Russia: How the Revolution Was Lost

34 Pages·1985·3.978 MB·English

by  Alan Gibbons

Alan Gibbons
RUSSIA
How the rev ution w
RUSSIA
Haw the revolution was last
Alan Gibbons
This pamphlet is a re-working of the arguments first outlined in
an excellent essay written by Chris Harman in 1969. 1t owes
much to the original; both the overall viewpoint and many of
the illustrations from the history of the revolution.
The reason many of us felt we needed a new version of 'How
the Revolution was Lost' is this: in the decade since Chris
wrote his pamphlet, the revolutionary left has grown consider
ably, from student groups to small revolutionary socialist
parties. The audience of the SWP and its weekly paper 'Socialist
Worker' is no longer to be found mainly among students, but
among working people. Unlike the students who took to the
streets in the late sixties, our audience today often has neither
the time nor the opportunities to pore over the writings of
Trotsky and Lenin. Many people who read this pamphlet will
not know what a Soviet was, or have more than the vaguest
outline of the events of 1917. We felt we needed to fill out
Chris's arguments in a little more detail.
I hope this pamphlet will lead its readers to explore further the
wrinngs of Marxists and socialists today.
Alan Gibbons
t
Socialist Workers Party
Introduction
When a wave of revolt swept western Europe and America in
1968, and the biggest general strike in history rocked the
French government, a new generation of socialists was created.
Tens of thousands of people rediscovered socialist ideas during
those heady months. The kind of socialism we in the Socialist
Workers Party fight for was being reborn in the streets, in the
factories, offices, and colleges.
But that same year Russian tanks rumbled into the streets of
Czechoslovakia, crushing the 'Prague Spring' as they had crushed
the infant workers' democracy in Hungary twelve years earlier.
'Look', said the people who could find no excuse for the
barbarities being committed by the Americans in Vietnam, the
hypocrisy of a sell out Labour government, the batons of the
Paris police, 'Your side's no better.'
How could it happen? How could a 'socialist' country use
armed force to destroy the aspirations of millions of working
people? Indeed, how had a revolution which seemed to hail an
end to tyranny in 1917 degenerated into the repressive police
state which exists in Russia and Eastern Europe today?
To answer these questions, we have to turn to the early years of
the Russian Revolution. Millions of half-starved workers and
peasants made history when they emerged from the bloody
battlefields of the First World War to overthrow the Tsar,
absolute ruler of Russia. The first workers' government of an
entire nation was born. But they seized power only to leave it a
dozen years later in the hands of a new ruling class, hardly less
brutal and despotic than the one they had overthrown.
rnwr Some members of the Petro grad Soviet
First published April 1980.
Produced and distributed for the SWP by Socialists
Unlimited, 265 Seven Sisters Road, London N4 2DE.
ISBN 0 905998 10 3
Typesec by Printacolor Services (TU), IOI Praed Street, W2 INT.
Printed by East End Offset Ltd (TU), PO Box 82, London E2.
I
The Road to October
There were two revolutions in Russia in 1917. The first occurred
in February. It must have been very like the overthrow of the
Shah of Iran in our own times. The Tsar's regime had lcst the
1
support of virtually the whole population, and was swept away
by a vast uprising of workers, peasants and soldiers. Even many
from the privileged classes wanted the Tsar to go.
Tired or war and corruption, the Russian people demanded a
new society. But what kind of society? There was no way the
women textile workers who had sparked the February revolu
tion could identify with the hopes of their boss. There was no
way the peasant could share the aims of the landlord who had
bled his family dry these many years. It seemed the whole
world was being turned upside down, yet the workers still
toiled for the boss, the peasant for the landlord. The unity of
purpose they may have felt in dumping an unpopular monarch
was to vanish like the morning mists before the realities of
Russia in 1917.
To the new premier, Kerensky, the aim was the kind of society
we have in Britain today. Let the masses vote for whoever they
will. Let them have their toothless parliaments. The real power
would still rest with those who were born to wealth and privi
lege. Kerensky wanted to make Russia safe for the employers to
make their profits. But the workers and peasants had other
ideas. They hadn't fought and died to suffer more of the same
only under another name.
For months there was this uneasy balance of power in Russia.
First the huge workers' demonstrations and strikes would
paralyse the government. Then that same government would be
prodded by the bosses into putting the workers in their place
with gun and baton. Victory had to fall to one side or the other.
In October, the breaking point came. Kerensky's government
was by now totally discredited. It was incapable of giving the
vast majority of the population - the workers and peasants -
what they wanted. Instead of peace, it gave them fine words
about fighting on until the war was won. Instead of bread, it
gave them continued hunger. Instead of land, it gave them the
landlords' rack-renting bailiffs.
The government which took power through the revolution of
3
October 191 7 was of a kinJ the world had never seen before -
a workers' socialist republic. This second revolution was the
product of two social movements which took place at one and
the same time.
In the countryside, home of the vast majority of Russia's enorm
ous population, the struggle was between two property-owning
classes, the landowners and the peasants. The despised, impover
ished and oppressed peasants saw the old power shaken. They
had risen in revolt before, but never before had their masters'
grip on the reins of power looked so unsure. The peasants
seized the estates of the landowners and began dividing them
into individual plots. It seemed they could achieve their long
cherished ambitions: to own their own patch of land and farm
it as they liked - free of the landlords who demanded extor
tionate payments in rents, taxes and produce. They had their
own peasant party, the Social Revolutionaries, to represent their
interests.
In the towns and cities, the revolution bore a different face.
Here, the struggle was between new classes thrown up by the
rapid development of industry as Russia tried to drag herself
into the twentieth century. There were the employers who made
massive fortunes out of the huge, new manufacturing plants
and were determined to hang on to them at all costs. Ranged
against them was the enemy industrialisation had created, a
numerically tiny but powerful working class marshalled in the
enormous factories.
These workers sensed their power and learned a new philosophy,
radically.different to the centuries-old ideas their peasant fore-
/\ mcssaK<" JI-om the Jio/shcviks
4
fathers had accepted in the unchanging villages. They learned
socialism. They wanted to decide how to use what they made.
They wanted to elect their own managements. They wanted the
marvellous new technology which was rising everywhere around
them to be put at the service of every man, woman and child in
Russia, not just the miserable money-grubbing employing class.
In 190 5 the workers had challenged the Tsar in a series of mass
strikes, but they faced a peasant army still loyal to the Tsar.
They paid dearly for their failure to defeat the old order during
years that followed of imprisonment, shootings, poverty, and
police terror. But the workers learned from their defeat. They
discovered from their own experience of organising strikes that
they were able to manage the day-to-day running of society
better than their rulers.
In Petrograd in 1905, they had organised their own workers'
council, made up of delegates elected from workplaces all over
the city. From economic demands, they grew to organise politi
cal strikes in defence of mutineering sailors at the Kronstadt
naval base who were threatened with execution. We know this
body better by its Russian name, the Soviet.
The Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet or workers' council, Leon
Trotsky, has explained how it worked:
'The Soviet is in reality an embryo of a revolutionary
government. It organises street patrols to secure the safety
of the citizens ... It takes over. .. the post office, the tele
graph and the railroads ... It made an effort to introduce
the eight-hour <lay ... The first wave of the next revolution
will lead to the creation of Soviets all over the country.'
Trotsky was right. What began as a kind of giant strike com
mittee was forced, in the dislocation and chaos of revolution, to
develop into an alternative government. Twelve years after the
first Soviets appeared, they became the basis for the national
government of October 1917, a government infinitely more
democratic than any parliament. You didn't just put a cross on
a ballot and watch them sell you out for the next five years. The
delegates to the Soviets were subject to recall by the voters and
had to explain themselves regularly at workers' mass meetings.
They i11volvcd the mass of working people.
American journalist john Reed wrote this eye-witness account:
'No political body more sensitive and responsive to the
popular will was ever invented. And this was necessary, for
in time of revolution, the popular will changes with great
rapidity. For example, during the first week of_Dec~mber
191 7, there were mass parades and demonstrations m
favour of the Constituent Assembly - that is to say,
against the Soviet Power. One of these parades was fired
5
on by some irresponsible Red Guards and several people
killed.
'The reaction to this stupid violence was immediate. With
in twelve hours the complexion of the Petrograd Soviet
changed. More than a dozen Bolshevik deputies were with
drawn and replaced by Mensheviks [moderate socialists) .
And it was three weeks before public sentiment subsided
- before the Mensheviki were one by one retired and the
Bolsheviks sent back.'
Can you imagine our rulers responding in 12 hours? We're lucky
if they take notice in 12 months!
Working people could exert control over national decision
making bodies on a day-to-day basis after October 1917 in a
way that has never been possible in capitalist societies. A lot of
people who don't want to believe that working people can
control their own lives try to convince us that the revolution in
Russia was nothing like this. They never mention the torrent of
debate and argument, the flood of newspapers, the active
democracy of the revolution in ferment. They paint a very
different picture, with Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party
as dark, conspiratorial villains plotting in secret to seize power.
This is sheer nonsense. The Bolsheviks formed the new Soviet
government because they had proved over twenty long years of
struggle that they were the best fighters against the rotten
Tsarist regime.
Just before the October revolution, the Bolsheviks won a
majority in the Soviets. So it was with the support of virtually
the whole working class that they mounted the insurrection
which toppled the bankrupt Kerensky regime. Little wonder the
old system went down like a pack of cards. So bloodless was the
insurrection that more people died in the making of Eisenstein's
silent film about it than died in the real thing!
A moderate socialist called Martov, a Jam es Callaghan-type
figure who had no love for the Bolsheviks, wrote at the time:
'Understand, please, what we have before us after all is a
victorious uprising of the proletariat - almost the entire
proletariat supports Lenin and expects its social liberation
from the uprising.'
The Bolshevik Party in July 1917 had 176,000 members. When
you think that there were just three million workers in the
towns you can imagine the enormous support it had. In Britain,
it would add up to a party of 2Yi million members! And these
weren't the passive card-holders you get in the Labour Party.
They were active party workers. By the time the Bolsheviks
came to form the first Soviet government, something like one
worker in every ten was a member of the Bolshevik Party.
6
The October revolution could not have happened without the
coming together of the revolution in the towns and the revolu
tion in the countryside. Without the industrial power of the
workers, the peasant revolt would have become just one more
uncoordinated failure. Without the support of the millions of
peasants in the army, the workers would have been crushed, as
they were in 190 5, by sheer force of numbers and military
strength.
Though they did unite, the workers and peasants shared no
long-term identity of interest. What united them was the alliance
of their enemies - the big industrialists and the great land
owners - against them.
When the workers rose in insurrection in October they had the
sympathy of the peasants and the army, made up as it was
mainly of peasant recruits. The revolution was initiated, led and
completed by the organised working class, drawing in behind it
the peasant masses. Because the workers' insurrection allowed
them to seize and hold the land, the peasants accepted the new
Soviet power. And, by accepting the rule of the Soviets, the
peasants accepted the majority party of the Soviets, the
Bolsheviks, and its right to be the party of government.
In the first months of Soviet Russia, theJeasants continued to
accept the leadership of the workers, an the workers' party,
the Bolsheviks. After all, the land was being divided up between
them. Their hopes were being fulfilled. But what would happen
if the interests of the workers and the peasants came into
conflict? This was the question which would haunt the
revolution.
2
Days of Hope
So the workers held power. The dream of generations of social
ists had come true. The working people had overthrown the old
ruling class and held power through their own workers' govern
ments, the Soviets.
] ohn Reed has described the feelings of the Russian workers:
'!\cross the horizon spread the glittering lights of the
capital, immeasurably more splendid by night than by day,
like a dyke of jewels on the barren plain. The old work
man who drove held the wheel in one hand, while with the
other he swept the far-gleaming capital with an exultant
gesture.
"'Mine!" he cried, his face alight, "All mine now' My
Petrograd ! " '
7
TO ALL WORKERS
OF PETRO GRAD!
Comrades I Tile •evolution ls wtnnlng, the Revolution
has won. All the power bas passed over to our Soviets.
The first weeks are the most dHficult ones. The broken
reaction mast be finally crashed, a fall triumph mast be
secured for oar endeavors. The worklng·class ought to
-must-show in these days
THE GREATEST FIRMNESS AND ENPURANCE
Well might they celebrate their new power. From the offices of
the Bolsheviks who formed the first Soviet government poured
decree after decree. They announced workers' control of the
factories, they abolished the death penalty, they announced
the separation of state and education from the church, and they
announced full freedom of religion - ending the anti-semitic
terror which had ruled Russia for hundreds of years. They
embarked on a great experiment in education, ending the
dictatorship of the teacher. They launched a mass campaign to
teach reading and writing to the millions of illiterate people in
Russia. They swept away the degrading legislation which had
crushed women for centuries. Marriages could be dissolved by
either partner. Children born out of wedlock were given equal
rights with the children of married parents. They announced
the provision of free abortion on demand.
And to spell out that these weren't just the empty promises of a
self-seeking elite, they announced that government officials
would be paid the average wage of a skilled industrial worker.
Hope was in the air. The freedom they had won almost intoxi
cated the Bolsheviks. How else can we explain their naivety in
releasing General Kaledin, later to become the leader of the
White Armies who fought against them, solely on the promise
that he would not fight against them?
But people do not, unfortunately, make history in circumstances
of their own choosing.
The Russia now ruled by the Soviet government was a grim
place. Shattered by the ravages of the First World War, its
railways, communications and industry dislocated, Russia was
not the kind of place in which past socialists had expected the
workers to seize power. Until then, all socialists had expected
that workers would first take over in the wealthy, advanced
countries of western Europe and north America. The material
basis of socialism would be high productivity, sophisticated
technology and a high level of human skill.
8
Travel the nine-tenths of Russia still shrouded in backwardness
and ignorance in 1917, and you would have compared it to
Europe in the Middle Ages or India today, rather than to an
advanced capitalist nation. As early as the summer of 1918 the
situation in which the Bolsheviks sought to create their new
world was already desperate. There was cholera in the capital
city, Petrograd. Famine stalked the country. Opponents of the
workers' state resorted to assassination, the Bolshevik leader
Lenin being shot and seriously injured.
The Bolsheviks looked beyond the frontiers of their devastated
country for help. The only way a socialist republic could survive
in Russia, where the working class was a minority of just three
million out of 160 millions, would be with the aid of other,
more developed socialist states, they said. Workers' republics in
great, industrial nations like Germany and France could send
tractors and machinery to improve the lot of the peasants, so
winning their loyalty to Soviet Russia. They could help Russia
industrialise rapidly and drag her by the bootstraps into the
twentieth century. The alternative would be even deeper crisis,
worse shortages, and ultimately the end of the peasants' support
for the Soviet state. The Bolsheviks had no doubt that it had to
be international socialism - or destruction.
Lenin returned to this question time and time again:
'We are living not only in a state, but in a system of states,
and it is inconceivable for the Soviet Republic to exist
alongside of the imperialist states for any length of time.
One or the other must triumph in the end.'
And:
'We have always staked our play upon an international
revolution and this was unconditionally right. We have
always emphasised ... the fact that in one country it is
impossible to accomplish such a work as a socialist
revolution.'
And again, in March 1919:
'The absolute truty is that without a revolution in Germany
we shall perish.'
Nor was this the dreaming of a few idealists. In those days the
whole world seemed to be in the rapids of revolution. In
Germany and Austria the monarchy collapsed and workers',
sailor~' an? soldiers' coun~ils we~e set up. In Hungary and
Bavaria, Fmland and Latvia, Soviet governments briefly came
to power. In Italy the factories were occupied. The Turkish
Sultan was overthrown. The British Army was fought to a
standstill by the Irish national liberation movement. Even here
in Britain terror gripped the ruling class and gunboats were
anchored on the Mersey and the Clyde.
9