Lenin’s State and Revolution was one of the most famous texts of the twentieth century. Written in 1917 before the October revolution and published shortly after, it looked forward to a new polity, one that should be fully democratic, with a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ creating ‘democracy for the people’.1 The substance of the work was a review of Marx and Engels texts (the Paris Commune especially). Lenin did not ask if these texts were suited to framing a discussion of current issues. His discussion assumed that a Marxist party’s thinking should predominate. He did not consider differences between artisan Paris in 1871, and industrial St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1917; between the older (commune) and newer forms of mass participatory organisation. He did not consider the pressing issues of what role factory committees might play, how they might relate to unions, Soviets and other structures, and how these various organisations could work together.
Lenin often took his cue from the German model of social democracy before the war. Notably, in State and Revolution he still refers to the German post office – under socialist guidance – as a model,2 without noting the post office’s hierarchal status-proud culture, with officials recruited from the army; ex-soldiers inured to military discipline. It is telling that he refers to beamte (state officials delivering letters) proud of their status, rather than organised workers. Lenin called for the destruction of autocratic and parliamentary state forms. But he also admired orderly hierarchies. So State and Revolution contains diverse and somewhat contradictory elements.
The revolution advanced through disorderly local initiative. Women workers, disregarding the advice of activists, initiated the first demonstration that sparked the downfall of the Tsar. Demands for decent housing arose in an unplanned manner. So, for example, the Kronstadt Soviet resolved that housing should be shared out – those who possessed large houses had to give up spare rooms. Local Bolsheviks pressed for this decision to be delayed, urging that no decisions should be made on a local basis; some were recalled by their base organisations for failing to follow the instructions of their electors, others were expelled from the Bolshevik Party for following these instructions.3
The October revolution brought such diverse elements to the fore; moreover, as it developed the substance and weight of various elements – old and new – changed, and so too did the interrelation between them. These dynamics were both complex and somewhat unprecedented: there was no single road map for the transition towards socialism, rather several sketchy ‘maps’ with diverse and somewhat inconsistent signposts.
The quote below gives a taste of industrial problems in St Petersburg towards the end of 1917. The speaker here is Alexander Shliapnikov, Commissar of Labour, laying down the law when workers protested at the closure of their Nobel oil refinery:
If the workers resist, so much the worse for them! They will simply be laid off by force, and without indemnity. The most recalcitrant, the leaders, enemies of the proletarian cause in general will expose themselves besides to consequences infinitely graver. And as to the Anarchist gentleman, let them take care! The Government cannot tolerate their mixing in affairs that are none of their business, nor their inciting honest workers to disobedience . . . The government will know how to penalise them, and will not hesitate.4
Initially at least the new government did enjoy widespread goodwill – even when workers were told that redundancies were inevitable. It was understood that the new government could not immediately remedy economic chaos. Yet Shliapnikov’s comment that ‘honest workers’ were being incited reflected a concept that anyone who opposed his party was a corrupting ‘un-person’. Behind his bullying language was the view that governments should govern. The new central state had one way streets – orders flowed down, reports flowed up; lower organisations had to obey directives; nothing obliged the centre to consult with or be accountable to local grassroots participatory structures.5
Factory committees were the most popular urban organisation formed in the wake of the February revolution. They imposed an eight-hour day. They held meetings during working hours, open to all. At a factory committee conference held in January 1918, delegates made clear they wanted policy and planning co-ordinated by new state organs at the national level while hoping that equality and participatory democracy would be preserved. As one resolution put it:
[W]e, the proletariat . . . build leadership on the principle of complete democratism . . . if these organs really do turn away from the masses, then, of course we will have to introduce that amendment. Indeed we would have to overthrow those organs, and perhaps make a new revolution. But so far we feel that the Soviet of People’s Commissars is our soviet and the institutions it creates are fully in accord with us.6
Among his famous ‘April Theses’ of 1917, so important for guiding the Bolsheviks’ strategic orientation between the February and October revolutions, Lenin had set out a transitional industrial strategy: ‘It is not our immediate task to “introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.’7 In September, in The Impending Catastrophe, he would write: ‘[S]tate-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs. . . . [S]ocialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people . . .’8 State policy from October to mid-1918 was in line with this thinking. It envisaged state centres – glavki – guiding industries, leaving managers and owners in possession but subjected to workers’ control – defined by Lenin as ‘all-embracing, omnipresent, most precise and most conscientious accounting of the production and distribution of goods’.9
In fact, in many factories ‘workers’ control’ was much more than this. Factory-committees expanded and took on aspects of management (not least because some bosses ran away), kept enterprises going, shared out work, and sought out sources of food and raw materials. Of some 500 firms nationalised before July 1918, 400 were taken over by initiative of local organisations and only 100 ‘by decree of the centre’.10 In these workplaces and even where factory owners remained in place, the committees acquired substantial weight, to such an extent that they sometimes had ‘greater power than the official administration in the areas of supplies, output, equipment, labour discipline, purchasing or demobilisation’.11 As S.A. Smith’s Red Petrograd goes on to note: ‘In a vague, incoherent way, the committee leaders knew that unless the transfer of power to workers at the level of the state was accompanied by a transfer of power at the level of production, then the emancipation of labour would remain a chimera.’12
However ‘vague’ or ‘incoherent’, this sensibility echoed the challenge that Anton Pannekoek had issued to German Social Democrats in Vorbote, in May-June, 1917:
National ownership of large branches of industry is synonymous with their militarisation. . . . To the proletariat this state socialism can mean only an aggravation of its sufferings and increased pressure upon the burden of life. Notwithstanding this, it is to be expected that a large part of our Social-Democracy will not oppose this plan but will lend it its heartiest support. Their old ideals make them the prisoners of this new system of national exploitation. . . . Socialism is not based upon national ownership, but upon the strength, the might of the proletariat. In the past the conceptions of socialism and state industries have been hopelessly confused in the minds of our Social-Democracy; in the future, this party will face the state socialist plans for the increased enslavement of the working class, with neither mental weapons nor a clearly defined attitude.13
Syndicalist railway workers in Russia, like those in Britain and Italy at the time, quickly concluded that nationalization was no panacea. By the spring of 1918, Russian rail workers strongly resented the state’s ‘railroad dictators’14 who had been tasked with restoring the transport system. The threat of starvation in cities had motivated the imposition of military discipline on the railways, but the effect of the orders, ‘apart from creating another layer of inexperienced, often corrupt security forces, had little, if any, practical impact’.15
Syndicalists argued for a national network to manage the economy – but one based on grassroots control and federation. At the first national trade union congress in January 1918, Grigori Maximov, one of the leading anarcho-syndicalists in the 1917 revolution, acknowledged the need ‘to create a centre but not a centre of decrees and ordinances but a centre of regulation, of guidance – and only through such a centre to organise the industrial life of the country’.16 The difference between syndicalists and Bolsheviks (and even sometimes among them, since neither was a monolith) was not over the scale of industrial organisation but over its forms, with syndicalists wanting workplace and community organs, and their federations, invested with substantial grassroots power.
Lenin did not promote these aspirations.17 Those elements in State and Revolution that suggested subordination could not be dispensed with in a period of revolutionary transition now came more clearly to the fore in guiding state practices. Already in 1917 he had argued that that the ‘whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labour and pay . . . All citizens become employees and workers of a single country-wide state “syndicate”’.18 As it turned out, Lenin’s concept of ‘workers’ control’ in practice meant only a check on official management, curtailing managerial ambitions that factory committees may have held.
In the negotiations held between the new state and Russian industrialists in the spring of 1918, attempts were made to reach some accommodation – leaving ownership of industry in private hands but subjecting it to state control and direction. These negotiations led nowhere. It was feared that German industrialists might take over industries.19 Nationalisation was decreed to prevent this, as well as to facilitate industrial planning. In this context, trade unions became instruments of government policy. They prevented some abuses, but were not independent. They might both defend a shorter working day and demand paid and unpaid overtime. As early as 23 February 1918, Schmidt, the new Commissar of Labour, declared that unions ‘can no longer call strikes’.20
Factory committees were merged with unions in early 1918, with some of their leaders becoming union and state officials. There were growing complaints in St. Petersburg plants that the new committees rejected demands from labour assemblies for new elections.21 Although union membership was compulsory, participation fell away and it became the practice to hold meetings outside working hours. Union officials took on some of the attributes of personnel managers. They helped to enforce workplace rules and implement punishments for absenteeism and other infractions. The agendas of union meetings were controlled – those raising previously unauthorized topics attracted the attention of the police (the Cheka). On 20 March, the critical newspaper Novaia Zhizn carried a report of a meeting of 83 delegates in St Petersburg which had raised a series of complaints: workers were ‘without hope’. The government had done everything to oppose them, it had blocked new elections, threatened workers with machine guns, brought hunger, economic disorganization, civil war, unemployment, even execution without trial.22 By 29 April 1918 critical union leaders were asserting that ‘organizations can exist only insofar as they subscribe without a murmur’ to government policy.23
In May 1918 Lenin wrote that the world revolution had born:
. . . two unconnected halves of socialism exist[ed] side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia have become the most striking embodiment of the economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions for socialism, on the one hand, and the political conditions on the other. . . . [O]ur task is to study the state-capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods . . . we must not hesitate to use barbarous methods.24
In this context, production in Russia was to be promoted through the imposition of managerial power: ‘Iron discipline . . . is the general and summarising slogan of the moment.’25 On 4 May an instruction called for ‘Obedience during work, and unquestioning obedience at that, to the one-man decisions of the Soviet directors, elected or appointed by Soviet institutions and vested with dictatorial powers . . .’ Equal wages, as advocated in State and Revolution, were abandoned. Productivity was to be raised through piece-work with the application of ‘what is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system’.26
Urban residents were directed into jobs, without being able to choose between state and non-state employment in a co-op or collective. The Left Communists now wrote that current policies were leading ‘in the direction of bureaucratic centralization, of rule by various commissars, of deprivation of independence from local Soviets and of rejection in practice of the type of “Commune state” ruled from below’.27 They feared that former workers who sat in glavki and in the state would not represent the working class. In response to the argument that the stifling of workers was bringing state-capitalism rather than socialism, Lenin asserted: ‘state-capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state-capitalism in Russia that would be a great victory.’28
In April 1918, the twelfth of the theses of the Left Communists, mentioned above, commented:
The introduction of labour discipline in connection with the restoration of capitalist leadership in production cannot essentially increase the productivity of labour, but it will lower the class autonomy, activity and degree of organisation of the proletariat. It threatens the enslavement of the working class, and arouses the dissatisfaction both of the backward sections and of the vanguard of the proletariat.
But in June 1918, at a conference of factory committees and unions, Lenin demanded unquestioning obedience to a single will as an absolute necessity for large-scale industry.29 The workers’ state was to be constituted through workers’ submission to industrial managers directed by the state. Workers were to act in ways prescribed by management, party and state; relying on managers and other specialists to bring useful technology into industry, allowing them superior pay and rations. Lenin saw this as conforming with the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, since workers ‘are the majority on the collegiums of the Supreme Economic Council’.30
While many former workers did in fact become officials, specialists and managers in the glavki and ministries, it was often remarked at the time that such people were losing touch. As Kommunist, a Left Communist journal, put it in June 1918: ‘We are far from affirming that Soviet personnel have already been transformed into the last word of bureaucracy as irredeemably separated from the masses as has befallen, for example, the upper layers of the German trade-unions, but it is undeniable that this tendency exists.’31 By October 1918, even a Communist secretary in the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) (the ministry set up on 7 November 1917 with responsible for security and law enforcement) was expressing his concern that Soviet power was turning into ‘All Power to the Chekas’.32 It was on the basis of these developments that in September 1918 the anarcho-syndicalist leader Maximov summed up what the first year of the revolution had brought about:
The proletariat is gradually being enserfed by the state. The people are being transformed into servants over whom there has risen a new class of administrators – a new class born mainly from the womb of the so-called intelligentsia . . . it is only a matter of time before privileges will pass to the administrators. We do not mean to say that this inequality and these privileges are arbitrary, or that the Bolshevik party set out to create a new class system. But we do say that even the best intentions and aspirations must inevitably be smashed against the evils inherent in any system of centralized power. The separation of management from labour, the division between administrators and workers flows logically from centralization. It cannot be otherwise. There are no other words to the song. The song goes thus: management implies responsibility, and can responsibility be compared with ordinary labour? Responsibility demands special rights and advantages. Such is the source of privilege and of the new anti-socialist morality. Thus we are presently moving not towards socialism but towards state-capitalism. Will state-capitalism lead us to the gates of socialism? Of this we see not the slightest evidence.33
The revolution had been confronted by tensions between industry and agriculture since February 1917. Years of war had weakened the transport infrastructure that sustained exchanges between town and country. Industry was cut off from areas that supplied food and raw materials. As industry faltered it had little to exchange with rural areas. Measures were established before October to collect and ration food and to secure industrial supplies from rural areas. Peasants – some 85 per cent of Russia’s population – had made their own revolution, taking over land for themselves. They had little incentive to produce more for the state. Famine stalked the cities of northern Russia.
The Bolsheviks had won only 25 per cent of the vote in Constituent Assembly elections of November 1917, but had little support outside urban areas. The new voting system was unequal. Rural Russia had one delegate for 125,000 persons, while urban Russia had one delegate for 25,000 electors.34 The left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party, whose base was in the peasantry, was brought into the new government as a minor partner but complained that decisions were being taken without proper debate or procedure. In the summer of 1918, amidst reports of violence against their rural supporters, the Left SR party broke with the Bolsheviks and was ousted from the Soviets. What Lenin proclaimed openly in 1921 was already being asserted in practice at this time: ‘We tell the peasants quite openly that they must choose between the rule of the bourgeoisie and the rule of the Bolsheviks.’35
In the period of ‘War Communism’, between 1918 and 1921, the new state focused on the comprehensive direction of people and resources. Barriers were imposed between town and country to regulate trade. An army of food requisition squads was created. It was instructed to target middling and richer peasants, taking grain but offering little or nothing in return. These squads were seen as oppressive outsiders grabbing food and behaving ‘as if they were in enemy country’.36 ‘[B]lood flowed in torrents: the poor peasants, the middle peasants and the numerically insignificant Kulaks, the rich peasants all rose as one.’37 Further deaths from hunger and disease followed, perhaps as many as twelve million between 1918 and 1922.38
In the cities the state tried to direct all social and economic activity. Unplanned initiative was curtailed or criminalised. There were forests and rivers around St Petersburg that might have provided fuel and fish, but unauthorised fishing, it was said, would produce nothing – and security forces would take the catch.39 In 1918 only half of workers’ food came from official sources.40 The state was forced to compromise: it tolerated open-air markets and allowed individuals to bring 25 kg food-sacks into cities. Official and unofficial economic systems existed side-by-side. Productivity suffered as urban workers starved. Payment for piece-work had little immediate effect: most of workers’ ‘income’ consisted of inadequate rations. ‘Iron discipline’ could not remedy the structural problems that had been exacerbated since 1914.
All-too-visible inequalities provoked angry responses. Party leaders in St Petersburg had hot baths while much of the city shivered. Guards protected their hotel woodpiles while other houses were torn apart for fuel. Adolf Ioffe wrote on the privileged nature of party life in May 1920. In Moscow inequality was enormous:
At the lowest level it means a pair of boots and a tunic; higher up, an automobile, a railcar, access to the Sovnarkom [State Executive] dining room, an apartment in the Kremlin or the National [hotel] . . . There is no room here for the old party dedication and self-sacrifice . . .41
The Bolsheviks saw their political base shrink.42 There were many strikes. Opposition to the party-state increased. At times, the Bolsheviks did sound out the views of non-party labour, and attempted to respond to complaints, but there were limits to this tolerance, and where their domination was threatened they maintained their rule through intimidation.
The Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Congress did not meet between June 1918 and February 1920.43 Where Soviets were recalcitrant they were dissolved – they functioned only where the party had a majority. The right of recall lapsed. Elections were fixed. The holding of ‘free’ unsanctioned elections was penalised. Everything discussed within Soviets and non-party organizations was to be decided beforehand in a party fraction. In its own words, the party wanted ‘unquestioned leadership in all organisations of working people, in the unions, co-operatives, village communes, etc. The Communist Party strives especially to carry out its programme and to exercise unlimited leadership . . . Outright military discipline is needed in the party in the present epoch.’44 When May Day 1920 came round Mensheviks wanted a day off work and declined to join in a state sponsored day of supplementary ‘voluntary’ work – a ‘Subbotnik’.45 Lenin’s response was:
[O]nly malicious enemies of the working people, only malicious supporters of the bourgeoisie,46 can treat the May First Subbotnik with disdain; only the most contemptible people, who have irrevocably sold themselves to capitalists, can condemn the utilisation of the great First of May festival for a mass-scale attempt to introduce communist labour.47
Trotsky now advocated the militarisation of labour as ‘the inevitable method of organizing and disciplining labour power during the period of transition from capitalism to socialism’.48 The dictatorship of the proletariat, as Lenin himself put it, was to be exercised ‘only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class’. Lenin’s own respect for democracy appeared to have vanished, when in June 1920 he said:
The proletarian dictatorship should display itself primarily in the advanced, the most class-conscious and most disciplined of the urban and industrial workers – the greatest sufferers from hunger who have made great sacrifices during these two years – educating, training and disciplining all the other proletarians, who are often not class-conscious, and all working people and the peasantry. All sentimentality, all claptrap about democracy must be scrapped.49
Not everyone shared this perspective. Many Communist Party members resigned at the time of the Kronstadt revolt. Hermann Kanaiaeff, a Red Army officer explained:
Communist politics have brought the country to an impasse. The party has become bureaucratic, and evidently it has no desire to listen to popular aspirations. How could it hear the voice of the people, when it seeks only to impose its will? (Just think of 150 million peasants!) If workers are to be revived, electoral methods need transforming, allowing freedom of speech so that the masses can participate freely in the country’s reconstruction.50
Resistance was also expressed in less violent forms, perhaps because hunger left little energy for protest. A study of the city of Saratov at the time describes routine dissent: abstention, dissimulation and voting against Communist resolutions and candidates; absenteeism, go-slows and pilfering. Conformity became ‘ritualistic and opportunistic’; the new state had alienated working people.51
Of course, through the years of War Communism the social shape of Russia had changed greatly. Major cities had shrivelled. Tens of thousands of urban workers had joined food requisition squads (60,000 strong); 200,000 workers from Moscow and St Petersburg had been conscripted into the Red Army. Lenin wrote that the urban proletariat had been declassed.52
By the end of 1919 nearly half the workforce in St Petersburg consisted of women.53 ‘Women’s work’ remained: child-care, cooking, etc. was unpaid, unvalued and often un-recognised. Lenin remarked that ‘very few husbands, not even proletarians, think of how much they could lighten the burdens and worries of their wives, or relieve them entirely, if they lent a hand in this “women’s work”’.54 Progressive measures taken by the new regime in urban areas were important in this context, promoting literacy, providing kitchens, nurseries, and care for pregnant women. Abortion and divorce were legalized. But years of war and conflict impacted on family life. Huge numbers of children were abandoned. Venereal disease was rife. Inequalities persisted despite new and progressive legislation. Work done by a peasant family earned some compensation for those who exchanged produce for money, but not so much for those who worked unpaid under the direction of a male family head. For their part, urban women workers were viewed as less class conscious and less proletarian. They had little influence in the unions, party and state, and had little power to defend their interests. Carers and housekeepers might vote but, lacking associations of their own, had no particular representation in Soviets or unions. Some attempts were made to set up unions to defend the particular interests of women, but the party resisted such initiatives.55
Meanwhile, the ranks of officialdom mushroomed. In St Petersburg their numbers rose from some 38,000 in 1910, to over 170,000 in 1920 while workers’ numbers declined from 411,000 to 150,000. Moscow had some 150,000 officials, more bureaucrats than workers.56 A new layer of bureaucracy, the Workers’ and Peasants Inspectorate, was invented to check older ones. A 200,000-strong Cheka policed everyone. Lenin now talked of old oppressive classes ‘hiding out among Soviet government employees’.57 His argument missed the point: it was not so much the former class origins of state officials that was an issue, but rather their current practice. If one had to get a pass to see an official, to get a stamp on a document, and one then had to queue for hours to get another pass and another stamp; if officials turned up late and went home early leaving people frustrated and having to queue again one might come to the conclusion that the state apparatus was self-serving.58 If one saw off-ration perks and foods going to commissars and was hungry one would conclude that officials were using their current status for their own benefit. Former workers, turned officials, were absorbed into the state machine and had ‘lost their living links with the masses’.59 In 1926 Anton Ciliga described these new strata’s desiccated egoism, concerned ‘to hew themselves out a good place, regardless of others’.60 Besides the manner in which it operated, the new state was disproportionately large and costly.
Lenin had talked of a ‘cheap state’61 back in 1917, and claimed the only ‘reason why the functionaries of our political organisations and trade unions are corrupted . . . and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged persons divorced from the masses and standing above the masses’ was due to ‘the conditions of capitalism’.62 Lenin’s assessment was short sighted. It became clear after 1917 that it was not just the conditions of capitalism that engendered the ‘divorce’ of the privileged from the masses, the new state’s privileged officials, Cheka operatives, commissars and bureaucrats absorbed an officious energy from their new roles.
Many dissidents kept quiet while ‘White’ fascistic forces were a threat.63 Some were very aware that there was precious little freedom in other countries at war. In the USA for example, all dissent was suppressed, and IWW activists were largely imprisoned. But as Russia’s civil war came to an end in the spring of 1921, dissent revived. For example, in February, at a conference of metalworkers, critics received stormy applause in response to their calls for wage equality, the abolition of privileged rations and for distribution of those rations through unions, suggesting that state structures were distrusted: ‘By their words one could sense a complete breach between the masses and the party, between the masses and the union.’64 The state cracked down on opposition. In Kronstadt a mass meeting called for a return to equal rations and the mass democracy of 1917:
Having heard reports of delegates sent to Petrograd by the general assembly of ships’ companies, to investigate the situation, the assembly decides that, given that the present Soviets do not express the will of workers and peasants, to proceed with the immediate organisation of new elections of Soviets by secret ballot; there should now be complete freedom of expression and propaganda among workers and peasants for the preparatory electoral campaign. Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for Anarchists and for Socialist parties of the left; freedom of assembly for unions and peasant organisations is to be guaranteed . . .65
In the face of such discontent Lenin abandoned War Communism. The New Economic Policy did improve general conditions, especially for rural people, but not so much for urban workers. Unemployment increased and much of the welfare state was dismantled producing dire consequences for women.
One critic, writing in 1923, concluded that unions had become organs of police surveillance and that ‘the Communist boss, the State, not only exploits the workers, but also punishes them himself, since both of these functions, exploitation and punishment, are combined in him’.66 Another, Ciliga, a sympathiser of the Left Opposition, remarked in 1926 that factory workers:
were prisoners of their foremen and directors, as in capitalist countries. Their lot was indeed worse, for, in the latter countries, the workers can protest in the press and at meetings. Here there was no one to whom to turn. It was not socialism, he concluded, it was slavery.67
We have seen that Lenin looked for a process of transition rather than immediate socialism. From this, several overlapping questions arise: Was the shape of the revolution the result of choice or unpredictable circumstance (or both)? Could the Leninist model of transition arrive at socialism?
Russia’s economy was a mess before the Bolsheviks took power. In other countries, too, the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy brought huge disruption. On the other hand, if one compares these circumstances with those of other revolutions, Russia had certain advantages: for one thing, it initially developed over a long period to May 1918, so there was some space for problems to be resolved. Moreover, it had geographical advantages: capital cities were able to provide war materials and act as transport hubs so resources could be redirected from place to place.
Circumstances of war, mass demobilization and economic dislocation would have made any strategy for change very difficult. Disruption was inevitable. However, the policies of War Communism – particularly the agrarian policy of requisitioning food – exacerbated problems. Critics inside and outside the Bolshevik Party called for it to be abandoned.
The swollen state was inefficient. Workers perceived its enormous structures as wasteful, corrupt, ill informed and chaotic68 – issuing contradictory instructions. Much conflict was a turf war between managers. ‘The simplest act of distribution, the provision of matches for the Moscow population for instance, might be held up for weeks or even months as a result of endless quarrels in regard to departmental jurisdiction.’69 The state, was obsessed with large-scale planning, and its appetites were frequently overambitious, unbalanced, and greater than its capacity, so that resources went to waste. Simultaneously it might obstruct unsanctioned local initiatives, such as individuals growing food for themselves on urban allotments – something that was allowed in the Second World War.
Discipline was imposed to remedy the chaos allegedly introduced by workers’ control, but naturally enough this could remedy neither a chaotic state nor the problems that arose from a disorganised economy. Workers’ pay was refashioned, using piece-work and payment-by-results; that harsh discipline was not inflicted on failing commissars and managers. Substantial perks remained available for them.
Before October, Lenin had believed that: ‘The idea of “direction” by officials “appointed” from above is essentially false and undemocratic . . .’70 In December 1920 he thought: ‘Democracy is a category proper only to the political sphere.’71 Circumstances perhaps determined his focus. But his doctrine setting out distinct spheres – political and economic – did not admit that feedback from the latter would shape the norms of the former. To believe that factory workers would give unquestioning obedience from Monday to Saturday and enjoy power and ‘rule’ on Sunday; to believe that powerful and privileged elites would facilitate a transition towards socialism rather than seek to fulfil their own interests – all this was fantasy.
By the autumn of 1918, Rosa Luxemburg had already come to her chilling assessment of the Russian revolution: ‘Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep.’72
Fifty years later, Isaac Deutscher concluded in the final pages of The Prophet Armed – the first volume of his trilogy on Trotsky – that by 1921 the Bolshevik leadership, having been driven into Communism by unanticipated, harsh circumstances beyond their control, were experiencing ‘defeat in victory’.73 In another text he wrote that revolutionary socialist leaders ‘suddenly’ found themselves in a situation in which there was no revolutionary class behind them74 – a possibility none of the classical Marxist theorists had anticipated.75
Fifty years later still, Tamás Krausz’s Reconstructing Lenin – even while concluding that Lenin still ‘provides tools for those who still think of the possibility of another, more humane world’ – clearly reveals the severe contradictions in Lenin’s theory and practice, acknowledging that ‘it was a mistake to think that the workers could defend themselves against their own state without democracy’.76
Krausz writes that the party does not appear as a concept in State and Revolution.77 Lenin’s key message had been to assert the key role of the commune as a revolutionary model, superseding parliamentary democracy. But the concept of the party was in fact present in State and Revolution, under the rubric of the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’ educated by Marxism to become the teacher, guide and leader.78 Underlying Lenin’s thinking is the concept of the key role of the vanguard party in negating other ‘non-proletarian’ influences in the labour movement, with truth residing in the party’s correct interpretation of Marxist texts. This Marxism assumed a symbiosis between one party and one class. The possibility that the party might articulate the aspirations of a part of the proletariat against another part was not considered. There was no pluralism here, nor any reflection on how conflicting perspectives might be resolved – or not.79 The notion of a single vanguard for a single class was not derived from consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of various unorganised or organised sectors (and factory committees, unions, housing committees, peasant assemblies, etc.) – structures that were largely absent in State and Revolution, a text Krausz calls the ‘handbook’ of revolution.80
Krausz writes ‘that the soviet dictatorship, “the dictatorship of the majority (dictatorship of the proletariat) vis-à-vis the minority” was politically legitimated by the revolution itself’.81 And he adds that State and Revolution was ‘the theoretical “self-definition” of an array of social-political forces organized in the framework of the soviets and other spontaneous social organizations . . .’82 Yet Lenin admitted that a minority was disciplining a majority. Dissident spokespeople from an array of social forces felt the untender attentions of the Cheka. Krausz’s use of three disparate terms glosses over these problematic realities.
In 1917 Lenin worked with forces of mass direct democracy to destroy the old state machine. Aspects of his thinking already present before October – the admiration of order, discipline and organisation – emerged more clearly thereafter. The party disciplined and commanded a decimated urban proletariat, and working people in general, through a rigged democracy that operated only in the political sphere. This political system was an appropriate fit, perhaps, for a transition to state-capitalism but quite unfit for a socialist purpose. The energy of working people was sapped as they found the new state unresponsive and oppressive; state power facilitated popular apathy and powerlessness.
Of course all transitions are limited by material and social factors. Everything cannot come all at once: one cannot build today’s factories with tomorrow’s bricks. But whereas older materials may have to be used, and may be used, with a limited impact on the process of transition towards socialism, the same does not hold for social relations. Hierarchical and authoritarian social relations seem destined to create feedback, recreating relations of power and powerlessness and material inequality.
Strategies for transition towards socialism have tended to focus on two central concerns: workers’ power and state planning. One set of strategies looked first to the planning of industrial production. Planning was viewed as essentially progressive, and its potential shortcomings were often disregarded. Circumstances – Russia’s isolation, economic disruption, the preponderance of peasant farming – did not suit this sort of transition. Lenin and his party chose traditions and priorities, along with iron discipline and one-man management. Their thinking leaned on that of Friedrich Engels, who viewed authority as natural and indispensable, citing railways as an example.83 But other options might have been taken, and other interests might have been given priority.
Another socialist perspective focused on local accountability and equitable social relations. There was some satisfaction – albeit limited – in choosing between thin or thick cabbage soups. Workers could begin building new social relations and new networks to serve needs that could not be met on a local scale. Subsequent experience with collectives in Republican Spain after July 1936 suggests that a libertarian model could work, even on railways,84 and with greater success than the Russian system, run on military lines. If events in Spain took another course, with the widespread growth of industrial and agricultural collectives, that development was also not merely accidental. It reflected a different revolutionary perspective and heritage deriving from Bakunin and his legatees, which rejected the Jacobin/bourgeois model and envisaged a self-managed social revolution. In this tradition, authority certainly existed, but efforts were made to socialize it and ensure it was not permanently fixed, so that capacities, expertise and responsibilities were rotated and shared. Grassroots bodies would work to both ensure accountability and build wider federations. As for relations between rural and urban collectives, here too the Spanish experience, while hardly rosy, was still happier than the Russian.
For a short time, the range of political forces that generated the October 1917 revolution came together in factory committees, soviets and other participatory institutions. The shortcomings of the leading players in the new state were not so evident in the early phase of the revolutionary process. But the common purpose that brought these various forces together in October soon fragmented; thereafter this array of forces had no unity. For the most part they continued to defend participatory change, and opposed reaction, but only a fraction of these forces lined up behind Lenin’s party. The new state promoted layers of intellectuals and some industrial workers into roles as managers, commissars, officials and officers in security forces facilitating power and privilege.
The Bolsheviks portrayed these forces’ bureaucratic and militaristic organisational norms as virtues, setting out that ‘iron proletarian centralism’ was the basic principle of the Third International in the epoch of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that iron military discipline must be established in its ranks.85 Trotsky would say: ‘Clearly, the Party is always right . . . We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right.’86 Thus the former chair of the St Petersburg Soviet himself could not see the soviets as an independent ‘way of being right’. Soviets, in this perspective, were not forums where the policies of various layers of working people might be reconciled, but administrative bodies that implemented the directives of a fused party-state leadership. Russia became, in name, a Federalist, Soviet and Socialist Republic, but reality proved quite different. Participatory and egalitarian politics were largely submerged.
Since 1917, there has been a reversal in the balance between the rural and urban worlds. Employment in the service sector is now greater than in industry. Gender relations have changed. Contemporary levels of literacy and education are hugely different. Communication passes through the internet. Such changes – and experience elsewhere – make the Bolshevik model ever more inappropriate. Movements for transformative change may seek out new paths that facilitate new social relations and forms of accountability, with both economic security for particular regions and the benefits of international trade. Democracy may yet be given a new twist towards participation and federalism. Devolution, decentralisation and autonomy may better facilitate participation and accountability.87 Change in the future may be informed by past history, but may also take on new shapes to adapt to future developments and conform to new hopes and aspirations through a very different strategic imagination.
1Vladimir Lenin, Collected Works Volume 25, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1960, p. 468. Lenin defined ‘proletariat’ as industrial workers; ‘the people’ was a wider term including white-collar employees and peasants.
2Lenin, Collected Works Volume 25, pp. 431-2.
3Efim Yartchouk, ‘L’autogestion à Kronstadt en 1917’, Autogestion et socialisme, No. 18-19, Paris: Martin, 1972, pp. 223-6.
4Voline, The Unknown Revolution, Detroit: Black & Red, 1974, pp. 293-4.
5James Bunyan and H. H. Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1918: Documents and Materials, Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1934, p. 280.
6David Mandel, ‘The Factory Committee Movement in the Russian Revolution’, in Immanuel Ness & Dario Azzellini, eds., Ours to Master and to Own, Chicago: Haymarket, 2011, pp. 125-6.
7Lenin, Collected Works Volume 24, p. 24.
8Lenin, Collected Works Volume 25, pp. 362-3.
9Emphasis added. Lenin, Collected Works Volume 26, pp. 106-7.
10Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development Since 1917, London: Routledge, 1966, p. 90.
11S.A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917-1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 213-14.
12Smith, Red Petrograd, p. 227.
13Emphasis added. Anton Pannekoek, ‘After the War Ends’, available at www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1917/after-war-ends.htm. See also my translation in Not Our War, London: Merlin Press, 2014, pp. 185-7.
14This is a term is used in Vladimir Brovkin, ‘Politics, Not Economics was the Key’, Slavic Review, Vol. 44, Issue 2, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985, pp. 244-50. Brovkin notes a series of strikes in the summer of 1918.
15Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007, p. 268.
16Quoted in Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, London: Solidarity, 1970, p. 21.
17Lenin banned the writings of Pelloutier and other syndicalists. Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967, p. 225.
18Lenin, Collected Works Volume 25, pp. 478-9.
19Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of Communist Autocracy, London: George Bell and Sons, 1966, p. 141.
20Quoted in Bunyan and Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution, p. 643.
21Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism, London: Polity Press, 1990, p. 69.
22Bunyan & Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution, pp. 645-6. Novaia Zhizn was banned that summer.
23Bunyan and Fishcer, The Bolshevik Revolution, p. 647.
24Lenin, Collected Works Volume 27, p. 340.
25Lenin, Collected Works Volume 27, p. 317.
26Quoted in Yuri Akhapkin, First Decrees of Soviet Power, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970, pp. 132-5. Before 1917 Alexander Bogdanov had criticised Taylorism fearing that making workers fit a repetitious mechanical process would dull senses and produce mindlessness. He predicted that the overall productivity of industry would decline if an army of unproductive middle managers was created. See also Steve Smith, ‘Taylorism Rules OK?’, Radical Science Journal, No. 13, 1983.
27Left Communists’ Theses on the Current Situation, Critique April 1918, Glasgow. Available at: https://libcom.org.
28Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 27, p. 293.
29Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 27, p. 316.
30Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 27, p. 488.
31Marc Ferro, Des soviets au communisme bureaucratique, Paris: Éditions Gallimard/Julliard, 1980, p. 133.
32Quoted by Israel Getzler, ‘Soviets as Agents of Democratisation’, in Edith Rogovin Frankel, et al, eds., Russia in Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 30.
33Published in Vol’nyi Golos Truda. This paper, like its predecessor Golos Truda was banned. Paul Avrich, ed., The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution, London: Thames & Hudson, 1973, pp. 122-5. Maximov fought in the Red Army but was sentenced to death for refusing to do police work. Appeals by the metalworkers’ union secured his reprieve.
34Yuri Akhapkin, First Decrees, p. 157.
35Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 32, pp. 495-6.
36Isaac Steinberg, Spiridonova, London: Methuen, 1935, p. 224.
37Gregory P. Maximov, The Guillotine at Work, Vol. 1, Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1979, p. 69. See also: Jacques Baynac, La Terreur sous Lénine, Paris: Le Sagittaire, 1975, p. 137.
38Alexandre Skirda, Kronstadt 1921, Éditions de Paris, 2012, p. 74.
39Marcel Body, Au Cœur de la Révolution, Éditions de Paris, 2003, pp. 181-2.
40Roy Medvedev, The October Revolution, London: Constable, 1979, p. 141.
41Quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 237; see also Emma Goldman, Living My Life, Vol. 2, New York: Dover Publications, 1970, pp. 753-754.
42Vladimir Brovkin, ‘The Mensheviks’ Political Comeback: The Elections to the Provincial City Soviets in Spring 1918’, Russian Review, Vol. 42, Issue 1, Lawrence, Kansas: Wiley, pp. 1-50. Roy Medvedev, The October Revolution, p. 148.
43Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, London: Merlin Press, 1980, p. 230.
44Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets, New York: Pantheon, 1974, p. 241; Mervyn Matthews, Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents, London: Jonathan Cape, 1974, pp. 134-5, 144.
45Subbotniks were rewarded by free meal, no small matter in hungry times. Participation was obligatory for members of the Communist Party, others would have anticipated troubles if they desisted. Lenin’s violent language is itself evidence of coercive intent.
46Mensheviks were not ‘malicious supporters of the bourgeoisie’. Stalinist propaganda would go on to use such mendacious discourse and the mechanism of the amalgam. These methods were already being used at this time.
47Lenin, Collected Works Volume 31, pp. 123-5.
48Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, London: New Park, 1975, p. 154. See also chapter 8, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, Economics of the Transformation Period, London: Pluto Press, 1978.
49Lenin, Collected Works Volume 31, p. 176.
50Kronstadt Izvestia, No. 3, 5:3, 1921.
51Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 376-7, 408, 413-6.
52See for instance the speeches in March and May 1921. Lenin Collected Works Volume 32, 1973, pp. 199, 412.
53See comments on a ‘sea of women’ in Mary McAuley, Bread And Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 244.
54Clara Zetkin, ‘My Recollections of Lenin’, in Vladimir Lenin, On the Emancipation of Women, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977, p. 114.
55Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism, p. 86.
56William J. Chase, Workers, Society and the Soviet State, Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 1990, p. 50.
57Lenin, Collected Works Volume 32, p. 455.
58Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, London: Pluto Press, 1987, pp. 180, 219-21.
59Petrogradskii Pravda, quoted in Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice, p. 254.
60Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, pp. 12-13. Bakunin had anticipated as much: former workers, ‘once they become popular representatives or rulers cease to be workers. They begin to regard the proletarian world from the heights of the State, they represent themselves and their pretension to govern the people, but no longer represent the people’. See Michael Bakunin, Selected Texts, London: Merlin/Annares, 2016, p. 245.
61Lenin, Collected Works Volume 25, p. 426.
62Emphasis added. Lenin, Collected Works Volume 25, p. 491.
63Chase, Workers, Society, pp. 51-2; Walter Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution 1917-1921, Vol. 2, New York: Macmillan, 1954, p. 109.
64Chase, Workers, Society, p. 50.
65Skirda, Kronstadt 1921, pp. 125-6.
66Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement 1918-1921, Detroit & Chicago: Black & Red, 1974, p. 71.
67Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London: Ink Links, 1979, pp. 11-12.
68Thomas F. Remington, ‘Institution Building in Bolshevik Russia: The Case of “State Kontrol”’, Slavic Review, Vol. 41, Issue 1, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982, pp. 91-105.
69Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, pp. 2, 99 and 112-13.
70Lenin, Collected Works Volume 24, p. 322.
71Lenin, Collected Works Volume 32, pp. 32, 26.
72Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, London: Carl Slienger, 1977, p. 47.
73Left SRs, Maximalists and Anarchist were winning influence—Deutscher writes: ‘People listened even more sympathetically to anarchists violently denouncing the Bolshevik regime. If the Bolsheviks had now permitted free elections to the Soviets, they would almost certainly have been swept from power’. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 504-5 and 515-17.
74Isaac Deutscher, Die unvollendete Revolution, Frankfurt: Fischer Bücherei, 1967, p. 31. The events of 1921 did not come suddenly, ‘out of the blue’—they flowed from the conflicts and tensions that had been building since 1918.
75Fifty years earlier Bakunin had anticipated potential conflict between town and country in the course of revolution if rule by decree prevailed. An alliance between rural and urban workers was imperative. ‘The entire revolutionary question lies here, one must resolve it or perish’. Bakunin, Selected Texts, p. 183.
76Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015, pp. 331, 370. Krausz comments on workers’ supervision (in English language texts this is usually rendered as ‘workers’ control’) and suggests incorrectly that Lenin borrowed this concept from the anarchists (p. 202). Anarchists and syndicalists, as we have seen, wanted much more than mere accounting and checking, while Lenin, concerned with the growing influence of libertarians in the latter half of 1917, had carefully and deliberately asserted strictly limited forms of workers’ control, subordinated to state power. As was noted above, developments exceeded this agenda and led to incipient forms of workers’ management. There is another error, perhaps an error in translation, on page 191: ‘In a study from 1910, Bakunin acknowledged that . . .’ Bakunin died in 1876.
77Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, p. 196
78Emphasis added. Lenin, Collected Works Volume 25, p. 409.
79The Sixth Congress of the International Workers’ Association, meeting in Geneva, 1-6 September 1873, had adopted the view that the purpose of workers’ congresses was to discuss and to attempt to bring some degree of harmony between various points of view. Rene Berthier, Social-Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864-1877, London: Merlin/Anarres, 2015, p.185
80Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, p. 178.
81Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, p. 196. Krausz notes that there were only some four million industrial workers in Russia, so, even if all proletarians had supported the Bolshevik party (never the case), the dictatorship of this proletariat could never have amounted to the dictatorship of a majority of working people.
82Emphasis added. Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, p. 197.
83For a critical perspective see Anthony Zurbrugg, ‘Socialism and Strategy: A Libertarian Critique of Leninism,’ Anarchist Studies, 22.1, 2014.
84For an example—on railways—see: Gaston Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, London: Freedom Press, 1975, p. 247.
85Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt & Barbara Holland, London: Ink Links, 1980, p. 73
86Boris Souvarine, Stalin, London: Secker & Warburg, 1939, pp. 362-363.
87For example: http://zcomm.org/category/topic/parecon, www.solidaires.org, and www.cgt.es.