The Enlightenment Period’s Influence on Bolshevism
by Shonda Werry
Shonda Werry is the founder of COATS International, an organization that provides assistance to orphans in the former Soviet Union. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of Chicago and she holds a Master's Degree in Soviet history from Johns Hopkins University.
The Age of Enlightenment, with its emphasis on science, reason, and progress led to many positive outcomes in human history, including political democracy and many of the core concepts of human liberty found in the U.S. Constitution. While this period certainly led to positive advancements in science, art, and politics, it also brought forth several misguided abstract ideas about human beings and history. These theories about mankind and historical progression have proven to have dangerous implications and, in fact, later provided the foundation of Marxism-Leninism. Three of the most significant areas that Enlightenment thinking influenced Soviet Communism were the ideas about mankind, the ideas about historical progress, and the abstract notion of a “general will.”
Intellectuals’ ideas about mankind and human nature shifted drastically during the Enlightenment period, specifically introducing the ideas that humans are malleable, that humans are perfectible, and that there is no uniqueness among human beings. With these new concepts about human nature, imperfections – once considered an inherent part of man’s natural state – were no longer tolerated. It was no longer accepted that humans even had an inherent nature, and instead the emphasis was placed on humans’ ability to be transformed in the quest for perfection.
The belief that mankind is infinitely malleable was accepted among most Enlightenment philosophers. John Locke, in particular, wrote extensively about mankind’s malleability and its ability to be shaped by the environment. In An Essay Concerning Human Spirits, Locke argued that human beings have no “innate ideas, but form ideas exclusively from sensory perceptions.” Locke even described the human thought process as “entirely involuntary,” and man was, therefore, helpless to refute the ideas impressed upon him in his environment.
The Enlightenment belief that mankind is shaped entirely by the external environment allowed the Soviet intelligentsia to advocate for a scientific process of altering the environment in order to improve human beings. The Bolsheviks believed, as the Enlightenment philosophers had believed, that mankind could be shaped by external “physical sensations,” and that humans, therefore, could be “made virtuous through no act of [their] own will,” simply by exposing them to impressions and influences “made for virtue.” For the Bolsheviks, this scientific process of molding new, more virtuous men relied on proper legislation and education. The unfortunate consequence of this seemingly laudable goal – making mankind more virtuous – was that widespread terror and oppression were unleashed on the Soviet citizens in the name of improving mankind. Richard Pipes understands the extreme danger of viewing mankind as wholly malleable. He describes how the Bolsheviks adopted the Enlightenment belief that man is “…nothing but material substance shaped by the environment.” The communists thus believed their revolution in Russia was not simply a replacement of the tsarist system, but was instead “…a total transformation of the human environment for the purpose of creating a new breed of human beings.”
Another radical idea about mankind that emerged during the Enlightenment period was the belief that humans are perfectible. This confidence that man is capable of unlimited improvements resulted from the optimism about progress that characterized the entire period of Enlightenment in Europe. One Enlightenment philosopher, Marquis de Condorcet, provided a succinct summary of the Enlightenment period’s hopeful expectation that man was on the path towards perfection. He declared, “No bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties [and] the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite.” This idea of perfectibility, however, has proven to be one of the Enlightenment period’s most dangerous ideas.
The Soviet Union’s failed experiment illustrates the danger of viewing mankind as perfectible. The belief that mankind is capable of, and even destined for, perfection allowed the intelligentsia to act as the rightful “educators” of everyone in the Soviet Union. As Richard Pipes explains, the Enlightenment ideas about mankind elevated the intellectuals in the Soviet Union to a special status in society. They alone became the “repository of reason,” which was “superior to experience.” Pipes gives a clear explanation of why this type of thinking naturally appealed to the intellectuals in Russian society. “A life ruled by ‘reason’ is a life ruled by the intellectuals,” and it naturally followed that the Russian intellectuals eagerly sought to rearrange society “in accord with the requirements of ‘rationality.’” Indeed, if all human beings follow universal scientific laws and formulaic patterns, then the Soviet intellectuals, as the ones who possessed the understanding necessary to direct and refine these laws, would become “man’s natural leaders.”
This misguided confidence in the perfectibility of mankind created a strong link between morality and legislation. Based on the Enlightenment’s confidence in the transformative power of the state, the Soviet communists believed “good government [could] literally refashion man.” Soviet laws became the instrument by which the communist leaders believed mankind would attain this perfect condition. Countless laws governing every aspect of life – religion, the arts, family, and education – were written with the goal of entirely reshaping humankind.
Leon Trotsky, one of the most important figures in the Bolshevik movement, explained that the early socialists’ objectives were not simply to correct capitalism’s flaws; on the contrary the socialists had much more ambitious goals. The socialists wanted to remake all of society by recreating every single person. Trotsky was a faithful devotee of the Enlightenment period’s ideas about mankind, and he believed that during the process of studying human nature, the Bolsheviks would acquire the unlimited power of transforming and reshaping mankind. This faulty proposition provided the Bolsheviks with the theoretical justification for using legislation to build a new society.
Trotsky frequently described how the Bolsheviks could apply the idea of human perfectibility to create a new social order. In an especially revealing passage, Trotsky explained that the communists intended to re-build each human being in the Soviet Union. Trotsky claimed the Soviet man would master “…the unconscious processes of his own organism; breathing, the circulation of blood, digestion, reproduction…[and] subordinate them to the control of reason and will.” Trotsky elaborated that the Soviet man would become “incomparably stronger [and] wiser…” through this conscious effort to perfect himself. Incredibly, Trotsky’s ideas about human beings’ future ability to control their own internal biological systems represented actual Soviet ambition and his writings were not simply a reflection of one idealistic communist’s hopes.
Unfortunately, the Soviet architects of society were not content simply to write about these inevitable human improvements, and they set out to create social experiments designed to expedite this process of improvement. As Pipes notes, the Enlightenment way of thinking of mankind “legitimized the most savage social experiments” in Bolshevik Russia. The Soviet Union carried out some of its greatest crimes against humanity in the name of recreating mankind and propelling humans towards perfection. The Bolsheviks’ assault on the family structure and the attempt to eliminate religion from the Soviet Union were two extreme examples of the communists’ attempts to engineer society based on the idea that mankind could be entirely remade.
Another aspect of these new ideas about mankind was the concept that there was no natural variation among human beings. Once the Bolsheviks had adopted the Enlightenment idea that mankind as a whole could be managed scientifically, they no longer recognized individual uniqueness among humans. The scientific laws and social experiments were intended to remake mankind as a whole, irrespective of individuals’ varying needs, desires, or personalities.
Hannah Arendt believes it was precisely this denial of any individual uniqueness or variation among humans that allowed the totalitarian regime in Soviet Russia to carry out its terrifying experiments on human beings. In order to achieve “total domination” the Soviet regime treated all human beings “…as if all of humanity were just one individual … transforming the human personality into a mere thing.” Stéphane Courtois, too, believes the Soviet Union robbed entire segments of society (property owners, for example) of their status as human beings, and it was only by destroying any notion of individual uniqueness and value that Lenin was able to wipe out entire sections of society.
An unfortunate consequence of destroying individual human uniqueness was that Soviet individuals were no longer respected as part of the human race. A widespread process of dehumanization occurred in the Soviet Union, which made it possible to exterminate large portions of the population. As the writers of The Black Book of Communism note, the secret police never killed individuals; the secret police merely removed unwanted portions of the population. Thus, the NKVD executioners “did not denounce, cause suffering, or kill people; they merely eliminated some sort of abstraction that was not beneficial to the common good.” Of course, this type of scientific approach to perfecting mankind was only possible once the concept of human uniqueness had been destroyed, and once it was widely accepted that mankind is destined to reach a more perfect state.
The Soviet leaders were thus able to justify murder once the concept of human uniqueness had been destroyed. As Arendt writes, “Terror, whose ultimate goal is not the welfare of men or the interest of one man but the fabrication of mankind, eliminates individuals for the sake of the species, sacrifices the ‘parts’ for the sake of the ‘whole.’” The generation of the present could be sacrificed for the benefit and improvement of future generations. If the goal was simply to perfect mankind as a whole, then individual humans could certainly be sacrificed as part of the Soviet Union’s grand plan.
The Enlightenment idea of human malleability has proven to have serious implications, and the communists in Soviet Russia were responsible for countless murders because of the belief that mankind could be reshaped and reformed through environmental pressure. The most dangerous consequence of this type of thinking is that the Bolsheviks ceased to consider certain segments of society as human beings with intrinsic value and reduced them to abstract ideas. At that point, it was then possible to oppress and destroy people with the stated objective of creating a more perfect human species for the future. As Richard Pipes notes, Lenin and the Bolsheviks readily identified with the Enlightenment idea that humans have no inherent nature and are merely the products of their environments because it provided free license to oppress the Soviet citizenry in the name of correction and experimentation.
The second area in which Enlightenment thinking deeply affected communist thought was its view of history. The Enlightenment philosophers believed the historical process was always moving in the direction of improvement and positive progress. Marquis de Condorcet believed not only that human perfectibility was possible, but also that it was inevitable. He claimed that this progress could “never be retrograde.” Without any consideration for the possibility that some progress may not necessarily be an improvement, he optimistically asserted, “By looking at the past revolutions of progress, we can be assured that the future revolutions will be happy ones.” Condorcet surveyed history and believed the trend was for history to move only in the direction of positive improvement.
The Bolsheviks, however, reduced the Enlightenment idea of historical progress to the concept that “the end justifies the means.” As Leon Trotsky explained to those who were critical of the Soviet Union’s violent measures, “Whoever aims at the end cannot reject the means.” At another point he wrote, “The man who recognizes the revolutionary historic importance of the very fact of the existence of the Soviet system must also sanction the Red Terror.” In these instances, Trotsky clearly believed that any amount of force and oppression could be justified if they were employed to hasten an inevitable historical outcome. Writing about Trotsky’s unfortunate view of history, the writers of The Black Book of Communism remark that Trotsky often made history out to be a “divine force to which anything [could] be sacrificed.”
As the American historian Reinhold Niebuhr notes, the idea that history is a “process of redemption” – a common idea during both the Enlightenment and the Soviet rule in Russia – was popular because the continued advances in science seemed to confirm this theory of continual positive progress. Niebuhr cautions, however, that technological advancements should never be confused for moral progress. He also writes: “History does not move forward without catastrophe.” In other words, for all of the technological progress that has occurred over the course of time, it can not be overlooked that historical progression has also included human tragedies on a massive scale.
The Bolsheviks proved that thinking about history as an inevitable linear progression towards perfection often has serious negative consequences. The Marxists believed socialism was the inevitable end result of history and that the demise of capitalism was equally assured. With that socialist understanding of the end result of history, the Soviet leaders quickly appropriated the Enlightenment theories pertaining to history’s progress. The Bolsheviks then reasoned that the oppression they used against the Soviet citizens was justifiable because it was merely hastening the inevitable historical result. The Bolsheviks frequently relied upon violence and terror as the tools to speed up the historical process, whether it was to move Soviet society toward atheism or toward the total abolition of private property, which the communists believed were the natural and inevitable end results of history. These illusions of history’s outcome, as well as the Bolsheviks’ perceived obligation to accelerate history, provided the foundation of Leninist policies.
The danger of thinking of history as a linear and purposeful progression, however, is that the Soviet intelligentsia successfully justified brute force against Russia’s own people. By the communists’ reasoning, the Politburo knew not only what the end result would be, but also knew how best to accelerate the historical process. Niebuhr cites Molotov as an example of the Communists’ arrogant claim to know the future. Vyacheslav Molotov, a Soviet politician, declared that the Soviet leaders knew “not only the inner meaning of current events but [were] able to penetrate the curtain of the future and anticipate its events.” By Molotov’s reasoning, the Bolsheviks, as the omniscient actors, were above reproach in their conduct.
Hannah Arendt also describes the importance of historical progression in the USSR, and she describes totalitarian systems’ tendency to attribute a “super-human” characteristic to history. She notes the tremendous intellectual shift that occurred in both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia; among intellectuals, there was a “consistent interpretation of everything as being only a stage of some further development.” Again describing Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Arendt writes: “Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being. They are historical, concerned with becoming and perishing.” In other words, the Soviet intellectuals were less concerned with the present than they were with the future. Arendt believes that terror and oppression became, from the intellectuals’ perspective, “lawfulness” because the law suddenly took on the perverse definition of being that which furthers the “movement of some suprahuman force – History.”
Arendt also describes how the Soviet citizens were “…caught in the process of … history for the sake of accelerating its movement.” Terror in the Soviet Union was the instrument by which the historical process could be accelerated. Terror and oppression meted out “…the death sentences which Nature [was] supposed to have pronounced on races or individuals who [were] ‘unfit to live.’”
Niebuhr, however, provides a warning against the view that historical progression is always positive. For Niebuhr, one of the tragic consequences in the Soviet Union of the intellectuals’ refusal to consider that history might not be moving in the direction of communist utopia is that the Politburo used terror and force against anyone who seemed to be thwarting or hampering the unrealistic end-results they had imagined.
In addition to the new ideas about mankind and the direction of history, the Enlightenment also introduced the concept of the “general will.” The general will is, by definition, always correct, but is not necessarily reflective of the majority’s desires. Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced the idea of the general will, which clearly influenced Bolshevik philosophy. This vague notion of a “general will” that does not represent individuals’ desires proved to have terrible and long-lasting consequences for the Soviet citizens.
Rousseau believed that every person in society “gives up individual rights for the general will.” In Rousseau’s naïve understanding, the general will was always positive and would only be used to guide people to an improved life. He provided a very optimistic view of how the general will within the social contract would elevate and improve individuals. Rousseau conceded one drawback in this system: an individual must deprive himself of some of the basic advantages that nature had given him at birth, but in their place, he “…gains in return [other advantages] so great [that] his faculties [will become] so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted….”
Although Rousseau envisioned the general will as morally superior to the individual’s will, the Soviet Communist interpretation of the general will revealed the danger of subordinating the individual’s will to it. As Richard Pipes explains, in the Soviet Union, the general will (defined by the Politburo) transcended the actual will of the majority of the Soviet citizens. He further notes that the Soviet communists interpreted the Enlightenment theories about the general will to mean “the ‘rational’ rather than the actual will of the people,” and the Bolsheviks preferred Rousseau’s vague concept of a general will instead of “the will made manifest through elections or referenda.
In a complete distortion of Rousseau’s utopian belief that the general will could advance and refine the individual’s will, the Soviet version of the general will actually trampled the individual’s will. In fact, whereas Rousseau had optimistically asserted that the general will “would force people to freedom,” the Soviet application of his ideas proved the reverse could be true. The general will could also deprive people of the same freedoms they had been granted by nature. Pipes notes that this Soviet interpretation of Rousseau’s general will has raised profound moral questions about a government’s right “…to try to remake human beings and refashion society without their mandate and even against their will.”
Once it had been accepted that the rational general will was always superior to individuals’ desires, anything the Russian intelligentsia deemed to be beneficial for society was encouraged. In the Soviet Union, one’s personal objections to the general will were irrelevant. Hannah Arendt shows that totalitarian regimes, including the Soviet Union, employed an idea similar to Rousseau’s idea that the general will is always right when it claimed that “right is what is good for the movement” and not necessarily what is good for individuals.
With its apparent influence on the Soviet Communists’ ways of thinking about human nature, history, and the general will, the Enlightenment period can be viewed as an unwitting intellectual source of Soviet oppression. In defense of the Enlightenment philosophers, it was certainly never their intention for these optimistic ideas about humans’ malleability and perfectibility to be used for such devastating purposes. As Russian historian Richard Pipes describes, “Locke, the father of classical liberalism … never anticipated the political implications that some would draw from his theory.” However, as Richard Pipes also notes, the idea of human malleability, which is a direct product of the Enlightenment, is perhaps the most important foundation of the Soviet mentality.
In Niebuhr’s estimation, in spite of all the Enlightenment’s positive contributions to mankind, that period was “also productive of dangerous errors.” It was the Enlightenment philosophers’ misguided understanding of human nature and their notions about the direction of history that led to the calamity that was the Soviet Union. As scholars have since observed, ideas have consequences that are often unintended. The Enlightenment philosophers bequeathed abstract ideas about human nature and the role of the historical process to the communist intellectuals who then ruthlessly applied those ideas in an attempt to attain a utopian state that was contrary to human nature. The most significant lesson of the Soviet Union’s failure is that it is always dangerous to attempt to reconstruct society based on abstract notions.
 Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom, (New York: Vintage Books 2000), 40.
 Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, (New York: Vintage Books 1990), 125.
 Ibid., 126.
 Ibid., 495.
 Marquis de Condorcet, “The Future Progress of the Human Mind,” in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaak Kramnik (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 388.
 Pipes, The Russian Revolution,127.
 Ibid., 126.
 Ibid., 137.
 Ibid., 126.
 Ibid., 137.
 Leon Trotsky, Literatura i revoliutsiia, (Moscow, 1924), 192.
 Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 132.
 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (San Diego: Harcourt Inc 1966), 453.
 Ibid., 438.
 Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press 1999), 752.
 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 465.
 Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 132.
 Pipes, Property and Freedom, 40.
 Condorcet, “The Future Progress of the Human Mind,” 388.
 Ibid., 394.
 Leon Trotsky, Terrorizm i kommunizm (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 12.
 Courtois, The Black Book of Communism, 749.
 Reinhold Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics: His Political Philosophy and Its Application to Our Age as Expressed in His Writing., ed. Harry R. Davis and Robert C. Good (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 19.
 Ibid., 21.
 Ibid., 25.
 Ibid., 29.
 Ibid., 31.
 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 464.
 Ibid., 469.
 Ibid., 465.
 Ibid., 466.
 Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, 8.
 Ibid., 13.
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” in The Portable Enlightenment Reader,ed. Isaak Kramnik (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 433.
 Ibid., 435.
 Pipes, Property and Freedom, 35.
 Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 127.
 Rousseau, 424.
 Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 512.
 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 412.
 Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 136.
 Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, 18.