Thermidor
테르미도르
By analogy with the Thermidorian reaction that toppled Robespierre, the phase in which a revolution slides back into bureaucratic reaction. Trotsky called the Stalin regime a 'Soviet Thermidor': property forms survived while power passed to the bureaucracy.
In depth
Source of the analogy
Thermidor is a month of the French revolutionary calendar, and the term comes from the events of 9 Thermidor in July 1794, when Robespierre fell. Those events closed the radical phase of the revolution without restoring the monarchy. What characterized the phase was that the transformation of property relations held while political power detached itself from the revolutionary mass movement and passed to a new ruling layer.
Russian revolutionaries were conscious of the analogy early. The possibility that a revolution could turn into reaction from within was discussed in the vocabulary of French revolutionary history, and Thermidor served as the name for that turn.
Trotsky's characterization
Trotsky used the concept in the 1930s to characterize the Stalin regime. On his analysis the USSR had not returned to capitalism, and the social gains of October, nationalized means of production and a planned economy, remained. Political power, however, had passed from the workers' soviets to a bureaucratic layer that reproduced itself through privilege and hierarchy.
In The Revolution Betrayed (1936) he defined this state as a degenerated workers' state: proletarian in its social foundations, bureaucratic caste rule in its political regime. The conclusion followed that what was needed was a political revolution rather than a social one. He used the concept of Bonapartism alongside this diagnosis, describing a police and bureaucratic government raised above a balance of class forces.
Dispute
The characterization was argued over on the left for decades. Theories of state capitalism held that the bureaucracy had constituted itself as a ruling class in fact, so that the USSR could not be called a workers' state. Theories of bureaucratic collectivism proposed a new exploitative society that was neither capitalist nor socialist. Soviet orthodoxy, conversely, rejected all such characterizations as anti-Soviet theory.
The adequacy of the Thermidor analogy was also questioned. Where the French Thermidor was a political event of a few months, Soviet bureaucratization was a structural process across decades, so the analogy could obscure the character of what it named. The concept nonetheless remains in use as vocabulary for the problem of reaction after a revolution.