Returning to the Leninist Line under Khrushchev and Brezhnev

Abstract

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the ambivalence with which Lenin viewed the Jacobins is once again the reigning orthodoxy. As a result, the debate among Soviet historians over the relationship between the Jacobin dictatorship and the Thermidorian reaction to it, which began in the 1920s but was interrupted during the Stalin era, resumed. Most considered the downfall of the Jacobins the catalyst for economic changes that essentially reversed the Jacobins’ policies; several others, however, saw a ‘growing over’ in terms of policy from the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution to the Thermidorian one. But the debate did not shake the consensus that the revolution ended with the demise of the Jacobins in 1794, rather than with Napoleon’s coup five years later.