The World Significance of the Russian Revolution/Section 13

by George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

XIII. The Psychological Significance of the Terror. Sadism as Motive.

While it does little good to dwell on the horrors and bestialities that have been committed wholesale in Red Russia, all mention of their psychological significance cannot altogether be omitted, as they serve to give meaning to what would otherwise seem to lack explanation. It has long been known to the medical profession and to psychiatrists that the lust to murder and inflict acute suffering is often an all-dominating motive in the conduct of a very large number of pathological individuals. That is to say that murdering, torturing and raping have been indulged in and systematically organised to a very great extent in both the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Among the conscious or unconscious motives in the scoundrels who perpetrate these crimes there exists in many of them the satisfaction afforded by indulging their perverted and diabolical tastes.^[1]

Such an individual was Jean Baptiste Carrier, a wholesale executioner in the French Revolution, and the willing tool of Marat, whom this little misshapen, hideous dwarf resembled in many ways.

Carrier enrolled companies of criminals, negroes and mulattos, one of which was called "The Company of Marat," just as Trotsky & Co. formed Terrorist Troop and Chinese gangs in Russia, and just as the troops of "Lenin Boys," under a homicidal Jew maniac called Szamuelly, were formed during the Communistic Terror in Hungary. These companies were used by Carrier to butcher men, women and children, chiefly of the peasant class, as Prudhomme describes, during the terror at Nantes. It was Carrier who invented the famous "noyades" or wholesale drownings, which also took place at Nantes; when, according to the estimate of one of Carrier's own committee, 9,000 people, priests, peasants, and women with babies were herded into barges ,which were taken out and sunk in the Loire. Carrier's own declaration of the intense joy he experienced in seeing his victims suffer are recorded at his eventual trial after the downfall of Robespierre. "I have never laughed so much," he declared, "as when I saw the grimaces those priests made as they died." These incidents may help us to understand the psychology and the motives of at any rate some of these men.^[2]

Robespierre and Marat, like their ardent admirers, Lenin and Trotsky, at the present day, were animated by the same noble vision, not to relieve present distress and injustice by legislation, but only to annihilate all existing conditions, and "to exterminate all classes of the community except 'the people' over whom they hoped to rule supreme."

Is it without significance that Trotsky (alias Leiba Douvitz Bronstein, the son of a well-to-do merchant) is an epileptic? Or is it without historical precedent that, as Kuprin, the well-known Russian writer, describes him, "this bilious and dyspeptic chemist, anarchist, spy and plotter, whose speeches are full of such phrases as 'roast on a slow fire,' 'strangle,' 'inundate with blood,' 'cut off their heads,' should be seized by a blind fate and placed in the seat of power, instead of ending his days as a 'sadist' in a ward for violent lunatics?"

The importance of 'sadism' as a revolutionary motive is widely recognised by psychologists. There is much evidence in the writings of revolutionaries and syndicalists that it exists as a motive in the unconscious, at times becoming wholly conscious and very plainly articulate; as, for instance, in the writings of those worshippers of "violence for the sake of violence" (e.g., M. Georges Sorel's Refléxion sur la Violence). In their vision of the "New Birth of Society," it is the blood of the Caesarian section they hope to practise on the expiring mother society, not the fate of the offspring which is their chief concern.

Medical men and psychologists may be referred to Dr. Iwan Bloch's very instructive contribution to the psychology of the Russian Revolution contained in Chapter XXI. of his book on the Sexual Life of Our Time. The part played by sadism as a revolutionary motive is revealed in the authentic journal of an "algolagnistic revolutionist" herein published.

Now that the terrorist period appears to have burned itself out to a very great extent in Russia, it is well that we should realise that it was an essential and deliberately designed phase of the Bolshevik plan, and that, as it was manifested with the same maniacal ferocity, wholesale butchery and bestiality, in Hungary, so would it be an inevitable prelude to any successful attempt to establish the same régime in any other European country. Mob licence and destruction would be encouraged and tolerated only as a means to preparing the way for the new dictators and for placing them in power.

1. Many authorities hold that this instinct to inflict or to suffer pain lies hidden in every man's subconsciousness, but only finds expression in normal and healthy individuals in harmless and useful "sublimated" forms, as in artistic work, poetry, games, sports, etc. The perverted and pathological manifestations of the instinct are more likely to appear in those individuals or races whose normal outlets for free expression have suffered unduly from a long course of "repression." For these, religion or alcohol, by supplying the mechanism of "sublimation," may act as compensation, and preserve the sanity of many, who, when both are withheld and the "Reign of Reason" is proclaimed, must fall a prey to madness.
2. The pathology of the Terrorists of the French Revolution deserves a closer study than that usually devoted to it. I am indebted to a friend for calling my attention to Barras's cynical claim to relationship with the notorious Marquis de Sade. Count Paul de Barras, general-in-chief of the Revolutionary army, debauchee and enthusiast of the Terror "avows himself with a sly smile somewhere in his memoirs the cousin of the Marquis de Sade." (See Louis Madelin's 'French Revolution,' p. 489.)