9
The Aftermath
‘Revolutions are the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited,’ Lenin had written in Two Tactics of Social-Democracy.
He was shocked when informed a a few weeks after the revolution that sections of the oppressed had decided to celebrate their victory in more traditional fashion by organising an impromptu festival more in keeping with medieval orgies than the lofty ideas Lenin had put forward, but with the aim of polishing off all the tsarist remnants. The scene was Petrograd. The words are those of the Bolshevik leader Antonov-Ovseenko, the chief military commissar and commander of the Petrograd garrison. The description in his memoir of what took place is rarely mentioned by historians. It was a wild and out-of-control bacchanal that lasted for weeks, paralysing the revolutionary capital:
A wild and unprecedented orgy spread over Petrograd and until now it has not been plausibly explained whether or not this was due to any surreptitious provocation … The cellars of the Winter Palace presented the most awkward problem … The Preobrazhensky regiment, which had hitherto kept its discipline, got completely drunk while it was doing guard duty at the Palace. The Pavlovsky regiment, our revolutionary rampart, did not withstand the temptation either. Mixed guards, picked from different detachments were then sent there. They, too, got drunk. Members of the regimental committees [i.e., the revolutionary leaders of the garrison] were then assigned to guard duty. These, too, succumbed. Men of the armoured brigades were ordered to disperse the crowds – they paraded a little to and fro, and then began to sway suspiciously on their feet. At dusk the mad bacchanals would spread. ‘Let us finish off these Tsarist remnants!’ This merry slogan took hold of the crowd. We tried to stop them by walling up the entrances. The crowd penetrated through the windows, forced out the bars and grabbed the stocks.
Antonov-Ovseenko, now desperate, appealed to the Council of People’s Commissars (the highest authority) for help. They appointed a ‘special Commissar endowed with special powers’ to help solve the crisis, but he too ‘proved unreliable.’ Pity the author did not name him. Only when a ‘Finnish regiment with anarcho-syndicalist leanings’ threatened to blow up the cellars and shoot the looters ‘was this alcoholic lunacy overcome’.1 It needn’t have been lunacy if the Petrograd Soviet had organised it as a public event open to all citizens. The tsar’s wine would then have been consumed within a day by ordinary citizens as well as the core Bolshevik regiments. The decision of the Council of People’s Commissars to pump the remnants of the cellar into the Neva River was misjudged, in my opinion, and revealed a lack of imagination. The wine could have been put to much better use with proper distribution, but obviously there were more important problems to confront at home and abroad.
Lenin believed strongly that the combination of war and October 1917 would create a revolutionary firestorm across the whole of Europe, ending both the isolation of Petrograd and European capitalism. This estimate was not totally contradicted by the events that took place during the first three years after the Russian Revolution. Never before or since has Europe been shaken to its very core as it was in the years 1918–20. A wave of almost concurrent political and industrial uprisings engulfed the continent: the Berlin uprising, the Munich Soviet, the Budapest Commune, the mass strike in Austria, the factory occupations in Italy, unrest in the armies and navies of a number of countries and a growing feeling on the part of rulers that they could no longer govern in the same old way.2
Britain alone, separated by the Channel, avoided upheavals of this character, but it was confronted by another threat: its internal colony, Ireland, ever since the defeated Easter Rising of 1916, was simmering. The long-distance impact of that uprising resulted in the largely unexamined 1919 mutiny of the Connaught Rangers in India, the first and last of its type during the long years of British imperial rule in the occupied lands of Asia and Africa.
In Petrograd itself, two days after the revolution, the new government started working to make good on its pledges. The first of these and, in some ways, the most important was to end the war. The Soviet issued a decree written by Lenin that called on ‘all belligerent peoples and their governments … to open immediate negotiations for a just and democratic peace.’ It was a two-edged sword. If the governments of Britain, France and Germany did not respond, suggested Lenin, the working class in those countries had to undertake direct action. The decree praised the radical traditions in those countries. The workers had been in the leadership of most progressive struggles and, he wrote,
The great example of the Chartist movement in England, the series of revolutions, of universal historic importance, made by the French proletariat and, finally the heroic struggle against the anti-Socialist laws in Germany … all these examples of … historic creative work serve as a pledge that the workers of these countries will understand the duty which now rests upon them of saving mankind from the horrors of war.
The Entente leaders ignored the appeal. The German government accepted and agreed to attend a conference to discuss a separate peace with Russia. Both Lenin and Trotsky regarded this as the worst alternative. The only way for the Bolsheviks to justify a separate peace was if there was an outbreak of revolution in Germany.3
Trotsky, in his capacity as foreign minister, redoubled the intensity of previous appeals by urging the British and French governments to join the peace talks. The war was no longer even in their interests, given the large-scale butchery on the western front. It was unjustifiable to carry on in this fashion. No response from London or Paris. The Allies were confident that a new entrant waiting in the wings across the Atlantic would decisively change the balance and help them inflict a defeat on the kaiser.
On 15 December 1917, Trotsky signed the armistice with Germany, bringing the war on the eastern front to an end. In an appeal to the ‘toiling, oppressed and exhausted peoples of Europe’, he explained that what they had done was necessary to stop the slaughter and called on them to cast aside the governments that had refused to attend the conference and agree to immediate peace: ‘The workers and soldiers must wrest the business of war and peace from the criminal hands of the bourgeoisie and take it into their own hands … We have the right to demand this from you, because this what we have done in our own country.’ This appeal did have an impact on Europe. The workers and members of the Social Democratic Party in Austria reacted angrily when they heard that the Austrian general Hoffman had threated to rain destruction on Russia unless it capitulated to the extravagant revanchist demands put on the table at Brest-Litovsk. The Social Democrats called for mass rallies in Vienna, in solidarity with the Russian Revolution. Simultaneously, a huge wave of spontaneous strikes, surprising the Social Democrats, brought industrial life to a halt in Vienna, Styria and Upper Austria, and within a day had spread to Budapest.
Elected by the factories, an Austrian workers’ soviet held its first assembly on 16 January 1918. The socialists attended the council and backed the actions proposed, but put forward no programme of their own to take matters further. A delegation, including Victor Adler and Karl Seitz, went to see a frightened prime minister. The minute the delegation arrived, they were handed a statement from Count Czernin, the foreign minister. He pledged that Austria would no longer support any territorial gains at the expense of the Soviet Republic and would recognise unconditionally Poland’s right to self-determination.
The Austrian Social Democrats treated this as a triumph and hurriedly declared that the workers had won their main objective. The mood in Austria was undoubtedly prerevolutionary. Even some left Social Democrats agreed that this was the case. There was no objective reason for paralysis. But neither was there an organised political party or current to propose a total break with war, capitalism and empire. On the contrary, at a key meeting of the Vienna Soviet, the Austrian Social Democrats called on the workers to break the strike. Their speech met with an uproar and angry debates arose with militant workers denouncing the politicians. Lacking a political alternative, the strike collapsed four days later. Even as workers returned to the factories, a naval mutiny erupted at Cattaro on the Dalmatian coast, the base of the imperial Austro-Hungarian fleet. Half of the fleet – over forty battleships, cruisers and gunboats – were docked there. The pattern of revolt was no different from Russia in 1905 and 1917. The sailors seized the ships, arrested two admirals, hoisted red flags from every mast and elected delegates to a sailors’ soviet. They demanded improved conditions and an immediate end to the war. Once again they were stymied by the lack of political agitators attached to a revolutionary party. The military commander Von Gusseck played for time, assembled military units from Bosnia and called for help from the navy stationed at Fiume. The sailors, armed but not politically, were surrounded from land and sea and had no option but to surrender. Eight hundred sailors were court-martialed and most sentenced to death. Only four were executed, however, after Victor Adler threatened the war ministry with a mass strike. Later the left Social Democrat Otto Bauer defended his party, arguing that had they launched a revolution, the German army would have been dispatched to crush them, the southern front would have collapsed and ‘the armies of the Entente advanced from the south would have clashed on Austrian soil, with the German armies breaking in from the North. Austria would have become a battlefield.’ Was ever such a weak and pathetic argument presented to justify the effective sabotage of a revolution? No analysis whatsoever of the stage of the conflict, of universal war-weariness, of the possibility that German soldiers might have mutinied if ordered to open fire on their Austrian brothers. No recognition either of the fact that the shell-shocked soldiers of the Entente were also deserting. Mutinies in the French and English armies were being crushed. The cancer of social chauvinism had infected the Austrian socialists just as much as their German colleagues. Bauer was effectively arguing that turning the world war into a civil war against Austria’s own rulers would have brought the larger war back home. He considered himself a Marxist, but his justifications suggested that he had not assimilated Hegel. Times had changed, but traditional Social Democratic customs had not. Twenty years later, as they organised the desperate, last-minute, tragic Schutzbund uprising on the eve of Hitler’s entry into Austria, did any of the Austrian socialist leaders reflect on the possibility that they might have avoided this calamity had they shown more daring in 1918?
And what did Bauer, Adler and their colleagues think of the turnaround in Berlin? Here, too, the Bolshevik appeal to the workers of Europe bore fruit. Inspired by the Viennese mass strike, German workers attempted the same in Berlin. Even before the Russian Revolution there was growing unrest in Germany.
Lenin addresses a May Day meeting, 1919.
On May Day 1916, the Spartacusbund, the group led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg that had turned its back on the SPD leadership after 4 August 1914, appealed audaciously for a huge demonstration in favor of peace and socialism. Both leaders had been imprisoned for short terms in 1915 and had just been released. The turnout exceeded all their expectations. The mood had changed. The realities of war had pricked the chauvinist bubble. In Karl and Rosa, the opening novel of his great trilogy, the German writer Alfred Döblin describes that May Day scene in documentary style. Not a fact is out of place. The message is clear: in times of war, every capitalist democracy, however truncated (half the population was excluded from voting because of gender), becomes a dictatorship. More visibly in some countries than others:
What a magnificent time there on Potsdammer Platz in Berlin! The police have occupied the area early that morning, but the workers come nevertheless. Their numbers grow. Thousands of them. And then Karl appears. Karl Liebknecht in the uniform of a common private. She stands next to him … She speaks. But Karl’s voice roars above everything else: ‘Down with war! Down with war! Down with the government.’
Then the police, with sabres drawn, move to arrest him. Rosa and others throw themselves between them. He goes on shouting … The cavalry gallops up, Karl is arrested. The tumult is overwhelming. He is led away. People mill about angrily in the square and in the streets leading to it for hours … What a volcanic May 1st! … Karl is sentenced to four years’ imprisonment … and shortly afterwards they arrest her as well … They sentence her to indefinite preventive detention. And now prison has swallowed her up.
The following spring (1917) there were mass strikes in Berlin, Halle, Brunswick, Magdeburg and Leipzig due to food shortages. Leipzig, however, was at the time a stronghold of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) – another left-wing split after August 1914 which veered between reform and revolution but ended up firmly in the camp of the former. There the workers went much further and insisted on a government ‘pledging willingness to accept an immediate peace settlement, and renouncing any open or covert annexations’.
In the summer of that same year, the mutinous sailors of the German fleet in Kiel demanded peace without annexations or reparations. ‘Ten ringleaders’ were court-martialled, two of them executed and the others sentenced to a total of 181 years of penal servitude. The rulers of Germany had learnt the lessons of the Russian Revolution.
In January 1918, on the heels of what had happened in Vienna, the distant thunder erupted into a gigantic storm of strikes throughout Germany. The Berlin shop-stewards’ committee had, on 27 January, issued a call for a general strike. The USPD supported them as, of course, did the Spartacusbunds, whose principal leaders and key activists were in prison. A million workers (half a million in Berlin alone) went on strike for ten days. The main demand was for peace, solidarity with Russia and no annexations, but the mood of the workers, who wanted a new government, was much more militant. General Luddendorf, the effective dictator of the country, refused to budge. He decided on repression and the soldiers carried out their orders.
An Austrian Social Democratic historian would later write that ‘only if the troops had gone over to the strikers’ side could the movement have been turned into a revolutionary struggle. But the soldiers remained unmoved and untouched.’4 Might this have had something to do with the abject capitulation of the SPD in August 1914? Or did it predate that event? After all, a majority of the fulltime trade union leadership and base, especially in southern Germany, had long been infected with Bernstein’s pro-capitalist revisionism. And as Rosa Luxemburg would later remark, the centre’s (Kautsky’s) opposition to Bernstein was based on its own ‘conservatism’. Having been the interpreter of Marxism for such a long time, Kautsky found it difficult to break with this past theoretically. Practice was another matter altogether. Nonetheless, had the war been strongly opposed by the mass party of German workers (and Bernstein’s position on the war was ambiguous), it undoubtedly would have helped educate the workers in uniform who belonged to the SPD.
The most impossible task for a soldier is refusing to obey orders. Desertions are difficult enough. And many deserters in the armies that fought in the First World War were shot as ‘cowards’ and ‘traitors’ after token court-martials. The large-scale soldiers’ mutinies in Russia were made possible by the fact that the Bolsheviks, as well as many rank-and-file members and some leaders of the Mensheviks and the SRs, hated their own government. This made opposition to the war much easier. The SPD’s decision to vote for the war credits had disarmed the workers in the factories and on the front. Frightened by the wave of chauvinism displayed by the crowd on 4 August 1914, the SPD leadership could not think beyond presentism. Political consciousness, as Lenin insisted many times, was not linear. It changed, as the period between the defeat of 1905 and the triumph of 1917 had amply demonstrated. Which was why a party needed to remain strong in bad times. This had not happened in Germany. The soldiers were not presented with a serious alternative to Luddendorf’s iron heel. And when workers and soldiers were ready to rebel, the Spartacusbund was not strong enough.
Once war began in Britain, the Trades Union Congress and a large majority of the Labour Party dropped all opposition to it, signed a no-strikes truce for the war’s duration, participated in the recruitment campaign and published a pamphlet entitled The War to End all Wars, a weak reflection of pro-war Liberal propaganda. The ILP and the British socialist party remained hostile but ineffective. The majority of the forty Labour MPs in Parliament followed suit, with the striking exception of Ramsay MacDonald. The suffragettes, too, split on the question. Emmeline Pankhurst called off the mass movement and sent her women supporters home to knit socks for the soldiers. Her daughter Sylvia, a staunch socialist well before the war, steadfastly opposed the slaughter and became a communist.5 Bertrand Russell was equally hostile to the war, opposed it in strong language and served a spell in prison. It was Scotland that produced the glimmerings of an opposition. A young socialist schoolteacher, John MacLean, addressed large meetings in Glasgow, explaining the imperialist nature of the war and calling on workers not to participate in a fight for greed and colonies. If they were that desperate to fight, he suggested they march to London and get rid of the monarchy. From the beginning of his political life, MacLean stressed the separateness of Scotland and argued in favour of a Scottish Workers’ Republic. He loathed the British Empire and vice versa. Arrested in 1914 under the Defence of the Realm Act, he was sentenced to three years of hard labour at Peterhead Prison and force-fed when he went on hunger strike. On his release he was met by tens of thousands of workers and carried in triumph through the streets of Glasgow. The Bolsheviks honoured his struggle against the war by electing him an honorary president of the First All Russian Congress of Soviets, along with Lenin, Trotsky, Liebknecht, Adler, and Spiridonova. The news was greeted joyously on the Clyde.6 He died of pneumonia at the age of forty-four in 1923. The combination of poverty, prison and giving his only overcoat to a freezing Jamaican comrade sent him to an early grave.
In southern Europe, the Russian Revolution had its biggest impact on Italy. United as a state as late as 1860, it was demographically dominated by a Southern peasantry that did not speak Italian and a majority of whom were illiterate till 1911. Italy’s decision to join the Entente in 1915 was not popular in the South or amongst workers in Northern factories, but it was a bonus for Italian industrialists. The massive growth of industry to meet war needs was reflected in the steel and engineering sector, where output and profits (including those of the Fiat company) doubled from 1914 to 1917. This striking growth of capital was paralleled by an equally dramatic increase in the size of the proletariat: the number of workers employed by Fiat, for instance, grew from 4,400 in 1914 to 41,200 in 1918. The three corners of Italy’s golden triangle were Turin, Milan and Genoa.
Sporadic peasant anger against the war, triggered by brutal conscriptions, food shortages and requisitions, had been evident in the countryside from January 1916 onwards, usually accompanied by violent assaults on the police and village notables. Urban discontent centred in Turin was the outcome of food shortages and very high levels of exploitation in the factories. Social amenities barely existed. The social situation was not unlike that of Petrograd on the eve of the February Revolution (Fiat’s profits mirrored in the growth of the Putilov arms industry). News that the tsar had been toppled and that the workers had taken power had created hope amongst the poor in Italy, in both town and countryside. In August 1917 the carabinieri shot two people dead for protesting against the shortages, demanding bread and an end to the war. Women and children participated in all these protests and chanted at the police to ‘join your brothers, don’t fire at them.’ They were ignored. The response to the killings was a general strike. Once again the objective conditions for creating citywide soviets – autonomous organs of dual power – were ripe. No political force existed that could press this point home. As the First World War ended and was followed by the imposition of a calamitous peace that ensured there would be a second one, the Italian losses were proportionate to those of Russia. Over 5 million men had been conscripted to fight. Figures vary, but these were between 600,000 and a million dead. Half a million were severely disabled and a million were wounded.
A year after the armistice, young revolutionary intellectuals fired up by the Turin strikes, the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary turbulence that both signified had gained control of a newspaper. L’Ordine Nuovo would now be edited by Antonio Gramsci, a young Sardinian intellectual who had studied and made his home in Turin, assisted by Palmiro Togliatti. It was this journal that became the voice of the Turin workers. As a result Gramsci was greatly respected and admired in the factories. He was not yet the leader of any political party or faction. On 20 June 1919, the newspaper published an editorial entitled ‘Workers’ Democracy’, in which Gramsci strongly urged the workers to transform their virtually toothless ‘internal commissions’ (a wartime concession) into democratically elected workers’ councils. The soviets had reached Turin. The response to the editorial was dramatic. In December 1919, over 150,000 workers were participating in the new councils, which consisted of commissars elected by each work team in the factory. The model was a heady mixture of Petrograd and the Paris Commune. The term of any commissar could be revoked if a majority of those who had elected him willed it to be so.
The employers were preparing as well. In March 1920, they met to establish a General Confederation of Industry. Its secretary, Signor Olivetti, brought a typed-up memorandum stating that whatever the cost, the factory soviets had to be destroyed. The government agreed. Troops were deployed to encircle Turin. A trivial dispute over daylight-saving time changes was used as a provocation by Fiat employers. They announced a lockout, insisting that the only way to reach a settlement was to disband the workers’ council and revert to the old ‘internal commissions’. Confronted with such a crude manoeuvre to destroy working-class organisation, the engineering workers’ union and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) called a general strike. Half a million workers responded to the call and all the large factories in Piedmont fell silent. However, the leaders of the Italian Confederation of Labour (CGL) and the PSI refused to help the strike develop, hoping it would remain provincialised. After eleven days, the Turin workers had no option but to settle the dispute, while refusing to disband their soviet. It was a stalemate.
Four and a half months later the battle resumed, this time in Milan and on a larger scale. The employers had broken off negotiations with the engineering workers’ union. The latter responded with a strict work-to-rule. The employers had not experienced this tactic before and were livid. They now resorted to violence. The Alfa Romeo bosses ordered a mass punishment in the shape of a lockout. The workers occupied the factory. Elsewhere in the city other workers followed suit. Two days later the large metallurgical plants in Turin were occupied. The movement rapidly spread to Italian heavy industry, presenting a generalised challenge to Italian capitalism. The occupying workers kept production going and Red Guards protected the factories against external attacks. The situation required a political party to move forward on a national level and challenge the government. The CGL, incapable of leading the struggle, passed the buck to the PSI, who returned it by suggesting a referendum. Members were asked whether they wanted further negotiations or a revolution. Unsurprisingly, a narrow majority opted for more negotiations, fearful of losing jobs and wages and incurring mass starvation. The Liberal prime minister Giolitti made economic concessions and even claimed to agree with the principle of ‘workers’ control’. The occupations were ended. Not far from the summit, the Italian workers, abandoned by the CGL and the PSI (some of whose leaders were secretly negotiating with Giolitti), slipped all the way back, reeling from a catastrophic defeat with even more horrific consequences.
The Italian capitalists and the political parties on their side had been unnerved by the militancy of the workers. They were not prepared for another round, and therefore opted for fascism. Did the CGL and PSI, watching Mussolini’s Blackshirts burn down trade union and party headquarters throughout Italy, pause to reflect on how it might all have been different? Those who did had already left to help found the Communist Party at a congress in Livorno in 1921. Those who, like Antonio Gramsci, had believed that a party-less road to workers’ democracy was possible, soon changed their minds. The defeat of September 1920 had concentrated Gramsci’s mind even more than the Russian Revolution. He admitted that his programme for the Workers’ Council suffered from severe limitations, and for a short time embraced a virulent Jacobinism denouncing all representative assemblies as diversions from the main task. He soon returned to a more considered view of the relationship between the party and the masses, but he never abandoned his new position that no revolution was possible without a political party. This would be the ‘Modern Prince’. And a political revolutionary party needed a permanent ‘military substratum’.7 Gramsci had not read much of Lenin at this time but the conclusion he had reached was not so different from one of Lenin’s theses (supported at the time by Plekhanov, Axelrod and most of the leaders of Russian Social Democracy) to the effect that a revolutionary party had to be ‘ready for everything’ and especially ‘the preparation, timing and execution of the national armed insurrection’.
Watching these uprisings and defeats from afar, was Lenin wrong in thinking that what was desperately needed was a new International and new parties? The collapse of German Social Democracy still haunted him. He would have agreed with Gramsci’s critique of that party written in December 1919. The Italian had argued then that the German SPD in 1919–20 had reduced the soldiers and workers’ councils in that country to ‘a form malleable and plastic to the leaders’ will’. And furthermore it had ‘created its own councils by fiat, with a secure majority of its own men on them; it [had] hobbled and domesticated the revolution’ and its main link to workers was the ‘contact of Noske’s fist on the workers’ backs’.