The End Of Communism By Robert Vincent Daniels
The End Of Communism By Robert Vincent Daniels
348 Words2 Pages
Robert Vincent Daniels was an American historian at the University of Vermont. He had written beautifully about the âEvolution of the Communist Mind-In Russiaâ till the âEnd of Communismâ. Almost all of the books written by him were about the Russian history, mostly about communism. Among the famous books, he had written The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (published in 1960), Soviet Communism: The Era of Controversy, The Stalin Revolution: Fulfillment or Betrayal of Communism (1965) were few of his well-known works.
Social revolutions are not “made” by parties, groups, or cadres; they occur as a result of deep-seated historic forces and contradictions that activate large sections of the population. They occur not merely (as Trotsky argued) because the “masses” find the existing society intolerable, but also because of the tension between the actual and the possible, between “what is” and “what could be.”
Abject misery alone does not produce revolutions; more often than not, it produces an aimless demoralization, or worse, a private, personalized struggle to survive.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 weighs on the brain of the living like a nightmare because it was largely a project of “intolerable conditions,” of a devastating imperialistic war. Whatever dreams it had were pulverized by an even bloodier civil war, by famine, and by treachery. What emerged from the revolution were the ruins not of an old society, but of whatever hopes existed to achieve a new one.