Dictatorship and the USSR

Before leaving the topic of dictatorship, I want to address one more issue that has nothing to do with the MENA protests. For, it is often claimed that the events following the Russian Revolution of 1917 demonstrate a truth about human nature that implies the necessary failure of any attempts to create an egalitarian society.

The argument goes something like this: It is human nature for people to try to gain power and take advantage of others. Therefore, attempts at creating an egalitarian society will necessarily end with power being concentrated into the hands of a few people. It should come as no surprise that the Russian Revolution resulted in a repressive dictatorship. (In fact, I am basically outlining the entire premise of Animal Farm, as I remember it.)

But it is always a mistake to haphazardly attribute to "human nature" (a muddled concept anyway) circumstances that have emerged out of specific historical processes and material conditions.

From an anthropological standpoint, the above argument is unfounded. In fact, there is a much better explanation for why the Russian Revolution produced a dictatorship.

At the time of the Revolution:
-Most of the country suffered from poverty and famine
-Infrastructure had been ravaged by World War 1
-Adequate ideological infrastructure had not been developed to integrate the very diverse regions of the Empire and to legitimate the rule of the Tsar.

Thus, amid conditions of poverty and an infrastructural void, the state had to rely on repression and violence to consolidate its rule, just as it does in other countries facing the same internal conditions.

When the conditions that have produced dictatorships all over the world, time and again, were present in Revolutionary Russia, then one must assume that it was these conditions that predisposed the USSR to dictatorship.

So, neither did the U.S. possess an economic organization that was diametrically opposed to the USSR, nor did it possess such a political organization. The difference between the U.S. and the USSR was always a difference in wealth and not in ideology.