7 - The Typical Troublemakers: Bolsheviks as Hybrid Revolutionaries

Summary

When alternatives to the system of domination are created, they always occur during singular moments. The revolutions were singular moments that lasted days, weeks, months or years. This amounts to saying that the normal order of things was interrupted, that, at certain times, the normal rules disappear, that time is suspended and at the same time accelerates because the movements generate high speeds,

Rancière noted recently (Gavroche, 2018). The Bolshevik Revolution represents a paradigmatic case of an attempted upheaval of a sociopolitical order. It was driven by a political utopia based on a radically different notion of collective emancipation when compared to Wilson's liberal internationalism or exclusionary nationalism, which it competed with after World War I. It promised a millennium that would be a negation of the mundane time of catastrophes. Where the liberal utopia was provided as a regulative for mundane history, the communist utopia radicalised it, directing (linear) time toward the actualisation of the realm of freedom and equality, later simulating its actual presence. Yet, conventional geopolitical thought and strategies constituted elements of Bolshevik international practice along non-linear instruments of expansion, mobilising transnational class solidarity in the labour movement (which was divided among the Bolshevik Revolution's support). Moreover, the restoration of centralised territorial governance domestically – including at the expense of ideological collectives represented by local councils (soviets) – also signalled that territory was never waived as a political technology (Elden, 2013).

This chapter seeks to make Bolshevik revolutionary practice intelligible by deploying the book's conceptual toolbox. It points to the coalescence of a space of spaces and spaces of flows (Ruggie, 1993) in Bolshevik practice, or of the Bolshevik war machine that contested the Westphalian order's dominant spatiality and temporality, relating to the outside milieu without horizon while also re-enacting territorialised and despotic state elements, even prior to the ‘sedentarisation’ in the form of the USSR. It attends to key futures in the constitution of the Bolshevik subject, whose genesis it traces to the decades prior to the Red October (1917). It interrogates the Bolsheviks’ hybrid practice following the revolution, its international ‘subject effects’, and similarly a hybrid counterrevolutionary action from a limited armed intervention and occupation combined with support to an array of local actors in the erstwhile Tzardom.