This appendix of the FAQ is not a full history of the Russian Revolution. The scope of such a work would simply be too large. Instead, this section will concentrate on certain key issues which matter in evaluating whether the Bolshevik revolution and regime were genuinely socialist or not. This is not all. Some Leninists acknowledge that that Bolshevik policies had little to do with socialism as such were the best that were available at the time. As such, this section will look at possible alternatives to Bolshevik policies and see whether they were, in fact, inevitable.
So for those seeking a comprehensive history of the revolution will have to look elsewhere. Here, we concentrate on those issues which matter when evaluating the socialist content of the revolution and of Bolshevism. In other words, the development of working class self-activity and self-organisation, workers' resistance to their bosses (whether capitalist or "red"), the activity of opposition groups and parties and the fate of working class organisations like trade unions, factory committees and soviets. Moreover, the role of the ruling party and its ideals also need to be indicated and evaluated somewhat (see "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?" for a fuller discussion of the role of Bolshevik ideology in the defeat of the revolution).
This means that this section is about two things, what Alexander Berkman termed "the Bolshevik Myth" and what Voline called "the Unknown Revolution" (these being the titles of their respective books on the revolution). After his experiences in Bolshevik Russia, Berkman came to the conclusion that it was "[h]igh time the truth about the Bolsheviki were told. The whited sepulchre must unmasked, the clay feet of the fetish beguiling the international proletariat to fatal will o' wisps exposed. The Bolshevik myth must be destroyed." By so doing, he aimed to help the global revolutionary movement learn from the experience of the Russian revolution. Given that "[t]o millions of the disinherited and enslaved it became a new religion, the beacon of social salvation" it was an "imperative to unmask the great delusion, which otherwise might lead the Western workers to the same abyss as their brothers in Russia." Bolshevism had "failed, utterly and absolutely" and so it was "incumbent upon those who have seen though the myth to expose its true nature . . . Bolshevism is of the past. The future belongs to man and his liberty." [The Bolshevik Myth, p. 318 and p. 342]
Subsequent events proved Berkman correct. Socialism became linked to Soviet Russia and as it fell into Stalinism, the effect was to discredit socialism, even radical change as such, in the eyes of millions. And quite rightly too, given the horrors of Stalinism. If more radicals had had the foresight of Berkman and the other anarchists, this association of socialism and revolution with tyranny would have been combated and an alternative, libertarian, form of socialism would have risen to take the challenge of combating capitalism in the name of a genuine socialism, rooted in the ideals of liberty, equality and solidarity.
However, in spite of the horrors of Stalinism many people seeking a radical change in society are drawn to Leninism. This is partly to do with the fact that in many countries Leninist parties have a organised presence and many radicalised people come across them first. It is also partly to do with the fact that many forms of Leninism denounce Stalinism for what it was and raise the possibility of the "genuine" Leninism of the Bolshevik party under Lenin and Trotsky. This current of Leninism is usually called "Trotskyism" and has many offshoots. For some of these parties, the differences between Trotskyism and Stalinism is pretty narrow. The closer to orthodox Trotskyism you get, the more Stalinist it appears. As Victor Serge noted of Trotsky's "Fourth International" in the 1930s, "in the hearts of the persecuted I encountered the same attitudes as in their persecutors [the Stalinists] . . . Trotskyism was displaying symptoms of an outlook in harmony with the very Stalinism against which it had taken its stand . . . any person in the circles of the 'Fourth International' who went so far as to object to [Trotsky's] propositions was promptly expelled and denounced in the same language that the bureaucracy had] employed against us in the Soviet Union." [Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 349] As we discuss in section 3 of the appendix on "Were any of the Bolshevik oppositions a real alternative?", perhaps this is unsurprising given how much politically Trotsky's "Left Opposition" had shared with Stalinism.
Other Trotskyist parties have avoided the worse excesses of orthodox Trotskyism. Parties associated with the International Socialists, for example portray themselves as defending what they like to term "socialism from below" and the democratic promise of Bolshevik as expressed during 1917 and in the early months of Bolshevik rule. While anarchists are somewhat sceptical that Leninism can be called "socialism from below" (see section H.3.3), we need to address the claim that the period between February 1917 to the start of the Russian civil war at the end of May 1918 shows the real nature of Bolshevism. In order to do that we need to discuss what the Russian anarchist Voline called "The Unknown Revolution."
So what is the "Unknown Revolution"? Voline, an active participant in 1917 Russian Revolution, used that expression as the title of his classic account of the Russian revolution. He used it to refer to the rarely acknowledged independent, creative actions of the revolutionary people themselves. As Voline argued, "it is not known how to study a revolution" and most historians "mistrust and ignore those developments which occur silently in the depths of the revolution . . . at best, they accord them a few words in passing . . . [Yet] it is precisely these hidden facts which are important, and which throw a true light on the events under consideration and on the period." This section of the FAQ will try and present this "unknown revolution," those movements "which fought the Bolshevik power in the name of true liberty and of the principles of the Social Revolution which that power had scoffed at and trampled underfoot." [The Unknown Revolution, p. 19 and p. 437] Voline gives the Kronstadt rebellion (see the appendix on "What was the Kronstadt Rebellion?") and the Makhnovist movement (see the appendix on "Why does the Makhnovist movement show there is an alternative to Bolshevism?") pride of place in his account. Here we discuss other movements and the Bolshevik response to them.
Leninist accounts of the Russian Revolution, to a surprising extent, fall into the official form of history -- a concern more with political leaders than with the actions of the masses. Indeed, the popular aspects of the revolution are often distorted to accord with a predetermined social framework of Leninism. Thus the role of the masses is stressed during the period before the Bolshevik seizure of power. Here the typical Leninist would agree, to a large extend, with summarised history of 1917 we present in section 1. They would undoubtedly disagree with the downplaying of the role of the Bolshevik party (although as we discuss in section 2, that party was far from the ideal model of the vanguard party of Leninist theory and modern Leninist practice). However, the role of the masses in the revolution would be praised, as would the Bolsheviks for supporting it.
The real difference arises once the Bolsheviks seize power in November 1917 (October, according to the Old Style calendar then used). After that, the masses simply disappear and into the void steps the leadership of the Bolshevik party. For Leninism, the "unknown revolution" simply stops. The sad fact is that very little is known about the dynamics of the revolution at the grassroots, particularly after October. Incredible as it may sound, very few Leninists are that interested in the realities of "workers' power" under the Bolsheviks or the actual performance and fate of such working class institutions as soviets, factory committees and co-operatives. What is written is often little more than vague generalities that aim to justify authoritarian Bolshevik policies which either explicitly aimed to undermine such bodies or, at best, resulted in their marginalisation when implemented.
This section of the FAQ aims to make known the "unknown revolution" that continued under the Bolsheviks and, equally important, the Bolshevik response to it. As part of this process we need to address some of the key events of that period, such as the role of foreign intervention and the impact of the civil war. However, we do not go into these issues in depth here and instead cover them in depth in the appendix on "What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?". This is because most Leninists excuse Bolshevik authoritarianism on the impact of the civil war, regardless of the facts of the matter. As we discuss in the appendix on "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?", the ideology of Bolshevism played its role as well -- something that modern day Leninists strenuously deny (again, regardless of the obvious). As we indicate in this section, the idea that Bolshevism came into conflict with the "unknown revolution" is simply not viable. Bolshevik ideology and practice made it inevitable that this conflict erupted, as it did before the start of the civil war (also see section 3 of the appendix on "What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?").
Ultimately, the reason why Leninist ideas still have influence on the socialist movement is due to the apparent success of the Russian Revolution. Many Leninist groups, mainly Trotskyists and derivatives of Trotskyism, point to "Red October" and the creation of the first ever workers state as concrete examples of the validity of their ideas. They point to Lenin's State and Revolution as proving the "democratic" (even "libertarian") nature of Leninism while, at the same time, supporting the party dictatorship he created and, moreover, rationalising the utter lack of working class freedom and power under it. We will try to indicate the falseness of such claims. As will become clear from this section, the following summation of an anonymous revolutionary is totally correct:
"Every notion about revolution inherited from Bolshevism is false."
In this, they were simply repeating the conclusions of anarchists. As Kropotkin stressed in 1920:
"It seems to me that this attempt to build a communist republic on the basis of a strongly centralised state, under the iron law of the dictatorship of one party, has ended in a terrible fiasco. Russia teaches us how not to impose communism." [Peter Kropotkin, quoted by Guerin, Anarchism, p. 106]
Ultimately, the experience of Bolshevism was a disaster. And as the Makhnovists in the Ukraine proved, Bolshevik ideology and practice was not the only option available (see the appendix on "Why does the Makhnovist movement show there is an alternative to Bolshevism?"). There were alternatives, but Bolshevik ideology simply excluded using them (we will discuss some possibilities in this various sub-sections below). In other words, Bolshevik ideology is simply not suitable for a real revolutionary movement and the problems it will face. In fact, its ideology and practice ensures that any such problems will be magnified and made worse, as the Russian revolution proves.
Sadly many socialists cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this. While recognising the evils of the Stalinist bureaucracy, these socialists deny that this degeneration of Bolshevism was inevitable and was caused by outside factors (namely the Russian Civil War or isolation). While not denying that these factors did have an effect in the outcome of the Russian Revolution, the seeds for bureaucracy existed from the first moment of the Bolshevik insurrection. These seeds where from three sources: Bolshevik politics, the nature of the state and the post-October economic arrangements favoured and implemented by the ruling party.
As we will indicate, these three factors caused the new "workers' state" to degenerate long before the out break of the Civil war in May of 1918. This means that the revolution was not defeated primarily because of isolation or the effects of the civil war. The Bolsheviks had already seriously undermined it from within long before the effects of isolation or civil war had a chance to take hold. The civil war which started in the summer of 1918 did take its toll in what revolutionary gains survived, not least because it allowed the Bolsheviks to portray themselves and their policies as the lessor of two evils. However, Lenin's regime was already defending (state) capitalism against genuine socialist tendencies before the outbreak of civil war. The suppression of Kronstadt in March 1921 was simply the logical end result of a process that had started in the spring of 1918, at the latest. As such, isolation and civil war are hardly good excuses -- particularly as anarchists had predicted they would affect every revolution decades previously and Leninists are meant to realise that civil war and revolution are inevitable. Also, it must be stressed that Bolshevik rule was opposed by the working class, who took collective action to resist it and the Bolsheviks justified their policies in ideological terms and not in terms of measures required by difficult circumstances (see the appendix on "What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?").
One last thing. We are sure, in chronicling the "excesses" of the Bolshevik regime, that some Leninists will say "they sound exactly like the right-wing." Presumably, if we said that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West we would also "sound like the right-wing." That the right-wing also points to certain facts of the revolution does not in any way discredit these facts. How these facts are used is what counts. The right uses the facts to discredit socialism and the revolution. Anarchists use them to argue for libertarian socialism and support the revolution while opposing the Bolshevik ideology and practice which distorted it. Similarly, unlike the right we take into account the factors which Leninists urge us to use to excuse Bolshevik authoritarianism (such as civil war, economic collapse and so on). We are simply not convinced by Leninist arguments.
Needless to say, few Leninists apply their logic to Stalinism. To attack Stalinism by describing the facts of the regime would make one sound like the "right-wing." Does that mean socialists should defend one of the most horrific dictatorships that ever existed? If so, how does that sound to non-socialists? Surely they would conclude that socialism is about Stalinism, dictatorship, terror and so on? If not, why not? If "sounding like the right" makes criticism of Lenin's regime anti-revolutionary, then why does this not apply to Stalinism? Simply because Lenin and Trotsky were not at the head of the dictatorship as they were in the early 1920s? Does the individuals who are in charge override the social relations of a society? Does dictatorship and one-man management become less so when Lenin rules? The apologists for Lenin and Trotsky point to the necessity created by the civil war and isolation within international capitalism for their authoritarian policies (while ignoring the fact they started before the civil war, continued after it and were justified at the time in terms of Bolshevik ideology). Stalin could make the same claim.
Other objections may be raised. It may be claimed that we quote "bourgeois" (or even worse, Menshevik) sources and so our account is flawed. In reply, we have to state that you cannot judge a regime based purely on what it says about itself. As such, critical accounts are required to paint a full picture of events. Moreover, it is a sad fact that few, if any, Leninist accounts of the Russian Revolution actually discuss the class and social dynamics (and struggles) of the period under Lenin and Trotsky. This means we have to utilise the sources which do, namely those historians who do not identify with the Bolshevik regime. And, of course, any analysis (or defence) of the Bolshevik regime will have to account for critical accounts, either by refuting them or by showing their limitations. As will become obvious in our discussion, the reason why latter day Bolsheviks talk about the class dynamics post-October in the most superficial way is that it would be hard, even impossible, to maintain that Lenin's regime was remotely socialist or based on working class power. Simply put, from early 1918 (at the latest) conflict between the Bolsheviks and the Russian working masses was a constant feature of the regime. It is only when that conflict reached massive proportions that Leninists do not (i.e. cannot) ignore it. In such cases, as the Kronstadt rebellion proves, history is distorted in order to defend the Bolshevik state (see the appendix on "What was the Kronstadt Rebellion?" for details).
The fact that Leninists try to discredit anarchists by saying that we sound like the right is sad. In effect, it blocks any real discussion of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism (as intended, probably). This ensures that Leninism remains above critique and so no lessons can be learnt from the Russian experience. After all, if the Bolsheviks had no choice then what lessons are there to learn? None. And if we are to learn no lessons (bar, obviously, mimic the Bolsheviks) we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes -- mistakes that are partly explained by the objective circumstances at the time and partly by Bolshevik politics. But given that most of the circumstances the Bolsheviks faced, such as civil war and isolation, are likely to reappear in any future revolution, modern-day Leninists are simply ensuring that Karl Marx was right -- history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce.
Such a position is, of course, wonderful for the pro-Leninist. It allows them to quote Lenin and Trotsky and use the Bolsheviks as the paradigm of revolution while washing their hands of the results of that revolution. By arguing that the Bolsheviks were "making a virtue of necessity," (to use the expression of Leninist Donny Gluckstein [The Tragedy of Bukharin, p. 41]), they are automatically absolved of proving their arguments about the "democratic" essence of Bolshevism in power. Which is useful as, logically, no such evidence could exist and, in fact, there is a whole host of evidence pointing the other way which can, by happy co-incidence, be ignored. Indeed, from this perspective there is no point even discussing the revolution at all, beyond praising the activities and ideology of the Bolsheviks while sadly noting that "fate" (to quote Leninist Tony Cliff) ensured that they could not fulfil their promises. Which, of course, almost Leninist accounts do boil down to. Thus, for the modern Leninist, the Bolsheviks cannot be judged on what they did nor what they said while doing it (or even after). They can only be praised for what they said and did before they seized power.
However, anarchists have a problem with this position. It smacks more of religion than theory. Karl Marx was right to argue that you cannot judge people by what they say, only by what they do. It is in this revolutionary spirit that this section of the FAQ analyses the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik role within it. We need to analyse what they did when they held power as well as the election manifesto. As we will indicate in this section, neither was particularly appealing.
Finally, we should note that Leninists today have various arguments to justify what the Bolsheviks did once in power. We discuss these in the appendix on "What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?". We also discuss in the appendix on "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?" the ideological roots of the counter-revolutionary role of the Bolsheviks during the revolution. That the politics of the Bolsheviks played its role in the failure of the revolution can be seen from the example of the anarchist influenced Makhnovist movement which applied basic libertarian principles in the same difficult circumstances of the Russian Civil War (see "Why does the Makhnovist movement show there is an alternative to Bolshevism?" on this important movement).
No, far from it. Looking at the history of vanguardism we
are struck by its failures, not its successes. Indeed, the
proponents of "democratic centralism" can point to only one
apparent success of their model, namely the Russian Revolution.
However, we are warned by Leninists that failure to use the
vanguard party will inevitably condemn future revolutions to
failure:
To anarchist ears, such claims seem out of place. After all,
did the Russian Revolution actually result in socialism or
even a viable form of soviet democracy? Far from it. Unless
you picture revolution as simply the changing of the party
in power, you have to acknowledge that while the Bolshevik
party did take power in Russian in November 1917, the net
effect of this was not the stated goals that justified
that action. Thus, if we take the term "effective" to mean
"an efficient means to achieve the desired goals" then
vanguardism has not been proven to be effective, quite
the reverse (assuming that your desired goal is a socialist
society, rather than party power). Needless to say, Trotsky
blames the failure of the Russian Revolution on "objective"
factors rather than Bolshevik policies and practice, an
argument we address in detail in
"What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?" and will not
do so here.
So while Leninists make great claims for the effectiveness of
their chosen kind of party, the hard facts of history are
against their positive evaluation of vanguard parties.
Ironically, even the Russian Revolution disproves the claims
of Leninists. The fact is that the Bolshevik party in 1917
was very far from the "democratic centralist" organisation
which supporters of "vanguardism" like to claim it is. As
such, its success in 1917 lies more in its divergence from
the principles of "democratic centralism" than in their
application. The subsequent degeneration of the revolution
and the party is marked by the increasing application
of those principles in the life of the party.
Thus, to refute the claims of the "effectiveness" and
"efficiency"
of vanguardism, we need to look at its one and only success, namely
the Russian Revolution. As the Cohen-Bendit brothers argue, "far
from leading the Russian Revolution forwards, the Bolsheviks were
responsible for holding back the struggle of the masses between
February and October 1917, and later for turning the revolution
into a bureaucratic counter-revolution -- in both cases because
of the party's very nature, structure and ideology." Indeed,
"[f]rom April to October, Lenin had to fight a constant battle
to keep the Party leadership in tune with the masses." [Obsolete
Communism, p. 183 and p. 187] It was only by continually violating
its own "nature, structure and ideology" that the Bolshevik
party
played an important role in the revolution. Whenever the principles
of "democratic centralism" were applied, the Bolshevik party
played
the role the Cohen-Bendit brothers subscribed to it (and once in
power, the party's negative features came to the fore).
Even Leninists acknowledge that, to quote Tony Cliff, throughout
the history of Bolshevism, "a certain conservatism arose."
Indeed,
"[a]t practically all sharp turning points, Lenin had to rely on
the lower strata of the party machine against the higher, or on
the rank and file against the machine as a whole." [Lenin,
vol. 2, p. 135] This fact, incidentally, refutes the basic
assumptions of Lenin's party schema, namely that the broad party
membership, like the working class, was subject to bourgeois
influences so necessitating central leadership and control from
above.
Looking at both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, we are struck
by how often this "conservatism" arose and how often the higher
bodies were behind the spontaneous actions of the masses and
the party membership. Looking at the 1905 revolution, we discover
a classic example of the inefficiency of "democratic centralism."
Facing in 1905 the rise of the soviets, councils of workers'
delegates elected to co-ordinate strikes and other forms of
struggle, the Bolsheviks did not know what to do. "The
Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks," noted Trotsky, "was
frightened at first by such an innovation as a non-partisan
representation of the embattled masses, and could find nothing
better to do than to present the Soviet with an ultimatum:
immediately adopt a Social-Democratic program or disband. The
Petersburg Soviet as a whole, including the contingent of
Bolshevik workingmen as well ignored this ultimatum without
batting an eyelash." [Stalin, vol. 1, p. 106] More than
that, "[t]he party's Central Committee published the resolution
on October 27, thereby making it the binding directive for all
other Bolshevik organisations." [Oskar Anweiler, The
Soviets,
p. 77] It was only the return of Lenin which stopped the
Bolshevik's open attacks against the Soviet (also see
section 8 of the appendix on
"How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?").
The rationale for these attacks is significant. The St.
Petersburg Bolsheviks were convinced that "only a strong
party along class lines can guide the proletarian political
movement and preserve the integrity of its program, rather
than a political mixture of this kind, an indeterminate and
vacillating political organisation such as the workers council
represents and cannot help but represent." [quoted by Anweiler,
Op. Cit., p. 77] In other words, the soviets could not reflect
workers' interests because they were elected by the workers!
The implications of this perspective came clear in 1918, when
the Bolsheviks gerrymandered and disbanded soviets to remain
in power (see
section 6). That the Bolshevik's position
flowed naturally from Lenin's arguments in What is to be
Done? is clear. Thus the underlying logic of Lenin's
vanguardism ensured that the Bolsheviks played a negative
role with regards the soviets which, combined with "democratic
centralism" ensured that it was spread far and wide. Only by
ignoring their own party's principles and staying in the
Soviet did rank and file Bolsheviks play a positive role in
the revolution. This divergence of top and bottom would be
repeated in 1917.
Given this, perhaps it is unsurprising that Leninists started
to rewrite the history of the 1905 revolution. Victor Serge,
a "Left Oppositionist" and anti-Stalinist asserted in the
late 1920s that in 1905 the Petrograd Soviet was "led by
Trotsky and inspired by the Bolsheviks." [Year One of the
Russian Revolution, p. 36]. While the former claim is correct,
the latter is not. As noted, the Bolsheviks were initially
opposed the soviets and systematically worked to undermine
them. Unsurprisingly, Trotsky at that time was a Menshevik,
not a Bolshevik. After all, how could the most revolutionary
party that ever existed have messed up so badly? How could
democratic centralism faired so badly in practice? Best,
then, to suggest that it did not and give the Bolsheviks
a role better suited to the rhetoric of Bolshevism than
its reality.
Trotsky was no different. He, needless to say, denied
the obvious implications of these events in 1905. While admitting that the Bolsheviks "adjusted themselves
more slowly to the sweep of the movement" and that the Mensheviks
"were preponderant in the Soviet," he tries to save vanguardism
by asserting that "the general direction of the Soviet's
policy proceeded in the main along Bolshevik lines." So, in
spite of the lack of Bolshevik influence, in spite of the
slowness in adjusting to the revolution, Bolshevism was, in
fact, the leading set of ideas in the revolution! Ironically,
a few pages later, he mocks the claims of Stalinists that Stalin
had "isolated the Mensheviks from the masses" by noting that
the "figures hardly bear [the claims] out." [Op. Cit., p.
112
and p. 117] Shame he did not apply this criteria to his own
claims.
Of course, every party makes mistakes. The question is,
how did the "most revolutionary party of all time" fare
in 1917. Surely that revolution proves the validity of
vanguardism and "democratic centralism"? After all, there
was a successful revolution, the Bolshevik party did seize
power. However, the apparent success of 1917 was not due
to the application of "democratic centralism," quite the
reverse. While the myth of 1917 is that a highly efficient,
democratic centralist vanguard party ensured the overthrow
of the Provisional Government in November 1917 in favour
of the Soviets (or so it seemed at the time) the facts are
somewhat different. Rather, the Bolshevik party throughout
1917 was a fairly loose collection of local organisations
(each more than willing to ignore central commands and
express their autonomy), with much internal dissent and
infighting and no discipline beyond what was created by
common loyalty. The "democratic centralist" party, as
desired by Lenin, was only created in the course of the
Civil War and the tightening of the party dictatorship.
In other words, the party became more like a "democratic
centralist" one as the revolution degenerated. As such,
the various followers of Lenin (Stalinists, Trotskyists
and their multitude of offshoots) subscribe to a myth,
which probably explains their lack of success in
reproducing a similar organisation since. So assuming
that the Bolsheviks did play an important role in the
Russian revolution, it was because it was not the
centralised, disciplined Bolshevik party of Leninist
myth. Indeed, when the party did operate in a vanguardist
manner, failure was soon to follow.
This claim can be proven by looking at the history of the
1917 revolution. The February revolution started with a
spontaneous protests and strikes. As Murray Bookchin
notes, "the Petrograd organisation of the Bolsheviks
opposed the calling of strikes precisely on the eve of
the revolution which was destined to overthrow the
Tsar. Fortunately, the workers ignored the Bolshevik
'directives' and went on strike anyway. In the events
which followed, no one was more surprised by the revolution
than the 'revolutionary' parties, including the Bolsheviks."
[Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 194] Trotsky quotes one
of the Bolshevik leaders at the time:
Not the best of starts. Of course rank and file Bolsheviks
took part in the demonstrations, street fights and strikes
and so violated the principles their party was meant
to be based on. As the revolution progressed, so did the
dual nature of the Bolshevik party (i.e. its practical
divergence from "democratic centralism" in order to be
effective and attempts to force it back into that schema
which handicapped the revolution). However, during 1917,
"democratic centralism" was ignored in order to ensure the
the Bolsheviks played any role at all in the revolution.
As one historian of the party makes clear, in 1917 and
until the outbreak of the Civil War, the party operated
in ways that few modern "vanguard" parties would tolerate:
"Suburb committees too faced difficulties in imposing
discipline. Many a party cell saw fit to thumb its nose
at higher authority and to pursue policies which it
felt to be more suited to local circumstances or more
desirable in general. No great secret was made of this.
In fact, it was openly admitted that hardly a party
committee existed which did not encounter problems
in enforcing its will even upon individual activists."
[Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution
1917-1923, pp. 51-2]
So while Lenin's ideal model of a disciplined, centralised
and top-down party had been expounded since 1902, the
operation of the party never matched his desire. As Service
notes, "a disciplined hierarchy of command stretching down
from the regional committees to party cells" had "never
existed in Bolshevik history." In the heady days of the
revolution, when the party was flooded by new members,
the party ignored what was meant to be its guiding principles.
As Service constantly stresses, Bolshevik party life in
1917 was the exact opposite of that usually considered
(by both opponents and supporters of Bolshevism) as it
normal mode of operation. "Anarchist attitudes to higher
authority," he argues, "were the rule of the day" and
"no Bolshevik leader in his right mind could have
contemplated a regular insistence upon rigid standards of
hierarchical control and discipline unless he had abandoned
all hope of establishing a mass socialist party." This
meant that "in the Russia of 1917 it was the easiest thing
in the world for lower party bodies to rebut the demands and
pleas by higher authority." He stresses that "[s]uburb and
town committees . . . often refused to go along with official
policies . . . they also . . . sometimes took it into their
heads to engage in active obstruction." [Op. Cit., p. 80,
p. 62 p. 56 and p. 60]
This worked both ways, of course. Town committees did "snub
their nose at lower-echelon viewpoints in the time before the
next election. Try as hard as they might, suburb committees
and ordinary cells could meanwhile do little to rectify
matters beyond telling their own representative on their
town committee to speak on their behalf. Or, if this too
failed, they could resort to disruptive tactics by
criticising it in public and refusing it all collaboration."
[Op. Cit., pp. 52-3] Even by early 1918, the Bolshevik
party bore little resemblance to the "democratic centralist"
model desires by Lenin:
It is this insubordination, this local autonomy and action
in spite of central orders which explains the success of
the Bolsheviks in 1917. Rather than a highly centralised
and disciplined body of "professional" revolutionaries,
the party in 1917 saw a "significant change . . . within
the membership of the party at local level . . . From the
time of the February revolution requirements for party
membership had been all but suspended, and now Bolshevik
ranks swelled with impetuous recruits who knew next to
nothing about Marxism and who were united by little more
than overwhelming impatience for revolutionary action."
[Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, p. 41]
This mass of new members (many of whom were peasants who
had just recently joined the industrial workforce) had a
radicalising effect on the party's policies and structures.
As even Leninist commentators argue, it was this influx of
members who allowed Lenin to gain support for his radical
revision of party aims in April. However, in spite of this
radicalisation of the party base, the party machine still
was at odds with the desires of the party. As Trotsky
acknowledged, the situation "called for resolute
confrontation of the sluggish Party machine with
masses and ideas in motion." He stressed that "the
masses were incomparably more revolutionary than the
Party, which in turn was more revolutionary than its
committeemen." Ironically, given the role Trotsky usually
gave the party, he admits that "[w]ithout Lenin, no one
had known what to make of the unprecedented situation."
[Stalin, vol. 1, p. 301, p. 305 and p. 297]
Which is significant in itself. The Bolshevik party is
usually claimed as being the most "revolutionary" that
ever existed, yet here is Trotsky admitting that its
leading members did not have a clue what to do. He even
argued that "[e]very time the Bolshevik leaders had to
act without Lenin they fell into error, usually inclining
to the Right." [Op. Cit., p. 299] This negative opinion
of the Bolsheviks applied even to the "left Bolsheviks,
especially the workers" whom we are informed "tried with
all their force to break through this quarantine" created
by the Bolshevik leaders policy "of waiting, of accommodation,
and of actual retreat before the Compromisers" after the
February revolution and before the arrival of Lenin.
Trotsky argues that "they did not know how to refute the
premise about the bourgeois character of the revolution
and the danger of an isolation of the proletariat. They
submitted, gritting their teeth, to the directions of
their leaders." [History of the Russian Revolution,
vol. 1, p. 273] It seems strange, to say the least, that
without one person the whole of the party was reduced to
such a level given that the aim of the "revolutionary"
party was to develop the political awareness of its
members.
Lenin's arrival, according to Trotsky, allowed the influence
of the more radical rank and file to defeat the conservatism
of the party machine. By the end of April, Lenin had
managed to win over the majority of the party leadership
to his position. However, as Trotsky argues, this "April
conflict between Lenin and the general staff of the party
was not the only one of its kind. Throughout the whole
history of Bolshevism . . . all the leaders of the party
at all the most important moments stood to the right of
Lenin." [Op. Cit., p. 305] As such, if "democratic
centralism"
had worked as intended, the whole party would have been
arguing for incorrect positions the bulk of its existence
(assuming, of course, that Lenin was correct most of the
time).
For Trotsky, "Lenin exerted influence not so much as an
individual but because he embodied the influence of the
class on the Party and of the Party on its machine."
[Stalin, vol. 1, p. 299] Yet, this was the machine
which Lenin had forged, which embodied his vision of how
a "revolutionary" party should operate and was headed by
him. In other words, to argue that the party machine was
behind the party membership and the membership behind the
class shows the bankruptcy of Lenin's organisational scheme.
This "backwardness," moreover, indicates an independence of
the party bureaucracy from the membership and the membership
from the masses. As Lenin's constantly repeated aim was for
the party to seize power (based on the dubious assumption
that class power would only be expressed, indeed was identical
to, party power) this independence held serious dangers,
dangers which became apparent once this goal was achieved.
Trotsky asks the question "by what miracle did Lenin manage
in a few short weeks to turn the Party's course into a new
channel?" Significantly, he answers as follows: "Lenin's
personal attributes and the objective situation." [Ibid.]
No mention is made of the democratic features of the party
organisation, which suggests that without Lenin the rank
and file party members would not have been able to shift
the weight of the party machine in their favour. Trotsky
seems close to admitting this:
Thus the party machine, which embodied the principles of
"democratic centralism" proved less than able to the task
assigned it in practice. Without Lenin, it is doubtful
that the party membership would have over come the
party machine:
Little wonder the local party groupings ignored the
party machine, practising autonomy and initiative in
the face of a party machine inclined to conservatism,
inertia, bureaucracy and remoteness. This conflict
between the party machine and the principles it was
based on and the needs of the revolution and party
membership was expressed continually throughout 1917:
Looking at the development of the revolution from April
onwards, we are struck by the sluggishness of the party
hierarchy. At every revolutionary upsurge, the party
simply was not to the task of responding to the needs of
masses and the local party groupings closest to them.
The can be seen in June, July and October itself. At
each turn, the rank and file groupings or Lenin had to
constantly violate the principles of their own party
in order to be effective. The remoteness and conservatism
of the party even under Lenin can be constantly seen.
For example, when discussing the cancellation by the central
committee of a demonstration planned for June 10th by
the Petrograd Bolsheviks, the unresponsiveness of the
party hierarchy can be seen. The "speeches by Lenin and
Zinoviev [justifying their actions] by no means satisfied
the Petersburg Committee. If anything, it appears that
their explanations served to strengthen the feeling that
at best the party leadership had acted irresponsibly and
incompetently and was seriously out of touch with reality."
Indeed, many "blamed the Central Committee for taking so
long to respond to Military Organisation appeals for a
demonstration." [Rabinowitch, Op. Cit., p. 88 and p. 92]
During the discussions in late June, 1917, on whether to
take direct action against the Provisional Government there
was a "wide gulf" between lower organs evaluations of the
current situation and that of the Central Committee.
[Rabinowitch, Op. Cit., p. 129] Indeed, among the delegates
from the Bolshevik military groups, only Lashevich (an
old Bolshevik) spoke in favour of the Central Committee
position and he noted that "[f]requently it is impossible
to make out where the Bolshevik ends and the Anarchist
begins." [quoted by Rabinowitch, Op. Cit., p. 129]
In the July days, the breach between the local party groups
and the central committee increased. As we noted in the
section 1,
this spontaneous uprising was
opposed to by the Bolshevik leadership, in spite of the
leading role of their own militants (along with anarchists)
in fermenting it. While calling on their own militants to
restrain the masses, the party leadership was ignored by
the rank and file membership who played an active role in
the event. Sickened by being asked to play the role of
"fireman," the party militants rejected party discipline in
order to maintain their credibility with the working class.
Rank and file activists, pointing to the snowballing of
the movement, showed clear dissatisfaction with the Central
Committee. One argued that it "was not aware of the latest
developments when it made its decision to oppose the movement
into the streets." Ultimately, the Central Committee appeal
"for restraining the masses . . . was removed from . . .
Pravda . . . and so the party's indecision was reflected
by a large blank space on page one." [Rabinowitch, Op. Cit.,
p. 150, p. 159 and P. 175] Ultimately, the indecisive nature
of the leadership can be explained by the fact it did not
think it could seize state power for itself. As Trotsky
noted, "the state of popular consciousness . . . made
impossible the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in July."
[History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 2, p. 81]
The indecision of the party hierarchy did have an effect,
of course. While the anarchists at Kronstadt looked at the
demonstration as the start of an uprising, the Bolsheviks
there were "wavering indecisively in the middle" between
them and the Left-Social Revolutionaries who saw it as a
means of applying pressure on the government. This was because
they were "hamstrung by the indecision of the party Central
Committee." [Rabinowitch, Op. Cit., p. 187] Little wonder
so many Bolshevik party organisations developed and protected
their own autonomy and ability to act!
Significantly, one of the main Bolshevik groupings
which helped organise and support the July uprising,
the Military Organisation, started their own paper
after the Central Committee had decreed after the
failed revolt that neither it, nor the Petersburg
Committee, should be allowed to have one. It "angrily
insisted on what it considered its just prerogatives"
and in "no uncertain terms it affirmed its right to
publish an independent newspaper and formally protested
what is referred to as 'a system of persecution and repression
of an extremely peculiar character which had begun with
the election of the new Central Committee.'" [Rabinowitch,
Op. Cit., p. 227] The Central Committee backed down,
undoubtedly due to the fact it could not enforce its
decision.
As the Cohn-Bendit brothers argue, "five months after the
Revolution and three months before the October uprising, the
masses were still governing themselves, and the Bolshevik
vanguard simply had to toe the line." [Op. Cit., p. 186]
Within that vanguard, the central committee proved to be
out of touch with the rank and file, who ignored it rather
than break with their fellow workers.
Even by October, the party machine still lagged behind the
needs of the revolution. In fact, Lenin could only impose
his view by going over the head of the Central Committee.
According to Trotsky's account, "this time he [wa]s not
satisfied with furious criticism" of the "ruinous Fabianism
of the Petrograd leadership" and "by way of protest he
resign[ed] from the Central Committee." [History of the
Russian Revolution, vol. 3, p. 131] Trotsky quotes
Lenin as follows:
Thus the October revolution was precipitated by a blatant
violation of the principles Lenin spent his life advocating.
Indeed, if someone else other than Lenin had done this we
are sure that Lenin, and his numerous followers, would have
dismissed it as the action of a "petty-bourgeois intellectual"
who cannot handle party "discipline." This is itself is
significant, as is the fact that he decided to appeal to
the "lower ranks" of the party. Simply put, rather than
being "democratic" the party machine effectively blocked
communication and control from the bottom-up. Looking at
the more radical party membership, he "could only impose
his view by going over the head of his Central Committee."
[Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Op. Cit., p. 187] He
made sure to send his letter of protest to "the Petrograd
and Moscow committees" and also made sure that "copies fell
into the hands of the more reliable party workers of the
district locals." By early October (and "over the heads of
the Central Committee") he wrote "directly to the Petrograd
and Moscow committees" calling for insurrection. He also
"appealed to a Petrograd party conference to speak a firm
word in favour of insurrection." [Trotsky, Op. Cit., p. 131
and p. 132]
In October, Lenin had to fight what he called "a wavering"
in the "upper circles of the party" which lead to a "sort
of dread of the struggle for power, an inclination to
replace this struggle with resolutions protests, and
conferences." [quoted by Trotsky, Op. Cit., p. 132] For
Trotsky, this represented "almost a direct pitting of the
party against the Central Committee," required because
"it was a question of the fate of the revolution" and
so "all other considerations fell away." [Trotsky,
Op. Cit., pp. 132-3] On October 8th, when Lenin addressed
the Bolshevik delegates of the forthcoming Northern
Congress of Soviets on this subject, he did so "personally"
as there "was no party decision" and the "higher institutions
of the party had not yet expressed themselves." [Trotsky,
Op. Cit., p. 133] Ultimately, the Central Committee came
round to Lenin's position but they did so under pressure
of means at odds with the principles of the party.
This divergence between the imagine and reality of the
Bolsheviks explains their success. If the party had
applied or had remained true to the principles of
"democratic centralism" it is doubtful that it would
have played an important role in the movement. As
Alexander Rabinowitch argues, Bolshevik organisational
unity and discipline is "vastly exaggerated" and, in
fact, Bolshevik success in 1917 was down to "the party's
internally relatively democratic, tolerant, and
decentralised structure and method of operation, as
well as its essentially open and mass character --
in striking contrast to the traditional Leninist model."
In 1917, he goes on, "subordinate party bodies with the
Petersburg Committee and the Military Organisation were
permitted considerable independence and initiative . . .
Most importantly, these lower bodies were able to tailor
their tactics and appeals to suit their own particular
constituencies amid rapidly changing conditions. Vast
numbers of new members were recruited into the party . . .
The newcomers included tens of thousands of workers and
soldiers . . . who knew little, if anything, about Marxism
and cared nothing about party discipline." For example,
while the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" was "officially
withdrawn by the Sixth [Party] Congress in late July, this
change did not take hold at the local level." [The Bolsheviks
Come to Power, p. 311, p. 312 and p. 313]
It is no exaggeration to argue that if any member of a current
vanguard party acted as the Bolshevik rank and file did in 1917,
they would quickly be expelled (this probably explains why no
such party has been remotely successful since). However, this
ferment from below was quickly undermined within the party
with the start of the Civil War. It is from this period when
"democratic centralism" was actually applied within the party
and clarified as an organisational principle:
Service stresses that "it appears quite remarkable how
quickly the Bolsheviks, who for years had talked idly
about a strict hierarchy of command inside the party, at
last began to put ideas into practice." [Op. Cit., p. 96]
In other words, the conversion of the Bolshevik party into
a fully fledged "democratic centralist" party occurred
during the degeneration of the Revolution. This was both
a consequence of the rising authoritarianism within the
party and society as well as one of its causes. As such,
it is quite ironic that the model used by modern day
followers of Lenin is that of the party during the decline
of the revolution, not its peak. This
is not surprising. Once in power, the
Bolshevik party imposed a state capitalist regime onto
the Russian people. Can it be surprising that the party
structure which it developed to aid this process was also
based on bourgeois attitudes and organisation?
Simply put, the party model advocated by
Lenin may not have been very effective during a revolution
but it was exceedingly effective at prompting hierarchy and
authority in the post-revolutionary regime. It simply
replaced the old ruling elite with another, made up of
members of the radical intelligentsia and odd ex-worker
or ex-peasant.
This was due to the hierarchical and top-down nature of
the party Lenin had created. While the party base was
largely working class, the leadership was not. Full-time
revolutionaries, they were either middle-class intellectuals
or (occasionally) ex-workers and (even rarer) ex-peasants
who had left their class to become part of the party machine.
Even the delegates at the party congresses did not truly
reflect class basis of the party membership. For example,
the number of delegates was still dominated by white-collar
or others (59.1% to 40.9%) at the sixth party congress at
the end of July 1917. [Cliff, Lenin, vol. 2, p. 160] So
while the party gathered more working class members in
1917, it cannot be said that this was reflected in the
party leadership which remained dominated by non-working
class elements. Rather than being a genuine working class
organisation, the Bolshevik party was a hierarchical group
headed by non-working class elements whose working class
base could not effectively control them even during the
revolution in 1917. It was only effective because these
newly joined and radicalised working class members
ignored their own party structure and its defining
ideology.
After the revolution, the Bolsheviks saw their membership
start to decrease. Significantly, "the decline in numbers
which occurred from early 1918 onwards" started happening
"contrary to what is usually assumed, some months before
the Central Committee's decree in midsummer that the party
should be purged of its 'undesirable' elements." These lost
members reflected two things. Firstly, the general decline
in the size of the industrial working class. This meant
that the radicalised new elements from the countryside
which had flocked to the Bolsheviks in 1917 returned home.
Secondly, the lost of popular support the Bolsheviks were
facing due to the realities of their regime. This can be
seen from the fact that while the Bolsheviks were losing
members, the Left SRS almost doubled in size to 100,000
(the Mensheviks claimed to have a similar number). Rather
than non-proletarians leaving, "[i]t is more probable by
far that it was industrial workers who were leaving in
droves. After all, it would have been strange if the
growing unpopularity of Sovnarkom in factory milieu
had been confined exclusively to non-Bolsheviks."
Unsurprisingly, given its position in power, "[a]s the
proportion of working-class members declined, so that
of entrants from the middle-class rose; the steady drift
towards a party in which industrial workers no longer
numerically predominated was under way." By late 1918
membership started to increase again but "[m]ost newcomers
were not of working-class origin . . . the proportion of
Bolsheviks of working-class origin fell from 57 per cent
at the year's beginning to 48 per cent at the end." It
should be noted that it was not specified how many were
classed as having working-class origin were still employed
in working-class jobs. [Robert Service, Op. Cit., p. 70,
pp. 70-1 and p. 90] A new ruling elite was thus born,
thanks to the way vanguard parties are structured and the
application of vanguardist principles which had previously
been ignored.
In summary, the experience of the Russian Revolution does
not, in fact, show the validity of the "vanguard" model.
The Bolshevik party in 1917 played a leading role in the
revolution only insofar as its members violated its own
organisational principles (Lenin included). Faced with a
real revolution and an influx of more radical new members,
the party had to practice anarchist ideas of autonomy,
local initiative and the ignoring of central orders which
had no bearing to reality on the ground. When the party
did try to apply the top-down and hierarchical principles
of "democratic centralism" it failed to adjust to the
needs of the moment. Moreover, when these principles were
finally applied they helped ensure the degeneration of
the revolution. As we discussed in
section H.5, this was to be
expected.
In a nutshell, no. In fact the opposite was the case.
Post-October, the Bolsheviks not only failed to introduce
the ideas of Lenin's State and Revolution, they in fact
introduced the exact opposite. As one historian puts it:
Daniels is being far too lenient with the Bolsheviks. It
was not, in fact, "a few short years" before the promises
of 1917 were forgotten. In some cases, it was a few short
hours. In others, a few short months. However, in a sense
Daniels is right. It did take until 1921 before all hope
for saving the Russian Revolution finally ended. With the
crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion, the true nature of
the regime became obvious to all with eyes to see. Moreover,
the banning of factions within the party at the same time
did mark a return to the pattern of "What is to be Done?"
rather than the more fluid practice Bolshevism exhibited
in, say, 1917 (see
section 3).
However, as we discuss in the appendix "Were any of the Bolshevik oppositions a real alternative?",
the various Bolshevik oppositions were,
in their own way, just as authoritarian as the mainstream
of the party.
In order to show that this is the case, we need to summarise
the main ideas contained in Lenin's work. Moreover, we need
to indicate what the Bolsheviks did, in fact, do. Finally,
we need to see if the various rationales justifying these
actions hold water.
So what did Lenin argue for in State and Revolution?
Writing in the mid-1930s, anarchist Camillo Berneri
summarised the main ideas of that work as follows:
As he noted, "[n]ot a single one of the points of this
programme has been achieved." This was, of course,
under Stalinism and most Leninists will concur with
Berneri. However what Leninists tend not to mention is
that in the 7 month period from November 1917 to May 1918
none of these points was achieved. So, as an example
of what Bolshevism "really" stands for it seems strange
to harp on about a work which was never implemented when
the its author was in a position to do so (i.e. before
the onslaught of a civil war Lenin thought was inevitable
anyway!).
To see that Berneri's summary is correct, we need to quote
Lenin directly. Obviously the work is a wide ranging defence
of Lenin's interpretation of Marxist theory on the state.
As it is an attempt to overturn decades of Marxist orthodoxy,
much of the work is quotes from Marx and Engels and Lenin's
attempts to enlist them for his case (we discuss this issue
in
section H.3.10). Equally, we need to discount the numerous
straw men arguments about anarchism Lenin inflicts on his
reader (see sections
H.1.3,
H.1.4 and
H.1.5 for the truth
about his claims). Here we simply list the key points as
regards Lenin's arguments about his "workers' state" and
how the workers would maintain control of it:
1) Using the Paris Commune as a prototype, Lenin argued
for the abolition of "parliamentarianism" by turning
"representative institutions from mere 'talking shops'
into working bodies." This would be done by removing
"the division of labour between the legislative and the
executive." [Essential Works of Lenin, p. 304 and p. 306]
2) "All officials, without exception, to be elected and
subject to recall at any time" and so "directly
responsible to their constituents." "Democracy means
equality." [Op. Cit., p. 302, p. 306 and p. 346]
3) The "immediate introduction of control and
superintendence by all, so that all shall become
'bureaucrats' for a time and so that, therefore, no one
can become a 'bureaucrat'." Proletarian democracy would
"take immediate steps to cut bureaucracy down to the roots
. . . to the complete abolition of bureaucracy" as the
"essence of bureaucracy" is officials becoming transformed
"into privileged persons divorced from the masses and
superior to the masses." [Op. Cit., p. 355 and p. 360]
4) There should be no "special bodies of armed men" standing
apart from the people "since the majority of the people
itself suppresses its oppressors, a 'special force' is no
longer necessary." Using the example of the Paris Commune,
Lenin suggested this meant "abolition of the standing army."
Instead there would be the "armed masses." [Op. Cit., p. 275,
p. 301 and p. 339]
5) The new (workers) state would be "the organisation of
violence for the suppression of . . . the exploiting class,
i.e. the bourgeoisie. The toilers need a state only to
overcome the resistance of the exploiters" who are "an
insignificant minority," that is "the landlords and
the capitalists." This would see "an immense expansion
of democracy . . . for the poor, democracy for the people"
while, simultaneously, imposing "a series of restrictions
on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the
capitalists. . . their resistance must be broken by force:
it is clear that where is suppression there is also violence,
there is no freedom, no democracy." [Op. Cit., p. 287 and
pp. 337-8]
This would be implemented after the current, bourgeois, state had
been smashed. This would be the "dictatorship of the proletariat"
and be "the introduction of complete democracy for the people."
[Op. Cit., p. 355] However, the key practical ideas on what the
new "semi-state" would be are contained in these five points.
He generalised these points, considering them valid not only
for Russia in 1917 but in all countries. In this his followers
agree. Lenin's work is considered valid for today, in advanced
countries as it was in revolutionary Russia.
Three things strike anarchist readers of Lenin's work. Firstly,
as we noted in
section H.1.7, much of it is pure anarchism.
Bakunin had raised the vision of a system of workers' councils
as the framework of a free socialist society in the 1860s and
1870s. Moreover, he had also argued for the election of mandated
and recallable delegates as well as for using a popular militia
to defend the revolution (see
section H.2.1). What is not
anarchist is the call for centralisation, equating the council
system with a state and the toleration of a "new" officialdom.
Secondly, the almost utter non-mention of the role of the party
in the book is deeply significant. Given the emphasis that Lenin
had always placed on the party, it's absence is worrying.
Particularly (as we indicate in
section 5) he had been
calling for the party to seize power all through 1917. When he does mention the party
he does so in an ambiguous way which suggests that it, not
the class, would be in power. As subsequent events show, this
was indeed what happened in practice. And, finally, the
anarchist reader is struck by the fact that every one of these
key ideas were not implemented under Lenin. In fact, the
opposite was done. This can be seen from looking at each point
in turn.
The first point as the creation of "working bodies", the
combining of legislative and executive bodies. The first
body to be created by the Bolshevik revolution was the
"Council of People's Commissars" (CPC) This was a government
separate from and above the Central Executive Committee (CEC)
of the soviets congress. It was an executive body elected
by the soviet congress, but the soviets themselves were
not turned into "working bodies." Thus the promises of
Lenin's State and Revolution did not last the night.
As indicated in
section 5, the Bolsheviks clearly knew
that the Soviets had alienated their power to this body.
However, it could be argued that Lenin's promises were
kept as this body simply gave itself legislative powers
four days later. Sadly, this is not the case. In the
Paris Commune the delegates of the people took executive
power into their own hands. Lenin reversed this. His
executive took legislative power from the hands of
the people's delegates. In the former case, power was
decentralised into the hands of the population. In the
latter case, it was centralised into the hands of a few.
This concentration of power into executive committees
occurred at all levels of the soviet hierarchy (see
section 6
for full details). Simply put, legislative
and executive power was taken from the soviets assemblies
and handed to Bolshevik dominated executive committees.
What of the next principle, namely the election and recall
of all officials? This lasted slightly longer, namely
around 5 months. By March of 1918, the Bolsheviks started
a systematic campaign against the elective principle in
the workplace, in the military and even in the soviets.
In the workplace, Lenin was arguing for appointed
one-man managers "vested with dictatorial powers" by
April 1918 (see section 10).
In the military, Trotsky
simply decreed the end of elected officers in favour of
appointed officers (see
section 14). And as far as
the soviets go, the Bolsheviks were refusing to hold
elections because they "feared that the opposition parties
would show gains." When elections were held, "Bolshevik
armed force usually overthrew the results" in provincial
towns. Moreover, the Bolsheviks "pack[ed] local soviets"
with representatives of organisations they controlled
"once they could not longer count on an electoral
majority." [Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism, p. 22,
p. 24 and p. 33] This gerrymandering was even practised
at the all-Russian soviet congress (see
section 6
for full details of this Bolshevik onslaught against
the soviets). So much for competition among the parties
within the soviets! And as far as the right of recall
went, the Bolsheviks only supported this when the
workers were recalling the opponents of the Bolsheviks,
not when the workers were recalling them.
In summary, in under six months the Bolsheviks had replaced
election of "all officials" by appointment from above in many
areas of life. Democracy had simply being substituted by
appointed from above (see
section 4 of the appendix on
"How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?"for the deeply
undemocratic reasoning used to justify this top-down and
autocratic system of so-called democracy). The idea that
different parties could compete for votes in the soviets
(or elsewhere) was similarly curtailed and finally abolished.
Then there was the elimination of bureaucracy. As we show
in section 7 of the appendix
on "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?",
a new bureaucratic and centralised system
quickly emerged. Rather than immediately cutting the size
and power of the bureaucracy, it steadily grew. It soon
became the real power in the state (and, ultimately, in
the 1920s became the social base for the rise of Stalin).
Moreover, with the concentration of power in the hands of
the Bolshevik government, the "essence" of bureaucracy
remained as the party leaders became "privileged persons
divorced from the masses and superior to the masses."
They were, for example, more than happy to justify their
suppression of military democracy in terms of them knowing
better than the general population what was best for them
(see section 4 of the appendix on
"How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?" for details).
Then there is the fourth point, namely the elimination of
the standing army, the suppression of "special bodies of
armed men" by the "armed masses." This promise did not
last two months. On the 20th of December, 1917, the
Council of People's Commissars decreed the formation
of a political (secret) police force, the "Extraordinary
Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution." This was more
commonly known by the Russian initials of the first two
terms of its official name: The Cheka. Significantly,
its founding decree stated it was to "watch the press,
saboteurs, strikers, and the Socialist-Revolutionaries
of the Right." [contained in Robert V. Daniels, A
Documentary History of Communism, vol. 1, p. 133]
While it was initially a small organisation, as 1918
progressed it grew in size and activity. By April 1918,
it was being used to break the anarchist movement across
Russia (see section 23
for details). The Cheka soon
became a key instrument of Bolshevik rule, with the full
support of the likes of Lenin and Trotsky. The Cheka
was most definitely a "special body of armed men" and
not the same as the "armed workers." In other words,
Lenin's claims in State and Revolution did not last
two months and in under six months the Bolshevik state
had a mighty group of "armed men" to impose its will.
This is not all. The Bolsheviks also conducted a sweeping
transformation of the military within the first six months
of taking power. During 1917, the soldiers and sailors
(encouraged by the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries)
had formed their own committees and elected officers. In
March 1918, Trotsky simply abolished all this by decree
and replaced it with appointed officers (usually ex-Tsarist
ones). In this way, the Red Army was turned from a workers'
militia (i.e. an armed people) into a "special body"
separate from the general population (see
section 15
for further discussion on this subject).
So instead of eliminating a "special force" above the people,
the Bolsheviks did the opposite by creating a political police
force (the Cheka) and a standing army (in which elections were
a set aside by decree). These were special, professional, armed
forces standing apart from the people and unaccountable to
them. Indeed, they were used to repress strikes and working
class unrest, a topic we now turn to.
Then there is the idea of that Lenin's "workers' state"
would simple be an instrument of violence directed at
the exploiters. This was not how it turned out in practice.
As the Bolsheviks lost popular support, they turned the
violence of the "worker's state" against the workers (and,
of course, the peasants). As noted above, when the Bolsheviks
lost soviet elections they used force to disband them (see
section 6 for further
details). Faced with strikes and
working class protest during this period, the Bolsheviks
responded with state violence (see
section 5 of the appendix on
"What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?" for
details). We will discuss the implications of this for
Lenin's theory below. So, as regards the claim that the
new ("workers") state would repress only the exploiters,
the truth was that it was used to repress whoever opposed
Bolshevik power, including workers and peasants.
As can be seen, after the first six months of Bolshevik
rule not a single measure advocated by Lenin in State
and Revolution existed in "revolutionary" Russia. Some
of the promises were broken in quiet quickly (overnight,
in one case). Most took longer. For example, the
democratisation of the armed forces had been decreed in
late December 1917. However, this was simply acknowledging
the existing revolutionary gains of the military personnel.
Similarly, the Bolsheviks passed a decree on workers' control
which, again, simply acknowledged the actual gains by the
grassroots (and, in fact, limited them for further
development -- see section 9).
This cannot be taken
as evidence of the democratic nature of Bolshevism as
most governments faced with a revolutionary movement will
acknowledge and "legalise" the facts on the ground (until
such time as they can neutralise or destroy them). For
example, the Provisional Government created after the
February Revolution also legalised the revolutionary
gains of the workers (for example, legalising the soviets,
factory committees, unions, strikes and so forth). The
real question is whether Bolshevism continued to encourage
these revolutionary gains once it had consolidated its
power. Which they did not. Indeed, it can be argued that
the Bolsheviks simply managed to do what the Provisional
Government it replaced had failed to do, namely destroy
the various organs of popular self-management created
by the revolutionary masses. So the significant fact is
not that the Bolsheviks recognised the gains of the masses
but that their toleration of the application of what their
followers say were their real principles did not last long
and was quickly ended. Moreover, when the leading Bolsheviks
looked back at this abolition they did not consider it in
any way in contradiction to the principles of "communism"
(see section 14).
We have stressed this period for a reason. This was the
period before the out-break of major Civil War and thus
the policies applied show the actual nature of Bolshevism,
it's essence if you like. This is a significant date
as most Leninists blame the failure of Lenin to live
up to his promises on this even. In reality, the civil
war was not the reason for these betrayals -- simply
because it had not started yet (see
section 16
on when the civil war started and its impact). Each of the
promises were broken in turn months before the civil war
happened. "All Power to the Soviets" became, very quickly,
"All Power to the Bolsheviks." In the words of historian
Marc Ferro:
Where does that leave Lenin's State and Revolution? Well,
modern-day Leninists still urge us to read it, considering
it his greatest work and the best introduction to what
Leninism really stands for. For example, we find Leninist
Tony Cliff calling that book "Lenin's real testament" while,
at the same time, acknowledging that its "message . . . which
was the guide for the first victorious proletarian revolution,
was violated again and again during the civil war." Not a
very good "guide" or that convincing a "message" if it was
not applicable in the very circumstances it was designed to
be applied in (a bit like saying you have an excellent
umbrella but it only works when it is not raining). Moreover,
Cliff is factually incorrect. The Bolsheviks "violated" that
"guide" before the civil war started (i.e. when "the
victories of the Czechoslovak troops over the Red Army in
June 1918, that threatened the greatest danger to the Soviet
republic," to quote Cliff). Similarly, much of the economic
policies implemented by the Bolsheviks had their roots in
that book and the other writings by Lenin from 1917 (see
section 5 of the appendix
on "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?").
[Lenin, vol. 3, p. 161 and p. 18]
Given this, what use is Lenin's State and Revolution? If
this really was the "guide" it is claimed to be, the fact
that it proved totally impractical suggests it should simply
be ignored. Simply put, if the side effects of a revolution
(such as civil war) require it to be ripped up then modern
Leninists should come clean and admit that revolution and
workers' democracy simply do not go together. This was,
after all, the conclusion of Lenin and Trotsky (see
section H.3.8).
As such, they should not recommend Lenin's work as
an example of what Bolshevism aims for. If, however, the
basic idea of workers' democracy and freedom are valid
and considered the only way of achieving socialism then
we need to wonder why the Bolsheviks did not apply them
when they had the chance, particularly when the Makhnovists
in the Ukraine did. Such an investigation would only end up by
concluding the validity of anarchism, not Leninism.
This can be seen from the trajectory of Bolshevik ideology
post-October. Simply put, it was not bothered by the breaking
of the promises of State and Revolution and 1917 in general.
As such, Cliff is just wrong to assert that while the message
of State and Revolution was "violated again and again" it
"was also invoked again and again against bureaucratic
degeneration." [Cliff, Op. Cit., p. 161] Far from it.
Lenin's State and Revolution was rarely invoked against
degeneration by the mainstream Bolshevik leadership. Indeed,
they happily supported party dictatorship and one-man management.
Ironically for Cliff, it was famously invoked against the
state capitalist policies being implemented in early 1918.
This was done by the "Left Communists" around Bukharin in
their defence of workers' self-management against Lenin's
policy! Lenin told them to reread it (along with his other
1917 works) to see that "state capitalism" was his aim all
along! Not only that, he quoted from State and Revolution.
He argued that "accounting and control" was required "for
the proper functioning of the first stage of communist
society." "And this control," he continued, "must be
established not only over 'the insignificant capitalist
minority, over the gentry . . . ', but also over the
workers who 'have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism
. . . '" He ended by saying it was "significant that
Bukharin did not emphasise this." [Collected Works,
vol. 27, pp. 353-4] Needless to say, the Leninists who
urge us to read Lenin's work do not emphasis that either.
As the Bolsheviks lost more and more support, the number
of workers "thoroughly corrupted by capitalism" increased.
How to identify them was easy: they did not support the
party. As historian Richard summarises, a "lack of
identification with the Bolshevik party was treated
as the absence of political consciousness altogether."
[Soviet Communists in Power, p. 94] This is the
logical conclusion of vanguardism, of course (see
section H.5.3).
However, to acknowledge that state
violence was also required to "control" the working
class totally undermines the argument of State and
Revolution.
This is easy to see and to prove theoretically. For
example, by 1920, Lenin was more than happy to admit
that the "workers' state" used violence against the
masses. At a conference of his political police, the
Cheka, Lenin argued as follows:
This was simply summarising Bolshevik practice from the
start. However, in State and Revolution Lenin had
argued for imposing "a series of restrictions on the
freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists."
In 1917 he was "clear that where is suppression there
is also violence, there is no freedom, no democracy."
[Op. Cit., pp. 337-8] So if violence is directed against
the working class then, obviously, there can be "no freedom,
no democracy" for that class. And who identifies who the
"wavering and unstable" elements are? Only the party. Thus
any expression of workers' democracy which conflicts with
the party is a candidate for "revolutionary coercion."
So it probably just as well that the Bolsheviks had
eliminated military democracy in March, 1918.
Trotsky expands on the obvious autocratic implications of
this in 1921 when he attacked the Workers' Opposition's
ideas on economic democracy:
Thus the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik regime
confirmed anarchist theory and predictions about state
socialism. In the words of Luigi Fabbri:
"The outcome would be that a new government - battening on
the revolution and acting throughout the more or less
extended period of its 'provisional' powers - would lay down
the bureaucratic, military and economic foundations of a new
and lasting state organisation, around which a compact network
of interests and privileges would, naturally, be woven. Thus
in a short space of time what one would have would not be the
state abolished, but a state stronger and more energetic than
its predecessor and which would come to exercise those functions
proper to it - the ones Marx recognised as being such -
'keeping the great majority of producers under the yoke of
a numerically small exploiting minority.'
"This is the lesson that the history of all revolutions teaches
us, from the most ancient down to the most recent; and it is
confirmed . . . by the day-to-day developments of the Russian
revolution . . .
"Certainly, [state violence] starts out being used against the
old power . . . But as the new power goes on consolidating its
position . . . ever more frequently and ever more severely,
the mailed fist of dictatorship is turned against the proletariat
itself in whose name that dictatorship was set up and is
operated! . . . the actions of the present Russian government
[of Lenin and Trotsky] have shown that in real terms (and it
could not be otherwise) the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'
means police, military, political and economic dictatorship
exercised over the broad mass of the proletariat in city and
country by the few leaders of the political party.
"The violence of the state always ends up being used AGAINST
ITS SUBJECTS, of whom the vast majority are always proletarians
. . . The new government will be able to expropriate the old
ruling class in whole or in part, but only so as to establish
a new ruling class that will hold the greater part of the
proletariat in subjection.
"That will come to pass if those who make up the government and
the bureaucratic, military and police minority that upholds it
end up becoming the real owners of wealth when the property of
everyone is made over exclusively to the state. In the first
place, the failure of the revolution will be self evident. In
the second, in spite of the illusions that many people create,
the conditions of the proletariat will always be those of a
subject class." ["Anarchy and 'Scientific' Communism", in
The Poverty of Statism, pp. 13-49, Albert Meltzer (ed.),
pp. 26-31]
The standard response by most modern Leninists to arguments
like this about Bolshevism is simply to downplay the
authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks by stressing the
effects of the civil war on shaping their ideology and
actions. However, this fails to address the key issue
of why the reality of Bolshevism (even before the civil
war) was so different to the rhetoric. Anarchists, as we
discuss in "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?",
can point to certain aspects of
Bolshevik ideology and the social structures its favoured
which can explain it. The problems facing the revolution
simply brought to the fore the limitations and dangers
inherent in Leninism and, moreover, shaping them in
distinctive ways. We draw the conclusion that a future
revolution, as it will face similar problems, would be
wise to avoid applying Leninist ideology and the
authoritarian practices it allows and, indeed, promotes
by its support of centralisation, confusion of party power
with class power, vanguardism and equation of state
capitalism with socialism. Leninists, in contrast, can
only stress the fact that the revolution was occurring
in difficult circumstances and hope that "fate" is
more kind to them next time -- as if a revolution, as
Lenin himself noted in 1917, would not occur during
nor create "difficult" circumstances! Equally, they
can draw no lessons (bar repeat what the Bolsheviks
did in 1917 and hope for better objective circumstances!)
from the Russian experience simply because they are blind
to the limitations of their politics. They are thus doomed
to repeat history rather than make it.
So where does this analysis of Lenin's State and
Revolution and the realities of Bolshevik power
get us? The conclusions of dissent Marxist Samuel
Farber seem appropriate here. As he puts it, "the
very fact that a Sovnarkom had been created as a
separate body from the CEC [Central Executive
Committee] of the soviets clearly indicates that,
Lenin's State and Revolution notwithstanding, the
separation of at least the top bodies of the executive
and the legislative wings of the government remained
in effect in the new Soviet system." This suggests
"that State and Revolution did not play a decisive
role as a source of policy guidelines for 'Leninism
in power.'" After all, "immediately after the
Revolution the Bolsheviks established an executive
power . . . as a clearly separate body from the
leading body of the legislature. . . Therefore, some
sections of the contemporary Left appear to have
greatly overestimated the importance that State and
Revolution had for Lenin's government. I would suggest
that this document . . . can be better understood as a
distant, although doubtless sincere [!], socio-political
vision . . . as opposed to its having been a programmatic
political statement, let alone a guide to action, for
the period immediately after the successful seizure of
power." [Farber, Op. Cit., pp. 20-1 and p. 38]
That is one way of looking at it. Another would be to draw
the conclusion that a "distant . . . socio-political vision"
drawn up to sound like a "guide to action" which was then
immediately ignored is, at worse, little more than a deception,
or, at best, a theoretical justification for seizing power
in the face of orthodox Marxist dogma. Whatever the rationale
for Lenin writing his book, one thing is true -- it was never
implemented. Strange, then, that Leninists today urge use to
read it to see what "Lenin really wanted." Particularly given
that so few of its promises were actually implemented (those
that were just recognised the facts on the ground) and all
of were no longer applied in less than six months after the
seize of power.
The best that can be said is that Lenin did want this vision
to be applied but the realities of revolutionary Russia, the
objective problems facing the revolution, made its application
impossible. This is the standard Leninist account of the
revolution. They seem unconcerned that they have just admitted
that Lenin's ideas were utterly impractical for the real
problems that any revolution is most likely to face. This
was the conclusion Lenin himself drew, as did the rest of
the Bolshevik leadership. This can be seen from the actual
practice of "Leninism in power" and the arguments it used.
And yet, for some reason, Lenin's book is still recommended
by modern Leninists!
It seems a truism for modern day Leninists that the
Bolsheviks stood for "soviet power." For example, they
like to note that the Bolsheviks used the slogan "All
Power to the Soviets" in 1917 as evidence. However,
for the Bolsheviks this slogan had a radically different
meaning to what many people would consider it to mean.
As we discuss in
section 25,
it was the anarchists
(and those close to them, like the SR-Maximalists) who
first raised the idea of soviets as the means by which
the masses could run society. This was during the 1905
revolution. At that time, neither the Mensheviks nor
the Bolsheviks viewed the soviets as the possible
framework of a socialist society. This was still the
case in 1917, until Lenin returned to Russia and
convinced the Bolshevik Party that the time was right
to raise the slogan "All Power to the Soviets."
However, as well as this, Lenin also advocated a somewhat
different vision of what a Bolshevik revolution would
result in. Thus we find Lenin in 1917 continually
repeating the basic idea: "The Bolsheviks must assume
power." The Bolsheviks "can and must take state power
into their own hands." He raised the question of "will
the Bolsheviks dare take over full state power alone?"
and answered it: "I have already had occasion . . . to
answer this question in the affirmative." Moreover, "a
political party . . . would have no right to exist, would
be unworthy of the name of party . . . if it refused to
take power when opportunity offers." [Selected Works,
vol. 2, p 328, p. 329 and p. 352]
He equated party power with popular power: "the power of
the Bolsheviks -- that is, the power of the proletariat."
Moreover, he argued that Russia "was ruled by 130,000
landowners . . . and they tell us that Russia will not
be able to be governed by the 240,000 members of the
Bolshevik Party -- governing in the interest of the poor
and against the rich." He stresses that the Bolsheviks
"are not Utopians. We know that just any labourer or
any cook would be incapable of taking over immediately
the administration of the State." Therefore they
"demand that the teaching should be conducted by the
class-consciousness workers and soldiers, that this
should be started immediately." Until then, the
"conscious workers must be in control." [Will the
Bolsheviks Maintain Power? p. 102, pp. 61-62, p. 66
and p. 68]
As such, given this clear and unambiguous position throughout
1917 by Lenin, it seems incredulous, to say the least, for
Leninist Tony Cliff to assert that "[t]o start with Lenin
spoke of the proletariat, the class -- not the Bolshevik
Party -- assuming state power." [Lenin, vol. 3, p. 161]
Surely the title of one of Lenin's most famous pre-October
essays, usually translated as "Can the Bolsheviks Retain
State Power?", should have given the game away? As would,
surely, quoting numerous calls by Lenin for the Bolsheviks
to seize power? Apparently not.
This means, of course, Lenin is admitting that the working
class in Russia would not have power under the Bolsheviks.
Rather than "the poor" governing society directly, we would
have the Bolsheviks governing in their interests. Thus,
rather than soviet power as such, the Bolsheviks aimed for
"party power through the soviets" -- a radically different
position. And as we discuss in the
next section, when soviet
power clashed with party power the former was always
sacrificed to ensure the latter. As we indicate in
section H.1.2,
this support for party power before the
revolution was soon transformed into a defence for party
dictatorship after the Bolsheviks had seized power. However,
we should not forget, to quote one historian, that the
Bolshevik leaders "anticipated a 'dictatorship of the
proletariat,' and that concept was a good deal closer to
a party dictatorship in Lenin's 1917 usage than revisionist
scholars sometimes suggest." [Sheila Fitzpatrick, "The Legacy
of the Civil War," pp. 385-398, Party, State, and Society
in the Russian Civil War, Diane P. Koenker, William G.
Rosenberg and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds.), p. 388]
While modern-day Leninists tend to stress the assumption of
power by the soviets as the goal of the Bolshevik revolution,
the Bolsheviks themselves were more honest about it. For
example, Trotsky quotes Lenin at the first soviet congress
stating that it was "not true to say that no party exists
which is ready to assume power; such a party exists: this
is our party." Moreover, "[o]ur party is ready to assume
power." As the Second Congress approached, Lenin "rebuked
those who connected the uprising with the Second Congress
of the Soviets." He protested against Trotsky's argument
that they needed a Bolshevik majority at the Second
Congress, arguing (according to Trotsky) that "[w]e have
to win power and not tie ourselves to the Congress. It
was ridiculous and absurd to warn the enemy about the
date of the rising . . . First the party must seize power,
arms in hand, and then we could talk about the Congress."
[On Lenin, p. 71, p. 85]
Trotsky argued that "the party could not seize power by
itself, independently of the Soviets and behind its back.
This would have been a mistake . . . [as the] soldiers
knew their delegates in the Soviet; it was through the
Soviet that they knew the party. If the uprising had
taken place behind the back of the Soviet, independently
of it, without its authority . . . there might have been
a dangerous confusion among the troops." Significantly,
Trotsky made no mention of the proletariat. Finally,
Lenin came over to Trotsky's position, saying "Oh, all
right, one can proceed in this fashion as well, provided
we seize power." [Op. Cit., p. 86 and p. 89]
Trotsky made similar arguments in his History of the
Russian Revolution and his article Lessons of October.
Discussing the July Days of 1917, for example, Trotsky
discusses whether (to quote the title of the relevant
chapter) "Could the Bolsheviks have seized the Power in
July?" and noted, in passing, the army "was far from
ready to raise an insurrection in order to give the
power to the Bolshevik Party." As far as the workers
were concerned, although "inclining toward the Bolsheviks
in its overwhelming majority, had still not broken the
umbilical cord attaching it to the Compromisers" and
so the Bolsheviks could not have "seized the helm in
July." He then lists other parts of the country where
the soviets were ready to take power. He states that
in "a majority of provinces and county seats, the
situation was incomparably less favourable" simply
because the Bolsheviks were not as well supported.
Later he notes that "[m]any of the provincial soviets
had already, before the July days, become organs of
power." Thus Trotsky was only interested in whether
the workers could have put the Bolsheviks in power or
not rather than were the soviets able to take power
themselves. Party power was the decisive criteria.
[History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 2, p. 78,
p. 77, p. 78, p. 81 and p. 281]
This can be seen from the October insurrection. Trotsky
again admits that the "Bolsheviks could have seized power
in Petrograd at the beginning of July" but "they could
not have held it." However, by September the Bolsheviks
had gained majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets.
The second Congress of Soviets was approaching. The time
was considered appropriate to think of insurrection. By
in whose name and for what end? Trotsky makes it clear.
"A revolutionary party is interested in legal coverings,"
he argued and so the party could use the defending the
second Congress of Soviets as the means to justify its
seizure of power. He raises the question: "Would it not
have been simpler . . . to summon the insurrection directly
in the name of the party?" and answers it in the negative.
"It would be an obvious mistake," he argued, "to identify
the strength of the Bolshevik party with the strength of
the soviets led by it. The latter was much greater than
the former. However, without the former it would have
been mere impotence." He then quotes numerous Bolshevik
delegates arguing that the masses would follow the soviet,
not the party. Hence the importance of seizing power in
the name of the soviets, regardless of the fact it was
the Bolshevik party who would in practice hold "all power."
Trotsky quotes Lenin are asking "Who is to seize power?"
"That is now of no importance," argued Lenin. "Let the
Military Revolutionary Committee take it, or 'some other
institution,' which will declare that it will surrender
the power only to the genuine representatives of the
interests of the people." Trotsky notes that "some other
institution" was a "conspirative designation for the Central
Committee of the Bolsheviks." And who turned out to be
the "genuine representatives of the interests of the people"?
By amazing co-incidence the Bolsheviks, the members of
whose Central Committee formed the first "soviet"
government. [Op. Cit., vol. 3, p. 265, p. 259, p. 262,
p. 263 and p. 267]
As we discuss in section H.3.11,
Trotsky was simply
repeating the same instrumentalist arguments he had
made earlier. Clearly, the support for the soviets
was purely instrumental, simply a means of securing
party power. For Bolshevism, the party was the key
institution of proletarian revolution:
Thus the soviets existed to allow the party to influence
the workers. What of the workers running society directly?
What if the workers reject the decisions of the party?
After all, before the revolution Lenin "more than once
repeated that the masses are far to the left of the party,
just as the party is to the left of the Central Committee."
[Trotsky, Op. Cit., p. 258] What happens when the workers
refuse to be set in motion by the party but instead set
themselves in motion and reject the Bolsheviks? What then
for the soviets? Looking at the logic of Trotsky's
instrumentalist perspective, in such a case we would
predict that the soviets would have to be tamed (by
whatever means possible) in favour of party power (the
real goal). And this is what did happen. The fate of the
soviets after October prove that the Bolsheviks did not,
in fact, seek soviet power without doubt (see
next section).
And as we discuss in section 4 of
the appendix on "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?",
the peculiar Bolshevik
definition of "soviet power" allowed them to justify the
elimination of from the bottom-up grassroots democracy in
the military and in the workplace with top-down appointments.
Thus we have a distinctly strange meaning by the expression
"All Power to the Soviets." In practice, it meant that the
soviets alienate its power to a Bolshevik government. This
is what the Bolsheviks considered as "soviet power," namely
party power, pure and simple. As the Central Committee argued
in November 1917, "it is impossible to refuse a purely Bolshevik
government without treason to the slogan of the power of the
Soviets, since a majority at the Second All-Russian Congress
of Soviets . . . handed power over to this government."
[contained in Robert v. Daniels (ed.), A Documentary
History of Communism, vol. 1, pp. 128-9] Lenin was clear,
arguing mere days after the October Revolution that "our
present slogan is: No Compromise, i.e. for a homogeneous
Bolshevik government." [quoted by Daniels, Conscience of
the Revolution, p. 65]
In other words, "soviet power" exists when the soviets hand
power over the someone else (namely the Bolshevik leaders)!
The difference is important, "for the Anarchists declared,
if 'power' really should belong to the soviets, it could not
belong to the Bolshevik party, and if it should belong to
that Party, as the Bolsheviks envisaged, it could not belong
to the soviets." [Voline, The Unknown Revolution, p. 213]
Which means that while anarchists and Leninists both use
the expression "All Power to the Soviets" it does not mean
they mean exactly the same thing by it. In practice the
Bolshevik vision simply replaced the power of the soviets
with a "soviet power" above them:
Isolated from the masses, holding power on their behalf,
the Bolshevik party could not help being influenced by
the realities of their position in society and the social
relationships produced by statist forms. Far from being
the servants of the people, they become upon the seizing
of power their masters. As we argue in
section 7 of the appendix
on "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?",
the experience of Bolshevism in power confirmed anarchist
fears that the so-called "workers' state" would quickly
become a danger to the revolution, corrupting those who
held power and generating a bureaucracy around the new
state bodies which came into conflict with both the ruling
party and the masses. Placed above the people, isolated
from them by centralisation of power, the Bolsheviks
pre-revolutionary aim for party power unsurprising became
in practice party dictatorship.
In less than a year, by July 1918, the soviet regime was
a de facto party dictatorship. The theoretical revisions
soon followed. Lenin, for example, was proclaiming in
early December 1918 that while legalising the Mensheviks
the Bolsheviks would "reserve state power for ourselves,
and for ourselves alone." [Collected Works, vol. 28,
p. 213] Victor Serge records how when he arrived in Russia
in the following month he discovered "a colourless article"
signed by Zinoviev on "The Monopoly of Power" which said
"Our Party rules alone . . . it will not allow anyone
. . . The false democratic liberties demanded by the
counter-revolution." [Memoirs of a Revolutionary,
p. 69] Serge, like most Bolsheviks, embraced this
perspective wholeheartedly. For example, when the
Bolsheviks published Bakunin's "confession" to the
Tsar in 1921 (in an attempt to discredit anarchism)
"Serge seized on Bakunin's passage concerning the need
for dictatorial rule in Russia, suggesting that
'already in 1848 Bakunin had presaged Bolshevism.'"
[Lawrence D. Orton, "introduction," The Confession
of Mikhail Bakunin, p. 21] At the time Bakunin wrote
his "confession" he was not an anarchist. At the time
Serge wrote his comments, he was a leading Bolshevik
and reflecting mainstream Bolshevik ideology.
Indeed, so important was it considered by them, the
Bolsheviks revised their theory of the state to include
this particular lesson of their revolution (see
section H.3.8
for details). As noted in
section H.1.2, all the
leading Bolsheviks were talking about the "dictatorship
of the party" and continued to do so until their deaths.
Such a position, incidentally, is hard to square with
support for soviet power in any meaningful term (although
it is easy to square with an instrumentalist position
on workers' councils as a means to party power). It was
only in the mid-30s that Serge started to revise his
position for this position (Trotsky still subscribed to
it). By the early 1940s, he wrote that "[a]gainst the Party
the anarchists were right when they inscribed on their
black banners, 'There is no worse poison than power' --
meaning absolute power. From now on the psychosis of
power was to captive the great majority of the leadership,
especially at the lower levels." [Serge, Op. Cit., p. 100]
Nor can the effects of the civil war explain this shift.
As we discuss in the
next section, the Bolshevik assault
on the soviets and their power started in the spring of
1918, months before the start of large scale civil war.
And it should be stressed that the Bolsheviks were not
at all bothered by the creation of party dictatorship
over the soviets. Indeed, in spite of ruling over a one
party state Lenin was arguing in November 1918 that
"Soviet power is a million times more democratic than
the most democratic bourgeois republic." How can that
be when the workers do not run society nor have a say
in who rules them? When Karl Kautsky raised this issue,
Lenin replied by saying he "fails to see the class
nature of the state apparatus, of the machinery of
state . . . The Soviet government is the first in
the world . . . to enlist the people, specifically
the exploited people in the work of administration."
[Collected Works, vol. 28, p. 247 and p. 248]
However, the key issue is not whether workers take part
in the state machinery but whether they determine the
policies that are being implemented, i.e. whether the
masses are running their own lives. After all, as
Ante Ciliga pointed out, the Stalinist GPU (secret
police) "liked to boast of the working class origin of
its henchmen." One of his fellow prisoners retorted to
such claims by pointing out they were "wrong to believe
that in the days the Tsar the gaolers were recruited
from among the dukes and the executioners from among
the princes!" [The Russian Engima, pp. 255-6] Simply
put, just because the state administration is made
up of bureaucrats who were originally working class
does not mean that the working class, as a class,
manages society.
In December of that year Lenin went one further and
noted that at the Sixth Soviet Congress "the Bolsheviks
had 97 per cent" of delegates, i.e. "practically all
representatives of the workers and peasants of the
whole of Russia." This was proof of "how stupid and
ridiculous is the bourgeois fairy-tale about the
Bolsheviks only having minority support." [Op. Cit.,
pp. 355-6] Given that the workers and peasants had no
real choice in who to vote for, can this result be
surprising? Of course not. While the Bolsheviks had
mass support a year previously, pointing to election
results under a dictatorship where all other parties
and groups are subject to state repression is hardly
convincing evidence for current support. Needless
to say, Stalin (like a host of other dictators)
made similar claims on similarly dubious election
results. If the Bolsheviks were sincere in their
support for soviet power then they would have
tried to organise genuine soviet elections. This
was possible even during the civil war as the
example of the Makhnovists showed.
So, in a nutshell, the Bolsheviks did not fundamentally
support the goal of soviet power. Rather, they aimed to
create a "soviet power," a Bolshevik power above the
soviets which derived its legitimacy from them. However,
if the soviets conflicted with that power, it were the
soviets which were repudiated not party power. Thus the
result of Bolshevik ideology was the marginalisation of
the soviets and their replacement by Bolshevik dictatorship.
This process started before the civil war and can be traced
to the nature of the state as well as the underlying
assumptions of Bolshevik ideology (see
"How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?").
As indicated in the last question, the last thing which
the Bolsheviks wanted was "all power to the soviets."
Rather they wanted the soviets to hand over that power
to a Bolshevik government. As the people in liberal
capitalist politics, the soviets were "sovereign" in
name only. They were expected to delegate power to a
government. Like the "sovereign people" of bourgeois
republics, the soviets were much praised but in practice
ignored by those with real power.
In such a situation, we would expect the soviets to
play no meaningful role in the new "workers' state."
Under such a centralised system, we would expect the
soviets to become little more than a fig-leaf for party
power. Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what they did
become. As we discuss in
section 7 of the appendix on
"How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?", anarchists are
not surprised by this as the centralisation so beloved
by Marxists is designed to empower the few at the centre
and marginalise the many at the circumference.
The very first act of the Bolshevik revolution was for
the Second Congress of Soviets to alienate its power and
hand it over to the "Council of People's Commissars." This
was the new government and was totally Bolshevik in make-up
(the Left SRs later joined it, although the Bolsheviks
always maintained control). Thus the first act of the
revolution was the creation of a power above the soviets.
Although derived from the soviet congress, it was not
identical to it. Thus the Bolshevik "workers' state" or
"semi-state" started to have the same characteristics as
the normal state (see section H.3.7
for a discussion of
what marks a state).
The subsequent marginalisation of the soviets in the "soviet"
state occurred from top to bottom should not, therefore be
considered an accident or a surprise. The Bolshevik desire
for party power within a highly centralised state could have
no other effect. At the top, the Central Executive Committee
(CEC or VTsIK) was quickly marginalised from power. This
body was meant to be the highest organ of soviet power but,
in practice, it was sidelined by the Bolshevik government.
This can be seen when, just four days after seizing power,
the Bolshevik Council of People's Commissars (CPC or Sovnarkom)
"unilaterally arrogated to itself legislative power simply by
promulgating a decree to this effect. This was, effectively,
a Bolshevik coup d'etat that made clear the government's
(and party's) pre-eminence over the soviets and their
executive organ. Increasingly, the Bolsheviks relied upon
the appointment from above of commissars with plenipotentiary
powers, and they split up and reconstituted fractious Soviets
and intimidated political opponents." [Neil Harding, Leninism,
p. 253] Strange actions for a party proclaiming it was acting
to ensure "All power to the soviets" (as we discussed in the
last section, this was
always considered by Lenin as little
more than a slogan to hide the fact that the party would be
in power).
It is doubtful that when readers of Lenin's State and
Revolution read his argument for combining legislative
and executive powers into one body, they had this in mind!
But then, as we discussed in
section 4, that work was
never applied in practice so we should not be too surprised
by this turn of events. One thing is sure, four days after
the "soviet" revolution the soviets had been replaced as
the effective power in society by a handful of Bolshevik
leaders. So the Bolsheviks immediately created a power
above the soviets in the form of the CPC. Lenin's argument
in The State and Revolution that, like the Paris Commune,
the workers' state would be based on a fusion of executive
and administrative functions in the hands of the workers'
delegates did not last one night. In reality, the Bolshevik
party was the real power in "soviet" Russia.
Given that the All-Russian central Executive Committee
of Soviets (VTsIK) was dominated by Bolsheviks, it comes
as no surprise to discover it was used to augment this
centralisation of power into the hands of the party.
The VTsIK ("charged by the October revolution with
controlling the government," the Sovnarkom) was "used
not to control but rather extend the authority and
centralising fiat of the government. That was the work
of Iakov Sverdlov, the VTsIK chairman, who -- in close
collaboration with Lenin as chairman of the Sovnarkom
-- ensured that the government decrees and ordinances
were by the VTsIK and that they were thus endowed with
Soviet legitimacy when they were sent to provincial
soviet executive committees for transmission to all
local soviets . . . To achieve that, Sverdlov had to
reduce the 'Soviet Parliament' to nothing more than
an 'administrative branch' (as Sukhanov put it) of the
Sovnarkom. Using his position as the VTsIK chairman and
his tight control over its praesidium and the large,
disciplined and compliant Bolshevik majority in the
plenary assembly, Sverdlov isolated the opposition and
rendered it impotent. So successful was he that, by
early December 1917, Sukhanov had already written off
the VTsIK as 'a sorry parody of a revolutionary
parliament,' while for the Bolshevik, Martin
Latsis-Zurabs, the VTsIL was not even a good
rubberstamp. Latsis campaigned vigorously in March
and April 1918 for the VTsIK's abolition: with its
'idle, long-winded talk and its incapacity for
productive work' the VTsIK merely held up the work
of government, he claimed. And he may have had a
point: during the period of 1917 to 1918, the
Sovnarkom issued 474 decrees, the VTsIK a mere
62." [Israel Getzler, Soviets as Agents of
Democratisation, p. 27]
This process was not an accident. Far from it. In
fact, the Bolshevik chairman Sverdlov knew exactly
what he was doing. This included modifying the way
the CEC worked:
Under the Bolsheviks, the presidium was converted "into
the de facto centre of power within VTsIK." It "began
to award representations to groups and factions which
supported the government. With the VTsIK becoming ever
more unwieldy in size by the day, the presidium began
to expand its activities." The presidium was used "to
circumvent general meetings." Thus the Bolsheviks were
able "to increase the power of the presidium, postpone
regular sessions, and present VTsIK with policies which
had already been implemented by the Sovnarkon. Even
in the presidium itself very few people determined
policy." [Charles Duval, Op. Cit., p.7, p. 8 and p. 18]
So, from the very outset, the VTsIK was overshadowed by
the "Council of People's Commissars" (CPC). In the first
year, only 68 of 480 decrees issued by the CPC were
actually submitted to the Soviet Central Executive Committee,
and even fewer were actually drafted by it. The VTsIK functions
"were never clearly delineated, even in the constitution,
despite vigorous attempts by the Left SRs . . . that Lenin
never saw this highest soviet organ as the genuine equal
of his cabin and that the Bolsheviks deliberated obstructed
efforts at clarification is [a] convincing" conclusion to
draw. It should be stressed that this process started before
the outbreak of civil war in late May, 1918. After that
the All-Russian Congress of soviets, which convened every
three months or so during the first year of the revolution,
met annually thereafter. Its elected VTsIK "also began to
meet less frequently, and at the height of the civil war
in late 1918 and throughout 1919, it never once met in full
session." [Carmen Sirianni, Workers' Control and Socialist
Democracy, pp. 203-4]
The marginalisation of the soviets can be seen from the
decision on whether to continue the war against Germany.
As Cornelius Castoriadis notes, under Lenin "[c]ollectively,
the only real instance of power is the Party, and very soon,
only the summits of the Party. Immediately after the seizure
of power the soviets as institutions are reduced to the status
of pure window-dressing (we need only look at the fact that,
already at the beginning of 1918 in the discussions leading
up to the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, their role was absolutely
nil)." [The role of Bolshevik Ideology in the birth of the
Bureaucracy, p. 97] In fact, on the 26th of February, 1918,
the Soviet Executive "began a survey of 200 local soviets;
by 10 March 1918 a majority (105-95) had come out in favour
of a revolutionary war, although the soviets in the two
capitals voted . . . to accept a separate peace." [Geoffrey
Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War, p. 128] This
survey was ignored by the Bolshevik Central Committee which
voted 4 against, 4 abstain and 5 for it. This took Russia
out of the Great War but handed over massive areas to
imperialist Germany. The controversial treaty was ratified
at the Fourth Soviet Congress, unsurprisingly as the Bolshevik
majority simply followed the orders of their Central Committee.
It would be pointless to go over the arguments of the rights
and wrongs of the decision here, the point is that the 13
members of the Bolshevik Central Committee decided the
future faith of Russia in this vote. The soviets were simply
ignored in spite of the fact it was possible to consult them
fully. Clearly, "soviet power" meant little more than
window-dressing for Bolshevik power.
Thus, at the top summits of the state, the soviets had
been marginalised by the Bolsheviks from day one. Far
from having "all power" their CEC had given that to a
Bolshevik government. Rather than exercise real power,
it's basic aim was to control those who did exercise it.
And the Bolsheviks successfully acted to undermine even
this function.
If this was happening at the top, what was the situation
at the grassroots? Here, too, oligarchic tendencies in the
soviets increased post-October, with "[e]ffective power
in the local soviets relentlessly gravitated to the executive
committees, and especially their presidia. Plenary sessions
became increasingly symbolic and ineffectual." The party was
"successful in gaining control of soviet executives in the
cities and at uezd and guberniya levels. These executive
bodies were usually able to control soviet congresses, though
the party often disbanded congresses that opposed major
aspects of current policies." Local soviets "had little input
into the formation of national policy" and "[e]ven at higher
levels, institutional power shifted away from the soviets."
[C. Sirianni, Op. Cit., p. 204 and p. 203] The soviets quickly
had become rubber-stamps for the Communist government, with
the Soviet Constitution of 1918 codifying the centralisation
of power and top-down decision making. Local soviets were
expected to "carry out all orders of the respective higher
organs of the soviet power" (i.e. to carry out the commands
of the central government).
This was not all. While having popular support in October
1917, the realities of "Leninism in power" soon saw a
backlash develop. The Bolsheviks started to loose popular
support to opposition groups like the Mensheviks and SRs
(left and right). This growing opposition was reflected in
two ways. Firstly, a rise in working class protests in the
form of strikes and independent organisations. Secondly, there was a rise in votes for
the opposition parties in soviet elections. Faced with this,
the Bolsheviks responded in three ways, delaying elections.
gerrymandering or force. We will discuss each in turn.
Lenin argued in mid-April 1918 that the "socialist character
of Soviet, i.e. proletarian, democracy" lies, in part, in
because "the people themselves determine the order and time
of elections." [The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,
pp. 36-7] However, the reality in the grassroots was somewhat
different. There "the government [was] continually postponed
the new general elections to the Petrograd Soviet, the term of
which had ended in March 1918" because it "feared that the
opposition parties would show gains. This fear was well
founded since in the period immediately preceding 25 January,
in those Petrograd factories where the workers had decided
to hold new elections, the Mensheviks, SRs, and non-affiliated
candidates had won about half the seats." [Samuel Farber,
Before Stalinism, p. 22] In Yaroslavl, the more the
Bolsheviks tried to postpone the elections, the more the
idea of holding new elections became an issue itself." When
the Bolsheviks gave in and held elections in early April,
the Mensheviks won 47 of the 98 seats, the Bolsheviks 38
and the SRs 13. ["The Mensheviks' Political Comeback:
The Elections to the Provincial City Soviets in Spring
1918", The Russian Review, vol. 42, pp. 1-50, p. 18]
The fate of the Yaroslavl soviet will
be discussed shorted. As Geoffrey Swain summaries, Menshevik
and SR "successes in recalling Bolshevik delegates from the
soviets had forced the Bolsheviks increasingly to delay
by-elections." [The Origins of the Russian Civil War, p. 91]
As well as postponing elections and recall, the Bolsheviks
also quickly turned to gerrymandering the soviets to ensure
the stability of their majority in the soviets. In this
they made use of certain institutional problems the
soviets had had from the start. On the day which the
Petrograd soviet was formed in 1917, the Bolshevik
Shlyapnikov "proposed that each socialist party should
have the right to two seats in the provisional executive
committee of the soviet." This was "designed, initially,
to give the Bolsheviks a decent showing, for they were
only a small minority of the initiating group." It was
agreed. However, the "result was that members of a dozen
different parties and organisations (trades unions,
co-operative movements, etc.) entered the executive
committee. They called themselves 'representatives'
(of their organisations) and, by virtue of this, they
speedily eliminated from their discussions the committee
members chosen by the general assembly although they were
the true founders of the Soviet." This meant, for example,
Bolshevik co-founders of the soviet made way for such
people as Kamenev and Stalin. Thus the make-up of the
soviet executive committee was decided upon by "the
leadership of each organisation, its executive officers,
and not with the [soviet] assembly. The assembly had lost
its right to control." Thus, for example, the Bolshevik
central committee member Yoffe became the presidium of
the soviet of district committees without being elected
by anyone represented at those soviets. "After October,
the Bolsheviks were more systematic in their use of these
methods, but there was a difference: there were now no
truly free elections that might have put a brake to a
procedure that could only benefit the Bolshevik party."
[Marc Ferro, October 1917, p. 191 and p. 195]
The effects of this can be seen in Petrograd soviet
elections of June 1918. In these the Bolsheviks "lost
the absolute majority in the soviet they had previously
enjoyed" but remained its largest party. However, the
results of these elections were irrelevant. This was
because "under regulations prepared by the Bolsheviks
and adopted by the 'old' Petrograd soviet, more than
half of the projected 700-plus deputies in the 'new'
soviet were to be elected by the Bolshevik-dominated
district soviets, trade unions, factory committees,
Red Army and naval units, and district worker
conferences: thus, the Bolsheviks were assured of
a solid majority even before factory voting began."
[Alexander Rabinowitch, Early Disenchantment with
Bolshevik Rule, p. 45] To be specific, the number
of delegates elected directly from the workplace made
up a mere third of the new soviet (i.e. only 260 of the
700 plus deputies in the new soviet were elected directly
from the factories): "It was this arbitrary 'stacking' of
the new soviet, much more than election of 'dead souls'
from shut-down factories, unfair campaign practices,
falsification of the vote, or direct repression, that
gave the Bolsheviks an unfair advantage in the contest."
[Alexander Rabinowitch, The Petrograd First City
District Soviet during the Civil War, p. 140]
In other words, the Bolsheviks gerrymandered and packed
soviets to remain in power, so distorting the soviet
structure to ensure Bolshevik dominance. This practice
seems to have been commonplace. In Saratov, as in Petrograd,
"the Bolsheviks, fearing that they would lose elections,
changed the electoral rules . . . in addition to the
delegates elected directly at the factories, the trade
unions -- but only those in favour of soviet power, in
other words supporters of the Bolsheviks and Left SRs --
were given representation. Similarly, the political
parties supporting Soviet power automatically received
twenty-five seats in the soviets. Needless to say, these
rules heavily favoured the ruling parties" as the
Mensheviks and SRs "were regarded by the Bolsheviks as
being against Soviet power." [Brovkin, Op. Cit., p. 30]
A similar situation existed in Moscow. For example, the
largest single union in the soviet in 1920 was that of
soviet employees with 140 deputies (9% of the total),
followed by the metal workers with 121 (8%). In total,
the bureaucracies of the four biggest trade unions had
29.5% of delegates in the Moscow soviet. This packing
of the soviet by the trade union bureaucracy existed
in 1918 as well, ensuring the Bolsheviks were insulated
from popular opposition and the recall of workplace
delegates by their electors. Another form of
gerrymandering was uniting areas of Bolshevik strength
"for electoral purposes with places where they were weak,
such as the creation of a single constituency out of the
Moscow food administration (MPO) and the Cheka in February
1920." [Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists in Power, p. 179
and p. 178]
However, this activity was mild compared to the Bolshevik
response to soviet elections which did not go their way.
According to one historian, by the spring of 1918 "Menshevik
newspapers and activists in the trade unions, the Soviets,
and the factories had made a considerable impact on a working
class which was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the
Bolshevik regime, so much so that in many places the Bolsheviks
felt constrained to dissolve Soviets or prevent re-elections
where Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries had gained
majorities." [Israel Getzler, Martov, p. 179] This is
confirmed by other sources. "By the middle of 1918," notes
Leonard Schapiro, "the Mensheviks could claim with some
justification that large numbers of the industrial working
class were now behind them, and that for the systematic
dispersal and packing of the soviets, and the mass arrests
at workers' meetings and congresses, their party could
eventually have won power by its policy of constitutional
opposition. In the elections to the soviets which were
taking place in the spring of 1918 throughout Russia,
arrests, military dispersal, even shootings followed
whenever Mensheviks succeeded in winning majorities or
a substantial representation." [The Origin of the
Communist Autocracy, p. 191]
For example, the Mensheviks "made something of a comeback
about Saratov workers in the spring of 1918, for which the
Bolsheviks expelled them from the soviet." [Donald J.
Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War, p. 187] Izhevsk,
a town of 100,000 with an armaments industry which was
the main suppliers of rifles to the Tzar's Army, experienced
a swing to the left by the time of the October revolution.
The Bolsheviks and SR-Maximalists became the majority and
with a vote 92 to 58 for the soviet to assume power. After
a revolt by SR-Maximalist Red Guards against the Bolshevik
plans for a centralised Red Army in April, 1918, the
Bolsheviks became the sole power. However, in the May
elections the Mensheviks and [right] SRs "experienced a
dramatic revival" and for "the first time since September
1917, these two parties constituted a majority in the
Soviet by winning seventy of 135 seats." The Bolsheviks
"simply refused to acquiesce to the popular mandate of
the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries." In June,
the Bolshevik leadership "appealed to the Karzan' Soviet
. . . for assistance." The troops sent along with the
Bolshevik dominated Red Guards "abrogated the results
of the May and June elections" and imprisoned the SR
and Menshevik soviet delegates. The summer of 1918 also
saw victories for the SRs and Mensheviks in the soviet
elections in Votkinsk, a steel town near Izhevsk. "As
in Izhevsk the Bolsheviks voided the elections." [Stephan
M. Merk, "The 'Class-Tragedy' of Izhevsk: Working Class
Opposition to Bolshevism in 1918", pp. 176-90, Russian
History, vol. 2, no. 2, p. 181 and p. 186]
However, the most in depth account of this destruction
of soviet is found in the research of Vladimir Brovkin.
According to him, there "are three factors" which emerge
from the soviet election results in the spring of 1918. These
are, firstly, "the impressive success of the Menshevik-SR
opposition" in those elections in all regions in European
Russia. The second "is the Bolshevik practice of outright
disbandment of the Menshevik-SR-controlled soviets. The
third is the subsequent wave of anti-Bolshevik uprisings."
In fact, "in all provincial capitals of European Russia
where elections were held on which there are data, the
Mensheviks and the SRs won majorities on the city
soviets in the spring of 1918." Brovkin stresses that
the "process of the Menshevik-SR electoral victories
threatened Bolshevik power. That is why in the course
of the spring and summer of 1918, the soviet assemblies
were disbanded in most cities and villages. To stay in
power, the Bolsheviks had to destroy the soviets. . .
These steps generated a far-reaching transformation in
the soviet system, which remained 'soviet' in name
only." Brovkin presents accounts from numerous towns
and cities. As an example, he discusses Tver' where
the "escalation of political tensions followed the
already familiar pattern" as the "victory of the
opposition at the polls" in April 1918 "brought about
an intensification of the Bolshevik repression. Strikes,
protests, and marches in Tver' lead to the imposition
of martial law." [Brovkin, Op. Cit., p. 46,
p. 47, p. 48 and p. 11] Thus Bolshevik armed force not only
overthrew the election results, it also suppressed working
class protest against such actions. (Brovkin's book The
Mensheviks after October contains the same information
as his article).
This Bolshevik attack on the soviets usually started with
attempts to stop new elections. For example, after a
demonstration in Petrograd in favour of the Constituent
Assembly was repressed by the Bolsheviks in mid-January
1918, calls for new elections to the soviet occurred in
many factories. "Despite the efforts of the Bolsheviks
and the Factory Committees they controlled, the movement
for new elections to the soviet spread to more than twenty
factories by early February and resulted in the election
of fifty delegates: thirty-six SRs, seven Mensheviks and
seven non-party." However, the Bolsheviks "unwillingness
to recognise the elections and to seat new delegates
pushed a group of Socialists to . . . lay plans for an
alternative workers' forum . . . what was later to become
the Assembly of Workers' Plenipotentiaries." [Scott Smith,
"The Social-Revolutionaries and the Dilemma of Civil War",
The Bolsheviks in Russian Society, pp. 83-104, Vladimir
N. Brovkin (Ed.), pp. 85-86] This forum, like all forms of working class protest, was
crushed by the Bolshevik state. By the time the elections
were held, in June 1918, the civil war had started
(undoubtedly favouring the Bolsheviks) and the Bolsheviks
had secured their majority by packing the soviet with
non-workplace "representatives."
In Tula, again in the spring of 1918, local Bolsheviks
reported to the Bolshevik Central Committee that the
"Bolshevik deputies began to be recalled one after
another . . . our situation became shakier with passing
day. We were forced to block new elections to the soviet
and even not to recognise them where they had taken place
not in our favour." In the end, the local party leader
was forced to abolish the city soviet and to vest power
in the Provincial Executive Committee. This refused to
convene a plenum of the city soviet for more than two
months, knowing that newly elected delegates were
non-Bolshevik. [Smith, Op. Cit., p. 87]
In Yaroslavl', the newly elected soviet convened on April
9th, 1918, and when it elected a Menshevik chairman, "the
Bolshevik delegation walked out and declared the soviet
dissolved. In response, workers in the city went out on
strike, which the Bolsheviks answered by arresting the
strike committee and threatening to dismiss the strikers
and replace them with unemployed workers." This failed and
the Bolsheviks were forced to hold new elections, which
they lost. Then "the Bolsheviks dissolved this soviet as
well and places the city under martial law." A similar
event occurred in Riazan' (again in April) and, again,
the Bolsheviks "promptly dissolved the soviet and declared
a dictatorship under a Military-Revolutionary Committee."
[Op. Cit., pp. 88-9]
The opposition parties raised such issues at the All-Russian
Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK), to little avail.
On the 11th of April, one "protested that non-Bolshevik controlled
soviets were being dispersed by armed force, and wanted to
discuss the issue." The chairman "refus[ed] to include it in
the agenda because of lack of supporting material" and such
information be submitted to the presidium of the soviet. The
majority (i.e. the Bolsheviks) "supported their chairman"
and the facts were "submitted . . . to the presidium, where
they apparently remained." It should be noted that the "same
fate befell attempts to challenge the arrests of Moscow
anarchists by the government on 12 April." The chairman's
"handling of the anarchist matter ended its serious discussion
in the VTsIK." [Charles Duval, Op. Cit., pp. 13-14] Given that
the VTsIK was meant to be the highest soviet body between
congresses, the lack of concern for Bolshevik repression
against soviets and opposition groups clearly shows the
Bolshevik contempt for soviet democracy.
Needless to say, this destruction of soviet democracy
continued during the civil war. For example, the
Bolsheviks simply rejected the voice of people and
would refuse to accept an election result. Emma
Goldman attended an election meeting of bakers in Moscow
in March, 1920. "It was," she said, "the most exciting
gathering I had witnessed in Russia." However the "chosen
representative, an Anarchist, had been refused his mandate
by the Soviet authorities. It was the third time the
workers gathered to re-elect their delegate . . . and
every time they elected the same man. The Communist
candidate opposing him was Semashko, the Commissar of
the Department of Health . . . [who] raved against the
workers for choosing a non-Communist, called anathema
upon their heads, and threatened them with the Tcheka
and the curtailment of their rations. But he had no
effect on the audience except to emphasise their
opposition to him, and to arouse antagonism against the
party he represented. The workers' choice was repudiated
by the authorities by the authorities and later even
arrested and imprisoned." After a hunger strike, they
were released. In spite of chekists with loaded guns
attending union meetings, the bakers "would not be
intimidated" and threatened a strike unless they
were permitted to elect their own candidate. This ensured
the bakers' demands were met. [My Disillusionment in
Russia, pp. 88-9]
Unsurprisingly, "there is a mass of evidence to support
the Menshevik accusations of electoral malpractice" during
elections in May 1920. And in spite of Menshevik "declaration
of support for the Soviet regime against the Poles" the
party was "still subject to harassment." [Skawa, Op. Cit.,
p. 178]
This gerrymandering was not limited to just local soviets.
The Bolsheviks used it at the fifth soviet congress as
well.
First, it should be noted that in the run up to the congress,
"on 14 June 1918, they expelled Martov and his five Mensheviks
together with the Socialist Revolutionaries from the Central
Executive Committee, closed down their newspapers . . and
drove them underground, just on the eve of the elections to
the Fifth Congress of Soviets in which the Mensheviks were
expected to make significant gains." [Israel Getzler,
Martov, p. 181] The rationale for this action was the
claim that the Mensheviks had taken part in anti-soviet
rebellions (as we discuss in
section 23, this was not
true). The action was opposed by the Left SRs, who correctly
questioned the legality of the Bolshevik expulsion of
opposition groupings. They "branded the proposed expulsion
bill illegal, since the Mensheviks and SRs had been sent
to the CEC by the Congress of Soviets, and only the next
congress had the right to withdraw their representation.
Furthermore, the Bolsheviks had no right to pose as
defenders of the soviets against the alleged SR
counter-revolution when they themselves has been disbanding
the peasants' soviets and creating the committees of the
poor to replace them." [Brovkin, The Mensheviks After
October, p. 231] When the vote was taken, only the
Bolsheviks supported it. Their votes were sufficient
to pass it.
Given that the Mensheviks had been winning soviet elections
across Russia, it is clear that this action was driven far
more by political needs than the truth. This resulted in
the Left Social Revolutionaries (LSRs) as the only
significant party left in the run up to the fifth Congress.
The LSR author (and ex-commissar for justice in the only
coalition soviet government) of the only biography of LSR
leader (and long standing revolutionary who suffered
torture and imprisonment in her fight against Tsarism)
Maria Spiridonova states that "[b]etween 900 and 100
delegates were present. Officially the LSR numbered 40
percent of the delegates. They own opinion was that
their number were even higher. The Bolsheviks strove to
keep their majority by all the means in their power." He
quotes Spiridonova's address to the Congress: "You may
have a majority in this congress, but you do have not
a majority in the country." [I. Steinberg, Spiridonova,
p. 209]
Historian Geoffrey Swain indicates that the LSRs had a
point:
Historian Alexander Rabinowitch confirms this gerrymandering.
As he put it, by the summer of 1918 "popular disenchantment
with Bolshevik rule was already well advanced, not only in
rural but also in urban Russia" and the "primary beneficiaries
of this nationwide grass-roots shift in public opinion
were the Left SRs. During the second half of June 1918,
it was an open question which of the two parties would
have a majority at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of
Soviets . . . On the evening of 4 July, virtually from
the moment the Fifth Congress of Soviets opened in Moscow's
Bolshoi Theatre, it was clear to the Left SRs that the
Bolsheviks had effectively 'fabricated' a sizeable majority
in the congress and consequently, that there was no hope
whatever of utilising it to force a fundamental change in
the government's pro-German, anti-peasant policies." While
he acknowledges that an "exact breakdown of properly
elected delegates may be impossible to ascertain" it
was possible ("based on substantial but incomplete archival
evidence") to conclude that "it is quite clear that the
Bolshevik majority was artificially inflated and highly
suspect." He quotes the report of one leading LSR, based on
data from LSR members of the congress's Credentials Committee,
saying that the Bolsheviks "conjured up" 299 voting delegates.
"The Bible tells us," noted the report's author, "that God
created the heavens and the earth from nothing . . . In the
twentieth century the Bolsheviks are capable of no lesser
miracles: out of nothing, they create legitimate credentials."
["Maria Spiridonova's 'Last Testament'", The Russian Review,
pp. 424-46, vol. 54, July 1995, p. 426]
This gerrymandering played a key role in the subsequent
events. "Deprived of their democratic majority," Swain
notes, "the Left SRs resorted to terror and assassinated
the German ambassador Mirbach." [Swain, Op. Cit., p. 176]
The LSR assassination of Mirbach and the events which
followed were soon labelled by the Bolsheviks an "uprising"
against "soviet power" (see
section 23 for more details).
Lenin "decided that the killing of Mirbach provided
a fortuitous opportunity to put an end to the growing
Left SR threat." [Rabinowitch, Op. Cit., p. 427]
After this, the LSRs followed the Mensheviks and Right SRs
and were expelled from the soviets. This in spite of the
fact that the rank and file knew nothing of the plans of
the central committees and that their soviet delegates
had been elected by the masses. The Bolsheviks had finally
eliminated the last of their more left-wing opponents
(the anarchists had been dealt with the in April, see
section 24 for details).
As discussed in section 21,
the Committees of
Poor Peasants were only supported by the Bolsheviks.
Indeed, the Left SRs opposed then as being utterly
counter-productive and an example of Bolshevik ignorance
of village life. Consequently, we can say that the
"delegates" from the committees were Bolsheviks or
at least Bolshevik supporters. Significantly, by
early 1919 Lenin admitted the Committees were failures
and ordered them disbanded. The new policy reflected
Left SR arguments against the Committees. It is hard
not to concur with Vladimir Brovkin that by
"establishing the committees of the poor to replace
the [rural] soviets . . . the Bolsheviks were trying to
create some institutional leverage of their own in
the countryside for use against the SRs. In this light,
the Bolshevik measures against the Menshevik-led city
soviets . . . and against SR-led village soviets may
be seen as a two-pronged attempt to stem the tide
that threatened to leave them in the minority at the
Fifth Congress of Soviets." [The Mensheviks after
October, p. 226]
Thus, by July 1918, the Bolsheviks had effectively
secured a monopoly of political power in Russia. When
the Bolsheviks (rightly, if hypocritically) disbanded
the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, they had
claimed that the soviets (rightly) represented a
superior form of democracy. Once they started losing
soviet elections, they could find no better way to
"secure" workers' democracy than to destroy it by
gerrymandering soviets, disbanding them and expelling
opposition parties from them. All peaceful attempts
to replace them had been destroyed. The soviet CEC
was marginalised and without any real power.
Opposition parties had been repressed, usually on
little or no evidence. The power of the soviets
had been replaced by a soviet power in less than
a year. However, this was simply the culmination
of a process which had started when the Bolsheviks
seized power in November 1917. Simply put, the Bolsheviks
had always aimed for "all power to the party via the
soviets" and once this had been achieved, the soviets
could be dispensed with. Maurice Brinton simply stated
the obvious when he wrote that "when institutions such
as the soviets could no longer be influenced by
ordinary workers, the regime could no longer be
called a soviet regime." [The Bolsheviks and Workers'
Control, p. xiii] By this obvious criteria, the
Bolshevik regime was no longer soviet by the spring
of 1918, i.e. before the outbreak of civil war. While
opposition groups were not finally driven out of the
soviets until 1923 (i.e. three years after the end
of the civil war) their presence "does not indicate
the existence of a multi-party system since they in
no way threatened the dominating role of the Bolsheviks,
and they had not done so from mid-1918." [Richard
Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 168]
Tony Cliff, leader of the British Leninist party the SWP,
justified the repression of the Mensheviks and SRs on the
grounds that they were not prepared to accept the Soviet
system and rejected the role of "constitutional opposition."
He tries to move forward the repression until after the
outbreak of full civil war by stating that "[d]espite their
strong opposition to the government, for some time, i.e.
until after the armed uprising of the Czechoslovakian Legion
[in late May, 1918] -- the Mensheviks were not much hampered
in their propaganda work." If having papers banned every
now and then, members arrested and soviets being disbanded
as soon as they get a Menshevik majority is "not much
hampered" then Cliff does seem to be giving that phrase
a new meaning. Similarly, Cliff's claim that the "civil
war undermined the operation of the local soviets" also
seems lacking based on this new research. [Lenin:
Revolution Besieged, vol. 3, p. 163, p. 167 and p. 150]
However, the Bolshevik assault on the soviets started during
the
spring of 1918 (i.e. in March, April and May). That
is before the Czech rising and the onset of full scale
civil war which occurred in late May (see
section 3 of the appendix
on "What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?"
on Bolshevik repression before the Czech revolt). Nor is
it true that the Mensheviks rejected constitutional
methods. Though they wished to see a re-convocation of the
Constituent Assembly they believed that the only way to
do this was by winning a majority of the soviets (see
section 23).
Clearly, attempts to blame the Civil
War for the elimination of soviet power and democracy
seems woefully weak given the actions of the Bolsheviks
in the spring of 1918. And, equally clearly, the
reduction of local soviet influence cannot be fully
understood without factoring in the Bolshevik prejudice
in favour of centralisation (as codified in the Soviet
Constitution of 1918) along with this direct repression.
The simple fact is that the soviets were marginalised
and undermined after the October Revolution simply
because they did reflect the wishes of the working
class, in spite of their defects (defects the Bolsheviks
exploited to consolidate their power). The problem was
that the workers no longer supported Lenin. Few Leninists
would support such an obvious conclusion. For example,
John Rees states that "[i]n the cities the Reds enjoyed
the fierce
and virtually undivided loyalty of the masses
throughout the civil war period." ["In Defence of October",
pp. 3-82, International Socialism, no. 52, p. 47] Which,
of course, explains the vast number of strikes and protests
directed against the Bolshevik regime and the workers'
resolutions calling its end! It also explains why the
Bolsheviks, in the face of such "undivided loyalty",
had to suppress opposition parties and impose a party
dictatorship!
Simply put, if the Bolsheviks did have the support
Rees states they did then they had no need to repress
soviet democracy and opposition parties. Such "fierce"
loyalty would not have been amenable to opposition
arguments. Strange, then, that the Bolsheviks continually
explained working class unrest in terms of the influence
of Mensheviks, Left SRs and so on during the civil war.
Moreover, Rees contradicts himself by arguing that if
the Kronstadt revolt had succeeded, then it would have
resulted in "the fall of the Bolsheviks." [Op. Cit.,
p. 63] Now, given that the Kronstadt revolt called for
free soviet elections (and not "soviets without parties"
as Rees asserts), why did the Bolsheviks not agree to them
(at least in the cities)? If, as Rees argues, the Reds had
the fierce loyalty of the city workers, then why did the
Bolsheviks not introduce soviet democracy in the cities
after the end of the Civil War? Simply because they knew
that such "loyalty" did not, in fact, exist. Zinoviev,
for example, declared that the Bolsheviks' support had
been reduced to 1 per cent in early 1920. [Farber,
Before Stalinism, p. 188]
So much for working class "loyalty" to the Bolsheviks.
And, needless to say, Rees' comments totally ignore
the election results before the start of the civil war
which prompted the Bolsheviks to pack or disband soviets.
As Bertrand Russell summarised from his experiences in
Lenin's Russia during the civil war (in 1920): "No
conceivable system of free elections would give majorities
to the Communists, either in the town or country." [The
Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, pp. 40-1] Thus we
have a major contradiction in the pro-Leninist argument.
On the one hand, they stress that the workers supported the
Bolsheviks wholeheartedly during the civil war. On the other,
they argue that party dictatorship had to be imposed. If
the Bolsheviks had the support they claimed they had, then
they would have won soviet elections easily. They did not
and so free soviet elections were not held.
This fact also explains the fate of the so-called "non
party" conferences favoured by the Bolsheviks in late
1920. In spite of praising the soviets as "more democratic"
than anything in the "best democratic republics of the
bourgeois world," Lenin also argued that non-Party
conferences were also required "to be able to watch the
mood of the masses, to come closer to them, to respond
to their demands." [Left-Wing Communism, p. 33 and p. 32]
If the soviets were as democratic as Lenin claimed, then
the Bolsheviks would have no need of "non-party" conferences.
Significantly, the Bolsheviks "responded" to these conferences
and "their demands" by disbanding them. This was because
"[d]uring the disturbances" of late 1920, "they provided an
effective platform for criticism of Bolshevik policies."
Their frequency was decreased and they "were discontinued
soon afterward." [Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists in Power,
p. 203] In other words, they meet the same fate as the
soviets in the spring and summer of 1918.
Perhaps we should not be too surprised by these developments.
After all, as we discuss in
section 8 of the appendix on
"How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?", the Bolsheviks had
long had a distinctly undemocratic political ideology. Their
support for democratic norms were less than consistent. The
one thing they were consistent was their hypocrisy. Thus
democratic decisions were to be binding on their opponents
(even if that majority had to be manipulated into being) but
not upon them. Before the revolution Lenin had openly espoused
a double standard of discipline. "We will not permit," he
argued, "the idea of unity to tie a noose around our necks,
and we shall under no circumstances permit the Mensheviks to
lead us by the rope." [quoted by Robert V. Daniels, The
Conscience of the Revolution, p. 17] Once in power, their
political perspectives had little trouble ignoring the will
of the working class when it classed with what they, as that
class's self-proclaimed vanguard, had decided what was in
its best interests. As we discussed in
section H.5, such a
autocratic perspective is at the heart of vanguardism. If
you aim for party power, it comes as no surprise that the
organs used to achieve it will wither under it. Just as
muscles only remain strong if you use them, so soviets
can only work if it is used to run society, not nominate
the handful of party leaders who do. As Kropotkin argued
in 1920:
"But as long as the country is governed by a party dictatorship,
the workers' and peasants' councils evidently lose their
entire significance. They are reduced to . . . [a] passive
role . . . A council of workers ceases to be free and of any
use when liberty of the press no longer exists . . . [and
they] lose their significance when the elections are not
preceded by a free electoral campaign, and when the elections
are conducted under pressure of a party dictatorship . . . It
means the death-knell of the new system." [Kropotkin's
Revolutionary Pamphlets, pp. 254-5]
Clearly, the fate of the soviets after October shows the
dangers of Bolshevism to popular self-management and
autonomy. We should be try and learn the lessons from the
experience rather than, as pro-Bolsheviks do, rationalise
and justify the usurpation of power by the party. The most
obvious lesson to learn is to oppose the creation of any
power above the soviets. This was not lost on Russian
anarchists active in the revolution. For this reason,
anarcho-syndicalists resolved, in August 1918, that they
"were for the soviets but categorically against the Soviet
of People's Commissars as an organ which does not stem
from the soviet structure but only interferes with its
work." Thus they were "for the establishment of free
soviets of workers' and peasants' representatives, and
the abolition of the Soviet of People's Commissars as an
organisation inimical to the interests of the working
class." [contained in Paul Avrich, The Anarchists in
the Russian Revolution, p. 118 and p. 117] This resolution
was driven by the experience of the Bolshevik dominated
"soviet" regime.
It is also worth quoting Rudolf Rocker at length on this
issue:
"We already know that a revolution cannot be made with rosewater.
And we know, too, that the owning classes will never yield up
their privileges spontaneously. On the day of victorious
revolution the workers will have to impose their will on the
present owners of the soil, of the subsoil and of the means
of production, which cannot be done -- let us be clear on
this -- without the workers taking the capital of society
into their own hands, and, above all, without their having
demolished the authoritarian structure which is, and will
continue to be, the fortress keeping the masses of the people
under dominion. Such an action is, without doubt, an act of
liberation; a proclamation of social justice; the very essence
of social revolution, which has nothing in common with the
utterly bourgeois principle of dictatorship.
"The fact that a large number of socialist parties have
rallied to the idea of councils, which is the proper mark
of libertarian socialist and revolutionary syndicalists,
is a confession, recognition that the tack they have taken
up until now has been the product of a falsification, a
distortion, and that with the councils the labour movement
must create for itself a single organ capable of carrying
into effect the unmitigated socialism that the conscious
proletariat longs for. On the other hand, it ought not to
be forgotten that this abrupt conversion runs the risk of
introducing many alien features into the councils concept,
features, that is, with no relation to the original tasks
of socialism, and which have to be eliminated because they
pose a threat to the further development of the councils.
These alien elements are able only to conceive things from
the dictatorial viewpoint. It must be our task to face up
to this risk and warn our class comrades against experiments
which cannot bring the dawn of social emancipation any
nearer -- which indeed, to the contrary, positively postpone
it.
"Consequently, our advice is as follows: Everything for the
councils or soviets! No power above them! A slogan which at
the same time will be that of the social revolutionary."
[Anarchism and Sovietism]
The validity of this argument can be seen, for example, from
the expulsion of opposition parties from the soviets in June
and July 1918. This act exposes the hollowness of Bolshevik
claims of their soviet system presented a form of "higher"
democracy. If the Bolshevik soviet system was, as they
claimed, based on instant recall then why did they, for
example, have to expel the Mensheviks and Right SRs from
the soviet CEC in the first place? Why did the electors not
simply recall them? It was two weeks after the Czech revolt
before the Bolsheviks acted, surely enough time for voters
to act? Perhaps this did not happen because the CEC was not,
in fact, subject to instant recall at all? Being nominated
at the quarterly soviet congress, they were effectively
isolated from popular control. It also means that the
Bolshevik government was even more insulated from popular
control and accountability. To "recall" it, electors would
have to either wait for the next national soviet congress
or somehow convince the CEC to call an emergency one. As
an example of workers' running society, the Bolshevik
system leaves much to be desired.
Another obvious lesson to learn was the use of appointments
to the soviets and their executives from other organisations.
As seen above, the Bolsheviks used the "representation" of
other bodies they control (such as trade unions) to pack
soviet assemblies in their favour. Similarly, allowing
political parties to nominate representatives in soviet
executives also marginalised the soviet assemblies and those
delegates actually elected in the workplaces.
This was obvious to the Russian anarchists, who argued "for
effective soviets organised on collective lines with the
direct delegation of workers and peasants from every factory,
workshop, village, etc., and not political chatterboxes
gaining entry through party lists and turning the soviets
into talking shops." [contained in Paul Avrich, The
Anarchists in the Russian Revolution, p. 118] The
Makhnovists, likewise, argued that "[o]nly labourers who
are contributing work necessary to the social economy should
participate in the soviets. Representatives of political
organisations have no place in worker-peasant soviets,
since their participation in a workers' soviet will
transform the latter into deputies of the party and
can lead to the downfall of the soviet system."
[contained in Peter Arshinov's History of the Makhnovist
Movement, p. 266] As we discuss in section 15 of the appendix on "Why does the Makhnovist movement show there is an alternative to
Bolshevism?", Leninists
sometimes distort this into a claim that the Makhnovists
opposed members of political standing for election.
This use of party lists meant that soviet delegates could
be anyone. For example, the leading left-wing Menshevik
Martov recounts that in early 1920 Bolsheviks in a chemical
factory "put up Lenin against me as a candidate [to the
Moscow soviet]. I received seventy-six votes he-eight (in
an open vote)." [quoted by Israel Getzler, Martov, p. 202]
How would either of these two intellectuals actually know
and reflect the concerns and interests of the workers they
would be "delegates" of? If the soviets were meant to be
the delegates of working people, then why should non-working
class members of political parties be elected to a soviet?
However, in spite of these problems, the Russian soviets
were a key means of ensuring working class participation
in the revolution. As recognised by all the socialist
oppositions to the Bolsheviks, from the anarchists to the
Mensheviks. As one historian put it:
The sad fate of the soviets after the Bolshevik seizure
of power simply confirms the opinion of the left
Menshevik Martov who had "rubbed it in to the Bolsheviks . . .
at the first All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions [in January
1918], that they who were now extolling the Soviets as the
'highest forms of the socialist development of the proletariat,'
had shown little love of them in 1905 or in 1917 after the
July days; they loved Soviets only when they were 'in the
hands of the Bolshevik party.'" [Getlzer, Martov, p. 174]
As the next few months showed, once the soviets left those
hands, then the soviets themselves were destroyed. The civil
war did not start this process, it just gave the latter-day
supporters of Bolshevism something to use to justify these
actions.
1 Can you give a short summary of what happened in 1917?
2 How did the Bolsheviks gain mass support?
3 Surely the Russian Revolution proves
that vanguard parties work?
"The proletariat can take power only through its vanguard. . .
Without the confidence of the class in the vanguard, without
support of the vanguard by the class, there can be no talk
of the conquest of power . . . The Soviets are the only
organised form of the tie between the vanguard and the
class. A revolutionary content can be given this form
only by the party. This is proved by the positive
experience of the October Revolution and by the negative
experience of other countries (Germany, Austria, finally,
Spain). No one has either shown in practice or tried to
explain articulately on paper how the proletariat can
seize power without the political leadership of a party
that knows what it wants." [Trotsky, Stalinism and
Bolshevism]
"Absolutely no guiding initiative from the party centres
was felt . . . the Petrograd Committee had been arrested
and the representative of the Central Committee . . . was
unable to give any directives for the coming day." [quoted
by Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 1,
p. 147]
"The committees were a law unto themselves when it came to
accepting orders from above. Democratic centralism, as
vague a principle of internal administration as there ever
has been, was commonly held at least to enjoin lower
executive bodies that they should obey the behests of all
higher bodies in the organisational hierarchy. But town
committees in practice had the devil's own job in imposing
firm leadership . . . Insubordination was the rule of the
day whenever lower party bodies thought questions of
importance were at stake.
"The image of a disciplined hierarchy of party committees was
therefore but a thin, artificial veneer which was used by
Bolshevik leaders to cover up the cracked surface of the
real picture underneath. Cells and suburb committees saw
no reason to kow-tow to town committees; nor did town
committees feel under compulsion to show any greater respect
to their provincial and regional committees then before."
[Op. Cit., p. 74]
"As often happens, a sharp cleavage developed between the
classes in motion and the interests of the party machines.
Even the Bolshevik Party cadres, who enjoyed the benefit
of exceptional revolutionary training, were definitely
inclined to disregard the masses and to identify their own
special interests and the interests of the machine on the
very day after the monarchy was overthrown." [Stalin,
vol. 1, p. 298]
"Lenin was strong not only because he understood the laws
of the class struggle but also because his ear was
faultlessly attuned to the stirrings of the masses in
motion. He represented not so much the Party machine as
the vanguard of the proletariat. He was definitely
convinced that thousands from among those workers who
had borne the brunt of supporting the underground Party
would now support him. The masses at the moment were
more revolutionary than the Party, and the Party more
revolutionary than its machine. As early as March the
actual attitude of the workers and soldiers had in many
cases become stormily apparent, and it was widely at
variance with the instructions issued by all the parties,
including the Bolsheviks." [Op. Cit., p. 299]
"In short, the success of the revolution called for action
against the 'highest circles of the party,' who, from
February to October, utterly failed to play the
revolutionary role they ought to have taken in theory.
The masses themselves made the revolution, with or even
against the party -- this much at least was clear to
Trotsky the historian. But far from drawing the correct
conclusion, Trotsky the theorist continued to argue
that the masses are incapable of making a revolution
without a leader." [Daniel & Gabriel Cohn-Bendit,
Op. Cit., p. 188]
"I am compelled to request permission to withdraw from
the Central Committee, which I hereby do, and leave
myself freedom of agitation in the lower ranks of the
party and at the party congress." [quoted by Trotsky,
Op. Cit., p. 131]
"It was quite a turnabout since the anarchic days before the
Civil War. The Central Committee had always advocated the
virtues of obedience and co-operation; but the rank-and-filers
of 1917 had cared little about such entreaties as they did
about appeals made by other higher authorities. The wartime
emergency now supplied an opportunity to expatiate on this
theme at will." [Service, Op. Cit., p. 91]
4 Was Lenin's "State and Revolution" applied after October?
"To consider 'State and Revolution' as the basic statement of
Lenin's political philosophy -- which non-Communists as well
as Communists usually do -- is a serious error. Its argument
for a utopian anarchism never actually became official policy.
The Leninism of 1917 . . . came to grief in a few short years;
it was the revived Leninism of 1902 which prevailed as the
basis for the political development of the USSR." [Robert V.
Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, pp. 51-2]
"The Leninist programme of 1917 included these points:
the discontinuance of the police and standing army,
abolition of the professional bureaucracy, elections
for all public positions and offices, revocability of
all officials, equality of bureaucratic wages with
workers' wages, the maximum of democracy, peaceful
competition among the parties within the soviets,
abolition of the death penalty." ["The Abolition and
Extinction of the State," Cienfuegos Press Anarchist
Review, no. 4, p. 50]
"In a way, The State and Revolution even laid the
foundations and sketched out the essential features
of an alternative to Bolshevik power, and only the
pro-Leninist tradition has used it, almost to quieten
its conscience, because Lenin, once in power, ignored
its conclusions. The Bolsheviks, far from causing the
state to wither away, found endless reasons for
justifying its enforcement." [October 1917,
pp. 213-4]
"Without revolutionary coercion directed against the
avowed enemies of the workers and peasants, it is
impossible to break down the resistance of these
exploiters. On the other hand, revolutionary coercion
is bound to be employed towards the wavering and unstable
elements among the masses themselves." [Collected Works,
vol. 42, p. 170]
"The Party . . . is . . . duty bound to retain its
dictatorship, regardless of the temporary vacillations
of the amorphous masses, regardless of the temporary
vacillations even of the working class. This awareness
is essential for cohesion; without it the Party is in
danger of perishing . . . At any given moment, the
dictatorship does not rest on the formal principle of
workers' democracy . . . if we look upon workers'
democracy as something unconditional . . . then . . .
every plant should elect its own administrative organs
and so on . . . From a formal point of view this is
the clearest link with workers' democracy. But we are
against it. Why? . . . Because, in the first place,
we want to retain the dictatorship of the Party, and,
in the second place, because we think that the
[democratic] way of managing important and essential
plants is bound to be incompetent and prove a failure
from an economic point of view . . ." [quoted by
Jay B. Sorenson, The Life and Death of Soviet Trade
Unionism, p. 165]
"It is fairly certain that between the capitalist regime
and the socialist there will be an intervening period of
struggle, during which proletariat revolutionary workers
will have to work to uproot the remnants of bourgeois
society . . . But if the object of this struggle and this
organisation is to free the proletariat from exploitation
and state rule, then the role of guide, tutor or director
cannot be entrusted to a new state, which would have an
interest in pointing the revolution in a completely
opposite direction. . .
5 Did the Bolsheviks really aim for Soviet power?
"The party set the soviets in motion, the soviets set
in motion the workers, soldiers, and to some extent
the peasantry . . . If you represent this conducting
apparatus as a system of cog-wheels -- a comparison
which Lenin had recourse at another period on another
theme -- you may say that the impatient attempt to
connect the party wheel directly with the gigantic
wheel of the masses -- omitting the medium-sized
wheel of the soviets -- would have given rise to the
danger of breaking the teeth of the party wheel."
[Trotsky, Op. Cit., p. 264]
"The success of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution
-- that is to say, the fact that they found themselves
in power and from there subordinated the whole Revolution
to their Party is explained by their ability to substitute
the idea of a Soviet power for the social revolution and
the social emancipation of the masses. A priori, these
two ideas appear as non-contradictory for it was possible
to understand Soviet power as the power of the soviets,
and this facilitated the substitution of the idea of
Soviet power for that of the Revolution. Nevertheless,
in their realisation and consequences these ideas were
in violent contraction to each other. The conception of
Soviet Power incarnated in the Bolshevik state, was
transformed into an entirely traditional bourgeois power
concentrated in a handful of individuals who subjected to
their authority all that was fundamental and most powerful
in the life of the people -- in this particular case, the
social revolution. Therefore, with the help of the 'power
of the soviets' -- in which the Bolsheviks monopolised
most of the posts - they effectively attained a total
power and could proclaim their dictatorship throughout
the revolutionary territory . . . All was reduced to
a single centre, from where all instructions emanated
concerning the way of life, of thought, of action of
the working masses." [Peter Arshinov, The Two Octobers]
6 What happened to the soviets after October?
"The structure of VTsIK itself began to change under
Sverdlov. He began to use the presidium to circumvent
the general meeting, which contained eloquent minority
spokesmen . . . Sverdlov's used of the presidium marked
a decisive change in the status of that body within the
soviet hierarchy. In mid-1917 . . . [the] plenum had
directed all activities and ratified bureau decisions
which had a 'particularly important social-political
character.' The bureau . . . served as the executive
organ of the VTsIK plenum . . . Only in extraordinary
cases when the bureau could no be convened for technical
reason could the presidium make decisions. Even then
such actions remained subject to review by the plenum."
[Charles Duval, "Yakov M. Sverdlov and the All-Russian
Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK)", pp. 3-22,
Soviet Studies, vol. XXXI, no. 1, January 1979, pp. 6-7]
"Up to the very last minute the Left SRs had been
confident that, as the voice of Russia's peasant masses,
they would receive a majority when the Fifth Congress of
Soviets assembled . . . which would enable them to deprive
Lenin of power and launch a revolutionary war against Germany.
Between April and the end of June 1918 membership of their
party had almost doubled, from 60,000 to 100,000, and to
prevent them securing a majority at the congress Lenin was
forced to rely on dubious procedures: he allowed so-called
committees of poor peasants to be represented at the congress.
Thus as late as 3 July 1918 returns suggested a majority
for the Left SRs, but a Congress of Committees of Poor
Peasants held in Petrograd the same day 'redressed the
balance in favour of the Bolsheviks,' to quote the
Guardian's Philips-Price, by deciding it had the right
to represent the all those districts where local soviets
had not been 'cleansed of kulak elements and had not
delivered the amount of food laid down in the requisitioning
lists of the Committees of Poor Peasants.' This blatant
gerrymandering ensured a Bolshevik majority at the
Fifth Congress of Soviets." [The Origins of the Russian
Civil War, p. 176]
"The idea of soviets . . . of councils of workers and peasants
. . . controlling the economic and political life of the country
is a great idea. All the more so, since it necessarily follows
that these councils should be composed of all who take part in
the production of natural wealth by their own efforts.
"Let no one object that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'
cannot be compared to run of the mill dictatorship because
it is the dictatorship of a class. Dictatorship of a class
cannot exist as such, for it ends up, in the last analysis,
as being the dictatorship of a given party which arrogates
to itself the right to speak for that class. Thus, the liberal
bourgeoisie, in their fight against despotism, used to speak
in the name of the 'people'. . .
"Small wonder that the principal political demand of
Mensheviks, Left SRs, SR Maximalists, Kronstadt sailors
and of many oppositionists . . . has been for freely
elected soviets which would this be restored to their
original role as agents of democratisation." [Israel
Getzler, Soviets as Agents of Democratisation, p. 30]
7 How did the factory committee movement develop?
8 What was the Bolshevik position on "workers' control" in 1917?
9 What happened to the factory committees after October?
10 What were the Bolshevik economic policies in 1918?
11 Did Bolshevik economic policies work?
12 Was there an alternative to Lenin's "state capitalism" and "war communism"?
13 Did the Bolsheviks allow independent trade unions?
14 Was the Red Army really a revolutionary army?
15 Was the Red Army "filled with socialist consciousness"?
16 How did the civil war start and develop?
17 Was the civil war between just Reds and Whites?
18 How extensive was imperialist intervention?
19 Did the end of the civil war change Bolshevik policies?
20 Can the Red Terror and the Cheka be justified?
21 Did Bolshevik peasant policies work?
22 Was there an alternative to grain requisition?
23 Was the repression of the socialist opposition justified?