Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (33 page)

The developing army had three other characteristics distinguishing it. First, the doctrine of specialists had great force and between a third and half of all officers had previously served in the Imperial Army. To counterbalance their potentially harmful ideological influence and to capitalize on the army as a point of political contact between the Party and the mass of the population, political commissars were attached to military units. Their task was to uphold ideological rectitude and educate, especially peasants, in the fundamentals of the Bolshevik cause. However, as in all comparable spheres, it was not easy to find people with the right consciousness. By December 1918 the Red Army had nearly 7,000 commissars. Astonishingly, many of them were not communists! This is one of the most striking examples of the shortage of ‘conscious’ supporters of the cause. Third, the Party was largely enrolled in the army as the Civil War flared up again. In March 1919 there were 60,000 communists in the army. By March 1920 the figure was 280,000 constituting about half the entire membership of the Party, though only comprising 8 per cent of the personnel of the army itself. None the less, it does indicate that, far from being a freely elected and participative militia, the Red Army was becoming a key instrument, not of soviet, but of Bolshevik power and influence.
³
One-man management and iron discipline, enforced by the reintroduction of the hated death penalty – the abolition of which had brought the Bolsheviks their first majorities in the key soviets – were firmly entrenched in the Red Army.

Could the principles of the second transition be extended into the village? Here Lenin was more directly involved in policy-making which bore a distinctly Leninist imprint. At the heart of Lenin’s view of the peasantry, as we have seen, was the assumption that there were class divisions within it corresponding to wealth and status. We have already mentioned that this might be seen as wishful thinking in that it provided a respectable Marxist excuse for enrolling a chunk of the peasantry, which might otherwise be thought to be hostile to the proletarian revolution, into the proletarian camp. Lenin had made a great deal of the need to demarcate the poor peasants and labourers from the middle peasants and so-called kulaks. In June 1918 he was instrumental in setting up committees of poor peasants (
kombedy
). The ostensible aim was to cement the expected alliance between the Party and the most exploited part of the peasantry. In practice it turned the commune peasants as a whole against the non-commune rural population, such as small traders and incomers, who opposed the commune because it denied them land. The result was rural chaos and the committees were, in effect, disbanded in December 1918 because, Lenin said, they had become ‘so well established we found it possible to replace them with properly elected soviets’.
⁴
In fact it was the first sign of yet another transformation in Lenin’s policies towards the peasants, referred to as ‘the turn towards the middle peasant’. The new line, which evolved through the militarily critical year of 1919, was intended to heal the breach between the Party and the majority of the peasantry who, Lenin now argued, should be won over to the socialist cause. He even went so far as to say, in his article ‘Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ written in October 1919, that ‘In this demarcation, lies the
whole essence
of socialism.’ [SW 3 279] Why was the divide growing?

The setting up of
kombedy
was not Lenin’s only initiative. Approaching civil war and urban disruption brought two new initiatives, conscription and food requisitioning. The peasants were not enthusiastic about the former but, as White advances happened in 1918 and 1919, they began to see the need for it to protect themselves from returning landlords. By and large, perhaps also because it was an accepted aspect of peasant life, conscription worked fairly smoothly. However, when it came to giving up their produce, they believed workers in the cities were, by comparison, being feather-bedded and resented their supposed privileged position. Peasants perceived workers as shirkers protected from conscription in defence industries and idle recipients of requisitioned food, since, in the peasants’ eyes, the workers were not producing the goods the peasants were promised in exchange for their produce. Throughout the period from 1918 to 1920 grain requisitioning provoked deep peasant resentment and, more than anything, drove a wedge between the Party and the peasantry. They evaded it in every possible way and under-delivered, especially to the resented cities, which brought famine to Petrograd and Moscow. Eventually, as we shall see, peasant resistance to the requisitioning of produce brought the collapse of Lenin’s second model of transition in late 1920.

INTO THE STORM – THE CRISIS OF 1918–21

If Lenin thought the situation up to late spring 1918 was complicated that which followed was infinitely more difficult. Let us take a look at the interacting factors that made the next three years incredibly complex.

Conventionally these are often seen as years of civil war and related war communism. To put the focus in that direction is misleading. True the Civil War, which reignited in June and July 1918, was a major component of the crisis. Soviet Russia was threatened by advancing White armies backed up diplomatically, financially and militarily by Britain, France and the United States. Other neighbouring countries joined in the attempt to seize territory – Turkey, Germany, Austria, Poland and Japan all mounted attacks at various points. Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all became independent while Ukraine almost did as well. In mid-1919, Lenin’s writ ran in only some 10 per cent of the territory of the former Russian Empire. However, the Soviet government still controlled the majority of the population, the industrial (though not the food) resources and, crucially, the hub of the railway network. By the end of 1919 it had put most of its enemies to flight.

But beneath this conflict there were other serious historical processes taking place. The underlying one was that the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks renamed themselves in March 1918) was doing its best to deepen the revolutionary transformation of Russian society. This meant continuing to pressurize the peasantry but also to turn the industrial economy into something worthy of being called socialist and the Russian worker, whom Lenin frequently upbraided for being backward, into a true, advanced, conscious proletarian. To do this involved coercion of the population on a massive scale, and this aspect of events is often overlooked in traditional views of the period. In fact, the Whites’ inability to find a secure political and ideological base in the population meant that, despite the military advances, they were a paper tiger.

By comparison, the threat to the Leninist project presented by recalcitrant workers and peasants was much greater than has been traditionally thought. Ironically, it was perhaps the existence of the Whites which saved the Soviet regime. How so? In many ways their actions, especially the atrocities they committed including the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews and their hostility to the separatist aspirations of the peripheral populations like the Cossacks among whom they were forced to establish their bases, undermined their cause. Whatever their differences with the Communists, the workers, peasants and the national minorities had even more issues with the Whites who threatened the reversal of the land settlement, the return of capitalist exploitation and the return of ‘Russia one and indivisible’.

True, Bolshevik promises of federalism for the minorities were vague and for workers the Revolution had brought very little but it still promised some kind of better future. In fact, the very meagreness of their gains could be explained as a consequence of the White challenge. As a result, the White advance served to discipline the population and cause most of them to turn to the Reds for protection. Only small numbers looked to the Whites. The corollary of this is that, as the White threat receded, the opposition of peasants and workers to the Bolsheviks would become more overt. In 1920 and 1921 this is exactly what happened with a series of anti-Communist uprisings in West Siberia, Tambov and Kronstadt. Strikes also threatened the authorities in Petrograd and elsewhere. However, by 1920, the population was exhausted by war and social upheaval and there was insufficient energy left in the popular movement to prevail against an ever-more organized and self-defensive soviet system. Had the uprisings happened in 1918, the outcome might have been very different.

It should also be added that the twists and turns of policy to deal with these issues created tensions within the Party. As early as Brest-Litovsk and the turn to ‘iron proletarian discipline’ in spring 1918 a substantial proportion of the longest-serving members of the Party began to criticize the leadership for abandoning the fundamental principles of the Revolution. Workers were not being liberated, they argued, but merely fitted with new harnesses. Given that the right wing of the Party had objected to the actions of October and the establishment of a purely Bolshevik rather than soviet system, one can see how the threat to Party unity was a real one. Lenin had to look to pacify both right and left oppositions.

There was also another, more deadly, dimension to the crisis of these years. Social and economic collapse led to famine. Famine brought death to hundreds of thousands. Even those who survived might suffer physical weakness which made bodies vulnerable to illness and infection. Social breakdown multiplied the sources of infection, especially bad water. As a result, cholera, typhoid, typhus and influenza mowed down great swathes of the population. It has been calculated that the associated traumas of these years brought about 10 million premature deaths. The vast majority of these, even in the fighting armies, were the result of disease rather than of violence and repression.

As if all this were not sufficient, Soviet Russia was trying to spark off world revolution, without which it did not expect to survive. In practice, this element had little major impact on the crisis of 1918–21. It did help marginally in organizing overseas sympathizers in Britain, France and elsewhere to conduct campaigns against intervention. In Britain, the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign was, perhaps, the last straw which broke the camel’s back when the government finally came to wind down the policy of intervention instead of build it up as Churchill suggested. The war with Poland in 1920 was also a point at which the spread of the revolution impinged on the crisis but it was not the decisive factor in causing the war. Conversely, eventual failure in the war with Poland was decisive in undermining optimistic expectations of a rapid spread of revolution to Germany and beyond. Even so, spreading the Revolution played a huge part in Lenin’s thinking: it was the revolution as a whole, not just the Russian Revolution, which occupied his mind. Russia’s was never more than a second-rank revolution in Lenin’s eyes. Famously, in a message sent to ‘American comrades’ via Albert Rhys Williams in May 1918, he said he was ‘absolutely convinced that the social revolution will finally prove victorious in all civilized countries. When it begins in America it will surpass the Russian revolution by far.’ [Weber 149] None the less it was with the realities of the Russian Revolution that Lenin had to deal.

Such was the massively complex set of interacting processes with which Lenin was confronted from spring 1918 onwards. Our present purpose is not to focus on the general historical picture of these years.
⁵
Instead, we will concentrate on how Lenin responded to the multiple challenges. From his point of view, military, internal and even foreign policies were only threads in a holistic cloth of carrying out a revolution. However, it is easier to understand what he was doing if we separate out some of the sub-areas. In particular, we need to look at the evolution of his socio-political policies and then turn to the sometimes marginalized but actually crucial sphere of cultural revolution. Also, the stress will be on the evolution of Lenin’s strategic thinking rather than the morass of everyday decisions he had to make.

LENIN’S REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY 1918–20 – THE ROAD MAP

From 1918 to about 1920, when its shortcomings were too great to be ignored any longer, Lenin was preoccupied with implementing his new model of revolutionary transformation. Combating the White enemy was, to some extent, subsumed in the struggle against class enemies – notably the bourgeoisie – as well as the struggle against ‘backward’ parts of the working class and the mass of the peasantry, the petty-bourgeoisie. Lenin was working at the levels of theory and practice and it is easier for us to follow what he was trying to do if we divide our analysis into the same two categories. The first section will look at his revolutionary road map, the second at the vehicles he was using to travel along his chosen route.

In the field of theory a number of themes dominated Lenin’s thinking. The foundation of his outlook was the world revolution. Lenin still saw it as the main
raison d’être
of the Revolution. Without it the Russian Revolution would not be able to follow the path he believed it should. Beyond that there were the practical problems of transition, how to run the economy to support the population and to transform it at the same time. This produced a hybrid, based on productionism, which Lenin increasingly referred to as state capitalism. The term most frequently used in western discourse is ‘war communism’ but that term was only coined after the phenomena to which it referred had been radically altered and was applied in retrospect. Productionism affected Lenin’s thinking on a wide variety of social issues, from the role of trades unions to women’s rights. Let us look at these two aspects of Lenin’s road map.

One might expect that, given the great weight of practical problems pressing in on him, Lenin would have become preoccupied with the mundane. This was not the case. The ‘intellectual with vision’ survived in the soul of the everyday decision-maker and the larger picture was never far from the centre of Lenin’s attention. In particular, the international revolution was a major preoccupation even though its immediate practical impact on events in Russia was minimal, not least because the desired revolution never materialized. However, its mythical significance for the leadership was very great. Lenin put it starkly on 7 March 1918: ‘At all events and under all conceivable circumstances, if the German revolution does not come we are doomed.’ [SW 2 583] Trotsky had said the same at the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 October 1917: ‘Our whole hope is that our revolution will kindle a European revolution. If the rising of the people does not crush imperialism, then we will surely be crushed. There is no doubt about that. The Russian Revolution will either cause a revolution in the West, or the capitalists of all countries will strangle ours.’
⁶
In Lenin’s mind there was an intimate connection between events inside and outside Russia. He was still working in the framework of a European, even worldwide, civil war. He followed radical developments in Europe and later in the colonies with great optimism, though little hard information. He also saw foreign intervention in Russia as part of counterrevolution. The result was a very complex discourse in Lenin’s mind. World revolution must happen because theory said it should. At times, he appeared to propose Bolshevism as a worldwide model for such a revolution – in the Comintern for example – while at others he emphasized that not only every country but even minority nationalities within them, including Russia’s minorities, would have to find their own ways to socialism. As far as capitalist governments were concerned he also had a complex attitude. Do what you can to overthrow them but do not hesitate to do beneficial trade and diplomatic deals with them if you can in the meantime. It was an area in which the strengths and weaknesses of Lenin’s analytical powers were brought out. The overall framework set up a dogmatic discourse of the inevitability of revolution which interacted with his pragmatism and often brilliant assessments of particular conjunctures, such as having to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

His most constant theme was reiteration of the basic point about survival. He returned to it time and time again. In May 1918, in his article ‘“Left-wing” Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality’ he affirmed that the victory of socialism requires ‘the revolutionary co-operation of the proletarians of all countries’. [CW 27 323–54] In a
Report on Foreign Policy
to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet and the Moscow Soviet he said the same thing – final victory can come only through the efforts of the workers of all countries – but opened up a crucial nuance. It was vital to ‘preserve our socialist island in the middle of stormy seas’. [CW 27 368–71] The seed of ‘socialism in one country’ was beginning to germinate. Thereafter, Lenin’s discourse developed both themes. The final victory depended on world revolution but the world revolution depended on the survival of the Russian Revolution.

It was clear, however, that Lenin did not believe the Russian Revolution could survive long without help from abroad. He believed that it was only the contradictions within imperialism, mainly expressed in the fact the imperialists were at each other’s throats, which meant they had less time to do what they should do, as he had oddly predicted in 1917, namely, settle their differences and mount a consolidated joint assault on the real threat to them all posed by the Russian Revolution. [Letter to Shaumyan 14 May 1918, CW 35 332] When such help would come, was, however, another question. In August 1918 he wrote that, while world revolution was inevitable, ‘only a fool can answer when revolution will break out in the West. Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.’ [CW 28 79–84,
Address at a Meeting in the Polytechnic Museum
]

Only a few weeks later the revolutionary temperature began to rise. It appeared, from events in Germany, that the process had begun. Writing to Sverdlov and Trotsky on 1 October, while convalescing from a serious assassination attempt on 30 August, he said that world revolution has ‘come so close in
one week
that it has to be reckoned with as an event of the
next few years
… We are all ready to die to help the German workers to advance the revolution which has begun in Germany.’ [CW 35 364–5] His enthusiasm continued to get the better of him through the autumn. On 3 November he waxed lyrical about the revolution in Austria-Hungary: ‘The time is near when the first day of the world revolution will be celebrated everywhere. Our labour and sufferings have not been in vain.’ [CW 28 131] Three days later, at an All-Russian Congress of Soviets, he said the complete victory of the revolution ‘in our country alone is inconceivable and demands the most active co-operation of at least several advanced countries, which do not include Russia.’

This was a point he had made many times before and was to do again. On 23 April 1918 he had said unequivocally that Russia was in the forefront of world revolution ‘not because the Russian proletariat is superior to the working class of other countries, but solely because we were one of the most backward countries in the world.’ [CW 27 229–33]

Nonetheless, he went on to say at the Soviet Congress that ‘We have never been so near to world proletarian revolution as we are now’, though he warned ‘the situation is more dangerous than ever before.’ [CW 28 135–64] Lenin’s realism and optimism were in close combat at that moment! Even after the decline of the post-war revolutionary wave his point remained the same. In one of his last writings,
Notes of a Publicist
of February 1922, he said: ‘we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth – that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism.’ [CW 33 204–11]

By the end of 1918 Lenin believed the time was ripe for implementing yet another point from
The April Theses
, the establishment of a new International. It should, he wrote on 31 December, be ‘based on the programme of the Spartacus League and the All-Russian Communist Party’. [Weber 154] Just a couple of weeks later the Spartacist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were murdered and the German revolution was on its way to destruction. It was, however, one of the few occasions when Lenin appeared to be ready to cede at least a fraction of his supremacy to another party or group. When the Comintern finally became established it had an indubitably Bolshevik feel about it.

The First Comintern Conference in 1919 was not a very grand affair. Because of the blockade and other post-war travel restrictions, it was largely composed of foreign sympathizers who were already in Russia. It may have had some effect, however, in calling on workers of western Europe to oppose their governments’ policy of intervention in Russia. However, it was only in 1920 that a more substantial organization was set up. By then, in France and elsewhere, communist parties had already begun to get off the ground. There were over 200 delegates from sixty-seven organizations in thirty-two different countries. The main focus of the meeting, apart from propagandistic boasting of the coming export of revolution via Warsaw, the Russo–Polish war being in progress at the same time, was the establishment of conditions of entry. Lenin listed nineteen, the meeting finally approved twenty-one. Key provisions committed adherent parties to support Soviet Russia, call themselves communist parties and fight an unrelenting struggle against centrist social democrats. The last point was obsessive. A majority of the conditions referred, directly or indirectly, into splitting parties to obtain purity of doctrine and unity of purpose. Purges were required to maintain standards.

No better model of ‘Bolshevizing’ the international movement could have been thought up, even though Lenin continued to insist on separate roads to socialism. Even in areas of Soviet influence which were to be incorporated in the Soviet Union when it was finally formed Lenin held to the principle. Back in March 1919 he had chided Bukharin for overlooking the right of national self-determination. In Lenin’s view, although each nation is travelling ‘in the same historical direction’ each one does so ‘by very different zigzags and bypaths’. ‘The more cultured nations are obviously proceeding in a way that differs from that of the less cultured nations. Finland advanced in a different way. Germany is advancing in a different way.’ [CW 29 97–140]

Two years later he made the same point. He wrote to communists in the Transcaucasus that they should ‘refrain from copying our tactics but thoroughly vary them and adapt them to the differing concrete conditions.’ [CW 32 316–18] He even appeared miffed when critics claimed the Russian model was being imposed. He accused the Italian communist, Serrati, of telling tales that the Russians wanted to impose a model. ‘We want the very opposite.’ Principles ‘must be adapted to the specific conditions of various countries. The revolution in Italy will run a different course from that in Russia. It will start in a different way. How? Neither you nor we know.’ The Comintern will never require that others ‘slavishly imitate the Russians’. [CW 32 451–96] The accusation remained, however, and in November 1922, at the Fourth Comintern Congress, Lenin was at pains to refute it again. According to an American observer he told foreign communists ‘not to hang Russian experience in a corner like an icon and pray to it.’
⁷

Lenin’s outlook on international revolution remained complex to the end. He hovered between the need for Soviet Russia to survive and the need for revolutions to occur elsewhere. Yet, at the same time, he continually castigated the left inside and outside Russia for putting too much stress on the international revolution. Unlike them, Lenin would not mobilize serious forces to back foreign revolutions. Revolution would be exported only by example and by nurturing friendly communist parties elsewhere, not at the point of Red Army bayonets. There was also a crucial gap through which Stalin was eventually able to drive the doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ in that, for Lenin, protection of the Soviet Revolution was a major duty of all communists from wherever they came and survival of the Russian Revolution was the first prerequisite for international revolution. Indeed, Lenin might have followed the same path since practical prospects for revolution were thin by the mid-1920s. There was also a related ambiguity. World revolution was always, in Lenin’s mind, needed before the ‘final’, ‘complete’ or ‘total’ victory of socialism was possible. However, what constituted its ultimate victory? How far could one go in the interim? This was another area that Lenin did not resolve. Nor could he. He was not a clairvoyant. His principle continued to be, as he put it in 1917, quoting Napoleon: ‘
On s’engage, et puis, on voit
’ meaning roughly, get on with it and see what happens. What Lenin was getting on with, above all, was building the internal structures for socialism within Russia.