Mike Haynes

"History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism" is a collection of essays on various subjects relating to historical revolutions of the modern period. The book is designed to combat the resurgence of anti-revolutionary revisionism by rightist historians in the public sphere, in particular Furet on the French Revolution, the continuing Cold Warrior style historiography of the October Revolution, and Ernst Nolte's apologia for the Nazi revolution. Against these, this book marshals a series of impressive counter-attacks, which succeed in destroying all the above positions. There is additionally an article by Geoff Kennedy defending the radical credentials of the English Revolution's Diggers and Levellers, and two pieces on the concept of revolution in general.

The sequence of articles goes chronologically, roughly, beginning with Kennedy's essay, then two articles on the French Revolution by Jim Wolfreys and Florence Gauthier respectively, subsequently two articles on the Russian Revolution by Mike Haynes and Lars Lih respectively, and an article against Nolte and attempts to compare Communism to Nazism, by Enzo Traverso. The articles by Gauthier and Lih are the best in the book: Gauthier demonstrates excellently why the Jacobins were a progressive force and why they deserve our support, refutes the claims that the Vendée civil war was genocidal, shows how limited the so-called Terror of the revolution really was, especially compared with the Terror of the counter-revolution (the Revolutionary Tribunal acquitted almost as many people as it condemned, and even so the total cases was fewer than 5.000), and reject Furet's idealistic posturing. Lih, in turn, uses articles and speeches by Trotsky to refute the claim that the policy of "war communism" was considered positive or ideal by the Bolshevik leadership, as well as that the Bolsheviks made the crisis or made it worse, and that the Bolsheviks could have solved it less violently but didn't out of ideology. Lih shows that in contrast to all these claims, the hand of the leadership was forced, and that they considered their position "in the highest degree tragic". And indeed, that there was no widespread super-famine under the conditions of the Civil War is entirely to be ascribed to the competence of Bolshevik policy at the time. These articles are invaluable on their own.

At the end follow Marc Ferro's alternative reading of Nazi genocidal policy as following from the legacy of colonialism, which is somewhat meandering and vague; a defense of revolutions in general as producing democratic change by Geoff Eley (who oddly ignores the clearly anti-democratic Nazi revolution entirely), and finally a philosophical rambling on by Daniel Bensaïd about revolution in a totally unintelligible and annoying manner, typical of Parisian philosophers. This article could best have been scrapped.

Overall, the book is an excellent addition to any left-wing historical library.… (more)