History of the Soviet Union
Geoffrey Hosking
Originally published in 1992 and now available as an ebook.This edition does not include any images.WINNER OF THE 'LOS ANGELES TIMES' BOOK AWARD FOR HISTORYNow that the great Soviet empire has finally unravelled, and with the future of the Commonwealth of Independent States looking precarious at best, and violent at worst, as long-subdued territorial conflicts flourish from Moldova to Siberia, never has it been so important to understand the vast continued bureaucracy that for seventy years held so many disparate peoples together. How it did so, and the tactics it employed, form the spine of this acclaimed study of the world's last great land empire.Geoffrey Hosking traces the evolution of the Soviet political system from its revolutionary origins in 1917 to the collapse instigated by the reforms of Gorbachev's 'perestroika'. He shows how power was rarely devolved outside a particularly tightly knit ruling elite, and focuses on the forms of contact that existed between rulers and ruled. He places special emphasis on the experience of the peasantry, urban workers and the professional class, drawing on a mass of monographs and memoirs to show how they generated their own informal practices to adjust to changing Soviet social structures, and how, more often than is commonly realized in the West, they resisted repression and deprivation. This Final Edition obliges us to reflect on the enormity of the changes witnessed in the lands of the Soviet Union in the past five years.By providing a vivid picture of what it has felt like to be a Soviet citizen during the prodigious upheavals of the twentieth century, it reminds us that we cannot afford to ignore the impact of this empire, globally and locally – an impact whose legacy will be with us well into the twenty-first century.
Geoffrey Hosking
A History of
the Soviet Union
1917–1991
Final edition
Copyright (#ulink_61c88bcc-a6e8-59b1-826d-9704d0997e29)
William Collins
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A Fontana Press Original 1985
Revised edition published by Fontana Press 1990
This Final Edition published 1992
Copyright © Geoffrey Hosking 1985, 1990, 1992
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006862871
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Contents
Cover (#u866895d3-6fa2-5603-9c7d-1ce68b176d30)
Title Page (#u11382415-3e96-5754-915b-cf2ed212fb05)
Copyright (#ulink_9093c183-d828-5f02-bf2e-16798eafbfbf)
Maps: (#ulink_8778386b-53a7-55aa-a4a8-1479e7e518cd)
The Soviet Union (#ulink_565996a7-8e61-5852-bc12-148cd5cccf59)
The Soviet Union in the Second World War (#ulink_2d1729bc-0082-5651-85c1-c10eb2fc83b3)
The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe (#ulink_56005107-7d72-5ec8-b7ec-d5135051b9d4)
Prefaces (#ulink_83dbb391-f8cb-5b34-8f55-831ec634b52d)
1. Introduction (#ulink_864f1555-6b76-5704-b8b2-a2d79403ce46)
2. The October Revolution (#ulink_53d63ff9-06b3-518a-8b06-7e560d7e3e49)
3. War Communism (#ulink_912b5581-cbb1-5340-ac38-0a6b382b40ac)
4. The Making of the Soviet Union (#ulink_3616782a-685b-5663-aad0-e0402e3c6072)
5. The New Economic Policy and Its Political Dilemmas (#ulink_cba09355-2b9d-59d6-8387-8b90f141c3d4)
6. Revolution from Above (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Stalin’s Terror (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Stalinist Society (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Religion and Nationality under the Soviet State (#litres_trial_promo)
10. The Great Fatherland War (#litres_trial_promo)
11. The Last Years of Stalin (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Krushchev and De-Stalinization (#litres_trial_promo)
13. Soviet Society under ‘Developed Socialism’ (#litres_trial_promo)
14. Religion, Nationality and Dissent (#litres_trial_promo)
15. The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (#litres_trial_promo)
Chronology (#litres_trial_promo)
Statistical Tables (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
A HISTORY OF THE SOVIET UNION
Geoffrey Hosking has been Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic Studies, University of London, since 1984. Born in Scotland in 1942, he studied Russian at Cambridge and European History at Oxford before gaining his doctorate in modern Russian history on the basis of archive work done in Moscow and Leningrad. He has taught at the universities of Essex, Wisconsin, Cambridge and Cologne, and has been a Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University in New York. Amongst his other books are The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914 (1973) and Beyond Socialist Realism: Soviet Fiction since ‘Ivan Denisovich’ (1980). In 1986, A History of the Soviet Union won the Los Angeles Times history book prize. In 1988, Professor Hosking was invited to give the annual Reith Lectures; he spoke on the subject of Change in Contemporary Soviet Society.
Maps (#ulink_39be9d09-d6b0-5773-925f-62f585c1f1cf)
(#ulink_2563f035-3882-51ab-bc20-3a000bf23254)
(#ulink_2563f035-3882-51ab-bc20-3a000bf23254)
(#ulink_191365c6-9bc1-5711-b15b-328d686ea866)
(#ulink_4dc19c7f-9ed4-51d1-9985-200dc335fc49)
Adapted from Martin Gilbert, Russian History Atlas (1972)
Preface (#ulink_b5efbcde-4fa4-5035-913a-ac20b3890fcf)
Viewed from the West, the peoples of the Soviet Union tend to seem grey, anonymous and rather supine. When we see them on our television screens, marching in serried ranks past the mausoleum on Red Square, it is difficult to imagine them as more than appendages–or potential cannon fodder–for the stolid leaders whom they salute on the reviewing stand. This is, of course, partly the image the Soviet propaganda machine wishes to project. But is it not also partly the result of our way of studying the country? So many general works on the Soviet Union concentrate either on its leaders, or on its role in international affairs, as seen from the West.
There is plenty on the Soviet leaders in this book, too. No one could ignore them in so centralized and politicized a society. But I have also tried to penetrate a little more into their interaction with the various social strata, the religious and national groups, over which they rule. Fortunately, in the last ten to fifteen years, quite a large number of good monographs have been published in the West and (to a lesser extent, because of censorship) in the Soviet Union itself, which enable us to say more about the way of life of the working class, the peasantry, the professional strata, and even the ruling elite itself. In addition, many recent émigrés have, since leaving, given us candid accounts of their lives in their homeland, and these have afforded us a much more vivid insight into the way ordinary people think, act and react.
In order to focus on this material and give, as far as possible in brief compass, a rounded picture of Soviet society, I have deliberately said little or nothing about foreign policy or international affairs. There are already many excellent studies from which the reader can learn about the Soviet Union’s role in world affairs: to add to them is not the purpose of this book. I have, however, given some consideration to the Soviet Union’s relationship with the other socialist countries lying within its sphere of influence. As I argue in Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo), developments in those countries have a claim to be considered almost as Soviet internal affairs; besides, East European efforts to discover their own distinctive ‘roads to socialism’ have brought out elements in the socialist tradition which have been obscured or overlaid in the Soviet Union itself. These elements may yet be of great importance, and therefore it is essential to give them due weight.
I have, moreover, again in the interests of concentration, consciously laid the strongest emphasis on the years of Stalin’s personal rule–roughly from the start of the first Five Year Plan in 1928 until his death in 1953–because this seems to me the most crucial period for understanding the Soviet Union today. It is also the one on which recently published works throw the greatest light.
In order to avoid cluttering the narrative and to allow a smoother flow of argument, I have dealt with some individual topics–such as literature, religion, education and law–not within each chapter, but in large sections confined to a few chapters. Thus, for example, the reader interested in the Russian Orthodox Church will find most of the material on it concentrated in Chapters 9 and 14. The index indicates these principal sections in bold type.
This history is the product of some fifteen years’ teaching on the Russian Studies programme at the University of Essex, and it reflects the often stated needs of my students on the post-1917 history course. I owe a considerable debt to them, especially to the inquisitive ones, who tried to encourage me to depart from vague generalization and tell them what life has really been like in a distant and important country they had never seen. I have also learnt a great deal over the years from my colleagues in the History Department and in the Russian and Soviet Studies Centre at Essex University. The marvellous Russian collection in the Essex University Library has provided me with most of the materials I needed, and I am particularly thankful to the collection’s custodian, Stuart Rees, for his unfailing attention to my wants.
I am most grateful to my colleagues who have read all or part of an earlier draft: the late Professor Leonard Schapiro, Peter Frank, Steve Smith, Bob Service and, the most tireless of my students, Philip Hills. At crucial stages of the writing, I have benefited from conversations with Mike Bowker, William Rosenberg and George Kolankiewicz. Where I have ignored their advice and gone my own way, I acknowledge full responsibility.
I am much beholden to the support and encouragement of my wife Anne, and my daughters Katherine and Janet. Without their endless patience and indulgence, this book would have been abandoned long ago, and then they might have seen more of me.
School of Slavonic Studies,
University of London,
July 1984
Preface to Second Edition
By a strange coincidence, the first edition of this book was published on the very day that Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. That made for good publicity, but it meant that the text rapidly became overtaken by the remarkable events which began to take place under the new leadership. It is true that in the last pages of the old edition I remarked that change, when it came, would be rapid and far-reaching, and that the Soviet public would prove to be more ready for it than we were then accustomed to think. As a pointer to the future, that now seems to have been reasonably apt, but all the same, a mere four years into the new era, a generous extension of the last chapter seemed essential to give some idea of the momentous changes which have been occurring and to relate them to earlier Soviet history. I have taken this opportunity to correct a few errors earlier in the text, and thank those reviewers and readers who have pointed them out to me.
School of Slavonic & East European Studies,
University of London,
July 1989
Administrative Divisions
Often in the text I refer to one or other of the main administrative divisions of the Soviet Union. These may be schematically laid out as follows:
1 (#ulink_1a8aa318-eaaa-518b-a506-064a4f4205d3)
Introduction (#ulink_1a8aa318-eaaa-518b-a506-064a4f4205d3)
‘The philosophers have only explained the world; the point is to change it.’ This famous dictum of Marx invites us to judge his doctrine by its practical consequences, in other words by examining the kind of society which has resulted from its application. Yet, paradoxically, many Marxists themselves will deny the validity of such a judgement. They will dismiss the example of Soviet society as an unfortunate aberration, the outcome of a historical accident, by which the first socialist revolution took place in a country unsuited to socialism, in backward, autocratic Russia.
It is important, therefore, to begin by asking ourselves just why this happened. Was it indeed a historical accident? Or were there elements in Russia’s pre-revolutionary traditions which predisposed the country to accept the kind of rule which the followers of Marx were to impose?
It is true that Russia was, in some ways, backward and it was certainly autocratic. Economically speaking–in agriculture, commerce and industry–Russia had lagged behind Western Europe from the late Middle Ages onward, largely as a result of two centuries of relative isolation under Tatar rule. There is, however, no single track along which history advances, and this backwardness had positive as well as negative features. It made the mass of the people more adaptable, better able to survive in harsh circumstances. It may also have helped to preserve a more intimate sense of local community, in the peasants’ commune (mir) and the workmen’s cooperative (artel).
Politically, on the other hand, nineteenth-century Russia might be thought of as rather ‘advanced’, if by that we mean resembling twentieth-century Western European political systems. It was an increasingly centralized, bureaucratized and in many ways secular state; its hierarchy had strong meritocratic features; it devoted a considerable share of its resources to defence, and operated a system of universal male conscription; and it accepted an ever more interventionist role in the economy. Furthermore, the state’s opponents, the radicals and revolutionaries, pursued secular utopias with the same mixture of altruism, heroism and intense self-absorption which characterized, for example, the West German and Italian terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s. What Russia did not have, of course, was parliamentary democracy, though even that was developing, in embryonic form, from 1906.
As for autocracy, there were very good reasons why it should have proved the dominant political form in Russia, and why it should have been acceptable to most of the people. It is unnecessary to postulate an inborn ‘slave mentality’, as many Westerners are prone to do. First, there are Russia’s flat, open frontiers, which have been both her strength and her weakness. Her strength, because they gave Russia’s people the chance to spread eastwards, colonizing the whole of northern Asia and occupying in the end one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Her weakness, because they have rendered Russia ever vulnerable to attack, from the east, the south and, especially in recent centuries, from the west. For that reason all Russian governments have made the securing of their territory their chief priority, and have received the whole-hearted support of the population in so doing. National security has been, in fact, more than a priority–an obsession to which, when necessary, everything else has been sacrificed with the enthusiastic approval of the people. Any other people in such circumstances would react the same way. That is not to say that Russian governments have not abused the trust their subjects have placed in them: on the contrary they have found it possible to do so again and again. But the geographical and historical motives for accepting strong authority have nearly always prevailed.
Another reason for the popular identification with the autocrat is that, historically speaking, Russia’s formation as a self-conscious nation began unusually early. The Tatar occupation of the thirteenth century generated, by reaction, intense Russian national feeling, which centred on the Orthodox Church, as the one national institution which had survived the disaster. And because the church conducted its liturgy not in Latin but in a Slavonic tongue close to the vernacular, this national feeling had deep roots among the ordinary people. All this imparted to Russian national consciousness from early times a demotic quality, a defensiveness, and an earth-boundness which still have strong echoes today. Its religious basis was celebrated as soon as Russia was able, thanks to strong Muscovite rulers, to throw off the Tatar yoke. Moscow Grand Dukes proclaimed themselves Tsars (Caesars), claiming the heritage of Byzantium, which had fallen to the infidels in 1453: ‘Two Romes have fallen, the third Rome stands, and there shall be no fourth.’ Russia became Holy Russia, the one true Christian empire on earth.
In order to ensure that armies could be raised and the country defended, the tsars imposed a tight hierarchy of service on the whole population. Nobles were awarded land in the form of pomestya, or service estates, on condition that they performed civilian or military service, usually the latter. They also had to raise a unit of fighting men from among the peasants committed to their charge. In this way the old independent aristocrats, the boyars, were gradually displaced, while the peasants became enserfed, fixed to the land, bound to serve their lord, to pay taxes, and to provide recruits for the army. For nobles and peasants alike, their function and status in society was defined by state service. Society became almost an appendage to the state.
In the end, even the church was taken into service. The process began in the seventeenth century, when its head, Patriarch Nikon, tried to provide for the church’s imperial role by correcting liturgical mistakes which had crept into the prayer books over the centuries, and which he felt would shame the Russian Orthodox Church in its relations with other churches. He was also ambitious for the church to play a stronger role in the state. Although Tsar Alexei dismissed him as a dangerous rival, the reforms he had sponsored were ratified by a Church Council. These reforms aroused vehement opposition among both priests and laity, who felt that the integrity of the Russian faith was being violated by foreign importations. All the strength, exclusiveness and defensiveness of Russian national feeling was exhibited by the Old Believers, those who clung to the old liturgical practices, and were prepared to be imprisoned or exiled, or even commit mass suicide, rather than submit to the new and alien practices. The Old Belief survived right up to the revolution of 1917, and beyond, depriving the official church of many of its natural, indeed most fervent, supporters.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of this schism, whose importance for Russian history can scarcely be exaggerated, was that the church became dependent on the full coercive support of the state in implementing its reforms. The way was thus prepared for. Peter I, in the early eighteenth century, to abolish the Patriarchate, symbol of the independent standing of the church, and replace it with a so-called Holy Synod, essentially a department of state, headed moreover by a layman. Peter did this with the same aims as Henry VIII in England: to bring the church under firm state control, to discipline it and make it fitter to fulfil the tasks the state had in mind for it, such as education, social welfare and the pastoral care and supervision of the common people. His principal ecclesiastical theorist, Feofan Prokopovich, insisted that the state should have undivided and indisputable sovereignty on earth, including the right to interpret God’s law. Any less clear arrangement he deemed dangerous, since it might mislead ordinary, gullible people to entertain the ‘hope of obtaining help for their rebellions from the clergy’. This secular approach to church-state relations, and the obsession with civil disorder, was close to the thinking of many European Protestant thinkers at the time, notably Thomas Hobbes. Shades of the Leviathan hung over Russian society from then on.
Peter I also impugned Russian traditions in numerous other ways. He moved the capital from Moscow to a swampy outpost on the Baltic coast, simply because that sea gave direct access to the ports of Europe, in whose more ‘progressive’ ways Peter hoped for salvation. In the new city of St Petersburg, he required his nobility to adopt European fashions in everything from education to clothing. When some of his courtiers refused to shave their beards–honoured as a sign of manhood in Muscovite custom–Peter took the shears and did the job personally. Both the changes he promoted, and his uncouth manner of imposing them, aroused considerable opposition. Old Believers, indeed, regarded him as the Antichrist.
Catherine II completed the subordination of church to state by expropriating the church’s huge landholdings, which left the priesthood poor and dependent on their parishioners for subsistence. The clergy became in effect a subordinate estate, having neither the education nor the financial independence to cultivate a distinctive stand, even in spiritual matters. They were also a more or less closed order, since clergy sons usually had little choice but to take their education in a church seminary, and then to follow in father’s footsteps. The high culture and politics of the period were essentially secular: priests were regarded by most intellectuals as beings of inferior education and status, peddling superstition to pacify the plebs. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this subordination of the church. It meant that Holy Russia, still haunted by visions of unique religious rectitude, was governed in a radically secular manner, outdoing most Protestant states, and was acquiring an almost aggressively secular culture.
Russian government in the nineteenth century is often described as ‘reactionary’, but this view is based on superficial comparisons with West European political systems. In fact, from the time of Peter I, Russian governments were radical and modernizing to an almost dangerous degree. They were so because they felt they faced a potential military threat from European nations which on the whole were technically better equipped. It was to face this challenge that Peter sacrificed so much to the creation of a strong army and navy, with a modern armaments industry to back them up, and overhauled the administration of the country, the tax system, education and even social mores. He regarded all the country’s resources–material, cultural and spiritual–as being at the service of the state for the good of society as a whole. His successors continued his work, but they faced both the advantages and disadvantages of weak social institutions. Advantages, in that no fractious nobility or urban patriciate possessed the independence to impede the monarch’s commands. Disadvantages, in that the existing aristocratic and urban institutions (the elites of town and country) were often not even strong enough to act as transmission belts for orders from above, as they did in other European countries; in their absence the government’s intentions often petered out ineffectually in the vast expanses of the landscape.
For that reason some Russian monarchs, notably Catherine II in the late eighteenth century, and Alexander II in the 1860s, actually tried to create or strengthen what Montesquieu would have called ‘intermediary bodies’, that is, self-governing associations of nobility and of townsmen, with a direct responsibility for local government. Others–Paul I, for example, and Nicholas I–regarded such associations as self-seeking and divisive, tried to curb them and to rule through monarchical agents, controlled from the centre. Much of the history of Imperial Russia’s government between Peter I and the revolution of 1917 is to be found in this swing to and fro between local autonomy and strict centralization, between support of local elites and distrust of them.
The radical intelligentsia of the nineteenth century were in some ways the unnatural offspring of this frustrating relationship. Most of the radicals came from the social strata from which the tsarist government recruited its central and local officials–the minor nobility, the clergy, army officers and professional men–and they typically went through the same education system as the country’s civil servants. They espoused many of the ideals of the modernizing wing of the bureaucracy: progress, equality, material welfare for all, the curbing of privilege. Frustrated, however, by the hierarchy and authoritarianism of the state service, and by the gross discrepancy between ideal and reality, they underwent a conversion, usually as early as their student days, and harnessed their vision to a revolutionary ideology.
In the absence of a genuinely conservative political theory, and lacking the support of an independent church, the Russian imperial state often found itself extraordinarily vulnerable when faced with the activists of the revolutionary movement. In effect the state’s own ideals had been hijacked by its opponents, and as a result the government found itself being deserted by those who should have been its natural supporters. Even Dostoevsky, a writer of conservative views, once said that, if he knew that revolutionaries were going to blow up the Winter Palace, he would not report the plot to the police, for fear of ‘being thought an informer’: ‘The liberals would never let me hear the end of it.’ Without necessarily approving of terrorism, in fact, members of the nobility and liberal professions sometimes felt a kind of sympathy for the terrorists’ world outlook. The impeccably liberal Kadet Party in 1906, for example, refused publicly to condemn terrorism for fear of discrediting itself in the eyes of public opinion. In this way the revolutionaries came to constitute a kind of ‘alternative establishment’.
This did not make the practical dilemmas of the radicals any easier. It was not at all clear how they were to achieve their aims. Alexander Herzen, perhaps the first thorough-going Russian socialist, thought the peasant commune should function as the nucleus of the new society, but he was ambivalent about how and even whether a revolution should take place to bring that about. Mikhail Bakunin urged that the only essential thing was to spark off a massive popular uprising by the narod (the common people), and this would of itself purge and destroy the evils of existing society, leaving men free to improvise. Petr Lavrov, on the contrary, hoped that revolution would not be necessary at all: he felt that the educated strata had a debt to the narod, their education having been made possible by the latter’s toil. They should pay this debt off by ‘going to the people’ and passing on the fruits of their education to them, teaching them how they might create a truly humane society on the basis of their own institutions, the mir and the artel. In the 1870s several hundred students tried to fulfil Lavrov’s vision, learning handcrafts and dressing in smocks and felt boots in order to live in the village, practise a trade and pass on the good word. Most, though not all, of the peasants met them with incomprehension and some suspicion: for the time being at least their faith in the ‘little father’ tsar was still unshaken. Many of the student idealists who ‘went to the people’ finished up in prison.
Their failure lent strength to those who argued that a revolutionary movement must lead and it must use violence, disorganizing the government apparatus by terror, and if possible seizing power by a coup d’état. An organization called the People’s Will (Narodnaya volya) was set up to achieve this, and in 1881 it actually succeeded in assassinating the Emperor Alexander II. But setting up a different regime, or even putting effective pressure on Alexander’s successor–that proved beyond their capacities. Their victory was a pyrrhic one: all it produced was more determined repression.
By the 1880s, in fact, the Russian revolutionary movement seemed to be in a blind alley, unable to achieve its aims either by peaceful propaganda or by terrorism. It was in this situation that Marxism presented itself as a panacea in troubled times. Its first Russian exponent, Georgy Plekhanov, was the leader of those who had refused to accept the methods of the People’s Will. He welcomed Marxism because it suggested he had been right all along in rejecting the idea of a coup d’état: no revolution could yet come about in Russia, by any means, simply because objective social and economic circumstances were not yet ripe. Plekhanov’s interpretation thus emphasized Marxism’s determinist features: he argued that capitalism had not yet even begun in Russia, so that naturally the socialist revolution, which could only take place as a result of the contradictions of capitalist society, had no chance of success yet. In his view, Russia must first accept the coming of capitalism, with the concomitant breakdown of the peasant commune and the creation of large-scale industry, because these processes would generate a genuinely revolutionary class, the factory proletariat, which would not let down the hopes of the radical intelligentsia, as the peasantry had done. Plekhanov took up Marxism with such enthusiasm because he discerned in it a scientific explanation of history, and hence the certainty that the revolutionaries, if they followed it, would no longer sacrifice their hopes, and indeed their lives, in vain. Previous revolutionaries he dismissed contemptuously as ‘Populists’.
Historians of Russia often approach Marxism as though it came to the country as a completely formed and internally consistent doctrine. In fact this was far from being the case. Marxism was itself the product of European experiences not unlike those which had troubled the Russian revolutionaries of the 1860s and 1870s, especially the disappointments of the French revolution, and of the European risings of 1848–9. Each time, the shortfall between revolutionary expectation and subsequent reality had been immense. Marx claimed that this was because the revolutionaries had not heeded objective socioeconomic conditions: they were in fact mere ‘utopian socialists’. His kind of socialism, on the contrary, he described as ‘scientific’. He argued that the proletariat, growing now uncontrollably with the expansion of capitalist industry, would overcome the gap between ideal and reality. The factory worker was in a uniquely favourable position to achieve this, since he was both the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ of history: the object in that he was the victim of its economic laws, the subject in that he was conscious of the fact that he had nothing to lose and he was impelled by the vision of the more just and prosperous society that would come out of his revolt. As the unavoidable contradictions of capitalism bore ever more heavily on the workers, so they would inevitably rise and overthrow their oppressors, creating of their shared destitution a more just and humane society.
In this way Marx overcame, to his own satisfaction and that of most of his followers, the troubling gap between ideal and fulfilment. The trouble is, there was and is no necessary connection between Marx’s vision of intensifying socioeconomic crisis, with everyone moved by their own material interests, and the world of harmony and brother-hood which was supposed to succeed the revolution. Indeed, logically speaking, if the workers were impelled by their own economic interests in making revolution, then the more likely sequel of such a revolution would be further economic struggle, but with a different set of masters. Nevertheless, the idea that the workers’ revolution would somehow magically cancel out all the conflicts of society had enormous attraction. It seemed to be both realistic and optimistic at the same time. It had the simultaneous attractions of a science and a religion. That is what made it so appealing, and nowhere more so than in Russia, where the intelligentsia already had its own troubles with a secular state claiming religious prerogatives.
Certainly the young Vladimir Ulyanov–or Lenin, as he became known–was attracted by precisely this dual nature of Marxism. He had been deeply affected by the execution in 1887 of his elder brother Alexander for membership of a conspiracy to murder the emperor. Lenin was attracted by his brother’s idealism and self-sacrifice, but at the same time he was determined not to give up his own life in vain. He wanted to pursue Alexander’s aim of revolutionary social transformation with certainty. Hence the scientific claims of Marxism were very important to him. Reading Marx’s Capital was, as he later said, a revelation to him, because it seemed to demonstrate that revolution was embedded in the objective evolution of society, if one only had the patience and consistency to await its unfolding. In his own early writings, Lenin made a similar analysis of Russia’s own socioeconomic structure, aiming to show that capitalism was already destroying the economy of the peasant commune, and that capitalism–and therefore ultimately revolution–was inevitable in Russia. Admittedly Lenin felt that Russia had further to go than most of Europe, and, following Plekhanov, he envisaged a revolution in two stages: (i) the ‘bourgeois democratic’ one, when the feudal system, still not entirely destroyed in Russia, would be finally overthrown by an alliance of the ‘bourgeois liberals’ with the as yet small workers’ party; (ii) the later socialist stage, which would come in the fullness of time, when capitalism was fully developed and the working class had reached maturity.
All this had the merit of apparent certainty. But it was predicated on a formidably extensive time scale, and would require daunting patience and self-restraint to realize in full. In fact Lenin did not for long adhere to the full schema, but began to cast around for ways of telescoping the two stages. Furthermore, in his own way, he was aware of the gap between science and prophecy in Marx. He did not share the master’s confidence that the workers would automatically grasp the full significance of their destitution in existing society and how it might be ended. On the contrary, in his pamphlet What is to be Done? (1902) he expressed his fear that, left to themselves, workers would not attempt a revolution but would fight for more limited goals, such as higher wages, better working conditions and more humane treatment from their employers. His own experience of propaganda work in the St Petersburg factories of the 1890s led him to the conclusion that ‘The workers did not have, nor was it possible for them to have, an awareness of the irreconcilable contradiction of their interests with the whole modern political and social system.’ This did not apply just to Russian workers: ‘The history of all countries shows that by itself the working class can only develop a trade union consciousness, that is to say a conviction of the necessity to form trade unions, struggle with the employers, obtain from the government this or that law.’ Only the ‘educated representatives of the propertied classes–the intelligentsia’ could fully understand the real, as distinct from the superficial, needs of the workers. To bring about a revolution, a genuinely revolutionary party was needed, that is, one ‘embracing primarily and chiefly people whose profession consists of revolutionary activity’. That seemed, on the face of it, to exclude any workers, since their profession, perforce, was factory labour.
This was a most important clarification of a weak point in Marxist theory. In actual practice, Lenin never tried to run his party in this way. But he always stuck theoretically to his definition of the revolutionary party, and indeed made it his touchstone of the true revolutionary spirit. For the sake of it he was prepared to break with other Marxists who took a different view. At what was, in effect, the founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party, in Brussels and London in 1903, Lenin insisted that ‘personal participation in one of the party’s organizations’ was to be the key qualification for membership. His principal opponent, Yuly Martov, wanted a more relaxed formulation: ‘regular personal support under the guidance of one of the party’s organizations’. This would make it easier for workers to become full party members, even in conditions of illegality. Lenin lost that particular vote, but nevertheless emerged from the congress with a majority, and henceforth called his faction the ‘Bolsheviks’ or ‘men of the majority’, while Martov’s had to content themselves with the sobriquet ‘Mensheviks’ or ‘men of the minority’.
The issue which provoked the great split in the Russian Social Democratic Party sounds like a minor organizational quibble. In fact, however, this quibble turned out to symbolize more profound disagreements, which drove the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks ever further apart. With time it became clear that they were envisaging two different kinds of revolution. The Mensheviks laid great store by the coming of a parliamentary ‘bourgeois’ republic, in which a mass working-class party would act as a legal opposition until they were numerous enough to take power on their own account. Lenin, however, became increasingly impatient with the protracted timetable entailed by this vision. He hankered after telescoping the whole process, running the two revolutions together by enlisting the peasants (carrying out a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution against the landlords) as auxiliaries of the workers (carrying out their ‘socialist’ revolution against the capitalists). However, he did not fully clarify his ideas on this issue until his final return to Russia from exile in 1917.
In effect, Lenin reintegrated into Russian Marxism certain elements of the Populist tradition: the leadership of a small group of intelligentsia revolutionaries, the readiness to regard the peasants as a revolutionary class, and the telescoping of the ‘bourgeois’ phase of the revolution.
The Populists had, however, their own views. They recovered from their prostration of the 1880s, and by 1901 managed to form a new political party, with its centre in emigration, the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Their theoreticians no longer disputed the proposition that industrial capitalism had come to Russia, but they maintained that it had taken a very different form from the one Marx envisaged. First, it was heavily dominated by the state. Secondly, most of the workers had not really broken away from the countryside: they were ‘peasant-workers’, not proletarians in the Marxist sense. The Socialist Revolutionaries refused, in fact, to recognize any fundamental distinction between workers and peasants: they organized themselves, and with some success, to work among both. They also set up a ‘fighting detachment’ to continue the work of the People’s Will by terrorism directed against officials: they succeeded between 1901 and 1908 in murdering a Grand Duke, several ministers and over a hundred other senior officials.
In 1905, risings broke out in both town and countryside. These outbursts owed little to the organizational efforts of the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, but rather more to their long-term inspiration. The most powerful ingredient of all, however, was the enduring discontent felt by the peasants and workers who made up the great majority of Russia’s population.
The Emancipation Act promulgated by Alexander II in 1861 had released the peasants from personal bondage, but it had not relieved any of their other hardships, and indeed had burdened them with an additional grievance. This was the obligation to pay for land which they already regarded as their own–and indeed, in the Lockean sense that they ‘mixed their labour with it’, so it was. The peasants’ collective legal sense had never accepted the legitimacy of the awards of land made by the tsars to the nobles.
In order to ensure that the peasants would pay for the land ‘newly allotted’ to them, and would discharge their other taxes, the government bound them to a ‘village society’, which was often, though not always, equivalent to the old ‘commune’, or mir. This institution has been the subject of more myth-making and less solid empirical research than perhaps any other in Russian history, partly because its members left little or no written testimony, and partly because ideologists of left and right hoped and feared great things from it. The government saw it as a guarantor of law and order, as well as of primitive social security, while the revolutionaries, at least the Populists, regarded its practices as a kind of rudimentary socialism, which might enable Russian society to proceed straight to real socialism without the unpleasant intermediate stage of capitalism. In Great Russia the mir assembly, consisting of heads of household, periodically redistributed land, adding to the allotments of families grown larger (along with the obligation to pay higher taxes) and subtracting from the allotments of those which had lost members. In the Ukraine and Bielorussia, on the other hand, rather different customs prevailed: land was usually passed down the family hereditarily, and was not subject to periodic redistribution. In both types of commune, timber, meadows, pastures and water-courses were held in common.
The communal land tenure system, though it provided a safety net in time of difficulty, had real economic disadvantages. All the villagers were compelled to adopt a safe but primitive and underproductive form of agriculture: the open three-field system with strip farming. At a time when the peasant population was growing very fast–from around 55 million in 1863 to 82 million in 1897–the mir in effect impeded the introduction of improved seeds, fertilizers or machines; and it offered a disincentive to land improvement, since the cultivator never knew when his plot might be taken away from him and awarded to someone else.
The low level of agricultural productivity was only partly a result of communal tenure. Partly, too, it was a function of low urbanization. Where, as in most of western Europe, there was a dense network of towns and good communications between them, then a receptive market existed for a wide variety of agricultural produce. In Russia this was the case only around St Petersburg and Moscow. Over the remaining expanses of Russia’s main agricultural regions, peasants scratched the soil with wooden ploughs, grew rye and oats, lived on a diet of ‘cabbage soup and gruel’ (as a popular saying had it) and sold very little to the outside world, except when economic need made it unavoidable.
As a result, though the picture varied from area to area, it seems clear enough that most peasants were poor, threatened by hunger in bad years, and that the problem was getting worse. In 1890 more than 60 per cent of peasants called up for the army were declared unfit on health grounds: and that was before the famine of 1891.
The peasants themselves felt that the explanation for all this was obvious: they needed more land, and they had a right to it. In the neighbouring nobles’ fields they saw their own potential salvation. This was an illusion: the total area of peasant landholdings exceeded that of the landowners by nearly three to one, so that simple expropriation of the latter would not solve the problem. But in 1905 the peasants were convinced that it would, and that their grievance was justified. Acting in common, by decision of their mir assemblies, they began to take the law into their own hands, seizing estates and driving the landowners out. It took a long time for the government to restore order.
In fact, there was no simple solution to Russia’s agrarian problem, as the later experience of developing countries confirms. Only a patient combination of improvements in land tenure and in agricultural methods with the gradual development of the commercial and industrial life of the country could in the end have brought greater prosperity to the village. But the myth that there was a simple solution, and that the peasants had a natural right to all the land, was the single most explosive factor in Russian politics in the last years of the tsarist regime.
Peter Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 to 1911, tried to make a start to the process of patient improvement by giving peasant households the right to withdraw from the village commune, set up on their own and enclose their holdings. After a promising start, however, this programme was abruptly curtailed by war and revolution.
Workers, the other great factor in the revolutionary upheaval of 1905, were also restless to an unusual degree in Russia compared with their West European counterparts. This may have been because they had unusually close ties with the land. Under the Emancipation legislation of 1861, a peasant who went into the town to work permanently was still registered with his ‘village society’ and remained legally a peasant. His family still paid taxes there, and he probably sent back money regularly to help them out; perhaps he would return at Christmas or Easter for family celebrations, or in the late summer to help with the harvest. Some workers, especially those in construction and transport, organized themselves in an artisan cooperative, or artel, which had its origins in village life, and was sometimes found even in heavy industry. Individual factories often perpetuated the rural link by recruiting most of their workforce from a particular province; and workers themselves would often form a zemlyachestvo, or regional association, to keep in touch with each other and with their home villages.
Compared with the workers who had lived in the towns for a generation or more, these ‘peasant-workers’ seem to have been unusually prone to unrest at times of crisis. This may have been partly because their right to allotment land in the village gave them something to fall back on, and hence an extra sense of security. Or it may have been because, in the absence of legalized trade unions in the towns, the tradition of collective action was far stronger in the countryside. In their case, too, the newly discovered urban discontents, over housing, pay, working conditions or overbearing foremen, were superimposed on the grievances which they had brought with them from the village. As R. E. Johnson, the most recent student of this subject, has suggested, ‘the fusion of rural and urban discontents and propensities produced an especially explosive mix’.
At any rate, the experience of 1905 suggested that Russian workers, in times of crisis, were unusually good at improvising their own institutions. The body which sparked off the unrest of that year was, ironically, organized by Father Gapon, a priest who wished to save the monarchy. On Sunday 9 January 1905 he led a huge demonstration in the capital, St Petersburg, bearing ikons and portraits of the tsar: they were to march to the Winter Palace with a petition appealing for a living wage and for civil rights. The troops stationed in the streets panicked in the face of the crowd and opened fire: nearly two hundred people were killed and many more wounded.
This incident, which has passed into history as Bloody Sunday, had a dramatic effect: more than any other, it undermined the popular image of the tsar as the benevolent ‘little father’. It helped to release the restraint which the peasants had previously felt about taking the law into their own hands. And it certainly contributed to the wave of strikes, demonstrations and sometimes violence which swept Russia’s industrial cities. In the course of this, workers set up trade unions for the first time, rather begrudgingly legalized by the government. They also improvised councils (or soviets) of workers’ deputies. Beginning as strike committees elected at the workplace, these bodies often found themselves temporarily exercising local government functions as well, in cities whose normal administration was paralysed by strikes. They also negotiated with the employers and the government. In short, they gained a brief but intense experience of self-government, unforgettable to workers who had never before been allowed to organize in their own interests.
The mass popular unrest gave the professional strata and the intelligentsia the chance to press their demands for an elected parliament, or even a constituent assembly, to decide on Russia’s future form of government. Political’ parties were formed, of which the most prominent were the Constitutional Democrats (or Kadets for short), under their leader, the Moscow University history professor, P. N. Milyukov. Their ideal was a constitutional monarchy on the British model, or even a parliamentary republic, as in France.
In the end, faced with a general strike, Tsar Nicholas II reluctantly conceded much of what the Kadets were demanding. In the October Manifesto of 1905 he promised that henceforth the civil rights of all citizens would be observed, and he granted a parliament, the Duma, to be elected on an indirect but fairly broad franchise. Written into its statute was the provision that ‘without [its] consent no law can take effect’. This concession relieved him of the outright opposition of the liberals, and Nicholas was then able to instruct the police and army–which remained almost completely loyal–to crush the workers’ and peasants’ movement.
During the few years of its existence, the Duma was sometimes harassed, sometimes ignored by the government, and indeed twice summarily dissolved. Nevertheless, its mere presence made a great difference to political life. Its electoral assemblies remained as a minimal focus for working-class and peasant political education and activity, even at a time when the government was trying to withdraw some of its concessions of 1905. And the existence of a relatively free press alongside it meant that the reading public (now growing very fast) were incomparably better informed about political issues than they ever had been before. Combined with the rapid growth in literacy, with the bitter political conflicts resulting from 1905, and with ever-accelerating social and economic change, all this was potentially very explosive.
The tsarist monarchy was finally overthrown in the midst of the First World War. Major wars, of course, raise all the stakes in domestic politics, since survival itself is at issue. Furthermore, the government fought this one before a Duma which proved watchful and at times bitterly critical, while the press, though under wartime censorship, remained freer than at any time before 1905. Whether the constitutional monarchy founded by the October Manifesto could have survived if there had been no war is an open question. What is certain is that the war caught it at a very vulnerable moment, when it had not yet fully established itself in the eyes of the public, yet was already suffering from the exposure to fierce criticism which civil liberties made possible. Bloody Sunday had weakened the reputation of the tsar. His standing was now further undermined by rumours–bandied around in the press though never substantiated–that the royal family was being compromised by a ‘holy man’ of dubious credentials, Rasputin, and that the court even had treacherous connections with the enemy, Germany. As the normally restrained Milyukov put it in a famous Duma speech of November 1916, ‘Is this stupidity or is it treason?’
Against the background of such public accusations, the more or less normal difficulties of war, military defeat, shortages of guns and food, became magnified into matters involving the very survival of the monarchy.
The end came relatively suddenly, and to at least the revolutionary parties, unexpectedly, in February 1917, when food queues in Petrograd suddenly turned into political demonstrations, demanding an end to what many still called the ‘autocracy’. When even the Cossacks, long the faithful upholders of order, refused to disperse the crowds, Nicholas II suddenly found that he had no supporters. Liberals and socialists were in agreement, for the first time since 1905, and what they agreed was that the monarchy must go. Fearing for national unity, not even the army generals attempted to resist the demand. Two Duma deputies were sent to see the tsar, who tendered his abdication in a railway carriage outside Pskov, on 2 March 1917.
As we now know, the collapse of the monarchy opened the way to eventual rule by Marxist revolutionaries. Russia became the first country to fall under Marxist socialist domination. In the light of Russia’s previous history it is perhaps possible to see why this should have been so. The country’s life had long been arranged on highly authoritarian lines (at least until 1905), dominated by an ideology which was ostensibly religious but was imposed by secular means and thus forfeited most of its spiritual authority. In this sense Russia was ripe for takeover by a self-avowedly secular ideology bearing unacknowledged religious overtones–which is what Marxism was, especially in its Bolshevik form.
In a very real sense, in fact, the Russian autocracy, especially since Peter I, provided a pattern for socialist rule: the notion of the ideological state to which all ranks of the population owed service absolutely and in equal measure. Much, however, was yet to happen before this variant of Marxist socialism gained the upper hand.
2 (#ulink_d36031bd-3202-542d-bdaa-6c14046ca679)
The October Revolution (#ulink_d36031bd-3202-542d-bdaa-6c14046ca679)
It was a mark of the abruptness of political change in Russia that when the monarchy fell, what replaced it was not one regime, but two. On the one hand, the politicians surviving from the Duma established a Provisional Government, in which the principal parties were at first the Kadets, later the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. It was called ‘provisional’ because it was to exercise power only until a Constituent Assembly could be convened, elected by all the people. On the other hand, the workers of Petrograd (as St Petersburg was now called) hastened to revive their memories of the days of freedom in 1905 by re-establishing the Petrograd Soviet. They were joined by the soldiers of the capital city’s garrison, active participants in the revolution for the first time, and their joint tribune was known as the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.
But government and soviet refrained from trying to oust each other–for good reason. The Provisional Government, which began by abolishing the tsarist police and security services, had no effective power of coercion, and therefore had to tolerate the soviets as expressions of the popular will, at least in the big cities. As the minister of war, Guchkov, said, ‘The Provisional Government does not possess any real power; and its directives are carried out only to the extent that it is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which enjoys all the essential elements of real power, since the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are all in its hands.’ The leaders of the soviets, for their part, recognized that the Provisional Government contained experienced politicians, that it could command the loyalty of the army officers, reduce the chances of counterrevolution, and gain international recognition. The theoretically inclined among them regarded the Provisional Government as a ‘bourgeois’ institution, which the soviets would ‘supervise’, on the workers’ behalf, until such time as the socialist revolution became possible.
The Provisional Government was from the start in a very difficult, arguably an untenable position. It had not been brought to power by election, but nor could it claim direct descent from the old imperial government or the Duma. Prince Lvov, its first prime minister, proclaimed that it had been created by the ‘unanimous revolutionary enthusiasm of the people’. That was to prove a shaky basis, especially since the new government found itself in a situation where it was unable to carry out the reforms that the ‘people’ were expecting. The fundamental difficulty was the war. The peasants might be crying out for a redistribution of the land in their favour, but could such a complex operation be carried out equitably without first a thorough land survey, and while millions of peasant-soldiers, with an impeccable claim to their own shares, were far away from the village at the front, and unable to take part in the share-out? The workers began to organize themselves to exercise a greater share in the running of factories and enterprises, but was it responsible to attempt such intricate reorganization in the middle of keeping up industrial output for the war effort? Could the supplies problems, which had brought the tsarist government down, be solved while the war was on? Most important of all, was the soldiers’ demand to elect their own committees and to take part in the running of their units compatible with the discipline needed at the front line?
While the war continued, none of these questions could be solved without serious and damaging political conflict. And yet, to stop the war proved almost impossible (I say ‘almost’, since the Bolsheviks did eventually achieve it, but at a price which nearly split the party in two). The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet tried to organize a conference of socialists from all the combatant states, to put pressure on their governments to negotiate a peace ‘without annexations or indemnities’. The British and French governments, however, put paid to this plan by refusing to allow representatives from their parliaments to attend. The alternative would have been to sign a separate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but this would have amounted to a capitulation, and not until the Provisional Government was in its final days did any of its members recommend such a desperate step. So the war went on. Its problems continued to undermine the Provisional Government’s efforts to establish a new political system, until the popular expectations aroused by the February revolution finally brought the Bolsheviks to power.
The new-found freedoms of February caused a tremendous upsurge in the ordinary people’s capacity to organize themselves. It is often supposed that the Russians are a passive people, accustomed to doing what their rulers tell them. Actually, this is far from being the case. Partly because of the huge distances, many Russian communities remained, at least up to the early twentieth century, relatively unaffected by central government, and had to improvise their own arrangements. But even where government has been near and ever-pressing, Russians have always been highly inventive in devising social forms such that they appear to be obeying their rulers, whilst in fact running matters as far as possible to their own advantage. This was the centuries-old basis of the peasant commune, which the government had always intended as an agency for taxation and military recruitment. Now, in 1917, with government repression suddenly removed, there was a veritable explosion of ‘self-help’ organizations among Russian workers, peasants and soldiers, each with their own, often exaggerated demands.
The peasants saw in the February revolution an opportunity to rectify what they considered a very longstanding injustice, that much of the land they worked did not belong to them. As a resolution from Samara province put it, ‘The land must belong to those who work it with their hands, to those whose sweat flows.’ Peasants were prepared to support the Provisional Government as long as it appeared to be actively promoting a wholesale transfer of land to them. As the months passed, and the Provisional Government did nothing, they lost interest in it and turned instead to direct action. Ironically, the government helped them to create the institutions which made this possible: the local land committees, which it set up to carry out a land survey and prepare for the ultimate land reform, actually became dominated at the lowest level by the peasants themselves, and increasingly proceeded to direct land seizures. This was especially the case after the army began to break up. A typical scenario was for a deserter to return to the village from the front, bringing news of land seizures elsewhere. The peasants would gather in their traditional mir assembly, or use the facade of the local land committees; they would discuss the situation and decide to take the local landowner’s estate for themselves. They would then all march together up to the steward’s office, demand the keys, proclaim the land, tools and livestock sequestered and give the owners forty-eight hours to leave. Then they would divide up the land among themselves, using the time-honoured criteria employed in the mir, the ‘labour norm’ or the ‘consumption norm’ (i.e. the number of working hands available, or the number of mouths to feed), whichever prevailed in local custom. They used violence where they thought it necessary, or where things got out of hand.
Inevitably, then, a gulf of mistrust opened between the peasants and the Provisional Government. It was widened by the government’s supplies policy. Because of the problem of supplying the towns with bread, the tsarist government in its last months had instituted a grain monopoly at fixed prices. The Provisional Government felt it had no alternative but to continue this, though the belatedly adjusted prices in a period of high inflation inevitably caused resentment among the peasants. Ultimately, indeed, it led to the peasants’ refusing to part with their produce in the quantities needed. This is where the backward nature of the rural economy became a positive strength to the peasants. It was, of course, more convenient for them to buy matches, paraffin, salt, ironmongery and vodka from the urban market, but, if the terms of trade turned badly against them, then peasants could always turn their backs on the market and make do with the primitive products they could manufacture for themselves. During the summer and autumn of 1917 this is what many of them began to do, resuming a natural economy which their fathers and grandfathers had gradually been leaving behind, shutting themselves off from the market and refusing to provide food for anyone outside their own village. All Russian governments had to face this potential isolationism of the peasant communities until Stalin broke open the village economy by brute force in 1929–30.
Nowhere was the exuberant improvisation of the revolutionary period so evident as in the multiplicity of organizations created by the workers of Russia’s cities. Pride of place, of course, belonged to the soviets, to which the workers of Petrograd streamed back as soon as they had a chance in February 1917. It cannot be said, however, that the Petrograd Soviet, or any other large city soviet, lived up to its original ideals. Perhaps that was impossible. The Petrograd Soviet’s plenary assembly consisted of three thousand members, and even its executive committee soon grew to an unmanageable size, so that many of its functions had to be delegated to a bureau of twenty-four members, on which each of the main socialist parties had a prearranged quota of representatives. Naturally enough, these representatives tended to be established politicians and professional men rather than workers or soldiers. In fact, the attempt to introduce direct democracy led to an engaging but unproductive chaos, so that the real business had to be transferred upstairs to a small number of elected officials. This engendered a feeling among the rank and file that their voices no longer counted for anything. As we shall see, this discontent played an important part in the events of 1917, and helped to provide the Bolsheviks with the impetus that carried them to power.
In reaction, workers tended to devote more of their energies to lower level organizations which expressed their aspirations more directly. In some cases this meant the trade unions. These, however, were not well suited to a fast-changing revolutionary situation. They were bodies with some local roots but also strong national organizations: a few of them had managed to survive in shadowy form since 1905, in spite of persecution. They were organized on the ‘production’ principle, that is to say by branch of industry, whatever the precise skill, qualification or rank of their members. This tended to produce hierarchical splits within unions, which weakened their influence. They were also, of course, designed to function within a relatively stable economic and political environment, promoting their members’ interests within that setting. They were not well adapted to fast-changing circumstances or to attempts to assume real power. It is not surprising that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries retained a grip on many unions up to and beyond October.
In this respect, the factory or shop committees (fabzavkomy) were more suited to the circumstances of 1917. Often their origins were similar to those of the soviets of 1905: they began as informal strike committees during the February-March days, but this time at the level of the individual factory or even shop. The question of how they should develop caused controversy. Many Socialist Revolutionaries and most Mensheviks wanted them to run cultural and welfare facilities for the workers and to represent their interests in negotiations with the employers. That, however, would have reduced them virtually to the status of local trade union branches. The Anarchists, on the other hand, and in the short run the Bolsheviks, wanted fabzavkomy actually to run the factories, or at the very least to supervise the management’s discharge of that duty. The Anarchists intended that in that way they should become units in a self-governing society, while the Bolsheviks planned to subordinate them to the state economic administration of an embryonic socialist society. For both of them, however, the immediate watch-word was ‘workers’ control’, and they persuaded a Petrograd congress of fabzavkomy to adopt it at the end of May–the first institution to pass a Bolshevik resolution.
The factory committees were thus in the vanguard of all the workers’ struggles between February and October–for the eight-hour day, for higher pay and better conditions, and then increasingly for ‘control’ itself. At first the pressure was directed particularly against harsh foremen or staff: workers sometimes dealt with unpopular figures by bundling them into a wheelbarrow and carting them out of the factory gates, to the accompaniment of jeers and catcalls, for a ducking in the nearest river. Increasingly, however, the struggles concerned the very survival of enterprises. Faced with newly militant workers, as well as the more familiar problems of shortages of raw materials, fuel and spare parts, employers sometimes decided that the game was not worth the candle, and that their capital would be better invested in something safer. There was a wave of factory closures. The workers regarded these as lockouts, and often reacted by occupying the factory, and trying to keep production going under their own management.
Right from the beginning, some soviets and factory committees had armed contingents at their disposal. These bodies, often formed during the heady days of February, gradually assumed the name of ‘Red Guards’. They were able to provide themselves with weapons and ammunition by courtesy of garrison soldiers, or by pilfering from armaments works. They patrolled factory premises and maintained order in industrial areas (where the writ of the Provisional Government’s militia never really ran). Not until the Kornilov affair at the end of August did they assume real political importance. At that stage, however, the Bolsheviks, now in control of the Petrograd and many other urban soviets, mobilized them as paramilitary units under the soviets’ Military Revolutionary Committees, originally set up to forestall a military coup (see below, page 48). In that form they made a major contribution to the October seizure of power.
The real troubleshooters of 1917, however, were the soldiers, both at the front and in the rear. Their charter was the famous Order No. 1, passed in full session by a seething and chaotic Petrograd Soviet, before any Provisional Government had even been established. It was intended originally for the Petrograd garrison alone, but it soon spread far more widely, probably because it met soldiers’ wishes, and was swiftly taken up in most units. It called on servicemen to elect committees to run all units down to company level, and to send their delegates to the new soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Soldiers were to recognize the soviets (rather than the Duma) as their political authority. In combat situations, officers were to be obeyed as before, but the committees would control the issue of weapons, and off-duty officers were no longer to be recognized as superiors. In practice, in some units the committees actually arrogated to themselves the authority, not mentioned in Order No. 1, of electing and dismissing officers.
The position of officers during 1917 was not enviable. Because of the high casualty rate at the front during two and a half years of war, most of the junior officers were quite recent appointees, from the same social class as their men, often raw and unsure of their new-found superiority. Though some reacted flexibly to the new situation and found a common language with their men, others retreated into an ex-aggeratedly rigid defence of their recently acquired authority. Among the senior officers were rather more survivors from pre-1914, but they were mostly men who had been taught to regard politics as subversive, an affair of which they were properly ignorant. It is not surprising, therefore, that at all levels of the officer corps there was support for a return to the unquestioning discipline of pre-February.
Evidence suggests that the soldiers, especially at the front line, remained patriotic in outlook even after February, and determined at least to prevent the Germans advancing any further into Russia. The revolution did, however, induce in the men a feeling that they no longer had to obey all orders unquestioningly. The soviets’ peace programme circulated among them, and led to a widespread conviction that only a defensive war was still justified: the formula ‘without annexations or indemnities’ was very popular. The peace offensive also aroused expectations that the war would be over soon and that they could return home. These expectations were further sharpened by intensive propaganda from the Bolsheviks, who sent agitators, newspapers and broadsheets to popularize the idea of a separate peace to be concluded without reference to the Allies.
These expectations were rudely jolted by Minister of Defence Kerensky, who in June ordered an offensive on the south-western front. This was timed partly in order to aid the Allies (the mutinies in the French army looked at that stage more serious than the Russian ones), but partly because the officers hoped it would restore a sense of purpose and discipline among their men. The opposite turned out to be the case. Soldiers’ committees discussed the order to advance at great length: some refused, some went ahead initially and then pulled back when they saw the casualty rate. At any rate, the offensive soon turned into a rout in which the Russian army lost territory. Far more serious than that was the effect on morale. Whole units abandoned their positions, and some of them murdered officers who tried to restore order. Then the mutinous soldiers seized freight wagons, or even whole trains, and held them at gunpoint until they were transported deep into the rear. From there they could return home, rifles at the ready, to take a decisive part, as we have seen, in the share-out of land.
The mood of the garrison troops was, if anything, even more radical than that of those at the front. Many of them were recently mobilized peasants or workers, undergoing their training, and still identifying strongly with the class from which they came. The Provisional Government’s initial agreement with the Petrograd Soviet stipulated that these troops would not be sent to the front, but would stay in the capital to ‘defend the revolution’. And in fact the refusal of a machine-gun regiment to be sent to the front sparked off the July Days in Petrograd, when an undisciplined armed mob caused havoc on the streets.
Even at this stage, however, the army did not disintegrate altogether. Some units remained loyal, particularly Cossack ones, with their special traditions, or specialist units, like those from the artillery, cavalry or engineers. Nowhere was the collapse so complete that the Germans felt they could advance without risk. Indeed, the German High Command deliberately held back, fearing that a major advance might be the one factor which could yet restore morale in the Russian army.
At the time of the February revolution the Bolsheviks numbered, at the highest estimate, no more than 20,000, and their leaders were scattered in exile, at home and abroad. For that reason they had even more difficulty than the other parties in adjusting to the sudden changes. They were seriously divided about what to do, but the dominant figures inside Russia, notably Kamenev and Stalin, inclined towards cooperation with the other socialist parties in the soviets in exercising ‘vigilant supervision’ over the Provisional Government. Some even talked of a rapprochement with the Mensheviks.
Lenin had quite different ideas. He was still in Switzerland in February. He returned to Russia with the help of the German High Command, taking a specially provided ‘sealed train’ through Germany to Sweden. The Germans were anxious to facilitate his return, so that he could begin fomenting unrest inside Russia and spread his idea of a separate peace. They also provided the Bolsheviks with considerable funds thereafter, which helped to pay for the newspapers and political agitators who proved so effective among the soldiers and workers.
As soon as he arrived back in Petrograd, Lenin poured scorn on the notion of ‘revolutionary defencism’, conditional support for the Provisional Government, or cooperation with the other socialist parties. The ‘bourgeois’ stage of the revolution, he maintained, was already over, and it was time for the workers to take power, which they could do through the soviets. Russia should unilaterally pull out of the war, calling on the workers of all the combatant nations to convert it into an international civil war by rising against their rulers. Landed estates should be expropriated forthwith, and all other land nationalized and put at the disposal of ‘Soviets of Agricultural Labourers and Peasant Deputies’.
Lenin’s new programme should not have been a complete surprise to those who had read his writings since 1905, but all the same it did represent something of a shift in his thinking. His study of imperialism had led him to the view that the socialist revolution would take place on an international scale, with the colonized nations of the world rising against their exploiters. In this perspective, Russia, as the weakest of the imperialist powers, but also the strongest of the colonies (in the sense that it was exploited by French, German and other capital), was the natural setting for the initial spark of the revolution–though it would need swift support from within economically stronger nations if it was not to die away. Lenin, in fact, had moved close to the position of Trotsky, who since 1905 had been preaching ‘permanent revolution’ on an international scale. Trotsky acknowledged this rapprochement by joining the Bolsheviks in the course of the summer.
Another new facet of Lenin’s thinking was his view that imperialism created the economic prerequisites of socialism–trusts and syndicates, large banks, railways, telegraph and postal services–and that when the imperialist state was smashed, these structures would survive and be taken over by the new proletarian government. Since they were sophisticated and self-regulating, all that would be needed was to ensure that they were used in the interests of the people as a whole, not of a small class of exploiters, and this would be essentially a matter of ‘book-keeping and monitoring’ (uchet i kontrol). ‘Capitalism’, he asserted, ‘has simplified the work of book-keeping and monitoring, has reduced it to a comparatively simple system of accounting, which any literate person can do.’
This vision was the real source of Lenin’s confidence in 1917. He seems to have really believed that, through the soviets, ordinary working people could take power into their own hands, and administer complex economic systems. He called his vision the ‘commune state’, taking as his model the Paris Commune of 1871. This introduced a certain contradiction into his ideas, since of course the Paris Commune had originated in precisely the kind of ‘revolutionary defencism’ which Lenin rejected. But the image was to prove useful to him and to confuse some of his opponents. At any rate there proved to be a good deal of support among Bolsheviks for Lenin’s heightened radicalism, and by May most of his programme had been accepted as party policy.
Initially, the Bolsheviks’ position in the new popular institutions was very weak. With the disappointments of the summer and autumn, however, some existing delegates swung over towards the Bolsheviks, while new ones were elected on a Bolshevik mandate. The appeal of the Bolsheviks lay in their programme of ‘peace, land and bread’. Facing a Provisional Government which could not end the war, and which was therefore incapable of carrying out land reform or ensuring food supplies either, the Bolsheviks were able to offer something which nearly all workers, peasants and soldiers wanted. Bearing these promises in their hands, Bolshevik speakers were often able to win over audiences and gradually the new grass-roots popular insitutions as well. This was the case first of all in the factory committees, then in the soviets of workers’ deputies, then in the soldiers’ committees and in some of the trade unions. The failure of the July uprising and the public revelations about German backing for Lenin reduced this support for a time, but it revived and redoubled with the Kornilov affair at the end of August.
This affair has been the subject of much historical controversy, and it cannot be said that it is clear even now exactly what happened. In the last week of August General Kornilov, commander-in-chief of the Russian army, sent troops from the front to Petrograd, evidently with the intention of dispersing the soviets and arresting all the leading Bolsheviks, probably in order to set up a military government. He was thwarted by the action of Kerensky (now prime minister) in declaring him under arrest, by the railwaymen, who blocked the passage of his troops, and by the soldiers of the garrisons south and west of Petrograd, who fraternized with Kornilov’s troops and persuaded them they were fighting on the wrong side. General Krymov, their commander, committed suicide at this disgrace.
The mysterious aspect of the affair is that Kornilov had been appointed by Kerensky only shortly before, with an apparent mandate to tighten the discipline in the army. Indeed, the early stages of the coup itself were coordinated with Kerensky, who then abruptly changed his mind. The whole business seems, in fact, to have been dogged by the insoluble ambiguities of the Provisional Government’s position. Kerensky wanted to restore military discipline in order to be able to go on fighting the war, especially after the débâcle of the June offensive, but at the same time he knew that the measures Kornilov proposed–abolishing soldiers’ committees at the front, restoring the full power of officers, imposition of full military discipline among rear garrisons, in armament factories and on the railways–would alienate his allies in the soviets, and probably provoke a popular rising with Bolshevik backing. In the end Kerensky could not have it both ways, and he came down on the side of the soviets, in a manner that exposed Kornilov to maximum humiliation.
What is quite certain is that this fiasco dramatically revived the fortunes of the Bolsheviks. It left the High Command confused, demoralized and resentful of the Provisional Government. Alexeyev, Kornilov’s immediate successor, resigned in disgust in the middle of September, saying, ‘We have no army’, and describing his fellow officers as ‘martyrs’ in the face of the general indiscipline. By contrast, the workers’ militias, especially in Petrograd itself, gained enormously in status and self-esteem: under their new name of ‘Red Guards’ they gained many new recruits during September and October. The Bolsheviks’ view of events generally seemed to have been vindicated, and nearly all popular institutions, especially the soviets, swung sharply in their direction. From the beginning of September the Bolsheviks had a majority in the crucial Petrograd Soviet, and Trotsky became its chairman. Moscow soon followed suit, and it became clear that the elections to the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets would result in the Bolsheviks becoming the largest single party.
To forestall any possible repeat of the Kornilov affair, the Petrograd Soviet established on 9 October a Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), to organize the ‘revolutionary defence’ of the capital against either a military putsch or Kerensky’s reported intention of evacuating the city and letting the Germans (already in Riga, only 300 miles away) occupy it and crush the soviet. The motion to establish MRC was supported by left-wing Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries; its first chairman was a Socialist Revolutionary. All the same, the majority of its members were Bolsheviks. The new body immediately set about coordinating the Red Guards and, helped by the impassioned oratory of Trotsky, persuading the garrison troops to recognize it rather than the Provisional Government as their ultimate source of authority.
Throughout September, Lenin, at first from the safety of Finland (a warrant had been out for his arrest since the July Days), then from hiding in Petrograd, bombarded the party Central Committee with letters urging that the moment for the insurrection had come. He cited as evidence the Bolshevik majorities in the soviets, the rising wave of peasant unrest, the intended surrender of Petrograd (which would produce the ‘Paris Commune’ situation), and in the international dimension the recent mutiny in the German Baltic Fleet. Once MRC was in existence, that seemed to him the appropriate instrument for the seizure of power. And indeed, it was on the day after its establishment, 10 October, that he at last persuaded his colleagues on the Central Committee that a rising was ‘on the agenda’.
Even at this stage, however, there were sceptics among Lenin’s closest colleagues, notably Zinoviev and Kamenev, two of the longest standing members of the Bolshevik Party. Their arguments are worth dwelling on, as they represent an important strand in Bolshevik thinking at the time. They maintained that the Bolsheviks had more to gain by working with the other socialist parties in a coalition government based on the soviets, than by going it alone and risking a violent seizure of power. Bolshevik support was rising among peasants, workers and soldiers: they would soon dominate the soviets, and would gain a substantial share of the seats in the Constituent Assembly, whose elections were approaching. Why jeopardize all this by a violent coup, which would alienate everyone? And even if it succeeded, then the Bolsheviks would be left bearing the responsibility alone for the huge tasks of improving the food supply, restoring the industrial economy, and, most difficult of all, either securing peace with Germany or else leading a ‘revolutionary war’ against her. For such tasks a coalition was needed, and, moreover, the Bolsheviks were already in a position to lead it.
Of course, it can be argued that Zinoviev and Kamenev were pleading merely for different tactics, for what became known after the Second World War as the ‘popular front’ policy. Yet major differences of conception underlay their argument. Lenin’s attitude was utopian, even apocalyptic: for him, the Bolsheviks embodied, in some mystical sense, the people, and once they seized power that power would ipso facto be in the hands of the people. Zinoviev and Kamenev, by contrast, were practical politicians, worried about how power could actually be exercised. Probably their views were closer to those of the majority of Bolsheviks in the soviets.
One significant observation they made: ‘Insofar as the choice depends on us, we can and must confine ourselves now to a defensive position.’ That was precisely what, in the event, MRC did, and this fact may have been crucial to the success of the insurrection. For what finally provoked the seizure of power was Kerensky’s action, on the night of 23–24 October, in trying to close down two Bolshevik newspapers and to arrest some Bolsheviks on charges of antigovernment agitation. On the initiative of Trotsky, MRC responded by reopening the newspaper offices, and then, to ensure the safety of the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, due to open the next day in Petrograd, its troops began to occupy bridges, road junctions and railway stations, moving on to take over telegraph offices and government ministries during the following night. Lenin came out of hiding and went to the Smolny Institute, now the headquarters of MRC, to persuade them not to confine themselves to a defensive operation, but to carry on and arrest the Provisional Government. This is certainly what happened, whether because of Lenin’s influence or from the natural dynamic of events. MRC called in Baltic sailors from Kronstadt and Helsingfors, while Kerensky’s attempts to raise units from the front line were almost wholly unavailing, so low was the stock of the Provisional Government among army officers. In the end Kerensky slipped out of the city in a car to continue his efforts in person. The rest of the Provisional Government was duly arrested in the Winter Palace late on the night of the 25th–26th.
Already on the 25th Lenin felt able to issue a proclamation announcing that power had passed into the hands of the soviets. He did not, however, significantly, identify the Congress of Soviets or even the Petrograd Soviet as the new source of authority, but rather MRC, ‘which has placed itself at the head of the proletariat and the garrison of Petrograd’. He thus specifically located power in the institution where the Bolsheviks had perhaps the greatest weight. When the Congress of Soviets met that evening, a large and influential group of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, including most of the members of the executive committee of the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets (back in June), condemned this step as a usurpation and walked out of the assembly, to form a Committee of Public Safety and to try to organize resistance to unilateral Bolshevik rule. A few Mensheviks remained behind, while the much larger number of Socialist Revolutionaries who did so reconstituted themselves as the Left Socialist Revolutionary party, finalizing a break which had existed for some months in all but name.
Now that power was in the hands of the soviets, one might have expected that it would be exercised by the All-Russian Executive Committee (VTsIK), which was elected by the congress to conduct its business between sessions and to hold authority in the soviet movement. This, of course, contained representatives of several socialist parties. Lenin, however, announced that the supreme body in the new ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’ would be the so-called Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), a kind of ‘council of ministers’, whose members would all be Bolshevik. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries were invited to participate, but were unwilling to do so without other socialist parties also being represented.
As a result of the way Lenin and the Central Committee interacted, then, the Bolsheviks had seized power under the guise of defending the soviets against a Provisional Government bent on undermining them. That was the basis on which most of the participants in the seizure of power had acted, and most of them expected a coalition socialist government to follow, resting on the authority of the soviets.
There was indeed an attempt to form just such a government, sponsored by the railwaymen’s union, Vikzhel, which welcomed the departure of the Provisional Government, but condemned the Bolsheviks’ unilateral seizure of power, and invited representatives of the major parties and political institutions to try to reach agreement on the formation of a socialist coalition. Vikzhel backed their invitation with the threat of a railway strike. Against Lenin’s opposition, several leading Bolsheviks did take part in these negotiations, and indeed discussed political options which would have entailed removing Lenin and Trotsky from the government. They were worried by the intolerant and arbitrary measures their government was taking, such as the suspension of non-socialist newspapers. On 4 November five of them–Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Nogin and Milyutin–resigned from the party’s Central Committee, declaring that ‘we cannot take responsibility for the Central Committee’s disastrous policy, which is being pursued against the will of the vast majority of workers and soldiers.’ Other Bolsheviks resigned from Sovnarkom, warning that ‘there is only one way to keep a purely Bolshevik government in power–by political terror.’
This Fronde in the upper levels of the party soon dissipated, however. The Vikzhel negotiations got nowhere, partly because of Lenin’s obstruction of them, partly because the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were unwilling to go on parleying with a party which was suppressing the freedom of the press. The five dissident members of the Central Committee suddenly found themselves isolated, and begged their way back by renouncing their personal opinion. Zinoviev commented, ‘We would prefer to make mistakes together with millions of workers and soldiers, and die together with them, rather than withdraw from events at this decisive historical moment.’ This was to be only the first of many occasions on which doubting Bolsheviks suppressed their personal scruples in the face of the simple fact that their party held power, and of their judgement that this was all that really mattered. As Leonard Schapiro has commented, ‘The greatest weakness of the opposition was that, having supported thus far a policy of insurrection without foreseeing its full implications, they felt it was too late for them to withdraw.’ This is not wholly fair to Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had publicly expressed their doubts before the insurrection, but it well captures the essential dilemma of all Bolsheviks who disagreed with Lenin.
In the event, Vikzhel proved unable to mobilize the railway workers to carry out their threat of a strike. For his part, Lenin decided to broaden somewhat the basis of his regime by admitting seven Left Socialist Revolutionaries to Sovnarkom. They stayed for only three months, before resigning over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (see below, pages 61–2).
In the provinces, as in Petrograd, power also passed to the Bolsheviks in the form of a soviet takeover of some variety. Their opponents were either the scanty and poorly armed forces of the old tsarist local government bodies, the zemstvos and municipalities, or else Committees of Public Safety on the Petrograd model. Where the Bolsheviks had a majority in the local soviet, they assumed power smoothly, and used their domination of the local revkom (equivalent of MRC) to suppress their opponents. Where they did not have such a majority, they formed a soviet consisting simply of workers, or called directly on Red Guards or sympathetic garrison units to form a revkom and take power. Some of the bitterest fighting was in Moscow, where the soviet did not set up a revkom till the Petrograd seizure was already accomplished and the soviet troops needed a further week, with artillery barrages, to overcome the Committee of Public Safety.
The only places where the Bolsheviks’ methods were used successfully against them were, significantly, the national areas, where local support could be secured for a policy directed against the ‘Russians’ or the ‘Muscovites’. A notable example of this was Kiev, where the Ukrainian nationalists managed to swamp the local congress of soviets.
The one body that might successfully have resisted the Bolshevik coup was the officer corps. They, however, after the experience of the Kornilov affair, were less than lukewarm in their support for the Provisional Government. General Cheremisov, commander of the northern front, refused to divert any troops from his sector to defend Kerensky. The latter’s desperate personal mission to the front only succeeded in raising some seven hundred Cossacks commanded by General Krasnov: these advanced as far as the Pulkovo Heights, outside Petrograd, but were resisted and eventually thrown back by a large force of Red Guards and of sailors from the Baltic Fleet. A rising of officer cadets within the city was not coordinated with this expedition and was crushed separately by Red Guards.
In this way, during November and December, the Bolsheviks succeeded in extending their control to most of the country which had been ruled by the Provisional Government. There remained, however, a final potential limit to their authority. This was the Constituent Assembly, whose nationwide elections were imminent even as the seizure of power took place. This body had been the aspiration of Russian democrats and socialists since before the 1905 revolution. The Bolsheviks themselves had criticized the Provisional Government for not hastening its convocation, and even after taking power they called their new ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’ ‘provisional’ in deference to the claims of the assembly.
Privately Lenin had strong forebodings that the Constituent Assembly would not support the Bolsheviks, but he decided that his new government could not allow itself the outrageous inconsistency of forbidding its convocation. His fears were confirmed by the results of the elections, held in November. The Socialist Revolutionaries polled 15.8 million votes and emerged as the largest single party, with 380 seats, while the Bolsheviks, with 9.8 million votes and 168 seats, were a respectable but clear second. Once that was evident, Lenin began to speak of the Assembly as if it were on a level with the Provisional Government, an institution of ‘bourgeois democratic type’ whose only function must be to yield to a ‘democratic institution of a higher order’, namely the soviets.
Even though they had lost the election, the Bolsheviks did permit the assembly to meet. They did everything possible, however, to instil in its members the impression that they were on sufferance, even under direct threat, from the new government. Sovnarkom issued a decree outlawing the leading members of the Kadet Party (which had 17 seats in the assembly), as a party of ‘enemies of the people’ (the first use of a phrase which was to have terrifying implications under Stalin); their newspapers were closed down, and some Socialist Revolutionaries and Kadet delegates were in fact arrested. On the day the assembly opened, 5 January 1918, Red Guards were posted all over Petrograd, especially around the Tauride Palace, where the assembly was to meet. Even during the session itself, soldiers leered at the delegates from the balconies, and took symbolic aim at them with their rifles.
The Bolsheviks put before the assembly a resolution recognizing the authority of the new Soviet government. The assembly rejected it, and went on to pass the first ten articles of a new Basic Land Law, intended to supplant the new Bolshevik legislation on the subject. The guards then requested the chairman to adjourn the session, and locked and sealed the building so that the delegates could not meet the next day. Rejection of the Bolshevik resolution had meant the forcible end of the Constituent Assembly.
Some Socialist Revolutionaries had recognized before the Assembly met that its fate would be decided by force. They had set up a Committee for the Defence of the Constituent Assembly, and, like MRC before them, had appealed for the support of the garrison troops in the city. According to one of their members, Boris Sokolov, the Semenov and Preobrazhensky regiments were prepared to come to their support, but the Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee decided against using arms in defence of the assembly. They anticipated that the government would win any armed confrontation in the capital, and decided therefore to rely on the moral appeal of the Constituent Assembly and the broad support which the Socialist Revolutionaries enjoyed in the country at large. When a workers’ demonstration took place in support of the assembly, then, it was unarmed and was forcibly dispersed by the Red Guards, with the loss of some lives.
The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was confirmed the next day by the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and the Soviet government finally removed the word ‘provisional’ from its title.
Looking at the resistance offered by the moderate socialists, one cannot but conclude that they misjudged both the historical situation and the nature of the Bolshevik Party. They all considered the October seizure of power to be an adventurist putsch, morally reprehensible and objectively unjustified by Russia’s social and economic development. They tended to regard the Bolsheviks as misguided comrades who would be taught a lesson both by history and by the Russian people. None of them thought the Bolsheviks could last long in power. For that reason the reaction of most Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks was to keep their moral record clean for the battles of the future by walking out of the soviets and assemblies where the Bolsheviks had just taken control. In that way they more or less capitulated without putting up a fight (though one should note the places, notably Moscow, which were exceptional in this respect). Only belatedly and reluctantly did many of them come to realize that if the Bolsheviks were to be effectively resisted, then it must be by force.
In the long run, some army officers, the liberal parties and many of the Socialist Revolutionaries did come round to the view that it was necessary to fight the Bolsheviks. By that time, however, this meant a civil war in which the Bolsheviks already held many of the advantages.
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War Communism (#ulink_416135be-3db3-5630-b5b4-b38cfe51ad99)
Even after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, it was not clear what form of government the Bolsheviks would be able to install, what its relations would be with local soviets as local centres of power, nor what kind of support it would receive from the various sectors of the population. The Bolsheviks had called for ‘All Power to the Soviets’, but Lenin clearly had reservations about that slogan, and the manner in which he had established Sovnarkom did not augur well for the future of decentralized government. The Bolsheviks had also talked a great deal of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and had called their new government a ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’; but how was the proletariat to put their new-found authority into effect? What was to be the relation between the new centralized institutions of the Soviet government (admittedly as yet largely on paper) and bodies like trade unions and factory committees, which had their own narrower interests to defend?
The Bolsheviks had absolutely no clear answer to these questions. As we have seen, they were divided over how and even whether to seize power.
Even Lenin himself had no clear conception of how he was going to run the enormous, divided, war-torn country. He fully admitted this. Not long before the seizure of power, he said, ‘We do not pretend that Marx or Marxists know the road to socialism in detail. That is nonsense. We know the direction of the road, we know what class forces lead along it, but concretely, practically, this will be shown by the experience of millions when they decide to act.’ He did have a general vision, expounded in State and Revolution, of ordinary workers and peasants taking over the smoothly running mechanism of the imperialist economy. He evoked this vision frequently in the early days of the new regime, in language which mixed democratic voluntarism with ruthless authoritarianism. ‘Comrade workers,’ he exhorted them on 5 November 1917, ‘remember that you yourselves are administering the state. Nobody is going to help you if you do not yourselves unite and take over all state affairs. Rally round your soviets: make them strong. Get to work right there, at the grass roots, without waiting for orders. Institute the strictest revolutionary order, suppress without mercy the anarchic excesses of drunken hooligans, counterrevolutionary cadets [yunkera], Kornilovites, etc. Institute rigorous supervision over production and accounting over products. Arrest and deliver to the tribunal of the revolutionary people whoever dares to raise his hand against the people’s cause.’ This was the language of the utopian, confident that he is already on the threshold of the ideal society.
Some of the very early Bolshevik legislation did seem to be putting this vision into practice by creating or strengthening institutions through which workers, peasants and soldiers could gain greater control over their own fate and also over the running of the country.
1. The land decree of 26 October 1917 abolished all private landownership without compensation, and called on village and volost (rural district) land committees to redistribute the land thus secured to the peasants on an egalitarian basis. The decree was couched in the words of a Peasant Congress of June 1917. It reflected the Socialist Revolutionary programme and gave the peasants what most of them wanted at the time, while making no mention of the ultimate Bolshevik aim of nationalization of the land.
2. The decree of 14 November 1917 on workers’ control gave elected factory committees the power of supervision (kontrol) over industrial and commercial enterprises, for which purpose commercial secrecy was to be abolished.
3. Decrees of November and December 1917 abolished all ranks, insignia and hierarchical greetings in the army and subordinated all military formations to elected committees of soldiers, among whose duties would be the election of their officers.
4. Existing judicial institutions were replaced, in a decree of 22 November 1917, by ‘people’s courts’, whose judges would be elected by the working population. Special revolutionary tribunals were to be elected forthwith by the soviets to deal with counterrevolutionary activity, profiteering, speculation and sabotage.
On the other hand, some of the Bolsheviks’ very earliest measures pointed in the other direction, towards tighter central authority. On 2 December 1917 a Supreme Council of the National Economy was set up, almost universally known by its initials, VSNKh (or Vesenkha), to ‘elaborate general norms and a plan for regulating the economic life of the country’ as well as to ‘reconcile and coordinate’ the activities of other economic agencies, among them the trade unions and factory committees. In January 1918 the factory committees were converted into local branches of the trade unions, and the whole structure subordinated to Vesenkha. This was not necessarily done against the wishes of the workers themselves: indeed there is a good deal of evidence that, to keep production going at all in the desperately difficult economic circumstances, many factory committees were only too glad to seek support from some larger entity. Nevertheless, in practice it meant that the economy was becoming very centralized even before the civil war broke out.
The same was true of the decision to set up the Cheka — or, to give it its full name, the Extraordinary Commission for Struggle with Counterrevolution and Sabotage — instituted by Sovnarkom on 7 December 1917. Its immediate task was to combat looting, hooliganism and black market trading, which had increased alarmingly, and to keep watch on organizations known to be opposed to the Bolsheviks. In its early appeals it tried to mobilize the population in the same style as Lenin: ‘The Commission appeals to all workers, soldiers and peasants to come to its aid in the struggle with enemies of the Revolution. Send all news and facts about organizations and individual persons whose activity is harmful to the Revolution and the people’s power to the Commission …’ In practice, the Cheka was never subordinated to any soviet institution, nor indeed to any party body, only to Sovnarkom, and was able to extend its powers unchecked.
Another source of uncertainty about the new Soviet regime was its relation to the outside world. Lenin had encouraged the seizure of power in the expectation that its example would provoke workers’ revolutions in other countries of Europe, especially in Germany. As the months passed and this did not happen, it became clear that the Bolsheviks were going to have to honour their pledge to end the war, not through negotiations with a friendly, socialist Germany, but by reaching some kind of agreement with the old imperial Germany. Given the weakness of the Russian army, which the Bolsheviks themselves had fostered, this could only mean acceptance of whatever terms the German generals cared to dictate. Trotsky, as the newly appointed commissar for foreign affairs, tried to put the new-style ‘public diplomacy’ into effect by addressing the German people directly over the heads of their leaders, but his words produced no immediate effect.
The dilemma of how to deal with this situation very nearly tore the Bolshevik Party in two once again. The Germans were demanding the Baltic provinces and the whole of Bielorussia and the Ukraine, which meant losing a substantial proportion of Russia’s industrial and agricultural wealth. The Left Communists, led by Bukharin, argued that to accept this meant capitulating to imperialism and losing a golden opportunity to continue the world revolution which October had started. Bukharin agreed with Lenin that the Russian army was no longer capable of holding back the Germans in regular warfare, but he rejected this concept of warfare:
Comrade Lenin has chosen to define revolutionary war exclusively as a war of large armies with defeats in accordance with all the rules of military science. We propose that war from our side–at least to start with–will inevitably be a partisan war of flying detachments. … In the very process of the struggle … more and more of the masses will gradually be drawn over to our side, while in the imperialist camp, on the contrary, there will be ever increasing elements of disintegration. The peasants will be drawn into the struggle when they hear, see and know that their land, boots and grain are being taken from them–this is the only real perspective.
Bukharin’s views certainly had wide support in the party. They may appear quixotic, but his recipe for involving the masses, especially the peasants, in the revolution through partisan warfare against an occupying power does closely resemble the methods of later successful Communist leaders, such as Mao, Tito and Ho Chiminh. Lenin, however, took the line of strict Realpolitik. The most precious possession of the world revolution, he argued, was that a Soviet government existed in Russia. That, above all, must not be placed in jeopardy. It followed that the only possible policy was to gain a ‘breathing space’ by capitulating to the German demands and preserving what could be preserved while postponing international revolution to the distant future.
In this controversy we see Lenin on the opposite side from the one he took in October. Then he had been an internationalist in perspective, trusting to the revolutionary élan of the workers all over the world. Now he became distrustful of any working-class revolutionary spirit not guided by the Bolshevik Party (as in What is to be Done? so many years before) and retreated into the one ‘socialist fortress’. The party eventually accepted his arguments, and Soviet Russia signed a treaty at Brest-Litovsk, acceding in full to the German demands. Much flowed from that decision, especially the creation of a relatively conventional army (see below) and the abandonment of ‘open diplomacy’. One might even see here the first glimmerings of ‘socialism in one country’, later to be developed by Stalin. However that may be, Germany’s subsequent defeat by the Western Allies rescued Lenin from the most damaging consequences of his decision: the Germans withdrew from the occupied territories after November 1918.
The Left Socialist Revolutionaries agreed with the Left Communists on this issue and resigned from the government in indignation, calling the Brest-Litovsk Treaty a ‘betrayal’. Thenceforth the Bolsheviks exercised literally ‘one-party rule’. As if to mark this break, they renamed themselves the Communist Party (in memory of the Paris Commune).
The Bolsheviks’ method of seizing and consolidating power led naturally to civil war. This was something Lenin had always accepted. He had repeatedly urged that the First World War should be turned into a class struggle or ‘international civil war’. The same logic underlay his determination in 1917 to shun all agreements with other parties, even from the socialist camp, and to promote a violent seizure of power single-handed.
It took some time, however, for the various anti-Bolshevik forces to grasp the reality of the situation, and to retrieve themselves from their initial reverses. Senior officers from the Imperial Army made their way to the Don Cossack territory in the south, where they tried to assemble an anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army. Because of the divisions among the Cossacks, however, it took them a long time to secure a base area. Long before they did so, an opportunity for anti-Bolshevik activity was created in quite another part of Russia, namely Siberia. Following the termination of hostilities on the German front, the Czech Legion was being evacuated on the Trans-Siberian Railway, when fighting broke out between them and Red Guards at Chelyabinsk. Using the telegraph system, the Czechs managed to gain control over the entire length of the railway. Since this is the one vital artery of Siberia, that meant the whole of that enormous territory, together with the Urals and part of the Volga basin, became an area where anti-Bolshevik forces could gather.
The first to take advantage of the situation were the Socialist Revolutionaries. Since the October revolution they had been uncertain and divided about how to meet the Bolshevik threat. On walking out of the Second Congress of Soviets they had declared the seizure of power ‘a crime against homeland and revolution, which means the beginning of civil war’. But they had been reluctant to back this declaration with actions. One inhibiting factor was the fear of finding themselves along with the ‘Kornilovites’ on the side of counterrevolution: they still felt the lingering ties of socialist brotherhood with the Bolsheviks. All the same some Socialist Revolutionaries, without the approval of their Central Committee, did organize the assassination of the German ambassador and attempted to seize power by a coup in the new capital, Moscow, in July 1918. This coup was supplemented by an armed rising in Yaroslavl and one or two other northern towns, timed to coincide with an Allied landing at Arkhangelsk. The landing, however, was postponed, and the risings put down.
Taking advantage of the Czech revolt, the Socialist Revolutionaries set up a government at Samara on the Volga, which they called the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, or Komuch. As their title implied, they wanted to reconvene the Constituent Assembly on non-Bolshevik territory. They saw themselves as a ‘third force’, between the emerging ‘Red’ and ‘White’ orientations. Their programme declared, for example, that the land was ‘irrevocably the property of the people’, which was not to the taste of most of the generals. In Omsk a Provisional Government headed by the Kadet, P. Vologodsky, promised, on the contrary, that all nationalized property, including land, would be restored to its former owners. The two governments eventually reached a compromise and formed a joint Directory, but this in its turn was overthrown by officers and Cossacks, who objected to its (moderately) left-wing programme, and installed Admiral Kolchak as supreme ruler and ‘commander-in-chief of all the land and naval forces of Russia’. In this way political uncertainty and disunity undermined the efforts of the Whites, while the attempts to found a ‘third force’ all failed, since such a force always needed support from army officers, which meant the Whites.
The emerging White armies did have some degree of foreign support, from Russia’s former allies, especially Britain and France. The effectiveness of this support should not, however, be exaggerated. The truth was that Allied governments, though worried by the incipient power vacuum in Russia, and by the growth of communism there, were not sure what they wanted to achieve, nor of the best means for doing so. In the summer and autumn of 1918 the main aim was to get the Russians back into the war against Germany. When that objective lapsed in November 1918, some Western politicians still took the view that it was necessary to rid Russia of Bolshevism, which might otherwise sweep Europe like the plague (Trotsky’s vision in reverse). The majority, on the other hand, felt that after a long war the first priority must be to bring the troops home at last, and that in any case anti-communism was a policy that would split public opinion at home. Some British soldiers, indeed, mutinied. For that reason, most Allied troops left Russia during 1919, though the Japanese stayed on longer in the Far East, where they had more durable geopolitical interests.
Perhaps the most important contribution the Allies made was to supply the Whites with arms, ammunition and equipment, without which they could scarely have mounted an effective military challenge to the Communists. On the other hand, they never committed enough men to make a decisive difference to the outcome of the war, and, by committing what they did, they opened the Whites to the charge of being unpatriotic, of encouraging foreigners to intervene in Russian affairs. They also gave the Communists impeccable grounds for believing, as Lenin had warned them, that the imperialists were out to crush the young Soviet state. The foundations of many a myth were laid by the Allied intervention.
The Whites were able, at any rate, to mount a very serious threat to the Soviet Republic. Two moments of crisis stand out in particular. The first was in August 1918, when the Czechs and other White forces captured Kazan, on the Volga. This was some four hundred miles from Moscow, but there was no significant force of the infant Red Army ready to interpose itself, so that the capital was very vulnerable. Trotsky, now commissar for war, rushed in what was to become his famous armoured train, to assemble a force to defend the town of Svyazhsk, on the road to Moscow. He succeeded in doing so, and in recapturing Kazan. This was when he issued his command, ‘I give a warning: if a unit retreats, the commissar will be shot, then the commander.’ This crisis gave the decisive impulse towards the creation of a full-scale Red Army, as well as to the declaration of the Red Terror (see below, page 70).
The second period when it seemed as if the Reds might be defeated was in the autumn of 1919. The Volunteer Army, having finally become a formidable force under General Denikin, took advantage of a Cossack rising against the Reds to conquer most of the south and the Ukraine, and by October had advanced as far as Chernigov and Orel, the latter less than two hundred miles from Moscow. At the same time, General Yudenich, using the Baltic region as a base, advanced on Petrograd, and penetrated as far as the suburbs of the city by October. In both cases the Red Army proved equal to the challenge, and was able to drive the attackers back.
The Whites were, then, ultimately unsuccessful. This was partly because of political disunity, as has been suggested: at the very least they failed to act as a focus for all the various anti-Bolshevik forces. They failed even to attract a mass following among the population, though both the workers and the peasants were becoming very disillusioned with Bolshevik rule as it had turned out in practice. The Whites’ political programmes were vague and inadequate: they did nothing to reassure the peasants that the land they had won in 1917 would not be taken away from them again in the event of a White victory. They failed to offer the workers a secure status for the trade unions, factory committees and other new representative organizations of 1917. In fact their only consistent political message was ‘Russia one and indivisible’–which of course alienated the non-Russian nationalities who might otherwise have been inclined to support the Whites as Bolshevik nationality policy began to reveal itself in practice.
All this might not have mattered so much if the Whites had demonstrated by their behaviour towards the population that they were fairer and more responsible rulers than the Bolsheviks. But this was not the case. Dependent for quartering and food supplies on the regions where they were fighting, they requisitioned and pillaged less systematically, but scarcely less ruthlessly, than the Bolsheviks. They never glorified in terror as a system of rule, but they often applied it nevertheless. Moreover, the White generals continually lost control of their subordinates, so that, even if Kolchak and Denikin were themselves morally blameless, they proved powerless to prevent their armies committing excesses. As Kolchak wrote to his wife: ‘Many of the Whites are no better than the Bolsheviks. They have no conscience, no sense of honour or duty, only a cynical spirit of competition and money-grabbing.’ That was no recipe for winning a civil war, especially against opponents who were such masters of political propaganda.
The creation of the Red Army was one of the clearest examples of the way in which the Communists reversed the slogans of the revolution. The Bolsheviks had come to power by undermining the old army. Insofar as they had thought about what might replace it, they had envisaged an armed people’s militia, on the model of the Red Guards. This was what made the Left Communists’ programme for a ‘revolutionary war’ against the Germans so logical and appealing. Even for some time after Lenin had secured the defeat of that idea at Brest-Litovsk, the regime left itself with only a small new army, the so-called Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, structured on the principles the Bolsheviks had proclaimed in 1917: there were no insignia or ranks, and each unit was run by an elected committee, one of whose jobs was to choose officers. Military discipline was recognized only in active combat, and even there unit commanders had to operate for the time being without the sanction of the death penalty.
This structure, however, did not last for long. During the confusion of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, the Germans actually resumed their advance for a time. This was a cruel reminder of just how helpless and quixotic the new Russian army was. Trotsky decided to scrap it, and to rebuild on more traditional principles. He set up a Supreme Military Council, under the tsarist General Bonch-Bruevich, to organize the task of creating a new army. A network of military commissariats was distributed over Red-controlled territory to raise recruits, at first voluntarily, then, after the Czech revolt, by compulsory conscription. Most of the Red Guard and militia units were disbanded as unreliable, with a few party members drawn from each to constitute the nucleus of newly formed and conventionally constituted regiments. But who was to command the new units? The party did not possess anywhere near enough men with the necessary degree of military training and experience to lead troops in modern warfare. With Lenin’s support, Trotsky turned to officers of the old Imperial Army, at least those who had not fled to serve with the Whites: their insignia and ranks were not restored, but otherwise they were given the disciplinary powers to which they had been accustomed, up to and including the death penalty. There was no longer any nonsense about ‘soldiers’ committees’: they were simply abolished and replaced by ‘political commissars’. These were party-approved appointees, placed at the side of the officers–some of whom, at least initially, were reluctant to serve the Reds–to ensure their loyalty, pass on political instructions and raise the level of political consciousness among the conscripts. The commissar was explicitly not subordinated to the officer but was his equal, with the right to execute him if he committed treason towards the Red Army.
Trotsky’s methods aroused much criticism, both in and outside the party. In VTsIK the Menshevik, Dan, exclaimed, ‘Thus the Napoleons make their appearance’, while inside the party a so-called Military Opposition called for a return to the militia principle and the dismissal of old-regime officers. However that might be, Trotsky did create an effective fighting organization under ultimate party control. Considering how hastily it was put together, and the magnitude of the tasks it faced, the Red Army fought remarkably well, and it can probably be asserted that morale inside it was better than in any other section of the Russian population. Its troops were, of course, better fed than almost anyone else at the time, and service in the Red Army was an excellent means of advancing oneself in the new society. Hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants in the Red Army joined the party, and some of them later advanced through it to positions of power and responsibility in the new society. Trotsky, in fact, did his best to ensure that Red soldiers were given special training and promoted to command positions as soon as possible. By the end of the civil war, these new promotees constituted two-thirds of the officer corps: among them were some destined to become household names during the Second World War. All this had a profound effect upon the social structure of the party (see below, pages 86–7).
The revolutionary regime’s other main instrument was the Cheka. As we have seen, this was established in such a way that it was not subject to the supervision either of the party or of the soviets. It arose outside even the rough and ready legal norms which the new regime set before itself. It might be said, indeed, that the Cheka directly embodied Lenin’s ambivalence about democracy and authoritarianism. ‘The workers and soldiers’, he exhorted the presidium of the Petrograd Soviet in January 1918, ‘must realize that no one will help them except themselves. Malpractices are blatant, profiteering is monstrous, but what have the masses of soldiers and peasants done to combat this? Unless the masses are aroused to spontaneous action, we won’t get anywhere. … Until we apply terror to speculators–shooting on the spot–we won’t get anywhere.’
From the beginning it was the Cheka, as the ‘avenging sword’ of the proletariat, which in fact carried out these functions, though Lenin talked of ‘spontaneous mass action’. With Lenin’s at least implicit encouragement, it soon overstepped the restrictions that had initially been placed on it: it proceeded from mere investigation of counterrevolutionary crime to the arrest of suspects, and from there to staging trials, deciding sentences and even carrying them out. The first person shot by the Cheka was a certain exotically named Prince Eboli, an extortionist who particularly offended the Cheka head, Felix Dzerzhinsky because he claimed to be a member of his organization. ‘Thus’, said Dzerzhinsky, ‘does the Cheka keep its name clean.’ The Cheka also received the right to create its own armed formations to carry out its growing duties.
From January to July 1918 the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were represented on the ruling Collegium of the Cheka, and they resisted summary justice and the application of the death penalty (traditionally abhorred by Russian revolutionaries). Steinberg, the Left Socialist Revolutionary commissar for justice, sought to restrict the Cheka’s judiciary functions in the name of the ‘revolutionary tribunals’, which, though not necessarily gentle with their accused, were at least elected by the soviets and to some extent under their control. They more nearly, in fact, embodied popular involvement in justice.
After the rising of July 1918, however, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were expelled from the Cheka, and the republic entered a more dangerous period, when emergency justice became more acceptable. A start was made with the insurgents of Yaroslavl. The future prime minister, N. A. Bulganin, there headed a Cheka detachment which summarily shot 57 rebels, mostly officers, while a commission of investigation selected a further 350 captives for execution. This was still an isolated incident, but with the proclamation on 5 September of the Red Terror, such operations became routine. The decree stated that ‘it is essential to protect the Soviet Republic against its class enemies by isolating these in concentration camps; all persons involved in White Guard organizations, plots and insurrections are to be shot.’ It became unnecessary for an actual crime to be proven against any person of non-worker and non-peasant origin. His very existence could be held to imply that he was at war with the Soviet system, and therefore with the people as a whole. The sinister term ‘enemy of the people’ began to creep into official instructions and propaganda. Latsis, chairman of the eastern front Cheka, told his officers in November 1918:
We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror.
The imagery of public hygiene became part of the standard language of Soviet propaganda. Already in December 1917 Lenin had called for ‘a purge of the Russian land from all vermin’, by which he meant the ‘idle rich’, ‘priests’, ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘slovenly and hysterical intellectuals’. And on 31 August 1918 Pravda exhorted: ‘The towns must be cleansed of this bourgeois putrefaction. … All who are dangerous to the cause of the revolution must be exterminated.’
Concentration camps served the same sanitary purposes, by isolating the class enemy from the ordinary people. Lenin first proposed their establishment in a letter to the Penza provincial soviet on 9 August 1918 (the town was in an exposed position on the vulnerable eastern front): ‘It is essential to organize a reinforced guard of reliable persons to carry out mass terror against kulaks [rich peasants], priests and White Guardists; unreliable elements should be locked up in a concentration camp outside the town.’ Such camps were mentioned again in the decree on Red Terror, and were evidently already in existence, although the enactment authorizing them was not passed by VTsIK till 11 April 1919. By 1922 it appears from official figures that there were some 190 camps containing 85,000 inmates. According to Solzhenitsyn and others, conditions in most of them (there were notorious exceptions) were still tolerable compared with later days: prisoners still worked an eight-hour day and received a small regular wage. Perhaps something of the genuine notion of ‘corrective labour’ still survived. On the other hand, the inmates were hostages, liable to be summarily shot or taken out in a barge and drowned in a river in retribution for some action of the Whites in the civil war.
It is impossible to know how many people died at the hands of the Cheka during this period. Latsis stated that 12,733 persons were shot by them up to December 1920. Chamberlin in his standard history of the revolution makes an estimate of more like 50,000, while more recently Robert Conquest has given a figure of 200,000 for the period 1917–23, reckoning that a further 300,000 died as a result of other repressive measures, such as the suppression of peasant risings, strikes and mutinies.
These figures yield something by comparison with Stalin’s later efforts, and of course it must be remembered that they occurred in a period of genuine civil war, when the other side was also committing atrocities. One has the impression that White brutality was sporadic and sometimes committed without the knowledge of White leaders, while the Reds frankly and proudly acknowledged terror to be part of their system. Lenin’s attitude we have seen above, and Trotsky (in Terrorism and Communism, 1920) called terror ‘no more than a continuation … of armed insurrection’. Perhaps these distinctions are tenuous. What one can say with certainty is that Lenin introduced and made habitual the ruthless use of violence against all real and imagined ‘enemies’, while also creating, outside soviet or party control, the extra-legal institutions to enable this to be done.
Whatever may have been the Bolsheviks’ intentions when they came to power, there can be no doubt that during the civil war they withdrew or nullified most of the benefits they had given to the people in October, while submitting the democratic institutions they had helped create to rigid and often brutal control from above. ‘During the civil war’ does not, however, necessarily mean ‘because of the civil war’: in fact, there is considerable controversy among historians on this point. Soviet historians, and some Western ones, would attribute the extreme authoritarianism of Bolshevik rule at this time to the emergencies which the regime faced. Many Western historians, on the other hand, have always insisted that such authoritarianism was to be found in Lenin’s attitudes from the outset and in the way he organized his own faction and broke with all those who were unable to agree with him wholeheartedly.
There is in fact no need no posit any total incompatibility between these two views. By their very method of seizing power the Bolsheviks plunged Russia into a situation akin to civil war–which later developed into actual civil war. Futhermore, some of their most authoritarian measures were taken either before or after the most critical phases of the civil war. The war, in fact, merely offered the Bolsheviks the first occasion to grapple with reality, to move out of the realm of fantasy into that of practical politics. They were guided by the vague but powerful preconceptions they had brought to the situation. Wartime, moreover, in some ways provided them with the best opportunity to combine democracy (in the sense of contact with the masses) and authoritarianism in the manner of Lenin’s exhortations of November and December 1917. In State and Revolution he had urged that ‘to organize the whole national economy on the lines of the postal service … all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat–this is our immediate aim.’ If one substitutes for ‘armed proletariat’ ‘the party and the Red Army’ that is a pretty close approximation to what War Communism actually was. But of course that substitution is the whole point. Lenin easily made the transition from the concept of ‘proletariat’ to that of ‘party’, without seeing the enormity of the questions begged. He displayed the same ambivalence in his article ‘The immediate tasks of Soviet power’, of April 1918, in which he was able to assert at one and the same time that ‘without full-scale state accounting and supervision of production and the distribution of products, the workers’ rule cannot hold, and a return to the yoke of capitalism is inevitable’, yet also that ‘each factory, each village is a producers’ and consumers’ commune, with the right … of deciding in its own way the problem of acounting for production and distributing the products’. Perhaps such ambivalence was natural in what was still largely a utopian programme being tempered by reality.
At any rate, there can be no doubt that the actual measures adopted even before, but especially during and after the civil war increased the power of the state enormously, and withdrew or nullified the benefits the Bolsheviks had granted to the people in October. The essence of War Communism consisted in (i) the nationalization of virtually all industry, combined with central allocation of resources; (ii) a state trade monopoly (which, because it could not satisfy people’s needs, was accompanied by a vigorous black market); (iii) runaway inflation, leading to a partial suspension of money transactions (welcomed by those Bolsheviks who considered that money had no place in socialist society) and the widespread resumption of barter and of wage payments in kind; (iv) requisitioning of peasant surplus (or even non-surplus) produce. Alec Nove has summed it up trenchantly: ‘A siege economy with a communist ideology. A partly organized chaos. Sleepless, leather-jacketed commissars working round the clock in a vain effort to replace the free market.’
Already gravely overstrained by more than three years of a huge war, and then by the fears and conflicts of revolution, the economy finally collapsed. By 1921 heavy industrial production was at about a fifth of its 1913 level, and in some spheres had virtually ceased altogether. Food production declined somewhat less severely, as far as we can tell from the inevitably unreliable figures we have, but the trading and transport systems to bring it to the consumer had broken down. The situation of both cities and countryside was indescribable. Evgeny Zamyatin thus evoked Petrograd in the winters of War Communism: ‘Glaciers, mammoths, wastes. Black nocturnal cliffs, somehow resembling houses; in the cliffs, caves.... Cave men, wrapped in hides, blankets, wraps, retreated from cave to cave.’ And Pasternak, in Doctor Zhivago, depicted the devastation on the railways:
Train after train, abandoned by the Whites, stood idle, stopped by the defeat of Kolchak, by running out of fuel and by snowdrifts. Immobilized for good and buried in the snow, they stretched almost uninterruptedly for miles on end. Some of them served as fortresses for armed bands of robbers or as hideouts for escaping criminals or political fugitives–the involuntary vagrants of those days–but most of them were communal mortuaries, mass graves of the victims of the cold and typhus raging all along the railway line and mowing down whole villages in its neighbourhood.
In the countryside the peasants had already set about the welcome task of expropriating private land and dividing it up among themselves. Under the terms of the Bolshevik Land Decree, this process was mainly managed by the old village communes, which of course tended to be dominated by the more established and wealthier (or less poor) village families. The redistribution engendered a lot of friction, was probably not strictly egalitarian in its results, and was in any case vitiated by the discovery that, even when all private, church and state land had been absorbed, each peasant household could only add, on average, half a desyatina (just over an acre) to their holding.
Before the process was complete, moreover, the peasants were being importuned by supply officials looking for produce and unable to offer much in the way of money or goods to pay for it. This problem, of course, was inherited from the Provisional Government, but with the increasing hunger of the towns in the winter of 1917–18 it now became much more severe, and clashes became more bitter. Given their political philosophy, the Bolsheviks were bound to regard this problem as one of class warfare, and therefore to react much more sharply than the Provisional Government. In January Lenin suggested that the Petrograd Soviet should send out armed detachments to find and confiscate grain, and that they should be empowered to shoot the recalcitrant. And in May VTsIK and Sovnarkom issued a joint decree dubbing those who were reluctant to deliver grain to the state as a ‘peasant bourgeoisie’ and ‘village kulaks’. ‘Only one way out remains: to answer the violence of the grain owners against the starving poor with violence against the grain hoarders.’ To organize class war in the village, and to make the search for hidden stocks more effective, ‘committees of poor peasants’ (kombedy) were set up in every village and volost. Theoretically these were to consist of all peasants whose holdings did not exceed the local norms laid down at the land redistribution. But, in practice, whatever the village’s internal disputes, peasants were more and more reacting with united resentment against outsiders. Few except down-and-outs were prepared to help the hated intruders, and the kombedy degenerated into bands of louts looting for their own benefit or getting senselessly drunk on home-brewed ‘moonshine’. The Bolsheviks themselves quickly came to the conclusion that the kombedy were doing more harm than good, and abolished them in November 1918.
In fact, then, much of the provisioning of the towns was carried on outside the state supplies monopoly. Peasants trudged with their sacks of produce into the towns and there either sold it for high prices or–in view of the unreliability of money–bartered it for manufactured items tendered directly by artisans or workers. Intellectuals and non-manual workers bargained away furniture and family heirlooms in the desperate struggle to stay alive, sometimes themselves going out to the villages to do so: Zoshchenko’s story in which a bewildered peasant accepts a grand piano in return for a sack of grain was only a slight exaggeration. Half of Russia was on the roads or railways, carrying or trundling objects with which to trade. These were the so-called meshochniki, or ‘bagmen’, who became part of the daily scene. Such urban markets as the famous (or notorious) Sukharevka in Moscow became arenas of permanent lively and desperate haggling, as people sought the means to survive. Of course the Communists deeply disapproved of this commerce: it offended their trade monopoly and their ideological instincts. At times they set up road blocks round cities to apprehend the ‘bagmen’. But they never really tried to eradicate the illicit trade, since they knew that to do so would finally bring mass starvation.
These experiences, and the kombedy episode, naturally inflamed peasant feelings against the Communists. Further fuel was added to the flames by the closures of churches and the arrests of priests, as well as by compulsory conscription for the Red Army. Between the spring and autumn of 1918 rural violence against Communists and against supply officials increased markedly. It was still somewhat restrained, perhaps, by the fear that if the Communists were overthrown by the Whites, then the peasants would lose the land they had recently gained. But in the autumn of 1920 and spring of 1921, when the Whites no longer represented any danger, sporadic violence broke out into full-scale peasant insurrection.
According to the Dutch historian Jan Meijer, a typical peasant rising would begin with a meeting of the skhod, the traditional gathering of heads of households. There an act of condemnation would be formulated, and local Communists or members of kombedy taken prisoner or shot. Arms would be seized from the local military training unit (set up by the Red Army), and the requisition team driven off. The peasants would then endeavour to cut themselves completely off from the outside world and to defend this isolation by force.
These risings culminated in the huge insurrections of the black-earth provinces, the Volga basin, North Caucasus and Siberia (the major grain-producing areas) in 1920–1. The largest of them was probably that in western Siberia, where armed rebels may have numbered as many as 60,000: they occupied two large towns (Tobolsk and Petropavlovsk) and cut several stretches of the Trans-Siberian Railway for three weeks in February-March 1921. We know very little about this rising, however, whereas that in the black-earth province of Tambov left somewhat more in the way of written evidence, which has been exhaustively investigated by the American historian, Oliver Radkey. Much of what he discovered may well be true of other risings too.
The Tambov movement was a peasant rising in the classical sense, with no direct influence or support from any political party. The Socialist Revolutionary Party, who would have been their natural sponsors, were reticent in their support for the insurrection, perhaps because their civil war experience suggested to them that fighting meant sub-ordination to generals, and they wanted no more of that. It is true that the leader of the rising, Antonov, had once been a Left Socialist Revolutionary, and that there were Socialist Revolutionary features in the programme issued by the Union of the Toiling Peasantry, which was the civilian branch of the movement: reconvening the Constituent Assembly, renewed guarantees of civil liberties, full socialization of the land, and restoration of the mixed economy. But the latter two were natural peasant demands anyway.
At first Antonov’s men consisted of odd bands of deserters from the Red Army, dispossessed peasants and other people ‘on the run’ for a variety of reasons. It was not until the final defeat of Denikin that Antonov extended his forces any further. Then began a campaign of murdering Bolshevik and soviet officials, raiding village soviets and court rooms (burning documents, like the French peasants of 1789), railway stations, and grain collection points.
Full-scale insurrection came only in August-September 1920, with the appearance of the requisition teams to claim their share of the harvest, which that year was a poor one. Battles broke out between grain teams and villagers, to whose aid Antonov came. At first he was very successful: thousands of peasants flocked into the Green Army (as it became known), and, since Bolshevik morale and strength in Tambov was low, they were able to liberate whole rural districts and establish a civilian administration. The Green Army was in some ways remarkably like the Red Army in structure, complete with political commissars, though naturally with few trained officers: even the Reds’ opponents found themselves imitating Red methods. At its height the Green Army numbered up to 20,000 men, with a good many more fighting as irregulars. It cut no fewer than three main railway lines on which the Bolshevik government depended for communications with the Volga and North Caucasus. By December 1920 Lenin was so alarmed by the situation that he created a Special Commission for Struggle with Banditry, initially under Dzerzhinsky. Surviving local Bolsheviks and Cheka officials were pulled out of Tambov province, and special troops sent in under the command of Antonov-Ovseyenko (formerly of the Petrograd MRC) and later Tukhachevsky (fresh from suppressing the Kronstadt rising–see below, pages 90–1). These troops took control of villages one by one, shooting whole batches of peasants suspected of having fought with Antonov’s army. Some villages they actually burned down. At the same time they flushed the Green forces out of the relatively sparse woodland into the open fields, where armoured units with machine-guns could function more effectively against them.
Repression was, however, combined with concessions. Grain requisitioning was abolished in Tambov on Lenin’s specific order, and scarce supplies were brought in from elsewhere. In effect, the New Economic Policy (see below, page 119) was given a preliminary trial in Tambov, and seemed to work well, when combined with ruthless repression, in reducing the peasant will to fight.
It remains to be explained, however, why this and other peasant risings failed. After all, their aims were shared by most peasant communities, especially in the grain-producing regions, and even in some measure by urban workers. Yet there was never any consistent link, either between individual peasant movements, or with the workers. The peasants remained too localized and rural in their consciousness. The Green Army did once mount an attack on the town of Tambov, but seems to have been repulsed relatively easily by Red Guards. Above all, there was a lack of political coordination, such as might have been supplied by the Socialist Revolutionaries, had they not been already organizationally weakened and reluctant to take up arms; and in any case the peasants were by now distrustful of all political parties and of all help from urban intellectuals.
In some ways, given the anti-rural prejudices of most Marxists, it was not surprising that relations between the Bolsheviks and the peasants should have deteriorated so sharply. Matters were not much better, however, among the workers, who should have been the new government’s natural allies. We have already seen that by the summer of 1918 the Bolsheviks had nationalized most of industry and subordinated the factory committees to the trade unions, centralizing ‘workers’ control’ to a point where it no longer came from the workers. This certainly contributed to the revolution’s loss of its ideals, but nevertheless such centralization was often accepted by the workforce as an alternative to the even graver threat of hunger. The fact was that the peace policies of the Bolsheviks, popular though they undoubtedly were, created a great deal of unemployment. It has been estimated that as many as 70 per cent of Russia’s factories were working in some way for the war effort–and these tended to be the larger enterprises, employing large numbers of workers. State defence contracts ended abruptly with the ceasefire of December 1917, and in Petrograd some 60 per cent of the workforce was laid off between January and April 1918. The factories which survived very often went over to one-man management, since Lenin was now very keen on clear lines of authority, and began to pay piecework wages. Since the managers who took over were sometimes the old capitalist ones, now working under state supervision, factory discipline became once again reminiscent of pre-revolutionary days.
At the same time, food prices rose: in Moscow the price of potatoes doubled between January and April 1918, while rye flour (the main ingredient of the staple Russian loaf) quadrupled. In Petrograd rations fell to 900 calories a day, as against 2300 considered necessary for non-manual labour. Productivity declined as workers became malnourished and exhausted. To supplement their rations, many pilfered, resorted to the black market, went out to the villages to barter, or even to resettle there permanently, if they still had relatives or communal rights. Many workers of course joined the Red Army. The great depopulation of the major cities began. Between mid-1917 and late 1920 the number of factory workers declined from around 3½ million to barely over a million. Those who stayed behind either sought a career in the new party and state institutions (which gave preference to entrants from the proletariat), or they remained cold, hungry, insecure and powerless.
The demonstrations over the Constituent Assembly offered the first opportunity for the workers to express their new discontents. The shooting of unarmed workers by the Red Guards was widely denounced, while workers in a number of factories condemned Sovnarkom, demanded the disarming of the Red Guards (in some resolutions compared to the tsarist gendarmerie) and called for new elections to the soviets. On 9 January (which happened to be the anniversary of Bloody Sunday in 1905) a huge procession accompanied the funeral of those killed.
The non-Bolshevik political parties were too restrained and disorganized to offer effective articulation to the movement. All the same, some dissident Mensheviks managed to organize in Petrograd a so-called Extraordinary Assembly of Delegates from Works and Factories, which met in March 1918. It is not clear how the assembly was elected, but it did contain a number of working-class activists of 1917, especially from among the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. Their speeches gave abundant evidence of renewed discontent among the workers: at hunger, unemployment, the closure and evacuation of factories–the capital had just been moved to Moscow–at arbitrary arrests by the Cheka, and the muzzling of the soviets. Above all, the workers felt powerless: they no longer had any institutions speaking for them. The factory committees were turning into obedient organs of government, the trade unions were no longer in a position to protect their interests, the soviets would no longer permit them to recall delegates of whom they disapproved in order to choose new ones. ‘Wherever you turn’, complained one worker delegate, ‘you come across armed people who look like bourgeois and treat the workers like dirt. Who they are we don’t know.’ In general, they felt that they had been promised bread and peace, but given food shortages and civil war; they had been promised freedom and given something nearer to slavery. The assembly called for the resignation of Sovnarkom, the repudiation of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the reconvocation of the Constituent Assembly.
The Assembly movement did spread to other parts of Russia, and organized a number of stoppages and protests directed against Communist policy. It looks as if the movement mainly attracted workers from sectors such as metalworking and armaments, which had suffered particularly severe dislocation at the end of the war. The assembly’s debates reflect the alarm and disorientation of such workers. On the other hand, many workers continued to identify ‘soviet power’ with the Communists, seeing them as their best hope in a bewildering and dangerous world. In June 1918 the Communists received working-class support in the elections to the Petrograd Soviet, while the general strike called by the assembly on 2 July fizzled out. Its failure was partly due to increased governmental pressure. The whole Moscow bureau of the Extraordinary Assembly was arrested, and the Red Army cordoned off the entire Nevsky district of Petrograd (the southern industrial area where the assembly was especially strong) and declared martial law there.
By the summer of 1918, though many, perhaps most workers were profoundly disillusioned with Communist rule, they had no convincing alternative to which to look. This may account for the haphazard and inconclusive nature of their activity, compared with the previous year. Most, in any case, were more preoccupied with survival. In 1917 they had felt themselves to be on an upswing, creating the future through the new democratic institutions they had themselves brought into being. Now they had ostensibly achieved their aims, yet were faced by poverty, insecurity and oppression such as they had never known before. The institutions they had created were now being used against them. Of the two political parties who might have articulated and channelled their grievances, the Mensheviks had pledged themselves to strictly legal activities through the soviets, while the Socialist Revolutionaries were divided and ambivalent about whether to oppose the Bolsheviks outright. One Menshevik summed up the workers’ political mood in June 1918 as follows: ‘To hell with you all, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the whole of your political claptrap.’
This disillusionment and uncertainty, combined with the increasing repression now being applied by the Communists, probably explain the failure of the Assembly movement. On 21 July, the Cheka finally arrested all 150 participants at a congress and took them to the Lubyanka, where they were accused of plotting against the Soviet government and threatened with the death penalty. In the event, however, they were all gradually released over the next few months. The age of rigged trials against supporters of the October revolution had not quite arrived.
The workers were not again able to mount such a widespread challenge to Communist rule, but their voting behaviour in the soviets during 1919–21 showed the extent to which they had become disillusioned. Some of their support went to the Mensheviks, who maintained a strong presence in the trade unions, especially among the printers. The Mensheviks also sent an increasing number of delegates to the soviets, even though they were banned from them for several months after June 1918. Even after they were readmitted they faced constant official harassment: the candidates would be detained shortly before an election, or Menshevik votes would be disqualified on technical grounds. Since soviet voting was by show of hands, moreover, it was easy for Menshevik voters to be victimized. In view of all this, it is a tribute to their tenacity that they still had any deputies at all in the soviets: one or two were elected as late as 1922, after which the party’s Central Committee (or its surviving members in emigration) forbade further participation in soviet elections, as too dangerous for the voters. By that time, anyway, all the party’s leaders still inside Russia had been arrested by the Cheka. The Mensheviks’ main political activity thereafter was to publish an émigré journal, Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (The Socialist Herald), which evidently claimed an extensive network of correspondents inside the country: over the next decade it published abundant accounts of working-class life in the Soviet Union, which are invaluable to historians.
The working-class movement was also, of course, gravely weakened by hunger, poverty and the drain of so many town-dwellers. By 1921 the industrial working population was at about a third of its 1917 level, and was poorer in every respect. The Communists had their own ideas about how to restore this supposed social base of their rule. To absorb soldiers coming out of the Red Army at the end of the civil war, the Central Committee resolved early in 1920 to convert certain army units into ‘labour armies’–thus the Third Army became the First Labour Army. The railways and certain key industrial enterprises were placed under military discipline, and political commissars from the Red Army were brought in to replace trade union officials. ‘Labour soldiers’ felled trees, cleared roads, rebuilt bridges and restored railway lines. All this was supposed to facilitate the transition to a peacetime planned economy, without the disruption which demobilization would have brought. Some Communists thought that in any case the ‘labour army’ was the appropriate industrial unit in a socialist society. ‘In a proletarian state, militarization is the self-organization of the working class,’ proclaimed Trotsky. And in an Order of the Day he exhorted them, ‘Begin and complete your work … to the sound of socialist songs and anthems. Your work is not slave labour but high service to the socialist fatherland.’
Not everyone agreed. The Workers’ Opposition (see below, pages 89–90) were strongly resistant to the idea, and in the great crisis of February-March 1921 (pages 90–2) Lenin came over to their way of thinking (on this issue alone). Apart from the enormous resentment the labour armies aroused among soldiers who wanted to get back home, their actual work achievements were unimpressive. In 1921 they were abolished.
By 1921, the Communists were the only significant political force in Soviet Russia. They were also an enormously important social force. Most of the other classes of Russian society had been destroyed or gravely weakened in the revolution and civil war–even the working class in whose name the Communists ruled. In the absence of any ruling class, the full-time officials of the Communist Party and the Soviet state came closest to fulfilling that function. Of course they could not yet be regarded as a social class in the full sense: their power and their institutions were as yet embryonic, likewise their customs and their culture, and they certainly had not devised a means of perpetuating their power and privilege. In many ways the history of Soviet Russia might be regarded as the history of their efforts to extend this embryonic power and privilege into a permanent, secure and accepted acquisition, such as any ruling class expects to have.
Anyone who had known the Bolsheviks in February, or even October, 1917, would have found them in many ways difficult to recognize in 1921. In February they had been a party of underground and exile, small, loosely organized (in spite of Lenin’s principles), quarrelsome, but lively, spontaneous, and beginning to make real contact with the mass of the population, especially the workers and soldiers. In October the party still looked much the same, though by then it had perhaps ten times as many members, and close contact with the mass of workers and soldiers, to whose aspirations it was far more sensitive than any other party at the time. By 1921, it had changed in almost every respect. It now had a mass membership, including many who were in it for careerist reasons; it was tightly organized, rigid, intolerant of divergent views, and out of touch with the mass of the people, indeed regarded by most of them with resentment and fear. The Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 sanctified the final stages of this transformation.
What had made this difference? Basically it had been the experience of holding power and of conducting a civil war; and both those experiences had resulted directly from Lenin’s decision to go it alone in seizing power in October.
The most obvious external change was the growth in membership. After their rapid rise in 1917, numbers grew a further three- to fourfold by March 1921, when officially membership stood at nearly three quarters of a million. The climb had been by no means smooth. There was, for example, a considerable influx immediately after October, but then a large-scale exodus, probably mainly of workers disillusioned with Bolshevik rule. Growth resumed during the civil war as Red Army soldiers joined, but there were also periodic ‘purges’ designed to weed out the half-hearted, the corrupt and the merely careerist.
These ups and downs reflected in part anxiety in the leadership about their rank and file. Membership policy was dictated by two considerations which were in tension with one another. The Communists were unequivocally the ruling party, but on the other hand they also called themselves a mass party. Now, ruling parties inevitably have many members who, whatever their social origin, become unmistakably middle-class in their lifestyle. With the working-class base fading away, and the peasants increasingly alienated by the party, it constantly faced the threat of becoming largely a party of officials. Between 1917 and 1921 working-class membership reportedly sank from 60 per cent to 40 per cent. In reality, it probably fell a good deal further than that, since many who declared themselves workers were actually by now administrators, commissars, Red Army commanders and the like. Indeed, party records show that in October 1919 only 11 per cent of members were actually working in factories, and even some of them were in administrative posts.
Another natural result of numerical growth was that the proportion of pre-October Bolsheviks declined. In the summer of 1919 it was discovered that only one fifth of the members had been in the party since before the revolution. This proportion must have declined further thereafter. The formative experience of most Communists was no longer the revolutionary struggle in the factories (still less the deprivations and theoretical wrangles of underground and exile), but rather the fighting of the civil war. The archetypal Communist was no longer a shabbily dressed intellectual, but rather a leather-jacketed commissar with a Mauser at his hip, and promotion in party ranks now tended to go to the poorly educated, theoretically unsophisticated, direct, resourceful, often brutal types who had risen to prominence in the Red Army. If they were of worker or peasant origin–and most were–they were only too glad to have risen beyond it. It would be too much to say that the party now became militarist in outlook, but it is true that most party officials were by now used to solving problems by willpower, effort and coercion. This wartime experience reinforced Lenin’s dictum that politics was essentially about who defeats whom (kto kogo).
The civil war and the experience of power also profoundly affected the party’s internal organization. If in 1917 it had been possible for Sverdlov and Stasova, in the Secretariat, to handle all the party leadership’s correspondence and to keep the membership records more or less in their heads, that was clearly no longer satisfactory once the party had governmental responsibility. All the same, it took quite a long time before the party’s structure assumed clearly defined forms, and for a year or more after October improvization was often the order of the day.
When it did come, the hardening of the party’s institutional structure owed as much to pressure from below as from above, as emerges clearly from recent research by Robert Service. During the emergencies of the civil war, local party organizations often found themselves desperately short of capable organizers, since their best men had gone off to fight. They were only too glad to be sent emissaries or instructions from the Central Committee in Moscow. Local party secretaries, deprived of colleagues or assistants, would take important decisions themselves: party meetings would become perfunctory formalities, with resolutions passed ‘at a cavalry gallop’, as someone complained. The practice of electing party officials, and of seriously discussing alternative candidates and policies, withered away. It became the norm for officials and committees to be appointed from the next higher level, and for commissars from the centre to arrive in an emergency and take all the really important decisions.
Of course, all this suited Lenin’s leadership style–and Trotsky’s too, for that matter. Both men were used to dealing with local difficulties by firing off peremptory telegrams cutting through Gordian knots. What happened now was that their instinctive authoritarianism received institutional form.
This meant that, especially at the medium and upper levels of the party, a stratum of full-time officials was emerging, whose main function, given the grip the party now had over the soviets and the Red Army, was simply the exercise of power. At the very top, 1919 also saw further hardening of the structures, owing both to the war and to Sverdlov’s death in March. The Central Committee, currently a body of nineteen full members and eight candidates, was already too large for speedy decision-making, and the Eighth Party Congress (March 1919) set up a Political Bureau (or Politburo) of five to do this. Its initial five members were Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev and Krestinsky. Alongside it an Orgburo was installed to concentrate on the organizational and personnel work of the Central Committee, and this soon developed a formidable array of files and card indices on cadres (as the party’s staff came to be called) all over the country. Originally there were only two joint members of the Politburo and Orgburo: Krestinsky and Stalin. The Secretariat was also now formalized to conduct the party’s correspondence and deal with ‘current questions of an organizational and executive character’, the Orgburo being entrusted with ‘the general direction of the organizational work’. In practice these two bodies had overlapping functions. Stalin did not move into the Secretariat until 1922, but when he did so, he not only took charge of it as General Secretary, but also became the only man to sit on all three of the party’s directive committees.
From the outset, the new bodies, especially the Politburo, took over much of the de facto power of the Central Committee. In theory the latter was supposed to meet once a fortnight, but during the rest of 1919 it met less than half that often, while between April and November the Politburo held 29 separate meetings, and 19 joint ones with the Orgburo, while the latter met no less than 110 times on its own.
The party’s relationship with the rest of society was also beginning to take shape. The party rules passed in December 1919 laid down that, where there were three or more party members in any organization whatever, they had the duty to form a party cell ‘whose task it is to increase party influence in every direction, carry out party policies in non-party milieux, and effect party supervision over the work of all the organizations and institutions indicated’. To ensure that suitable people were selected for this authoritative role, the Ninth Party Congress recommended party committees at all levels to keep lists of employees suitable for particular kinds of work and for promotion within their field. Such lists, coordinated and extended by the Secretariat, became the nucleus of the nomenklatura system of appointments, not just in the party, but in all walks of life.
Not everyone in the party approved of these developments. Some prominent members, not in the top leadership, were disturbed by them, feeling that they ran counter to the ideals which had brought the party to power. Two groups in particular emerged during 1919–20. The Democratic Centralists called for restoration of the ‘democratic’ element in Lenin’s theory of party organization: that is, the restoration of genuine elections and genuine debate over matters of principle. The Workers’ Opposition were worried by what they saw as the ‘growing chasm’ between the workers and the party which claimed to act in their name. They spoke in the language Lenin had used in October 1917, calling for ‘self-activity of the masses’, and proposing specifically that industry should be run by the trade unions, rather than by the managers and specialists that the government had installed under Vesenkha. Alexandra Kollontai, the most flamboyant and imaginative member of this group, argued that what had taken the place of ‘self-activity’ was ‘bureaucracy’, buttressed by the system of appointments within the party, and she therefore also urged a return to genuine elections and spontaneous debate by the rank and file. Although fundamental research on this issue still needs to be done, it does seem that the Workers’ Opposition had substantial support among the industrial workers.
Before binding discussion of these issues took place, however, the party was faced by a crisis even more threatening to its ideals than the civil war. Towards the end of February 1921, first of all in Moscow, then in Petrograd, strikes and demonstrations broke out among the industrial workers. Their immediate cause was a further cut in the bread ration, but the workers’ demands rapidly took on a political colouring as well, and began to reflect the effects of more than three years of hunger and repression. The demands, in fact, were remarkably similar to those being made at the same time by the peasants of Tambov province (see above, page 77). The workers called for free trade, an end to grain requisitioning, and abolition of the privileges and extra rations enjoyed by specialists and by Bolshevik officials. Their political demands reflected the influence of both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, who were regaining popularity, despite their semi-legal status: freedom of speech, press and assembly, the restoration of free elections to factory committees, trade unions and soviets, an amnesty for socialist political prisoners. There were some calls for the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly.
Zinoviev, the party leader in Petrograd, closed down some of the most affected factories (in effect instituting a ‘lockout’) and declared martial law in the city. Special troops and kursanty (Red Army officer cadets) were drafted in and posted to key positions. Selected workers and the most prominent Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were arrested. At the same time emergency supplies were rushed into the city, road blocks were dismantled, and Zinoviev let it be known that there were plans to abolish grain requisitioning.
These measures did eventually quieten the Petrograd disorders, but not before they had spread to the nearby naval base of Kronstadt, where the Baltic Fleet had its head-quarters. The sailors of Kronstadt had a long revolutionary tradition, dating back to 1905, when a soviet had first been set up there. They had played a vital part in the October seizure of power. Central to the anarchism which had been the dominant mood in Kronstadt was the original conception of the soviet as a free and self-governing revolutionary community. This ideal of course had been unceremoniously pushed aside by the Bolsheviks, and now, more than a year after the virtual end of the civil war, there was still no sign of an improvement.
A delegation of sailors went to meet the Petrograd workers and reported back to a general meeting of the sailors on 1 March. In spite of the presence of Mikhail Kalinin (president of the Russian Soviet Republic), the meeting unanimously passed a resolution which repeated the demands of the Petrograd workers (though there was no mention of the Constituent Assembly). Pride of place was given to the following demand: ‘In view of the fact that the present soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants, immediately to hold new elections by secret ballot, the pre-election campaign to have full freedom of agitation among the workers and peasants.’
The Soviet government reacted forthwith by declaring the Kronstadt movement ‘a counterrevolutionary conspiracy’. They claimed it was led by one General Kozlovsky–who was actually one of Trotsky’s numerous appointees from the former Imperial Army, sent to take charge of the Kronstadt artillery. The Communists appointed their own army commander, Tukhachevsky, to head a special task force and storm the fortress across the ice before the March thaw. Once again, special duty troops and kursanty were used, in larger numbers. On 17 March they finally stormed Kronstadt, capturing it with huge losses on both sides. These were compounded on the rebel side by the subsequent repression, in which the Cheka shot hundreds of those involved.
Assembling under the direct shadow of these events, the Tenth Party Congress took some decisions which confirmed the rigid centralization the party had developed since 1917. Lenin admitted that the Kronstadt revolt had awakened echoes in many industrial towns, and warned that this ‘petty bourgeois counterrevolution’ was ‘undoubtedly more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak combined’. He admitted, too, that relations between the party and the working class were poor: much more ‘solidarity and concentration of forces’ was required, he exhorted. He submitted two resolutions, one explicitly condemning the Workers’ Opposition as a ‘syndicalist and anarchist deviation’, the other, entitled ‘On Party Unity’, condemning the practice of forming ‘factions’ and ordering that all future proposals, criticisms and analyses be submitted for discussion, not by closed groups, but by the party as a whole. ‘The Congress orders the immediate dissolution, without exception, of all groups that have been formed on the basis of some platform or other, and instructs all organizations to be very strict in ensuring that no manifestations of factionalism of any sort be tolerated. Failure to comply with this resolution of the Congress is to entail unconditional and immediate expulsion from the party.’ Such was the besieged mood at the Congress that these resolutions were passed by overwhelming majorities, which even included members of the Workers’ Opposition. One of the delegates, Karl Radek, made a portentous and perceptive comment: ‘In voting for this resolution I feel that it can well be turned against us, and nevertheless I support it … Let the Central Committee in a moment of danger take the severest measures against the best party comrades if it finds this necessary... That is less dangerous than the wavering which is now observable.’
No less important was the justification which Lenin gave for the suppression of all opposition parties, as was now finally done. ‘Marxism teaches us that only the political party of the working class, i.e. the Communist Party, is capable of uniting, educating and organizing such a vanguard of the proletariat and of the working masses as is capable of resisting the inevitable petty bourgeois waverings of those masses … [and] their trade union prejudices.’
It is true that factions and programmes survived a few years longer, in spite of these resolutions. Nevertheless, with the Tenth Congress the party finally sanctified the substitution of itself for the working class, and gave into the hands of its leaders the means for the suppression of all serious criticism and discussion.
4 (#ulink_c1180738-401f-5bae-af45-8cbc5702c079)
The Making of the Soviet Union (#ulink_c1180738-401f-5bae-af45-8cbc5702c079)
The country which the Bolsheviks took over in 1917 was the largest territorial state on earth. It was also a great multinational empire, containing a bewildering variety of peoples: their formation as nations and their absorption into Russia had been going on ever since the Middle Ages.
The Tatar invasion began the process. We saw in the first chapter that the rule of the eastern hordes did much to develop Russians’ sense of their identity as a nation. But it also divided them. Those Russians in the north-west who remained outside the Tatar empire developed their language and culture (Bielorussian) separately: this later became the official language of a Lithuanian state, which in its turn amalgamated with Poland. Thereafter Bielorussian became largely a peasant language, which absorbed marked Polish elements, while agriculture and land tenure tended to follow Polish patterns. In the south and south-west another branch of the old Russian nation, the Ukrainians (which means ‘border folk’), also evolved separately, first under Tatar, then Polish rule. Like the Bielorussians, some of them became Catholics, while even some of those who remained Orthodox in their liturgy recognized the Pope as head of their church (the so-called Uniate Church). They absorbed many Cossacks, or ‘freemen’, fleeing from taxation, military service and serfdom in Muscovy. These became fiercely independent local communities of fighting men, living in a kind of no man’s land between Russia, Poland and Turkey. Their traditions were invoked when Ukrainian national feeling began to revive in the nineteenth century, even though by that time Cossack units had been reintegrated into the Russian army, and indeed were performing internal security duties for the tsar.
By the time the Bielorussians and most Ukrainians were reabsorbed into Russia during the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, their languages and cultures were very distinct from that of Great or Muscovite Russia; but the nations themselves were largely peasant, while the urban and rural elites were composed of Russians, Poles or even Jews.
Over the centuries the course of Russian expansion brought under Russian rule many people who had no kinship with Russia at all. Already in the sixteenth century the Russians were beginning to reverse the Tatar invasion (though at a much slower pace), conquering territories in the Volga basin still inhabited by Tatars as well as by Bashkirs and other pagan or Islamic peoples. In the eighteenth century the Russians conquered the last independent Tatar Khanate, in the Crimea, and began the subjugation of the Islamic mountain peoples of the Caucasus–which, however, took them nearly a century. The Caucasians proved to be fierce fighters and under their leader, Shamil, waged a jihad or ‘holy war’ against the infidel invaders.
During the mid- and late nineteenth century Russian armies struck across the steppes and deserts of Central Asia, into the oasis regions beyond, in the foothills of the mountains, where a variety of Turkic peoples lived, again of Islamic faith. The aim of the advance was partly better to secure existing frontiers, partly to acquire Central Asian cotton, and partly the desire for sheer military glory. Once the armies had passed, the nomad Kazakh people of the steppes were gradually displaced from their best grazing land by Russian and Ukrainian peasant settlers, while in the oasis regions of Turkestan, colonies of Russian workers immigrated to the towns, including eventually large numbers of railwaymen, as the railway followed conquest and trade. The resentment aroused among the local population by this incursion culminated in a major anti-European rising in 1916: much blood was shed on both sides, and many Central Asian Muslims fled across the border into China.
Just beyond the Caucasus mountains, surrounded by Muslims on all sides (and with Turkey just across the border), were two of the oldest Christian peoples in the world, the Georgians and the Armenians. They both came under Russian rule in the early nineteenth century. Although they tended to regard the Russians as uncouth upstarts, both peoples acquiesced in Russian suzerainty, for it meant the protection of a strong Christian power against Islam. In other respects the Georgians and Armenians were very different from one another. The Georgians were a rural people, mostly nobles or peasants, though with a lively intelligentsia: they had a reputation for immense national pride, love of their homeland and lavish hospitality. The Armenians, on the other hand, were more urban and cosmopolitan, successful bankers and traders, often to be found outside their homeland, throughout the Caucasian region, and indeed the whole Middle East.
Along the coast of the Baltic Sea, Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century conquered regions which had been ruled since the Middle Ages by the Teutonic Knights and their German descendants. There German landowners and burghers of Lutheran faith ruled over a largely peasant population of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. The Estonians spoke a language related to Finnish, but the other two nations were completely isolated in the European community of languages. During the nineteenth century they began to generate their own native intelligentsia, often centred on the church to begin with: by the early twentieth century, with the coming of industry to these relatively advanced regions, a native working class was beginning to develop. In fact the growing national consciousness led to especially violent clashes there in the 1905 revolution.
The annexations of Poland in the late eighteenth century brought several million Jews into the Russian Empire. Speaking Yiddish and practising their own faith, they ruled themselves in self-governing communities (the kahal) under the general protection of the crown. Most of them were traders, artisans, innkeepers and the like. They were usually prohibited from owning land, so that very few practised agriculture. The Imperial government decided to restrict them to the territories where they already lived, which became known as the Pale of Settlement. Only Jews with higher education or certain professional qualifications were permitted to live elsewhere. Official discrimination against them was aggravated by powerful popular prejudice, which sometimes flared up into violent pogroms, especially from the 1880s onwards. Jews began to seek a way out of their situation, some by setting up their own socialist party (the Bund), others by calling for the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine (the Zionists).
Altogether, the peoples of the Russian Empire were at very different stages of national integration by the early twentieth century: some were still primitive nomadic clans, while others had their own literate intelligentsia and working class. In all cases, however, the social changes of the time–urbanization, industrialization, the growth in commerce, the rise of primary education–tended to intensify and accentuate national feelings, both among Russians and non-Russians. More and more citizens of the empire were faced with the question: do I belong primarily to the Russian Empire or to my national homeland? On the answer depended language, culture, career, often religion.
The 1917 revolution posed the same question again, in even sharper form. Marxism had no ready formula for the national question. Marx himself had tended to underestimate the whole thing, assuming that the existing industrial nations of Europe had a natural right, at least for the time being, to speak for the proletariat everywhere, while ultimately national differences were less important than economic ones.
In the spectrum of European Marxism, Lenin occupied an intermediate position on the national question. Unlike the Austrian Marxists, Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, he did not regard nations as permanent historical entities: he held that they were conditioned, like all other social formations, by economic forces. On the other hand, he did not believe, like Rosa Luxemburg, that as soon as the socialist revolution took place they could all be merged forthwith in an international community. Like most Marxists, Lenin was inclined to underestimate the strength of national consciousness as a social force, but he was very well aware that in the circumstances of 1917, the desire of the subject nations of the former Russian Empire to enjoy greater independence was a powerful potential ally. His observations of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had made him conscious of the power of national feelings during what he called the ‘bourgeois’ revolution.
Besides, during the First World War, Lenin became increasingly impressed by the revolutionary potential of the colonized nations of the world, especially those in Asia. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) he developed the view that the class struggle was now taking place on an international scale, and that the colonized nations as a whole were being exploited by the advanced industrial nations of Europe and North America. It followed that, at the present stage of history, the slogan of national self-determination was a revolutionary one, and in particular that the subject nationalities of Russia, led if necessary by their ‘national bourgeoisie’, should be encouraged to over-throw their oppressors and decide their own future.
Lenin, then, viewed national aspirations as real and powerful. Nevertheless, he did believe that in the long run they were secondary. And since Lenin always tended to hope that ‘the long run’ might be speeded up, the result was considerable ambivalence on the national question, an ambivalence reflected in his policy after October. His intention was that nations of the old Russian Empire should be allowed either to declare their complete independence from Soviet Russia or to join the new state as a constituent part of it. He did not envisage any intermediary position. In fact, however, as it turned out, what most nations actually desired in 1917 was neither complete independence nor total assimilation, but some form of associate or autonomous status within a multinational federal state.
In this significant way, the Bolsheviks were out of tune with the aspirations of the nationalities. Furthermore, in the absence of world revolution, Lenin was in no position to offer them genuine internationalism: the most he could extend to them was membership in a multinational state dominated in numbers, language, culture and administrative power by Russians. Without the safeguards of a federal structure, this threatened to mean actual Russification, the very evil against which they had struggled, with Lenin’s support, under the tsars. This danger was intensified by the Bolsheviks’ explicit subordination, in theoretical terms, of national independence to ‘proletarian internationalism’: as Lenin frequently reiterated, the primary concern of the proletarian party was ‘the self-determination, not of peoples, but of the proletariat within each nation’.
In order to meet these dilemmas, the Bolsheviks in government had from the beginning to compromise, and to accept in practice what they denied in theory, a federal structure. The Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People, of January 1918, explicitly called the new Soviet state ‘a federation of Soviet national republics’. At that stage, of course, even this was a mere aspiration, since the Bolsheviks did not control most of the outlying regions of the empire in which the intended national republics were situated: federation was accepted temporarily as preferable to disintegration. Nevertheless, the use of the word had long-term implications. It harmonized with the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia (2 November 1917), which recognized the equality and sovereignty of all peoples, abolished all national privileges and restrictions, and established the right to self-determination ‘up to and including secession and the formation of an independent state’.
To deal with the manifold and delicate problems of relations with the nationalities, Lenin set up a People’s Commissariat of Nationality Affairs (Narkomnats for short) under Stalin. It mediated in conflicts between national groups, and advised generally on the ways in which Bolshevik policies would affect the non-Russians. As more nationalities gradually passed under Soviet rule, Narkomnats also became a real instrument of political influence. At its head was a ‘collegium’, a kind of large committee on which elected representatives of the nationalities sat. Narkomnats thus collated and aggregated national opinion as well as providing a means by which orders could be passed down from above.
Whenever national self-determination clashed with ‘proletarian internationalism’, it was the latter which took precedence. This can be seen even in the case of Finland, which had been a Russian protectorate for only a century. It is true that when a non-socialist government led by Svinhufvud declared independence, the Soviet government in Petrograd recognized this. It also, however, simultaneously supported a Red rising inside Finland, designed to instal a pro-Soviet government in Helsinki. This rising was crushed after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, when the Germans intervened on the side of the Finnish Whites. Here for the first time a danger appeared which was to recur frequently: that of Red troops being regarded by the local population as Russifiers and being therefore resisted as foreign invaders.
The history of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was somewhat similar. In Estonia and Latvia a National Council took advantage of the Soviet Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples and announced their independence from Russia, only to be arrested by Red Guards who installed a Soviet regime. These in their turn were swept aside by the German occupation troops following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Then, after November 1918, with the defeat of the Germans, all three national movements struggled to consolidate the existence of independent republics in a dual war against both the Red Army and local socialists (who were especially strong in Latvia). They succeeded in this, at least partly owing to armed support both from irregular German units and from the British navy, which was trying to clear the region of both Russian and German influence. In this way Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became independent republics which lasted till 1940.
Poland’s independence from Russia was already a fait accompli when the Bolsheviks came to power, since the whole of the Congress Kingdom (the Russian sector of Poland) had been occupied by the Germans in 1915. Recognition of this was a pure formality. What reopened the question was the decision of Pilsudski, the Polish leader, in 1920, to invade the Ukraine and attempt to reincorporate territory which had been ruled over by the Poles before the partitions of the late eighteenth century. The Poles did very well at first, and in fact captured Kiev, but the Red Army then regrouped itself from its victories over Denikin and managed to drive the Poles back out of the Ukraine. The question then arose: should the Red Army profit by its impetus, pursue the enemy into Poland itself, and try to set up a Soviet republic in Warsaw? On this the Soviet leaders were themselves divided, and their divisions were significant. Trotsky took the immaculately internationalist line that socialist revolution in Poland should proceed from the efforts of the Polish workers themselves: for the Red Army to invade would merely persuade them that the Russians had returned, albeit under a new banner, to occupy and rule over their country as before. Lenin, on the other hand, took the view that circumstances were once again favourable for world revolution: encouraged by the heroism of the Red Army against their own bourgeoisie and landowners, the Polish workers would rise against their native oppressors and overthrow their government. Beyond that, too, the revolution might spread to Germany and even the rest of Europe. For a brief intoxicating moment the dreams of October 1917 returned: a Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee, headed by the Social Democrat Marchlewski, waited in Moscow to take up the reins of power in Warsaw (a scene to become familiar in Europe in 1944–5), while Stalin began to elaborate plans for the creation of a super-confederation of Soviet republics, to include Poland, Hungary and Germany.
This Polish war brought the final stage in the reintegration of part of the old officer corps into the new Red Army. General Brusilov, perhaps the most distinguished of the former tsarist commanders, and a man who had hitherto held aloof from the Communists, published an appeal in Pravda: ‘Forget the wrongs you have suffered. It is now your duty to defend our beloved Russia with all your strength, and to give your lives to save her from irretrievable subjugation.’ Many fellow officers responded to his words. And in case anyone should worry about the revival of Russian nationalism in Communist guise, the internationalist Radek provided a ready justification: ‘Since Russia is the only country where the working class has taken power, the workers of the whole world ought now to become Russian patriots. …’ This was of course only an extension of the arguments Lenin had used to justify the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: it marked a stage in the eventual emergence of the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’.
In the end, the Red Army failed to capture Warsaw for reasons which have been the subject of controversy ever since (Trotsky ascribed the failure to Stalin’s military insubordination). Lenin, however, summed it up as follows: ‘The Poles thought and acted, not in a social, revolutionary manner, but as nationalists, as imperialists. The revolution in Poland which we counted on did not take place. The workers and peasants, deceived by Pilsudski, … defended their class enemy and let our brave Red soldiers starve, ambushed them and beat them to death.’
The war of 1920 showed, in fact, that Soviet Russia was prepared to act as a new kind of great power with a traditional army, and that its actions would be so interpreted by its neighbours, even where the ostensible aim was the promotion of international proletarian brotherhood. The ambiguity of Soviet ‘fraternal aid’ has remained to the days of the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’.
The immediate result was a frontier settlement relatively favourable to the Poles. By the Treaty of Riga, concluded in October 1920, Poland was awarded territories that included large numbers of Bielorussian and Ukrainian peasants, and until 1939 her eastern frontier ran only just west of the capital of the Soviet Bielorussian Republic, Minsk.
The Ukraine offers an example of a national movement which, though far from negligible in pre-revolutionary Russia, received considerable fresh impetus from the revolutions of 1917. Ukrainian nationalism had been slow to develop in nineteenth-century Russia, partly because of government repression (it was livelier across the border in Austria-Hungary, where the authorities were less opposed to it). Something of a flowering followed the revolution of 1905, with the easing of national restrictions, and a Ukrainian urban intelligentsia began to develop, particularly in Kiev and the western regions. It remained true, however, that the great majority of Ukrainian speakers were peasants, and that the towns were very strongly influenced by Russian, Jewish and Polish cultural life. Many of the industrial workers were Russian, especially in the modern industries of Kharkov (the largest city in the Ukraine), the Krivoi Rog region and the Donbass: generally the eastern Ukraine had a much higher proportion of Russians than the west.
After the February revolution, a Ukrainian central Rada (Ukrainian for soviet) convened in Kiev, elected rather haphazardly (though no more so than the Russian soviets of the time) by those inhabitants, particularly in the towns, who felt themselves to be Ukrainian. In June, after abortive negotiations with the Provisional Government, this rada issued a ‘Universal’ (or decree, in old Cossack usage) proclaiming an ‘autonomous Ukrainian republic’. The rada was under pressure from a Ukrainian Military Congress, representing Ukrainian officers and soldiers from the Imperial Army: they had gathered in St Sophia’s Square in Kiev and vowed not to disperse until such a proclamation appeared.
During the summer of 1917 a great variety of congresses met, representing Ukrainians from all walks of life: from peasant communes and agricultural cooperatives, from zemstvos and municipalities, from universities and schools, from hospitals and army units. All of them took a pride in using the Ukrainian language and in stressing those traditions which distinguished them from the Russians. What was taking place was the explosive creation of a Ukrainian nation, discovering and confirming its identity in this multiplicity of organizations and meetings, rather as the Russian working class was doing at the same time. For most urban Ukrainians at this moment, however, national, not social, consciousness was paramount. It is not clear that the same was true of the peasants, many of whom shared the grievances and aspirations of their Russian counterparts, and wanted above all more land.
After the October revolution in Petrograd, the rada (in its Third Universal, of 7 November 1917), supported again by the Ukrainian Military Congress, confirmed the existence of a Ukrainian People’s Republic, and promised an early land reform and the convening of a Ukrainian Constituent Assembly. At this stage the rada did not insist on complete independence from Soviet Russia–Ukrainian intellectuals had always thought of themselves as part of Russia, but wanted to be a self-ruling part–yet, all the same, bitter disputes soon broke out between Kiev and Petrograd. With encouragement from the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, separate from the rada, were established in Kiev and other Ukrainian towns: because of the national composition of the population, these were normally dominated by Russians. Troops loyal to the rada closed some of these soviets down, rather as the Bolsheviks themselves were doing to their opponents in other parts of Russia; but in fact Ukrainian national feeling was so strong, even in the soviets, that when an all-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets opened in Kiev in December, it turned out to have a non-Bolshevik majority anyway. The Bolsheviks, dismayed by this result, withdrew from it and called an alternative congress in Kharkov, where they could be surer of working-class Russian support. So in the Ukraine too the Bolsheviks found themselves acting as agents of Russification.
In this way the scene was set for civil war on Ukrainian territory, with Red troops and Ukrainian military formations facing one another. The Reds succeeded in capturing Kiev before the fighting was halted by the German occupation of the Ukraine in March 1918.
During the following two and a half years at least eight different kinds of regime ruled in the Ukraine, and not one of them was able to consolidate itself, or even to claim the adherence of a majority of the population. This was not only because of the multiplicity of forces interested in the region, but also because of the divisions of interest in the population itself. It is scarcely surprising that the Germans, the Poles and the Whites under Denikin (who would have crushed Ukrainian autonomy) were unable to command mass support. But it is perhaps more surprising that the rada, or the later Ukrainian nationalist government under Petlyura, were not able to attract a more stable following. This may have been because, as Vinnichenko, leader of the rada government, later confessed, the rada had not done enough to win over the peasants by carrying through a thorough land reform. After all, the great majority of Ukrainian speakers were peasants, for whom the agrarian issue was at least as important as the national one: to ignore their interests was to deprive oneself of a vital source of support. This impression is strengthened by the enthusiastic support given by many Ukrainian peasants to Makhno, the Anarchist leader, who seems to have filled a much-felt need, without being able to lay the foundations of stable and lasting government because he had so little support outside the peasantry.
Lacking a convinced peasant following, the Ukrainian nationalists could expect little enthusiasm from the Russians, who preferred rule from Moscow to that from Kiev, and still less from the Jews, whom Petlyura alienated by his encouragement of vicious pogroms against them. The Ukrainian national movement was thus defeated in its hour of apparent victory, and the Reds were eventually able to establish themselves permanently in Kiev.
The Ukraine’s brief and turbulent independence did, however, leave a heritage. The victorious Ukrainian Bolsheviks were themselves affected by it. It is true that in October 1919 the Ukrainian Communist Party had its own Central Committee abolished and was directly subordinated to the Russian Communist Party in Moscow. But many Ukrainian Communists never really accepted this decision: indeed they protested to Moscow and succeeded in provoking from Lenin a ringing denunciation of Great (i.e. Muscovite) Russian chauvinism. He recommended that the Ukrainian Communist Party should rule in a coalition government with the Borotbisty (equivalents of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries), and that party members should ‘act by all means available against any obstacles to the free development of the Ukrainian language and culture’, for example by making it a condition that all administrative offices should have a kernel of Ukrainian speakers, and that no one should be officially employed who did not have some knowledge of Ukrainian.
Under a regime of this kind, the Ukraine did in fact in the 1920s experience an unprecedented flowering of its language, its culture and its education system. But it was to prove fragile, since all the elements of tight subordination to Moscow remained in place.
Rather similar developments took place in Bielorussia, where two imperfectly elected radas arose, one in Minsk and the other in Vilnius. They amalgamated for a time, and declared national independence under German protection (following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk). When the Germans withdrew in November 1918, the Bielorussian state collapsed, and the territory it claimed was subsequently divided between Poland and Soviet Russia at the Treaty of Riga. All the same, its brief, precarious independence served as the basis for later nationalist myths.
The nations of the Transcaucasus broke away from Russia not so much from determination to do so, as because circumstances detached them from the empire. The three main nations of the region, the Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaidjanis, had little in common with one another. The Azerbaidjanis were Muslims, the other two Christians: but whereas the Georgians were a settled people of peasants and nobles (some 5 per cent of the population belonged to the nobility), among the Armenians was a fair number of active and thrusting merchants, many of whom lived outside their homeland, and were resented as successful foreign businessmen usually are. There were substantial Russian minorities, administrators, professional men and workers, in most of the main cities of the region.
All three local nations had territorial claims on each other, and the Armenians and Azerbaidjanis, in particular, had got into the habit of inflicting violence on one another. The numerous nationalist and socialist parties of the region wanted an easing of Russian dominance, but, with the exception of the Muslim movements, they did not seek secession from Russia: their fear and dislike of each other was too great for that, and the Armenians still welcomed Russian protection as an insurance against a repetition of the horrifying Turkish massacre among their countrymen in the 1890s and in 1915.
It is scarcely surprising, in view of all this, that an attempt at a Transcaucasian federation in 1917–18 swiftly broke down, and that each nation tried to go its own way, seeking armed support from abroad. The Georgians received it first from the Germans, then from the British; the Azerbaidjanis from their fellow Muslims, the Turks; and the Armenians from the Whites under Denikin, who, though insensitive to national aspirations, at least offered protection from the hated Turks.
The Germans, the Turks and Denikin were, however, all in turn defeated, while the British withdrew. This left the three republics open to Soviet Russia. During 1920 Armenia and Azerbaidjan, weakened by internal conflicts and border disputes, were reintegrated into Russia by the technique which the Bolsheviks had tried in Finland and the Baltic: military invasion coordinated with an internal coup by the local Reds. Azerbaidjan, with its large colony of Russian oil workers in Baku, was especially vulnerable to such means, while Armenia was weakened by a Turkish attack.
The Georgian Republic was a somewhat more formidable adversary. Alone of the three it had established a stable government, under the Menshevik, Noi Zhordania, and it was carrying out a land reform which brought it solid peasant support. Nevertheless, in February 1921 the Red Army invaded, and was able to conquer the country after a month or so of stubborn fighting. Lenin was doubtful about the timing of this invasion, and he insisted afterwards that a gentler occupation policy should be pursued than in Armenia and Azerbaidjan. He was on the eve of announcing the New Economic Policy in Russia proper, and he was aware of the resentment that brutal Communist policies had aroused elsewhere. ‘It is imperative’, he exhorted, ‘to enforce a special policy of concessions towards Georgian intellectuals and small traders.’ He even talked of a compromise with Zhordania and the Mensheviks. Nothing came of this, not entirely through Lenin’s fault. Stalin was anxious to establish a tightly controlled regime in his own homeland, and, as we shall see, came into direct conflict with Lenin over this.
The relationship between Islam and Bolshevism was an ambivalent one. There was, of course, a basic incompatibility between the atheism of the Marxists and the staunch monotheism of Islam. All the same, many politically active Muslims had become socialists of one kind or another in the decade or so before the revolution. This was partly for instrumental reasons: they had seen socialism in 1905 as a form of politics able to organize an underground party, mobilize the masses and threaten an oppressive government. They saw in it too the means of attracting international support for their own movements. But the adoption of socialism by Muslim intellectuals sprang from reasons of substance too: as a doctrine, socialism offered them, in theory, the brother-hood and equality of all nations, and solidarity in the struggle against Western imperialism. As Hanafi Muzaffar, a Volga Tatar radical intellectual, predicted, ‘Muslim people will unite themselves to communism: like communism, Islam rejects narrow nationalism.’
Significantly, however, he continued: ‘Islam is international and recognizes only the brotherhood and the unity of all nations under the banner of Islam.’ That sentence sums up both what was to attract Muslims to communism, and what was to alienate them from it. The ideal of the Umma, the worldwide Muslim community, was still very different from ‘proletarian internationalism’. It was not a vision to which Lenin could accommodate himself save for passing expediency, especially when combined, as it often was, with the idea of a ‘pan-Turkic’ state–a federation joining all the peoples, both inside and outside Russia, of Turkic language and ethnic origin.
All the same, in the late months of 1917, there was much on which Muslims and Bolsheviks could agree. Muslims had been infuriated by the temporization of the Provisional Government, which had declined to concede the separate educational, religious and military institutions demanded by the All-Russian Muslim Congress in May 1917. As against this, the Bolsheviks opened their eastern policy with a declaration of 20 November 1917 ‘To all Toiling Muslims of Russia and the East’, which expressed abhorrence of religious and national oppression under the tsars, and promised: ‘Henceforth your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions are declared to be free and inviolate. … Know that your rights, like the rights of all the peoples of Russia, are protected by the whole might of the revolution and its organs, the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.’
This promise was to be belied by events soon enough, but for the first two or three months the Bolsheviks were actually in no position to prevent the emergence of Islamic governing institutions, since this usually happened in areas where soviet power was insecure. As a result, soviets and Muslim committees often existed side by side. It soon became clear, however, that the divide between them was a national as well as a religious one. The soviets were usually entirely composed of Russians, and their attitude to the Muslim committees was often suspicious and hostile, especially in Central Asia, where the memory of the 1916 massacres was still vivid. There were also ideological reasons why no indigenous delegates were admitted to the soviets or to responsible party posts in Islamic regions. As Kolesov, chairman of the Tashkent Congress of Soviets, explained, ‘It is impossible to admit Muslims to the supreme organs of the Communist Party, because they do not possess any proletarian organization.’ And indeed, the working class of Tashkent (mostly either railway or textile workers) were largely Russian. The Tashkent Soviet, consequently, was 100 per cent Russian, and the local native population tended to regard it as the bearer of a relabelled but familiar Russian colonialist oppression. Soviet moves to expropriate waqf (religious endowment) lands, and to close mosques, Koranic schools and sharia (Islamic law) courts, vividly exemplified this oppression: indeed the tsarist regime had never attempted religious discrimination on this scale.
The tension between the two communities burst into the open in February 1918, when units of the Tashkent Soviet stormed and destroyed the city of Kokand, where a Muslim People’s Council had proclaimed the autonomy of Turkestan. Similarly in Kazan, the capital of the Volga Tatars, the soviet decreed martial law, arrested the leaders of the Harbi Shuro, the Muslim military council, and stormed the suburb in which its surving members took refuge.
As a result of these ferocious attacks, some Muslims allied themselves with the Whites. But they did not usually stay with them for long, for the Whites were no less ruthless with those who opposed them–they shot the prominent Tatar leader, Mulla-Nur Vakhitov, for example, in August 1919–and they did not even have any theoretical commitment to national or religious freedom: on the contrary, they proclaimed their intention of restoring Russian supremacy over other nations within the empire. This may explain the fact that most Muslims continued to try to work with the Communists, despite the frequent brutality of their policy in the localities.
For their part, the Communist government in Moscow did come half way to meet them, at least as long as they needed their support in the civil war. As part of Narkomnats, Stalin set up a Central Muslim Commissariat, headed by Vakhitov (until his death), to coordinate Muslim affairs, and to articulate the views of the Muslim population. They were even allowed for a time to run a Muslim Military College, directed by the Tatar, Mir-Said Sultan Galiev: at one stage nearly half the Red troops on the eastern front facing Kolchak were Muslim, so that the Bolsheviks had an overwhelming interest in their morale and training, in spite of the obvious dangers, from their point of view, of authorizing separate Islamic fighting units.
Stalin even held out the hope that the Soviet government would create a large Tatar-Bashkir Republic, to act as an arena for the development of Islamic socialism: though less than a pan-Turkic republic, it could be seen as the first step towards such a state. The Russian Communist Party also recognized at this stage the existence of an independent Muslim Communist Party, not directly subordinated to Moscow.
At the height of their fortunes, in the summer of 1918, the Muslim socialists had succeeded in creating the embryos from which an Islamic socialist state could grow: a state apparatus, a party, an army. The potential ideology of such a state was adumbrated by Sultan Galiev in Zhiznnatsionalnostei (The Life of the Nationalities), the organ of Narkomnats. He extended Lenin’s view, expounded in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, that the class struggle was now taking place on an international scale: Sultan Galiev actually claimed that European nations as a whole objectively exploited the colonized nations as a whole.
All Muslim colonized peoples are proletarian peoples and as almost all classes in Muslim society have been oppressed by the colonialists, all classes have the right to be called ‘proletarians’.... Therefore it is legitimate to say that the national liberation movement in Muslim countries has the character of a socialist revolution.
This was the first statement of a thesis which has become enormously influential in the twentieth century, as developed by Mao Tsetung, Ho Chiminh, and other Asian, African and Latin American Marxists. Like them, Sultan Galiev increasingly suspected that only the colonized peoples were really revolutionary in spirit. He feared that the Russian people, having achieved supremacy in a revived empire, albeit now socialist in name, would resume their oppression of other peoples. He could not give vent to such fears in Zhizn natsionalnostei, but he did express the conviction, unwelcome to most Bolsheviks at the time, that revolution was to be expected, not from Western Europe, where the workers were already, from an international viewpoint, ‘bourgeois’, but from the East, where colonized and oppressed peoples could be united by the joint Islamic and Communist battle cry of anti-imperialism. Like Mao, he saw the army–in his case the Muslim units of the Red Army–as a nucleus and training ground for a revolutionary movement, and ultimately for a legitimate and popular socialist government. In Tashkent a similar line was taken by the Kazakh Tarar Ryskulov, who hoped to establish an autonomous Turkic Republic and Turkic Communist Party.
As soon as the Bolsheviks had a little more confidence in their military position, they moved to inhibit any developments which might impart substance to Sultan Galiev’s vision. Already in November 1918 they merged the Muslim Communist Party with the Russian Communist Party, as a subordinate unit. The scheme for a Tatar-Bashkir Republic was dropped and instead two smaller republics, Tatarstan and Bashkiria, were set up within the Russian Republic: in this way hopes of a homeland for Islamic socialism were dashed.
Once the civil war was safely over, and Sultan Galiev’s doubts became even more irksome to the Bolsheviks, in 1923 he was arrested on Stalin’s orders, charged with collaborating with the Basmachi (see below), and expelled from the Communist Party. He was released for a time, but finally rearrested in 1928, and sent to the concentration camp of Solovki. Once the Bolsheviks were securely in power, they unambiguously disavowed the temporary alliance with Muslim ‘national communism’.
This way having been closed, there remained to Muslims only meek submission or outright armed resistance. The latter began with the Soviets’ overthrow of the Kokand government, whose chief of militia escaped and began to organize raids against Russian settlements and Red Army detachments. Gradually more and more partisan bands came into existence, contesting Soviet control over the whole of Turkestan, at a time when the region was cut off from European Russia by White armies.
To begin with, the partisans came from all social classes. The various bands were not always in agreement with one another: they fought under different leaders and for different aims. Some continued the anti-Russian tradition of 1916; some wanted to reverse the Bolsheviks’ anti-Islamic legislation; yet others actually fought alongside Russian peasants in anti-Bolshevik movements. Nearly all of them, however, believed that they were fulfilling a religious duty in resisting Russian and infidel domination. In Fergana they called themselves an ‘army of Islam’, and proclaimed a jihad, or ‘holy war … in the name of our founder and prophet, Muhammad’. Traditionalist and reformist Muslims were at one in their estimation that Bolshevik policy posed a grave threat to Islam. The term basmachi (brigands) was fastened on these various partisan groups by their opponents: they referred to themselves, however, as ‘freemen’.
The fall of the Central Asian Khanates of Khiva and Bukhara during 1920 brought more recruits to these irregular armies, and a new element of political organization and coordination was injected the following year by the arrival of Enver Pasha, former leader of the Young Turk government in Istanbul. Ironically, he had come determined to convert the Muslims of Turkestan to the cause of communism: what he saw there changed his mind completely, and he began planning the overthrow of Bolshevism and the establishment of Turkestan as a base for an international pan-Turkic state. He made considerable progress towards the formation of a unified army with its own, partly Turkish, officer corps. He regularized communications with the Afghans who, long accustomed to anti-Russian resistance from tsarist days, were supplying the Basmachi with arms and affording them asylum.
By 1921 the Communist government had realized that the Basmachi posed a serious threat to their control of Central Asia. They began to send in European Red Army troops, with aerial support, and they devoted an all-out effort to the capture of Enver Pasha. In this they succeeded, capturing and killing him in August 1922.
As in their treatment of the Tambov peasant revolt, the Communists combined repression with a degree of appeasement. In May 1922 they restored waqf land to the mosques, reinstated the sharia courts and relegalized the Koranic schools. At least for a time they were prepared to compromise with Islam in its traditional forms (while turning against Islamic reformism and socialism).
This combination was quite successful. Popular support for the partisans dwindled sharply from 1922, and was largely confined to the mountainous regions thereafter, at least until it revived with compulsory collectivization of agriculture (see below), which once again entailed a direct assault on Islamic values and institutions.
By the beginning of 1921 the territorial and national composition of the new Soviet Russia was becoming clearer. Lenin had hoped, of course, for a worldwide union of Soviet republics, but with the collapse of the short-lived Bavarian and Hungarian Soviet regimes, and the defeat of the Red Army in Poland, this vision had receded.
The Communists found themselves the masters of ethnic Russia–now called the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic)–surrounded by a network of theoretically independent Soviet republics, whose territory covered approximately the same area as the former tsarist empire, with the significant exceptions of Finland, Poland and the Baltic area.
The Soviet republics now within the Russian sphere of influence were of two types. There were those on the borders (later to be known as ‘union republics’), which had known at least a period of genuine independence during the turmoil of 1917–21, and had established diplomatic relations with foreign powers: these were the republics already mentioned in this chapter. Then there were the republics surrounded by Russian territory, known as ‘autonomous republics’, the largest of which were Tatarstan and Bashkiria, which had never been in a position to exercise any real sovereignty. The situation of these ‘autonomous republics’ was fairly straightforward from Moscow’s point of view: they were permitted their own governmental bodies (people’s commissariats), but subordinate to those in Moscow, while their local Communist Party organizations were equivalent to those of the Russian provinces. The border republics, however, posed greater problems. They had been led to believe that they would be able to exercise genuine self-determination, and all of them had done so, at least briefly, during 1917–21, notably Georgia, whose new Communist rulers proved almost as anxious to assert the nation’s self-government as their Menshevik predecessors.
With these republics–Ukraine, Bielorussia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaidjan, Bukhara, Khoresm (formerly Khiva) and the Far Eastern Republic–Soviet Russia concluded bilateral treaties which varied somewhat from one another, and were highly ambiguous in form. In some respects they were worded like treaties with separate sovereign states, yet in others they were more like articles of federation: they reflected, in fact, the ambiguities of ‘proletarian internationalism’. They began as military treaties, offering guarantees in case of external attack; but the military clauses were supplemented by economic ones, which placed decisive authority in most economic matters in the hands of organizations in Moscow. Anomalously, some of the republics actually retained a separate diplomatic service, and foreign representation, for a year or two, but this was lost when the RSFSR claimed and secured the right, in 1922, to negotiate for all the republics at the European conference of Genoa.
These anomalies and ambiguities could not last for long. Already during the civil war, the population of the border republics had mostly become accustomed to accepting the authority of certain centralized institutions controlled from Moscow: Sovnarkom, the Red Army, the Council of Labour and Defence (which since November 1918 had coordinated the civilian war effort) and the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (the political branch of the army). Except in the special case of Georgia, it did not stretch custom and expectation too much to extend and formalize these arrangements and establish a unitary Soviet Russian Republic containing all these disparate political entities.
That was precisely what Stalin, as people’s commissar for nationalities, had in mind. He wanted to see a political framework which would give expression to the dominance Russia had assumed in the world revolutionary movement. As one delegate at the Tenth Party Congress proudly declared: ‘The fact that Russia had first entered on the road of revolution, that Russia had transformed itself from a colony–an actual colony of Western Europe–into the centre of the world revolutionary movement, this fact has filled with pride the hearts of those who have been connected with the Russian revolution, and has engendered a peculiar Red Russian patriotism.’
This process might have been accomplished unproblematically had it not been that Lenin himself became concerned by the Russian nationalist implications of Stalin’s project, as exemplified in such speeches. His fears were deepened when Stalin and his local lieutenant, Sergei Ordjonikidze, came into conflict with the Georgian Bolshevik leaders, Budu Mdivani and Filip Makharadze, over the place of Georgia in the new state. Stalin wanted Georgia to enter the proposed new republic merely as part of a ‘Transcaucasian federation, which would also include Armenia and Azerbaidjan. Mdivani and Makharadze objected vehemently to this downgrading of their homeland. Lenin eventually gave his blessing to Stalin’s scheme, but during an argument on the subject, Ordjonikidze became very heated and actually struck one of Mdivani’s followers. Lenin was incensed at this uncouth behaviour, which confirmed his worst fears about Stalin, and he ordered an investigation into the incident; but he suffered his third and most serious stroke before it could be completed, and was never able to intervene effectively and ensure that the lessons of the incident were absorbed.
He did, however, prepare a memorandum on the national question for the forthcoming Twelfth Party Congress: it was suppressed by Stalin (with the scarcely explicable connivance of Trotsky), and did not come to light until 1956. In it Lenin recognized that ‘self-determination’, embodied in the theoretical right to secede from the Soviet state, had been reduced in practice to ‘a scrap of paper’, and that as a result the minority nationalities were in danger of being delivered up to ‘this 100 per cent Russian phenomenon, Great Russian chauvinism, which is characteristic of the Russian bureaucracy’. He demanded ‘exemplary punishment’ for Ordjonikidze, to demonstrate that this would not be tolerated, and recommended that the Soviet constitution should guarantee real governmental power to the minority nationalities, in the form of people’s commissariats for all except diplomatic and military matters, as well as enshrining in an explicit code the right to use local language.
Although Lenin’s memorandum was not publicly discussed, some of its spirit did find its way into the formal provisions of the Soviet constitution of 1923. For one thing the new state did not bear the appellation ‘Russia’: it was called the ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ (USSR), and was formally a federal union between its various constituent republics, in which none of them was supreme. Also Narkomnats as a forum for national opinion survived as a second chamber of the All-Union Executive Committee of the Soviets (VTsIK): called the Council of Nationalities, it gave equal representation to each union and autonomous republic, regardless of population. Significantly, though, Lenin did not recommend any change in the highly centralized functioning of the party: his conversion to the cause of the nationalities was never more than partial.
In most respects the new constitution embodied Stalin’s conceptions rather than Lenin’s. The distribution of governmental powers between the republics and the Union as a whole left the latter with all real authority not only in diplomatic and military matters, but also in the running of the economy, while the Union also secured the right to lay down general principles in the fields of justice, labour, education and public health. With the notable exception of culture and linguistic policy, this left most power in internal affairs, as well as external, in the hands of the Union.
Another strong centralizing factor, in practice, was the disparity between the Russian Republic and all the others. The RSFSR contained 90 per cent of the land-area and 72 per cent of the population of the Soviet Union, so that its constitutional status as just one republic among seven was a fiction. Add to this the fact that 72 per cent of members of the Communist Party were Russian, and it will be clear that only ironclad constitutional guarantees could have restrained Russia from dominating the Union. In the words of E. H. Carr, the Soviet Union was ‘the RSFSR writ large’. Or, to put it another way, the Soviet constitution of 1923 was Leninist in form, but Stalinist in content.
All the same, just a few residuary ambiguities remained in practice. The revolution and civil war had given most of the nationalities of the former tsarist empire at least a brief experience of real independence, such as they had not known for centuries, or in some cases had never known. This gave a tremendous impetus to feelings of national identity, and, taken together with the policies of cultural and linguistic autonomy pursued for some years yet, rendered non-Russian national identity far stronger than it had ever been under the tsars. This fact built permanent tensions into the working of the Soviet system.
5 (#ulink_527c5fb4-f818-5465-8a0e-dabf637a39b3)
The New Economic Policy and its Political Dilemmas (#ulink_527c5fb4-f818-5465-8a0e-dabf637a39b3)
Even as the delegates to the Tenth Party Congress were voting for tight party discipline and the violent repression of the Kronstadt revolt, they also approved a radical change in economic policy, this time towards greater freedom. This was the abolition of grain requisitioning and its replacement by a tax in kind set at a much lower level than the compulsory deliveries. This measure was being tried out in Tambov and had been announced in Petrograd: it was conceived as a way of taking the sting out of popular discontent without making political concessions.
The abandonment of requisitioning had, however, profound economic consequences. Since the tax was both lower and more predictable than the requisitions had been, it gave the peasant an incentive once again to maximize the productivity of his plot of land, secure in the knowledge that whatever surplus he achieved could be sold for profit on the market. This meant, of course, that the government had to restore freedom of private trade. Since, moreover, peasants could not be expected to trade unless there was something to buy with the proceeds, it was obviously important to generate at least a reasonable supply of consumer goods. In practice, the easiest way to do this was to abolish the state monopoly of small- and medium-scale manufacture, retail trade and services.
This was in fact what the government did during 1921, while keeping heavy industry, banking and foreign trade in the hands of the state. Taken together, these measures became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). In the urban markets the results were apparent immediately. When a hero of the novelist Andrei Platonov returned to his native town in 1921:
At first he thought the Whites must be in town. At the station was a café where they were selling white rolls without ration cards or queuing.... In the shop he came across all the normal equipment of trade, once seen in his long forgotten youth: counters under glass, shelves along the walls, proper scales instead of steelyards, courteous assistants instead of supply officials, a lively crowd of purchasers, and stocks of food which breathed an air of well-being.
Although some private trade recovered remarkably quickly, in general the economy was still in deep crisis. Years of war, conscription and food requisitioning had devastated agriculture, particularly in the most fertile regions. On top of this, the Volga basin experienced drought in 1920 and 1921. Unprotected by any reserves, peasant households faced two very poor harvests in succession. The result was famine on a scale that the government simply could not meet. For the one and only time, it allowed direct foreign aid inside Soviet Russia. An international relief committee was formed, which included prominent Russian non-Communists (who were all arrested once the emergency was over). But in spite of its efforts, probably about 5 million people died.
Industry, too, was in a desperate state. In the major branches of manufacture, output in 1921 was a fifth or less of the 1913 level: in the case of iron and steel it was actually below 5 per cent. The number of workers employed to generate this output did not fall below 40 per cent of the 1913 level, and here lay one of the major problems of the new era. For these underemployed workers were soon joined by a flood of new job-seekers, heading in from the countryside as soon as there was any prospect of a job, and also by millions of former soldiers demobilized from the Red Army. They joined the labour market at the very time when industrial concerns were having to adjust to the new conditions. Whether they were nationalized or private firms made no difference: henceforth there were to be no direct state subsidies. That meant the expenditure for fuel, raw materials, wages and further investment had to be met out of sales revenue. Firms had to balance their books, or they could well go out of business. This was a reality which workers, party and trade unions had to recognize.
The industrial recovery thus started on a very shaky basis. Initially this led to an imbalance in the terms of trade with agriculture. In spite of the famine, the ploughing and sowing of underused fields proved to be a much faster process than the re-equipment of damaged and dilapidated factories. By the summer of 1923 the shortage of industrial products in relation to agricultural ones had reached such a pitch that the ratio of industrial to agricultural prices stood at more than three times its 1913 level. What this meant in practice was that peasants who sold their produce on the market were not thereby raising enough revenue to buy the industrial goods they wanted. The danger was that repeated experiences of this kind would induce them to cut back their sowings–as they had done during the civil war–and food shortages would resume. Industrial products would then remain unsold, to everyone’s mutual disadvantage. Although the fact was not immediately recognized, this ‘scissors crisis’ (as it was called in reference to the divergent parabolas of industrial and agricultural prices) proved to pose a fundamental threat to NEP. The disputes generated by it formed the first stage in the long-term debate on the economic development strategy of the Soviet government (see below, pages 136–40).
Another result of the uncertain industrial recovery was that the workers, who were theoretically the inheritors of the new society, in practice found it very difficult to understand their place within it. The large reserve of unemployed ensured that their wages remained low: in 1925, Sokolnikov, people’s commissar for finance, admitted that the pay of miners, metal workers and engine drivers was still lower than it had been before 1914. This in turn meant that workers’ housing and nourishment was often inadequate. The factory committee of a cement works in Smolensk reported, for example, in 1929: ‘Every day there are many complaints about apartments: many workers have families of six and seven people, and live in one room.... [We] have about 500 applications from workers who do not have apartments.’ Food supplies, though far better than before 1922, fluctuated and so prices were unstable: again from Smolensk it was reported that wheat flour doubled in price and rye flour trebled between the end of 1926 and early 1929. ‘Workers are being inadequately supplied by consumers’ cooperatives [run by the soviets to cushion the workers from the worst effects of price fluctuation] … , and as a result, private traders virtually occupy a dominant position in the market.’ It is understandable that workers consequently felt resentment about the peasants, who charged them such high prices, and about the specialists and officials, who were paid so much better. How was this possible in a society allegedly ‘moving towards socialism’ under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’?
The structure of industrial enterprises was also a disappointment to workers who recalled the heady days of October. All remnants of ‘workers’ control’ had now finally disappeared. Factory administration was once more hierarchical, with clearly identifiable individual managers in charge (sometimes drawn from pre-revolutionary managerial staff, for their expertise and experience), while technical specialists and foremen enjoyed unambiguous authority over the ordinary operatives. Since efficiency and productivity were paramount, some enterprises (though not enough for Lenin) were experimenting with ‘Taylorite’ schemes for time-and-motion rationalization and conveyor-belt mass production. Lenin had once regarded such schemes as the quintessence of capitalist exploitation, but now favoured them for the higher output they generated. As a further incentive, most workers were paid on a piece-rate system, which tied their income directly to productivity.
Before 1917 the workers would have expected the trade union or indeed the party to act on their behalf. But both these organizations were now explicitly part of the state economic mechanism, and hence tended only to support workers in conflict with private employers. In 1925 the trade union newspaper Trud (Labour) itself complained that unions seemed to be ‘occupied in dismissing and fining workers, instead of defending their interests’. The mood on the shop floor seems to have been volatile (though research on worker attitudes in this period is still embryonic), and quite a lot of labour disputes and strikes did break out, typically over housing, supplies, late or inadequate pay, or conflicts with specific administrators. The unions hardly ever supported the workers in such disputes.
Although further research on this needs to be done, there appears to be no link between industrial protests and any of the opposition groups within the party. Most workers, in fact, seem to have regarded the party as ‘them’, a part of the structure of authority with which they had to deal. Political and production meetings were shunned as ‘boring’, unless they dealt with something of immediate interest to the workman, such as pay or housing. Some workers, of course, looked on the party as a way to get on in life, seeking training, promotion, and ultimately perhaps escape from the shop floor. Party workers, for their part, often complained that the workers were ‘contaminated by bourgeois tendencies’ and ‘petty bourgeois individualism’.
Mutual relationships between the party and the class they claimed to represent were, in fact, by the late 1920s, rather cool. For a ‘working-class’ party about to embark on a major industrialization programme, that was a discouraging, not to say dangerous, situation.
Relations with the peasants were even worse. In the peasantry the Bolsheviks faced the only social class which had survived the revolution in substantially its previous form. Indeed revolution and civil war had actually strengthened the more traditional and underproductive aspects of Russian agriculture. The landowners, who had by and large used more modern equipment and methods and who had provided much of the pre-1914 grain surplus, had been expropriated, and their estates had mostly been divided up among the peasants. The ‘Stolypin’ peasants likewise had their enclosed plots of land taken away from them, and they were either expelled from the village or reabsorbed into the mir. Enclosed holdings were once again divided up into strips and often made subject to periodic redistribution; modern crop rotations were abandoned where they did not fit the communal pattern. The mir, in short, achieved a dominance in Russian rural life which it had never known before. This was a direct consequence of the Bolsheviks having adopted the Socialist Revolutionary programme in 1917, but that did not mean to say it was welcome to them now.
Landholdings, even among peasants themselves, had also tended to get smaller since 1917, in spite of the new awards of land. The problem was that millions of unemployed and hungry workers had streamed out of the towns, looking to resettle on the land, and many of them were awarded communal strips, where they still had claims. The revolution also seems to have intensified strains and disputes within peasant households, which provoked younger family members to break away and claim holdings of their own. As a result of all these new awards, the total number of family holdings rose from 17–18 million in 1917 to 23 million in 1924 and 25 million in 1927. The average size of each holding naturally fell also, in spite of the annexations from landowners, church and state in 1917, as did the proportion of the crop from each holding which was sold on the market rather than used for subsistence.
For the government the implications of this fragmentation of holdings, and of the reversion to primitive techniques were very alarming. As they began to conceive ambitious industrial projects, they needed more food to be both produced and sold. Yet their own policies aggravated the situation. The better-off and more productive peasants were usually taxed more heavily and felt themselves to be under stronger political pressure than their poorer colleagues. They always suspected, moreover, that the policies of 1918–21 might return.
These factors are reflected in the agricultural production figures, especially for grain, the most vital crop for the regime. It is true that output recovered rapidly from the catastrophic levels of 1920–1, but it never quite returned to pre-war levels. Compared with 81.6 million tonnes in 1913 (admittedly an unusually good year), grain output never exceeded 76.8 million tonnes in 1926, and fell off thereafter. Livestock production did reach pre-war levels in 1926, but declined subsequently. And there were some 14 million extra mouths to feed: in 1914, grain production had been 584 kg. per head of the population, in 1928–9 it was only 484 kg., while the government was planning for an enormous growth in the number of industrial workers, who would not produce food but would certainly need to consume it. Furthermore, of the amount produced, somewhat less was being marketed than in 1914–though Stalin exaggerated this factor in order to produce the impression that grain was deliberately being hoarded on a large scale. In fact, since official grain prices remained low, many peasants preferred to turn their grain into samogon (unlicensed liquor), or even not to grow it at all.
Of course it had never been the Bolsheviks’ intention to let Russian agriculture stagnate in small and primitively cultivated holdings. They had always envisaged large farms, collectively owned and mechanized. Their 1917 Land Decree had been a tactical diversion from this strategy, and they intended now to return to the main highway. In the last years of his life Lenin on the whole thought that this ‘collectivization’ of agriculture should take place gradually, with the party encouraging the creation of model collectives whose high productivity and prosperity would in time persuade the rest of the peasantry to join them.
A certain number of collective farms did already exist, some of which had started during the civil war, with party encouragement and help. Broadly speaking, these were of three types: (i) the kommuna, in which all property was held in common, sometimes with communal living quarters and childrearing; (ii) the artel in which each household owned its own dwelling and small plot of land, together with such tools as were needed to cultivate it, but all other land and resources were shared; (iii) the TOZ, or ‘association for common cultivation’, in which some or all of the fields were cultivated collectively. The last category might be barely distinguishable from the traditional village community, with its custom of pomochi, or mutual aid at busy times of year. It is no surprise, then, to find that the majority of collectives were of the TOZ variety, and there is evidence to show that some of them at least were ordinary village communes relabelled to draw the tax advantages of ‘collective’ status.
In addition, there were some state farms (sovkhozy), in which the labourers were paid a regular wage, like industrial workers. Even taken together, however, all state and collective farms accounted in 1927 for less than 2 per cent of cultivated land. It is significant, though, that their share of marketed produce was much higher: about 7.5 per cent in 1927. In view of this, one might have expected that the party would have begun a programme of ‘collectivization’ much earlier. In fact, however, the party was remarkably dilatory during most of the 1920s about pursuing its own official policy.
In part this was because of the weakness of the village soviets. In theory the soviets were supposed to take over local administration, leaving the peasant mir (renamed ‘land society’) to cope with questions of land tenure and cultivation. In practice, however, the mir continued to collect local taxes and to perform administrative functions, as before the revolution. A study published by Izvestiya in 1927 showed that the mir, not the soviet, was still the basic unit of local government in most villages, and that this was creating problems in the relations with the next tier above, the volost soviet.
Nor was the party any more successful than the soviets in rooting itself in the countryside. The Communists were townspeople by mentality and inclination, and most of them regarded village life with indifference or distaste. It is true that the revolution and civil war did bring an influx of rural members into the party, mostly Red Army soldiers. Yet these were often the first to be expelled in purges against the corrupt or insufficiently active, and in any case they constituted a negligible proportion of the rural population. The 1922 party census reported that party members formed a mere 0.13 per cent of the villages’ inhabitants, and many of these were teachers, doctors, agronomists and officials of volost soviets. By 1928 this proportion had only doubled: out of an estimated rural population of 120 million, about 300,000 (0.25 per cent) were Communists, and of that number only some 170,000 were actual peasants.
By and large, the weakness of the party meant domination of the village by the traditional notables. While all adults, including women, enjoyed a vote for the soviet, the commune was, by custom, a gathering of the heads of household, almost invariably male. Younger men, women and the landless were usually excluded. This meant that, in spite of the equalizing tendencies of the revolution, a degree of stratification soon reappeared in the villages. Indeed, it had never entirely disappeared. Since the commune had usually controlled the process of redistribution in 1917–18, the village notables had typically tried to ensure that some elements of greater wealth–whether in the form of acreage, livestock, or tools–remained in their own hands, or with the families whom they trusted. The former landless were better off than before, but they never became the equals of their ‘betters’.
This stratification is greatly emphasized in the Soviet studies of the subject, both contemporary and subsequent. They divide peasants into so-called ‘kulaks’ (‘fists’ or moneylenders, by nineteenth-century usage, but a term now loosely applied to better-off peasants), middle peasants, poor peasants and landless labourers. The definitions of these terms fluctuated, and they were used by the party on the whole for political rather than scientific purposes. Their use was intended to suggest that class war was brewing in the countryside between the richer and poorer strata. However, Teodor Shanin’s examination of the Soviet data tends to invalidate this hypothesis. He shows that the incomes of kulak households were only marginally higher than those of the ‘middle peasants’: they might own two horses, hire labour at busy times of year and have more produce left over for the market, but they were in no sense a separate, capitalist stratum. As for the ‘poor peasants’, while clearly a real category, their poverty was typically due to circumstances that were temporary–illness, natural disaster, military service of the breadwinner, shortage of working hands. ‘The chance of a hard core of poor peasants showing lasting cohesion and ability for political action emerging was very limited, therefore.’ Nevertheless, this was the layer which the party was to try once more to organize, from 1927, in the form of ‘committees of poor peasants’.
Nor is there much evidence of systematic conflict between different classes of rural dwellers. What Soviet sources call ‘kulak outrages’ usually turn out, when one can look more closely at the sources, to have involved more than just the wealthier peasants, and often the whole village. It would be much closer to the truth, in fact, to say that the great dividing line was not that between classes of the peasantry, but that between peasants and the rest of society, in particular anything that smelt of the towns. Gorky, writing of his conversations with peasants in 1922, reports that they felt ‘suspicious and distrustful … not of the clergy, not of authority, but simply of the town as a complex organization of cunning people who live on the labour and grain of the countryside and make many things useless to the peasant whom they strive in every way to deceive, and skilfully do so.’ There was much in recent peasant experience to substantiate this view. Since 1914 the town had called up the peasant’s sons to fight in a war for aims quite irrelevant to the village, it had requisitioned his horse for the cavalry, it had taxed him extra and offered him derisory sums for his grain; then, after a paltry land allotment in 1917, it had called up his sons yet again and also extorted his produce by force, paying him nothing for it. Quite often, furthermore, the town had closed down his church, sometimes destroying it in the process, and arrested his village priest.
The peasants’ distrust, in fact, was wholly understandable, indeed rational. And although they found the products of the town useful, most peasants were still at a sufficiently primitive economic level to be able to fall back on their own resources if they had to. It was very convenient to buy candles, kerosene, matches, nails and vodka in the town, but if really up against it, a peasant could devise his own substitutes for most of these things, and cottage industry was still lively enough to satisfy many of the needs which in more ‘advanced’ societies are supplied from the town. If they found market conditions not to their liking, in other words, peasants could react, not by working harder and trying to make more money, but by withdrawing from the market altogether. That had been demonstrated in 1918–21, and the threat of a repeat performance always hung over Bolshevik calculations.
Altogether, then, NEP was the party’s creation, but it also faced the party with unforeseen and bewildering dilemmas. During the last couple of years of his life, Lenin began to reflect on these. He suffered a stroke in May 1922, which left him partly paralysed, and another in March 1923, which deprived him of speech, but he did not die till January 1924. Between the first two strokes, at least, he remained politically partly active. For the first time since October 1917 he was able to stand back to some extent from the immediate pressures of decision-making and come to some conclusions about what he and his party had done. His reflections were ambivalent, and his writings of these months sometimes betray a note of uncertainty which had never been present earlier.
On the credit side was the fact that the Bolsheviks had seized power and held it, in spite of grave emergencies. In almost all respects, however, the premises on which Lenin had urged an uprising in October 1917 had proved false. No international revolution had taken place: on the contrary, the revolution had remained confined to Russia, which as a result was now surrounded by suspicious or hostile states and was rapidly resuming the outward forms of the old tsarist empire. The proletariat and poorer peasantry had not proved capable of exercising any kind of class dictatorship: the proletariat was dispersed and impoverished, and the poorer peasants, as a result of the Land Decree, had more or less merged with the rest of the peasantry. Ordinary working people had never had a chance to try their hand at administration: in their place, a growing host of appointed officials (some of them inherited from the old regime) was running the country, especially in the localities. The Bolsheviks had seized power with few definite ideas about how they would govern, and such ideas as they had possessed had been swept away by civil war, deindustrialization and famine. Lenin spent the rest of his life grappling with these unintended consequences of his own revolution, and after his death his successors quarrelled and then split over the heritage. Utopia had failed. The party now divided between those who wanted to restore utopia by coercion (the left), and those who were inclined tacitly to recognize its failure and try to come to terms with the new reality (the right).
For all that he might talk of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, Lenin recognized the actual situation and was deeply worried by it. ‘Those who get jobs in factories now’, he commented at the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922, ‘are usually not real proletarians, but just people who happen to turn up [vsyachesky sluchainy element].’ ‘Marx’, he added, ‘was not writing about present-day Russia.’ Alexander Shlyapnikov, a leader of the Workers’ Opposition, taunted him from his seat: ‘Permit me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a non-existent class.’ This put the matter in a nutshell. Lacking a secure social base, the party could not direct NEP as it wanted to. The economy was like a car not being driven by the man who thought he was at the steering wheel: ‘Speculators, private capitalists, goodness knows who is actually driving the car … but it often goes not at all in the direction imagined by the person at the wheel.’
This feeling of being out of control was shared by many at the congress. Lenin attributed it partly to what he called cultural factors. Since the Communists would now have to play a more active role than they had envisaged in the construction of a new economy, it was vital that they should possess the basic skills to do this. In practice, he warned, that was not at all the case. Capitalists and private traders were usually more competent. Communist officials often lacked ‘culture’–by which he meant education, tact, honesty, public spirit and efficiency–and so, faute de mieux, they were being swamped by the bad old ways of the pre-revolutionary regime. ‘If we take Moscow–4700 responsible Communists–and then take the whole contraption of bureaucracy there. Who is directing whom? I very much doubt whether one can say that the Communists are doing the directing. … The culture [of the bureaucrats] is wretched and contemptible, but still it is higher than ours.’
Although he could see some problems clearly enough, Lenin was unable to devise any solutions to them. In some ways, he thought the most important thing to do was to ensure that the best individuals were in charge–people of proven ability and probity. In his Testament he reflected on the characteristics of his possible successors from that point of view–and, significantly, he found them all wanting. He expressed particular misgivings about Stalin, on the grounds that he might not be able to use his ‘unlimited authority’ as party General Secretary ‘with sufficient caution’. He later added in an appendix: ‘Stalin is too rude, and this defect, though quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post …’ He also proposed administrative reorganizations: enlarging the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (which had inherited the powers of the tsarist auditor-general) and merging it with the Party Control Commission (a kind of party inspectorate), so that the more capable and trustworthy people at the top could better monitor what was going on lower down. Actually that was a recipe for compounding the problems of overcentralized control, especially in view of the fact that the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate was headed by Stalin.
Lenin died before he was able to try to effect any of the changes he proposed, and the party leaders kept his unflattering personal comments secret from the rank and file. With Lenin’s death, the nature of politics and public life changed quite considerably. Lenin had always been confident that he was right in his ideas, but he acted by persuasion: until 1921 he had never tried to silence debate within the party, and even thereafter he often tolerated it in practice. Certainly he had never demanded consecrated status for his own ideas. Now, however, a very real change began to take place. Perhaps it is significant that two members of the commission in charge of Lenin’s funeral ceremony, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Leonid Krasin; were past adherents of ‘God-building’, the pre-revolutionary intellectual tendency which had claimed to be a ‘socialist religion of humanity’, indeed ‘the most religious of all religions’. Its main tenet had been that the proletariat, in creating a new and more humane kind of society, were building a new man, who would cease to alienate himself in illusions about a transcendental God, but instead would fulfil a more genuine earthly religious mission. Lenin had been scathing in his denunciation of this tendency, but, as far as is known, Lunacharsky had never abjured it, while Krasin had been a sympathizer of Bogdanov, who as the philosopher of Proletkult (see below, page 180) tried to revive God-building in a new form after the revolution.
At any rate, the form of ceremony chosen for Lenin had strong traditional religious overtones, especially the decision to embalm his body and preserve it for public display in a mausoleum on Red Square, in the middle of Moscow. This was comparable with the Orthodox cult of ‘relics’ of saints. But it was also different: Orthodoxy had never preserved a whole body. This was, in fact, a religious gesture of a new kind. Stalin approved of the decision to embalm Lenin–indeed he may have initiated it–and although he was never a God-builder, he had a shrewd idea of the value of religious symbolism to the state, derived perhaps from his youthful study in the Tiflis seminary. In accord with the new spirit, at a session of the Congress of Soviets on the eve of the funeral, he carefully enumerated Lenin’s ‘commandments’ and pledged himself to fulfil them, as if consciously assuming the mantle of disciple and heir.
During 1924–5 he continued this work by assembling a doctrine, drawn selectively from the dead man’s writings, which he published as The Foundations of Leninism. Two special institutes were set up, the Marx-Engels Institute and the Lenin Institute, to gather and study the heritage of the founding fathers of the new ideology, and a journal, Bolshevik, was founded to publish the results. Claiming for himself the home ground of these ideological temples, Stalin could assail the ideas of opponents of the new orthodoxy, not just as misguided, but as somehow illegitimate. Traditional religions would have used the term ‘heresy’; Stalin called them ‘deviations’.
The first issue on which Stalin tried thus to isolate and discredit his opponents was the fundamental question of the nature of the revolutionary state and the nation it claimed to represent. NEP had initially been launched in the expectation that it constituted a ‘retreat’, a temporary concession to capitalism in order to restore the economy until such time as socialist revolutions could break out elsewhere and backward, war-torn Soviet Russia receive fraternal help from outside. By the autumn of 1923, however, with the failure of yet another attempt at a Communist coup in Germany, it was becoming clear that, for the foreseeable future, Russia was going to be on its own. Did that mean that the Soviet state should indefinitely prolong a ‘provisional’ economic system, or did it mean that the Russians should abandon hope of external help, and buckle down to build socialism on their own?
Almost ever since the October revolution, some Bolsheviks had tacitly accepted the proposition that, for the moment at least, proletarian internationalism must mean Soviet (and even Russian?) patriotism, since Russia was the only country in which a ‘proletarian’ state had been established. We have seen this at the time of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and during the Soviet-Polish war. At the same time many non-Bolsheviks took a partly compatible view: that the Bolsheviks had succeeded in holding on to power because, in circumstances which threatened the disintegration of the Russian Empire, they had proved themselves to be the party best able to hold that empire together. This stream of thought crystallized in 1920 in the form of smenovekhovstvo (from the collection of essays, Change of Landmarks, which appeared in that year). Nikolai Ustryalov, its leading exponent, now in emigration in Kharbin, argued that the defeat of the Whites had demonstrated that the Bolsheviks were now the only truly Russian national force: they had succeeded in holding Russia together against all the attempts of foreigners and non-Russian nationalities to dismember her. His case was strengthened by the reincorporation of the remaining non-Russian nations into the new Soviet Union, and by the introduction of NEP, which seemed to show that, in social and economic terms as well, the new Russian state was becoming more like the old one. In a famous image, Ustryalov likened Soviet Russia to a radish–‘red outside and white inside’.
This point of view found some support among émigrés, but even more perhaps inside Russia itself. It was close to the outlook of probably the majority of former Imperial Army officers who had joined the Red Army. Many of the ‘bourgeois specialists’ would also have sympathized with it: indeed, Jeremy Azrael, the historian of the managerial stratum in Soviet society, goes so far as to call smenovekhovstvo ‘the ideology of the specialists’. Some writers (especially the ‘fellow travellers’) and clergy took a similar view. At a time when émigré books were still published inside Russia, and links between Soviet citizens and émigrés were strong, these ideas, while not universally accepted (especially in emigration) did play a part in reconciling the traditional professional classes to the new system.
Obviously the Soviet leadership could not simply take over smenovekhovstvo, since it was avowedly non-socialist and anti-internationalist. But there were good reasons why they should evolve their own version of Russian patriotism. First, because they needed to appeal to the specialists on whom they still depended so much: and it was cheaper and more effective to gain their willing compliance than to rely on compulsion alone. Secondly, even the party apparatus itself, now growing so fast under the guidance of Stalin’s card-indexers, could not be expected indefinitely to work enthusiastically for a system that was only provisional. They too needed to feel that they were doing something constructive, ‘building socialism’, even if only in Russia, and not just marking time till the world revolution, now apparently receding, should at last break out.
It was with them above all in mind that Stalin began in 1924 to reconsider the party’s theoretically absolute commitment to international revolution. In an article entitled ‘October and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution’, published in the newspapers in December 1924, he first raised the possibility that socialism might be achieved in one country alone, even if that country were less developed economically than its neighbours which had remained capitalist. Such a victory he deemed ‘perfectly possible and even probable’.
It is significant that this idea, backed with scanty but authentic quotations from Lenin, was directed against Trotsky. Stalin’s article was in fact a salvo in the power struggle for Lenin’s succession. The theoretical differences between Stalin and Trotsky were mainly ones of emphasis: even Stalin conceded that the ‘final victory’, as distinct from just the ‘victory’, of socialism required an international proletarian community. But Stalin depicted Trotsky as someone who lacked confidence in Soviet Russia, and in the ‘alliance of the proletariat and the toiling peasantry’, which had brought about the socialist revolution in Russia, and could, according to Stalin, now make possible the construction of a socialist society. This was a classic example of a weapon Stalin was to use increasingly: exaggerating and distorting the views of his opponents, and applying crude labels to them, as though from a position of unique and guaranteed rectitude. ‘Trotskyism’, ‘the left deviation’, ‘the right deviation’–these gradually became equivalent in Stalin’s rhetoric to ‘non-Leninism’, and hence to ‘anti-Leninism’, which ‘objectively’ meant supporting the imperialists. By stages, in fact, Stalin was able to insinuate that all his opponents were nothing less than enemies of the soviet system.
At any rate, as far as ‘socialism in one country’ was concerned, there was at least as much justification in Lenin’s writings for Trotsky’s assertions that primacy should be given to international revolution. But it was Stalin who managed to occupy the temple, to represent his interpretation as the only truly Leninist one, and to gain the institutional backing for it. The Fourteenth Party Conference, in April 1925, resolved that ‘in general the victory of socialism (not in the sense of final victory) is unconditionally possible in one country’.
Thereby ‘socialism in one country’ became official party doctrine, and its implications had to be absorbed. The economic ones were the most pressing. It was generally assumed that ‘building socialism’ meant developing Russia’s industry. Lenin had hoped to do this by attracting foreign concessions to the country, recognizing frankly that Russia needed help from abroad, even from capitalists. But, although a few significant deals were concluded, foreign concessions still accounted for only 0.6 per cent of industrial output in 1928. This was scarcely surprising, in view of the fact that the Bolsheviks had deliberately defaulted on all past Russian debts: it took them many years to regain a reputation for financial probity.
At any rate, it looked as if economic development would have to come out of Russia’s own resources. The Opposition, which was beginning to crystallize around Trotsky, felt this could only be done through rigorous state planning and the diversion of resources from the private sector to feed heavy industry. The manufactured products thus created would feed into all sectors of the economy, including consumer industry and agriculture, and would ultimately make them all more productive. Admittedly, there would probably be some years of austerity, while consumption was cut in order to concentrate resources on industrial investment. The Opposition’s main economic spokesman, Evgeny Preobrazhensky, even called this process ‘primitive socialist accumulation’, and likened it to the ‘primitive capitalist accumulation’, which Marx had described in Capital. He argued, however, that it would be far less objectionable than the capitalist variety, since (a) it would bear mostly on the ‘bourgeois’ sector of the economy, and (b) the surplus value generated would be used for the ultimate benefit of everyone, not just for the conspicuous consumption of the few.
The Oppositionists were moved by a dislike of NEP which was widely shared in the party. They were repelled by the raucous, untidy, money-grabbing peasant markets, by the debauchery of the nightclubs, by the furs and silk dresses at the theatre, all to be seen again just as if the revolution had never taken place. Even prostitutes had reappeared on the streets. Preobrazhensky warned, with Trotsky’s support, that if the socialist sector of the economy were not given deliberate advantages, then the country was in danger of being dominated by kulaks and nepmen (as the traders, retailers and small manufacturers were contemptuously known). Fast industrialization, on the other hand, would enable agriculture to be mechanized, and this in turn would draw the peasants into collective farms, as Lenin had recommended. ‘Only a powerful socialized industry can help the peasants transform agriculture along collectivist lines,’ Trotsky argued in the Opposition’s platform of September 1927.
Spokesmen for NEP were quick to point out the drawbacks in the Opposition programme. ‘Squeezing the private economy’ meant above all squeezing the peasantry: might the result not be the same as during the civil war–severe shortages and the revival of the black market? If Russia was now really on its own, could the nation afford a policy which would endanger the relatively smooth trading arrangements between town and country created by NEP? Or, to put it in Leninist terms, was it prudent to jeopardize the ‘alliance between the proletariat and peasantry’ which had made the October revolution possible? In his Testament Lenin had warned: ‘Our party rests upon two classes, and for that reason its instability is possible, and if there cannot exist an agreement between those classes its fall is inevitable.’
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