This is a short book — some twenty thousand words, seven brief chapters — with a large ambition. Boris Porshnev sets out to comb Lenin's scattered remarks on the moods, instincts, sentiments and "frame of mind" of the masses and to show that, taken together, they amount to the foundations of a science: a Marxist social psychology of revolution. It was issued in Moscow in 1970 by the Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, priced at twenty-one kopecks — the format and the price of an export pamphlet, an English-language item for the foreign reader rather than a domestic monograph. The book is therefore two things at once, and the interest of reading it now lies in the seam between them. It is a genuine and often subtle piece of intellectual work by a serious scholar. It is also a document of the precise moment when Soviet social psychology was being made respectable again, and of the terms on which that permission was granted.
Take the author first, because he is not an apparatus functionary and it would be a mistake to read him as one. Boris Fyodorovich Porshnev (1905–1972) was among the most original Soviet historians of his generation. His major historical work was on the popular uprisings of seventeenth-century France in the decades before the Fronde — a history written emphatically "from below," attentive to the crowd, the riot and the collective temper, and it won him a Stalin Prize in 1950. He was also the effective founder of Soviet social psychology as a discipline, and the theorist of the "we"/"they" opposition — the split of the social world into us and them — as its bedrock category. And he was, by the end of his life, a heterodox and somewhat isolated figure, whose speculative work on the origins of humanity, including a stubborn defence of surviving "relict hominids," drew ridicule and cost him standing. This is a man capable of fine-grained observation of how large numbers of ordinary people actually think and feel. That capability is the reason the book is worth republishing, and it is also what makes its central limitation worth naming.
The date on the imprint is the real date, and the year matters. Under Stalin, social psychology had been effectively proscribed as a bourgeois pseudo-science; a discipline that studied the mind of the crowd as something with its own dynamics was not welcome in a state that preferred to speak of the masses as an object to be led. Only in the mid-1960s was the field cautiously revived, and Porshnev's own Social Psychology and History (1966) was one of its founding texts. Seen against that background, this pamphlet is a legitimation exercise before it is anything else. Its opening sentence is candid about the situation it addresses: "Of late Soviet scholars have shown decided interest in social psychology." The problem such scholars faced was not lack of interest but lack of licence, and the surest licence available in 1970 was to demonstrate that the new science had impeccable Leninist credentials — that in studying the psychology of classes and masses one was not importing something foreign but recovering something Lenin had practised all along. That is the book's true commission. It is less an application of Lenin to psychology than a use of Lenin to protect psychology.
Within that frame Porshnev does real work, and it should be credited plainly. His governing thesis is that social consciousness is not exhausted by ideology. "Social consciousness consists not only of ideology (theory, world outlook and systems of concepts) but psychology as well," and to forget the second term "leads to vulgarisation of the teaching on basis and superstructure." Against the crude picture in which the economic base is mechanically mirrored by ideas, he insists on an intermediate layer — the shifting, half-articulate moods and sentiments of a class — through which economic conditions actually register in consciousness. He recovers this from Plekhanov, and does so with care, quoting Plekhanov's five-term analysis of the social structure in which "a definite state of mood and morals" mediates between the form of society and its religion, philosophy and art. His conclusion is a genuinely anti-economistic one: "an ideology does not directly stem from economic changes but is a reflection of social psychology, being its ideological quintessence." A reader who expects only wooden catechism will be surprised by how much of this is alive.
The best chapters trace what one might call the molecular life of mass feeling — and here Porshnev's instincts as a historian of crowds are unmistakable. He is drawn to Lenin's descriptions of contagion and cumulation: how "the workers of neighbouring factories gain renewed courage when they see that their comrades have engaged themselves in struggle," how the word "striker" came to displace the word "student" in the peasant's mouth as a term of respect, quietly redrawing the line between us and them. He organises a whole chapter around what he calls the "summation of revolutionary sentiments" — the patient task, as he puts it, of "tirelessly merging all separate rivulets, streams and drops of social protest" into a single current. And he handles the dialectic of spontaneity and consciousness without flattening it, arriving at a formulation that does the theory justice: "spontaneity can be both a major support and a major obstacle in the way of revolution." Spontaneous discontent is the indispensable raw material of revolution and, left to itself, the reliable route back to bourgeois ideology; the work of the party is to catch the first before it becomes the second. On the psychology of the revolutionary situation he is similarly exact, quoting Lenin's compressed formula — "(α) the lower orders won't, the upper classes can't (β) growth of misery (γ) extraordinary activity" — and rightly seeing that its first term is a statement about mass consciousness, about the moment the oppressed cease to consent to being ruled in the old way. As an account of how a revolutionary mood accumulates and turns, the book is a real contribution, and it is continuous with the honest social history Porshnev wrote elsewhere.
The difficulty is not in what the book contains but in the boundary it draws around itself, and the boundary is drawn on purpose. Porshnev's Lenin is interested in social psychology "only as a revolutionary." In the final chapter this is stated as a methodological principle: "Lenin took an interest in social psychology only as a revolutionary," and was therefore "almost exclusively interested in dynamic socio-psychological phenomena, a category often referred to as the 'frame of mind'." The dynamic, changing, insurgent moods of the masses are the proper object; the "comparatively stable category described as 'the psychological make-up' or 'character'" is set aside as of little interest. This sounds like a technical scoping decision. It is in fact the hinge on which the whole book turns, because it quietly guarantees that the science of mass consciousness will be pointed only at the past and only at the enemy's society. Revolution, in this book, is always something that happens to tsarist Russia or capitalist society; the psychology of a ruling order that has ceased to command belief is not a subject the method is allowed to reach.
Watch what happens to the vocabulary of apathy, servility and habit once the revolution has won. Before 1917 these are diagnostic terms, and sharp ones: Porshnev follows Lenin in dissecting "the psychology of wretchedness and servility," "the force of habit in millions and tens of millions," the somnolence of a people "accustomed to the omnipotence of the government." After 1917 the same words survive, but their target is silently switched. They no longer describe the relation between rulers and ruled; they describe "survivals of capitalism" lodged in the masses themselves, defects to be "expunged" by the new state. Chapter six, on the psychology of the post-revolutionary order, is entirely a chapter of tasks — retaining power, raising labour discipline, the moulding of the new man — and its emotional register is supplied by Lenin's most disciplinarian passages, quoted with approval: the call to combine "public meeting" democracy "with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work." The problem of a population that submits, that goes quiet, that loses its belief in the resolutions passed in its name — the very problem the book handles brilliantly for the years before 1917 — is declared solved, in principle, by the fact of the revolution. It cannot recur, because the category that would detect it has been defined as belonging only to the pre-revolutionary world.
There is one passage where the cost of this is almost visible on the page. Porshnev quotes, approvingly, Lenin's contempt for a Soviet that has become "a meaningless plaything that can only produce apathy, indifference and disillusion among the masses, who are legitimately disgusted at the endless repetition of resolutions and protests." Lenin was describing the Menshevik-led soviets of 1917. But read in Moscow in 1970, the sentence describes with uncomfortable precision the Supreme Soviet of the USSR — an assembly whose resolutions were repeated and unanimous and whose relation to the mass mood was exactly the one Lenin scorned. Porshnev's own instrument, turned on his own state, would register something. He does not, and by the terms of his method he cannot, turn it. This is the finding the book yields to a patient reader: not a falsehood asserted but a question forbidden. A social psychology of the rising consciousness of the masses that is structurally incapable of becoming a social psychology of their manufactured consent has told you where its loyalties lie. The silence is not incidental. It is the discipline's price of admission.
The reply to this book is not an argument the anti-Stalinist left had to invent for the occasion; it is the tradition's oldest possession, because a social psychology of revolution is precisely what Trotsky wrote. In his Copenhagen address of 1932, In Defense of October — the germ of the History of the Russian Revolution that followed — Trotsky put the thesis in a single sentence: "The active intervention of the masses in historical events is in fact the most indispensable element of a revolution." The whole method of the History is the working-out of that sentence: revolution studied as the "forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny," and the historian's task the tracing of the molecular changes in mass consciousness by which a submissive people becomes an insurgent one. On the specific point where Porshnev is strongest — that the revolution remakes the people who make it — Trotsky is stronger, and had said it first: "The most profound meaning of the Revolution... consists in the fact that it forms and tempers the character of the people." So far the two men are describing the same country and the same process, and a reader could be forgiven for thinking them allies.
They part on the question Porshnev will not ask. Trotsky did turn the analysis on the post-revolutionary order, and The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is the book Porshnev's method is built never to write. Where Porshnev sees the psychology of the masses after October as a field of heroic tasks, Trotsky sees a bureaucracy that has "given to the masses the well-known gospel of obedience and silence." Where Porshnev quotes "unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person" as a slogan of socialist labour, Trotsky describes a "Stalin regime, rising above a politically atomized society, resting upon a police and officers' corps, and allowing of no control whatever" — Bonapartism, whose "democratic ritual... is the plebiscite," in which "the voter feels the barrel of a revolver between his shoulders." This is not a different subject from Porshnev's. It is Porshnev's subject — the frame of mind of the Soviet masses — carried across the one line he draws and refuses to cross. The tools are the same; only the courage to use them on the near side of 1917 is different. Trotsky's masses under the bureaucracy are apathetic, silenced, atomised, their unanimity extracted rather than felt — every one of these a social-psychological category, and every one of them unthinkable within Porshnev's science, which has ruled in advance that the mood of a socialist people is a problem of construction and never of rule.
None of this cancels what the book achieves, and the point of reading it is not to reduce it to its silence. Porshnev genuinely advances the materialist case that consciousness has a psychological substrate irreducible to doctrine; he genuinely recovers Plekhanov's mediating "state of mood and morals" from the vulgarisers; he genuinely reads the contagion and summation of mass feeling with the eye of a historian who had spent his life among crowds. These are usable results, and a reader who wants a supple Marxist vocabulary for how a revolutionary mood gathers will find it here, better stated than in most of what the period produced. The tragedy — and it is worth calling it that, in a scholar of Porshnev's gifts — is that the man who could read the molecular life of the masses so well was permitted, and had learned to permit himself, to read it only in one direction. He built a science of how the oppressed stop consenting, and was not allowed to ask whether it might apply to the state that published him. The instrument outlives that restriction. Handed on to a reader who will point it both ways, Porshnev's social psychology of revolution becomes something he could not make it: a social psychology of the order revolution leaves behind, and the beginning of an answer to the question his book was designed not to raise.