This distortion of the revolution's words undermined the fragile democracy of 1917 - based as that had been on the fantasy that the people understood and accepted the ideals of civil rights and duties inherited from 1789. The word "democracy" illustrates this misunderstanding.
Today we understand the word "democracy" to signify a political system -- the opposite of which is dictatorship -- based on the idea of the equal rights of all citizens. But in Russia it was widely understood as a social category, roughly equivalent to the common people, the opposite of which was the bourgeoisie. The language of citizenship, imported by the liberal leaders from the west, was translated into a class language in the Russia of 1917.
Here we stand on the brink of the mass terror that engulfed the revolution. It was but a short step from the disenfranchisement of the bourgeoisie to their physical destruction. The Bolsheviks refused to recognize the bourgeoisie as human beings -- they called them "former people" -- and Lenin called repeatedly for a "war to the death" against such "vermin" and "scoundrel fleas."
The Bolsheviks alone meant their violent words for action. Other socialists shared the cultural traditions of the revolutionary underground. The Russian workers' version of the Marseillaise, with its calls to "kill and destroy" the "parasites, the rich," was sung by Mensheviks as well as Bolsheviks. Yet these other parties were troubled by the violent potential of their words, and warned their followers that they were just words. But Lenin meant his followers to take him at his word -- to "kill the rich." His words were performative, like bullets in a war.
The revolutions of 1989 brought this rhetorical tradition to an end -- or so one hopes. For all revolutions are portrayed as the decisive struggle between good and evil, the future and the past, and the rhetoric of terror is never far away from utopia.
Orlando Figes is the co-author, with Boris Kolonitskii, of Interpreting the Russian Revolution -- The Language and Symbols of 1917, published by Yale University Press
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