"A Past Charged with the Time of the Now": How Do Radical Movements Sustain a Sense of Past?

Abstract

"A Past Charged with the Time of the Now"How Do Radical Movements Sustain a Sense of Past? Andy Willimott (bio) Jay Bergman, The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture. 543 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-0198842705. $130.00. David Brandenberger and Mikhail Zelenov, eds., Stalin's Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. 744 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-0300155365. $72.00. How do radical movements sustain a sense of past even as they boldly declare their newness? With the Reformation a whole historiography of medieval dissent was forged by 16th-century Protestants, all vying to find a sense of origin in a virtuous past. Various 19th-century national movements embraced narratives proclaiming and explaining their existence, often retrospectively projecting their values back to a time armorial. In 1917, the Bolsheviks confidently proclaimed their newness, heralded a red dawn, and insisted on a new way of life. But the past mattered to the Bolsheviks, too. Far from disregarding the events and developments that preceded them, as Marxists they understood history as a linear, progressive process. They were deeply conscious of their place in "the march of history." More than that, the past could be meaningful to the Bolsheviks—a place where example and purpose were to be found. After all, as Marxists, they believed that the past was composed of manifest "universal laws" that could both explain and help unlock the course of history (Bergman, viii). Not so much rooted in a fixed sense of "time armorial," the forces of history seemed very much alive in the present [End Page 901] for the Bolsheviks. Or as Walter Benjamin observed, theirs was "a past charged with the time of the now."1 Understanding the past as having an active and evolving importance to the Bolsheviks—as opposed to a redundant, unchanging, or even purely subservient role—is crucial to explaining the formative underpinnings of 1917 and the Soviet Union.2 It has not always been thus. The long-dominant totalitarian school of thought presumed that ideology was fixed, permanent, and impervious to evolving circumstances. The meanings found in the past were deemed largely irrelevant next to the power of a "founding idea."3 In recent years, however, a growing array of scholars have sought to examine the Soviet relationship to the past, influenced by the burgeoning field of memory studies, building on Pierre Nora's formative assessment of rituals and symbols as sites of memory, Hayden White's pronouncements on our collective desire for narrative construction and storytelling in historical writing, and Henry Steele Commager's focus on presentism and the search for a "usable past," as well as Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger's notion of "invented traditions."4 The last particularly resonated with a field tending to focus on the top-down production of propaganda. Most accounts in the field have concerned themselves with the immediate (Soviet) past. Nina Tumarkin led the way with her study on the memory of the Great Patriotic War within the Soviet Union.5 Where Tumarkin led, others have followed. Crucially, David Brandenberger's popularising of the phrase "National Bolshevism" has served as an example of how a Russocentric past was incorporated into Soviet propaganda.6 Lisa Kirschenbaum, focusing on the legacies of the Leningrad Siege, assiduously [End Page 902] began the process of revealing how citizens engaged with official narratives on the Soviet past.7 Most recently, Jonathan Brundstedt's The Soviet Myth of World War II has sought nuance, challenging those who claim Soviet internationalism and its legacies were simply jettisoned in 1941.8 Jeremy Hicks's latest book analyzes the continued symbolic, ritualistic, and even indeterminate significance of the Victory Banner famously raised atop the Reichstag in 1945—tracing this image through film, documentaries, television, and even into current-day advertising and video games.9 Frederick C. Corney's Telling October, in contrast, turns attention to the historic framing of 1917, examining the documents and inner workings of the Commission on the History of the October Revolution and the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks...