The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
All these episodes pointed up the deep gulf which existed between the ideas of the Bolsheviks and those of the Left Social- Revolutionaries concerning the use of revolutionary force. The difference was not accidental. It grew organically from a profound divergence in their philosophical and sociological viewpoints. A more detailed analysis of the difference between them is important for two reasons. First, because their viewpoints did not remain abstract ideas to be found only in theoretical volumes; instead they descended into the living reality of a nation of well over a hundred million souls and took on the flesh and blood of a revolution. Second, because the conflicts then raging within Russia were to spread, sooner or later, to the other nations of the world. The barricades of the social and spiritual struggle which were erected on the vast plains of Russia were to become a barricade along the fronts of the world.
The Bolshevik Party embodied the aggressive, militant wing of Marxism. And when we speak of Marxism, we consider not only the theories and the political practices of Marx himself, but the entire system of the Marxist movement as it was moulded in the decades after Marx. Three main concepts formed the backbone of European Marxism. The first concept is that the process of human history moves according to certain unalterable social laws. In physical nature, life and evolution are subject to laws which science can discover and formulate for man’s use. Similarly, all social phenomena and developments are ruled by a system of laws which science (“social physics”) must discover in order to formulate the only correct program for the policy of mankind. Marxism was aware of the deep-felt, almost instinctive, longing for social liberation that existed in the masses, and of the lofty social ideals that inspired great thinkers. And knowing this, Marxism sallied forth in the forties of the nineteenth century with the ambition to provide a scientific basis for these ideals. “You cannot rely,” its protagonists explained to the working people, “on abstract ideals of passing value. We will prove to you that these ideals are not simply the dreams or hopes of kindly men, but laws, iron laws of social evolution. This realization will give you psychological security in your struggle for a better future, and you will need have no fears that your ideals might perish.”
As its second concept, Marxism outlines the precise character of these laws of social history: they are economic laws. Men- everywhere and in all generations-are primarily absorbed in the task of satisfying their physical and economic needs. In the process of production and distribution of manufactured goods, they establish diverse economic units, that is, classes. Solidarity in economic interests exists within the framework of each individual class (the peasants, artisans, proletarians, landowners, capitalists). But between them there is a permanent and bitter class struggle.
Therefore, Marxist doctrine continued, the modern class of the industrial proletariat must be made aware of its true class interests, of its commanding position in capitalist society. The capitalist system will inescapably lead to socialism and the proletariat is the chief agent in this historic trend. In modem society the workingman will best fulfill the historic law of evolution if he devotes himself entirely to the defense of his class interests. The emancipation of the worker would simultaneously mean the emancipation of society.
There was and is, of course, no room for moral aspirations as vital forces in this system of social evolution. Ideas of justice, love, brotherhood can not be independent factors in a society that is propelled by the movement of rigorously delineated economic interests. And what did Marx himself think of such ideas? In 1864 he was engaged in formulating the statute of the First Internationale. At that time the British labor leaders had insisted on the inclusion of notions of “rights, duties, truth, morals and justice,” in the statute. Marx acceded to their demands but, at the same time, he wrote to Friedrich Engels, saying that he had “spread out the words in such a manner that they would bring no harm.”
Rosa Luxemburg, the famous Marxist fighter and martyr of the German Revolution, wrote in the same spirit that the idea of justice was “an old mare mounted in all generations by those world reformers who had no better means of historic transportation-a broken-down Rosinante ridden in search of world reform by the Don Quixotes of history who'd bring back from their travels nothing but a black eye.” To the Marxist, then, not the prompting of a moral idea, but the elemental force of economic interests was to be the main driving motor of history and socialism.
The evolution of history (and this is the third fundamental concept of Marxism) is being enacted by human collectives, that is, classes. Hence the historic process depends least on the active will of the individual. The figures on the chessboard of humanity are not individuals moving in different directions, uniting or clashing with the full force of their personalities, but masses-groups with a collective will. It was not the individual worker, peasant or official who played his part in the evolution of history and culture, but the working class, the peasantry, the capitalist class, officialdom. The average man was no more than a cog in a complicated social system. The wealth of his individual thoughts and ideas, his hopes and dreams, his moral and religious beliefs could have no decisive value in the mechanics of society. He was, in a sense, to do no more than serve historic necessity; consequently, he also bore no personal responsibility for the trend of historic events.
On this Marxist stage only one group of people was to play an active historic role-the socialist leaders as representatives of the proletariat. It was they who had discerned the mysterious laws of economic evolution; they had discovered the road by which capitalism was moving toward its own destruction and vacating the stage to the socialist economic order. Their task was to enlighten the proletariat-the historic heir of capitalism-to make it class conscious. But even class-conscious proletarians required leaders who would continuously decipher for them the complex picture of political and economic phenomena and lead them in the struggle. These Marxist leaders compose the Party, which guides-in the name of the proletarian class -the inevitable historic process. The Party and its leaders are identified with history itself; they are the force of history.
Marxism, transported from Europe, was confronted with a different social reality in Russia. In Europe it had been based by Marx and his followers on the analysis of a well-developed industrial capitalism, where hundreds of thousands of workers had already severed all contact with land and agriculture and were concentrated in factories. The peasants were being deprived of their land and of their traditional way of life and were being subjected to the pressures of capitalism. The craftsman and small trader were struggling for their existence, and the intellectual was driven to spend his spiritual energy in the service of capitalism. But in Russia, social reality toward the end of the nineteenth century was quite different. The industrial city was in its infancy. Peasants and craftsmen constituted the major sections of the people, and both were subject to the powerful landowners. The intellectuals were as yet relatively free from capitalist pressures.
And yet Russian Marxists-Plekhanov, Martov, Potressov, Lenin-transferred to the Russian people all the principles and general theories of Marxism. Russian developments, too, were determined by historic laws; the same economic interests were in conflict with each other; there, too, the organized-or unorganized-mass collectives were in evidence. Russia’s future was to follow the example of Europe: a powerful capitalism and a fighting working class would inevitably develop. Hence Plekhanov declared at the International Socialist Congress in Paris in 1889 that “the Russian Revolution will either be victorious as a revolution of workers or it will not be victorious at all.” It became the task of Marxism, therefore, to conduct Russia’s economic development, its culture and the psychology of its people along the European pattern. The proletarian Party, having alone diagnosed correctly Russia’s historic trend, was to direct this tremendous undertaking. The Party concerned was the Russian Social-Democratic Party.
But the Social-Democratic Party harbored two factions: one moderate and the other radical-the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Both factions looked to Europe and envisaged the same capitalist-democratic evolution in Russia. But the Mensheviks believed that this development would take place in an evolutionary manner. The czarist regime would be removed first, creating the necessary conditions for the peaceful development of a capitalist economy and its antagonist-the working class.
The Bolsheviks, however, believed that this development should be hurried and prodded constantly by revolutionary pressure. They did not consider the Russian proletarians, at their present stage of social consciousness, sufficiently advanced to take over this revolutionary function. Lenin’s estimate of the potential of the Russian workers, before the revolution, is characteristic of this attitude.
“The workers,” he wrote in 1903, “can have no social-democratic consciousness. It must be brought to them from the outside. The history of all countries bears evidence that, left to his own devices, the worker can at best evolve a Trade- Union consciousness only, that is, a conviction that, in the struggle against the employers, it is necessary to join together in unions. A spontaneous labor movement results in no more than Trade Unions, and Trade Union policy is the bourgeois policy of the working class.”
Lenin therefore considered it absolutely essential that the workers fight under the strict control of “their” party, a party with stern discipline and a dictatorial leadership. He went so far as to compare the Social-Democratic Party with the Jacobins, who dominated the French Revolution by dictatorship and terror.
To fashion the workingman into an uncompromising revolutionary fighter, the Bolsheviks believed it necessary to intensify the class struggle as much as possible. They taught the Russian worker to fight not only against capitalist institutions, but against the capitalists. They taught him to pursue the social struggle with personal venom and contempt, with rage and despair. Bolshevism was readying for a revolution that would explode with the force of dynamite, absorbing vast millions of men and directed by the party of the proletarian dictators.
The movement of the Left Social-Revolutionaries sprung from a different cultural environment and from different ideological sources. Their ideology was known as Socialist Populism, which had unfolded in Russia several decades before Marxism. The pioneers of Populism based their theories not only on the experiences of European industrial capitalism, but also on those of the Russian semi-agrarian and semi-industrial social structure. Almost all pioneers and martyrs among the Populists had come from the well-to-do classes. Thus they had come to the defense of the toiling and suffering people not for the sake of their own class interests, but in the service of their moral ideals. They had found it impossible to watch with equanimity the exploitation, the poverty and misery in which the Russian people lived.
With passion and force Russian writers described these young men and women who had awakened to their own “rebellious conscience” and who had felt responsible for the “downtrodden honor” of the worker and peasant. Answering the call of their conscience, in the 1870’s thousands of these Populists began their magnificent “march to the people.” They renounced their social, and even their cultural, privileges; they lived with the peasants in their villages, and with the workers in factory slums; they carried education and socialist propaganda into peasant and working-class homes.
The philosophy of Populism had been developed and formulated by a number of Russian revolutionary thinkers. Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), in his great fight for the liberation of the peasants, had placed the dignity of the individual first among his demands. He was interested not only in the liberation of the peasant from economic slavery, but also in his elevation as a free human personality.
In powerful terms Alexander Herzen rejected European civilization, despite its scientific and artistic glory. To him this civilization was represented by the Philistine and the petty bourgeois who “smothered the individual personality, the beauty and the dynamism of society.” Herzen, therefore, followed with intense interest the development of the French Revolution of 1848, which was to inaugurate a new social and moral order in the world. But he lived to see the defeat of the workers’ rebellion and he recognized the danger points inherent in revolution. And so he came to warn, in even more compelling language, that future upheavals must beware and not permit the destruction of the dignity and the freedom of man. He wrote:
“The coming order must be not only a sharp-edged sword, but a preserving force. By striking down the old world it must at once save everything within worthy of salvation, and take over into the future whatever is varied, original, alive. Woe to the revolution which is poor in spiritual force and sickly in imaginative feeling, which out of the immensity that has passed and been acquired will create nothing but a dreary workshop, whose sole object is enough to eat and drink!” [5]
Peter Lavrov (182 3-1900) interpreted the evolution of history in terms of moral progress. He expounded the view that a moral world order was manifest in the course of history and that the task of socialism consisted in helping to realize this order. He acknowledged the great achievements of European civilization, but he saw that it had been erected “upon the bent shoulders and the mutilated lives of the stepchildren of civilization,” and that its fruits were enjoyed largely by those powerful groups he called the “savages of a higher culture.” One dare not, therefore, he maintained, depend on the spontaneous or “lawful” unfolding of history; one must inspire and guide it in the revolutionary spirit of the ideals of truth and justice.
Lavrov established a “formula of progress” for history, and he believed that the conscious, “critically thinking personality” is capable, of its own will, to rise to great moral heights. The ‘'formula of progress” was both simple and comprehensive: “The development of an individual, in its physical, spiritual and moral aspects, and the realization of truth and justice in the social forms of living.”
But Lavrov appealed to the revolutionary fighter at the same time to keep his historic struggle constantly under moral control. “The goal is establishment of the kingdom of justice; it implies love for those who are your brothers today and for those who may yet become your brothers. . . . The banner of the revolution must remain spotless and unsullied by a single unnecessary drop of blood. The ethical purity of the socialist struggle must never be in jeopardy.”
Nicolai Mikhailovski (1842-1904) considered the unceasing “struggle for the individuality” the focal point in the history of man. In his view, the human soul is a treasure chest of noble impulses for justice, freedom, brotherly love-and throughout history the oppressed individual therefore yearns for freedom with all his might. In the future, as has been true of the past, the individual will strive, first, to free himself from all chains of spiritual, social and political rule and, second, to create conditions for the constructive development of his personality, for the beatification and elevation of man as man. Socialism in the modern era is the best method, he believed, for achieving this ideal of a harmonious, creative personality.
“The Russian people,” Mikhailovski wrote with pride, “have created a wonderful concept in Pravda. It means, at one and the same time, truth and justice. It joins in harmonious union the supreme search of science and the profoundest aspirations of morals. The word represents also a clear expression of the intimate longing of the simple man of the people for a life of dignity, a life of Pravda.
“Let the Socialists remember this in their day-to-day struggle, in times of defeat and, particularly, on the day of victory.”
Viewed through the writings of its philosophers, the socialism of the Social-Revolutionaries was obviously quite unlike that of the Marxian Bolsheviks. They did not see it only as the great economic transformation of society, the “abolition of private property” and the “nationalization of the means of production.” To the Populists socialism was, first and foremost, the liberation of the oppressed individual (and of humanity) through the abolition of capitalism and the socialization of the means of production. In other words, the radical economic changes were to be but a means for a different, fundamental and final aim: to return to man both his inner and his outer dignity, his freedom and sense of brotherhood. That meant that the real purpose of the socialist movement was, by nature, a moral one.
The Populists sought this moral purpose not only in the goal of socialism, but also in the methods of its realization. They acknowledged the importance of the class struggle in society, but they saw it as far more than just a struggle for economic interests. Even when workers go on strike for certain immediate material aims, to improve their living standards, they exhibit in the fight their moral hunger for justice and sincerity. This longing for justice flickers in the smallest conflict in the class struggle. But the flicker bursts into flame during the decisive revolutionary battles of peasants, workers and artisans against their social adversaries. At such moments the toiling masses are able of heroism and self-sacrifice for far-reaching ethical goals-not only for themselves and their children but for generations ahead. Consequently the class struggle, though a significant living force among the working masses, must itself remain nder the constant control of moral ideals.
If we will recall now the three fundamental principles of the Marxist view of social evolution, we will recognize once more the deep gulf that lay between them and the Populists. To the Marxist-Bolsheviks, history evolved along unalterable economic laws reacting through various collectives, that is, classes. The Populists did not believe that the future of humanity must follow these supposed social laws. Rather, they based humanity’s development on the moral law which man establishes for himself by free decision and not by servile obedience to the historic Fatum. If the true agent of history is not some blind force of necessity that vibrates in the depths of capitalism, but full- blooded, critically thinking and deep-feeling man, then he bears the responsibility for history itself.
The Populists did not believe that the mechanics of society were fed and guided primarily by economic needs. Of course it was a disgrace that, within the framework of a growing material Civilization and spiritual culture, millions of men should live in poverty and insecurity from the time of their birth to their death. Of course it was the first task of socialism to do away with the pressures of hunger and homelessness by organizing the suffering masses for the struggle.
But the final goal was, and remained, the spiritual and moral liberation of humanity. This tremendous purpose, however, could not be realized only through the organization of large mass-groups into classes and parties which were to clash on the historic chessboard with the collectives (or classes) of the enemy and destroy them. The goal, after all, implied fundamental changes in a thousand-year-old civilization with all its complex interests, its way of life and its prejudices.
If this civilization was historically doomed and mankind was ready to take a step to a higher rung of a just society, the process of change could not but go through the individual conscience of each revolutionary fighter. If the modern worker was to partake in this great social upheaval, he must himself come to understand and accept responsibility for the future. It was not enough to belong to the working class. What the Populist was seeking was not the worker in the man, but the man in the worker.
All this will explain why the Social-Revolutionary movement did not include in its ranks only the industrial proletarians, whom the Bolsheviks proclaimed as the only progressive force in social evolution. The Social-Revolutionary movement included also large sections of the working peasants, that is, those who “worked their land with their own hands” and who belonged to co-operative Obschtchinas (land communes), as well as many members of the Russian intelligentsia-a very special group on the Russian scene. These latter were public-school teachers, professional men and women, university students, as well as children of the wealthier classes. They found support for their ideals in the Russian humanistic literature which devoted itself to the fate of the hunted and the humiliated in Russia. Literature helped to awaken among an attentive population emotions of pity and love for the socially degraded and the morally insulted “little man.” Under its influence, the best representatives of Russian youth and the intelligentsia streamed into the socialist parties, and particularly into the party of the Social-Revolutionaries.
But what actually united these three groups (workers, peasants and intelligentsia) in one movement was not only their interest in economic and political liberation. It was primarily the basic moral concepts of man’s individual freedom and of brotherly co-operation with his fellow men.
This difference in fundamental philosophy was, of course, at the source of the great divergence between Bolsheviks and Left Social-Revolutionaries in their attitude toward violence. Undoubtedly a revolution-every revolution-is the historic arena for the occurrence of violence. It could not have been expected that in Russia, a vast country with dozens of classes and nationalities and with thousands of suppressed passions and unfulfilled demands, the change-over to a new social order should occur without far-flung revolutionary violence. But it was important to know how, in what spirit, the responsible socialist parties approached this dangerous issue.
It was soon evident that the Bolshevik leaders-Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin and others-wanted to intensify the violence of events. As loyal Marxists, they never forgot the formula stated in Marx’s classic work Das Kapital: “Violence is the midwife of every old society that is pregnant with the new. Violence itself is an economic factor.” From this formula they concluded that, in a period of social upheaval, there must always be room for the element of violence. More than that: absence of violence would prove that the upheaval was not sufficiently revolutionary, not sufficiently far-reaching or secure in its achievements.
And of course, the “moral problem” did not exist for the Bolsheviks. They were concerned only with the question of how to use this violence most efficiently in the destruction of the class enemy and the establishment of a regime in line with their ideas. They would have acted in much the same manner had they restricted their demands to a bourgeois-democratic republic as had been their program until 1917. But from the moment when Lenin’s party decided to transform the Russian upheaval into a full socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the area and the scale of the battlefield expanded a thousandfold.
They viewed the road to be taken by revolutionary Russia, as determined and formulated by bolshevism, as the only possible road because Marxism claimed that history does not provide more than one line of development. Hence, people and land must be harnessed to the realization of this historic task. There can be but one political body to interpret this task in all its complicated ramifications and to guide the proletariat along the only possible highway of Russian and world history. And this is the Bolshevik Party, which represents brain and body of the proletariat and which must therefore hold power securely in its hands.
The inescapable, logical conclusion is that the Party must not permit anyone-class, movement or individual-to obstruct the policies of its leaders. Every opposition, every deviation from the indicated path is not only rebellion against the Party but against the dictates of history. Whoever stands in the way of this Bolshevik march-even if he belongs to their own socialist camp-must be removed unhesitatingly and ruthlessly. (Later, as a consequence of this logic, even Bolshevism’s own “Founding Fathers,” men like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Trotsky, were to be liquidated for so-called deviation.)
Bolshevism has exhibited a tremendous capacity for cruelty; but rather than psychological, it has been logical cruelty. The logic of their doctrine and their fanatic devotion to it has resulted in a denial of all humanistic and moral curbs on the revolutionary process. Hence Trotsky, for instance, in defending the terroristic excesses in the country, wrote while at the pinnacle (of his power: “In an environment of class slavery it is difficult to teach working people good manners. Aroused and enraged, they will grab a stick, a stone; they will reach for fire and the noose.” That is why Lenin, who knew the good-humored nature of the Russian people well, did his best to arouse terroristic instincts in them.
The Left Social-Revolutionaries, loyal to their spiritual heritage, always rejected these Bolshevik principles. They realized that the desperate struggle for liberation from czarism and social exploitation could not entirely avoid the use of revolutionary violence. As will be shown in another chapter, the Social- Revolutionaries had themselves conducted a terrorist battle against czarism which resulted in countless casualties on both sides. But they had never glorified bloodshed and the annihilation of man. They hated and despised both individual murder and class revenge. They did not see themselves as the only prophets and interpreters of history granting themselves the “right” to force their will on the masses of the people. They strove to realize their program of social transformation and personal liberation with the knowledge and the will of the people themselves. That is why they never rushed to raise their weapons at every available opportunity; they knew the danger that lay ahead if violence should escape the control of moral principle.
The Bolshevik kept a close watch over every move of the masses, but he was not concerned with the state of mind, the emotions of the individual. Hence he could calmly, with “scientific” calculation, impose his will, hold the sword of violence over the heads of the people blind to the agonized face of the individual.
The Left Social-Revolutionary, even in the days of the revolutionary upheaval and violent mass eruption in 1917, turned his eyes to the average Russian-to Ivan, to Maria. He could not forget, even for a moment, that in the last analysis they were the actual fighters for freedom as well as those for whose welfare and future the revolution had been born. Neither Bolshevism nor any other leading group would ever have risen to power had not the subjects of history-Ivan and Maria-lifted themselves from the depths of misery and, in a great moral surge, overthrown despotism. And, by the same token, the revolution would be senseless and void of all moral justification if they-Ivan and Maria-did not gain by it an opportunity to enjoy a new future in their lifetime. But can there be joy, dignity and security if a dictatorial power rules the land with the knout of unlimited violence?
Revolutionary violence might have been used at the beginning against the enemies of the revolution, but very soon the rank and file came to realize that the proletarian dictatorship had driven them, too, into the iron circle of “counter-revolutionaries.” The Bolshevik regime, which had risen on the promise of expropriating the rich man’s capital, turned to the complete expropriation of the free will and the well-being of the worker.
During the first Congress in Petrograd of the Party of Left Social-Revolutionaries in November, 1917, Maria Spiridonova expressed clearly the difference between materialistic and ethical revolutionary socialism.
“We have entered a new phase of history,” she said, “that of bitter class struggle. But because of that it is our duty to deanse the air, to refill our souls with idealism from that treasure left us by the martyred fighters of the past. The final goal is the human personality. We fight not only that all men might eat; our goal stands much higher: we fight so that in this economic struggle man may triumph and may rise as a moral human being. . . .
“We are about to realize a great social program. But remember all the while that you are socialists and revolutionaries. Inject into your work the search for truth. Only then will we infuse the often instinctive movements of the people with the living breath of religious passion-the passion by which the revolution exists and by which it avoids becoming purely destructive outbreaks. . . .
“Today the Bolsheviks have the support of the masses of the people, but that is temporary-temporary because everything there is hatred and bitterness. Such emotions, aroused by selfish interests, may be useful when the fight is on the barricades. But in the second phase of the struggle, when organic building begins, when a new life must be erected on the foundations of love and altruism, the Bolsheviks will go bankrupt. But we, who wish to retain the message of our pioneers, must always think of the second phase of the struggle.”