Russian revolution Bolshevik (1920), by Boris Kustodiev 381 Salimullah Khan On November 2, 1977, closing in on the sixtieth anniversary of the Russian revolution, the French historian Georges Haupt gave a provocative talk at the Fernand Braudel Center in Binghamton, New York. The title has been borrowed from that talk. Haupt said he too was given the title by others on the "Marxist and non-Marxist Left" who had been invoking the question for most of the sixty intervening years. Writing hundred years after the event that shook the world, I can hardly claim today that the terms of the debate have really changed much. I can only add that the dissolution of the USSR has rendered it rather more strident, indeed more topical. I also recall Georges Haupt qualifying his title a trifle farther: "In What Sense and to What Degree Was the Russian Revolution a Proletarian Revolution?" (Haupt 1979: 21). I Let me then begin at the beginning. It is interesting that an Italian internationalist and communist leader of the future, Antonio Gramsci, then hardly known beyond his native country, in making his first comments on events in Russia that overthrew the Tsarist autocracy asked the same question: "Why is the Russian revolution a proletarian revolution?" (Gramsci 1977: 28). "The Russian revolution," Gramsci noted writing on April 29, 1917, "has destroyed authoritarianism and replaced it by universal suffrage, extending the vote to women too. It has replaced authoritarianism by liberty, the Constitution by the free voice of universal consciousness." "Why are the Russian revolutionaries not Jacobins," Gramsci then went on asking, "in other words, why have not they too replaced the dictatorship of one man by the dictatorship of an audacious minority ready to do anything that will ensure the program's victory?"
