Transgressing the Leninist Line in the Gorbachev Era

With the advent of the Gorbachev era, there emerged a genuine diversity of opinion on the French Revolution, with ‘hardliners’ reiterating the Leninist orthodoxy, and ‘liberals’, most notably Alexander Yakovlev, the actual architect of Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika (‘reconstruction’), arguing publicly—and almost certainly with Gorbachev’s approval and agreement—that the revolution inaugurated a sequence of revolutions in modern history in which the October Revolution, while going well beyond the French Revolution, was itself superseded by the peaceful revolution that was perestroika. A corrective of the worst excrescences of Stalinism, Gorbachev’s policy of ‘reconstruction’ would redirect the course of history, culminating in a humane and liberal (though not necessarily democratic) socialism that was prefigured in the French Revolution and the revolutions in France that followed it.