‘How far they had soared, these Bolsheviki, from a despised and hunted sect less than four months ago, to this supreme place, the helm of great Russia in the full tide of insurrection!’
– John Reed, Ten days that shook the world.
IN THE Russian revolution of 1905, which so inspired Rosa Luxemburg, the workers in the Russian cities created a new form of political power. Up to that time, the limit of democracy for most oppressed people of the world was a parliament, elected by universal suffrage. Under the tyranny of the Tsars, of course, no worker or peasant in Russia had the vote. Nevertheless, in the great upheaval of the 1905 revolution, the Russian working class reached out for something far more democratic than an elected parliament. On their own, without any ‘blueprints’, they formed soviets, or workers’ councils, based on the democracy of the Paris Commune.
The leaders of the soviets were ‘responsible and revocable’ at all times. They earned exactly the same as the people they represented. And they found it easy and natural to combine with other soviets and so establish a network of democratic power the like of which had never been seen before, even during the Commune, and certainly has not been seen since.
The 1905 revolution was crushed by the Tsar and his army. In the twelve years which followed, he reluctantly made concessions on voting. For a few years both wings of the Russian Social Democratic Party – Bolsheviks (revolutionary) and Mensheviks (reformist) – had seats in the Russian parliament, the Duma. But soviets of all kinds were banned with the utmost severity. The short-lived soviets of 1905 had sown more terror in the hearts of propertied people than all the movements for parliamentary reform put together.
In February 1917, the Russian workers and peasants rose again in another, even more furious revolution. The First World War had inflicted on them greater suffering than anywhere else in Europe. There seemed no end to the war, nor to the ruthless class policies of the Tsar and his advisers. In a trice, the February revolution overthrew forever the Tsarist tyranny. It was replaced by a provisional government which promised a parliament and continued the war. At the same time, workers, soldiers and peasants set up soviets on a far greater scale than in 1905.
In the ensuing tumultuous nine months, the two forms of power – the old state and the new soviets – operated side by side.
The provisional government, under its prime minister, Kerensky, staggered aimlessly under the huge burden of the war, which it was determined to continue. Kerensky was forced again and again into the policies which had been carried out by the Tsar. Quickly, the popularity of the provisional government started to disappear. The people, both in the cities and in the countryside, clamoured for more. This clamour was not often heard by the government. The anger and aspirations of the people, and especially of the working class, expressed itself in the political organisations which more closely represented them: the soviets.
When the soviets were first elected in February, they were dominated by the Social Revolutionaries, whose strength was in the countryside among the peasants, and the Menshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party. The Mensheviks argued that the job of the soviets was to advise and pressurise the provisional government, not to replace it. They treated the soviets as sounding boards, glorified trade unions where people could express their opinions and pass them on to the real power: the provisional government.
The Bolsheviks, however, raised the slogan ‘All power to the soviets!’ For several months they remained in the minority. In June 1917, at the First All-Russian Congress of soviets, the peasant-based Social Revolutionaries had 283 delegates; the Mensheviks 248 and the Bolsheviks 105.
The soviets’ feeling that they were subordinate to the provisional government was reflected in the resolutions they passed. Even in the advanced areas of the two main cities, Moscow
and Petrograd, these resolutions flattered, begged or scolded the provisional government.
The mood changed, however, and it changed swiftly. Rising inflation, the increased horror of the war and the hesitancy and impotence of the provisional government stung the workers into action. In the factories, they started to take control of production. Social problems to do with housing, sanitation, fuel and food were increasingly dealt with not at the town hall, or by the government or civil service, but by the local soviet. The pendulum of power, which had been heavily weighted towards Kerensky, swung instead to the soviets.
At first this was reflected simply in ‘practical’ decisions: a house repair here, a bonus claim settled there. But as even these came up against the real economic power of the employers and the landlords, the discussions and demands of the soviets became increasingly political. In August, the employers and landlords backed a military coup whose aim was to destroy the soviets. The workers were armed and the coup was defeated.
The result was a staggering increase in the influence of the soviets and of the Bolshevik wing inside them. First the soviets started passing Bolshevik resolutions. Then they went over to the Bolsheviks. On 31 August, the soviet in Petrograd, then Russia’s biggest city, passed a Bolshevik resolution for the first time. It called for workers’ control of industry, immediate negotiations to end the war, confiscation of the large estates and a government of the ‘revolutionary proletariat and peasantry’.
These slogans were quickly whittled down to three words: Peace, Bread, Land. In another two weeks, the Bolsheviks won control of the soviets in Petrograd and Moscow. By the time the Ail-Russian Congress of soviets met again (in October) the whole political situation in Russia had changed. This time the Bolsheviks had 390 delegates, the Social Revolutionaries 160, the Mensheviks only 72.
This change in the soviets was repeated in the even more remarkable figures for Bolshevik Party membership. What had been, in John Reed’s words, a ‘despised and hunted sect’ became, almost overnight, a mass party. Between April and October Bolshevik Party membership in Petrograd rose from 16,000 to 43,000. In Moscow, membership in March was only 600; by August it was 15,000. In Kiev membership was up from 200 to 4,000; in Ekaterinburg from 40 to 1,700 and in the small industrial town of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, where there were ten Bolshevik members in March, in August there were 5,440.
While the provisional government stayed the same, talked the same, behaved the same, the workers of Russia had entirely changed their tune. These changes took place in conditions of great social turmoil: constant strikes, demonstrations, street meetings and debates. What was happening (without Kerensky really noticing) was the self-emancipation of the working class.
In April 1917, Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, came back to Russia from exile. He immediately embarked on a revolutionary strategy to replace the Kerensky government with a socialist one. He found that the paralysis of the provisional government had affected even the leaders of his own party. Many leading Bolsheviks saw the provisional government as the highest form of democracy for which anyone could hope; therefore they adapted their politics to supporting the government. Lenin replied at once – and he kept saying it all through the tempestuous months which followed – that it was possible to create a more advanced form of democracy than parliament:
Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison to medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor ... deceit, violence, corruption, mendacity, hypocrisy and oppression of the poor is hidden beneath the civilised, polished and perfumed exterior of modern bourgeois democracy.
Although Lenin was as vitriolic a polemicist as any writer in history, he did not rely on destructive abuse. Against the ‘polished and perfumed’ parliaments, he proposed real, live instruments of democratic political power. In the summer of 1917 he took time off from revolutionary activity to write a pamphlet, The State and Revolution, which again addressed the question: is there a way forward from this corrupt and paralytic provisional government? If we junk it, are we not junking any hope of what little democracy we have?
Lenin replied that the problem with parliaments was not that they were democratic, but that they were not democratic enough. He restated the socialism which had been emphasised by Marx, Engels and Rosa Luxemburg:
The way out of parliamentarism is to be found, of course, not in the abolition of the representative institutions and the elective principle, but in the conversion of the representative institutions from mere ‘talking shops’ into working bodies.
The problem with parliaments was that they did the talking while someone else did the doing:
The actual work of the state is done behind the scenes, and is carried out by the departments, the chancellories and their staffs.
These people who carried out ‘the actual work of the state’ were not elected, not responsible, not revocable. They directly represented the people with property, the capitalist class. Thus the elected representatives chattered in a language whose special purpose was ‘the fooling of the common people’ while the ‘actual work of the state’ went on robbing the common people.
The thousands of intellectuals then and since who abused Lenin as a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘dictator’ cannot have read The State and Revolution, which again and again repeats that socialism and democracy are indivisible.
‘Without representative institutions we cannot imagine a democracy, even a proletarian democracy,’ wrote Lenin. Representative institutions were the life blood of socialism, and socialists had to ensure that their institutions were truly representative, truly democratic, truly responsible and revocable, and above all secure from the corrupt and cloying attention of an exploiting class. That class managed to stay in control in spite of elected parliaments because it controlled the machinery of the state: the civil service, the army, the police, the media, the law. If any genuine democracy was to be set up, if society was to be governed by genuinely representative institutions, then that state had to be destroyed and a new one entirely rebuilt in the image of a democratic and egalitarian society:
We must reduce the role of the state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions; they must be responsible, revocable, moderately paid ...
It followed that democracy and the representative institutions, which were the foundation of socialism, were not inscriptions on blackboards for the workers passively to read and understand. They had to be created in struggle. Lenin writes, as Marx did, of the birth of the new society from the old’.
The State and Revolution part one was published in August 1917. There was never a part two. In December 1917, Lenin added an ‘afterword’ to yet another edition, explaining that he was for the moment otherwise engaged. ‘It is more pleasant and more useful to live through a revolution than to write about it,’ he wrote.
Lenin’s outline of the emancipation of the working class was and is ten times more powerful because it was written while the workers were emancipating themselves. Throughout the century, it has risen and fallen in popularity just as the masses have risen and fallen. During the Portuguese revolution of 1974, for instance, a Lisbon newspaper published a ‘best-sellers’ list. Harold Robbins’ novel The Carpet-Baggers was eighth. First was Lenin’s The State and Revolution.
The October revolution in Russia, in which the soviets, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, asserted their power over the parliament, sacked the government and established what Lenin called ‘the socialist order’, is the greatest event in all human history.
The world was turned upside down. Control and administration of society was no longer exclusive to a few. It was no longer necessary to be rich to be responsible. The wonder of the revolution was not so much in its festivities, in its cheering crowds and emotional renderings of the Internationale. It was in its democratic spirit. The talents, capacities, emotions and confidences of the common people, which are blunted and corrupted in an exploiting society, were unleashed. John Reed, an American journalist who had the luck to be in Russia during that October, wrote a book to celebrate the Ten days that shook the world:
Then the Talk, beside which Carlyle’s ‘flood of French speech’ was a mere trickle. Lectures, debates, speeches – in theatres, circuses, school-houses, clubs, soviet meeting rooms, union headquarters, barracks ... Meetings in the trenches at the Front, in village squares, factories ... What a marvellous sight to see the Putilov factory pour out its forty thousand to listen to Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever they had to say as long as they would talk! For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street corner was a public tribune. In railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere ...
The ‘socialist order’ set up after October was not a democratic paradise – far from it. There was a constant jumble of mistakes and counter-mistakes, uneasy relationships between different power brokers, lapses into bureaucracy. The capitalist governments outside Russia did not want their world turned upside down, and they immediately set out to destroy the Russian revolution by force. They redoubled their military effort on the Russian front, and financed army after army of angry Russian emigres outraged that ‘their property’, which they had amassed in centuries of plunder, had been confiscated by the Bolshevik upstarts. The very word ‘Bolshie’ was adopted in different languages to describe the uncooperative child who refuses to obey its parents.
The war and the economic blockade made it impossible for the new socialist republic to realise the main economic aim of socialism: plenty. For the first few years after the revolution, there was widespread starvation and privation. Production slumped to less than half what it had been before the war and before the revolution. The remarkable feature of those first few years, however, is how much the new society was able to survive, develop and emancipate itself. That it did so at all was entirely due to the workers who had created the revolution, and their determination not to let go of the democracy they had won. ‘I calculated,’ Lenin explained,
solely and exclusively on the workers, soldiers and peasants being able to tackle better than the officials, better than the police, the practical and difficult problems of increasing the production of foodstuffs and their better provision, the better provision of soldiers etc.
In January 1918, he told the first post-revolutionary All-Russian Congress of soviets:
In introducing workers’ control, we knew it would take some time before it spread to the whole of Russia, but we wanted to show that we recognised only one road – changes from below. We wanted the workers themselves to draw up, from below, the new principles of economic conditions.
The revolution was increasingly beleaguered by civil war, famine and a failure of production, but it was saved from instant defeat by this emphasis on control from below. When sacrifices had to be made, they were made even-handedly. The poor were treated as priorities, the privileged expropriated. Wonders were performed far more remarkable than in war or natural disaster. Because millions of newly emancipated people felt that this was their society which they had created, they stubbornly defended it literally to the last drops of sweat and blood. Victor Serge, a French socialist who joined in the Russian revolution with every fibre of his mind and body, wrote:
In spite of this grotesque misery, a prodigious impulse was given to public education. Such a thirst for knowledge sprang up all over the country that new schools, adult courses, universities and Workers’ Faculties were formed everywhere. Innumerable fresh initiatives laid open the teaching of unheard-of, totally unexplored domains of learning.
The education minister, Lunacharsky, lectured to thousands of starving, freezing workers – on Greek drama. Museums, enriched with works of art confiscated from great private estates, were somehow kept open and visited by hundreds of thousands of people who had never before heard of a museum. Theatres, libraries, ballet companies, scientific laboratories – all managed to defy the cold and dark and hunger.
At the new ministry of social welfare, under the first woman government minister in the whole history of the world – Alexandra Kollontai – they set up a new system of benefits which put the poorest first. Maternity benefit was introduced for the first time anywhere in the world. Old dark laws preventing abortion and divorce were swept aside in a series of revolutionary decrees. For the first time, abortion was free, safe and on demand.
Somehow, the new society clung to its democracy. Elections were still held to the soviets, whose members were indeed responsible and revocable. Victor Serge wrote:
In the years of the greatest peril the soviets and the central executive committee of the soviets included left social revolutionaries (who were part of the government in the first nine months), Maximalists, anarchists, Menshevik social democrats, and even right social revolutionaries – the latter unalterable enemies of the new power. Far from fearing discussion, Lenin seeks after it, having Martov and Dan, who had been expelled from the All-Russian executive, invited to come to take the floor. He feels that he has something to learn from their merciless criticism.
In spite of cries from all sides to keep the Mensheviks out of political activity, to ‘shut them up’ until at least the civil war was won, the Mensheviks went on playing an active part in the political life of the new society. Throughout 1920 they had party offices and a club in Moscow. They even led a strike in Moscow in the summer of 1918. And they kept winning seats (though a minority of them) in the soviets: in 1920 they won 46 seats in the Moscow soviet, 250 in Kharkov, 120 in Yaroslav, 78 in Kremenchung and plenty of others in towns all over the country. The democracy of the new society was part of its self-discipline.
Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the early years of the Russian revolution was the dedication of the working people to the running of their new society. In modern capitalist times rich and powerful people who have never made a sacrifice in their lives go on television to implore the majority, who spend in a week what their implorers spend on a single lunch, to make sacrifices for the ‘national good’. Their country, it is said, depends on them working harder and accepting less. Few workers take this seriously, since there is no sign that the people who ask for the sacrifice plan to share in it. But in Russia in 1918, 1919 and 1920 working people not only saw that everyone was taking part in the sacrifice, but felt it was their society which benefited from it.
The liberal British journalist Arthur Ransome, later to become rich and famous from writing children’s books, travelled widely in post-revolutionary Russia and reported in wonder for his paper The Daily News. His two books about Russia are full of admiration for the new society and the dedication to it of its working people.
He described an evening after a conference in Jaroslavl when he and Radek, a Bolshevik leader, were invited to see a play put on by railwaymen and their families. After the play, the workers called on Radek to make a speech:
He led off by a direct and furious assault on the railway workers in general, demanding work, work and more work, telling them that as the Red Army had been the vanguard of the revolution hitherto ... so now it was the turn of the railway workers ... Instead of giving them a pleasant, interesting sketch of the international position, which, no doubt, was what they expected, he took the opportunity to tell them exactly how things stood at home. And the amazing thing was that they seemed to be pleased. They listened with extreme attention, wanted to turn out someone who had a sneezing fit at the far end of the hall, and nearly lifted the roof off with cheering when Radek had done. I wondered what sort of reception a man would have who in another country interrupted a play to hammer home truths about the need of work to an audience of working people who had gathered solely for the purpose of legitimate recreation.
Shortly before he left Russia, Arthur Ransome had an interview with Lenin. He asked him a shrewd question:
‘Did he think they would pull through far enough economically to be able to satisfy the needs of the peasantry before that same peasantry had organised a real political opposition that should overwhelm them?’ Lenin laughed: ‘If I could answer that question,’ he said, ‘I could answer everything, for on the answer to that question everything depends. I think we can. Yes, I think we can. But I do not know that we can.’
The prospect that the socialist revolution could be overwhelmed by opposition from the peasantry had been faced squarely by Lenin and the Bolsheviks from the beginning of the revolution. They realised that they could not possibly sustain a socialist democracy for long within the bounds of a country the mass of whose population were peasants. The peasants had joined the revolution enthusiastically. It gave them the chance to seize the land from rapacious landlords and Tsarist plutocrats. But the peasants were not interested in a socialist society based on cooperation and democracy. They wanted land for themselves, which they could develop individually.
Two revolutions had therefore happened at the same time: in the cities for a socialist democracy; in the countryside for small ownership of land. Almost at once, as Lenin foresaw, the two revolutions started to work against one another. Since the working class was a small minority of the Russian population, the socialist democracy, if it was confined to Russia, was doomed.
Lenin spelt this out at a teachers’ conference in May 1919:
Even before the revolution, and likewise after it, our thought was: immediately, or at any rate very quickly, a revolution will begin in other countries, in capitalistically more developed countries – or in the contrary case, we will have to perish.
The whole of his strategy therefore was to use the revolution as an inspiration and agitation for revolutions in other ‘more developed countries’ – in particular Germany. If such revolutions did not break out and breathe life and sustenance into the tiny Russian working class, the alternative was simple and inevitable: ‘we will have to perish’. Thus Lenin’s foreign policy was directed to spreading revolution to other countries. The formation of new Communist parties was encouraged in Germany, France, Britain, Italy and elsewhere. The war had been ended on exceedingly unfavourable terms to Russia. Everything depended on the spark of revolution which had been struck in urban Russia igniting a revolutionary bonfire in Europe.
It did not happen. The German revolution, which broke out at the end of the war in 1918, was finally defeated in 1923. In Britain and France the workers preferred to stick to the parliamentary road. In Italy, the mass occupations of the factories in 1920 were defeated by the employers, who resorted soon after (as the German employers did a decade later) to fascism.
The Russian revolution was isolated. The working class which had made the revolution was almost entirely wiped out by war and famine. Of the three million adult workers in Russia, only 1.2 million remained in 1921, and many of those were driven out of the cities in search of food. Effectively the only revolutionary workers who were left were those who had taken over the reins of political power. The Bolsheviks still ruled, but there were no Bolshevik workers to maintain ‘control from below’ – the essence of the revolution. The inevitable happened quite quickly. The revolution perished.
No one can tell the exact moment when day becomes night, but everyone can tell the difference between light and darkness. Many socialists over the past 70 years have refused to accept that the Russian revolution was lost because there was no one moment, no cataclysmic upheaval in which the forces of reaction staged a counter-revolution and overthrew the Russian revolutionary government. This is strictly true. There was no moment of truth when the revolutionary bull was slain. Slain he was, however. The system of society in Russia in the 1930s was quite different from that thrown up by the Russian revolution.
Lenin died in 1924 – not long after the defeat of the German revolution. By that time a different political animal was filling the ranks of the Communist Party. These people were not inspired by the self-emancipation of 1917. They listened appreciatively to the views and priorities of the general secretary of the Communist Party, Stalin, against whose intolerance Lenin had. warned in his will. Stalin and his supporters had no time for the ‘luxuries’ of opposition (which had been tolerated and put to good effect when there were many fewer luxuries about).
Stalin insisted on the mummification of Lenin’s body and the deification of Lenin’s name. This was a grotesque flouting of everything Lenin had ever stood for – he had resisted to his dying day the slightest sign of reverence for any God or for any human being, particularly himself. The plans for his mummification were bitterly opposed by Lenin’s wife and by those who knew and loved him. But they suited the purpose of the General Secretary.
Before long, with the support of the new workers in the factories, and of the rapidly-growing political police, Stalin was ‘purging’ the party of all opposition. Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Russian revolution second in stature only to Lenin himself, was hounded and abused. In 1927, he was exiled. His exile paved the way for a complete reversal of the economic priorities of the revolution.
Most of the economic effort immediately after the revolution had been devoted to driving out the counter-revolutionary armies. But no one doubted that the central thrust of economic activity in the new society was to make a better world for the workers and the dispossessed. The object of investment, for instance, was to produce consumer goods that would improve workers’ lives. In 1928, in spite of all the dreadful privations suffered by the Russian revolution, 60.5 per cent of the goods produced were ‘consumer’ goods.
Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, which started in 1928, changed all that completely. The first two plans almost exactly halved the percentage of production devoted to consumer goods. The priority was accumulation, reinvesting wealth in further production. The more Russian workers produced, and production rose hugely, the less they got for their own needs, and the more went on industrial investment, on tanks and bombs, on more, still more, industrial investment, and on privileges for the new bureaucracy.
One by one the gains of the revolution were cast aside. Women’s liberation, for instance, was a menace to the regimented society which was necessary to fulfil the new norms. Out went the decree on free divorce, out went the decree on free abortion; in came the Great Russian family, and even the Great Russian Orthodox Church.
The worst impediment to the new Stalinist aims, however, was the Russian revolution itself. In words the revolution had to be honoured, just as the French revolution is still verbally honoured by a Parisian establishment that is anything but revolutionary. But the reality of the revolution, and particularly of the ruling Communist Party which was riddled with revolutionaries, was a menace to Stalin and his followers. For ten years and more they conducted their war on the revolutionaries with a single-minded savagery which was borrowed, often literally, from the barbaric regime of Ivan the Terrible.
Stalin’s hatred of opposition was maniacal. The Italian socialist Ignazio Silone described a meeting of the executive of the Communist International in Moscow in May 1927. Silone led the Communist underground in Italy, which was fighting a brutal fascist government. He and his fellow Italian delegate, Togliatti, were late for the meeting. When they arrived, the chairman, Thälmann, leader of the German Communist Party, was reading out an hysterical denunciation of a paper by Trotsky criticising the recent Russian policy in China – which had led to the mass slaughter of Chinese Communists.
Silone apologised for arriving late and for not having seen the document which was being condemned. ‘To tell the truth,’ said Thälmann, ‘we haven’t seen the document either.’ Refusing to believe what he had heard, Silone blamed the interpreter. He repeated that he could not possibly pass judgement on something he had not read. Stalin, standing by the window, said softly that if the resolution was not unanimous it could not be submitted.
Tremendous pressure was brought on the Italian delegates that evening and the following day to reconsider their position – which to their credit they refused to do. They were denounced as ‘petit bourgeois’ – and Thälmann remarked that there was little wonder fascism had taken root in Italy if the Italian Communists were capable of such indiscipline.
Already, in 1927, the new rulers of Stalinist Russia were turning with increasing frenzy on every manifestation of the revolutionary tradition. Soon after leaving that meeting of the International, Ignazio Silone was approached by an Italian Communist who had escaped to Russia to avoid fascist persecution. He was proud to have been taken on by a Russian factory. Wrote Silone:
He was ready to put up with the material shortages of every kind since to remedy them was clearly beyond the power of individuals, but he could not understand why the workers were entirely at the mercy of the factory directorate and had no effective organisation to protect their interests; why, in this respect also, they should be so much worse off than in capitalist countries. Most of the much-vaunted rights of the working class were purely theoretical.
There were still hundreds of thousands of workers who asked such questions in Russia in 1927. The new Stalinist regime bent every muscle to wipe them off the face of the earth. Anyone who breathed a word of socialism from below, even if they demanded the most marginal representation in the workplace, were shipped off to labour camps, or executed.
This persecution of the revolutionaries went on throughout the 1930s. By the end of that decade there was only one member of the original central committee of the Communist Party still living: Stalin himself. Lenin had died of illness. Every other member had been executed, murdered or forced into suicide. Most of the Bolshevik leaders were executed after show trials, in which they were either tortured or persuaded to ‘confess’ to their opposition to the revolution they had led. Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek – all confessed and were shot. Trotsky was pursued into exile and murdered by a Stalinist agent in Mexico.
The whole disgusting process was brilliantly satirised by the British socialist writer George Orwell in his famous fable Animal Farm. The ultimate horror of the story was the dispatching of the old warhorse Boxer, strong, loyal and revolutionary to the last muscle, to the knacker’s yard.
George Orwell was an exception among socialist writers in the rest’ of the world. Some of his most famous books – including Animal Farm – were rejected by publishers who detested Orwell for his opposition to Stalinist Russia. The enormous majority of socialists all over the world felt it was their duty to stand up for Stalinist Russia against its capitalist detractors. Some were prepared to support any monstrosity provided it emerged from the ‘socialist motherland’. Others felt uneasy about, say, the show trials of the late 1930s, but were prepared to defend Russia as the ‘lesser evil’.
Almost unanimously they accepted the definition of Russia as ‘socialist’. They referred to the fact that there was no stock exchange, no shareholders robbing the workers of the value of what they produced. They insisted that the Russian economy was planned. Socialism, they argued, was a planned economy with no private enterprise, no individual shareholding in the means of production. This existed in Russia, therefore Russia was a socialist country. For nearly 30 years, through the Second World War and on beyond Stalin’s death in 1953, the most courageous and militant socialists everywhere on earth stood shoulder to shoulder with one of the most reactionary dictatorships ever known.
How could this happen? Precisely because the definition of socialism which hypnotised the left did not include its most essential ingredient: workers’ control. An economic plan on its own, after all, could not be enough to define a socialist society. The crucial question is: what is the plan for?
The Russian plans under Stalin (and since) served no other purpose except to build up the Russian economy to compete with other economies. For this purpose the workers were directly excluded from decisions. The control of society was from above, not from below. It was, as it sometimes even called itself, a command economy. The commanders were appointed from above, not from below. They were the nomenklatura, leading party and state officials who were carefully selected and who performed the functions (and accepted the privileges) of a ruling class. They organised production to accumulate the national wealth at the expense of the Russian workers – exactly the function of the ruling class in every other country of the world. It mattered not a damn what forms this exploitation took, nor whether the Russian rulers rewarded themselves with shareholdings or with hunting lodges, travel permits, high salaries or servants. It was exploitation none the less.
Russia was not a socialist society at all. It was a state-capitalist society presided over by a tyranny every bit as savage as any stock exchange-based capitalist tyranny anywhere else in the world.
The support socialists in other countries gave to Stalinist Russia turned them into the unwitting tools of Russian foreign policy, which was as manipulative and cynical as any other foreign policy. In the early 1930s the menace of fascism, which had already taken power in Italy, started to threaten the whole of Central Europe. In Germany the left was split, almost evenly, between the Communists and the Social Democrats. A united left would have had the strike power, the influence in the communities and even the votes to beat off Hitler’s Nazis. The crisis called out for a campaign by the Communists to put pressure on the Social Democratic leaders to unite with them against Hitler. But because of Stalin’s reckless foreign policy, the German Communist Party turned its main fire not on the Nazis but on the Social Democrats, who it described as ‘social fascists’. The campaign irrevocably split the working-class movement, and Hitler was able to seize power. After that the Social Democrats and the Communists were united at last: in the concentration camps and the gas chambers.
The debilitating disease of Stalinism is expertly described by the novelist Doris Lessing in her 1962 masterpiece, The Golden Notebook. One of her characters, a Communist Party loyalist, goes to Russia, and returns with a story. He had, he said, been sitting in his hotel when he got a call from the Kremlin. Comrade Stalin would like to see him. All excited, he had been rushed to The Presence. An ordinary man in ordinary clothes, with a neat moustache and smoking a pipe, had asked for an account of developments in the British labour movement. The visitor, overcome with gratitude, blurted out what he could. Kindly and sympathetically Comrade Stalin offered a few words of advice, and begged to be allowed to get on with his work. Doris Lessing records, and she is certainly right, that every single Communist visitor to Russia in the two decades of the 1930s and 1940s suffered from the same fantasy.
The tragedy of it all is that the socialism which all those people represented, their fighting spirit, was dragged back to a crass utopianism in which the soul of socialism, the activity and control of the self-emancipated working class, was at worst replaced, at best personified, by a pipe-smoking despot.
Some socialists, like Ignazio Silone and Doris Lessing, were so repulsed by Stalinism that they left the Communist Party, and moved off to the right (Silone became a right-wing Social Democrat, and Doris Lessing’s novels, which had started with such zest and hope, degenerated into mystical reaction).
The first great shock for the mass of Communist Party members came three years after Stalin’s death when his successor, Khrushchev, denounced some of the horrors of the Stalinist period. Some Communists fled to the right or to apathy; some – a very few – to other socialist organisations. But the Communist parties survived the Khrushchev outburst, even when Khrushchev was chucked out and replaced by a regime which differed only on the margins from Stalin’s.
By the 1970s, the central claim with which socialists and Communists had defended their support for ‘socialism from above’ in Russia began to wear thin. Whatever else could be said about Stalinist Russia, they had argued, its economic growth was spectacular. Between 1928 and 1968, the Russian economy had doubled and redoubled. The puny working class of 1920, only a million strong, had been transformed into an industrial working class of more than sixty million. Russia could mount an army to defeat Hitler’s at Stalingrad and launch a Sputnik into space before even the United States of America.
All this had been achieved by a ‘command economy’, by state capitalism. But state capitalism has its limitations as well. It is an excellent system for bludgeoning a peasant society into mass industrial production. But it suffers from its own success. It can order production, bully and command workers to achieve higher and higher norms in heavy industries. But when it has to deal with more advanced technologies, to persuade and absorb skilled labour, to distribute goods as well as to produce them, state capitalism flounders.
The Russian economy has been floundering for a long time. For twenty years this ‘socialist country’ has been importing grain from its allegedly more inefficient capitalist rival, the United States of America. Economic growth rates have been much lower in the 1970s and 1980s than in the 1930s and 1940s. The argument that its planned economy would always provide Russia with a faster growth rate than its capitalist rivals has been confounded. On almost every front in the past fifteen years or so the Russian economy has been eclipsed by that of America. By comparison with the even more spectacular growth rates in Germany and Japan, Russia has been left far behind.
It is this failure of the central argument for a state-capitalist economy which has caused all the ‘rethink’ and ‘reform’ in Russia in recent years. If Russian state capitalism was to compete successfully with the West, then it would have to relax its central controls and open up to the world market. The ‘command’ economy had to be supplanted by a ‘demand’ economy. Workers had to be lured and incorporated rather than bullied. The privileges of the bureaucrat had to be replaced with the privileges of the entrepreneur.
This could be achieved only with a violent shake-up in the crumbling, corrupt Russian bureaucracy. If perestroika (economic reforms designed to make Russia more competitive) was to succeed, a little glasnost (free discussion and debate) was called for.
The man who started to put these anti-bureaucratic principles into practice was a bureaucrat who had himself climbed steadily up the Communist Party ladder without at any time appearing to oppose the reactionaries Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko. Mikhail Gorbachev had done nothing in particular, but he had done it very well. He had a forthright attractive manner, understood the importance of public relations, and he dressed well.
At once, the massed ranks of former Stalinists all over the world fell in love with this new anti-Stalinist reformer. The romantic attachment many of them had with Russia as a ‘socialist country’ was brought to life in the personality of this ‘bustling man of peace’. Here was a man who really would put ‘socialist Russia’ on the world agenda, who did not execute people who disagreed with him, and who would almost single-handedly bring about ‘revolution from above’.
Years of looking upwards had craned their necks and stunted their vision. If for a moment they had shifted their gaze downwards to the heaving, struggling working class of Russia they would have seen profound discontent, exploitation, squalor, hunger and a seething anger. All these got worse as Gorbachev and the ‘reformers’ tried to apply the standards of multinational corporations to state-capitalist corporations. In this much-heralded change, there was nothing to be gained by the Russian workers. Indeed, if anything, the market ‘medicine’ was even worse for the workers than the state-capitalist disease.
The vast Russian working class began to fight. In 1989, the coalfields of Siberia and the Ukraine, for the first time since the revolution, were paralysed by strikes. Gorbachev told the Supreme soviet:
This is perhaps the worst ordeal to befall our country in all four years of restructuring. There has been Chernobyl, there have been various other misfortunes. Nevertheless, I am singling this out as the most serious and difficult.
It was bad enough trying to oust the incompetent and corrupt officials who made up the Russian state-capitalist machine. They would fight tooth and nail for their privileges, exposing and denouncing their fellow bureaucrats in the process. But the prospect of facing down the huge Russian working class, at last galvanised into action, and even, horror of horrors, reading and listening to arguments about socialism from below, was much more serious.
Gorbachev backed off, allowing the miners the luxury of a little soap, and holding back a little from the excesses of perestroika. For most of 1989 and all of 1990 this Gorbachev, who came before the world in 1985 and 1986 as a determined and confident reformer, spent his time retracing his steps, then gingerly stepping out again. No sooner had he carried out an economic reform here, than he refused to carry out one somewhere else. No sooner had he sided with the ‘reformers’ in the Supreme soviet than he denounced them. All his political life and experience has been ‘from above’ and he intends to keep things there. Grafting private enterprise capitalism on to state capitalism is a difficult business, and Gorbachev intends to do it by keeping the class which he represents in economic power – whatever deprivation that may cause the rest.
Russian workers and reformers who adored him in 1985 and 1986 now detest him. Utterly confused by the mirage of reform, contradicted at every turn by reality, the world’s Communist parties have vanished in the wind like a puff of smoke. Sixty years of mythology about a socialist motherland are exposed for all to see.
What is left is something much more substantial: the working class of Russia in motion, and the working class of Eastern Europe, which in six fantastic months in 1989 helped to overthrow six state capitalist tyrannies masquerading as socialism from above, have started to pave the way to a completely different future: socialism from below.
Last updated on 5.2.2005