2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution,
the first and only time the working class took political power and control of
society. Like working class history in the US, this revolution under the
leadership of the Bolshevik Party has been maligned and demonized by the
capitalist media. This has been made easier as the revolution, isolated and
occurring in a non developed country as vast as Russia, was thrown back and the
workers lost political power to the bureaucratic monstrosity of Stalinism. The
collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracy has pushed those early gains back further
as capitalism has returned to Russia under the leadership of the former KGB
thug, Vladimir Putin. History took a step forward with the 1917 revolution. It
took half a step back as the working class lost power to the Stalinist
bureaucracy. It has now taken a full step back with the restoration of
capitalism. The following is an excellent article describing these
processes. We encourage all thinking workers and youth to read this account.
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| International Women's Day Protest March 1917 |
THE RUSSIAN
REVOLUTION - 100 YEARS
by Roger Silverman
7th
November 2017 marks the centenary of an event whose impact still today
reverberates throughout the world. The Russian revolution remains a constant
spectre at the feast of the rich, its shadow falling across all subsequent
history. Since its lessons lie buried in a century of sludge by all those determined
to malign its meaning, it is the duty of socialists to unearth them and bring
them back to light.
There
will be no shortage of articles and speeches commemorating it: some dismissing
it as a wicked conspiratorial putsch, some ascribing to it all the
subsequent horrors of the twentieth century, others still painting gaudy
anniversary chocolate-box extravaganzas in its honour. What matters is that
this was one of those rare moments when ordinary people took control of their
own lives. People humbled over generations to eke out a miserable anonymous
existence of hardship and submission suddenly rose up and stormed the stage,
determined for once to grasp hold of their destiny and shape history to their
needs.
A paradox
Russia entered
the twentieth century as a vast empire spanning one-sixth of the earth's
surface - a land of savage despotism ruled by the Tsars. Its most notorious
contributions to the world's vocabulary had been words like knout
(the instrument of torture by which prisoners were whipped, often to death) and
pogrom
(the frenzied mob massacre of a terrorised minority community). By 1917, Russia
was further crippled by years of slaughter on the eastern front of the first world
war, in which some three million Russians perished.
Organised
into democratic councils of workers', soldiers' and peasants' deputies elected
at every unit of labour with direct right of recall, working people briefly
held the power in their own hands. Tsars and landowners, racists and
bureaucrats, generals and executioners, capitalists and renegades were swept
into oblivion. Production was for the first time in history to be rationally
planned rather than subordinated to private profiteering and the blind forces
of the market.
And yet the
October revolution (so named in accordance with the then current calendar) remains
a gigantic paradox. It was greeted worldwide as the first step towards a new era
in history: a socialist civilisation. And yet the regime which was soon to emerge
from it became one of history's most bloodthirsty tyrannies. Its ideals were soon
to be perverted into a hideous mockery of socialism. Millions of workers were
to perish in the torture chambers and slave camps of Stalin's police state. And
in 1991 the crumbling relic of the "Soviet Union" finally collapsed
in ruins.
Apologists
for capitalism are fond of crowing that Russia's current economic devastation
is an indictment of decades of "socialism". The truth is exactly the
opposite. On the contrary: it was the downfall of the prevailing system of
state ownership, by then rusting and creaking under the deadweight of
bureaucratic mismanagement, that saw Russia transformed into a wasteland
ravaged by adventurers and cowboy gangsters, largely former bureaucrats. It was
with the restoration of a raw and primitive capitalism that Russia was brought
to the brink of catastrophe, devastated by what was probably the sharpest drop
in production and living standards that any country has ever endured. Real
gross domestic product fell by more than 40%, bringing hyperinflation,
lawlessness, destitution and despair. If Russia's economy later gained a very
marginal and temporary respite, it was only due to a short-lived boost in world
oil prices.
What a
contrast with the formative years of the planned economy! Even in the thieving
hands of a greedy and wasteful parasitic elite, the very survival over three
quarters of a century of the nationalised economy - not to mention its later extension
to swathes of Eastern Europe, Asia and beyond - fatally belies the capitalists'
triumphalist sneers.
It is
worth remembering that in earlier days, for all its devastating burdens, the
planned economy had boasted miracles of economic transformation. To take a
measure of what was then achieved, in the fifty years starting from 1913 (the
highest point of the Russian pre-revolutionary economy), Russia's share of
total world industrial output had soared from 3% to 20%, and total industrial
output had risen more than 52 times over. (The corresponding figure for the USA was
less than six times.) In the same period, industrial productivity of labour had
risen by 1,310%, compared to 332% in the USA, and steel production from 4.3
million tons in 1928 (at the start of the first Five Year Plan) to 100 million
tons. Life expectancy had more than doubled and child mortality dropped nine
times. Soviet Russia in its heyday produced more scientists, technicians and
engineers every year than the rest of the world put together.
These spectacular
achievements have no parallel. They are even more startling than they seem, in
that in this same period Russia had endured two world wars in which up to 25
million lives were lost, one civil war, one defensive war against 21 armies of
foreign intervention, two devastating famines, the paralysing convulsions of
the Stalinist purges and the constant deadweight of heavy-handed dictatorship.
Steady growth had been confined to the period between the start of the first
Five Year Plan in 1928 and the beginning of the Stalinist terror in 1937,
followed by the outbreak of war in 1941, and then, after post-war
reconstruction, from 1950 onwards - hardly a quarter of a century in all. And all
this had been achieved in the teeth of Russia's terrible handicaps - a heritage
of backwardness and illiteracy, a hostile capitalist encirclement and a vast murderous
parasitic bureaucracy clinging on to its back.
The weakest link
It was at
its weakest link that the chain of capitalism had first snapped. Russia in 1917
was a semi-colony. For every hundred square kilometres of land, there were only
0.4 kilometres of railway track. 80% of the population scratched a bare
existence out of their tiny strips of land, using the most primitive tools and
methods. Agriculture was fragmented into nearly 24 million smallholdings. Over
70% of Russian subjects were totally illiterate, and what reactionary
priest-ridden education there was focused only on rearing a new generation of
bureaucrats within the elite. Heavy industry was dependent on foreign finance capital;
French, British, Belgian and other Western investors owned shares amounting to
90% of Russia's mines, 50% of her chemical industry, over 40% of her
engineering plant, and 42% of her banking stock.
Russia
had experienced no bourgeois revolution clearing away feudal restrictions, as
in the West. With its vast under-populated territory overrun throughout the
centuries by nomadic hordes, Russia had a very weak, sluggish economic
development. Capitalism had been too weak to achieve political power through
the peasant revolt of the eighteenth century or the abortive coup d'etat of
1825, and had arrived on the scene too late to hope to compete with the modern
Western monopolies on the world market or pursue an independent historic role. It
was bound hand and foot to the Tsarist autocracy at home and the big financiers
abroad. A belated spurt of development only came following the emancipation of
the serfs in 1861, whereby the absolutist monarchy began to balance more heavily
on liberal landowners, nascent capitalists and foreign bankers, releasing
reserves of manpower for industry. Thus, capitalism in Russia did not evolve in
such a way as to rest securely on a wide stratum of intermediate small business
entrepreneurs, stable capitalist farmers, etc.; lacking any solid social
foundation, it hung precariously suspended over society by world imperialism on
the strings of the Holy Tsar.
Thriving
on substantial foreign investment, industrial enterprises now sprang up using the
most sophisticated machinery and production techniques. Russia's belated growth
prepared the rapid development of a concentrated industrial working class, and
with it a welcome new culture of solidarity and militancy. In 1914, while 17.8%
of American industrial workers were employed in factories with over 1,000
workers, the corresponding figure in Russia was as high as 41.4%, and higher still
in Moscow and Petrograd. Young peasants streaming off the land found themselves
suddenly plunged into great mechanical sweatshops of the most intensive
exploitation, and they came fresh to the realities of industrial class struggle
and militant organisation more rapidly than their counterparts in the West, with
their gradual evolution through intermediate stages of handicraft and
manufacture.
The early
Russian socialists had been "populists" who believed that the Russian
peasantry could jump straight into a peculiarly Russian rural form of
"communism". Paralysed by the inertia of the masses, they sought
short cuts to utopia through evangelism and terrorism alternately. First they
descended on the villages preaching revolution, only to find themselves
indignantly turned over to the police. Then, after twelve years' efforts, they
managed to assassinate a Tsar; the ruling caste having had no difficulty
finding a new one, the outcome was a wave of executions and renewed repression.
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| Workers Meeting at the Putilov Factory 1917 |
It was
the stirrings of the Petrograd workers in the stormy strikes of the 1890s that first
established Marxism in Russia. Soon came the revolution of 1905 - the biggest upheaval
in Europe since the Paris Commune of 1871. Independently of any theorist or
"agitator", the workers spontaneously formed the first soviets
(democratically elected workers' councils). In face of the workers'
radicalisation, the capitalist politicians hastily abandoned their tentative liberal
demands for a measure of control over the monarchy. It was becoming clear that
any effective challenge to the tottering regime could only come from the
workers.
Prior to
the outbreak of the revolution, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (the
Socialist International's Russian affiliate) found itself split over the nature
and goals of the coming revolution. Confining its outlook within the boundaries
of Russia, the "moderate" Menshevik wing of the RSDLP could envisage
no bolder aspiration than the installation of a liberal-democratic government
which would then mechanically retread the path of Western capitalism. According
to their sterile formula, until the entire historic mission of capitalism had
been fulfilled and the economy had attained Western levels the role of the workers'
parties would be to serve indefinitely as a loyal opposition.
The
Bolshevik wing considered this theory narrow and pedantic. They placed no
reliance on a weak capitalist class inextricably entangled with foreign
imperialism and hopelessly compromised by its collaboration with the despotic
Tsarist state machine. Placing the role of the Russian revolution firmly within
internationalist horizons, they predicted that the victory of a democratic
agrarian revolution in Russia led by the workers and peasants would act as an explosive
catalyst precipitating socialist revolution throughout Europe.
Along
with the Bolsheviks, Leon Trotsky (at that time independent of both wings) also
envisaged the coming revolution in Russia as the first breakthrough of the
workers of the world into the future, while also arguing that the Russian
workers, supported by millions of poor peasants and allied to the workers of
the metropolitan countries, could be the first to overthrow capitalism, in
alliance with the workers of Europe, leading the revolution inexorably onward
to socialist measures. While a capitalist Russia could only remain a
semi-colony of Western imperialism, socialism could only be built hand in hand
with the workers of the advanced countries.
The
events of 1917 quickly settled the argument. In February, against a background
of famine and starvation, riots on the bread lines, a bloodbath on the
battlefields, scandal in the palace, mutinies by soldiers and even by the elite
Cossack forces… it took just eight brisk days of street protests, led above all
by the defiant women of Petrograd, to bring the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty
crashing to its downfall.
A coup?
Five
times in the course of the next nine months the people poured on to the streets
in defence of their gains. In April, demonstrations led by the Bolsheviks
forced the direct agents of capitalism out of the "Provisional
Government", and by their simple slogans and skilful propaganda the
Bolsheviks exposed the impotence of the hand-wringing apologists for compromise
with the liberals. Far from the stock caricature of the Bolsheviks as
irresponsible rabble-rousers, when in July the workers of Petrograd and the
soldiers of the local garrison took to the streets again, impatient for a quick
resolution of the impasse, it was the Bolsheviks who had to urge restraint
until the provinces had caught up with them. Then, in August Petrograd was
threatened with a bloody defeat at the hands of the advancing troops of the
fascist General Kornilov. The Kerensky Government found itself helpless,
paralysed by its subservience to a ruling clique which feared the Bolsheviks a
thousand times worse than the relics of Tsardom, and it was the Bolsheviks who
organised the workers and soldiers of Petrograd in a united front with Kerensky
to repel Kornilov. Months of patient explanation against a dramatic background
of events won an overwhelming majority to the side of the Bolsheviks, and the
insurrection of 25th October (7th November in the new calendar) in the name of
the assembling congress of Soviets met with negligible resistance.
The lazy
hackneyed argument of most pro-capitalist historians is that the October
revolution was a conspiracy organised behind the scenes by a secretive
Bolshevik cabal: a "coup".
The truth
is that at the time of the collapse of the Tsarist regime the Bolsheviks had
numbered no more than 8,000 throughout the length and breadth of Russia, with
its population of more than 150 million. Once the Tsarist regime had fallen, the
so-called "Provisional Government" which had stepped uninvited into
the vacuum had no following in the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants which
had sprung up overnight as a true parliament of the masses. Caught unawares and
overcome with confusion, the local Bolshevik leaders on the spot (among them
Stalin) prepared to join forces with the Mensheviks. Lenin returned to Russia
in April to find the Bolshevik party thrown into confusion by the unexpected
fall of Tsarism and the assumption of power by liberal politicians. Greeted on
his return with bouquets and flowery speeches by Menshevik leaders, Lenin spoke
over their heads to the crowds, welcoming the "advance guard of the world
proletarian army", condemning the capitalist government and
calling for the victory of Soviet power. On this basis, Trotsky's group
promptly joined the Bolsheviks.
Within
five months their membership had grown more than twenty-fold, to 177,000. And
by September, on the eve of the revolution, in the words of Sukhanov (a
Menshevik, by the way, and a bitter enemy of Bolshevism): "for
the masses, [the Bolsheviks] had become their own people… They had become the
sole hope… The mass lived and breathed together with the Bolsheviks."
The
overthrow of the capitalist government had been a simple matter of hours, with
practically no fighting in the capital and only a short burst of gunfire in
Moscow. The Russian ruling class had forfeited all authority, and the
"socialist" stooges in the "Provisional Government", behind
whom they had been forced to shelter after April, had lost all trace of
credibility. The people were clamouring for "peace, bread and land".
Kerensky had led a million more to the slaughter on the front, halved the bread
ration, and turned his guns on to peasants spontaneously taking over the great
landed estates. No one respected theory more than Lenin, but he summed up very
simply what had happened: "The masses learn more in a day of social
revolution than in decades of socialist theory…An ounce of experience is worth
a ton of theory."
There is
another variant of the same argument: was the October revolution perhaps a
mistake? As if we could construct our own historical context…
The
insurrection was conceived by an entire generation of militant Russian workers
as merely a preliminary step towards a European-wide socialist revolution. If
they had let slip the opportunity, the alternative could only have been a
bloody defeat at the hands of General Kornilov, the contemporary Franco or a
Pinochet, from which it would have taken one or two generations to recover. It
was taken for granted that unless it were to spread westwards, the Russian
revolution would inevitably be crushed. No one at the time could have conceived
of the possibility that the Soviet state could survive in isolation for
decades, even as a grotesquely mangled bureaucratically deformed monstrosity.
Driven
beyond breaking-point by slaughter at the front and hunger at home, the Russian
workers, soldiers and peasants had overthrown their oppressors. If they had
foreseen the tribulations ahead of them in 1917, would they have launched their
revolution? Who can say? History had not granted them the luxury of
contemplation. They were impelled by the immediate duress of slaughter at the
front and hunger at home. It was not their revolution but its isolation in
conditions of virtual barbarism - the failure of the revolution elsewhere, not
their victory at home - that doomed them to the privations ahead.
In the
hour of danger that was approaching, with the brutal intervention of no less
than twenty-one armies of foreign capitalism, it was the active support of
working people throughout Europe that was the crucial factor in saving the
revolution from defeat.
Internationalism
Power was
at last concentrated in the hands of democratically elected representatives of
the urban workers and of soldiers recruited from the peasantry. But for how
long could they hold it?
It was
not at all fanciful for the Russian workers to rely on their counterparts
throughout Europe to come to their aid. It was an absolutely reasonable,
practical and almost commonplace assumption that had led them to place their
struggle firmly in the context of a Europe-wide revolution. After all, as late
as in November 1912, meeting at an Extraordinary International Socialist
Congress at Basel, the Socialist International – not a fringe sect but the
established voice of millions of organised workers throughout Europe and beyond
– had unanimously warned the ruling classes of Europe:
“Let
the governments remember that… they cannot unleash a war without danger to
themselves. Let them remember that the Franco-German War was followed by the
revolutionary outbreak of the Commune, that the Russo-Japanese War set into
motion the revolutionary energies of the peoples of the Russian Empire, that
the competition in military and naval armaments gave the class conflicts in
England and on the Continent an unheard-of sharpness, and unleashed an enormous
wave of strikes. It would be insanity for the governments not to realize that
the very idea of the monstrosity of a world war would inevitably call forth the
indignation and the revolt of the working class. The proletarians consider it a
crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions
of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.”
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| Armed German Workers 1918 |
And in
actual fact, within months of their own uprising, revolution really was raging
throughout Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Italy, France and elsewhere. As the
British prime minister Lloyd George wrote in a confidential memorandum: "The
whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution." The
royal dynasties of Europe were rudely dethroned, as the Hohenzollerns and
Habsburgs followed the Romanovs into oblivion. In Britain, growing militancy
was displayed in the general strike on the Clyde, the great mutinies among the
British forces in France, the Triple Alliance of trade unions, the adoption by
the young Labour Party of a socialist programme (the famous Clause Four which
was to define the party’s socialist aspirations for the next eighty years) and
the mass Councils of Action which sprang up expressly to defend the Russian
revolution and impede the intervention; councils which Lenin called
"Soviets, in essence if not in name".
The mass
of participants in the Russian revolution understood that they were part of an
international tidal wave. On the very day of the October revolution, the
resolution of the Petrograd Soviet affirmed its conviction that “the
proletariat of the countries of Western Europe will aid us in conducting the
cause of socialism to a real and lasting victory”. In his classic
eye-witness account, the American journalist John Reed recorded the common
thoughts of working-class Petrograd insurgents on the streets: “Now
there was all great Russia to win – and then the world!”
The
historic proclamation made the next day to the Congress of Soviets ended with
an explicit call to the workers of Britain, France and Germany to “help
us to bring to a successful conclusion… the cause of the liberation of the
exploited working masses from all slavery and exploitation”. Lenin
addressed the delegates with the hope that “revolution will soon break out in
all the belligerent countries”, and Trotsky warned that “if
Europe continues to be ruled by the imperialist bourgeoisie, revolutionary
Russia will inevitably be lost… Either the Russian revolution will create a revolutionary
moment in Europe, or the European powers will destroy the Russian revolution.”
Reed reports that “they greeted him with an immense crusading acclaim”.
He gives
ample evidence of the extent to which these internationalist ideas had
percolated through to the working population. He quotes a Red Guard who “plied
me with questions about America… Are the American workers ready to throw over
the capitalists?” He also quotes a soldier fresh from the front: “We
will hold the fort with all our strength until the peoples of the world arise”,
who then addresses Reed directly: “Tell the American workers to rise and fight
for the social revolution!”
Reed
continued:
“Something
was kindled in these men. One spoke of ‘the coming world revolution, of which
we are the advance guard’; another of ‘the new age of brotherhood, when all the
peoples will become one great family’.”
Even the
peasants – illiterate, superstitious, steeped for centuries in veneration of
Tsarism and Russian orthodoxy – became inspired. Their heroine Maria
Spiridonova addressed their congress days after the October revolution:
“The
present movement is international, and that is why it is invincible. There is
no force in the world which can put out the fire of the revolution. The old
world crumbles down, the new world begins.”
The
Bolsheviks knew that ultimately their only strength lay in the common class
interest of workers everywhere. They granted autonomy and the rights of
secession to all the nations of the former Great Russian Empire. They chose to
suffer the humiliating terms of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany,
ceding large areas of territory and provoking crisis within the party and a
government split with their Left SR allies, rather than break the faith of the
people and allow them to drift into the clutches of the White terror. They made
open appeals for peace, renounced all claim to booty and annexations and
published the secret treaties, to expose to the workers the real interests of
the capitalist governments. Their supreme task was the foundation in 1919 of
the Communist International, the world party of socialist revolution.
No one
reading Lenin's writings and speeches at the time could doubt the spirit of
international solidarity pulsing through his veins and embodied in his every
word. He emphasised that "without aid from the international world
revolution, a victory of the proletarian revolution is impossible…We did our
utmost to preserve the Soviet system under any circumstances and at all costs,
because we knew that we are working not only for ourselves, but also for the
international revolution." In March 1918, he wrote that there
could be "no hope of the ultimate victory of our revolution if it were to remain
alone… If the German revolution does not come, we are doomed."
He was
even prepared to sacrifice the accomplished victory in backward Russia if that
was the price to be paid for a successful revolution in industrial Germany. In an
emergency debate in 1918 over whether or not to seek a peace treaty with
Germany, Lenin had even said:
“If
the German movement is capable of developing at once in the event of peace
negotiations… we ought to sacrifice ourselves, since the German revolution will
be far more powerful than ours… It is not open to the slightest doubt that the final
victory of our revolution if it were to remain alone, if there were no
revolutionary movements in other countries, would be hopeless… Our salvation
from all these difficulties… is an all-European revolution.”
Civil war
Just as the
Russian workers, soldiers and peasants understood that their revolution was
doomed without international support, so too the world’s capitalists understood
that the October revolution constituted a mortal threat to their own survival.
Suddenly the rival powers that had spilt the blood of millions for the previous
four years in the scramble for markets joined together in combined attack on
their common enemy. Early in 1918, British naval forces landed in Murmansk on
the flimsy pretext of "helping to defend the gains of freedom won
by the revolution against the iron hand of Germany." Within days
they were in fact marching South on Petrograd, disarming the workers and
shooting local Bolsheviks. In April the Japanese landed at Vladivostok, and an
"Omsk All Russian Government" was set up - an alliance of Cadets,
Mensheviks and SRs which, having no forces to rely upon other than Tsarist
officers, was shattered after two months by a coup installing Admiral Kolchak
as dictator. Meanwhile, Germany occupied the Ukraine in collusion with White
Guard Generals Krasnov and Wrangel. While the Allies screamed that Lenin and
Trotsky were "German agents", Germany countered that "in
the Bolshevist movement…the hand of England is seen. By these movements England
has gained much, since owing to Bolshevik phrases and money the strike movement
was called forth in the Central Empire." The police mentality sees
in social clashes only the malevolent plots of conspirators. Every major
capitalist power, and many minor ones too, joined in the rush to smash the
revolution. It was officially admitted, for instance, that "the
North Western (Baltic) Government was organised by General Marsh in 45 minutes'
time."
Soon the
occupying forces had replaced their initial claims with the hackneyed pretext that
they were assisting the "vast portions of the population struggling
against Bolshevik tyranny." Respectable British diplomats and
officers on the spot, however, more sensitive to the mood of their
subordinates, revealed the true situation. Colonel Robins of the British
Embassy in Moscow telegraphed home in March 1918: "Know of no organised opposition
to Soviet Government." Kerensky's revolt had been crushed in hours
and in April the Don Cossacks mutinied, murdering the hated General Kornilov
and driving their Hetman (Chieftain) Kaledin to suicide. Colonel Robins wrote:
"Death Kornilov verified, this final blow organised internal force
against Soviet Government." The British secret agent Bruce Lockhart
admitted: "I had little faith in the strength of the anti-Bolshevik Russian
forces…The one aim of every Russian bourgeois - and 99% of the so-called
'loyal' Russians were bourgeois - was to secure the intervention of British
troops (and failing British, of German troops) to establish order in Russia,
suppress Bolshevism and restore to the bourgeois his property." Colonel
Sherwood-Kelly of the Siberian forces said, "I formed the opinion that the
puppet government set up by us in Archangel rested on no basis of public confidence
and support, and would fall to pieces the moment the protection of British
bayonets was withdrawn." General Gough recognised that "the
Russians are determined to prevent the return to power of the old official
classes, and if forced to a choice, which is what is actually happening at the
moment, they prefer the Bolshevik Government." Count Kokutsev, for
the Whites, put it even more delicately: "Without intervention, we cannot
get through, for, while the moderate element exists, it is not concentrated…"
Meanwhile, the counter-revolution could hardly offer the people of Russia a
very alluring programme programme; in the words of Count Kidovstev: "To
start with, it is clear that you must have a military dictatorship, and
afterwards that might be combined with a business element…"
The
unspeakable atrocities of White Guards Denikin, Kolchak, Yudenich, Wrangel,
etc., reflected the panic of a doomed elite. Wrangel boasted that, after
shooting one red prisoner in ten, he would give the others the chance to prove
their "patriotism" and "atone for their sins" in battle.
Thus, most White soldiers were actually press-ganged Red prisoners. What
crushed the White generals was not superior force of arms, but mass desertion,
mutinies and constant risings in occupied areas (in Archangel, Ukraine, Kuban and
elsewhere). The Red Army grew to become a militia of five million workers and
peasants.
However,
the Bolsheviks understood that their ultimate strength lay in the power of
workers' solidarity. The Socialist International had to its eternal shame
betrayed its ringing call in 1912 for a European-wide general strike in the
event of war. On the contrary: the members of its constituent parties found
themselves instead in army uniforms, shooting at one another across the
battlefields. Following the collapse of the international at its moment of
greatest need, the supreme task was the urgent foundation of a new international:
a world party of socialist revolution.
The
revolutionary government granted autonomy and the right of self-determination,
up to and including secession, to all the nations of the former Great Russian
Empire. They made open appeals for peace, renounced all claim to booty and
annexations and by publishing the Tsarist regime's secret treaties exposed the
real interests of the capitalist governments.
Once the
intervention had begun, they greeted the soldiers of the invading armies -
working-class conscripts exhausted by years of war - with leaflets published in
all their languages, explaining that they had been sent by their bosses to
crush a workers' republic, reporting news of the revolution raging throughout
Europe and appealing for active support. This had an immediate effect. Russia
was starved of arms. At one point, only a small area surrounding Moscow and
extending barely to Petrograd had been in the hands of the Red Army. But
mutinies broke out in the British, German, Czechoslovak and other armies, and in
the French fleet stationed off Odessa.
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| US Troops in Siberia 1917 |
In Britain,
the main contributor to the intervention, General Golovin reported on his
negotiations with Winston Churchill in May 1919: "The question of giving armed
support was for him the most difficult one; the reason for this was the
opposition of the British working class to armed intervention." The
Trade Union Congress condemned the Siberian occupation in September 1919 - and
Siberia was evacuated within days. In May 1920 workers on London's East India
Docks refused to load the "Jolly George" ship with hidden cachements
of arms for Poland. Mass demonstrations were held throughout the country, and a
joint meeting of the TUC, the Labour Party NEC and the Parliamentary Labour
Party threatened a general strike unless the intervention was called off. The
intervention stopped most abruptly, and the Red Army had no difficulty in
clearing up the native Tsarist relics within a few weeks. At indescribable
cost, for the moment the revolution survived. The capitalist chain around the
globe had been broken; the world revolution had begun.
Retreat and Reaction
It was at
its weakest link that the imperialist chain had snapped. The most revolutionary
working class in the world had taken power earliest in a country of age-old
backwardness, with little industry, low productivity, long hours, mass
illiteracy and a per capita income about one tenth of that of the USA. Less than
10% of the population were wage earners, and a far smaller proportion of heavy
industrial workers.
Three
years of savage civil war had aggravated conditions still further. In 1921
industrial production was down to one-ninth of the 1913 figure, and
agricultural produce had slipped below the pre-1900 level. Seven million
homeless waifs roamed the country, the people were starving and the peasants,
thirsting for private land and fair prices, were becoming restive once the
immediate danger of Tsarist restoration had been removed. The country had been
forced to the stark emergency restrictions of War Communism - "Communism
in a besieged fortress", as Trotsky described it. Grain requisitioning at
bayonet point, famine which brought in its wake cases even of cannibalism,
malaria, over-hasty nationalisation, payment in kind, militarisation of labour,
and the scarcity of finance, technical expertise and spare parts - this was the
terrible price paid to save the Soviet republic. Their country was already
steeped in age-old backwardness, with only pockets of industry, low
productivity, long hours, mass illiteracy and a per-capita income about one
tenth of that of the USA; but by the time they emerged from three years of
civil war and foreign armed intervention, Russia was plagued with mass
starvation, deadly epidemics, a desperate scarcity of finance, technical expertise
and spare parts. Years of civil war and unremitting hardship had sapped the
energies of the generation of October.
In such
barbaric conditions, what prospect could possibly exist for the flowering of a
democratic socialist civilisation? What is surprising is not that the
revolution suffered gross, hideous, monstrous distortions, and survived as a
grossly mangled caricature under the jackboot of a vile ruling clique… but that
it was not immediately overrun and crushed underfoot by a victorious
imperialism.
As soon
as the exigencies of the civil war had ended, the hard-pressed peasantry
revolted. At Kronstadt - formerly the rock-solid proletarian fortress of the
revolutionary sailors - a disaffected body of newly conscripted peasants
drafted from the rear mutinied. Riots broke out. So critical was the danger to
the revolution that the tenth party congress in March 1921 was compelled to
resort to the emergency expedient of temporarily forbidding factions within the
Party - a measure quite unprecedented, even at the crucial moment of the
October Revolution itself, when even dissident members of the Bolshevik central
committee were able with complete impunity to campaign openly against its
decision to call the insurrection.
Lacking a
Bolshevik leadership steeled in struggle, the revolutionary wave which swept Europe
finally subsided. The failure of the German Revolution in 1923 marked a
decisive turning point. Victory in a socially and industrially developed
country could have come to Russia's rescue. In a state of retreat, isolation
and hostile encirclement, bitter concessions to foreign companies, native
entrepreneurs and a privileged intelligentsia became unavoidable.
Bolshevism and Stalinism
Another
stock vilification of the revolution is the insinuation that it was Lenin,
Trotsky and the Bolsheviks who had paved the way to the monstrous excesses of
Stalinism. Once again, this is standing the truth on its head.
It was a
fundamental principle of Marxism that the
state itself was a barbaric relic, an instrument of class oppression which
would begin to wither away from the very inception of the workers'
dictatorship. "Government over people" would be superseded by the
mere "administration of things".
Once the
revolution found itself stranded within the confines of a backward semi-feudal Russia,
how was this principle to be applied? In such conditions a smooth transition to
a classless and stateless society was inconceivable. That's precisely why Lenin
and Trotsky placed the utmost priority on the urgent spread of the revolution
to the more developed Western countries. But even in Russia, until foreign
intervention had imposed the exigencies of "war communism", the
Bolsheviks enforced the strictest measures to stand guard against bureaucratic
encroachments, including all those principles of workers' democracy enacted by
the workers of the Paris commune in 1871 and subsequently underlined by Marx.
These were:
* no standing army, but the armed
people;
* election of all officials by the
workers' organisations with direct right of recall;
* no official to receive a wage above
that of a skilled worker;
* popular participation in all
administrative duties;
* direct management and control by soviets
("When everybody is a bureaucrat, nobody is a bureaucrat.")
It is
significant that when a communist regime briefly held power in Bavaria, Lenin's
first piece of advice was to introduce a seven-hour working day, to give every
worker the opportunity to participate in administrative duties and check
incipient bureaucratism.
But
didn't the Bolsheviks suppress rival parties? No! The first government established
by the October revolution was actually itself a coalition of two parties: the
Bolsheviks and the Left Social Revolutionaries (representing the poor
peasants). At first even the capitalist parties (apart from the fascist Black
Hundreds) were left free to organise. It was only under conditions of civil war
and armed attacks by saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries that the Bolsheviks were
compelled to impose an emergency temporary ban on other parties.
However,
the working class was ruling in conditions of weakness and exhaustion. Already
a tiny section of the population, it had been decimated by the civil war, the
intervention and the famine, in which another five million people had died. It
had to work long hours in excruciating conditions in the effort to reconstruct a
devastated economy. Vile elements were crawling out of the crevices once the
harsh regime of "war communism" had been replaced by a New Economic
Policy, under which painful concessions had been wrung out of the government
permitting a limited licence to private entrepreneurs. Worse still, in the
extreme conditions of a backward and isolated Russia, there was no alternative
but to enlist the services of the administrative personnel of the old Tsarist
regime, luring them back by conceding to them a relaxation on the limit to
their payment to allow a maximum wage differential of four to one; a concession
frankly admitted by Lenin to be "a capitalist differential". That
is what Lenin meant when he complained that "we still have the same old
Tsarist state machine today, with a thin veneer of socialism spread on top."
Demoralised
at the isolation of their revolution, nauseated by the antics of the
"NEPmen" - speculators, kulaks (rich peasants), profiteers
and black marketeers - and taunted by the return of a triumphant bureaucracy,
it is hardly surprising that the Russian working class fell under the darkening
shadow of a new form of despotism.
In such
conditions, the party drowned in a cesspool of careerism. It was the sly and ambitious
mediocrity Stalin (previously described as a "grey blur") - a perfect
personification of the resurgent bureaucracy - who surreptitiously accumulated
more and more administrative power into his own hands.
Speechless
on his deathbed after an unsuccessful assassination attempt and subsequent
strokes, Lenin conducted a desperate struggle to the last against Stalin and
the emboldened bureaucracy he represented. Increasingly aware of the powerful
machine he was constructing, the blatant growth of careerism and corruption, and
even the deception and intrigue he personally suffered at Stalin's hands, Lenin
broke off all relations with Stalin, formed a "bloc against
bureaucracy" with Trotsky and sent a testament to the Party Congress
urging Stalin's removal from his post, which was suppressed. Lenin's widow
Krupskaya commented as early as 1927: "If Vladimir Ilyich had been alive
today, he'd be in one of Stalin's jails."
Stalin
did not create the reaction - he was its most lethal expression, and once
created, he prolonged it. Bureaucratic degeneration was inevitable, given the
isolation of the revolution and the weakness of the working class. It led
Stalin inexorably along the road to the murder of all his comrades, the
enslavement of the Russian working class, and the outright betrayal of the
world revolution. The shrewd Georgian proceeded pragmatically, taking the line
of least resistance at every turn; and this made him as ideal a focus for the
Soviet bureaucracy as Lenin and Trotsky had been outstanding leaders of the
revolutionary working class. The nonentity who had hypocritically donned the
mantle of Lenin was to transform himself not into a revolutionary leader but
into an Oriental despot.
To create
a society founded on the principle "from each according to their ability,
to each according to their need," it must have at its disposal highly
developed technological resources capable of providing for the needs of all. Where
there is shortage there is inequality. Marx had said: "A
development of the productive forces is the absolutely necessary practical
premise [of socialism] because without it want is generalised and with want the
struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap
must revive." When a policeman is needed to control a food queue,
as Trotsky explained, he will always see to it that he eats first and best. In
the peculiar circumstances in which the revolution was isolated for a whole
period to backward Russia, the state, far from withering away, rose to
domination over the masses. For the workers, the only solution was the world
revolution. For bureaucrats with a stake in the status quo, it was
"socialism in one country." Their privileges and power were after all
secure.
Its relevance today
History
has seen countless working-class uprisings: the Paris Commune in 1871, Germany in
1918-23, Barcelona in 1937, France in 1968 and many more. Russia in 1917
remains an inspiration, irrespective of the deformities which ultimately
crippled it. It remains a historical testament to the truth that another world
is possible.
And now
more than ever, another world is necessary. In every continent today, a new
generation is waking up to the reality that the only future it faces under
capitalism is one of poverty, homelessness, hopelessness, discrimination,
environmental destruction and war. Millions of people are in revolt, casting
around for alternatives, sometimes seduced by false demagogues, but
increasingly determined to find a road to change. Those commentators who used
to scoff at the idea of revolution are today falling silent. In a recent Greek
opinion poll, 33% called for "revolution". And last year in the USA, 54% of respondents voted
yes to the idea of a "political revolution to redistribute money from the
wealthiest Americans". That included 68% of Afro-Americans, 65% of
Hispanics, and 68% of 18-29 year-olds.
It's time
to rescue the Russian revolution from the history books and return it to its
rightful place as a guide to action.
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