July 20, 2017
Paul Le Blanc
ONCE UPON a time, the small
but vibrant Russian working class, in partnership with a vast, impoverished
peasantry and war-weary soldiers, rose up against a viciously tyrannical
monarchy. Overthrowing the Tsar of the Russian Empire, they continued to surge
forward, and an inept Provisional Government was swept aside in the name of
socialist revolution. This second revolution was led by a left-wing socialist
faction known as the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Power was supposed to end up
in the hands of the laboring majority's democratic councils (the soviets),
although amid foreign invasions and a brutalizing civil war, a dictatorship of
the Bolsheviks (renamed the Russian Communist Party) emerged instead. After
Lenin's untimely death, Joseph Stalin fought his way to power, modernizing the
former Russian Empire while--still waving the red flag of revolution--he
consolidated an extreme authoritarian order.
In this 100th anniversary year
of the Russian Revolution of 1917, there has been a surge of books to explain
what happened.
Among works of high quality
from the revolutionary left, first out of the gate was the introductory
collection edited by Fred Leplat and Alex de Jonge, October 1917: Workers in
Power, followed closely by China Miéville's October, Neil Faulkner's A People's
History of the Russian Revolution, and Tariq Ali's Lenin's Dilemma, with other
valuable contributions pushing forward as one month follows the next.[1]
Review: Books
S.A. Smith, Russia in
Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890-1928. Oxford University Press, 2017, 455
pages, $34.95.
There are also accumulating
contributions by established academics, definitely not Bolshevik partisans,
reaching for an objective account and scholarly evaluation of what happened.
Steven A. Smith has written one of the best of these: Russia in Revolution: An
Empire in Crisis, 1890-1928.
Smith, currently at Oxford
University, was part of an insurgency of young social historians from the late
1960s through the 1980s that powerfully impacted on the common understanding of
the Russian Revolution--challenging the dominant anti-Communist narrative of
the Cold War era.
Smith's Red Petrograd:
Revolution in the Factories was a celebration of "history from
below," seeing 1917 as a heroic uprising of the workers and the oppressed.
It was among the best of the contributions that added layers of exciting new
research and an ocean of meaty footnotes to the story told in John Reed's old
classic Ten Days That Shook the World.
Yet with the passage of time,
the collapse of Communism and the conservative/neoliberal resurgence (as well
as further research and reflection), Smith and others in that cohort shifted
away from the earlier enthusiasm. The tone became more reserved, more
critical--which is certainly the case with this new volume.
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RUSSIA IN Revolution is a
remarkably rich and clearly written synthesis that takes into consideration
multiple strands of research. It combines economic history, intellectual
history, political-institutional history, diplomatic history, military history,
cultural history--without losing the attentiveness to the lives and struggles
of the laboring majorities, workers and peasants, always so distinctive in the
contributions of Smith and his once-young "social history"
colleagues. There is much that can be learned here by any serious-minded
reader.
Especially for so complex and
contentious a topic, this can hardly be the "final word"--it is a
reflection of the current state of scholarly understanding (and of Smith's
understanding) about the meaning of what happened leading up to the 1917
revolution and about what happened in its wake. For someone more inclined to
embrace the Bolshevik triumph than is Smith, assuming such a person aspires to
be true to Marx (who intoned: "doubt everything"), this honestly
written work is an especially valuable contribution.
Naturally, the honesty of a
scholar by no means guarantees accuracy--and one can find, here and there, the
mistakes that inevitably creep into any serious work that covers so much ground
(for example, citing the year of the Paris Commune as 1870 instead of 1871).
There is also the matter of
how one organizes one's material when there is so much material to present.
Sometimes, there can be a blunting of interrelationships and interplay between
one set of issues put forward in one chapter with those set forward in another
chapter.
To record the diminishing
democracy in the early Bolshevik regime in one chapter, and to record the
horrific circumstances besetting the embattled Soviet Republic in a different
chapter, can--for example--cut across one's understanding of the dynamically
evolving history, even if one finally draws the diverse threads together, as
Smith does, in a nicely drawn concluding chapter.
Complex, contradictory
currents and countercurrents must certainly be revealed in any serious
exploration of such broad swathes of historical and social reality as reflected
in Smith's study. A writer can assert that the glass is half full--and yet this
can be overshadowed, in the next breath, by a stress on the other half of the
story: emptiness.
The reader's perceptions are
more than once tilted in a negative direction in this narrative simply by
Smith's decision to start with positive accomplishments that are then offset by
negative limitations. Someone inclined to make the case for Bolshevism would
naturally reverse the order--a negative limitation being offset by the positive
accomplishment.
But one senses that Smith does
not intend in any way to distort the picture. He is vibrantly alert to the
"mixed" nature of reality.
He usefully gives a sense of
controversies among historians over various aspects of the institutional
dynamics of the Tsarist system and of growing industrial capitalism, over the
lived experience of the impoverished peasant majority (and the extent of their
impoverishment), over the variety of orientations within the growing working
class and labor movement, over the nature and depth of the crises impacting on
all of this.
Essential points are illustrated
with bits of data, brief quotes, an occasional anecdote, an apt
generalization--sometimes with tastes of conflicting evidence to highlight a
complexity or controversy. Some of the ways of understanding the Bolshevik
Revolution, its sources and outcomes, are still in play and have yet to be
settled--a fact the attentive reader will grasp from what the author presents.
Unfortunately, less attentive
readers may assume that the succinct summarizations tell us all we need to
know. But we don't know all that we need to--some judgments can only be
tentative, more work needs to be done, as Smith himself would surely emphasize.
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SMITH IS at his best as a
social historian, and he expertly traces the shape and experience of, and the
decisive activity within, the working class and peasantry, and how these
connected with the popular insurgencies of 1917. He provides essential
statistics and a vibrant sense of the internal diversity within each of these
substantial social classes.
There is considerable nuance
in his account. For example, he emphasizes that long-term trends suggest that
the overall quality of life of workers and peasants was not getting worse but,
in fact, improving.
What the long-term improvement
looked like, however, in the actual experience of the masses of people
involved: a) dramatic variation depending on specific occupation or
geographical location; b) continuing injustice and oppression at the heart of
the lives of the majority of people; and c) dramatic fluctuations flowing from
a variety of factors (policy shifts in the government's modernization efforts,
famines imposed by shifts in the weather, ups and downs in the global
capitalist economy, the explosion of imperialist war, and so on).
Smith goes on to connect all
of this to the developing consciousness (class consciousness, revolutionary
consciousness) and the consequent self-activity of insurgent masses.
Needless to say, all of
"the masses" neither think the same way nor do the same things, a
fact that Smith also conveys. Nor in any insurgency or revolution, including
this one, do all of the people or even a majority of the people take action.
Certain broad layers,
connected with and supported by majorities, do sometimes play such a vanguard
role--active in factory committees or peasant communes or red militias and
other formations. These, in turn, are influenced (sometimes decisively) by
ideologically and organizationally cohesive groups capable of providing the
analysis, plan of action and practical skills that are essential for any
successful insurgency.
Smith recognizes this and
gives attention to such matters. In some of what he has to say, there seem to
me to be weaknesses--but there are also valuable insights. Both can have
implications, not simply for how we understand what happened a hundred years
back, but also for how those of us engaged in the struggle for a better world
might understand how we can make things happen in our own time.
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THE REVOLUTIONARY opposition
to the Tsarist system can be largely summed up with the letters KD, SR, SD.
The first, Constitutional
Democrats (Kadets--pro-capitalist liberals), true to form, compromised
themselves terribly, over and over and over. The Socialist Revolutionaries
(populist-socialists) focused on the peasant majority and utilized individual
terrorism to inspire resistance.
The openly Marxist Social
Democrats (dedicated to building a working-class movement) divided into
Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, largely over whether to ally with
pro-capitalist liberals against Tsarism, or to build an uncompromising
worker-peasant alliance, as Lenin insisted.
One finds in this account
strikingly clear expression of the author's very mixed feelings regarding Lenin
and the Bolsheviks.
The Bolshevik leader, we are
told, had "contempt for liberalism and democracy (and indeed for
socialists who valued those things)." This is certainly true of Lenin's
attitude toward liberalism, with its essential acceptance of capitalism and its
willingness to promote compromised and distorted variants of
"democracy." But it is hardly the case, despite Smith's assertion to
the contrary, that Lenin's Menshevik rivals in the socialist movement were
"more committed to democracy" or that Lenin cultivated
"authoritarian habits of thought and action."
This is contradicted by
Lenin's own writings (for example, those gathered in the 2008 anthology Revolution,
Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings of V.I. Lenin), as well as observations
from intimates, such as Nadezhda Krupskaya, and an array of knowledgeable
scholars: Pierre Broué, E. H. Carr, Tony Cliff, Isaac Deutscher, C.L.R. James,
Tamás Krausz, Moshe Lewin, Marcel Liebman, Lars Lih, Ernest Mandel, August
Nimtz, Alan Shandro, Robert C. Tucker.
Pretty much ignoring all of
this, Smith (in unfortunate conformity to what Lars Lih once castigated as
"the textbook version") informs his readers that "the Bolshevik
ethos had always been characterized by ruthlessness, determination,
authoritarianism, and class hatred"--which is no more true of Lenin than
of Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky (pre-1910), Rosa Luxemburg, or Lenin's Menshevik
rivals.
It is interesting that Smith
also partially breaks free from this "textbook version." He repeats
the standard misrepresentation (demolished by Lars Lih's massive Lenin
Rediscovered) in a passing reference to "the tightly knit conspiratorial
party conceived by Lenin in 1903."
Immediately following the
misrepresentation comes his assertion that the Bolshevik party of 1917 was
qualitatively different from this: "Alongside cadres who had endured years
of hardship, tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, and sailors flooded into
the party after February, knowing little of Marx but seeing in the Bolsheviks
the most implacable defenders of the interests of the common people."
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IN MORE than one passage,
Smith impresses us with the Bolsheviks' effectiveness in winning a mass
following in 1917: "Arguably, far more important in winning the party
popular support in 1917 was not so much its organizational discipline, or even
its ideological unity, but its ability to talk a language that ordinary people
understood, and to rearticulate in terms of class struggle and socialism their
very urgent and desperate concerns."
The Bolshevik Central
Committee in the wake of the 1917 revolution, we are told, "was dominated
by an oligarchy consisting of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Stalin and
Bukharin"--which meant that Lenin was obviously "tolerant" of
(and shared leadership with) an array of strong personalities whom Smith
himself demonstrates had sharply disagreed with Lenin at various points.
He accurately notes that in
this leadership team (not actually an "oligarchy" in the literal
sense), "Lenin was first among equals." He attributes this not to
"ruthlessness" or "authoritarianism," but rather to that
fact that Lenin "enjoyed towering moral authority and it was his
extraordinary talent as a political leader, in particular his ability to
balance intransigence with compromise, that held the oligarchy together."
In his concluding chapter, as
he sums up his understanding of what happened, Smith offers remarkable
assessments of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 that are worth quoting at
length. First Lenin:
Upon his return to Russia in
April 1917, after a decade-long absence, Lenin's brilliant political instincts,
in particularly his deep distrust of Russian liberals and his passionate belief
that the [First World] War signaled a global crisis of capitalism, helped him
size up the various political forces in a trenchant and perspicacious fashion.
Against the leaders of his own party, he insisted that there must be implacable
opposition to the imperialist war and to the new government of
"capitalists and landowners." He recognized the deep unpopularity of
the war and the likelihood that the masses would turn against the Provisional
Government once its inability or unwillingness to tackle their grievances
became apparent.
This is matched by Smith's
re-emphasizing that "the Bolshevik party proved effective not because of
its disciplined character, but because its activists, armed with slogans and a
newspaper, campaigned relentlessly in the soviets, factory committees, trade
unions, and soldiers' committees." He elaborates:
The vision that the Bolsheviks
upheld in October was one of a socialist society rooted in soviet power,
workers' control, abolition of the standing army, and far-reaching democratic
rights, leading in the longer term to an international workers' revolution, the
complete abolition of capitalism, and the reduction of the powers of the state
to ones of simple administration.
More than this, there was
"its promise to abolish inequality and exploitation, its rejection of the
war as imperialist, its belief in the equality of people regardless of class,
race, or gender, its promise to dismantle the bureaucratic state and place
power in the hands of local soviets."
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YET THE profoundly democratic
vision of the Bolshevik Revolution was quickly compromised. Or as Smith
observes, "the exigencies of fighting a bitter civil war and of coping
with an unprecedented collapse of social and economic life quickly sobered up
the new Soviet government. Rival socialist parties, civil liberties, and the
abolition of the death penalty were early casualties of Bolshevik determination
to hold on to power."
Tragically, "the idea of
the working class as the agent of socialist revolution gave way gradually to
the idea of the party and the Red Army as guarantors of the workers' state."
This seems a rebuttal, however, of his earlier expressed notion that Lenin and
the Bolsheviks started off as authoritarians contemptuous of democracy.
Instead, it was after 1917
that "this culture of authoritarianism soon made itself felt" within
the Bolshevik party.
He quotes the 1920 complaint
by the knowledgeable veteran Bolshevik M.S. Olminskii that--rather than
understanding authoritarian measures as dictated by the emergency of
war--"many of our comrades understand the destruction of all democracy as
the last word in communism, as real communism." The emergency involved a
combination of multination military intervention and economic blockade with
massive aid to counterrevolutionary military forces inside Russia, all dedicated
to crushing the revolution.
Smith points out that "as
the civil war intensified, what began mainly as pragmatic restriction on the
opposition parties [including Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and
anarchists] hardened into a principled rejection of the right of
'petty-bourgeois' parties to exist at all." He traces "the dramatic
fall in representation of the opposition parties in the soviets: from 14.2
percent in 1918 to 0.2 percent in 1920, to their total disappearance by 1922."
This and accompanying
developments constituted a disastrous defeat for the vibrant soviet democracy
that Lenin and his comrades had called for, and that millions of "ordinary
Russians" reached for in 1917.
Smith throws into
uncompromising relief the extremely authoritarian policies and rationalization
that Lenin advanced amid the chaos and violence of the crises of 1918-1921.
"In other words," he writes, "Lenin must bear considerable
responsibility for the institutions and culture that allowed Stalin to come to
power."
At the same time, however, he
argues "we can be confident" that--after Lenin's death--Stalin's
rivals Trotsky and Bukharin "would not have unleashed anything like the
violent collectivization or Great Terror that soon ensued" after Stalin
took power.
"If continuities between
Leninism and Stalinism were real," he asserts, "the 'revolution from
above' [that Stalin initiated at the end of the 1920s] also introduced real dis-continuity,
wreaking havoc upon Soviet society. In bringing about what he called the 'Great
Break,' Stalin believed he was advancing the cause of socialism, yet whether
Lenin would have recognized the regime he brought into being as socialist is
very doubtful."
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IN FACT, as Russia in
Revolution documents, Lenin led a dramatic shift away from the regimentation
and repression of the "war communism" which had alienated a majority
of the workers and peasants during the civil war years.
Despite this alienation from
the Bolshevik regime, Smith indicates, when push came to shove a majority of
the people preferred the regime to the even more violent and vicious forces of
counter-revolution (which is why the Reds could win the civil war against the
Whites). But this hardly provided a durable basis for the revolutionary government--which
is why Lenin and his comrades sought to revive the economic and social and
cultural life of the country with a New Economic Policy (NEP).
The Bolsheviks understood that
the democracy, abundance and freedom at the heart of the socialist vision could
not be realized in a single backward "oasis" within the global
capitalist economy. This is why they established the Communist International
that could generate revolutions in order to bring more countries--especially
advanced industrial countries--into the socialist orbit.
In the meantime, under NEP,
there was to be a "mixed economy" that blended socialist-inspired
nationalized enterprises and broad social welfare programs with a significant
amount of capitalist small enterprise and market relations. This got the
economy going again--despite serious contradictions--and generated improved
living conditions and growing satisfaction (and supportiveness to the regime)
among peasants and workers alike.
While the Communist Party's
political monopoly was kept in place, the NEP years (1921-1928) saw the growth
of significant opportunities to express critical and diverse opinions. The
power and dominance of the Communist Party, which sometimes moved in repressive
directions (that some prominent Communists initiated and others opposed), did
not obliterate a meaningful degree of intellectual freedom.
"A paradox of NEP was
that the 'retreat' forced on the Bolsheviks by civil war devastation and
economic backwardness and the apparent turn towards pragmatic gradualism was
compensated for by bold imaginings and anticipations of the communist
future," Smith points out.
There was a diverse and
flourishing artistic avant-garde "which had emerged around 1908, [and] was
driven by a desire to destroy old aesthetic norms and convinced that art had
the power to transform 'life,' which it identified with the utopian
possibilities opened up by the Revolution."
Lenin himself preferred the
old aesthetic norms--yet what Smith dubs his "intolerance of 'absurd and
perverted' avant-garde art" was counterbalanced by Lenin's unwavering
support for Anatoly Lunacharsky in the influential position of Commissar of
Enlightenment, and Lunacharsky, in turn, unwaveringly "defended the
principle of creative freedom for different approaches, including the
avant-garde."
In stark contrast,
"Stalin presided over the consolidation of economic and social
hierarchies, the reconfiguration of patriarchal authority, the resurgence of a
certain Russian chauvinism, the rejection of artistic experimentation in favor
of a stifling conformism, the snuffing out of virtually all progressive
experiments in social welfare and new ways of living of the 1920s," not to
mention "the personal dictatorship, the unrestrained use of force, the
cult of power, paranoia about encirclement and internal wreckers, and spiraling
of terror across an entire society."
Such realities "served to
underline the difference between Stalinism and Leninism," with Stalin's
reversion to deep cultural and political traditions from earlier Russian history
that the Bolsheviks had been seeking to overcome.
Surveying the Stalinist
tragedy, Smith concludes:
Yet we shall not understand
the Russian Revolution unless we see that for all their many faults, the
Bolsheviks were fired by outrage at the exploitation that lay at the heart of
capitalism and at the raging nationalism that had led Europe into the carnage
of the First World War. Nor will we understand the year 1917 if we do not make
an imaginative effort to recapture the hope, idealism, heroism, anger, fear,
and despair that motivated it: the burning desire for peace, the deep
resentment of a social order riven between the haves and the have-nots, anger
at the injustices that ran through Russian society. That is why millions across
the world, who could not anticipate the horrors to come, embraced the 1917
Revolution as a chance to create a new world of justice, equality, and freedom.
He also comments: "In the
future the ambition of [the 1917 Revolution's] challenge to capitalism may once
again inspire." Indeed.
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Footnotes
1. Those coming to my
attention include one from the British Socialist Workers Party's publishing
house, Dave Sherry's Russia 1917: Workers' Revolution and the Festival of the
Oppressed, another from Workers' Liberty, Paul Vernadsky's The Russian
Revolution: When Workers Took Power, and (from Australia) Lenin's
Interventionist Marxism by the late Tom Freeman. My own somewhat more ambitious
contribution, October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy, 1917-1924,
can also be added to the list.
