9
Consolidation of the Soviet Republic
In 1924, the year that Lenin died, it could be said that the Soviet Republic had finally consolidated. Some have been inclined to see this as the moment when Stalin triumphed, the moment when the bureaucratic authoritarianism of “Stalinism” displaced the original revolutionary-democratic Bolshevism.
That strikes me as mistaken. Too much of the complex and contradictory “liberty under the Soviets” we have been examining continued to flourish into the later years of the 1920s. It could be argued that there was no thoroughgoing “Stalinism” until the destruction of the New Economic Policy—that Stalinism finally crystallized in the process advanced through the successive defeats of the Left Opposition of Trotsky (1923–24), the United Opposition of Zinoviev-Kamenev-Trotsky (1926–27), and then the Right Opposition of Bukharin-Rykov-Tomsky (1928–30), culminating in the “revolution from above” that carried out the forced collectivization of land and the rapid development of industry characterizing the Soviet Union from 1929 through 1934—obliterating the 1924 “consolidation” in the process. There were significant countervailing tendencies to this—reflected in the oppositions just mentioned, and in others arising earlier. Grounded in some of the dynamics explored in the previous chapters, these emancipatory tendencies would also, by necessity, push beyond the 1924 consolidation.
Thus, the “consolidation of the Soviet Republic” was neither a finished nor stable reality—it faced difficulties, not least of which were the contradictions of the NEP, the partial basis for the 1924 consolidation. It contained germs that would bring about further transformation. Some of these germs were qualitatively different from what came to be known as Stalinism. Possibilities existed for overcoming the contradictions along pathways that were quite different from those that Soviet Russia actually followed in the 1930s.
But it is certainly also the case that the germs of what became Stalinism, already latent in Bolshevism in 1917 (largely related to “blind spots” identified later in this chapter), were growing dramatically and spreading rapidly through the body politic of Soviet Russia during the period we have been examining. That authoritarian crystallization came to be identified, by a variety of political analysts and in the popular mind, with the dictatorship of the proletariat that had presumably been established by the October Revolution of 1917. We have already noted that the original meaning of that term is the opposite of what it came to mean.
The conceptualization labeled dictatorship of the proletariat—meaning “proletarian rule”—has been central to (1) Marxist theory in general, (2) Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which has played a role in the present study, and (3) the ideology and claims of the Bolsheviks. If utilized in a critical-minded way (taking it seriously but not employing it as a magical incantation), the concept can have value in helping us understand not simply the mind-set of the revolutionaries under examination but also the realities of Russian political life. To approach this seriously, we must determine the particular realities that allow us to say whether or not “proletarian rule” existed in Bolshevik Russia of 1917–24.
Defining Proletarian Dictatorship
For some, the regime issuing from the October Revolution was certainly a “proletarian dictatorship,” representing the evaporation of bourgeois participation in the political life of the country. In the wake of the Bolshevik seizure of power, parties of the conservative and liberal bourgeoisie received only 13 percent of the vote in the 1917 elections for the Constituent Assembly, with 87 percent of the vote going to the various socialist parties. All socialists committed to conciliation with capitalists were quickly marginalized within the dynamic framework of the soviets, and in Russia generally, by those committed to working-class rule. With the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and in some cases even before, bourgeois political forces worked exclusively to overthrow the Bolshevik regime by force and violence. Actual members of the capitalist class generally had only the most circumscribed means for expression of their ideas, no right to organize politically, and in most cases no right even to vote. In the Civil War period many were victimized by the policies of the “Red Terror.” The destruction of the Russian bourgeoisie as a political force coincided with the nationalization of the economy—taking place, again, under the banner of working-class rule.1
In what sense was there actually “proletarian rule”? For Marx, political rule by the working class was seen as “winning the battle of democracy,” involving full freedom of expression, a flourishing pluralism of parties, institutionalized forms of direct democracy in society from top to bottom, and so forth.2
We have seen that this was projected by the Bolsheviks in 1917 but fairly quickly went out of existence. The Bolshevik regime, nonetheless, was clearly (1) committed to carrying out policies and establishing programs beneficial to the proletarianized (and semi-proletarianized) layers constituting the majority of working people, (2) prepared to realize that priority at the expense of the capitalist class, (3) dependent for its existence on support of these proletarianized working people who saw it as a force representing their interests, and (4) committed to ensuring that a very high percentage of those involved in government decision-making and administration were from the working class.3
The combination of these factors—it could be argued—adds up to something consistent with the classical Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, even if the radical-democratic ideal of classical Marxism is not sustained. That tended to be the position of the Russian Communists, although the extent to which the reality diverged from the radical-democratic ideal of workers’ democracy (elaborated in the section of this volume’s appendix titled “Defining Democracy”) raises important questions, to be explored in this chapter. If we accept the notion that some variant of dictatorship of the proletariat existed, based simply on the restricted adherence to the four-point definition just provided in the paragraph above, additional questions can be raised. In particular, it would seem that if the combination of factors adds up to proletarian rule, then the elimination of any of the factors would raise a question about whether a proletarian dictatorship continued to exist.
This suggests that a failure of the regime to improve (or prevent the decline of) the situation of the proletariat might erode, and ultimately eliminate, proletarian support for the regime. In fact, the mixed-economy project of the Bolsheviks sometimes resulted in the regime favoring certain policies at the expense of the workers’ immediate needs and desires—although this was defended as being in the long-range interests of the proletariat. In the latter period of war communism in 1920–21, the so-called proletarian dictatorship more than once came into conflict with the actual proletariat and proved fully prepared to repress the workers. It can be argued that such a narrative oversimplifies a far more complex process, but to state it so baldly helps to pose the question more sharply.
We have already reviewed the crises that overwhelmed the democratic-
libertarian dreams of the Bolsheviks, resulting in an authoritarian trajectory. Within the Communist Party itself there were angry protests as the scope and momentum of authoritarianism increased—something that had initially been accepted under the circumstances but which many now pushed against as the circumstances changed. “When the enemy had you by the throat, it was no time for philosophy,” commented the militant Red Guard Eduard Dune. He elaborated:
From our position in the Red Army we looked in front of us, at the enemy; we had little opportunity to glance behind us and to see the bitter soviet reality. We were unwilling to see that at home, in the party, political appointees were replacing elected committees, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat was falling into the hands of a dictator; that the soviet constitution and self-government were being replaced by administrative debauchery. It seemed that these transformations were not actions of an enemy but “small defects in the larger mechanism.” We more readily explained the huge peasant rebellions that originated after the war as intrigues by enemies of the revolution than by their truer causes.4
But at the end of the Civil War, young worker-Bolsheviks and militants such as Dune found that the “bitter soviet reality” raised multiple questions in their minds about what was really what, and “amidst these bewildering questions we confronted the end of the civil war, debating, even after the [party] congress, the questions of inner-party democracy and the next stage of the revolution, the New Economic Policy.”5
Even before the NEP, debates raged and the push toward revolutionary democracy proved to be powerful in the wake of the Red Civil War victory. “As the war disappeared, there arose a new wave of opposition to the authoritarian regime in the Communist Party,” notes Robert V. Daniels. A salient aspect of this was advanced by one of the authors of the party handbook The ABC of Communism, Eugen Preobrazhensky, “who remained sensitive to infringements of democracy, even though he was now one of the top party secretaries,” and who drafted a set of critical theses on the problem of bureaucracy in the party in preparation for the Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1920—where oppositionists pushed the question even further. Discussions and debates at the congress revealed, according to Daniels, that “the actual differences between the leadership and the Opposition . . . were more a matter of emphasis than principle.” The agreed-upon resolution that came out of the congress was “a rousing manifesto of democratic intent,” which insisted on “broader criticism of the central as well as the local party institutions,” an end to the appointment of local party secretaries by the party’s national center, and a prohibition on “any kind of repression against comrades because they have different ideas.” And there was a sweeping affirmation of the principles that would make the “dictatorship of the proletariat” a genuinely democratic expression of political rule by the working class and by the toiling masses in general. The resolution stressed “the need again to direct the attention of the whole party to the struggle for the realization for greater equality: in the first place, within the party; secondly, within the proletariat, and in addition within the whole toiling mass; finally, in the third place, between the various offices and various groups of workers, especially the ‘spetsy’ [bourgeois specialists] and responsible workers, in relation to the masses.”6
Despite such stated intentions, the hoped-for realities—according to Simon Pirani—were “confounded by circumstances and pushed back by the state,” certainly not in a “uniform or unidimensional” manner, and most definitely against pressures from “workers, communists, and others [who] kept trying to push the revolution forward.” Such revolutionary pushing was not always grounded in an understanding of the difficult realities—Pirani notes that “in the mood of the civil war communists . . . there was a streak of super-optimism, i.e., and exaggerated confidence, based on the victories achieved in 1917–19, in their own ability to change the world.” At the same time, according to one of these militants, “in the heart of every conscious comrade from the front, who at the front has become used to almost complete equality, who has broken from every kind of servility, debauchery and luxury—with which our very best party comrades now surround themselves—their boils hatred and disbelief.” Under the pressure from the ranks at the 1920 party congress, Gregory Zinoviev—not known for being a consistently democratic figure in this period—advanced perspectives (summarized by Pirani) that targeted “accumulation of power in the glavki [bureaucracy]; the negative consequences of militarism, which had imbued some communists with arrogant, authoritarian methods; the integration of some communists into circles of spetsy with whom they worked and consequent corrupt relations; and the party’s failure to counter these tendencies.” But for many, this was not enough. One radical worker called for “a third revolution in production” to match the two revolutions of 1917, and Pirani concludes: “The central role that the state played in reproducing and reinforcing hierarchical social relations, and the exploitative nature of those relations in the economy, were only rarely alluded to by any participants in the discussions of 1920–21. Soon, the tenth congress would silence what discussion there had been, and strengthen the authoritarian tendencies that the dissidents of 1920, albeit partially and incoherently, tried to resist.”7
One of the most articulate critiques was advanced by the Workers’ Opposition, a faction inside the Russian Communist Party and led by Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai. Shlyapnikov was a veteran working-class activist and longtime Bolshevik organizer, leader of the Metalworkers’ Union, and the first commissar of labor in the Soviet government, and the feminist intellectual Kollantai, also an experienced revolutionary activist, was the first commissar of social welfare. Both had been closely associated with Lenin, especially as he had pushed forward to the revolution of October 1917—and now they crossed swords with him around the meaning of proletarian rule. “Some of the Bolsheviks’ most ardent supporters among the proletariat had begun to declare openly that the time had come for a real workers’ democracy, with decent food, decent housing, and full representation in decision making,” notes Barbara Evans Clements. The Workers’ Opposition was castigated for being anti-leadership—to which Kollontai responded: “Workers know there is something wrong. But instead of running to Ilyich’s [Lenin’s] office for a chat, as many of our more timid comrades do, we have proposed a series of practical measures to cleanse our ranks and revive our relations with them [i.e., the workers].” The Opposition was also accused of representing an “anarcho-syndicalist deviation,” because of its call for a decisive trade union role in running the economy. Shlyapnikov responded that this was false, that the Workers’ Opposition did “not repudiate political struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the party’s leading role, nor the significance of the soviets as bodies of power.”8
In a widely distributed document entitled The Workers’ Opposition, this dissident faction protested against the rise of a “bureaucratic state system” that had replaced the “self-activity of the working masses” with “a hierarchy of ‘permissions’ and ‘decrees,’” adding: “We give no freedom to class activity, we are afraid of criticism, we have ceased to rely on the masses: hence we have bureaucracy with us.” The dissidents attributed the problem to the fact that many nonrevolutionary elements had been drawn into the state apparatus and also that any party standing at the head of the Soviet state is compelled to consider the needs of nonproletarian layers in society (the vast peasantry, urban petty bourgeoisie, and so on) and the pressures of world capitalism, creating a gap between leaders of the party and state on the one hand and the working class on the other. The Workers’ Opposition observed that “during these three years of the revolution, the economic situation of the working class, of those who work in factories and mills, has not only not been improved, but has become more unbearable.” The faction perceived the outlook of “the working masses” in this way: “The leaders are one thing, and we are something altogether different. Maybe it is true that the leaders know better how to rule over the country, but they fail to understand our needs, our life in the shops, its requirements and immediate needs; they do not understand and do not know.” In fact, the leaders, “having severed all ties with the masses, carry out their own policy and build up industry without any regard to our opinions and creative abilities,” and “distrust of the workers by the leaders is steadily growing.” The solution seemed simple enough: “The Workers’ Opposition has said what has long ago been printed in The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels: the building of communism can and must be the work of the toiling masses themselves. The building of communism belongs to the workers.”9
To speak of building communism under conditions existing in Russia at that time was an illusion. The criticisms voiced by The Workers’ Opposition document reflected terrible realities, but the solution offered was based on this false assumption: “Since the October revolution, unprecedented opportunities for economic creation have now opened new, unheard-of forms of production, with an immense increase in the productivity of labor.” As we have seen, the opposite was the case. And yet the polemic of the Workers’ Opposition gave voice to discontent felt throughout the country among those who had been inspired by the Bolshevik revolution. “During the winter months popular anger developed on a wide front,” Paul Avrich recounts, “embracing sailors and soldiers as well as peasants and workers, who yearned for the anarchic freedom of 1917 while craving at the same time a restoration of social stability and an end to bloodshed and economic privation.”10
In addition to uprisings in the countryside, a rash of strikes and demonstrations broke out in Petrograd. The influence of Mensheviks, anarchists, and both Left and Right SRs could be felt in these heterogeneous protests. Workers turned out in the streets with banners focusing not only on economic demands but also on the restoration of civil liberties, pluralism, soviet democracy. Some (particularly those influenced by the Right SRs) appealed for a return of the bourgeois-democratic Constituent Assembly. There were others less liberal: “Down with the Communists and Jews.” According to Avrich, “an open breach occurred between the Bolshevik regime and its principal mainstay of support, the working class.” Yet this is far too categorical—Avrich himself acknowledges that “for many intellectuals and workers” in Russia at this time “the Bolsheviks, with all their faults, were still the most effective barrier to a White resurgence and the downfall of the revolution.”11
If we are to understand the class realities of this period, there is another key point that must be grasped. The multifaceted and diverse reality of the Russian working class discussed earlier in this study did not simply evaporate after 1917. As Mary McAuley has put it, “There will always be a number of different demands and disagreements within the working class. At times they may cluster together to create a relatively unified set. In October [1917], with its program of a Soviet government, an end to war, an attack on privilege and wealth, the Bolshevik party did express just such a set.” The working class in its great majority cohered into a powerful force to make the Bolshevik revolution. But with the profound change in the political, social, and economic realities, “the [working-class] demands no longer formed the same set as they had in October.” In fact, there tended to be different “sets” for different fractions and layers. “Throughout 1917–1920, worker activists in the factories differed significantly from ordinary workers,” observes William Husband. “Even among the most advanced workers of Petrograd, those who served on the factory committees and held trade union offices were more sophisticated politically than the worker on the factory floor.” He adds that “outside Petrograd and in industries in which unskilled workers predominated, this gap became critical” under changing conditions. (Husband goes on to make the interesting point that while many of the more skilled and politically confident “conscious workers” of Petrograd may have desired less centralized forms of workers’ control, which would give them greater authority, other layers of the working class—lacking such expertise and confidence—preferred greater centralization, for which the state and party provided direction.)12
An element in Husband’s argument adds a crucial dimension to the problematic we are considering. The cadres who assumed responsibility in the Bolshevik regime were in many cases the kind of worker activists he describes. At what point can we decide that they were no longer part of the working class? Perhaps such people, after a period of enjoying privilege and power in a stabilized and consolidated new social order, could be said to have become transformed from dedicated worker activists into a social layer of ex-workers who have risen above their class. But we are dealing, in 1920–21, with an intense and incredibly fluid situation, in which what is ostensibly a proletarian state is fighting for its life, in which the mobilization of working-class support is crucial for its survival, and in which the “worker activists” in question—still fired by socialist ideals and revolutionary enthusiasm, and not more than three years away from the workbench—are themselves making great sacrifices and often taking incredible risks. This doesn’t mean that all of them are necessarily free from narrowness, arrogance, pettiness, selfishness, and various other faults that crop up in human groups (whether workers, capitalists, bureaucrats, or whatever). But it is still too soon in 1921 to decide that they have passed, as a group, from the ranks of the proletariat to the ranks of a self-interested bureaucracy. In fact, it was from this layer of worker activists that many prominent members of the Workers’ Opposition arose. Other such worker activists disagreed with that opposition—and among these, some would evolve into bureaucrats while others would evolve into opponents of bureaucratic privilege.
This brings us to the Kronstadt uprising of 1921, when a majority of the sailors and workers at a key naval base outside of Petrograd—impatient with economic shortages and dictatorial restrictions—rose up, arms in hand, calling on the workers and peasants of Russia to carry out a new revolution that would reestablish soviet democracy, which some interpreted as “soviets without Communists.” In an appeal to “the laboring masses of the East and of the West,” the Kronstadt rebels declared there was “no middle ground in the struggle against the Communists and the new serfdom that they have erected,” elaborating: “Here is raised the banner of rebellion against the three-year-old violence and oppression of Communist rule, which has put in the shade the three-hundred-year yoke of monarchism. Here in Kronstadt has been laid the first stone of the third revolution, striking the last fetters from the laboring masses and opening a broad new road for socialist creativity.” They were able to count on Menshevik, Socialist Revolutionary, and anarchist support—and anticommunist forces and governments watched expectantly from abroad. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the Bolshevik regime, but it is important to recognize that this would not have been possible without a substantial residue of loyalty to that regime among the workers, peasants, and others—soldiers, sailors, civilians—who went into battle against the Kronstadt rebels: about fifty thousand participated in the assault on Kronstadt, of whom an estimated ten thousand were killed or wounded. Even the Workers’ Opposition participated in quelling the rebellion.13 One eyewitness who was sympathetic to the rebels, Victor Serge, explained why he and others like him finally supported the Bolshevik side in this tragic dispute:
If the Bolshevik dictatorship fell, it was only a short step to chaos, and through chaos to a peasant rising, the massacre of the Communists, the return of the émigrés, and in the end, through the sheer force of events, another dictatorship, this time anti-proletarian. Dispatches from Stockholm and Tallinn testified that the émigrés had these very perspectives in mind; dispatches which, incidentally, strengthened the Bolshevik leaders’ intention of subduing Kronstadt speedily and at whatever cost. We were not reasoning in the abstract. We knew that in European Russia alone there were at least fifty centers of peasant insurrection. To the south of Moscow, in the region of Tambov, Antonov, the Right Social-Revolutionary school-teacher, who proclaimed the abolition of the Soviet system and the re-establishment of the Constituent Assembly, had under his command a superbly organized peasant army, numbering several tens of thousands. He had conducted negotiations with the Whites. (Tukhachevsky [famed Red Army general] suppressed this Vendée around the middle of 1921.)14
It is simply not the case, then, that Kronstadt represented the working class and the Party turning against each other. Closer to the truth is an analysis that comprehends that members of a decimated, fragmented, demoralized working class were swept into a violent conflict with each other over the question of whether the existence of the Bolshevik regime continued to be in their interests. The proletarian unity of 1917, and the “historic partnership” of the working class as a whole with the Bolshevik Party, no longer existed. In what remained of the Russian working class in 1921, however, enough men and women were prepared to accept the Bolshevik regime (and enough were prepared even to fight and die for it) that its survival was ensured. And over the next few years, as the country recovered from the triple curse of civil war, foreign hostilities, and economic collapse, the regime was able to bring important benefits to the reviving working class, and “the historic alliance began to re-form on a tentative basis,” in the phrasing of William Chase.15 In significant ways, despite continuing difficulties and contradictions, it can be argued that Soviet Russia remained a proletarian state.16
Yet Isaac Deutscher has put forth apt imagery in his description of oppositional Bolsheviks of the 1920s as they increasingly “clashed with the party ‘apparatus’ as the apparatus grew independent of the party and subjected party and state to itself.” He emphasizes a growing cleavage between “the power and the dream”—and the deepening contradiction felt by the Bolsheviks who had created a machine of power to make the dream a reality. “They could not dispense with power if they were to strive for the fulfillment of their ideals; but now their power came to oppress and overshadow their ideals.”17
Intertwined with this contradiction was the problem of holding the country together, of holding off the forces of counterrevolution, as well as the forces of disintegration and chaos and starvation—which seemed to make “iron dictatorship” an absolute necessity. “Despite its mistakes and abuses,” Victor Serge wrote at the time, “the Bolshevik Party is at present the supremely organized, intelligent, and stable force that, despite everything, deserves our confidence. The Revolution has no other mainstay, and is no longer capable of any thorough-going regeneration.”18 For some of the central Communist leaders, the most serious issue was how to overcome the inefficiencies and disorganization generated by the inept bureaucratic tangles of war communism—embattled with a debilitating and further disorganizing “localism”—that threatened to wash away both the “machine and the dream.”
Trotsky became an exponent of increased centralization, which is not surprising in light of his role as head of the Red Army. “Under the form of the ‘struggle against despotic centralism’ and against ‘stifling’ discipline, a fight takes place for the self-preservation of various groups and subgroupings of the working class, with their petty ward leaders and their local oracles,” he wrote in this period. “The entire working class, while preserving its cultural originality and its political nuances, can act methodically and firmly without remaining in the tow of events and directing each time its mortal blows against the weak sectors of its enemies, on the condition that at its head, above the wards, the districts, the groups, there is an apparatus which is centralized and bound together by an iron discipline.”19
This came to a head in a debate on the trade unions. The Workers’ Opposition insisted that an increasingly empowered trade union movement—independent of control by the party leadership and restrictions from the Soviet state—should enable the working class to direct the country’s economic development. Trotsky argued for “the militarization of labor,” insisting that the working class was already in power, having its own workers’ state (the dictatorship of the proletariat), so it made no sense to counterpose the trade unions to this. Instead, the workers’ state, led by the workers’ party, should be in undisputed control—including of the trade unions.
Taking a centrist position, and (with essential assistance from Zinoviev and Stalin) mobilizing a majority within the party for it, Lenin himself emphasized: “A workers’ state is an abstraction. What we actually have is a workers’ state with this peculiarity, firstly, that it is not the working class but the peasant population that predominates in the country, and, secondly, that it is a workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions.” Because of this, while insisting on state control of economic development, he favored independent trade unions that would “protect the workers from their state.”20
In later years, Serge reflected on the dilemma and thinking of this time:
The great ideas of 1917, which had enabled the Bolshevik Party to win over the peasant masses, the army, the working class, and the Marxist intelligentsia, were quite clearly dead. Did not Lenin, in 1917, suggest a Soviet form of free press, whereby any group with the support of ten thousand votes could publish its own organ at the public expense? He had written that within the Soviets power could be passed from one party to another without any necessity for bitter conflicts. His theory of the Soviet State promised a state structure totally different from that of the old bourgeois states, “without officials or a police force distinct from the people,” in which the workers would exercise power directly through their elected Councils and keep order themselves through a militia system.
What with the political monopoly, the Cheka and the Red Army, all that now existed of the “Commune-State” of our dreams was a theoretical myth. The war, the internal measures against counter-revolution, and the famine (which created a bureaucratic rationing apparatus) had killed off Soviet democracy. How could it revive, and when? The Party lived in the certain knowledge that the slightest relaxation of its authority would give the day to reaction.21
Working-Class Rule?
If the Soviet government of 1917 was a genuine expression of workers’ democracy and was consequently what Marx meant by dictatorship of the proletariat (some also use the term workers’ state), what sense can one make of what existed by the early 1920s? Some scholars have drawn on Lenin’s own partial explanation: “An industrial proletariat . . . in our country, owing to the war and the desperate poverty and ruin, has become declassed, i.e., dislodged from its class groove, and has ceased to be a proletariat. . . . Since large-scale capitalist industry has been destroyed, since the factories and works are still at a standstill, the proletariat has disappeared.” Lenin’s view was that only the Communist Party, largely composed of those who had been workers and who were committed to a revolutionary working-class program, could hold the new Soviet Republic together. Isaac Deutscher made this a central component of his own influential account of Russia’s post-revolutionary realities. More recent historians such as Diane Koenker have effectively challenged this interpretation as exaggerated, though Koenker’s own data indicates elements of truth in Lenin’s formulation: dramatic socioeconomic disruptions, combined with the enlistment of revolutionary workers into the Red Army and state apparatus, obviously affected the vitality and political cohesion of the Russian workers’ movement. “A desperate, individualistic, and apolitical atmosphere permeated factory life,” notes Kevin Murphy. “The shortage of party workers was very keenly felt” in 1919, as “the most ardent believers in the revolution volunteered for the war effort, and the few Communists who remained had neither the resources nor the influence to combat the multitude of problems.”22
The fact remains—as Simon Pirani has observed in his important study The Russian Revolution in Retreat—that “the working class was far from non-existent, and when in 1921, it began to resuscitate soviet democracy,” responses from powerful elements in the Communist Party worked not for its revival but its limitation and even elimination.23
Eduard Dune, who became involved in the oppositional Democratic-
Centralist group, later cited Lenin’s explanation in his own wry criticism, asking, “Is not the existing party of a nonexistent class no longer a vanguard but something separate and apart?” He elaborated: “If Lenin’s argument was true, that the victory over the counter-revolution was marked by the disappearance of the class in whose name we triumphed, then had not the slogan of the dictatorship of proletariat become only a myth? A non-existing class could not have a vanguard—its own party.”24
In any event, there now existed a “workers’ state” that was independent of any actual control by the working class. A disillusioned party member explained in a letter of resignation: “I cannot be that sort of idealist communist who believes in the new God That They Call the State, bows down before the bureaucracy that is so far from the working people, and waits for communism from the hands of pen-pushers and officials as though it was the kingdom of heaven.” In 1920, a leader of the Democratic-Centralist faction in the Communist Party snapped: “Why talk about the proletarian dictatorship or workers’ self-activity? There’s no self-activity here!”25
A 1923 manifesto from the dissident Workers’ Group (not to be confused with the Workers’ Opposition) asserted: “What are we being told? ‘You sit quietly, go out and demonstrate when you’re invited, sing the Internationale—when required—and the rest will be done without you, by first-class people who are almost the same sort of workers as you, only cleverer.’ . . . But what we need is a practice based on the self-activity of the working class, not on the party’s fear of it.”26
Among the early working-class oppositional groups in and around the Russian Communist Party, the best known is the Workers’ Opposition, but other formations merit attention—the Democratic Centralists, led by Timofei Sapronov and Valerian Osinskii; Workers Truth, whose activists included such female militants as Polina Lass-Kozlova and Fania Shutskyever; and the Workers’ Group, whose leading personality was the tough, thoughtful worker-Bolshevik militant Gavriil Miasnikov. It is one of the great tragedies of Bolshevism that such oppositional currents were crushed by 1923, and that aspects of their perspectives, rooted deeply in the Bolshevism that culminated in the 1917 triumph, and initially enjoying significant working-class support, were not allowed the space to challenge the ominous, ultimately murderous, bureaucratization.27
Nonetheless, elements in the central core of the Bolshevik leadership who had promoted “iron dictatorship” to defend the revolutionary dream would eventually go into opposition as “the machine of that dictatorship when it began to devour the dream.” Beginning with Lenin himself, and then Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, and others (all of whom had “pragmatically” yet myopically worked to eliminate previous oppositional currents), the bureaucratic-authoritarian onslaught dealt them defeat after defeat after defeat. Ironically, it was Leon Trotsky, the very symbol of the militaristic-authoritarian element within the Bolshevism of 1918–1921, who became the most prominent and one of the most consistent leaders in opposing the bureaucratic dictatorship, incorporating and developing many of the oppositional insights which he had once haughtily dismissed.28
As one sifts through the perspectives and policies being developed in 1918–1923 by these revolutionaries—Lenin and all of the central leaders of the new Communist regime—amid the overwhelming challenges and pressures that they faced, one gets a sense of a dedicated political collective animated by an immense swirl of brilliant insights, horrified desperation, terrible blind spots, beset by an ongoing clash of egos, each buoyed up by an absolute confidence in the positive qualities of their own commitments. And one sees an accumulation of decisive moments, involving decisions that carry them further and further from the goals to which they were committed. Reality is often like that; history is like that—one often has no clear awareness of a transformative error that one is in the process of making.
Marxist-feminist scholar Soma Marik believes one such decisive moment occurred at the Tenth Party Congress of the Communist Party in March 1921, when a ban on organized opposition was codified both inside and outside of the Communist Party. “Yet, in 1921, it seemed to be only another temporary measure,” she writes. “Lenin pleaded for time, thereby creating the impression that eventually, in one or two years, matters would change. But the effect of the changes of 1921 was devastating. The danger of bureaucratization had been ever present from the early days of the revolution. Once workers’ democracy was throttled, this bureaucratization could proceed unhindered.”29
It is worth reflecting, however, on Trotsky’s classic essay of 1937, “Stalinism and Bolshevism,” in which he identifies the primacy of larger forces that shaped the destiny of the revolution:
As far as the prohibition of the other Soviet parties is concerned, it did not flow from any “theory” of Bolshevism but was a measure of defense of the dictatorship [of the proletariat, i.e., the workers’ state] in a backward and devastated country, surrounded by enemies. For the Bolsheviks it was clear from the beginning that this measure, later completed by the prohibition of factions inside the governing party itself, signaled a tremendous danger. However, the root of the danger lay not in the doctrine or in the tactics but in the material weakness of the dictatorship, in the difficulties of its internal and international situation. If the revolution had triumphed, even if only in Germany, the need to prohibit the other Soviet parties would immediately have fallen away.30
Marik also suggests a key problem embedded in Leninist theory. “The lack of discussion about the role of political parties in The State and Revolution remains a significant flaw,” she writes. “Lenin’s account of representative democracy can be criticized for being silent on the question of plurality, rival programs within the workers’ state, and on the distinction between counter-revolution and opposition.” In fact, Lenin, Trotsky, and other leading Bolsheviks idealized the Communist Party under their leadership as the only legitimate political expression of Russia’s revolutionary working class. This was, of course, related to the fact that most non-Bolshevik parties, initially elected by the workers, peasants, and soldiers to represent them in the soviets of 1917, “decided to turn their backs on the Soviets,” as Marik puts it, and in some cases “even to join hands with a bourgeois-aristocratic counter-revolution.” But she also insists that multiparty socialism was the key to avoiding the disaster that befell Soviet Russia.31
There were others, as we have seen, who were insisting on the same point at the very moment when Lenin and Trotsky were inadvertently helping to engineer the revolution’s defeat. A 1922 declaration of the Workers’ Group, calling for “the resurrection of workers’ democracy in the form of workplace-based soviets,” seems to hit the nail on the head, in Simon Pirani’s analysis. He writes:
It argued that, whereas during the civil war the emphasis had been on suppressing the exploiters, NEP required rebuilding such soviets as the “basic cells” of soviet power. There could be no free speech for those who oppose revolution, “from monarchists to SRs,” and curtailing democracy during the civil war had been an unavoidable necessity. But under NEP ‘a new approach’ was needed, including free speech for all workers: “there is no such thing in Russia as a communist working class, there is just the working class, with Bolsheviks, anarchists, SRs and Mensheviks in its ranks,” among whom “not compulsion, but persuasion” had to be used. . . . The manifesto lambasted the use of “bureaucratic appointments that brush aside the direct participation of the working class” to run industry.32
The fact remains, of course, that while some of the oppositional groups won significant working-class support, none won the support of the working class as a whole. Even many working-class Bolsheviks and pro-Bolshevik workers were not inclined to engage in oppositional activity. Some undoubtedly chose—out of naïve idealism or hard-headed opportunism—simply to accept for good coin the proposition that they were the rulers of the country because their benevolent leaders were ruling in their interests and in their name. (In history, such dynamics are hardly unique to the Soviet Republic of the early 1920s.) For others there developed, instead, a profound sense of alienation. One worker swept up in the 1930s purges, befriended by Communist Joseph Berger in the prison camps, explained why he and many workmates had avoided participation in any of the oppositions of the 1920s:
We would have joined anyone—Shlyapnikov [of the Workers’ Opposition] or Sapronov [of the Democratic Centralists] or Trotsky himself—if we had thought it would do any good. What we thought was needed was a shift in power or at least a change of attitude towards the workers. But whichever group won, it would only mean a change at the top. And there was something else. It seemed to us that already then, and especially after Lenin’s death, it was too late. They were doomed to fail because a new order was already established. The Party was no longer the Party we had known. We no longer had its confidence. But the last thing we could do was to stop trusting it. It was our whole life. It was still the Party . . . It was what we believed in. . . . We were the Party and the State, and yet the State and the Party were somehow outside us. They were our religion, but they were no longer ourselves.33
Kevin Murphy’s intensive research regarding a single metal factory in Moscow before, during, and after October 1917 highlights the dynamic. “In the first year of the revolution, workers in the Moscow Metalworks approximated the Marxist ideal of a united, irrepressible social force. . . . In the politically charged atmosphere of the late summer and early fall [of 1917], the Bolsheviks in the Moscow Metalworks won the political argument for a Soviet government, as they succeeded in doing throughout the Russian empire.” But afterward, “War Communism had fractured the relationship between the Soviet government and an exhausted, demoralized working class.”34
Inequality and Apparatus
Socialism—the profound economic democracy, the society of the free and the equal for which the October Revolution had been made—was beyond reach. Eduard Dune, and not he alone, asked “was it that without a world revolution we had given birth to a classless, starving collection of people, with silent factories and mills? When could we expect help from the world revolution? Was it only when the ‘crayfish whistles’?” He concluded, in the words of Alexander Shlyapnikov: “Another ‘better’ working class we will not have, and we need to satisfy the one we do have.”35 And to accomplish this, it obviously became essential to move beyond starvation and silent factories.
This brings us back to a consideration of the New Economic Policy. We have already given this considerable attention, but its importance in the development toward and crystallization of Stalinism calls out for additional examination.
The inability of the Soviet Republic to move forward to socialism in a capitalist world economy made inevitable far-reaching compromises with such capitalist hallmarks as market relationships and socioeconomic inequality. While Russia was vast and resource-rich, with immense economic potentialities, it was hardly economically self-sufficient. The extent to which the Soviet Republic was cut off from the world capitalist economy took a devastating toll. The failure of socialist revolutions in the advanced industrial countries contributed to the Bolshevik economic retreat of 1921 from war communism.
On the other hand, as Anna Louise Strong noted in 1923, “it was not the kind of communism that anyone wants again.” Trotsky, her mentor in this period, told her: “Our acts in those years were dictated not by economic good sense but by the need of destroying the enemy.” He explained: “Economic good sense would have taken over only the industries we could manage; but if we had followed this plan, we would not have survived to celebrate now the fifth anniversary of our Revolution.” Trotsky saw in the tragedy a dialectical necessity that paved the way for its own negation. “The whole policy of war communism was forced by the blockade, by the regime of a military fortress, with disorganized industry and exhausted resources,” he explained. “The military victory which was impossible without this severe policy, at last allows us to exchange it for measures of economic good sense. Here is the origin of the New Economic Policy.”36
It is beyond the scope of this study to engage in detailed exploration of the many facets of rich experience associated with the NEP and the era of Soviet history it shaped. Our primary focus here will be restricted to the question of how democracy and workers’ power were affected in the early years of NEP, as the Soviet Republic was becoming consolidated.37
Alec Nove has explained that the NEP “was a form of mixed economy, with an overwhelmingly private agriculture, plus legalized private trade and small-scale manufacturing,” though the Bolshevik regime maintained state ownership and control of “the commanding heights” of the economy (banking, foreign trade, most industrial enterprises, mechanized transport, natural resources). Even these now tended to operate under the influence of capitalist norms, according to the mechanism of “profit and loss,” with Lenin insisting that this shift in the direction of capitalism was “seriously meant and for a long time.” As Lenin himself had put it, “Only an agreement with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia until the revolution has occurred in other countries.” According to Simon Liberman (in charge of the Soviet timber industry in this period), Lenin “envisaged for Russia and its Communist regime a kind of advanced capitalist economy to be brought about by giving concessions to foreigners,” and in the opinion of some leading Bolsheviks (such as Abel Yenukidze), Lenin would have “brought NEP to its logical conclusion” by giving “light industry back to its owners” if he had lived a few years longer. Things didn’t go this far, however, nor did foreign capitalist enterprise become as significant a factor in Russia’s economic development as some had hoped. Even with its more limited application, Liberman noted, “while releasing private initiative, it led to a new variety in life.” There were continuities with some of what came before. “Under the revived (but also revised) notion of ‘state capitalism,’ Lenin stressed the paramount importance of reestablishing the link (smychka) between town and country on the basis of market relations,” writes Lewis Sieglebaum. “The state would regulate the exchange of commodities, educate the masses of small producers, the peasants, in the advantages of soviet power, and invigilate against those who might seek to take advantage of the state’s retreat.” According to the critical-minded Anatole Mazour, “a balanced budget was attained within a few years and a degree of prosperity was achieved within a relatively short period. The recuperative power of the nation was a marvel to many people at home and abroad.”38
William Henry Chamberlin saw the NEP, when it was still in effect, as marking “a turning point in the history of the Russian Revolution,” noting that its adoption “coincided with the stoppage of attacks from without and the gradual restoration of peace and order within the country,” in his view marking “the dividing line between the destruction of the old and the building up of the new Russian social order.”39
In multiple ways, the peasantry benefitted immensely. “Not only had the peasant for the first time since the revolution a surplus to sell and legal authority and encouragement to sell it, but the terms of trade were exceptionally favorable to him,” writes E. H. Carr, who adds: “If the countryside was profiting at the expense of the town, the town was deriving visible benefits, however unequal the distribution and however high the eventual cost, from the greater abundance of supplies.” While “in agriculture NEP quickly provided the indispensable stimulus to production which launched Soviet Russia on the path of economic rehabilitation,” achievements in industry “were slower, less direct and dangerously one-sided.” Specifically:
The peasant had been placed by NEP in a position, for the first time for many years, to sell his surplus production, after meeting the requirements of his family and of the tax-collector, at his own price. Those peasants who, in the winter of 1921–1922, had surpluses to sell were conscious of their strength and not unwilling to recoup themselves for what they had suffered at the hands of the cities under war communism.
The situation of industry was more complex. The freedom of trade and loosening of state controls under NEP, which stimulated and encouraged the peasant, meant something quite different for large-scale industry which suddenly found itself thrown on its own resources and on the tender mercies of khozraschet [profitability]: from the autumn of 1921 onwards, more and more enterprises were cut off from state credits and state supplies of raw materials and food, and told to shift for themselves.40
What this meant for workers, E. H. Carr tells us, was the replacement of guaranteed rations with “payment in a currency of uncertain and constantly declining purchasing-power,” as well as “a period of serious and widespread unemployment, due to drastic dismissals of workers both by public services and by industrial enterprises reorganizing themselves in response to the dictates” of profitability—so that, for workers, in less than a year NEP had reproduced the characteristic essentials of a capitalist economy.” Despite the improvements brought by NEP, the hardships for workers were intense in regard to food, clothing, and shelter, and “people were swallowed up by poverty,” as Jay Sorenson put it.41
The beneficial situation of the peasants should not be overstated. Chamberlin, in his journalistic investigations during the NEP, caught a key element of its complex meaning in the vast countryside in two different interviews—one with a Communist official “of the most devoted, fanatical, and uncompromising type,” uneasy with aspects of NEP, and the other a Cossack peasant woman who represented the direction in which that policy seemed to be tipping. “We didn’t fight through the civil war, we didn’t beat the White generals and landlords and capitalists, and the Allied troops who came to help them . . . to let capitalism creep back in veiled forms,” the official said. “Our policy is to unite the poor and the middle-class peasants in cooperatives and collective farms and raise the living standard of all the peasants gradually, instead of letting a few grow rich while the rest remain poor.” The peasant woman argued: “We can’t all be equal, because some of us will always work harder than others.” She implored: “Let me work as much land as I can with my own arms and I’ll gladly pay rent and taxes to the state for it, and sell my grain too, if I can get a fair price and some goods to buy with the money.” She rejected the old war communism norms: “Nothing will ever come out of this idea of making us all byedniaks [poor peasants] and calling everyone who is a capable hard worker a bloodsucker and a kulak. That sort of thing keeps us poor, and keeps the state poor too.”42
In fact, this reflects tensions and conflicts in the policies of the Soviet regime. By the late 1920s Alexei Rykov, Soviet premier in the NEP period, was angrily asserting:
We can’t fight for culture in the village if we reckon as kulaks peasants who are using metal spoons instead of wooden ones, and there are such cases. If we consider the peasant who has a radio receiver a kulak, then for a sewing machine we should call him a pomyeschik [feudal landlord]. If the peasant works the soil well, without exploitation of others, they burden him with the individual tax. Then who will undertake to work the land well? I don’t think there will be any such idiots who will do this when they know that for this they will be subject to the individual tax, their children will be driven out of school, and they themselves will be deprived of electoral rights.43
Privilege and Power
But, of course, even for peasants who had the right to vote, the bottom line was still the same as what had become true in the period of war communism—political power remained concentrated in the hands of the Communist Party dictatorship.
There was a dramatic transformation of urban social realities. New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty recorded that for the surviving members of Russia’s old ruling classes,
NEP was a respite from pressure, to restore perhaps a semblance of the respect and position that they had lost, and if the fates were kind, a chance to escape abroad. To the Communists and to the small group of proletarian leaders who had benefited by the Military Communist period NEP was doubtless repugnant, but to the mass of workers it brought jobs that would henceforth be paid in money instead of valueless paper or moldy rations, and the certainty that with money they could buy the food and necessities of life that had previously been lacking. To the traders NEP meant opportunity and the dawn of better days.
It is worth noting how Duranty’s account differs from that of Carr—the former calls the guaranteed rations for workers “moldy” and suggests that they were benefitting from the shift to money payment; the latter suggests the shift represented hardship and uncertainty. Duranty went on to stress the NEP’s “rapid acceleration, its confusion, its opportunities for quick and easy profit, and the immense stimulus it gave to employment of all kinds. Not to mention its growing contempt for the rules and restrictions which had previously been enforced by the Bolsheviks.” By 1925–26, the NEP had restored the economy to pre–World War I levels. On the other hand, the utilization of capitalist mechanisms to revive industry and increase productivity generated speedups and overtime in the factories and also relatively high rates of unemployment. Nor was this period free from shortages of goods, as well as rampant inflation. While benefitting from the NEP in many ways, the working class more than any other group in society found itself making the greatest sacrifices for the policy’s achievements.44
This was in contrast to the rise of the “Nepmen”—who to a significant degree introduced a jarring element into the young Soviet society. The description by Eugene Lyons is worth considering:
A new middle class of Nepmen—private merchants, artisans, small-scale manufacturers, professional men, bureaucrats in comfortable berths, more prosperous peasants, the criminal elements which are the excrescence of private initiative—had come into being. Some of them were resuscitated middle-class [bourgeois] people of the pre-revolutionary era, others were tasting affluence and the sweets of privilege for the first time.
No more extraordinary class has ever been called into being and blown into oblivion in the memory of humankind. Because it was young, born in chaos and in some measure outside the law, because it was at bottom uncertain of its tenure and therefore desperately eager to make the most of its advantages immediately, it was exceptionally vulgar, profiteering, crude, and noisy. Under capitalism the bourgeoisie has the poise and self-assurance that come with power. It has a culture of its own and an ideology of self-justification. In NEP Russia, for the first time, there was the anomaly of a large bourgeoisie without political power, without culture, without respect for its own class.45
“Already in the first year of the New Economic Policy abuses of freedom had made their appearance,” recalled Associated Press correspondent William Reswick. “Parvenues, grown rich in less than a year, were wary of government banks. They persisted in spending their big profits as fast as they made them. . . . Debauchery, wild orgies, drunken all-night parties with nudity as a feature became the vogue among the nouveau riche. This went on side by side with widespread unemployment and a rapidly dwindling currency that soon restricted the peasants’ produce to the Nepmen.” Duranty’s account is similar, detailing as well the dramatic rise of gambling, prostitution, the proliferation of opium, cocaine, and heroin, and gangsterism, as well as widespread corruption in official circles. And yet, he emphasized, “in a single year the supply of food and goods jumped from starvation point to something nearly adequate, and prices fell accordingly. This was the rich silt in NEP’s flood, whereas the gambling and debauchery were only froth and scum.”46 There is certainly truth to this, and yet something of the “froth and scum” must have penetrated more deeply than Duranty seems to allow. Consider the reminiscences of the year 1926 by Serge:
The sordid taint of money is visible on everything again. The grocers have sumptuous displays, packed with Crimean fruits and Georgian wines, but a postman earns about fifty roubles a month. There are 150,000 without jobs in Leningrad alone: their dole varies between twenty and twenty-seven roubles a month. Agricultural day-workers and female servants get fifteen, with their board added, it is true. Party officials receive from 180 to 225 roubles a month, the same as skilled workers. Hordes of beggars and abandoned children; hordes of prostitutes. . . . Our aim is still to be a party of poor men, and little by little money becomes master, money corrupts everything—even as it makes life blossom everywhere. In less than five years, freedom of trade has worked miracles. There is no more famine, and an intoxicating zest for life arises about us, sweeping us away, giving us the unfortunate sensation of slipping downhill very fast.47
The contradictions were sometimes intense. In the early 1920s, food rations were so short that the daily norm of nutrition for a worker laboring for eight hours was one pound of bread and one-and-a-half pounds of vegetables—with one-and-a-quarter pounds of bread for each additional two hours of overtime. These figures were reported by Premier Rykov, who added that 1.2 million workers could not be provided for at all. Angry gangs of young workers, often sporting leather jackets and organized into Communist Youth groups, took it upon themselves to deal brutally with the pervasive corruption they perceived, sometimes coordinating their efforts with the Cheka.48
Even Anna Louise Strong, who resisted pessimistic perceptions with an almost religious passion, acknowledged the existence in the NEP of “a many-sided conflict” in which forces destructive of her own communist ideals exerted a powerful influence: “I have seen graft honey-combing whole [government] departments. On the Murmansk [railroad] line most of the sleeping compartments were pre-empted by train officials, who exacted little bribes in addition to the regular fare, before they surrendered them. . . . Private merchants were handing money to workers in the Housing Department, to secure favored locations quickly. . . . During these two years I have seen certain small officials install themselves comfortably, and entrench themselves in bureaucratic methods.”49
Strong also cited what she believed to be essential countervailing tendencies, represented particularly by idealistic party activists who stressed to her: “We must see that the Communist Party remains a party of workers, and clean out bureaucrats and white collar men. . . . The workers of Russia will never sell out; as long as we keep our Party disciplined and clean, we are safe.” They argued that despite the corruption and the threatening rise of capitalist influences, “the power of the State is in our hands, and the lands, and the natural resources, and the basic industries, and also the press and the schools.” The influence and seductive materialism of the Nepmen could not compete, ultimately, with the powerful analyses of Marxism and transcendent ideals of socialism, which “are discussed in the newspapers” and whose adherents envision “the development of a vast Republic of free workers” and “even have in mind the dream of World Revolution, in which all countries will some day follow what they have begun, and all history will look back on them as founders of a new epoch.”50
Strong and her friends believed, then, that the Russian working class, led by the most far-sighted, incorruptible, and highly principled elements in the Communist Party, would transcend the backwardness, inequality, and brutality of their situation and achieve a full-bodied proletarian democracy and eventually a socialist society. Of course, reality unfolded differently.
Amid the complexities of Soviet Russia in this period, William Henry Chamberlin struggled to hold on to his earlier socialist convictions. Long after his final disillusionment, he recalled that initially he had “imagined a dictatorship of idealists . . . whose ruthlessness would be redeemed and offset by absolute devotion to their cause.” In fact, “there were such men and women, many of them, in Russia at that time, mostly among the veteran revolutionaries of prewar times. Whenever I met one I would feel strengthened in my original faith.” But, according to Chamberlin, there were three different layers in the Russian Communist Party of this time, and not all were dedicated to the cause. “The old revolutionaries at the top, the manual workers at the bottom of the Communist hierarchy contained a large proportion of honest and devoted men,” he wrote, but especially in the middle layers, “there was a host of careerists and adventurers who had flocked into the Communist ranks because they sniffed the loaves and fishes of power.” Such middle layers found assignments, and employment, in the bureaucracy (all too often “puffed up with the arrogance of the small official”) that “had spread and multiplied since the revolution had given the state so many economic functions to fulfill.” The NEP did not eliminate this problem. That the “social differentiation came into being everywhere, as much in the town as in the village,” has been pointed out by many, including David Rousset, who writes: “The state was not spared. The bureaucracy acquired its functional independence gradually, but quickly. This took on a more and more accentuated social character; the authorities gave themselves privileges in a most matter-of-fact fashion.”51
“Cadres Decide Everything”
The inequalities associated with the relative prosperity flowing from the NEP became part of a chemistry not anticipated by Strong and her Bolshevik comrades. For it was not the workers who had power. Nor was it the peasants or the Nepmen or the majority of the members of the Russian Communist Party. Power was in the hands of the hierarchical apparatus of the party, which had become an interpenetrating entity—as we have seen—with the hierarchical apparatus of the Soviet state, what has been commonly referred to as the bureaucracy. For some, the fact that the social class of those making up this bureaucracy was predominantly proletarian meant that political power was in the hands of the working class, but “the functional separation between the worker who had become an industrial and administrative cadre and the worker at his machine at the work-place,” as Rousset has put it, “took on the dimensions of an open divorce and was transformed into social differentiation.”52
The newly appointed general secretary of the Russian Communist Party’s Central Committee, tasked with overseeing the organization’s functioning and assignments of various members to government positions was a long-time Bolshevik organizer with considerable underground experience, Joseph Stalin. Keenly aware of the necessity of efficient “technique” to maintain “factories, mills, collective farms, state farms, a transport system, an army,” he viewed as an absolute necessity the development and placement of cadres imbued with such technique. Also crucial was the cadres’ absolute loyalty to the leadership of the Russian Communist Party. In 1935 he would comment that “the old slogan, ‘technique decides everything,’ which is a reflection of a period already passed, a period in which we suffered from a dearth of technique, must now be replaced by a new slogan, the slogan ‘Cadres decide everything.’” This was literally true in 1935 (when the multifaceted administrative apparatus in the USSR constituted at least 12 percent of the population), and it was becoming a reality in the 1920s.53
In the Marxism of the Bolsheviks, there is no clear conceptualization of or attention to the question of bureaucracy. One can find references to governmental inefficiency such as with the tsarist regime, or to the undemocratic and opportunistic qualities explaining the failure of the German Social Democratic Party in 1914, but there are no general theorizations along the lines one finds in writings by Max Weber, Robert Michels, Jan Waclaw Makhajsky—and certainly no anticipation of bureaucracy as a problem that would flow from making a revolution in Russia. “The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was supposed to end up in the withering away of the state,” notes Moshe Lewin. “Bureaucracy, a service layer of the state and of the ruling class, wasn’t supposed to represent much of a problem.” That it was a growing and intractable and increasingly problematical reality beginning in 1917 resulted in expressions of “bewilderment and helplessness, from the early pronouncements of Lenin through those of [Sergo] Ordzonikidze [prominent Communist, associated with Stalin], of Bukharin in 1934,” and others.54
“The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all,” Trotsky wrote. “When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It ‘knows’ who is to get something and who has to wait.”55 And yet, this alone does not define the problem. Looking back on the development of the bureaucracy, Trotsky suggested that the NEP affected this development in two essential ways. The first factor relates to the NEP’s necessity. “The young bureaucracy, which had arisen at first as an agent of the proletariat, began now to feel itself a court of arbitration between two classes,” he pointed out. “Its independence increased from month to month.” The second factor relates to the NEP’s successes:
In its first period, the Soviet regime was undoubtedly far more equalitarian and less bureaucratic than now. But that was an equality of general poverty. The resources of the country were so scant that there was no opportunity to separate out from the masses of the population any broad privileged strata. At the same time the “equalizing” character of wages, destroying personal interestedness, became a brake upon the development of the productive forces. Soviet economy had to lift itself from its poverty to a somewhat higher level before fat deposits of privilege became possible. The present state of production is still far from guaranteeing all necessities to everybody. But it is already adequate to give significant privileges to a minority, and convert inequality into a whip for the spurring on of the majority.56
There are different ways to understand this, however. For example, while an excellent study by Michal Reiman describes the bureaucracy under Stalin in the late 1920s as “separated from the people and hostilely disposed toward it,” Trotsky insists that “even when the bureaucratic rust was already visible on the party, every Bolshevik, not excluding Stalin, would have denounced as a malicious slanderer anyone who should have shown him on a screen the image of the party ten or fifteen years later.” Stalin brought to his task “the prestige of an old Bolshevik, a strong character, narrow vision, and close bonds with the political machine,” but “the success which fell on him was a surprise.” This involved “the friendly welcome of the new ruling group, trying to free itself from the old principles and from control of the masses, and having need for a reliable arbiter in its inner affairs.” He shared with others in the apparatus the inclination “to approach the inner life of the party exclusively from the viewpoint of convenience in administration,” and became the “indubitable leader.” Yet for many of the leading elements in the apparatus, their consciousness was by no means simply that of greedy or power-hungry opportunists. Stalin’s very conception of himself, Robert C. Tucker persuasively argues, involved a profound identification with Lenin: “Stalin always needed to think of himself as acting like Lenin when he embarked upon a major project.”57
Stalin’s self-conception was consistent with that of many in the Russian Communist Party as well as in the apparatus—including those who were oppositionists and those who were not, certainly through the 1920s and into the 1930s. They did not see themselves as “separated from the people and hostilely disposed toward it,” but instead believed themselves to be genuinely revolutionary cadres, doing their very best to be true to the ideals of the Bolshevik revolution.
Yet there was, at the same time, a quite different reality unfolding—what Marc Ferro calls “a rapid evaporation of the early Bolsheviks, who were submerged by new members.” In 1917, there were twenty-four thousand party members, and of these, twelve thousand remained in 1922 and eight thousand in 1927—but by 1920 there were already six hundred thousand party members, and one million in 1927. At the same time, the apparatus of full-time functionaries in the party soared from 700 in 1919, to 15,300 in 1922, to more than 100,000 by the end of the decade. The immense growth of the apparatus was, of course, even greater beyond the Communist Party—those servicing the state and economy ballooned to 5.8 million by 1920.58
The cadres who had lived through underground work, revolution, and civil war—absolutely committed to the revolutionary program for which they sometimes took great risks—would naturally be different from cadres without such experience who were holding a majority of apparatus positions in the era of the NEP. And if “being determines consciousness” as Marx insisted, then for some of the dedicated older comrades remaining, consciousness—the way of understanding things—would be subtly altered by their changed life circumstances.
Germs of Stalinism
“It is often said that ‘the germ of Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning.’ Well, I have no objection,” Victor Serge once commented. “Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs—and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the victorious revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse—and in him since birth—is this very sensible?”59
It is essential in medical science not to lose a sense of the interplay between endogenous and exogenous factors, and in our case between subjective and objective factors—the interaction between what was internal in the makeup of Bolshevism and what were the decisive socioeconomic dynamics of the larger reality. “It is rare for history to provide such an example, such a powerful demonstration of the impossibility of revolutionary action prevailing in a lasting way over the real technological level,” as David Rousset has aptly put it. The profoundly democratic, libertarian-socialist, and humanistic aspirations of the October Revolution, the triumph of soviet democracy, the amazing innovations and achievements in cultural life could not endure in the absence of the necessary material basis required for sustaining such things. The Bolsheviks understood that tsarist Russia could not provide such a material basis, but their hope and expectation was that their bold and life-affirming revolutionary initiative would help—in the specific and momentous context of their time—to generate similar initiatives throughout the world. This in turn would provide a material basis, global in reach, capable of sustaining the creative and democratic developments that they were initiating in Russia, and which they anticipated would be enriched by similar developments around the world. The failure of revolutions in other countries and the extended isolation of Soviet Russia provided, as Rousset notes, “a rigorous demonstration of the scientific validity of the principles on which the Marxist theory of society is based.” The consequence: “the irrevocable downfall of the Marxist leadership, tragic because of its victims and because of the intellectual regression which accompanied it,” as well as the loss of so much of the political and social and cultural achievement that flowed from the triumph of October.60
In order to explore this further, it might be helpful to define what is meant here by Stalinism. A succinct definition of Stalinism might be “authoritarian modernization in the name of socialism.” (Kevin Murphy has suggested a similarly succinct definition with more of an edge: “The primary function of Stalinism was to make possible the accumulation of capital for expanding production at the expense of the cultural and material needs of the populace.”) The democratic core of socialism—rule by the people over the economy—evaporates. “Our Soviet society is a socialist society, because the private ownership of the factories, works, the land, the banks and the transport system has been abolished and public ownership put in its place,” Stalin explained to journalist Roy Howard in 1936. “The foundation of this society is public property: state, i.e., national, and also co-operative, collective farm property.” The primary purpose of such a society would be industrial and agricultural development to advance living standards and cultural levels of the population, and to strengthen the nation. At the same time, he explained (for example, in his report to the 1930 Party Congress), “correct leadership by the Party” is essential for such efforts: “The Party should have a correct line; . . . the masses should understand that the Party’s line is correct and should actively support it; . . . the Party should . . . day by day guide the carrying out of this line; . . . the Party should wage a determined struggle against deviations from the general line and against conciliation towards such deviations; . . . in the struggle against deviations the Party should force the unity of its ranks and iron discipline.” Erik van Ree has suggested that this approach was consistent with Stalin’s view of democracy, which he saw not as rule by the people but as “policies alleged to be in the interest of the people” and as “a system that allowed the population to participate at least in state organs, even without having a determining say in it.”61
What has come to be termed Stalinism may be summarized as involving five interrelated components:
A Stalin admirer, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, captured something of this in his comment that “Stalinism was progressing from Leninism (as Lenin had progressed from Marxism) towards a form and development all its own,” adding: “Stalin deserved his victory because he was the strongest, and because his policies were most fitted to the Russian character and folkways in that they established Asiatic absolutism and put the interests of Russian Socialism before those of international Socialism.”63 Of course, to grasp the actual meaning of the “Russian Socialism” to which Duranty refers, one must understand what Stalin meant by it—which would not have been accepted by the Bolsheviks of 1917.
A number of serious historians have emphasized that Lenin and Trotsky themselves bear significant responsibility for what happened, yet this truth must be contextualized if it is not to be transformed into a falsehood. “They never pursued power for power’s sake,” as Rousset has pointed out. “In their very actions they were indomitable adversaries of parasitic bureaucracy. Their entire lives were not merely devoted to the proletarian revolution, but were integrated into it.” For Rousset the military suppression of the 1921 Kronstadt uprising, overseen by Lenin and Trotsky and the other central Bolshevik leaders, “definitively sapped workers’ power.” But this was only one element in a more extensive and profound process, explored earlier in this chapter. Nonetheless, their role in the early stages of this process—understandable and even well-intentioned as it may have been—“accelerated the ruin of the workers’ state,” as Rousset puts it. “With their own hands they prepared their own defeat.”64 When they sought to push back some of the increasingly negative effects of what they had done, it was too late.
What came to be known as Stalinism was not what Lenin and his comrades intended. Nor did it happen all at once—this was a complex process involving an interplay of “objective factors” influencing Russia’s revolution and post-revolution efforts, and “subjective factors” inherent in the revolutionary movement.
A primary and decisive factor was the isolation of revolutionary Russia in a hostile capitalist world—the failure of the anticipated world revolution that had been central to the strategic orientation, and that had been part of the very justification for the Bolshevik revolution. It is not possible to create the kind of socialism that Marx and his Russian followers envisioned in any country that is trying to exist and survive within a global capitalist economy.
Combined with this was Russia’s economic and cultural “backwardness.” On the one hand, that oft-used word referred to the industrial and agricultural conditions that provided far too low a level of productivity to sustain the hoped-for socialism; on the other hand, it meant the widespread and deep illiteracy, poverty, and brutalization flowing from centuries of the tsarist order, which also created barriers to the realization of a socialist polity. Along with not having the resources, internally, to sustain socialism in the Marxist sense, it could be the case that the economic and cultural thresholds allowing for a genuine and thoroughgoing democracy—rule by the people—to shape the economic and political life of society were far from being reached. Added to this were the multiple layers of raw and horrific devastation brought on by the First World War, the Allied war against the revolution, and the persistence of a civil war whose counterrevolutionary forces were sustained through outside financing.
This would most likely have been enough to ensure the failure of the revolutionary project. But there were theoretical blind spots within the Bolshevik movement to which we have given much attention, and which must be listed as part of any discussion regarding “germs of Stalinism” within the original, heroic Bolshevism of 1917. It should be repeated: even without these blind spots, the objective realities related to war, invasion, blockade, and economic collapse generated massive pressures toward authoritarianism. But the blind spots we are identifying made it harder to resist and triumph over negative consequences of such authoritarian pressures.
One blind spot involved an insufficient theorization and comprehension of the dynamics and requirements of democracy, which too easily allowed for naïve assumptions regarding (1) the possibility of sustaining genuinely mass-democratic involvement in the decision-making and problem-solving required in the early Soviet Republic; (2) the fatal dangers to the revolutionary process, as Rosa Luxemburg famously and aptly emphasized, in closing off organized diversity—particularly eliminating the existence of different parties—within the soviets and Russian political life, and in utilizing brutally repressive “emergency measures” to limit freedom of expression.65
This requires additional clarification. On the one hand, there is no question that the Bolsheviks, as Marxists, were profoundly committed to political and economic democracy as their end goal, and certainly into the early days of the Russian Revolution, rule by the people was also the means for attaining that end—such notions can be found in their theorizations, programmatic statements, internal discussions, and agitational appeals. On the other hand, we cannot find so clear an articulation of the complexities of democracy. Most people have the capacity to function in a purely democratic manner in order to sustain a relatively small group, the internal dynamics of a workplace or community (the size of a neighborhood or village), but this is not so easily transposed to larger contexts. To govern effectively—democratically or otherwise—a complex nation-state and national economy require the attainment by the decision-makers of certain educational and cultural thresholds involving literacy, knowledge, sensibilities (related to what Dewey and Krupskaya referred to as “personal cultivation”). At the same time—since no single person or current of people can be all-wise and all-knowing—effective decision-making, as well as the very possibility of democracy, requires the freedom to articulate diverse perceptions and points of view. There must be the possibility for those who will shape decisions to freely develop and express such perceptions and understandings. Those in agreement with such understandings must be free to join together in order to develop and argue for them—implying the need for different parties (and sometimes for organized tendencies within parties). While many Bolsheviks understood this, we cannot find a clear articulation of such understanding within the Bolshevik Party as a whole, and it is certainly missing from certain desperate pronouncements of its central leaders at moments of extreme crisis.
A second blind spot involved the peasantry, which was a far more complex entity than the standard Bolshevik theorizations allowed for. As the majority of the people, the peasants could be subjected to policies, based on faulty or arrogant assumptions, only at the peril of the revolutionary-democratic goals to which the Bolsheviks had dedicated themselves. Yet this blind spot in Bolshevik theorizations lent legitimacy to Stalin’s forced collectivization of the land—a policy “shattering to the structure of peasant society,” as Maurice Hindus described it at the time, adding with transparent wonder, “It was an audacious decision, a stupendous gamble!” Beyond simply solving “the question of food for export and for home consumption,” this “revolution from above” was seen by its partisans as bringing “death to private property in the village,” clearing “the road to the Communist millennium.” While Hindus at that time was inclined to give the Communist regime the benefit of the doubt, in later years he would lament that “the overwhelming mass of poor and so-called middle peasants, especially wives and mothers, opposed it as violently as did kulaks,” and that “millions of them died during the resulting famine in the autumn and winter of 1932–33, when the kulaks were already liquidated.” Hindus saw forced collectivization as bringing a momentous modernization—as he put it, “Stalin was a monster killer but he was also a monumental builder”—yet adds: “The victory would have been easier and far less costly had not he been the tyrant that he was.”66 Yet it would have been problematical even if it were less murderously implemented.
A third blind spot involved a lack of awareness of the nature of bureaucracy, and the danger—even the very possibility—that this phenomenon could, in more than one way, undermine and overwhelm the best of revolutionary intentions. Although Marx and Engels wrote extensively on the question of bureaucracy, they did not offer any systematic analysis of this phenomenon, and their attention on it was not focused on the working-class movement. The tendency among Marxists was to associate the term with the existence of a governmental or organizational apparatus of functionaries that may facilitate efficiency or, if it were malfunctioning, result in inefficiency, and—within the trade union movement—perhaps reflect alien class influences through overly close contact with employers. But as J. P. Nettl notes, for theorists in the Second (Socialist) International “the notion of a bureaucracy developing a will of its own and for its own benefit was unthinkable.” As Karl Kautsky had put it, there was no serious danger of bureaucratic degeneration “in the period preceding” the working class taking power or “in the period in which the predictable consequences of this victory are developed.” Among Bolshevik theorists, the possibility was not perceived until it was too late. In 1916, Gregory Zinoviev discussed the development of an undemocratic and opportunistic reformism dominating the apparatus of the workers’ movement, but he saw it as inconsistent with anything associated with the revolutionary component of the movement. In 1917, Lenin’s discussion of The State and Revolution envisioned proletarian revolution inexorably moving in the direction of a vibrant and thoroughgoing workers’ democracy. In 1921, Nikolai Bukharin argued in Historical Materialism that tendencies toward bureaucratic degeneration would be overcome by the growth of productive forces and the spread of education. It was not until 1928 that Trotsky acknowledged that a “bureaucratic hierarchy . . . with all its ministries and departments” had “raised itself over and above society.”67
Obviously, these blind spots interconnected, they reinforced each other, and under the immense “objective” pressures that we have noted, they provided the basis for the crystallization of a “cadres decide everything” approach that was an essential element in the Stalinist ethos. A second essential element affording a deeper material basis for that ethos was provided by the relative prosperity generated by the NEP. This created the basis for inequalities and privileges that added new and vital dimensions to the self-interest of these “cadres.”
We noted earlier that the NEP created elements affecting the chemistry of the situation, which brought a qualitative change in the nature of the bureaucracy—a powerful element of material privilege. We have already met the Yugoslav Communist Ante Ciliga, a thoughtful and dedicated activist doing international work in the early Soviet Republic (1926–29). He was able to observe how those well placed in the bureaucracy lived, and noted that while “their salaries were relatively modest,” they often benefitted from certain advantages:
First they received payment in kind from the State. They paid a ridiculously low rent, and furniture, cars, holidays, theatres, books, and children’s education cost them nothing at all. Next they had introduced into the administration the tacit understanding that the shops should reserve for them the entire stock at their disposal of the first-rate goods from the factory or from the contraband confiscated in the harbor of Leningrad. When the food shortage began, this illegal but efficacious system spread gradually to foodstuffs. Later on the system was perfected and legalized by the creation of a distributive network reserved to the bureaucracy.68
In fact, Ciliga’s own initial trajectory in the late 1920s carried him into the highest levels of the privileged elite, what he calls “the upper ten thousand.” In addition to having unlimited access to books and “periodicals of all tendencies, a fruit forbidden to the ordinary run of mortals and to plain Communists,” he was able to make himself at home “in the magnificent and well-kept halls,” as well as his private study, in Moscow’s Communist University. “I lived in truly splendid, well-furnished apartments at the Party House, which was one of the largest palaces of the most aristocratic quarter of the town.” He enjoyed a fair amount of leisure time to devote himself to literature, languages, and other studies, and “Russia’s finest watering places, travel, and entertainments were within my reach.”69 Life could have been very comfortable—except that he was becoming critical of the regime and still believed deeply in the kinds of things that had caused him to join the revolutionary movement. But many in or near this stratum were not so afflicted.
“Limousines for the ‘activists,’ fine perfumes for ‘our women,’ margarine for the workers, stores ‘de luxe’ for the gentry, a look at delicacies through the store windows for the plebs—such socialism cannot but seem to the masses a new refacing of capitalism, and they are not far wrong,” Trotsky wrote in The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1937. He went on to refer to Marx’s earlier-quoted comment that communism needed to be built on the basis of abundance rather than scarcity: “On the basis of ‘generalized want,’ the struggle for the means of subsistence threatens to resurrect ‘all the old crap,’ and is partially resurrecting it at every step.”70
More than a dozen years earlier, in Moshe Lewin’s judgment, the Russian Communist Party had “reinvented itself for new tasks and realities, while retaining the original labels,” and he marks the year 1924 as the end of Bolshevism. “For a few more years, one group of old Bolsheviks after another was to engage in rearguard actions in an attempt to rectify the course of events in one fashion or another,” he writes, as the organization’s political traditions “were rapidly swept aside by the mass of new members and new organizational structures which pressed that formation into an entirely different mode.” Lewin adds: “The process of the party’s conversion into an apparatus—careers, discipline, ranks, abolition of all political rights—was an absolute scandal for the oppositions of 1924–8. But their old party was dead.” He concludes that “people should not be misled by old names and ideologies: in a fluid political context, names last longer than substances.”71
And yet, well beyond 1924 there were still Communists who were genuinely engaged with Marxism, who believed in the old ideals, who truly adhered to the revolutionary commitments written into the program of the Communist Party. Some of them were uncritically inclined to follow the Stalin leadership—or any leadership of the Russian Communist Party—and others were inclined to be more critical-minded.72 Among those critical-minded ones in the Soviet Republic, some had helped to make the 1917 revolution and to win the Civil War, and others—often younger—had been inspired by such things and were won to them. Some were not yet facing the contradictions between “the dream and the machine” of which Isaac Deutscher spoke. Others had begun to see what was happening and (like Ciliga) were moving into opposition. If there had been a revolutionary victory in Germany or China (in both cases there were genuine possibilities), the chemistry of world politics, of the Communist movement, and of the Soviet Republic would have been altered, in which case the positive qualities of these genuine Communists might have decisively come into their own. And there remained, after 1924, positive aspects of the new order with which to identify. Despite terrible contradictions and limitations, there were, as we have seen, immense gains within early Soviet society that were being fought for and in some cases won in the late 1920s. Although there is much truth in what Lewin has written, in some ways it seems premature to mark 1924—the year of Lenin’s death—as the end of the October Revolution. One is left almost stammering, If, if, if . . .
The fact remains, however, that what happened did actually happen. For more than one reason, many have been inclined to see this actual outcome as what was fated to be.
Songs of Life and Death
Throughout the 1920s, as we have seen, fierce controversies raged among artists, writers, critics, and others, with a multiplicity of trends. Perhaps the clearest and most portentous conflict of views—as stark as the contrast between life and death—can be found in positions articulated by Anatoly Lunacharsky, who headed the early Soviet regime’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, and an extremely combative group of writers and critics, a rising young layer of militants within the Communist Party, gathered around the journal At the Post.
Lunacharsky’s views were nicely summarized by US Communist cultural writer Joseph Freeman in 1930:
Many years of preoccupation with pre-revolutionary art had created in Lunacharsky a profound respect for the past; he considered bourgeois culture a great treasure-house of esthetic pleasure and wisdom; he looked upon it as a means of understanding life and believed that it brought order out of chaos. At the same time he was anxious that art should develop new forms, and was therefore friendly to all kinds of experiments. Science, he argues, deals with abstract forms, but art is experience; the artist’s task is to concentrate life and intensify it, thus helping men to experience as much as possible. . . . Convinced that art in all its aspects is one of humanity’s greatest achievements, he established a network of institutions for the preservation of the art of the past, to serve not only as a source of pleasure, but as a stimulus for new creations. . . . Furthermore, he said, the workers cannot possibly create their own class esthetics without a knowledge of the art of the past. By accepting both the bourgeois past and the proletarian future in art, Lunacharsky became the intermediary between extreme views. . . . In direct opposition to the views of Na Postu [At the Post], Lunacharsky maintained that all art is useful if it shows talent.”73
The militants of At the Post insisted in their manifesto that “the basic criterion for the estimation of a literary tendency is its social significance,” elaborating: “Only that literature can be useful from a social point of view in our time which organizes the mind and consciousness of the reader, especially the proletarian reader, in the direction of the final aims of the proletariat as the creator of communist society—namely, proletarian literature. All other kinds of literature which act otherwise on the proletariat aids the rebirth of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois ideology.”74 This orientation—ferreting out and denouncing such “incorrect” ideologies in Soviet cultural life and insisting on an art and literature that it deemed “useful from a social point of view”—inspired fierce controversies within the incredibly creative “cultural chaos” of the 1920s, but it increasingly came into its own in the Soviet Union’s cultural life as time went on. To gain a sense of the vibrancy and complexity of the early Soviet period, however, one must focus on the rich variety of trends that flourished before the triumph of what became known as Socialist Realism.
Three poets—representing, successively, the very different trends known as Symbolism, Futurism, and Imagism—highlight some of the ambiguities inherent in Russia’s revolutionary process. A poem is characteristically dialectical—an interplay of words in movement, with different and sometimes opposite meanings inherent in the same vibrant image. Marc Slonim’s sympathetic appreciations (from the vantage point of the early 1930s) of poets Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Sergei Essenin are worth lingering over. Taken together, they are profoundly suggestive of the ambiguities of the early Soviet experience.
The oldest of the trio, and a poetic idol of prerevolutionary Russia, Blok (1880–1921) was from a privileged and highly cultured background. Victor Serge remembered his blue eyes and “long, serous face that hardly ever smiled . . . restrained in his gestures, with a fine dignity about him.” His sympathies were with the lower classes, not with the tsarist order, and in the wake of the Bolshevik triumph, he refused to join family and friends leaving Russia. A friend of his, ready to leave with his bags packed, noticed Blok’s bags were not. Over the telephone, the friend asked: “Are you by any chance going with the Bolsheviks?” To which Blok responded, “Yes, if you like to put it that way, I prefer to stay with the Bolsheviks” (although Serge comments that he also felt a strong affinity to the Left Socialist Revolutionaries).75 Slonim wrote:
A wonderful lyric poet, Blok had sung the dream and passions of a generation: he foresaw the Revolution and welcomed it. . . . His poem The Twelve, published in 1918 . . . pictured the riotous sweep of the revolutionary elements. The heroes of the poem are Red soldiers, who march light-heartedly to plunder and murder. They march through a Petersburg blizzard as bandits and dreamers inspired by hatred of the bourgeois world and by a confused belief in a better life. Christ Himself may be their invisible leader and inspirer. Thus the twelve bandits become identified with the twelve apostles and out of the blood and filth of the Terror and anarchy emerges a new Evangel, justifying all the cruelty and destruction of Bolshevism.76
Mayakovsky (1893–1930), drawn into the revolutionary socialist movement (and active as a Bolshevik while a teenager), became immersed in poetry that boldly, impertinently challenged social and cultural traditions. “Mayakovsky was a mighty and big-striding animal—physically more like a trained-down prize-fighter than a poet—and with a bold shout and dominating wit and nerves of leather,” writes Max Eastman, who tells us he “knew Mayakovsky and enjoyed him.” Living longer than Blok and Essenin, he more than they felt the constriction of a growing ideological-artistic orthodoxy—and seeking to be a disciplined soldier of the Revolution, he sought to adapt. Victor Serge’s severe judgment was that Mayakovsky “wasted his best talent in a weary quest for God knows what ideological line, demanded of him by petty pedants who made a living out of it.”77 Slonim wrote:
Mayakovsky is an outstanding example of reaction against Symbolism, against its airiness, musicality, and isolation. His language was course, pungent, and colloquial, his rhythm was militant and emphatic, and his effects crudely expressive, based upon street jokes and poster vividness. Mayakovsky’s poetry is essentially declamatory, and belongs to the street and the platform; his words are emphatic and weighty, his similes material, rough and ready, and he intersperses circus jokes with political quips and newspaper sensations.
Mayakovsky made his mark in Russian poetry in those years of battle when the poet’s role was to rouse men to battle and celebrate victories. Subsequently, he devoted his raucous voice and great inventive talent to the service of the Revolution, and to his very death he continued apostrophizing all the wrongs of the day: he wrote verses about bread prices, the New Economic Policy, the food supply, international events, the Chinese Revolution, and a party comb-out. . . . Mayakovsky, by stressing the communal function of poetry, exercised an enormous influence on Soviet literature. He personified the new generation, its revolutionary materialism and contempt of sentiment, its striving towards a collective construction and love of big numbers. His motto of participation was enthusiastically adopted by dozens of young poets.78
The youngest of the three, Essenin (1895–1925)—whose poems were like “tender moonlight over rural Russia with bells ringing in the steeples,” as Max Eastman put it—was a blond, blue-eyed boy-wonder, a blend of innocence and arrogance, alternately gentle and wild. To a friendly Communist critic, he said: “I am also on the side of Soviet power, but I love Rus’. I do things my own way. I won’t allow anyone to put a muzzle on me, and I won’t dance to anyone’s fiddle.” On the one hand, he proclaimed: “The moon is the tongue / In the bell of the sky, / My country’s my mother / A Bolshevik I.” On the other hand, it is said that he also had sympathies with the “Green” revolutionaries associated with the Tambov peasant rebellion and with anarchist Nestor Makhno’s peasant forces. In one poem he taunts, “Not even Lenin is god to me,” and he mocks a Communist speaker: “Das Kapital, her Bible, by her side, / She talks of Marx, / Of Engels . . . / By the way, / I’ve never read them—I’ve not even tried.” The young peasant-poet baited the Bolsheviks: “It’s not so simple, comrade communists. You’re going to have to huff and puff a bit when it comes to our dear little peasants. You’re not necessarily doing so well with them.” Yet various Communists—Voronsky, Serge, Trotsky, Freeman—would write of him with respect and affection. His short life was a chaos, blending drunkenness and scandals with brilliant verses and masterful performances.79 Slonim wrote:
Essenin came to the front in 1920–21 as the spokesman of the Imagist movement, which reproached the Futurists for forgetting that the “image” was the quintessence of poetry. The Imagists hoped to reform poetry by the creation of fresh images, unexpected similes, and daring metaphors, all profoundly hostile to the Symbolist stylistic tradition. For just as Mayakovsky may be said to typify the dynamism of Bolshevik assertion and to prove the poet of the city and the worker, so Essenin, a peasant by birth, stands out as the poet of peasant Russia and of that spiritual schism, which was, in those years, common to both intellectuals and peasant representatives.
It was his heavy lot, in those years of tragedy and brazen war, to be a purely lyric poet, with a bent for elegy and a thirst for idyll and calm. His poems of, very often, coarse pathos are always haunted by the image, and at the same time mirage, of a reminiscent and yet ideal “village,” whose dawns, fields, cows, and horses replenished his stock of images. . . . His greatest enemy was the machine, that “iron guest” which menaced the village of his dreams with destruction and his own life with annihilation. He foretold his death in many poems, and at last took his own “superfluous life” in December 1925.
Essenin’s influence is attributable not only to his considerable talents but also to the fact that his poems, as contrasted with Symbolist sophistries, Futurist war-whoops, and the theoretical argumentativeness of other revolutionary movements [among artists, poets, critics, etc.], spoke of simple human sufferings and told of the tragedy of a personality which was unable to adapt itself to the necessities of a historic schism.80
Anticommunists have often been tempted to portray the early death of each poet as proof of the heartlessness at the core of the communism to which each had hopefully looked. In some cases the accusation almost boils down to the revolutionary regime, like a cruel parent, not embracing the beautiful, sensitive child-poet. But, of course, reality is more complex than that.
Blok, Essenin, and Mayakovsky each consumed too much alcohol (Essenin was certainly an alcoholic), and all three had very complex and unhappy personal relationships (again, Essenin went through eight marriages in his short life). Unlike the other two, Blok did not kill himself but died from an illness not clearly identified, though variously chalked up to a heart condition, to venereal disease acquired through an obsession with prostitutes, and to severe depression (he suffered from all of these). At the same time, shortly before his own unhappy death, Blok spoke of an earlier poet from the tsarist era, Pushkin (who also died young, in a foolish duel), saying of this artistic hero that in the repressive society of his own time, he had found it impossible to survive. The necessities of peace and freedom can be taken away, Blok noted: “Not the outward peace but the creative. Not the childish freedom, the freedom of being liberal, but the freedom of creation, the secret freedom. And the poet dies because he can no longer breathe: life has lost its meaning.”81 It is generally agreed that this reflects Blok’s frame of mind as he himself stopped living in the difficult year of 1921.
The year 1925 was not as difficult—either for the Soviet Republic as a whole or for the peasantry with which Essenin so strongly identified. The sympathetic critic Alexander Voronsky, after one of the poet’s drunken ruckuses, found him alone in a room weeping: “I have nothing left. I feel terrible. I don’t have any friends, or people close to me. I don’t love anyone or anything. All I have left are my poems. I gave them everything, do you understand, everything. Once there was the church, the village, the countryside, the fields, the forest. Now they have left me all by myself.”82 He wrote his farewell with the blood from a cut wrist, before hanging himself: “There is nothing new about dying in this life / But there is surely nothing new about living either.”83
Yet the suicide was not simply the outcome of personal problems. It is interesting to see how different defenders of the Soviet regime—fellow poet Mayakovsky and the recent commander of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky—addressed this matter. Essenin was “a fine, fresh and genuine poet,” commented Trotsky, and “under the crust of his affected brazenness there throbbed the peculiar tenderness of an unshielded, undefended soul.” He went on to suggest that while Essenin was “a lyric poet, . . . ours is not a lyrical era,” that his poetry “is intimate, tender, lyrical; the Revolution is public, epic and catastrophic.” Trotsky concluded: “His lyrical spring could have expanded to the end only in a society alive with song, harmonious and happy, in which not only struggle, but friendship, love and tenderness rule. Such a day will come.” Mayakovsky, on the other hand, sternly lectured the departed poet: “We must wrest / delight / from the future’s grasp. / Let me tell you, friends, / dying is no trick, / Making life worth living / is a harder task.”84
It was in the difficult year of 1930 that Mayakovsky himself felt sufficient despair to give up the struggle and fire a bullet into his heart. He was contending with a tangle of personal complexities, to be sure, but it is also clear that he was wrestling with a convergence of political pressures and disappointments. In a poetic 1929 “Talk with Comrade Lenin,” he had focused on the proliferation of powerful and self-important bureaucrats: “Some people / without you / got out of hand. / Many a rogue, / many a scoundrel / rove to and fro / and around our land. / Who can tell / their names / and their numbers! . . . Chest thrown out. They stalk along / proudly, / all decked with badges / and fountain pens.” Nor was he happy over what was happening with his own poetry. “I’ve suppressed myself, / setting my foot / on the throat / of my own song,” he wrote in an unfinished poem before his death. He had spent the night before his death drinking, in bitter argument with friends who challenged him for accommodating to Communist Party hacks.85
Poetry reflects a vibrant life force that, when turned in on itself, can self-destruct. With each of these three poets, we can perceive multiple causes for his death—external barriers and blockages related to the conditions of the time and the dynamics of the new regime, as well as internal occlusions and conflicts. Each of these remarkable people—despite soaring hopes, and despite a capacity to deeply move so many other people with their passion and creativity—was finally pulled under by terrible and relentless demons. Yet the poetry, with all of its multiple meanings, endured and triumphed even with the tragic passing of the poet, continuing to affect the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, lives of many, many others over time. The poetry, with all its effervescent ambiguity, its blend of triumph and tragedy, continues to echo down to our own time.