Violences from Below, Violences from Above in the Russian Revolution

Supporters of an ideology which made mass violence the engine of History, and a political project founded on Terror as a primitive tool and a radical view which endorsed violence at the service of a political-military model to a new society, the bolsheviks were able, as no one else, to use and channel social violences. However, the brutalization of the social body of the old Russian empire had a crucial effect on Bolshevism itself. It enhanced some Leninist assumptions on violence as "the truth of politics" and activated the identification of politics and war, surprisingly inverting Clausewitz's words, 'politics as the continuation of war through other means'. In the end, a true 'political culture of violence' emerged within the very heart of the State which replaced the Tzarist Empire, the USSR. Adapted from the source document.