For a political-military reading of the Russian Revolution: the Soviet State and communism of permanent war

Abstract

This article, in the form of a small essay, is focused on a reading of soviet politics built under the revolutionary fervor. That is, a hermeneutic act that starts from the unfolding of the mud of the real and imagined battles fought in the eagerness of building the Proletary State. It consists in a political-military discharge with the purpose of safeguarding the project of overcoming capitalism, against the imminent danger of the counterrevolution. In this sense, soviet authoritarianism had, indeed, under a military matrix, been laden with bellicose discipline and hierarchy, a genealogy more often found in military manuals than in books about emancipatory Marxist politics. This explains the emergence of the militarized society as a whole. The main goal of this article is the political-military interpretation of the Russian revolutionary process of 1917 to construe a landscape of the reality lived from the bellicose practices that followed the formation of the Soviet State. Thereby, it is possible, throughout the text, to infer that there is an important singularity in this revolutionary context, a moment of emergency of total wars, that had impact in the becoming of the first Socialist State of the 20th century.