The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
German and Austrian troops held the Ukraine in a steel grip. The population, particularly in the villages, was powerless against the brutal requisitions and punitive measures of the occupant. But, on July 30, 1918, Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, shook with the thunder of a bursting bomb. The “combat organization” of the Left Social-Revolutionaries had carried out an attempt on the oppressor of the land, Field Marshal von Eichhorn. As in the past, the characteristics of the typical Russian Populist-Socialist revealed themselves in the assassin. Boris Donskoy, a young sailor of peasant stock who had carried out the attempt, made no move to flee from the spot where the field marshal had fallen. He wanted to be taken prisoner, to pay with his own life for the crime of bloodshed. He was hanged in Kiev. Shortly thereafter the Germans tracked down Irina Kakhovskaya who had helped organize the attempt. She was tortured in a German prison and sentenced to die on the gallows. But, being a woman, she had special privileges. Kaiser Wilhelm himself was to confirm the sentence and-in one of the strange coincidences of history-Wilhelm had, in the meantime, lost his throne. The German revolution broke out. Kakhovskaya was freed and returned to Moscow.
One might have thought that the outbreak of the German revolution at the end of 1918 and the removal of the yoke of Brest-Litovsk would also have changed the situation in Russia. Events in Berlin and Vienna should have opened the way to the European revolution which, the Bolsheviks had always claimed, would furnish help and support for Russia’s “backward” peasant economy. The accretion of revolutionary power from Germany should have loosened the psychological chains that still bound the Russian people. But none of this came true.
The German rebellion (it never was a real revolution!) put forth social and political forces which did not rush to aid the Bolshevik regime. The German Social-Democrats strove, first of all, to save the fatherland and to secure their position with “law and order” in the old-established sense. But even the German Communists, in the words of their two outstanding intellectual leaders-Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg-often expressed criticism of the party dictatorship in Soviet Russia. It is of great historic importance to recall here the courageous and eloquent words in which both formulated their attitude toward the problem of violence. In January, 1919, the program manifesto of the German Spartakists (Communists) was published. It was written by Rosa Luxemburg:
“In Bourgeois revolutions bloodshed, terror and political murder were a necessary weapon in the hands of the rebelling classes. The proletarian revolution has no need of terror to realize its tasks. It has hatred and loathing for murder. It has no need of such weapons because its struggle is against institutions, not individuals.”
To clarify further the import of this document, it is perhaps best to quote another statement by Rosa Luxemburg, soon after she was released from a German prison:
“During the four years of the imperialist slaughter of peoples streams and rivers of blood have flown. Now we must cherish every drop of this precious juice as in a crystal glass. The most sweeping revolutionary action and the most profound humanity-that is the true spirit of socialism. A whole world is to be changed. But every tear that is shed, when it could have been staunched, accuses us. And a man who hurries on an important matter and negligently tramples on a worm, commits a crime.”
That was written at the beginning of bitter civil war raging in Germany in the early 1920’s and after the experience of the Red Terror in the Bolshevik regime. It was an open condemnation of bolshevism both as a government and a way of life. And history willed it that these two humanistic German revolutionists, who had warned against political murder, were both assassinated a short while later in Berlin by the German counterrevolution. (The similar fate of Mahatma Gandhi inevitably comes to mind.)
But in addition to the Social-Democrats and Spartakists in Germany, there were hundreds of thousands of socialist workers who were intoxicated by the siren calls and news from “Moscow.” Bolshevism approached them and, using the spell of the October Revolution, it kneaded them into its own German- party units. Thus it was not the Russian Revolution that was aided and cleansed by the new forces from Germany. Instead, Russian bolshevism placed its deadly hand on German-and also on European-radical socialism.
Hence there was no respite to the tragic situation in Russia.
The bourgeois classes-thanks partly to the Brest peace-marshaled their military forces for civil war. One general after another emerged to direct the war in the name of the old Russia. Between 1918 and 1921, Aleksseyeff, Kornilov, Kaledin, Kolchak, Denikin, and Wrangel occupied by turns large areas of the country, including Siberia, the Donetz Basin, the Caucasus. In 1919, they were even marching on Moscow. They ruined and oppressed peasants and workers. In 1920, Pilsudsky led the Polish attack on Russia which laid the eastern provinces of the country in ruins.
And, as the civil war raged on, the Bolshevik Party dictatorship consolidated its army and police, and tightened its economic stranglehold on the people. Under cover of the exigencies of civil war (“War Communism”), it annexed all rights of state, society and individual. It strove to identify increasingly state and party, the revolution and bolshevism. And Lenin came to realize at last the strange idea he had outlined a year earlier, in April, 1918. He had announced at a meeting in Moscow that “in the history of revolutions the dictatorship of single individuals has often been the expression and personification of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes. Therefore, there is no inconsistency between social democracy and the assumption of dictatorial power by individual persons.” “Proletarian Caesarism” thus appeared for the first time on the historic scene.
With fanatic single-mindedness the Bolsheviks introduced a centralized system of economic life, in which there was more of distrust and control than of economy or life. To obtain a match or a bolt for a machine each one in the entire vast country had to place a request with Moscow, and Moscow itself did not usually have either the match or the bolt. This life of hunger and misery was further degraded by total contempt for the citizen’s human dignity. What wonder that peasants, who were deprived of the fruits of their labor without any compensation, sought salvation in revolts. The greatest and longest of these revolts was in the province of Tambov, a province that had always been faithful to the revolution. What wonder that the workers in the large industrial centers, and primarily in Petro- grad, collapsed at their workbenches cursing the regime.
This is how the people of the revolution were caught between the two hostile forces. It seemed as if the end would never come to the satanic game of the “Reds” and the “Whites.” All former socialist groups and free associations were either imprisoned en masse or driven underground. Protected by terror, only the Bolsheviks could speak or act freely. They glorified and preened themselves as the “iron cohorts,” presenting a front of monolithic unity. They did not know that soon the gruesome conflict would break out among themselves. And so the years passed- 1918 to 1921.
And yet the bloody period did come to an end; in March, 1921, the last shot of the civil war was fired. The people felt freed of the constant horror of White and Red. They hoped that the terrorist order would now be softened, that the economic resources of the country might function again. “It’s high time,” the people said. But the changes did not come to pass. The regime had no thought of withdrawing its heavy hand. On the contrary, it wanted to keep the people in slavery. Trotsky suddenly advanced the idea of “labor armies,” that is, to organize the people’s economic activities in a ruined land along the lines and discipline of the military. All hopes for freedom seemed dashed even at the beginning of the new peace, within the country and abroad.
Then, suddenly, on the border line of the eras, the revolt of the people against bolshevism broke: the revolt of Kronstadt. True, it was restricted in territory and involved mostly but one section of the people-the sailors. But Kronstadt represented all territories and all sections of the Russian revolutionary people. It symbolized the anger of men deceived and their readiness to do battle for moral ideals, not only for political or economic interests. The Kronstadt revolt was crushed. But it had revealed the goal and the methods of a true revolution.