Bolshevik Revolution was Above All First Challenge to Western World by Non-Western One, Kotsyubinsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 15 – The importance of the Bolshevik revolution, Daniil Kotsyubinsky says in a brief article that is already attracting widespread attention, was not its call to build communism but rather that it was “the first modernized challenge to the West by non-Western civilizations, albeit one camouflaged under a Westernizing ideology.”

            Understanding this, the St. Petersburg social theorist and philosopher says, is important in its own right but also because it underscores an important continuity that is becoming ever more visible in Moscow’s policies of turning away from the West and taking its proper place among the powers of the non-Western world (gorod-812.ru/velikij-oktyabr-i-konecz-chelovechestva/).

            While the Bolsheviks attacked Sultan Galiyev, the activist within their own ranks that argued Russia should lead a revolt of the global south against the West, Kotsyubinsky says, Lenin in fact recognized that that was what his revolution was about and that this would become Russia’s trajectory in the future.

            In one of the last article he wrote before he was silenced by illness and death, Lenin in January 1923 said that the future of the world would depend on the outcome of a struggle between a dying West and the rising powers of Russia, India, China and the rest who having taken what they could from the West must eventually break free from it.

            This is “the true political testament of the Bolshevik leader and his message to humanity,” one that Russia is now in fact continuing, And it is this legacy, Kotsyubinsky says, that explains why the authority of Russia remains “quite high” among the leading countries of the non-Western world.

            Intentionally or not, this description of the Leninist project helps to fit the 1917 revolution into the single stream of Russian history that Vladimir Putin has sought to promote; but it may also lead to a reevaluation of Sultan Galiyev, who continues to be attacked but who spoke even more clearly about this meaning of the Bolshevik revolution than did its leader.

            On Sultan Galiyev and his continuing legacy not only within the Russian Federation but more generally, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/12/putins-turn-to-east-and-talk-about.html and https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/01/three-events-in-sultan-galiyevs-life.html.