For Stalin, the Jacobins, while undeniably bourgeois, acted like NKVD agents during the Great Terror of the 1930s, linking treason inside France with the revolution’s reactionary enemies in the rest of the Europe. Chapter 9 also includes discussion of Stalin’s ambivalence towards Napoleon, and the intellectual contortions required of Soviet historians of France to remain in Stalin’s good graces.
... [Show full abstract] It also demonstrates how Stalin’s views on the Jacobins were reflected in Soviet culture. Finally, the chapter describes and explains the change in Trotsky’s conception of Thermidor; in 1935 he reversed himself, claiming now that while the Soviet Union was already experiencing it, it was merely a period of reaction that would end once Stalin lost power and Trotsky replaced him.