This text was originally published in 1997 as a supplement to Rouge. Writing in response to The Black Book of Communism, Bensaïd discusses the Stalinist counter-revolution.i
Our new book is a republication of Internationalism or Russification: A study in the Soviet nationalities problem, Ivan Dzyuba’s classic 1965 samizdat denouncing national oppression of Ukraine by the USSR.
Three defeats of the German revolution
I
On the occasion of the bicentenary celebrations of the Great French Revolution of 1789, there was an intense public controversy in France, Great Britain and the United States about the alleged ‘excessive costs’ of this revolution.i The conquest of human rights, so far, so good. But what about the deaths caused by the Terror and those of the Vendée uprisings?
At the end of the Second World War, the revolutionary movement faced an unexpected situation.i The bureaucratic Soviet regime had not only survived the war, but appeared to be expanding in Eastern Europe. Capitalism, out of breath in the 1930s, seemed to be regaining strength.
As a motto to the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon quotes Marx: ‘In order to find their own content, the revolutions of the nineteenth century have to let the dead bury the dead.’ The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future.i Hence, a descent to roots and a return to the source are not the solution. The existence of a black civilisation that disappeared in the 15th century does not grant black people ‘a badge of humanity’: ‘I am not a man of any past.
