Preface
Freedom, creative labor, and genuine community for each and every person—the free development of each as the condition for the free development of all, and rule by the people, to the extent possible, over the institutions, activities, and conditions that shape our lives—such are the elements of the socialist or communist society envisioned by Karl Marx and his closest comrades (who included his beloved life-companion, Jenny Marx, and his best friend, Frederick Engels).1 I have embraced these ideas for most of my life, as well as the belief that we must, as did Marx, use the social sciences to understand the world, while at the same time supporting struggles against oppression and exploitation, struggles waged by humanity’s laboring majorities down through the centuries, in present times, and into the future.
The How and Why of This Book
What I said above animated my doctoral dissertation in history of the late 1980s, from which the present book is derived. The dissertation was a comparative analysis of the Russian and Nicaraguan revolutions, examining the conditions leading up to them, the dynamics of the revolutionary overturn, and the early years of struggle and consolidation after each.2 I have recently summarized and updated what I have to say on Nicaragua’s revolution in an essay that is included in a collection of my writings entitled Revolutionary Studies.3
In preparation for the one hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, however, I have further developed the Russian piece. In the dissertation and in a book written and published at roughly the same time—Lenin and the Revolutionary Party—I offered a positive interpretation of Bolshevik theory and practice. There was, at the same time, a critical approach toward this tradition in the book and even more in the dissertation, but this was articulated within the broad framework of the tradition itself. What is offered in this revised and updated account is no less critical, but it contrasts with other works advancing criticisms from the standpoint of contempt, hostility, or disillusionment. Even some who disagree with this different slant may find in what is offered here a useful challenge within the realm of scholarship on revolutionary Russia.
At the same time, my hope is that activists who want to confront and overcome the crises of global capitalism facing us today can benefit from positive but also critical-minded engagement with the Bolshevik tradition. We cannot afford to be dismissive of our diverse and vibrant comrades who were part of the Bolshevik experience—we must take them seriously and learn what we can from them, even those with whom, on one or another extremely important issue, we disagree. (Just as many of them disagreed with each other.)
What Is in This Book
This book is an attempt at synthesis as much as a product of research. It is marked by a strong inclination to privilege older things—earlier sources, earlier expressions of opinion, which may seem decades or more past their “shelf date,” superseded by newer and more fashionable commodities. But sometimes the newer stuff is not much different from (and when different, sometimes isn’t much better than) things offered earlier. Perhaps the fact that I am old is related to this preference for what is older, but there it is. And, of course, far from being a finished product, what is offered here is part of an individual and collective interpretive process.
The subtitle of the book merits at least brief comment. The term Bolshevik existed in the Russian revolutionary movement from 1903 onward; it means “member of the majority” because at least for certain moments in the history of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), those so named represented a majority faction within that organization. It was seen as an extreme revolutionary wing of the RSDLP. From 1912 onward it constituted itself as an independent party, sometimes tagged “RSDLP (bolsheviks)” up until 1918. It then changed its name to “Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks).” In one respect, the Bolshevik Party and the Communist Party were basically the same group with different names, but there is also a deeper difference. The former was the party that made the October Revolution, while the latter was the party in power after the 1917 revolution. I don’t believe “all power corrupts”—although a tragic corruption of the original revolutionary triumph did take place—but one purpose here is to understand what happened, both 1917 triumph and post-1917 tragedy.
The initial chapter in this book is partly celebratory and partly a survey of previous accounts and interpretations—slightly revised from an introduction to a recent and splendid set of texts produced by Ernest Mandel, David Mandel, and others, under the title October 1917.4 The second chapter deals with the destabilizing and crisis-ridden blend of capitalism and tsarism, giving substantial attention to the two laboring classes that made up the majority of the people whose struggles would culminate in revolutionary upsurge: the vast Russian peasantry and the small but incredibly dynamic working class that was being generated by industrial capitalism.
The third chapter highlights the Bolshevik triumph—the ascendancy of Lenin’s organization within the cluster of revolutionary organizations that together provided the activist cutting edge of mass struggles and insurgencies culminating in the destruction of the old regime. Chapters 4 and 5 survey the early years of the revolutionary transition, during which Communist activists as well as the proletarian and peasant masses, each in their own ways, struggled to survive and improve their lives within the shifting realities of soviet democracy and bureaucratization: post-1917 mixed economy, followed by “war communism,” which gave way to a New Economic Policy—all unfolding amid imperialist intervention, brutalizing civil war, and hopeful revolutionary internationalism. Chapter 6 focuses on how the initial revolutionary ideals were overwhelmed by violence and authoritarianism, with the Bolsheviks losing their balance in a manner carrying them some distance from their initial goals. Contradictions in the Bolshevik understanding of, and policies involving, the majority of the Russian people, the peasantry, constitutes the seventh chapter’s focal point. The eighth chapter gives attention to the contradictory mix of positives and negatives in the early Soviet Republic. The consolidation of the new regime is the focus of the ninth chapter, followed by a final chapter of reflections and conclusions.
There is an appendix on the analytical tools that structure our critical explorations drawn from (1) challenges of the group that can be termed “post-Marxists,” (2) reflections on the meaning of democracy, and (3) an historical materialist approach involving “uneven and combined development.”
What Is Distinctive in This Book
This book presents “objective” realities and at the same time gives a sense of the “subjective” mixture of personalities, hopes, ideas, and experiences of people actually involved in the history we are looking at—as do other accounts. It is hardly the only book demonstrating that the Russian Revolution of 1917 led by Lenin and his comrades was profoundly democratic in its intent, its aspirations, and its potential. Nor is it the only book stressing the democratic qualities of the actual revolutionary process and of the Bolshevik Party that sought to advance the process. Still, a sustained concern with democracy defines much of this book. Democracy—rule by the people—is central to the actuality of socialism, as I understand it, as well as to what is inspiring about the Russian Revolution. The “Defining Democracy” section of the appendix identifies perspectives and concerns that permeate this entire study.
The insistence over the revolution’s democratic qualities is linked to three distinctive aspects of what this book does: it (1) focuses on continuities between the events of 1917 and some of what can be found in the “interregnum” of the early 1920s; (2) focuses on qualities of the “mixed economy” experience of late 1917 and early 1918, which was repeated more substantially from 1921 to 1928; and (3) stresses the centrality of the revolutionary internationalist orientation and efforts of the revolutionaries. A failure to give sufficient attention to these aspects, in my opinion, undermines our ability to understand the revolutionary-democratic qualities of what Lenin and his comrades were actually trying to do.
The revolutionary-democratic triumph was overcome by tragic defeat, and this book labors to understand how and why this happened. Historically, some of the revolution’s partisans denied that there was any such defeat—they defended the perspectives and practices of the Stalin regime of 1929–53 as being consistent with the intentions and aspirations of the revolutionaries of 1917. (Many critics have done the same—putting minus signs where the partisans put plus signs.)
Among the revolution’s more critical-minded partisans, the explanatory focus of why things turned out badly has been on a number of external factors (primarily, assaults and hostility on the part of foreign capitalist powers, and the heritage of backwardness bequeathed by the tsarist system) that blocked, defeated, and overwhelmed the revolutionaries. In this book, attention is given to those external factors. But there is also a need to explore significant internal factors in the theories of the revolutionaries and in the insurgent masses they inspired, and of whom they were a part. Throughout, divergent and contradictory elements can be found. Within the very same element we find a dynamic, if unstable, “unity of opposites.” Within insightful perspectives of the revolutionaries we can identify serious blind spots, and within the diverse psychologies and personalities among the masses we can find the bad and the ugly as well as the good.
There are several defining points in the narrative unfolding in these pages. One is the truism that people make their own history but that they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing—their actions are conditioned, their thoughts are influenced, and the possibilities of what they can and cannot do are limited by the material realities, especially the economic dynamics, in which they are enmeshed. Another defining point is that socio-economic classes, whose “members” do all of the things that make history, encompass multiple dimensions and layers. These include politically more conscious and active layers (sometimes referred to as “vanguard” layers), and organizations rooted in such vanguard layers can make a difference in what happens and fails to happen.
Based on such generalizations, an examination of the Bolshevik organization—an essential and genuinely working-class element in the 1917 revolution and its aftermath—reveals that this was a force animated by radical-democratic aspirations and dynamics, a force with genuine strengths, but also a force that was afflicted with four serious limitations:
I advanced all of these points in my 1989 dissertation, but I expand and deepen them here.
The revolutionary regime that consolidated itself in the period following 1917 was increasingly pushed from a radical-democratic to a radical-
authoritarian trajectory by the interplay of these internal limitations with the three objective difficulties regularly cited by partisans of the Bolshevik revolution: (1) foreign powers launched military interventions, funding and encouraging a brutal civil war, and attempting to strangle revolutionary Russia with an economic blockade; (2) the aftereffects of World War I, combined with Bolshevik inexperience, had a devastating impact on Russia’s economy; and (3) the failure of working-class socialist revolutions in other countries resulted in the isolation of the Bolshevik regime in a hostile capitalist world.
There is much to be learned from the mistakes of the Bolsheviks who embarked on the revolutionary course with such profound insights and worthy intentions. The mistakes can be explained, but some of them assumed destructive forms with inhumane consequences that cannot be defended. And yet, as indicated by the poem “October Song” by my friend Dan Georgakas, the negatives do not invalidate the amazing triumph of 1917. To set aside the revolutionary understanding and revolutionary goals associated with those who made the Bolshevik revolution undermines the possibility of dealing effectively with the crises, oppression, and violence of global capitalism in our own time.
History, Self, Meaning
The late Marshall Berman once characterized Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station—a sweeping account of the crystallizations of socialism, Marxism, and the Russian Revolution—as similar to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, commenting that “it is equally at home in the philosopher’s study, in the prisoner’s cell, on the steppes, in the streets, melancholy in great country houses, choking in the fetid industrial slums,” presenting “an inexhaustible cast of brilliant, exciting, driven, beautiful, heroic, demonic people, . . . not only great figures, but minor characters as well—dozens of them, wives and children, friends, enemies, lovers, rivals—nearly every one a real individual, drawn with exquisite sensitivity and care.”5
At the conclusion of Wilson’s amazingly panoramic “study in the writing and acting of History,” he sees Lenin at the Finland Station in 1917—arriving by train in revolutionary Petrograd—as representing something new: “Western man at this moment can be seen to have made some definite progress in mastering the greeds and the fears, the bewilderments, in which he has lived.” The immense creative effort in which the writer had been inspired to engage in the tumultuous and insurgent 1930s soon gave way to bitter disappointments, and as Berman has noted, Wilson “felt a great surge of anger toward the people he most loves, all the passionate, complex, radiant, tragic people who fill his book.”6
Yet the tragedies cannot be allowed to obliterate the triumphs. Three decades after the publication of Wilson’s masterpiece, Berman mused that a central problem of our own time is “to believe that by simply ignoring history we can conjure away its power to shape and define what we do and who we are.” He aptly tags the time when the twentieth century was making way for the twenty-first as “an age of historical amnesia,” but he insists this “history is alive and open and rich with excitement and promise.” He concludes: “It can help us learn to create ourselves.”7
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I have many debts to the scholars, activists, and dear friends who have deepened my understanding and sustained me in multiple ways. There are too many to list here, but regarding this specific volume I would like to thank Tom Twiss, Alex Rabinowitch, and Kevin Murphy for substantial conversations that helped spur me on, and I would especially like to thank Sebastian Budgen, Alexei Gusev, Jonathan Harris, Lars Lih, China Miéville, Tom Twiss, and Eric Blanc for providing helpful feedback as I labored to complete this book. Naturally, I alone bear responsibility for lingering limitations. Thanks must also be extended to the dedicated comrades associated with Haymarket Books who made possible the miraculous transition from manuscript to actual book (with special mention due to the thoughtful and astonishingly thorough copy editor Brian Baughan). And as has been true for more than a decade, the supportive and loving friendship of Nancy Ferrari has helped sustain me in all that I do.
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As I was working on this book, my son Gabriel died, not only forcing me to deal with the upside-down agony of losing this beloved, conflicted, wondrous man who was my child, but also to sort through what had happened and why. Elements of that process—comprehending both his triumph and his tragedy—have worked their way into some of what I have written here. I dedicate this book to his memory.