Soviet Legacies of the Paris Commune of 1871

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The Paris Commune of 1871 offered a glimpse of what a communist revolution could look like in practice. As Marx declared in The Civil War in France, it opened up a utopian horizon that history was called on to achieve: “it aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor.” Throughout the twentieth century, the Commune persisted in the revolutionary imagination, acquiring new life through varied interpretations. This momentous event simultaneously became a battleground for competing visions of socialism, particularly in the early Soviet Union. The papers on this panel consider the many legacies of the Paris Commune, from former communards’ experiences of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath to conflicting narratives of the Kronstadt Rebellion. Andy Willimott looks to the entanglement of Russian émigrés and exiles in the Paris Commune, demonstrating how their reinterpretations of the Commune influenced the Russian Revolution and the early years of the Soviet Union. Victoria Buyanovskaya addresses the ways in which the conflicting libertarian and centralist narratives of the Paris Commune were deployed to cast the Kronstadt rebellion as both an act of collective resistance and a necessary use of state violence. Abby Holekamp considers how the emigration in the 1920s of several elderly communards to Moscow created an embodied link between the USSR and the expansive revolutionary legacy it claimed.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Thom Loyd, Augusta U

Papers

• The Paris Commune and the Russian Revolutionary Imagination - Andy Willimott, Queen Mary, U of London (UK)

• From the Kronstadt Rebellion to the Paris Commune: The Two Legacies, and the Form of Power - Victoria Buyanovskaya, U of Wisconsin-Madison

• ‘Oh, no, you are not dead!’: Émigré Communards in the Soviet Union - Abby Holekamp, Vanderbilt U

Discussant

• Mari Jarris, Cornell U