10 Nationalizing the Bolshevik Revolution Transnationally In Search of Non-Western Modernization

Nationalizing the Bolshevik Revolution Transnationally

In Search of Non-Western Modernization Among “proletarian” Nations

In this chapter I will discuss how the impact of the Bolshevik Revolu- tion of 1917 reverberated far beyond the geopolitical parameters of the Cold War world and those set by Cold War historiography. In the Cold War era, postcolonial states were seeking to institute variations of the earlier Soviet attempts to create a collective society based on the radically transformed individual—but with one important difference. While the Soviet Union was firmly committed to the principle of fighting colonialism worldwide in its rhetoric, in practice it was an imperial power that was based at its core on a Russian ethnos. Postcolonial states in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America inherited the Soviet commitment to socialist subjectivity and collectivism but interpreted it through the lens of radical anticolo- nialism. A sense of historical backwardness, national humiliation, and wounded national pride that I have described elsewhere as “victimhood nationalism” created a hybrid political ideology that appropriated social- ist forms of authoritarianism and rapid modernization.3 Socialism as a hybrid of labor mobilization, national liberation, and rapid modernization was pervasive in parts of the postcolonial world, although historians have paid it little attention.

Mass spectacles, a product of supposedly free men and women united by a common ideal who voluntarily subordinate themselves to the com- munal good, were used to inspire and mobilize millions. Mass games became a worldwide phenomenon during the interwar period, when, in the capitals of Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union, men and women marched in menacing shows of strength, unity, and patriotism. Today the cult of mass games has died worldwide, and the only country where they are performed on a regular basis is North Korea. Mass games are a choreographed socialist spectacle consisting of over 100,000 partici- pants in a hypersynchronized display of gymnastics, dance, acrobatics, and dramatic performances, accompanied by music and other audiovisual effects. A deeply politicized commentary guides viewers in their consump- tion of the cultural event.4 The North Korean mass games must be situated within global history and the history of both postcolonial and socialist statecraft.

By fostering healthy and strong physiques and a high degree of organi- zation, discipline, and collectivism, the mass games were originally a mod- ernizing practice that was used to forge a revolutionary New Man, Homo sovieticus. Schoolchildren, conscious that a single slip in their action might spoil their mass-gymnastic performance, made every effort to subordinate all their thoughts and actions to the collective project they were engaged in, impervious to the pain their bodies were experiencing. Mass games were designed to create a modern subject through bodily discipline and exposure to “controlled and guided massification.”5 Indeed, participation in mass games is more efficient than organized sports in promoting a high degree of “emotional entrainment,” “bodily synchronization,” “people’s consciousness of togetherness,” and “charismatic mobilization” on the basis of mutual attention between the leader and masses.6 To make people surrender their individual identities for the sake of a collective subjectiv- ity desired by the regime constitutes a distinct art of government that has its roots in the early Soviet Union

The conjuncture of North Korean Juche ideology and Guyanese cooper- ative socialism as late as 1979 shows how Soviet models continued to be influential in the twentieth century and played a profound role in shaping the self-contradictory nature of socialist postcolonial states in the devel- oping world. While leaders in the wider arc of the Global East and South implemented the Soviet model of forced modernization and industrializa- tion, they jettisoned socialist principles of workers’ autonomy and freedom for the sake of the national interest. Elites in postcolonial nation-states used a series of techniques to mobilize the masses, including the subjuga- tion of the self to the collective and the biopolitical control of populations. Citizens were mobilized in a national and anti-Western political project of modernization that many in the developing world perceived to be the essence of Stalinism. As in Guyana, postcolonial states sought to achieve a disciplined and united collective that they believed to have been the core achievement of Stalinism. There were few attempts to re-create the revo- lutionary and often spontaneous mass movements that characterized the Russian revolutions of 1917. The Marxist concept of a class struggle between the propertied strata of society and the workers was reinterpreted as a geo- political struggle between bourgeois and proletarian nations on the global stage. The anger of impoverished masses in many postcolonial states was directed away from their own elites and toward their former colonial masters, the Western powers.

This chapter traces the process through which Bolshevik ideas regard- ing proletariat revolution and class war were repurposed in the struggle of postcolonial and proletarian nations against their former, European oppressors. By analyzing the transnational interactions of socialism, nationalism, colonialism, and fascism, I demonstrate the ways in which the vocabulary of the Soviet Union was appropriated by popular nationalists in the decolonized world and used for national projects of non-Western and Soviet-style forced modernization.

After the events of 1917, revolutionary Asian nationalists were offered the unprecedented opportunity of skipping or bypassing capitalism alto- gether in their path to modernity. They derived this approach from ideas born of the Bolshevik Revolution. The idea of bypassing the capitalist stage of development and proceeding through peasant communes directly to the stage of socialism had already been formulated within the Marxist intel- lectual tradition. When Russian agrarian socialists of the second half of the nineteenth century proposed this variation on the revolutionary road, Marx did not deny this option in his draft letters to Vera Zasulich.18 Rus- sian Populists in the late nineteenth century had connected the future of socialism with the traditional collectivism of the peasant commune, and they regarded socialism as a way of achieving “anti-Western moderniza- tion.” Lenin claimed that the October Revolution presented colonies and semicolonies with the historical precedent of transitioning to socialism and bypassing the capitalist stage. In fact, “Lenin never broke from the the- oretical and political traditions of Russian Populism, but completed Georgi Plekhanov’s project by assimilating Marxism to the very different theoretical framework of Populism.”19 The Russian Populists’ idea of bypass- ing capitalism as a model of development owed its second birth to Lenin- ism. After the October Revolution, due to the depredations of World War I and the ongoing civil war, the Bolsheviks found themselves in a very poor country that lacked the material base for constructing socialism. Rapid industrialization soon became the top priority, something that both Leon Trotsky and, later, Joseph Stalin urged.

As Eric Hobsbawm said, “Bolshevism turned itself into an ideology for the rapid economic development for countries in which the conditions of capitalist development did not exist.”20 By showing the possibility of a non- capitalist path toward modernization in underdeveloped countries, the Bolshevik Revolution solved the historical dilemma of former colonies

ex Yi Sun-tak 的欧洲游历记

ex Subhas Chan- dra Bose in Japan

As a colonial Marxist economist, Yi advocated a national united front of Marxists and nationalists and called for the establishment of class col- laboration between the national bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The Communist International had advocated this policy from its very incep- tion in 1919, as Lenin believed that successful colonial wars of independence in Asia and Africa would hasten the proletarian revolution in Europe. The emphasis on national unity originated in Yi’s peculiar analysis of the trans- national class structure in the Japanese Empire. Yi categorized all Korean colonial subjects as the total proletariat. In his view, the Japanese nation represented the ruling class of capitalists and landlords, while the exploited class of workers and tenant peasants epitomized the Korean nation. Thus he expected that the revolution in colonial Korea would be performed not by the Korean proletariat against the Korean bourgeoisie, but by the total proletariat of the Korean nation against the total bourgeoisie of the Japa- nese nation. Yi Sun-tak characterized the forthcoming revolution of colo- nial Korea as a national political revolution in which he recast the Marxist class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat into a national struggle between the Japanese people and the Korean people.

Strangely enough, the dichotomy between a bourgeois nation and a proletarian nation appears also in Italian Fascist discourse.

Using Yi Sun-tak’s arguments that the Italian nation was the total pro- letariat that should struggle against the total bourgeoisie of the bourgeois nations, I have found little proof to indicate that Yi knew about the Fascist dichotomy between the bourgeois nation and the proletarian nation. It might be a pure coincidence that Yi’s idea of “total proletariat” and “total bourgeoisie” coevolved with the Fascist dichotomy of the bourgeois nation and the proletarian nation. But the coevolution of these ideas, even if by chance, can be placed within a certain context. The strategic location of colonial Korea and Fascist Italy in the discourse of global modernity is revealing about the coexistence of ideas regarding the total proletariat and the proletarian nation. A colonial Korean Marxist’s encounter with Ital- ian fascism was a strange variation of the trope of East-West encounters. The strategic positions of Italy and Germany in the interwar world system as that of semiperipheries, peripheries in the center, or even as the East in the West, dictated their self-understanding as the underdog in world sys- tems. When Yi encountered fascism in Italy, it just so happened that one member of the East sympathized with another East located within Europe itself.51

The encounter between a colonial Korean Marxist and Italian fascism challenges the intellectual dichotomy of right-wing fascism and left-wing socialism. From the viewpoint of the transnational formation of moder- nity, the convergence of fascism and socialism as radical anti-Western modernization projects was not that improbable. The Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti, who became an inadvertent progenitor of Fascist art, was deeply respected by Russian Futurists, who in turn supported the Bol- shevik Revolution. Left-wing Fascists such as Berto Ricci, and Ugo Spirito were also pleased when the Soviet Union began to incline toward fascism in the 1930s. Left-wing Fascists in Italy could see the shift of emphasis from revolutionary internationalism to nationalist strength and development in the Soviet Union.52 Mussolini himself made it explicit that he would pre- fer “Italy as a Soviet republic” to “Italy as a British colony.”53 If the discur- sive position of Fascist Italy was that of the East in the West, Russia at the turn of the twentieth century was regarded as a developing or a periph- eral capitalist society, if even that. When Asia or Europe stopped being solely geopolitical concepts, fascism and socialism could appear on the same horizon, and even on the spectrum of anti-Western modernization projects.54 Colonial Korean Marxists, who occupied high administrative positions in postcolonial North Korea, traveled to the USSR as members of official government delegations. While they wrote unremarkable travel- ogues about their visits, almost all of them were deeply impressed by a Soviet modernity that was represented by automobile factories, high-rise buildings, trolley buses, double-decker buses, subway trains of high veloc- ity, luxuriously decorated metro stations, a department store full of consumer goods, low illiteracy rates, the mechanization of agriculture, well-organized cultural events, decent cultural infrastructure, and the civilized modern life in Moscow and other cities in the postwar USSR.55 In their estimation, Moscow, the socialist capital, was much more modern and more civilized than the imperial metropolis of Tokyo, and the social- ist modernization project was more successful and efficient than the capitalist-imperialist modernization project. These travelogues are in sharp contrast with Western ones, such as Eric Hobsbawm’s, in which he recorded his deep disappointment with the poverty and backwardness prevalent in the USSR.

Once they entered the stage of global modernity, the antimodernist self- image of Fascists was confirmed by either explicit or implicit references to the modernist Other, the West. Once the Fascist discourse of antimodern- ist ends is placed in the context of cultural transfer and interaction with modernity, then one can read the anti-Western modernization project as a transnational agenda of the weak states against the strong, or the reac- tion of postcolonial nations to the former colonial masters. In the nine- teenth century, German intellectuals advocated their national culture against Anglo-French notions of civilization. The Russian Slavophile asser- tion that inner truth based on religion, culture, and moral convictions is much more important than external truth expressed by law and the state was very similar to the Indian nationalist discourse of the superiority of the spiritual domain over the material domain. Most of them thought that socialism was no other than the Gemeinschaft capitalism of the East over- coming the Western Gesellschaft capitalism.58 Therefore the desire for anti- Western and socialist modernization overrode a genuine commitment to the classless society of socialism in much of the postcolonial world in the twentieth century. The nationalist appropriation and repurposing of socialist modernization in the postcolonial states of the Global East and South offers us a new way to think about the impact of the October Revolution.