Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (31 page)

Far from improving supplies of bread or anything else the economy went into a tail-spin. A strike of public employees in November 1917 paralysed government itself. At the same time, bank employees also struck in protest against amalgamation and nationalization. Factory owners made off with any movable assets they could get their hands on. Very quickly technical personnel, managers and clerks were in conflict with the blue-collar-dominated factory committees and soviets. Many left to try to find better conditions elsewhere. Some sought the protection of White enclaves as they developed. The result was a downward spiral. Difficulties with production and decreasing co-operation between management and workers led to workers being forced to take over more managerial and technical functions. The more they did that, the more they alienated the technicians and managers and drove them away. The more they drove them away, the deeper they were sucked in to taking their place and so on. Sadly, the workers lacked the skills needed, and so layer upon layer of chaos evolved.

In priority areas, such as the railways, direct involvement by the new authorities prevented total collapse and, though it was also failing, the war effort was maintained in part. However, by the end of the year Russia’s cities and urban, industrial economy were in chaos. Chaos promoted shock moves by workers to try and preserve their jobs. Various methods were tried. One was so-called workers’ control, which would be better translated as ‘workers’ supervision’, which appeared to correspond with Lenin’s plans for transition. However, Lenin quickly turned against the movement because it usually meant the takeover of individual factories by their individual workforce. This then turned factories into support networks for their workers, not efficient production units. It promoted what Lenin feared to be a process of subdividing and sectionalizing the working class into competing micro-units rather than drawing them together as a whole. Workers also nationalized factories without permission from the centre. It was only several months into the revolution that the centre itself promoted nationalization, not because it believed in it at that moment but because no alternative presented itself.

Conditions in towns and cities became worse and worse. Jobs were disappearing fast. Urban populations began to collapse as workers returned to the countryside to seek survival and join in the redistribution of land. As the war wound down even the armaments workers of Petrograd began to suffer. A combination of economic desperation and patriotic disgust fuelled a protest in the city just after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It appeared that Lenin’s critics might be proved right and there would be an extensive backlash against the unequivocal surrender to the Germans. In fact the protest is more notable for its eloquence than for its impact.

The new regime calls itself Soviet
… In reality, however, the most important matters in the life of the state are decided without the participation of the Soviets … They promised us immediate peace … In fact, they have given us a shameful capitulation to the German imperialists … They promised us bread. In fact, they have given us a famine of unparalleled dimensions. … They promised us freedom … All have been trampled by the heels of the police and crushed by the force of arms.
⁹

However, many other workers’ groups were protesting. Having appar
ently secured its immediate position through victory in what was thought to have been the Civil War and having ended the war with Germany, the new authorities turned more and more to the critical state of the home front. The industrial economy had to be restored. The unbridled transfer of land to the peasants, though initially sanctioned by the Soviet government, was stoking up potential problems for the future. Though it was not yet clear, the handing over of vast territories to the Germans provided a much more threatening renewal of the Civil War. Abandonment of the concept of revolutionary war, not to mention steps being taken to restore factory discipline such as one-person management, were provoking resistance from the left of the Party. The shambolic situation called imperatively for a reappraisal. The first model of transition was definitively dead. Lenin was surrounded only by the wreckage of his initial hopes and expectations. What could be done?

The period from early 1918 to 1920/1 is often described as the Civil War, but it was much more than that. Minority nationalities conducted their own revolutions. Within them smaller but no less bitter civil wars were fought out. Social conflicts within the civil wars added to the com
plexity. Wars and revolutions were inextricably entwined. It is beyond the scope of a biography to trace the narrative of these chaotic years. In any case it has been expertly done already. What has been less remarked upon, and which is crucial to our project, is the strategy, or to be more precise the series of three strategies pursued by Lenin. As we have seen, the first, naive, strategy for transition had already collapsed by spring 1918. It was to be followed by two more, discussed in depth in the next two chapters. However, these strategies did not exist in a vacuum and it is necessary to make a number of remarks about the flood of events which they were intended to contain and transform.

From late spring 1918 the new government was fighting on numerous fronts. The conflict against the Whites flared up again after a revolt by Czech former war prisoners who were returning home. This opened up new political vacuums that right-wing enemies of the regime could exploit. From summer 1918 into the crucial year of 1919 anti-Bolshevik armies composed of remnants of the tsarist Army, mostly from the officer class, battled to overthrow the usurpers. They also contained contradictions both within the separate armies – the main ones being Denikin’s Volunteer Army in South Russia, Kolchak’s force in Siberia and Yudenich’s troops in the now independent Baltic States – as well as between them as they sought eventual supremacy after a victory they considered inevitable. Despite considerable support from other countries, both direct and indirect, the anticipated victory was no more than illusory. They never had the personnel to win the war but even more problematically, they did not have a political strategy to light a fire under the Bolsheviks. Their confused, stale, contradictory principles of restoration, Great Russian nationalism and proto-fascism, including sickening bouts of anti-semitism, set few hearts racing. They were, in the end, only able to hold the ground on which they stood. When they moved away from a place the inhabitants were mostly glad to see them go and forgot all about them. Even so, in 1919 the three forces all advanced sufficiently to scare the Bolsheviks. By the end of the year, however, they were in headlong retreat and remained peripheral thereafter.

In fact, their existence was, on balance, a great help to the Bolsheviks because it sowed massive confusion in the minds of non-Bolsheviks, including most of the peasants and workers, who were growing restive at the developing Bolshevik dictatorship and armed requisitioning of grain, but were reluctant to take steps to undermine them while they provided the only protection against the Whites. As we shall see, Bolshevik internal problems multiplied as the White threat was replaced in 1920–1 by serious internal rebellions which could only be controlled by the abandonment of Lenin’s second strategy for transition, usually referred to as War Communism. It was replaced by his third attempt, the New Economic Policy as a result of economic defeat at the hands of the masses. While there is much debate about the degree of improvisation and pragmatism in Bolshevik policies at this time the focus below is mainly on Lenin’s attempted strategies to go beyond the everyday problems and get on with the implementation of his project, encapsulated in his statement of October, turned into a political poster cliché, that ‘we will now proceed to construct the socialist order’.

For Lenin, the first six months or so of the Revolution were a mixture of exhilaration and exhaustion. The dizziness he felt on the morrow of seizing power barely dissipated. Hardly any character in history had undergone such a precipitate rise. Up to 25 October Lenin had lived like a hermit crab, moving from shell to shell as appropriate, possessing nothing, accumulating no material goods whatsoever. He had been driven by revolutionary energy of extraordinary depth and conviction.

From this perspective his inner drive, to change the metaphor, was more like a volcano. Ideas, letters, articles, pamphlets, books, projects, alliances exploded from his mind. The energy and power of his intellectual creativity accounted for his pre-eminence. It was the feature which attracted his supporters and repelled his opponents. He was supported throughout by close family ties, especially to his mother and his sisters, Anna and Maria. Nadezhda and Inessa were extensions of this loving group. Friends, notably the Zinovievs, often moved around with them. A wider circle of friends, including Gorky who had become extremely critical of what he saw as Bolshevik adventures in 1917, and Bonch-Bruevich, were on hand to provide crucial support at decisive moments. Within this framework he had lived his life, partly as a professor holding seminars and defending his tumult of theses, partly as a stop-atnothing politico, driven to get his way by a morality of revolutionary expediency and class warfare.

His incredible self-belief was at the core of his political personality. Lenin was not the sort of person to sit with his head in his hands wondering if he was doing the right thing. It was not a question that arose to him, even privately, it seems. It was both his greatest strength and greatest weakness. The greatest strength in giving him the dynamism to achieve what he did. The greatest weakness in leading him to impose his own views at times when compromise and co-operation would have been beneficial. Arising from this was his failure to accept opposition. As we have seen, from early in his career, and increasingly from 1903, Lenin was almost pathological in attacking opponents. He not only refuted their ideas but questioned their motives, their class affiliations, their opinions. All opponents were automatically deemed to be mouthpieces of class enemies of the Revolution. They were at best mistaken, at worst malevolently undermining the true faith. In Lenin’s simple universe of ideas there were only believers and heretics.

In exile, the two Lenins – the intellectual-professorial and the political – had tended to live side by side, or perhaps more precisely, in alternating sequences with the bulk of the time Lenin being the quintessential intellectual, reading and writing his way to his goals. Intermittently, during Party meetings and conferences, the political Lenin took over to attempt the complete victory of his ideas and the political annihilation of his opponents. After the struggle, Krupskaya took him to the mountains, the forest or the beach to recover his equilibrium and resurrect the intellectual from the politician with shattered nerves. The transition to power did not kill off either of the Lenins. The intellectual survived. Lenin even referred to Central Committee meetings as gatherings of great minds which were conducted like professorial seminars. But the balance was changed forever. For slightly more than four years, from October 1917 onwards, the political Lenin came to the fore. Only severe illness undermined both Lenins from 1921 onwards, leaving him as only a shadow of his former self in his last years.

In the early months after the Revolution, Lenin was deeply conscious of the fragility of the forces which had brought him to power, but also of the epochal significance of what was happening, or so he thought. The Russian revolution was, as the title of his first newspaper had put it, the spark (
iskra
) to light the prairie fire of world revolution. In his morality of revolutionary expediency almost anything could be justified if it brought success. In the middle of the First World War, at that time the most massive human bloodletting ever, refinements of morality seemed not only constricting but obscene. A few sacrifices, a moment of ruthlessness, was not only justified but demanded if millions could be saved from death at the front and from the worldwide tentacles of imperialist exploitation. To lay the foundations of a new world, a more perfect, classless and human world, it was the revolutionary’s duty to have dirty hands. The morality of Leninism and Stalinism began from this premise. It was a morality of war – not of a disgusting national war that misled the many into serving the needs of the few, but a class war of the multitude against the exploiting minority. Soldiers, and increasingly civilians, suffered and died in war, that was inevitable. It was not desirable but that was the way it had to be.

It was in this frame of mind that Lenin, in the early months and beyond, was at his most violent. He never rejoiced in violence but he was convinced it was necessary in self-defence. As he had said several times in 1917, the Bolsheviks would refrain from violence until it was used against them. The struggle would necessarily become violent at some point because the repressive instruments of the state would have to be confronted and smashed. However, Lenin argued that there would be a short, sharp, shock and the enemy would see sense. They could not coerce a rampant, armed, revolutionary majority.

At first, it was the Military Revolutionary Committees (MRCs) which conducted the ruthless repression. By December, a new, supposedly temporary institution, the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, was set up. Its full title expressed its function. It was ‘The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating CounterRevolution and Sabotage’. Though it was by no means the first such organization – the tsars had made extensive use of secret police as had the Jacobins in the French Revolution – the Cheka had a peculiarly and characteristically Leninist aura. It embodied the complexities and contradictions of Lenin’s approach to revolution. In essence, the argument for its existence was unanswerable. A highly effective agent of revolutionary enforcement was needed against the resistance of the old ruling class. It needed, however, like the French Revolution, an ‘incorruptible’ leader imbued with the correct revolutionary consciousness. In choosing Dzerzhinsky to lead it Lenin had found such a person. He was intelligent, loyal and determined, and he knew what Lenin wanted. He would create a weapon in the same image. It would dispense revolutionary justice swiftly and sharply. Once resistance died down it could be disbanded.

One cannot underestimate the Cheka’s importance as an embodiment of correct revolutionary consciousness. For Lenin, the success and failure of the Revolution lay in its ability to nurture political consciousness, to persuade Russia, and then the world, of the correctness of the Marxist revolutionary path as mapped out by Lenin himself. The Party was supposed to be such an instrument. Only with the aid of people of the right consciousness could the Revolution be constructed. In this sense, the intellectual Lenin lurked in the depths of the political Lenin.

However, a key problem was quickly emerging. In 1917 Lenin had claimed that if the old elite could govern through 130,000 landowners then the Revolution could do the same. In
Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?
, written in September 1917, Lenin had claimed:

Since the 1905 revolution, Russia has been governed by 130,000

landowners, who have perpetrated endless violence against

150,000,000 people, heaped unconstrained abuse upon them, and

condemned the vast majority to inhuman toil.

Yet we are told that the 240,000 members of the Bolshevik Party

will not be able to govern Russia, govern her in the interests of the

poor against the rich. These 240,000 are already backed by no less

than a million votes of the adult population.
… We therefore already

have a ‘state apparatus’ of one million people devoted to the socialist state for the sake of high ideals and not for the sake of a fat sum received on the 20th of every month. [SW 2 402]

As Bolshevik Party membership had risen in 1917 from about 25,000 to about 250,000, Lenin seemed to have the material to hand. However, the events of 1917 had ‘deBolshevized’ the Party. People flocked to it to establish soviet, rather than Bolshevik, power and to overthrow the Provisional Government, end the war and take over the economy. They were not imbued with Marxist ideas and had no idea of Lenin’s deeper agenda, the ‘maximum’ as opposed to the ‘minimum’ programme. In reality, only a small number of really conscious Bolsheviks existed. In the early years many efforts were made to expand their number but it was an uphill struggle, as we shall see.

For the moment, however, Dzerzhinsky was in charge of an institu
tion whose fate resembled that of many other similar attempts to embody the elusive consciousness, the key ingredient of Leninist revolution. In place of high-minded, intelligent and well-informed people like himself, the Cheka had to rely on whoever would work for it. That increasingly meant a sizeable minority of unreliables who might even have served in the tsarist police. True, many determined revolutionaries, especially from the minority nationalities, above all Jews as White pogroms hit their communities in Ukraine, joined the Cheka to become the avenging arm of revolutionary justice. Unfortunately, neither they nor the scanty judicial authorities had the wisdom of Solomon to keep the enterprise within bounds. It became increasingly arbitrary though devastatingly effective in defending the regime.

In recent years, there has been much more attention given to this violent and repressive Lenin. There is no doubt that he sanctioned executions of several categories of active counterrevolutionaries. Asked how to deal with speculators who were exploiting shortages to make money he proposed arresting some to warn off the rest. Other parasitic and exploiting groups, as Lenin viewed them, from prostitutes to priests, were put on the list for arrest and, in extreme cases, execution. In the morality of the class war, the sacrifice of even hundreds, perhaps thousands, of resisters would, it was hoped, open the way to save the lives of millions.

However, only perfect justice could have guaranteed the success of such a policy. Lenin and the leadership took no delight in it, but, like generals who think they see an opportunity, they were prepared to call a barrage of fire down on the enemy’s weak spot and hasten the end of the war.