The Failure of the ‘Public Sphere’ in Late Tsarist Russia, Bolshevik Militarism and the Russian Civil War: A comparative analysis of the French and Russian Revolutions, 1789-1799 & 1917-1922 Harry James Cochrane – HUA-309 In 1962, Jurgen Habermas published his thesis The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in which he described the emergence of public opinion and the transformation of feudal societies into bourgeoisie liberal democracies during the eighteenth century. Habermas’ thesis was initially applied to the French Revolution of 1789 demonstrating the rise of non-industrial capitalism, and Enlightenment writers such as Kant, Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu; similarly, there was a rough Russian approximation of the ‘public sphere’ known as obshchestvo or obshchestvennost’ meaning ‘society’ or ‘general public’. The development of obshchestvennost’ roughly coincided with the Gold and Silver Ages of Russian Literature following the emancipation of the peasantry in 1861, essentially a second Enlightenment in Russia. What this essay asserts, however, is that the form of public sphere that developed in Late Tsarist Russia was splintered into anaemic, non-homogenous cul-de- sacs that failed, in contrast to the French Revolution, to become fully autonomous of the state nor integral to promoting legislative change within it. As such these wider fragmentations and ideologies sought their political expression and desire for change in the form of violence in both the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions. This essay will not follow a chronological order, but rather a conceptual order; first outlining the role of the middle and upper classes in the public sphere, peasant mobility and industrial workers in regards to political liberalisation, before outlining Populist and Bolshevik militarism, how violence shaped the Russian Marxists, and ultimately how the seizure of power by Lenin in
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