Nevertheless, it cannot be said that these problems remained totally unsolved. Discussion of the lecture gave rise to fresh debates, in which the participants got to grips with the conclusions to be drawn in principle. G.G. Diligensky concentrated on the subject of ‘Thermidor’. He declared that
neither the leading role of the working class in the revolutionary movement nor even the adoption by that movement of the programmatic principles of scientific socialism can guarantee, by themselves, that the aims of the movement will not become distorted.110
The only guarantee lies in conscious participation by the masses. And for that, ‘incidentally’, it is necessary that the masses themselves be capable of such conscious participation — that the country be ripe for revolution not only economically and politically but also socially and culturally. This consciousness (and of course, Diligensky meant by ‘consciousness’ not readiness for unquestioning submission but, on the contrary, capacity for independent action and decision-making) signifies that the working classes are mature and is the guarantee against utopianism, against descent by the revolution to totalitarian decisions, against a bureaucratic Thermidor:
A complex combination of factors: scientific and technological progress, new social experience by the masses, their increased education and culture, the decrease in the former social and cultural isolation of the working classes — all this has reduced the susceptibility of the ordinary person to a number of social illusions. The masses are no longer satisfied with mere promises, with more or less vague depictions of a happy life in the future. They more and more insistently demand rational, logical, convincing means of solving concrete problems. And the masses will march behind those persons and parties who offer them such means.111
At a certain stage the growth of consciousness leads not directly to revolutionization but to rejection of politics, to scepticism and indifference, as we have seen in the case of Soviet society. But this is a crisis of growth, which is followed by a fresh revolutionary upsurge.
K.L. Maydannik, representing the ‘extreme left’ wing of the Soviet legal Marxists, expressed himself still more definitely. The guarantee against Thermidorian dictatorship in post-revolutionary society lies in democratic forms of government: ‘The revolutionary struggle for democracy is a constituent part of the struggle for socialism, not a stage precedent thereto.…’112
Drabkin, Diligensky and Maydannik all used examples taken from the history of the West and of the ‘Third World’. But although considerations of censorship dictated avoidance of any direct reference to the connection between the problems under discussion and our own society, in Gefter’s lecture the discussion of Thermidor and revolution returned to primary sources and inquiry into concrete Russian material on social history. The lectures complemented each other, the conclusions to be drawn remaining somewhere in the spiritual space between them.
There was nothing surprising in the fact that questions raised by Russian history should eventually have brought the historians back to Russian material. What was important was something else — that material concerning other societies should provide so much for reflection about our own history. Gefter wrote later that ‘Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century was “a model of the world”.’113 In our country the tragic contradictions of the world as a whole reached their culmination. This was why, for example, discussion of the ‘Third World’ and ‘the Asiatic mode of production’; had and has such importance for the understanding of historical processes in Russia.
As a matter of fact, the problems of the ‘Third World’ are constantly raised not only by specialists in that field such as Maydannik, Mirsky and others, but also by theoreticians working in related fields — Vodolazov, Lukin, Burlatsky. Above all, the history of the ‘Third World’ countries makes it easy to find material for criticizing the vulgar schemas of official teaching. In this way the attempt to divide the whole history of the world into five phases — primitive society, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism — collapses like a house of cards. ‘It is hardly necessary to speak of setting up such constructions on ground so shaky,’ wrote the Sinologist L.S. Vasil'ev.
After all, facts are stubborn things, and take harsh revenge on those who disdain them. Here one bold hypothesis is quickly replaced by another, the ‘serfdom’ of one writer is easily transformed into the ‘slavery’ of another; but nothing is gained from all this for a scientific solution of the problem. Evidently, the time has come to say, frankly, that the entire three-thousand-years’ history of China — and, in the first place, the history of ancient China — testifies convincingly against any automatic application of a priori schemas.114
The authors of a work on the Asiatic mode of production made the following observation:
In contrast to what happened in the Graeco-Roman world, in most of the countries of the East a different process took place, the gist of which was this, that, given the absence (or only very slight presence) of private property, the management of a growing social organism, together with a number of purely political factors (conquests, necessity of defence against invasion, etc.), stimulated the development of state power on the basis of the absence (or slightness) of economic and property-owning differentiation in society.115
During the discussion on the Asiatic mode of production the Orientalist historians confirmed that appropriation of surplus product was effected in these societies not on the basis of private property but on that of state monopoly. An estate of officials became transformed everywhere into a class of exploiters. One and the same picture is seen in Egypt, in Persia [Iran] and to some extent in the Byzantine Empire. The countries of Southeast Asia — Cambodia [Kampuchea], Java, Burma — also knew exploitation of the people by a ‘temple-bureaucratic aristocracy’ and, directly, by a bureaucratic apparatus, ‘the apparatus of officialdom coinciding with the ruling class’.116
Thus, long before Shafarevich undertook his amateurish attempts, Orientalists had already begun to study the bureaucratic state of the past. They were not, of course, out to look for socialism in Byzantium: rather, their researches revealed the similarity between the Soviet state and the Byzantine system, a similarity which cannot be concealed under any ‘socialist’ phrases. M.A. Vitkin even sees a special category of ‘primary formation’ which includes all varieties of the Asiatic mode of production. This formation is connected not with the development of private property but with the growth of the state; in general, private property really develops only with transition to a higher ‘secondary formation’: ‘After concentrating in its hands the accumulated surplus product extracted on the basis of its power over the persons of the producers, the state distributes this surplus product among the members of the corporation of rulers’.117 The real question is not why the East hardly knew private property but why it developed in Greece. This was presumably connected with the collapse of the archaic bureaucratic monarchy of Mycenae and with the shortage of land needed for growing corn, which gave rise to an acute need for commodity exchange.