance. In this account, Stalinism remains disastrously bound to the October Revolution, while Fascism presents a false image of revolutionary authenticity; the contrast makes it possible to confront Communism’s horrors without treating its origins as equivalent to Fascism’s or dismissing the revolutionary project as a mere deception.

The Event and its imitation

The distinction turns on the relation between a political regime and the event from which it claims descent. Stalinist Communism is understood as an attempt to stabilize the October Revolution by converting its truth into a positive, durable order. That conversion is a disaster: the regime’s established structures embody and deform the revolutionary project, but remain historically connected to it. Fascism, by contrast, stages a supposed revolution as an aesthetic spectacle. Its claim to authenticity imitates the form of an Event while lacking the emancipatory substance that would make the claim true.

The French contrast between désastre and désêtre condenses the argument: better a disaster than a non-being. The point is not that the disaster is benign, or that its immense suffering is justified. It is that even a catastrophic outcome can remain tied to the truth it betrays, whereas a pseudo-event offers only the appearance of transformation. The distinction therefore refuses an easy moral equivalence while keeping the violence and failure of Stalinism fully in view.

Violence and the contradiction of Stalinist rule

The difference becomes visible in the regimes’ forms of political violence. In the account of Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism concentrates irrationality in the belief in a Jewish plot; for many people who did not oppose the regime and were not Jewish, ordinary life could retain an outward appearance of normality. Stalinist irrationality, by contrast, penetrates the whole social body. In the late 1930s, no one could be sure of safety: people could be denounced and arrested unexpectedly as traitors. The contrast is not a claim that Nazi rule was harmless, but an account of how its violence and Stalinist violence operated differently.

The contrast also appears in the work of investigators. Nazi police investigators still sought evidence or traces of actual opposition to the regime. Stalinist investigators manufactured plots and sabotage, fabricating the activity that was supposed to warrant punishment. The purges thus reveal more than arbitrary repression. They expose a regime attacking its own members and contradicting the Communist project in whose name it rules.

That contradiction gives the purges their particular historical meaning. They erase traces of the regime’s revolutionary origins, yet also return those origins in distorted form: their recurring violence recalls the radical negation that the new order tries to contain. The purges are therefore both an instrument of stabilization and a sign that stabilization has not resolved the regime’s founding tension. The betrayed revolutionary inheritance survives by haunting the order built to supersede it.

Collectivization and the remaking of society

The argument places the rupture of the late 1920s in a longer revolutionary sequence. The difficult, enthusiastic years from 1917 to 1921 put society in a general state of emergency. The New Economic Policy then consolidated Soviet state power while leaving much of the social fabric—the lives and positions of most peasants, artisans, and intellectuals—basically intact. The radical transformation of that fabric came with the thrust beginning in 1928 and the terrible years after 1929.

Collectivization sought to liquidate peasants as a class of individual owners. Rapid industrialization accompanied the replacement of the old intelligentsia—teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians—with a new one. The scale of change is registered through Moscow: someone who left in 1914 and returned in 1924 could still recognize the city’s shops, offices, theatres, and, in most cases, the people in charge. A return in 1934 would reveal a city whose entire texture of social life had changed. The point is not simply that industrialization altered the city’s appearance; the upheaval aimed directly at changing the composition of society and creating a new state, intelligentsia, and legal system.

This reading treats forced collectivization and industrialization as part of the October Revolution’s own dynamic, rather than as an accidental interruption of it. The revolutionary sequence, on this interpretation, continued beyond the early post-revolutionary years and ended only in 1937, when the purges were cut short and the Party nomenklatura stabilized itself as a new class. That proposed turning point also clarifies the double character of the disaster: the transformation carried a ruthless but sincere will to remake society, even as its methods and consequences made the revolutionary project catastrophic.

Revolution turned inward

The account connects this inward transformation to the revolution’s failure to expand beyond the Soviet Union. The Russian Revolution, conceived under Lenin as a first step toward a pan-European revolution, remained confined to one country. In Isaac Deutscher’s formulation, a dynamic force unable to expand outward turned inward and began violently reshaping Soviet society. Forced industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for the spread of revolution; the liquidation of the kulaks took the place of overthrowing bourgeois rule abroad.

This inward turn also revises the comparison with Napoleon. After the French Revolution’s Thermidorian reaction, revolutionary agitation could be displaced outward into war against other states. The Soviet case reverses the direction: when international expansion failed, revolutionary energy was redirected inside the country. The attempt to export revolution by military means had already failed at the end of the civil war in 1920, with the Red Army’s defeat in Poland. The account therefore locates the Napoleonic moment not in Stalinist collectivization itself, but in that earlier military attempt.

The political judgment that follows rejects two reductions at once. Stalinism cannot be explained simply as a contingent deviation that left the Communist project untouched; nor should the Communist project be declared totalitarian at its core. The task is instead to think the tragedy of the October Revolution: its distinctive emancipatory potential together with the historical necessity attributed to its Stalinist outcome. Disaster and pseudo-event supplies the conceptual terms for holding those claims in tension. Stalinism’s crimes do not erase its relation to the revolutionary Event, and that relation does not absolve the crimes; it is precisely the contradiction between them that the purges and the remaking of society make visible.