6
Losing Balance
As one seeks to understand the Russian Revolution, two of the most insightful guides are the participant-witness Victor Serge and the activist-turned-historian Isaac Deutscher.
Although in his later novels and memoirs Serge would express a highly critical understanding of authoritarianism and terror associated with the aftermath of 1917, in 1920, reflecting his own frame of mind as a Bolshevik activist from within the swirl of events, he was expressing an understanding that is worth looking at, straight in the face.
Revolution “is never the epic festival promised us by historians, who in truth were poets rather than historians,” as he tersely put it. “It is a storm in which no one is spared, which uproots the strongest, and where the unforeseen triumphs.” He added: “From the point of view of those who are making it, it is a rough and dangerous task, sometimes a dirty task for which you have to wear knee-length boots and roll up your sleeves, not fearing things that will make you sick.” He goes deeper: “All the selfishness, the slavishness, the cowardice, the stupidity which lies at the heart of the human beast will be laid bare at certain moments.” The good, the bad, and the ugly become inseparable in this relentless process—“no splendid sacrifice, no glorious victory, no stoical idealism in the hearts of the best can eradicate the display of human weakness,” deeply rooted in the past and overflowing in the present, as “a profound moral disorder is bound to become rampant.”1
Within this context Serge explains the necessity of dictatorship and terror. In explaining the notion of dictatorship of the proletariat he goes well beyond the notion of “political rule by the working class.” As he puts it:
Revolution implies violence. All violence is dictatorial. All violence imposes the power of a will by breaking resistance. Since the expropriation of the possessing class is at stake, the revolutionary violence which must accomplish this task can only be that of the non-possessing class, that is, of the most advanced minority of the proletariat. . . . And they cannot rely on the consciousness, the good will or the determination of those they have to deal with; for the masses who will follow them or surround them will be warped by the old regime, relatively uncultivated, often unaware, torn by feelings and instincts inherited from the past.2
Inseparable from this is the systematic use of terror, and Serge makes use of the experience of the French Revolution, then applies it to his own time and context:
From 1917 to 1919, in Red Russia, the same causes . . . could not fail to produce the same effects. Clearly we are observing a general law of the development of revolutions. We have only to recall the circumstances: revolutionary Russia retreated in the face of the need to shed blood as long as it was possible to retreat. But when the ceaseless plotting within found expression in the Yaroslav rising, in the murder of Uritsky in Petrograd, in the attempt on Lenin’s life in Moscow; when the Ural region, occupied by Czechoslovaks who were marching on the Volga, became a new Vendée [region of peasant revolts]; when the Russian counter-revolutionary émigrés began to organize armed intervention from Paris and London, while their gangs were devastating the Don country; when white Finland had assassinated eleven thousand defeated Communists—then it became necessary to have recourse to Red terror.
It was necessary on pain of death. For any sign of weakness could have brought about defeat. And defeat means White terror, a hundred times more terrible than Red terror. In 1871 in Paris in a fortnight [after the defeat of the Paris Commune], the Versailles forces killed three times as many people as were victims in the Red terror throughout the whole vast territory of Russia in three years of revolution.3
In 1966, not long before his death, Isaac Deutscher—for all of his adult life committed to revolutionary Marxist perspectives and the Bolshevik tradition—engaged in a fascinating discussion with radical pacifists in the United States on questions having to do with Marxism and nonviolence. Speaking of “the great tragedy of the isolation of the Russian Revolution,” and of “its succumbing to incredible, unimaginable destruction, poverty, hunger, disease as the result of the wars of intervention, the civil wars, and of course, of the long and exhausting world war,” Deutscher elaborated:
Men lost their balance. They lost, even the leaders, the clarity of their thinking and of their minds. They acted under overwhelming and inhuman pressures. I don’t undertake to judge them, to blame them or to justify them. I can only see the deep tragedy of this historic process, the result of which was the glorification of violence.
But what was to have been a glassful of violence became buckets and buckets full, and then rivers of violence. That is the tragedy of the Russian Revolution. . . .
To some extent we (and when I say we I mean that generation of Marxists with which I identify morally, I mean Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, the early Communist leaders in Europe) participated in this glorification of violence as a self-defense mechanism. Rosa Luxemburg understood this when she criticized the first faint signs of this attitude.4
Initially the Bolsheviks were committed to establishing a genuine workers’ democracy in the Soviet Republic corresponding to the criteria outlined in the first chapter of this study. They did not intend to create a one-party dictatorship. Within a fairly short period, however, they were overwhelmed by crises, and the regime consequently moved not simply in the violent direction of which Deutscher spoke, but also in an increasingly authoritarian direction. As Deutscher suggests, the Bolsheviks justified this trajectory in the name of expediency, but also tended to rationalize it by articulating new theoretical principles—some of which were significantly at variance with their earlier democratic perspectives.
For example, far from being premeditated, the formation of the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counterrevolution and Sabotage—what would become the notorious Cheka—occurred a month and a half after the Bolsheviks took power, as foreign intervention and civil war were about to become murderously destructive realities. Lenin’s reference point was, not surprisingly, the darker side of the Jacobin tradition.5
Revolutionary Russia was engulfed by chaos and violence far greater than had been anticipated. The revolutionary-democratic ethos that had been so powerful in 1917 was disintegrating. By 1919, the element in the Jacobin tradition that had been recessive or dormant in Lenin’s thought had now come to the fore. As Neil Harding has put it, “the project for universal self-activity transcending the state through a multiplicity of independent communes was replaced by an emphatically centralized dictatorship—the maximization of the state exercised exclusively by the single Party.” Instead of the insurgent masses of workers and peasants animated by revolutionary consciousness, which had ceased to be the vibrant reality it had been in 1917, the hope for the future could only be found in a relatively small band of the enlightened and incorruptible, for whom (as George Plekhanov had put it years before) “the success of the revolution is the highest law.” Lenin became a Jacobin in this sense “only at the very end, when all other avenues were closed to him.”6
Disintegrations
The slogan of “all power to the soviets” had been a keystone of the Bolshevik revolution. But this had assumed the continuation within these institutions of the vibrant workers’ democracy that had culminated in the soviet revolution. Instead, soviet democracy very quickly disintegrated—partly brought about through Bolshevik repression, as we shall see, but also partly through choices and limitations of the left-wing non-Bolshevik parties themselves.
Bolshevik attitudes toward socialists opposed to the October/November revolution were—as we’ve noted—extremely negative. The Right SRs tended to support the overturned Kerensky Provisional Government and the soon-to-be-dissolved Constituent Assembly. Many of them became involved in some of the first armed struggles against the Bolshevik revolution, setting up a rival government to the soviets in the early days of the Civil War. They generally agreed with Victor Chernov that before the Bolshevik seizure of power, Lenin had represented an “ultra-revolutionary platform” of the “lumpen-proletariat” of “the urban and village poor,” that the Bolshevik revolution “substituted plebianization for democratization,” accomplishing “mob rule through the bureaucracy.” Chernov saw it not as a true revolution but a coup of which “the overall result will be economic and political regression and not progress.” Thus, “objectively Bolshevism is not a revolutionary, but a reactionary or counterrevolutionary force.” Such a standpoint naturally justified fighting the Bolsheviks arms in hand, although Chernov himself hesitated to call for this. But as his wife, Olga Chernov, put it in her later memoir, “the Constituent Assembly, that ardent dream of past generations, no longer existed. . . . At the moment there was only one way to stop a Bolshevik dictatorship and set up a People’s Government. One must call in more forces and fight them on equal ground.”7
The Socialist Revolutionaries, explains their conscientious chronicler Oliver Radkey, by the autumn of 1917 had “disintegrated into three warring factions—right, center and left,” and “in the heat of factional strife they did not hesitate to malign one another.” The Left SRs, as we have noted, finally split away and for a time made common cause with the Bolsheviks. As July sped toward October, many of the others, according to Radkey, “were living in a sort of dream world where fears of counterrevolution mingled with scorn of Bolshevism,” with organizational dysfunction in which “deliberations eventuating in formal decisions had given way to fly-by-night conferences between individual members.” In the Provisional Government, President Alexander Kerensky and Minister of War Boris Savinkov, both by this point in the SR right fringe, and Minister of Agriculture Victor Chernov, an SR centrist, all were at loggerheads. Chernov vainly sought to adhere to democratic principles, in contrast to his more opportunistic comrades. Kerensky had for some time been an independent operative with only loose ties to the party, while Savinkov—who had been the powerful second-in-command of the SR terrorist apparatus, overseeing assassinations of tsarist officials—was soon to be expelled from the party because he refused to answer for his collusion with General Lavr Kornilov’s plotting against Kerensky. According to one writer, Savinkov “would conspire and murder in the name of human freedom against any regime which threatened it,” although Radkey has tagged him a “proto-fascist,” and Chernov reflected: “Once a brilliant figure among revolutionaries, . . . Savinkov was now inwardly empty. He had lost faith in people and looked down on them. . . . The militant bent in his soul . . . had grown unnoticed into a passion of war for its own sake, a strained, unhealthy, ‘apocalyptic’ passion.” A British agent who had extensive dealings with him commented: “His talents cannot be denied. He wrote several excellent novels. . . . [But] he had mingled so much with spies and agents-provocateurs that, like the hero of his own novel, he hardly knew whether he was deceiving himself or those who he meant to deceive.”8
After the Bolsheviks came to power, according to a Western intelligence report of May 1918, Savinkov was secretly coordinating a network of up to two thousand operatives (largely made up of army officers), and in July his Union for the Defense of Fatherland and Freedom—banking on a foreign military intervention that failed to materialize—would initiate an abortive uprising in Yaroslav. According to Louis Fischer, from February through June of 1918, “Savinkov mobilized White officers, monarchists, social revolutionaries, and a sprinkling of Mensheviks,” in such work, receiving money “from the French mission and the Czecho-Slovaks.” It was also the case that “the dominant clique in the [Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, or PSR] Central Committee decided on an armed struggle with Bolshevism in support of Kerensky’s effort” to retake power, and even Savinkov’s forces “now were welcome to the outraged patriots of the PSR, who were desperate for help.” According to a May 26, 1918, report from Bruce Lockhart to his government, “Savinkov’s plans for counter-revolution are based on Allied intervention. The French mission has been supporting them and has assured them that intervention is already decided. Savinkov proposes to murder all Bolshevik leaders on night of allies landing and to form a Government which will be in reality a military dictatorship.”9
The Mensheviks were also divided. Some were inclined to ally themselves with the Right SRs, but the bulk of them followed the nonviolent line developed by Martov, Dan, and Abramovitch. They sought to accept and stay within the legal bounds of the new soviet power, opposing the armed resistance to Bolshevism. At the same time they maintained an implacable political struggle against the Bolsheviks. Martov found the revolution repulsive. “Under the guise of ‘proletarian power’ . . . the most reprehensible vulgarity is let loose,” he wrote, “with all its specifically Russian vices of lack of culture, base careerism, bribery, parasitism, dissoluteness, irresponsibility, and so on.” He warned that “we are moving, through anarchy, . . . toward some kind of Caesarism, based on the whole people’s loss of faith in the possibility of self-government.” (It’s interesting to note that both Chernov and Martov initially accused the Bolsheviks not of authoritarianism but of the opposite: helping to unleash impractical popular impulses and expectations. The two critics had predicted that the forces that unleashed would create such social instability that an undemocratic outcome would be the eventual result.) The Mensheviks following Martov sought to establish “the unity of the proletarian movement on the basis of independent class politics and its liberation from anarchistic and utopian adulterations,” i.e., from Bolshevik adulterations. They would accomplish this task by “rallying the conscious elements of the proletariat for systematic influence on the backward proletarian masses in all worker organizations and in all arenas of revolutionary struggle.” Through such means they hoped that Bolshevik rule would be dissolved democratically by an increasingly sober-minded (or disillusioned) working class. Yet, especially as the Civil War intensified, the Bolsheviks came to feel that all Right SR and Menshevik efforts to dislodge them (whether violent or peaceful) were intolerable, that “if the Russian workers’ dictatorship with its Terror collapsed, its place would be taken, not by democracy, but by the White Terror of Kolchak and Denikin,” in the words of Karl Radek.10
The Right SRs were repressed early; the Mensheviks faced harassment (both official and unofficial) and restrictions almost from the start, culminating in their expulsion from the soviets in the spring of 1918. By 1919, however, Lenin himself was offering assurances that the government would “grant full liberty” to “all those Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who are really prepared to help us in our difficult struggle.” More than a year later, a delegation of the British Labor Party was able to attend a meeting of the Menshevik central committee, which was held in its public headquarters. Despite serious obstacles, the Mensheviks had forty delegates (out of fifteen hundred) in the Moscow Soviet, including such articulate leaders as Martov, Dan, and Abramovitch (all three of whom Lenin invited to sit on the Vee-Tsik). The fact remains that this period of legal status was precarious and short-lived. Marcel Liebman comments that “it was not until the winter of 1920–21 that the Menshevik Party was suppressed in a systematic way,” but suppressed it was.11
Regarding his own workplace, one Bolshevik militant, Eduard Dune, later recalled, “the core of Mensheviks consisted of older, thoughtful, and widely read comrades. They were also the most skilled workers in the factory. Their revolutionary ardor had cooled during their lifetimes, but their knowledge and experience were considerable.” While initially active in debates and discussions, Dune reports, their support dwindled and they found themselves sidelined by events.12
The move to systematic repression was hardly immediate. A very popular Bolshevik leader, V. Volodarsky (Moisei Gol’stein), serving in Petrograd as commissar for press, agitation, and propaganda, had been responsible for suppressing the opposition press in the spring of 1918, but—as Bolshevik militant A. F. Ilyin-Zhenevsky describes it—decided to veer toward a policy of openness as new soviet elections approached in 1918:
He turned up in a very excited state and said, his eyes shining: “You know, I want to let newspapers of all tendencies appear during the election period. We are so strong now, our achievement is so obvious to everyone, that we have no reason to fear the criticism of the SRs and Mensheviks.”
And, sure enough, soon after that, bourgeois, SR and Menshevik papers began to appear, with Volodarsky’s permission. But what floods of filth and slander came pouring out from them! Their chronicles of events were specially selected so as to demonstrate all-around ruin, and inability on the part of the Soviet power to cope with the tasks before it. Sometimes they gave deliberately false information aimed at causing panic among the population. There were articles which shamelessly called for open insurrection against the Soviet power. Volodarsky’s beau geste was not appreciated by his enemies. Worse than that, the treacherous bullet of an SR soon cut short the life of this outstanding tribune and revolutionary. Instead of gratitude he was given death. Such is the cruel law of the class struggle.13
Volodarsky’s assassination on June 20, 1918, as we will see, contributed powerfully to an incredibly repressive turn of events. Yet the repression of opposition groups was a gradual and uneven development. A young Bolshevik activist assigned to the Belarusian city of Gomel in 1919, Alexander Barmine, later recalled how the initial political pluralism in the soviet evaporated there:
The overwhelming majority of the delegates were Bolsheviks. But some Menshevik Social Democratic workmen had also been elected, and several members of the Jewish Socialist Bund. There was a good deal to discuss at the sessions. We debated the food scarcity and the military situation. The Bolshevik deputies quite openly criticized the handling of affairs. The Menshevik delegates supported the criticism but held the Soviet power responsible.
After a few days the Bolshevik leaders in the Soviet received from Moscow an order to exclude the elected Mensheviks as enemies of the Revolution. Esther Frumkin, who was then a leader of the Socialist Bund [though later a Communist], protested vehemently against this attack on working-class democracy. In those days I was not very clear in my mind about what was happening. But we were told that such was the decision of the Party. The Menshevik deputies withdrew in a dignified manner, little suspecting that their party had been outlawed for good. I reflect with regret now that one learns only too late the full significance of what is done in the heat of a political moment.14
The alliance between the Bolsheviks and Left SRs and anarchists also fragmented fairly quickly. It should be noted, however, that in neither case was this done at the initiative of the Bolsheviks. In both cases, the break was precipitated by the Bolshevik decisions to make concessions to German imperialism in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and to resist economic radicalism (such as rapid nationalizations and decentralized forms of workers’ control). Not only did this create a breach between the Leninist governmental majority and the Bolshevik allies, with the Left SRs walking out of the government just weeks after entering it, but significant elements among these erstwhile allies resorted to illegal and violent methods. This generated repression that eliminated the Left SRs and anarchists as a force in the mainstream of Russian political life. Paul Avrich, a historian sympathetic to anarchism, observes that by the summer of 1918 “the Bolshevik government had been plunged into a life-and-death struggle with its enemies, both foreign and domestic. . . . Terrorism reared its head in every corner of the land. Radical SRs launched a grim campaign of assassination against prominent state officials, just as they had done in the days of Nicholas II. . . . The anarchists, too, resorted to their terrorist ways.”15
Not all anarchists broke with the Bolsheviks. Some remained absolutely loyal to the Soviet regime, assumed positions of considerable responsibility on its behalf, and in some cases ended up joining the Communist Party, as anarchist historian Martin A. Miller has documented.16 Of course, the question can be raised about whether such comrades were still anarchists or were now former anarchists. Although few question that the oppositional trajectory indicated by Avrich was more common, hardly all engaged in terrorist violence.
The “radical SRs” to whom Avrich refers, however, include the Left SRs initially allied with the Bolsheviks. Despite very definite tensions, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs had appeared for a time to be engaged in a secure and long-term partnership. In the early months of 1918, when Bolshevik strength in Petrograd was significantly depleted due to many militants being drawn into government and military responsibilities, the “partnership with the Left SRs helped ease the difficulties,” as Alexander Rabinowitch puts it. “Along with educated, intellectually lively, seasoned, independent-minded revolutionary leaders, the Left SRs were a source of dedicated rank-and-file cadres who were often more capable and reliable than hastily, indiscriminately recruited new Bolsheviks.”17 They were an integral part—nationally and locally—of the new Soviet government, and they were trusted sufficiently by their Bolshevik comrades to be recruited into a number of prominent and sensitive positions within the Cheka—the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counterrevolution and Sabotage.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (signed March 3, 1918), concluded between delegates of the Soviet government and of Imperial Germany to allow for the new Soviet Republic to withdraw from the horrific World War, was a shameful document from the standpoint of concessions granted to the arrogant and bullying forces of German imperialism. This was frankly recognized by everyone on the Soviet side. But some refused to accept it, and among the most vociferous of these (despite Maria Spiridonova’s appeal for moderation and compromise) were the Left SRs, who promptly walked out of the government with angry public denunciations.
This hardly meant that the Left SRs joined the ranks of the suppressed—they continued their open criticisms of Brest-Litovsk and other Bolshevik policies with which they disagreed. However, while the Left SRs no longer were a government party, their members maintained positions at various levels in the soviets and in the state apparatus, including the Cheka. Kevin Murphy offers a significant account of Left SR activity in a metalworks factory in Moscow that sheds light on key aspects of the situation:
Worker grievances escalated during the continued economic collapse. Yet as late as 9 May 1918, cooperation between the Left SRs and Bolsheviks evidently continued. A general factory meeting elected four Bolsheviks and two SRs to the soviets “without debate.” However, workers’ festering grievances, combined with the intransigence of the national Left SR leadership, contributed to a rapid breakdown of trust between the LSRs and the Bolsheviks. A wild factory meeting (probably in June) included LSR leaders Spiridonova and Steinberg, and Bukharin for the Bolsheviks. “The SRs criticized the Bolsheviks in every possible way” and when Bukharin spoke, “the SRs made noise, whistled, howled like wolves, and did not let him finish his speech,” wrote one Bolshevik. The Bolsheviks shut down the meeting and “the next time Lebedev [a popular local LSR metalworker] came to us for permission to organize a meeting, we refused.” . . .
Spiridonova . . . may have misread workers’ economic grievances as political support for her party. . . . On 5 July . . . the factory committee rejected an LSR proposal to hold another meeting in the factory, but stated that, “if they desire, they may hold a meeting outside the factory.” The factory LSRs twice tried to organize meetings before [July 6] . . . but were dispersed by the Red Guards, according to one worker account.18
The Left SRs moved decisively out of the ranks of “loyal opposition” on July 6, 1918. According to Left SR leader Isaac Steinberg, his party “was not concerned at that moment with seizing the apparatus of government, it was concerned with bringing about a radical alteration of Soviet policy.” Be that as it may, two Cheka officers—under orders from the Left SR leadership—assassinated German ambassador Count Wilhelm Mirbach (in hopes of disrupting the newly negotiated peace). Left SRs “arrested,” among others, Cheka director Feliks Dzerzhinsky, took over the central post office and telegraph office, sent out telegrams in the name of “the Left SR party now in power,” and opened fire on the Kremlin before being overwhelmed, routed, captured, and disarmed. According to an eyewitness, Lenin himself was stunned when he learned that assassination had been carried out by Left SR Chekists, and “he turned white as he typically did when he was enraged or shocked by a dangerous, unexpected turn of events.” Despite Steinberg’s comment about simply hoping to pressure the Bolsheviks, “the Left SRs hoped to become leaders of the peasant revolution and form a new government,” writes historian Taisia Osipova. She quotes Maria Spiridonova: “Our party must take upon itself the burden of leadership of the insurrection. We shall call upon the masses to rise, we shall incite, ignite, and organize. Only by means of the insurrection shall we be able to overcome that which is moving upon us. . . . We are entering a new stage of political development, a stage when we probably shall be the ruling party.” But Communist forces moved quickly, decisively, brutally. Trotsky termed it all a “miserable parody of a revolt.” Bolshevik activist A.F. Ilyin-Zhenevsky brooded that “we had ourselves contributed not a little to increasing the influence of the Left SRs through offering them places in the government and drawing them in every way into out Soviet and public work. In our proclamations we spoke of the Left SRs as the party of the rural poor, enhancing thereby the social significance of the group.” Such things, he concluded, “went to their leaders’ heads. They saw themselves as messiahs destined to save the revolutionary honor of the Russian proletariat by hurling it into armed conflict with European imperialism.” They made use “of all the resources that the Soviet power and our Party had given to them,” in order to carry out “an act of barefaced treachery,” he concluded bitterly. “The Left SR party had committed suicide,” reflected Victor Serge.19
This foolhardy act by the socialist party closest to the Bolsheviks had particularly tragic consequences. Combined with all of the other calamities—the foreign interventions and civil war, the economic chaos and collapse, and so on—it pulled the Soviet Republic out of the proletarian-democratic trajectory that had defined it from its beginnings. The democratic inclinations hardly ended all at once. Despite the attempted coup, the sixth congress of All-Russia Soviets granted amnesty to arrested Left SRs, and members of the party who did not advocate the overthrow of the regime were able to function, albeit semi-legally, throughout the Civil War. “Seven months after their aborted coup d’etat only an estimated two hundred LSRs were in prison,” reports Kevin Murphy, “of whom thirty-four were released in June 1920.” Some, such as, by this time, Maria Spiridonova, were of the opinion, however, that “the Bolsheviks are the assassins and executioners of freedom, and they must be overthrown as speedily as possible.” Her outlook was now similar to that of her Right SR adversary Victor Chernov, who foresaw armed popular rebellion against the Bolsheviks and affirmed: “We will be with the people.”20
Vladimir Brovkin, hostile as he is among historians dealing with the Bolsheviks, usefully documents fluctuations in the Soviet regime’s policies regarding the legality of opposition parties, particularly the Mensheviks and the SRs. He notes a sudden shift in late 1918 away from what had been a growing policy of political repression. Detecting pulls and tugs between moderate and “hard-line” currents among the Bolsheviks, he points out that Lenin “maneuvered between the factions” and that “in his speeches Lenin simply admitted that the policy toward opposition parties was contradictory and inconsistent.” Brovkin speculates, “It is quite possible that Lenin was not certain himself how to deal with the opposition parties at this point.” However, he also offers a general rationale of Bolshevik policy at that time: “When reforms were contemplated in the direction of the rule of law, economic flexibility, and peasants’ private enterprise, the policy toward opposition parties was one of relative toleration; when on the other hand hard-line policy prevailed, repression followed toleration.” Not surprisingly, armed uprisings (in which right-Mensheviks and both Left SRs and Right SRs were sometimes involved) and other serious challenges to Bolshevik power were especially likely to generate spikes in repression.21
As time went on, political opposition increasingly tended to be equated with counterrevolution, freedom of expression increasingly seemed too dangerous to allow, the death penalty (although abolished but then reinstituted more than once) seemed too necessary to be dispensed with, the use of repression and terror increasingly appeared to be a necessary expedient for preservation of the endangered Soviet Republic. Political pluralism evaporated. One unanticipated consequence was what George Leggett has termed “the stringent overhaul” of the Cheka, with the elimination of the now traitorous or dubious elements; the Left SR rising not only resulted in the identification of the Soviet regime with a single ruling party, but—naturally following from this—the reorganization of the Cheka was “designed to ensure that its commanding cadres stayed unquestioningly loyal to the single-party dictatorship.” Victor Serge described another of the consequences: “With the disappearance of political debates between parties representing different social interests through various shades of their opinion, Soviet institutions, beginning with the local Soviets and ending with the Vee-Tsik and the Council of People’s Commissars, manned solely by Communists, now function in a vacuum: since all the decisions are taken by the party, all they can do is give them the official rubber-stamp.”22 A similar picture emerges from Lev Kamenev’s critical description of the soviets at the end of 1919:
We know that because of the war the best workers were withdrawn in large numbers from the cities, and that therefore at times it becomes difficult in one or another provincial or district capital to form a soviet and make it function. . . . [In] the soviet plenary sessions as political organizations often waste away, the people busy themselves with purely mechanical chores. . . . General soviet sessions are seldom called, and when the deputies meet, it is only to accept a report, listen to a speech, and the like.23
Such developments helped to pave the way for the single-party dictatorship that was perfected and glorified with the crystallization of the Stalin regime. This was not, however, the original conception of how things would be—at least not in the mind of a young militant named Alexander Barmine. Though later commenting that as early as 1922 “Stalin was intriguing . . . even then to get the threads of power into his grasp,” Barmine insisted that this was not the earlier norm:
During Lenin’s time, opposition outside the Party was not yet as rigorously denied expression as it was later “in the paramount interests of the Revolution,” and the internal functioning of the Party was democratic. Discussion on all issues was free and open. There was no fear yet of reprisals if one happened to turn out on the wrong side of the fence.
In this connection I want to recall an incident of 1919, the most critical year of the Civil War. I was sent to Simferopol with a Red Army mission to contact the staff of Dybenko, who was in command there. One of our mission, Maxim Stern, was a member of the Central Committee of the Menshevik Party of the Ukraine. Although Simferopol was then under siege, and the White armies of Denikin, holding the eastern Crimea, were only fifty miles away, Stern requested the use of the Simferopol city theater for the purpose of a political meeting. The theater was turned over to him gratis, and he held a mass meeting composed of citizens and Red Army soldiers, to whom he expounded with eloquence the Menshevik point of view and his basic opposition to the principle of one-party dictatorship. In the manner of a town-hall meeting, and with the same good feeling, I myself and two other Bolsheviks replied to him. The discussion was hot, but never passed the bounds of courtesy. Although he had all the time he wanted and said everything he had to say without mincing words, the audience voted by a large majority for our resolution.
I recount this incident because there is a tendency now among critics of Stalin’s murderously repressive regime to imagine that something similar dates back to Lenin and the first years of the Revolution.24
It is instructive, nonetheless, that the issue discussed and voted on was that of a one-party dictatorship. “The dictatorship of the proletariat is the same as the dictatorship of the Communist Party,” Zinoviev explained in 1920 to the delegates at the congress of the Comintern. One can question whether workers’ democracy (or any kind of democracy) can be taken seriously if only one party is permitted to function—and indeed, Mikhail Tomsky, a prominent worker-Bolshevik, would later make a joke of it: “There is room for all kinds of parties in Russia, but only one of them is in power and all the rest of them are in prison.”25
Red Terror
It is important to be clear on the fact that the “Red Terror” of 1918–21 referred to far more than simply the suspension of civil liberties. It involved summary executions of those not only convicted but in many cases simply suspected of “counterrevolutionary activity,” or even of innocent people (members of opposition parties, relatives of real or imagined counterrevolutionaries, vaguely defined “bourgeois elements,” etc.) whom the regime arrested as “hostages” in order to send an intimidating message to opponents: counterrevolutionary violence against the regime would result in the shooting of those “hostages.” The incorruptible and severe head of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, articulated the guiding principle as early as June 8, 1918: “We stand for organized terror—this should be stated frankly—terror being absolutely indispensable in current revolutionary conditions. . . . We terrorize the enemies of the Soviet government in order to stifle crime at its inception. Terror serves as a ready deterrent.”26
A scholar hostile to Bolshevism, George Leggett, notes that, despite some “excesses,” before the summer of 1918 the Cheka “had been remarkably restrained,” but that especially beginning in July and August it “was increasingly caught up in the crescendo of violence.” In August a prominent Bolshevik (and former Menshevik), M. S. Uritsky—who headed the Petrograd Cheka but had a reputation for being restrained and humane—was assassinated; on the same day Lenin was severely wounded by a would-be assassin. Both assailants had Socialist Revolutionary connections. With this the Red Terror was unleashed without restraint. In Petrograd alone five hundred people were immediately rounded up and shot. Hundreds more were executed from one day to the next. From 1918 to 1922, it is estimated that fifty thousand were killed by the Cheka. Although Lenin placed full confidence in Dzerzhinsky, and also elaborated a theoretical rationale for Chekist violence, many Bolsheviks still labored to restrain the new institution, whose actions were often more shocking in the villages than in Moscow and Petrograd. “The Extraordinary Commission tries to free itself of all controls,” wrote prominent Bolshevik M. S. Olminsky in December 1918, indignantly detailing Communist atrocities in the little town of Kakarev to readers of Pravda. “The second half of 1918 was a period when the Red Terror was at its height,” wrote N. V. Krylenko (the Bolshevik who organized the Revolutionary Tribunal system and began his career as a State Prosecutor in that year), “and it is therefore completely understandable that, given these exceptional powers, the work of these commissions [the Cheka] should have brought about a series of excesses and abnormalities which in turn could not but provoke justifiable reaction.”27
We have already seen that there had been anti-Bolshevik plotting and violence at least since early in 1918, but by the summer “events follow one another kaleidoscopically,” and a plan “to forge an iron ring around the capital quickly matures,” as Louis Fischer put it. “There are battles, insurrections, assassinations, invasions—two most exciting months.”28 Fischer provides the following chronology:
July 1. British-French landing in Murmansk.
July 6. Assassination of Count Mirbach, German ambassador in Moscow.
July 6. Left Social Revolutionary insurrection in Moscow.
July 6. Anti-Bolshevik rising in Jaroslav.
July 9. Anti-Bolshevik risings in Murom, Ribinsk and Arzamas.
July 25. Allied diplomats leave Vologda for Archangel.
July 29. Assassination of Eichorn, Commander-in-Chief of German forces in Ukraine.
August 1. Allied landing in Archangel.
August 6. Czecho-Slovaks take Kazan.
August 24. White plot against Soviets revealed in Moscow.
August 30. Uritsky, prominent Bolshevik, assassinated in Petrograd.
August 30. Attempt on life of Lenin in Moscow.
Not all of the items on this list are directly connected to some unified counterrevolutionary plan or conspiracy (though some are), but at the time it was impossible for the Bolshevik regime to know all of the details. “There, you see that’s what they do,” said Zinoviev to some of his comrades about their opponents. “They are not shy about their methods. But we stand on ceremony with them, we are too soft.” Looking back on this moment, A.F. Ilyin-Zhenevsky would conclude that his own earlier “complacent attitude . . . was radically mistaken.”29 His recollection of the mood among people such as himself is vivid and terrible:
Death! Merciless death to all White Guards must be our answer to these crimes. To the White Terror of the counter-revolution we must reply with Red Terror! They were killing our leaders—we would tear up by the roots their entire wretched class! Such were the slogans that glinted in all the resolutions passed by workers’ meetings and on all the banners carried in workers’ demonstrations.30
In his history of revolutionary Russia, New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury writes of a salient incident. In the course of a meeting about railroads in the Sovnarkom, Lenin passed a note to Dzerzhinsky: “How many hardened counter-revolutionaries have we in prison?” Dzerzhinsky passed the note back with the answer: “Around 1,500.” Lenin read it, put an “X” beside Dzerzhinsky’s answer, which he ordinarily did to indicate that he had read the reply, and passed the slip of paper back. Misunderstanding, the Cheka chieftain quietly left the room—and Lenin learned the next day, to his shock, that all fifteen hundred had been shot.31 Assuming the veracity of the story, even if Lenin hadn’t meant for such a thing to happen, he can hardly be absolved from contributing to the culture in which it could take place.
Lenin’s role in creating the culture of the Red Terror can be seen by his actions in the wake of the assassination, by a Socialist Revolutionary, of the Bolshevik official V. Volodarsky in June 1918. The ruling body on the scene, the Petrograd Committee of the Communist Party, responded with relative moderation. Alexander Rabinowitch notes that the killing of the popular Bolshevik leader “shocked most workers in neighboring factories and increased the danger of mob violence.” Some prominent Party activists “demanded quick vengeance in the form of immediate mass terror for the murder of their leader,” and others “formally registered concern about intensified activity by enemies of Soviet power and expressed a desire to settle scores with them”—some expressing a determination that “revolutionary leaders would not be cut down, one at a time.” But the majority opinion within the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet, Rabinowitch tells us, “was that lynch justice should be opposed.” The top Bolshevik in Petrograd, Gregory Zinoviev, explained that “we opposed this [vindictive] mood . . . we insisted that there be no excesses.”32 In response, Lenin wrote:
Comrade Zinoviev! Only today did we hear in the Central Committee that the Petrograd workers wanted to reply to Volodarsky’s murder by mass terror, and that you (not you personally, but members of the Petrograd Central Committee) restrained them. I emphatically protest! We are compromising ourselves: even in resolutions of the Soviet we threaten mass terror, and when it comes to action, we obstruct the absolutely correct revolutionary initiative of the masses. This is in-ad-miss-ible! The terrorists will take us for milksops. The time is ultra-martial. It is necessary to encourage the energy and mass-character of the terror against the counter-revolutionaries, and especially so in Petrograd, whose example is decisive. Greetings. Lenin.33
Although Zinoviev now became an extreme advocate for Red Terror, he continued to be restrained by other leading comrades—including Petrograd Cheka head Moisei Uritsky plus Nikolai Krestinsky and Elena Stasova (both Bolsheviks since 1903 and prominent in leadership circles), as well as Marxist scholar and trade union leader David Riazanov.34 But the tide was definitely flowing the other way—particularly after a growing number of violent rebellions combined with additional assassinations and attempted assassinations such as the killing of the moderate Chekist Uritsky, the failed attempt on Zinoviev, and the almost fatal wounding of Lenin—all on August 30, 1918.
Gregory Zinoviev’s reputation—including among his comrades—became entwined with some of the worst abuses. “His nerve was badly shaken by the murders of his friends Volodarsky and Uritsky last year,” reported on-the-scene journalist Arthur Ransome in 1919, “and he is said to have lost his head after the attack on Lenin, to whom he was extremely devoted. I have heard many Communists attribute to this fact the excesses which followed that event in Petrograd.”35
The violence against Uritsky and Lenin has commonly been seen as the spark that ignited the explosion, yet Rabinowitch insists that “undeclared Red Terror in all its forms had been underway in Moscow and other Russian cities for months.” Earlier in August 1918, for example, Lenin had written to comrades overseeing work in the province of Penza, in which a peasant rebellion was taking place:
Comrades! The uprising of the five kulak districts should be mercilessly suppressed. The interests of the entire revolution require this, because now “the last decisive battle” with the kulaks is underway everywhere. One must give an example.
Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts [one verst = one kilometer] around, the people will see and tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks.
Telegram receipt and implementation.
Yours, Lenin
P.S. Find some truly hard people.36
At the same time, Rabinowitch acknowledges, “it is certainly true that in the former capital the murder of Uritsky, coupled with the failed attempt on Lenin’s life, unleashed a wave of arrests and an orgy of politically motivated seizures of hostages and shootings by the Cheka, district security agencies, and worker and soldier bands that far exceeded anything that had come before, even in Moscow.” Samuel Farber comments that while Lenin “did not stand for stupidities [committed by Chekists] or for defense of torture,” and although “he often went to considerable lengths to stop Cheka excesses in individual cases,” he was “equally likely to criticize other Bolsheviks leaders for not being sufficiently zealous in the pursuit of the Red Terror.” He adds that “in February 1920, Lenin instructed the Cheka to direct ‘revolutionary coercion’ against the ‘wavering and unstable elements among the masses themselves.’”37
Alexander Berkman, the Russian-American anarchist deported to Soviet Russia during the infamous US Palmer Raids and “Red Scare” in 1919–20, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution whose ardor quickly cooled. He described the plight of a working-class family headed by his friend Kolya, a tailor, before the man’s disappearance: “His wife is ill, the children neglected, dirty, hungry.” In his diary covering the year 1920, he explains what happened to Kolya:
The workers of the clothing factory where my friend is employed have of late been very discontented. Their main complaint concerns the arbitrary methods of the yatcheika, the little group of Communists within every Soviet institution. Friction between them and the shop committee resulted in the arrest of the latter. In protest, the workers declared a strike. Three delegates were sent to the Cheka with the request to release the prisoners, but the men disappeared and Kolya was among them. “They call the strikers counter-revolutionists,” Kolya’s sister said. “They have made a list of the ‘opposition’ in the shop, and everyday someone is missing.”38
Intimidation, arrests, and imprisonment were certainly part of the Red Terror. But executions became the essential element. As early as 1918, in the first phase of the Terror, there were 6,300 official executions (including 2,431 charged with participating in open revolts), mostly in the latter part of that year. In 1921, as the official phase of Red Terror was coming to an end, the Soviet authorities documented that the Cheka had executed slightly more than 12,700 people from 1917 to 1920—which is generally seen as a gross underestimate. According to a 1971 study, Arno Mayer tells us, “it was estimated that 200,000 had been executed between 1917 and 1923, while an additional 300,000 to 400,000 were said to either have died in prisons and [prison] camps or been killed in the suppression of peasant revolts, industrial strikes, and military mutinies.” Different estimates of total deaths between these two extremes place the numbers at 50,000 and 140,000. “All these estimates,” notes Mayer, “are a mixture of incomplete or flawed data and informed conjectures.”39
Whatever the exact figures, executions on this scale are horrific. Among those who reacted most eloquently was the Left SR Maria Spiridonova, who wrote an open letter to the Bolsheviks from prison. “Your party had great tasks and began them finely,” she recalled. “The October Revolution, in which we marched side by side, was bound to conquer, because its foundations and watchwords were rooted in historical reality and were solidly supported by all the working masses.” But by November of 1918 this had all changed: “In the name of the proletariat you have wiped out all the moral achievements of our Revolution. Things that cry aloud to Heaven have been done by the provincial Chekas, by the All-Russian Cheka. A blood-thirsty mockery of the souls and bodies of men, torture and treachery, and then—murder, murder without end, done without inquiry, on denunciation only, without waiting for any proof of guilt.” Two years later, after surveying the scene with clearer eyes than many sympathizers or critics, Bertrand Russell confirmed: “It is, of course, evident that in these measures the Bolsheviks have been compelled to travel a long way from the ideals which originally inspired the revolution.”40
Making sense of this detour from the original revolutionary ideals is often done by blaming Lenin’s allegedly flawed ideas or personality. Whatever one thinks of that personality and those ideas, however, it is more reasonable to give attention to the larger context. This is the approach of Mayer, who points out that taking account of the White Terror (a matter we will take note of shortly) requires doubling the total casualty figures. He goes on to point out that this period involved a rising crescendo of violence throughout Europe, as the First World War destroyed between ten and thirteen million people, with almost twice that number wounded (not to mention millions more who were traumatized). “By 1917, Russia had suffered about three million casualties, nearly one quarter of its fighting forces,” he notes. “There followed the millions of direct and indirect casualties of the civil and foreign war of the Revolution, many of them due to disease furthered by inadequate provisions and medical services. Indeed, the Red and White leaders fought the civil war to the death, coûte que coûte [whatever the cost], as Europe seemed once again to be entering a ‘valley of the shadow of death.’”41
The Furies
Mayer has expressed the tragedy of the Bolshevik revolution more poignantly than most. His apt comment that of all the parties on the scene in 1917, “the Bolshevik party was by far the best organized and disciplined, as well as the most adaptable,” is balanced by his observation that “the Bolshevik project was an inconstant amalgam of ideology and circumstance, of intention and improvisation, of necessity and choice, of fate and chance.” He emphasizes that “the way the Bolsheviks took power was consistent with their credo of direct and defiant action, and their authoritarian rule following Red October was bound to provoke resistances which they were, of course, determined to counter and repress.” We have seen that their initial intention was to help lead the way to socialist revolution, anticipating partnership with other political forces on the working-class and peasant left prepared to follow this course—though some (certainly Lenin) were prepared to go it alone if need be. The fact remains, however, that Lenin’s Bolsheviks were not prepared (perhaps no party could have been prepared) for the tidal waves that would hit them. As Mayer puts it, “Just as they were unprepared for the enormity of the crisis, so they were caught unawares by its Furies, which they were not alone to quicken.”42
George Leggett’s important survey of the Cheka’s structure and Red Terror atrocities reinforces Mayer’s contextualization:
The summer and autumn of 1918 saw a build-up of economic and military pressures on the Soviet state. Internally it had to contend with hunger in the cities, with scores of peasant rebellions provoked by extortionate grain-requisitioning campaigns, and with a series of armed uprisings such as that of the LSRs in Moscow and Savinkov insurrections. Externally it found itself entangled in the escalating Civil War. The Denikin advance from the Caucasus had been stemmed, but the conflict with the formidable Czechoslovak Corps had exposed the Soviet eastern flank, where a further threat was signaled by the proclamation of Admiral Kolchak as Supreme Ruler on 18 November. Meanwhile the Allied landing in Archangel on 2 August inaugurated the era of foreign intervention, accompanied by Entente blockade of Soviet territory, whilst the collapse of the Central Powers resulted in the emergence of Hetman Skoropadkii’s anti-Communist government in the Ukraine, succeeded in December by Petliura’s nationalist regime.43
While insisting that “terror was implicit in Bolshevism from the start” (whatever that might mean—a matter to be explored later in this study), Leggett acknowledges that Allied intervention, by Britain, the United States, France, and other capitalist powers, “may have been responsible for exacerbating and prolonging the terror, by stoking the Civil War and investing it with the aura of ‘capitalist encirclement.’”44
If it is not the case that “terror was implicit in Bolshevism from the start,” the question still pushes itself forward regarding whether the Bolsheviks had to shoot to kill rather than imprison those seeking to overturn their revolution. The murder of the tsar and his family (mirroring what happened to the royal family during the French Revolution), while eliminating a rallying point for counterrevolutionaries, certainly helped to intensify the conflict. The historical parallel suggests that rage at former oppressors was an essential part of the equation, and that deep and real class hatred helped to drive the conflicts on both sides. Popular rage over the murder of Soviet leaders and the attempt on Lenin’s life was also part of the equation.
Christopher Read, whose account of the Bolshevik regime hardly shies away from severe criticism, provides reinforcement for the reciprocal aspect of the unleashed Furies to which Mayer refers: “If the White Terror is anything to go by, the supporters of the old regime could be equally, perhaps even more, murderous. After all, they were the first to embark on mass anti-
Semitic pogroms that, according to some accounts, cost the lives of 115,000 Jews in the Ukraine in 1919 alone. Compared with indiscriminate murder on this scale by a much smaller force, the actions on the Red side, although cruel, excessive and unjustifiable, appear, at least, to have been subjected to some serious attempts at control.”45
This aspect of the Terror (both Red and White) comes through, as well, in the memoir of Hans Kohn. In his later years an academic authority in the United States on nationalism, as a young Austro-Hungarian soldier, Kohn was captured during the First World War by the tsar’s military forces and then, as a prisoner of war, he witnessed the carnage of the Russian Civil War. Musing that “even the restraints of international agreements valid in war do not prevail in times of bitter revolutionary and counter-revolutionary conflicts when both sides are locked in a fanatical life-and-death struggle,” Kohn wrote: “Compromise is out of the question and any act, no matter how barbaric, is permissible.” He continues:
The “Red” terror during the Russian civil war was frightening, yet the “White” terror, with its disregard for human values, was even more savage and more depressing because it was not motivated by even the dedication to a universal cause that moved the Bolsheviks. Many people shuddered at the execution of the Tsar’s family; but few of them cared about the countless other victims on both sides. Looking back on history, I am inclined to believe that this double standard has been the general rule. The brutalities of the country people in the Peasants’ Wars [of the 1500s] could be explained by their long suffering and ignorance; their even more brutal repression by their masters was even more revolting because this cruelty was deliberate and was undertaken in the name of order, civilization, and religion. The same was the case when ruling classes suppressed colonial uprisings, or when the government of [Adolph] Thiers savagely put down the Paris Commune [of 1871]. The ruling classes have never attributed human dignity to peoples in revolt, nor did they ever for a moment believe that the life of one of the subject people could be equal to the life of one of their own class or race.46
Kohn “witnessed much of this inhumanity” at close range in Siberia, where he was imprisoned, and where White armies were operating under the command of Admiral Kolchak, “an ostensibly honorable and capable officer.” The dominant element among these forces, he observed, were “old-fashioned reactionaries who did not understand the need for change, much less a social revolution, and wished to restore the vast estates seized by the Bolsheviks to their former owners, and to reinstate Russian domination over its subject peoples.” Kohn concluded: “The desperate effort to restore a discredited ancien regime, the refusal to see its villainies and follies, and to grant the Russian masses’ longing for equality and dignity, doomed the ‘White’ armies in spite of their initial great advantages.”47
The rationale for the Red Terror was—presumably—to counter and defeat the reactionary terror of the Whites, and also of opponents on the left, such as the Right SRs (and ex-SR adventurers such as Savinkov), who were prepared to use violence against the supporters of the Bolshevik revolution. An official proclamation in September 1918, justifying the Terror in the wake of the Right SR assassination of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin, proclaimed, “There must be an end to laxity and weakness. All Right Socialist Revolutionaries known to the Soviets must be immediately arrested. A considerable number of hostages must be taken among the bourgeoisie and the officers. Mass shooting must be applied upon the least attempts at resistance or the least movement in the midst of the White Guards.”48 Drawing a military analogy, Trotsky explained in his classic defense of the Red Terror:
Terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the scene of operation. Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works the same way: it kills individuals and intimidates thousands. . . .
“But, in that case, in what do your tactics differ from the tactics of Tsarism?” we are asked by the high priests of Liberalism . . .
The terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat. The gendarmerie of Tsarism throttled the workers who were fighting for a Socialist order. Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist order. Do you grasp this . . . distinction? Yes? For us Communists it is quite sufficient.49
Yet what actually unfolded was far from being sociologically surgical or ideologically neat. As so often happens in violent contexts such as that of 1917–21, things went whirling far beyond such boundaries, unleashing a terrible inhumanity in the name of defending the revolution. Nowhere is this as clear as with the functioning of the Extraordinary Commissions to which Trotsky refers—in Russian Chrezvychainaia Komissiia, whose initials, C. K., would be pronounced “Cheka.” (If one adds that it is “All-Russian” or Vserossiiiskaia, it becomes “Vecheka.”) Formed at Lenin’s initiative in 1918, “for Combating Counter-Revolution, Sabotage, and Misconduct in Office,” it ballooned under Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s capable leadership from several hundred to close to forty thousand. Winston Churchill’s cousin, the sculptress Clare Sheridan, who had accepted an offer by Kamenev to sculpt likenesses of various Bolshevik leaders, vividly recalled Dzerzhinsky: “His eyes certainly looked as if they were bathed in tears of eternal sorrow, but his mouth smiled an indulgent kindness.” When she commented on his ability to sit so still while posing for her, he commented that “one learns patience and calm in prison,” adding—when asked—that he had spent “a quarter of my life, 11 years” in prison. Sheridan commented: “Obviously it is not the abstract desire for power or for a political career that has made revolutionaries of such men, but fanatical conviction of the wrongs to be righted for the cause of humanity and national progress.” This finds corroboration from a variety of knowledgeable sources. “Dzerzhinsky’s personal integrity has never been in question; his whole adult life was dedicated to the cause of proletarian revolution, and no petty considerations or egoistic ambitions sullied his moral purity,” writes the unrelentingly critical chronicler George Leggett. “Any crimes perpetrated on his orders, such as the shooting of hundreds of hostages, were committed ‘for the good of the cause.’”50
Isaac Deutscher tells us that the Cheka and its incorruptible leader were seen as the “sword of the revolution,” although, as we will see, he may overstate things somewhat in writing that “every Bolshevik had been proud to assist it in work directed against the revolution’s enemies.” Indeed, Dzerzhinsky himself had been heard to comment that “only saints or scoundrels” had the character to do the kind of work the Cheka did. This comes through in two reports by one of his lieutenants, Martyn Ivanovich Latsis. On the one hand: “However honorable the man, and however crystal-pure his heart, work in the Extraordinary Commissions, vested as it is with almost unlimited power and conducted in conditions deeply affecting the nervous system, leaves its mark.” On the other hand: “Naturally such a widely ramified apparatus, needing tens of thousands of personnel, could not ensure their universal, unfailing honesty. Often unworthy elements, sometimes even counter-revolutionaries, attached themselves to the Vecheka, some for motives of personal gain.”51
Even in the case of the most incorruptible of Chekists—as noted in regard to Dzerzhinsky—terrible mistakes and indefensible inhumanity are possible. There is ample documentation to demonstrate that this was even more the case with other Chekists.
The extreme violence of the Red Terror went beyond killing. This comes through in a story told by the left-leaning George Seldes in his articles published for the United Press and the Chicago Tribune. While covering Europe during and after the First World War, he was on the scene in Russia in the early 1920s—only to be expelled with several other reporters in 1923 for violating draconian Soviet censorship. His remarkable 1929 classic You Can’t Print That! contains a dozen chapters (out of twenty-six) on Russia; aside from a fascinating and positive interview with Lenin, his account is unrelenting in its scathing denunciation of bureaucracy and repression under the Bolshevik regime. He concludes this section of the book with a chapter entitled “The Moral Regeneration of Russia,” in which he shares the views of Marie Morozova (1890–1933), the daughter of Savva Morozov, the left-leaning capitalist who had contributed so much to cultural, philanthropic, and revolutionary causes before his death in 1905. “She was rich, beautiful, cultured, democratic,” Seldes wrote, noting as well that “some called her Santa Maria.” Steeped in the cultural reflections of Pushkin, Chekov, and Tolstoy, and deeply stirred by the dynamism and promise of the recent and ongoing insurgencies, she expressed her thoughts to him, in the early 1920s, on the importance of Russia’s revolution:
In the old Russia there was too much wealth for too few persons, too much debauchery, too much disgust with life, too much listlessness, too much seeking after new sensations, too much trying to find something to make life less boring, more worth living. . . .
In the new Russia there is the struggle to get a piece of bread, true, but it keeps all Russia active, active, awake, alive. It is a battle for life . . . and in time of battle one does not get moody or degenerate, one does not commit suicide out of boredom, out of disgust with life—the result of reading a morbid novel . . . no, one girds himself to the attack. The mind clears . . . the body exerts all its strength . . . moral inspiration comes for victory. . . .
That is the new Russia.
Once there was too much time to kill . . . leisure perverted life. Now there is a tremendous energy, seeking not artistic or noble expression as yet, but the daily bitter black bread. For love and for friendship and for social intercourse, for the amenities of civilized existence, for poetry and art there is today less time and less passion. But that too will come in time. Thank God we have broken with the old Russia. This is the day of moral regeneration.52
But countless innocents were swept up in the mad violence of the Red Terror, including supporters of the revolution, Maria Morozov among them. “She was charged with visiting the British mission headquarters and with being too friendly with foreigners,” Seldes reported. She had been arrested, jailed, tortured. “When we saw her again, it was in a sanitarium. She had gone mad.”53
Of course, it was not simply rich people who were targeted—and killing, of course, was definitely central to the Terror. Olga Chernov gives this account from Moscow in the period immediately after the assassination of the Chekist Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin:
The Cheka drew up a list on the following day: fifty people, chosen quite at random, were executed that same night.
Many of our comrades were among the victims: Boris Averkieff—the only son of an old Socialist exiled to Siberia during the Tsar’s regime; the two Gousseffs, and Zenaide Mourachkina, a mistress in a communal school. They had been arrested on quite unimportant charges, and were about to be released when this dreadful affair happened.
The other names meant nothing to me, but were quite well known to our host’s wife. She was almost weeping as she read down the list of those executed: “That one was a doctor, he used to look after my kids. Such a nice young fellow he was! Let me see, Axeljeff—oh, yes, he was one of the biggest fishmongers here, I knew him quite well. Holy Mother of God, would you believe it? Here’s the name of their school master—the kids used to love him, he was always the most popular man in the school. Here’s another one, I knew him too. And that man was my chemist [pharmacist], I’m sure he never did anyone any harm. May the Lord have mercy on them, they’re all innocent!”
The woman sobbed and went on reading the names. . . . This was a kind of infernal lottery in which the winners were picked out by chance.54
An eyewitness later described how the doomed were brought to a ravine in trucks at night and stripped naked—“some were proud and undressed themselves, but the others didn’t budge and just stood there, having their clothes torn off them shred by shred”—after which they were blindfolded, roped together in a straight line, and shot. Such scenes, while hardly constant, were not uncommon.55
Ripples from such realities could be felt, under the surface in the Soviet Republic, long after the end of the Red Terror. Eugene Lyons, at the time a left-leaning journalist who covered the Soviet Union for the United Press in the late 1920s and early 1930s, describes getting together with two friends—now “humdrum” functionaries in the regime—who were once Chekists. Periodically they felt a compulsion to get together, get very drunk, and relive with each other the horrors of the “good old days.” The grotesque account is worth quoting at length:
“Remember?” Lyova exulted. “I strangled them with these bare hands to save bullets! My fingers are like iron pincers. Here, feel them Gene. . . .”
“Do I remember!” Pyotr snorted. “And the time we lined up five of them and finished them off with one bullet . . . fell neatly, like pushing over a row of tin soldiers, do, re, mi, fa . . .”
In his sober incarnation as a factory director, Pytor’s hands trembled and he seemed a little scatter-brained. But vodka had a way of steadying his nerves and his brain. . . .
“After the killing of our chief, Lavrov,” he said, “we ordered the shooting of every tenth prisoner to put the fear of the Cheka in their rotten hearts. Lyova was with me—weren’t you Lyova?—and we lined them up single file and counted—eight, nine, you . . . eight, nine, and you. . . . That was a girl, a Jewess. ‘But Isaak Lasarovich,’ she wailed, ‘you wouldn’t shoot me, would you? We were in school together, you kissed me once.’ ‘You’re a goddam boorzhooyi now,’ says Isaak. [The word is commonly spelled burzhui—a Russified variant of the word “bourgeois.”] But he would have spared her if he wasn’t afraid of being soft-hearted in our presence. It was very funny.”56
Noting that Lyova and Pytor “could scarcely have been more than twenty when they served together in the Cheka of their city,” Lyons reflected that “it was hard to imagine them as dictators of a whole region,” but “when they were far gone with liquor I could no longer doubt their melodramatic past. . . . There were punitive expeditions to peasant villages which had harbored White fugitives, when every man, woman and child was slaughtered and the whole village set on fire.” Lyons also notes the similar inhumanity practiced by the White Armies. “There were fearful atrocities against the Reds, and a fearful vengeance wreaked against the next batch of boorzhooyi that came to hand,” he writes, adding that “once the Petliurists [anti-Bolshevik nationalists of the Ukraine] came and slit a lot of Jewish throats,” and quoting his friend Lyova: “They made our people dig their own graves and climb in and they made their comrades cover them over with earth and trample on the graves.” The ex-Chekist concluded: “But we knew as many amusing tricks as they did. And when there were not enough bullets, I strangled them with my own hands. Remember Petya?”57 Lyons’s understanding of these drunken memory-fests is worth considering:
As they talked I became sharply conscious of the bloody nightmare of remembrance under the humdrum surface of Soviet life. Pytor, Lyova, thousands like them, old Chekists, guerrilla fighters, G.P.U. executioners, carried a staggering burden of memories. They were pinned under the weight, hostages of their past. They dared not question the rightness of what they had done and suffered. Every prompting of conscience was an awesome threat to their peace of mind, their very sanity. To doubt for a moment the revolutionary sanctions of their cruelties—would turn them into fiends in their own eyes. . . . To admit the dignity and sanctity of life would have meant spiritual suicide for these men—it would have turned their heroism into a sordid crime. . . . They were prisoners of their own memories and could not even dream of escape.58
The destructive impact of Cheka activities on the psychological-emotional lives of Chekists was noted, as it was happening, by Bukharin: “Do not let us forget how many of them [Chekists] who remain are nervous wrecks and sometimes hopelessly ill. For their work was such torture, demanding such enormous concentration, it was so hellish, that it called for truly iron character.”59
That many implementing the Red Terror were themselves, in a profound sense, victims of their own inhumanity does not somehow absolve them from the inhumanity to which they subjected so many dozens, hundreds, and thousands of innocents. Nor can an understanding of the larger contexts of violence and inhumanity that generated the Furies of the Red Terror dilute the horrific things that were done to people in its name. At the same time, a keen and honest sense of the horrors does not allow us to turn away from trying to understand how and why these things happened, what they meant, and what they did not mean.
“Truly we cannot hide from ourselves the fact that in some places the word commissar has become a swear word,” Zinoviev noted in an early 1919 speech to comrades. “A man in a leather jacket [i.e., a Chekist] has become hateful, as they now say in Perm. To hide this would be laughable. We must face the truth.” Candor about such realities permeates early Soviet literature: the devastating Red Cavalry stories of Isaac Babel; Victor Serge’s inspiring yet horrifying Conquered City; the grim account of inhumanity in the service of idealism in Alexander Tarasov-Rodionov’s Chocolate; Fydor Gladkov’s Cement—in which (in its earliest version) an up-and-coming Red bureaucrat brutally rapes and thereby destroys an idealistic young female Communist; Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, which graphically relates peasant sufferings at the hands of Communists, showing how—as Georg Lukács puts it—“some subjectively outstanding, valuable human beings are destroyed.”60
Such works, written by people who embraced the Bolshevik revolution, suggest the importance of coming to terms with what happened as best we can. In fact, aspects of these works of art suggest that—contrary to much of what Lenin and Trotsky and others argued—the Red Terror may not have been the only effective way, or the most effective way, of defending the Revolution from the vicious assaults. Regarding the persecution of opposition parties on the left, Samuel Farber comments that “Lenin seems to have been only episodically interested in distinguishing among them . . . on their willingness to be a loyal opposition as opposed to a subversive force aiding the counter-revolution.” He imagines “what would have happened if the Bolsheviks had adopted a policy of ‘those who are not our active enemies are our friends’” instead of “what seemed to have been Lenin’s War Communist policy of ‘he who is not with us, is against us.’ Such a policy would have been especially welcome at the time of growing isolation and loss of support for the Bolsheviks even before the Civil War broke out in mid-1918. In any case, it may well be that the Red Terror strengthened rather than weakened the determination and even obstinacy of many enemies.”61 In developing this point, Farber quotes from Adam Ulam who—as he says—is “no friend of the Left” but who makes a point worth considering:
It is arguable that insurgency and bitterness against Communist rule grew in fact in the wake of executions and other inhumanities perpetrated by the Cheka and other authorities, and that many elements, at first friendly or lukewarm in their opposition to the Bolshevik power, became its fanatical enemies because of terror. One does not have to consult White propaganda to reach that conclusion. The most famous novel of the Civil War written by a Communist eyewitness, Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, presents an instructive take on how it was mostly through Bolshevik atrocities that the rank-and-file apolitical Don Cossack, like the hero of the novel, Gregory Melenkov, was turned into an anti-Bolshevik fighter. Far from being a regrettable necessity, the extent of the Bolshevik terror was one of the factors that made their victory in the Civil War more difficult.62
It was hardly the case that there was agreement among the Bolsheviks that the Red Terror was a necessity. Leggett acknowledges:
Many idealistic Communists were roused to vehement moral indignation by the cruel and arbitrary character of the Red Terror, and by the spectacle of its wanton application by Chekists, many of whom were criminals and sadists. A ground swell of criticism of the Vecheka manifested itself at Party meetings and in the official Communist press, to the point of demanding that the extra-judicial authority of the Vecheka be quashed and replaced by a proper process of law in open court.63
In 1919, resisting growing pressures within the Sovnarkom and party leadership to abolish the Cheka altogether and shift its functions to a reorganized Commissariat for Justice, Lenin won support instead for placing a member of the politburo on the Vecheka Collegium with the right to veto. “Bukharin, who had been campaigning for restriction of the Vecheka’s power to execute its prisoners, was nominated for this duty,” writes Leggett. “Lenin commented: ‘Let him go there himself, and let him try to keep the terror within limits, if it is possible. We shall be very glad if he succeeds.’”64
Lenin weighed in decisively about not tolerating grotesque Cheka abuses that had been reported. For example, there is this early 1919 telegram that he wrote in his position as chair of the Sovnarkom, to Zinoviev:
According to Lunacharsky, Afanasiev, Kromilitsyn, and other members of the Detskoe Selo Cheka have been charged with drunkenness, rape, and other similar crimes. I demand that all the accused be arrested, that no one be released, and the names of all the special investigators be sent to me, because if those guilty are not exposed and shot in a case of this kind, then unheard-of shame will fall on the Petrograd Council of Commissars. Arrest Afansasiev.65
According to Leggett’s very critical account of the Cheka, “credit must be given . . . to Dzerzhinsky’s early and apparently unsolicited initiative for reform. In a significant letter of 13 January 1921, addressed to the Party’s Central Committee, Dzerzhinsky set out the Vecheka’s views and actions with regard to restriction of the death penalty, contraction of the Vecheka’s punitive functions, and the need for systematization of judicial machinery, now that the Civil War was over.” This was preceded by a December 24, 1920, order from his office to all Provincial Chekas “forbidding executions without its express sanction, except in cases of open insurrection.”66
Bolshevik stalwart Lev Kamenev, beginning in 1919, proved one of the most consistent critics of the Cheka’s policies during the Red Terror. He was an early advocate for dismantling its power, which took things much further than Dzerzhinsky was inclined to go, but by the end of the Civil War, Lenin was also moving in that direction. “The Vecheka objected to the proposed transfer of its investigative machinery and regarded as premature the separation of political cases from those of major economic damage to the state or of misuse of authority,” according to Leggett. “Lenin, however, was determined to reform the Vecheka. In reply to Kamenev he wrote, on 29 November [1921]: ‘Comrade Kamenev! My position is closer to yours than to Dzerzhinsky’s. I advise you not to give way, and to raise [the issue] in the Politburo. Then we shall make a stand for the very maximum. In addition, we shall make the NKIu [People’s Commissariat for Justice] responsible for any failure to report to the Politburo (or Sovnarkom) on the Vecheka’s defects and errors.”67
The fact that by 1921 the Bolsheviks were backing away from the Red Terror, and all of the murderous Furies that this policy had unleashed, does not conjure away the murderous violence and extreme, systematic violations of human rights that resulted from the Terror. Lethal ripples and appalling aftereffects would be felt in Soviet political culture for years to come. The fact remains that they did back away. But more than recognizing this, it is necessary, if we wish to understand what happened, to return to the point Arno Mayer made in his study—that the Bolsheviks “were not alone to quicken” the Furies. We must consider, as well, Hans Kohn’s suggestion that, when all was said and done, the Whites were worse than the Reds. Otherwise, we cannot explain the outcome—Red victory.
Once again, we can gain important insights if we turn to that account of the Right Socialist Revolutionary who was absolutely hostile to the Bolshevik regime, Olga Chernov. She and her family (separated from her husband Victor, who was functioning underground) struggled to avoid arrest as they made their way to the city of Samara—which they saw as a progressive, democratic, and populist haven. In May 1918, Czechoslovak prisoners of war—making their way (with Bolshevik support) along the Trans-Siberian railway toward their homeland—rose in rebellion and linked up with anti-Bolshevik forces, including Kadets, Right SRs, and the prominent old revolutionary N. V. Chiakovsky of the Popular Socialist Party. Chiakovsky was proclaimed the head of a new Russian government with a mildly socialist coloration, and a People’s Army was formed—all with support from Allied military forces and funding from Britain, France, the United States, and other foreign powers. Also reinforcing this anti-Bolshevik center in the Siberian north were Russian military forces associated with Admiral Alexander V. Kolchak and others of more conservative orientation.68
As Olga Chernov and her family neared their destination, strange and unexpected developments disoriented them as the People’s Army appeared to be swept aside by pro-Bolshevik forces. She was soon astonished to reunite with a young peasant woman, Katia, who in earlier days had become part of the SR milieu, but who now was a member of the Communist Party with “all the ardent faith of a new convert.” Still harboring feelings of warm friendship, Katia hardly wanted to fight with her old mentor but rather to convert her. “If I had any doubts about the necessity of civil war they are all dispelled after having seen the country delivered from the power of the Whites,” Katia said. Chernov replied: “What do you mean? The People’s Army has nothing to do with the White Army.” To which Katia responded: “That’s what you think. But you’re badly mistaken. Of course the soldiers aren’t Whites, but their leaders, their officers, are all fighting to restore the old regime. Didn’t you know that?” She added: “The peasants who used to hate us and who sent their sons to fight against the Red Army have now come back to our side. Their new masters want to give the land back to landed proprietors and have reinstituted corporal punishment for the peasants.”69
At first Chernov refused to believe her friend, accusing her of spouting “political propaganda.” But she was unaware of the most recent developments. Sir Alfred Knox, British military attaché to Russia and an advisor to Admiral Kolchak, was of the opinion that Victor Chernov and other Socialist Revolutionaries were undesirables who deserved to be hanged, and he, along with other Allied personnel, felt little regret when Kolchak’s force overthrew the socialist-tainted government and proclaimed Kolchak himself Supreme Ruler of Russia. “Anxious to crush all socialists of whatever stamp,” as W. Bruce Lincoln notes, Kolchak condoned flogging prisoners with iron rods, and he also executed former members of the Constituent Assembly who had rebelled against his policies before unwisely putting themselves in his care. “We are verging on the death of human civilization and its culture,” protested forthright anti-Bolsheviks unable to stomach his policies. “The Kolchak regime’s use of terroristic methods to enforce its policies, including floggings, pogroms and mass executions,” as historian Alan Wood puts it, did little to win popular support.70
Finally realizing the truth of Katia’s account, Chernov had little with which to counter her young friend’s excited remarks:
I’ve seen a gang of Whites going through a village and beating all the peasants. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, I tell you! Do you imagine that peasants who have been whipped would not want to join our ranks? If you had seen all that I’ve seen you’d be with us. . . .
They want to re-establish the whole old regime, even the Tsar. But we are invincible. The peasants will never support them when they find they want to take away their land. . . .
You see what energy and enthusiasm there is in our ranks! We are all brothers and we are going to change the whole of life; we are going to build an earthly paradise for everyone who will march with us. And you and the best of your comrades will belong to our Party. That is my dream!71
Authoritarian Theorizations
These developments had an impact on Bolshevik theory. Authoritarian elements were introduced that conflicted with the radical-democratic elements that had been characteristic of Bolshevik thought up to 1918. Kamenev, for example, sweepingly generalized the necessity of “the harsh features of a dictatorship: a Red Army, a terrorist suppression of the exploiters and their allies, the limitation of political liberty, becomes inevitable if the proletariat does not wish to give up without a fight the power it has won.” Trotsky went further: “Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.” Lenin’s pronouncements in this period assumed a similarly harsh and authoritarian complexion. An example of his extremely sharp formulations (formulations contributing to an atmosphere that would have dire consequences) can be found as early as July 1918, when in open debate with Left SR leader Maria Spiridonova, he snapped: “If there are Left SRs like the previous orator, who say . . . ‘we can’t work with the Bolsheviks, we are leaving,’ we will not regret that for a minute. Socialists who abandon us at such a [critical] time . . . are enemies of the people.”72
Before critically examining the authoritarian theoretical justifications further, it is worth considering a very influential “defense” of them provided by many academics and others who see such things as representing what scholar George Leggett terms “the very nature of Leninism.” Leggett provides a succinct statement of this commonly held view: “It is axiomatic that, once Lenin had seized power for the avowed purpose of single-party rule despite that party’s numerical inferiority and in the face of opposition from every quarter, he was committed—whether he wanted it or not (but in fact he did want it, and said so)—to a regime of political terror in which some apparatus was required to implement that terror.”73
Leggett’s (and others’) assertions are sharply challenged by much evidence that he himself presents—much of which we have just reviewed: many prominent “Leninists” (including such lieutenants as Olminsky, Bukharin, and Kamenev, not to mention—at times—Cheka head Dzerzhinsky, and certainly Lenin himself) pushed against the alleged “nature of Leninism” that Leggett posits. We have already noted (and, I believe, amply documented the truth of) C. L. R. James’s classic assertion: “The theory and practice of the vanguard party, of the one-party state, is not (repeat not) the central doctrine of Leninism. It is not the central doctrine, it is not even a special doctrine.” That such things came to be seen as “Leninist” orthodoxy, well after the fact, is another matter. “It was overwhelmingly the force of circumstance which obliged the Bolsheviks to retreat so far from their goals,” argues John Rees. “They travelled this route in opposition to their own theory—no matter what rhetorical justifications were given at the time.”74 Central to the actual “Leninist” orientation of Lenin and his comrades over the course of decades, and certainly in the period leading up to the Bolshevik revolution, was the perspective that he articulated, for example, in 1915:
The proletariat cannot be victorious except through democracy, i.e., by giving full effect to democracy and by linking with each step of its struggle democratic demands formulated in the most resolute terms. . . . We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary programme and tactics on all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular election of officials, equal rights for women, the self-determination of nations, etc. While capitalism exists, these demands—all of them—can only be accomplished as an exception, and even then in an incomplete and distorted form. Basing ourselves on the democracy already achieved, and exposing its incompleteness under capitalism, we demand the overthrow of capitalism, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, as a necessary basis both for the abolition of the poverty of the masses and for the complete and all-round institution of all democratic reforms. Some of these reforms will be started before the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, others in the course of that overthrow, and still others after it. The social revolution is not a single battle, but a period covering a series of battles over all sorts of problems of economic and democratic reform, which are consummated only by the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It is for the sake of this final aim that we must formulate every one of our democratic demands in a consistently revolutionary way. It is quite conceivable that the workers of some particular country will overthrow the bourgeoisie before even a single fundamental democratic reform has been fully achieved. It is, however, quite inconceivable that the proletariat, as a historical class, will be able to defeat the bourgeoisie, unless it is prepared for that by being educated in the spirit of the most consistent and resolutely revolutionary democracy.75
The fact remains that Lenin’s formulations, and those of other comrades, increasingly took on an authoritarian cast in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution. In 1917, the essence of the dictatorship of the proletariat for Lenin and his comrades, as we have seen, was to be all power to such Soviets as these. According to Marcel Liebman, “Lenin never depicted what he considered to be a [civil war] necessity as being a virtue or as a really lasting system. On the contrary, some of his remarks—incidental, certainly—allow us to assume that the existence of a plurality of parties accorded better with his political plans.” Yet by the summer of 1919, Lenin was matter-of-factly explaining that “the dictatorship of the working class is being implemented by the Bolshevik party,” and in the following year Kamenev commented in remarks to the Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party that “the Communist Party is the government of Russia. The country is ruled by 600,000 party members.” In his 1921 volume of reportage The Crisis in Russia, Arthur Ransome—by no means unsympathetic to the Bolshevik revolution—gathered representative quotes from Trotsky and Lenin emphasizing that “a party as such, in the course of the development of a revolution, becomes identical with the revolution” (Trotsky) and that “the words ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ . . . actually constitutes a party” (Lenin)—in fact, amounting to “the Central Committee of the party” under the circumstances of 1920 (Trotsky).76
The logic of this was spelled out in a central work of 1919, written by Party theorists Nikolai Bukharin and Eugen Preobrazhensky in their elaborate explanation of the Communist Party’s just-adopted program, The ABC of Communism. In their discussion of the nature of the Communist Party, they assert that all political parties represent social classes, but that “nowhere and at no time has any party been able to enroll all the members of the class which it represents; never has any class attained the requisite degree of consciousness.” Rather, “those who organize themselves into a party are the most advanced members of a class; those who best understand their class interests; those who are most daring, most energetic, and most stubborn in the fight,” which naturally means that “the number of adherents of the party is always considerably less than the number of those composing the class whose interests the party represents.” This essentially amounted to identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship by the Communist Party: “In no other way than through the victory and the strengthening of the proletariat is there any possibility of rebuilding life on new foundations. But, since the victory of the proletariat can only be secured through the organization of the workers and through the existence of a strong, solid, and resolute party, we must draw into our ranks all those who labor, all those to whom the new life is dear, all those who have learned to think and to fight like proletarians.”77
By the end of 1920, Lenin was again matter-of-factly explaining what most Russian Communists had by then concluded:
The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organization embracing the whole of the class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organization taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of that class.78
The vanguard of the working class could be represented only by a single party, the Communists—the other contenders had discredited themselves as wavering, petit bourgeois, potentially or actually traitorous entities. As Lenin put it in 1919, “in regard to the Mensheviks and the Right and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, we must draw a lesson from our most recent experience.” Lenin acknowledged that much of the supporting periphery of these parties was shifting “towards Soviet power,” in opposition to the reactionary forces led by Admiral Kolchak and General Anton Denikin, and that the Bolsheviks must move to connect with such forces. But he also noted other elements in this milieu—“some deliberate and malicious, others unwitting and because of their persistence in their old mistakes”—that involved “the type of Menshevism and Socialist-Revolutionarism which leans towards Kolchak and Denikin.” Lenin concluded:
Our task is to put the question bluntly. What is better? To ferret out, to imprison, sometimes even to shoot hundreds of traitors from among the Cadets, non-party people, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, who “come out” (some with arms in hand, others with conspiracies, others still with agitation against mobilization, like the Menshevik printers and railwaymen, etc.) against Soviet power, in other words, in favor of Denikin? Or to allow matters to reach such a pass that Kolchak and Denikin are able to slaughter, shoot and flog to death tens of thousands of workers and peasants? The choice is not difficult to make.79
Some revolutionary Marxists warned against what they saw as a dangerous turn of events. Rosa Luxemburg argued as early as 1918: “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as an active element.” The Bolsheviks felt the criticism was unfair. “If our November revolution had taken place a few months, or even a few weeks, after the establishment of the rule of the proletariat in Germany, France, and England,” Trotsky argued, as if in response to Luxemburg, “there could be no doubt that our revolution would have been the most ‘peaceful,’ the most ‘bloodless’ of all possible revolutions on this sinful earth.” Instead, the Russian Revolution was the first socialist revolution, thus putting Russia alone among nations, the most powerful of which were responding with murderous hostility, and “in the moment of greatest peril, foreign attacks and internal plots and insurrections,” the Bolshevik regime resorted “to severe measures of State terror.” He insisted: “Without the Red Terror, the Russian bourgeoisie, together with the world bourgeoisie, would throttle us long before the coming of the revolution in Europe.”80
Here Luxemburg was prepared to agree. “All of us are subject to the laws of history, and it is only internationally that the socialist order of society can be realized,” she acknowledged. “The Bolsheviks have shown that they are capable of everything that a genuine revolutionary party can contribute within the limits of historical possibilities.” This is a remarkable admission. “They are not supposed to perform miracles,” she added. “For a model and faultless proletarian revolution in an isolated land, exhausted by world war, strangled by imperialism, betrayed by the international proletariat, would be a miracle.”81 The “betrayal” by the workers of other countries—that is, their failure to make socialist revolutions in their own lands, which would bring relief to the Russian Soviet Republic—was a circumstance that Luxemburg herself sought to alleviate in Germany, before she was murdered by Freikorps death squads under the Social Democrat Gustav Noske in 1919.
If Luxemburg was willing to concede so much, what then was the point of her initial critique? She herself explained it in this way: “The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics.” By trying to place into socialism’s theoretical arsenal “as new discoveries all the distortions prescribed in Russia by necessity and compulsion,” Luxemburg warned, the Bolsheviks would introduce disastrously “false steps” for those seeking to follow their example.82