“Kojève thought that this revolutionary terror formed the necessary condition for the creation of freedom to come. The realisation of this ‘actual’ freedom came about with the eventual dissolution of ‘absolute’ freedom. In 1918, with Russia standing at the crossroads of history, the constitution of the Bolshevik regime and the previous period of war communism were neither the completion of the revolution nor real existing communism — that is, post-revolutionary communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat was the extension of the revolution and its victorious fraction into the realm of the state. For Kojève, it logically followed that those thirty terrible years of Red Terror were necessary to ultimately arrive at post-revolutionary tranquility.”
Revolution as Hubris in Modern Tragedy
