On The 111th Anniversary Of
Russian Revolution of 1905 As We Honor Of The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg,
Liebknecht-Honor Another Historic Leader
Of The Russian Revolution-Leon Trotsky
EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR LENIN OF RUSSIA,
ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND, AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF
THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT. DURING THE MONTH WE ALSO HONOR OTHER
HISTORIC LEADERS AS WELL ON THIS SITE.
THIS IS A BOOK REVIEW ORIGINALLY
WIRTTEN IN 2007 OF LEON TROTSKY’S HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, ORIGINALLY
WRITTEN IN 1930-32, (EDITION USED HERE-THREE VOLUMES, PATHFINDER PRESS, NEW
YORK, 1980) BY AN UNREPENTANT DEFENDER OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION OF 1917.
HERE’S WHY.
Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian
Revolution is partisan history at its best. One does not and should not, at
least in this day in age, ask historians to be ‘objective’. One simply asks
that the historian present his or her narrative and analysis and get out of the
way. Trotsky meets that criterion. Furthermore, in Trotsky’s case there is
nothing like having a central actor in the drama he is narrating, who can also
write brilliantly and wittily, give his interpretation of the important events
and undercurrents swirling around Russia in 1917.
If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis
of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I
or its effect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s History of the
Russian Revolution offers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story
through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary
leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing from a moderately
leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s Notes
on the Russian Revolution. For a more journalistic account John Reed’s
classic Ten Days That Shook the World
is invaluable. Trotsky covers some of this material as well. However, if
additionally, you want to get a feel for the molecular process of the Russian
Revolution in its ebbs and flows down at the base in the masses where the
revolution was made Trotsky’s is the book for you.
The life of Leon Trotsky is intimately intertwined with the rise and decline of
the Russian Revolution in the first part of the 20th century. As a young man,
like an extraordinary number of talented Russian youth, he entered the
revolutionary struggle against Czarism in the late 1890’s. Shortly thereafter
he embraced what became a lifelong devotion to a Marxist political perspective.
However, except for the period of the 1905 Revolution when Trotsky was Chairman
of the Petrograd Soviet and later in 1912 when he tried to unite all the
Russian Social Democratic forces in an ill-fated unity conference, which goes
down in history as the ‘August Bloc’, he was essentially a free-lancer in the
international socialist movement. At that time Trotsky saw the Bolsheviks as
“sectarians” as it was not clear to him time that for socialist revolution to
be successful the reformist and revolutionary wings of the movement had to be
organizationally split. With the coming of World War I Trotsky drew closer to
Bolshevik positions but did not actually join the party until the summer of
1917 when he entered the Central Committee after the fusion of his organization,
the Inter-District Organization, and the Bolsheviks. This act represented an
important and decisive switch in his understanding of the necessity of a
revolutionary workers party to lead the socialist revolution.
As Trotsky himself noted, although he was a late-comer to the concept of a
Bolshevik Party that delay only instilled in him a greater understanding of the
need for a vanguard revolutionary workers party to lead the revolutionary
struggles. This understanding underlined his political analysis throughout the
rest of his career as a Soviet official and as the leader of the struggle of
the Left Opposition against the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian
Revolution. After his defeat at the hands of Stalin and his henchmen Trotsky
wrote these three volumes in exile in Turkey from 1930 to 1932. At that time
Trotsky was not only trying to draw the lessons of the Revolution from an
historian’s perspective but to teach new cadre the necessary lessons of that
struggle as he tried first reform the Bolshevik Party and the Communist
International and then later, after that position became politically untenable
, to form a new, revolutionary Fourth International. Trotsky was still fighting
from this perspective in defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution when a
Stalinist agent cut him down. Thus, without doubt, beyond a keen historian’s
eye for detail and anecdote, Trotsky’s political insights developed over long
experience give his volumes an invaluable added dimension not found in other
sources on the Russian Revolution.
As a result of the Bolshevik seizure of power the so-called Russian Question
was the central question for world politics throughout most of the 20th
century. That central question ended (or left center stage, to be more precise)
with the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s. However, there are
still lessons, and certainly not all of them negative, to be learned from the
experience of the Russian Revolution. Today, an understanding of this
experience is a task for the natural audience for this book, the young
alienated radicals of Western society. For the remainder of this review I will
try to point out some issues raised by Trotsky which remain relevant today.
The central preoccupation of Trotsky’s volumes reviewed here and of his later
political career concerns the problem of the crisis of revolutionary leadership
of the international labor movement and its national components. That problem
can be stated as the gap between the already existing objective conditions
necessary for beginning socialist construction based on the current level of
capitalist development and the immaturity or lack of revolutionary leadership
to overthrow the old order. From the European Revolutions of 1848 on, not
excepting the heroic Paris Commune, until his time the only successful working
class revolution had been in led by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. Why?
Anarchists may look back to the Paris Commune or forward to the Spanish Civil
War in 1936 for solace but the plain fact is that absent a revolutionary party
those struggles were defeated without establishing the prerequisites for
socialism. History has indicated that a revolutionary party that has
assimilated the lessons of the past and is rooted in the working class, allied
with and leading the plebeian masses in its wake, is the only way to bring the
socialist program to fruition. That hard truth shines through Trotsky’s three
volumes. Unfortunately, this is still the central problem confronting the
international labor movement today.
Trotsky makes an interesting note that despite the popular conception at the
time, reinforced since by several historians, the February overthrow of the
Czarist regime was not as spontaneous as one would have been led to believe in
the confusion of the times. He noted that the Russian revolutionary movement
had been in existence for many decades before that time, that the revolution of
1905 had been a dress rehearsal for 1917 and that before the World War
temporarily halted its progress another revolutionary period was on the rise.
If there had been no such experiences then those who argue for spontaneity
would have grounds to stand on. The most telling point is that the outbreak
occurred in Petrograd, not exactly unknown ground for revolutionary activities.
Moreover, contrary to the worshipers of so-called spontaneity, this argues most
strongly for a revolutionary workers party to be in place in order to affect
the direction of the revolution from the beginning.
All revolutions, and the Russian Revolution is no exception, after the first
flush of victory over the overthrown old regime, face attempts by the more
moderate revolutionary elements to suppress counter-posed class aspirations, in
the interest of unity of the various classes that made the initial revolution. Thus,
we see in the English Revolution of the 17th century a temporary truce between
the rising bourgeoisie and the yeoman farmers and pious urban artisans who
formed the backbone of Cromwell’s New Model Army. In the Great French
Revolution of the 18th century the struggle from the beginning depended mainly
on the support of the lower urban plebian classes. Later other classes,
particularly the peasantry through their parties, which had previously remained
passive enter the arena and try to place a break on revolutionary developments.
Their revolutionary goals having been achieved in the initial overturn- for
them the revolution is over. Those elements most commonly attempt to rule by
way of some form of People’s Front government. This is a common term of art in
Marxist terminology to represent a trans-class formation of working class and
capitalist parties which have ultimately counter-posed interests. The Russian
Revolution also suffered under a Popular Front period under various
combinations and guises supported by ostensible socialists, the Mensheviks and
Social Revolutionaries, from February to October. One of the keys to Bolshevik
success in October was that, with the arrival of Lenin from exile in April, the
Bolsheviks shifted their strategy and tactics to a position of political
opposition to the parties of the popular front. Later history has shown us in
Spain in the 1930’s and more recently in Chile in the 1970’s how deadly support
to such popular front formations can be for revolutionaries and the masses
influenced by them. The various parliamentary popular fronts in France, Italy
and elsewhere show the limitations in another less dramatic but no less
dangerous fashion. In short, political support for Popular Fronts means the
derailment of the revolution or worst. This is a hard lesson, paid for in
blood, that all manner of reformist socialists try deflect or trivialize in
pursuit of being at one with the ‘masses’. Witness today’s efforts, on much
lesser scale, by ostensible socialists to get all people of ‘good will, etc.’,
including liberal and not so liberal Democrats under the same tent in the
opposition to the American invasion of Iraq.
One of Trotsky’s great skills as a historian is the ability to graphically
demonstrate that within the general revolutionary flow there are ebbs and flows
that either speed up the revolutionary process or slow it down. This is the
fate of all revolutions and in the case of failed revolutions can determine the
political landscape for generations. The first definitive such event in the
Russian Revolution occurred in the so-called "April Days" after it
became clear that the then presently constituted Provisional Government
intended to continue participation on the Allied side in World War I and retain
the territorial aspirations of the Czarist government in other guises. This led
the vanguard of the Petrograd working class to make a premature attempt to
bring down that government. However, the vanguard was isolated and did not have
the authority needed to be successful at that time. The most that could be done
was the elimination of the more egregious ministers. Part of the problem here
is that no party, unlike the Bolsheviks in the events of the "July
Days" has enough authority to hold the militants back, or try to. These
events only underscore, in contrast to the anarchist position, the need for an
organized revolutionary party to check such premature impulses. Even then, the
Bolsheviks in July took the full brunt of the reaction by the government with
the jailing of their leaders and suppression of their newspapers supported
wholeheartedly by the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionary Parties.
The Bolsheviks were probably the most revolutionary party in the history of
revolutions. They certainly were the most consciously revolutionary in their
commitment to political program, organizational form and organizational
practices. Notwithstanding this, before the arrival in Petrograd of Lenin from
exile the Bolshevik forces on the ground were, to put it mildly, floundering in
their attitude toward political developments, especially their position on
so-called critical support to the Provisional Government (read, Popular Front).
Hence, in the middle of a revolutionary upsurge it was necessary to politically
rearm the party. This political rearmament was necessary to expand the party’s
concept of when and what forces would lead the current revolutionary upsurge.
In short, mainly through Lenin’s intervention, the Party needed to revamp its
old theory of "the democratic dictatorship of the working class and the
peasantry" to the new conditions which placed the socialist program i.e.
the dictatorship of the proletariat on the immediate agenda. Informally, the
Bolsheviks, or rather Lenin individually, came to the same conclusions that Trotsky
had analyzed in his theory of Permanent Revolution prior to the Revolution of
1905. This reorientation was not done without a struggle in the party against
those forces who did not want to separate with the reformist wing of the
Russian workers and peasant parties, mainly the Mensheviks and the Social
Revolutionaries.
This should be a sobering warning to those who argue, mainly from an anarchist
or anarcho-syndicalist position, that a revolutionary party is not necessary.
The dilemma of correctly aligning strategy and tactics even with a truly
revolutionary party can be problematic. The tragic outcome in Spain in the
1930’s abetted by the confusion on this issue by the Party of Marxist
Unification (POUM) and the Durrutti-led left anarchists, the most honestly
revolutionary organizations at the time, painfully underscores this point. This
is why Trotsky came over to the Bolsheviks and why he drew that lesson on the
organization question very sharply for the rest of his political career.
The old-fashioned, poorly trained, inadequately led peasant-based Russian Army
took a real beating at the hands of the more modern, mechanized and disciplined
German armies on the Eastern Front in World War I. The Russian Army,
furthermore, was at the point of disintegration just prior to the February
Revolution. Nevertheless, the desperate effort on the part of the peasant
soldier, essentially declassed from his traditional role on the land by the
military mobilization, was decisive in overthrowing the monarchy. Key peasant
reserve units placed in urban garrisons, and thus in contact with the energized
workers, participated in the struggle to end the war and get back to the take
the land while they were still alive. Thus from February on, the peasant army
through coercion or through inertia was no longer a reliable vehicle for any of
the various combinations of provisional governmental ministries to use. In the
Army’s final flare-up in defense, or in any case at least remaining neutral, of
placing all power into Soviet hands it acted as a reserve, an important one,
but nevertheless a reserve. Only later when the Whites in the Civil War came to
try to take the land did the peasant soldier again exhibit a willingness to
fight and die. Such circumstances as a vast peasant war are not a part of
today’s revolutionary strategy, at least in advanced capitalist society. In
fact, today only under exceptional conditions would a revolutionary socialist
party support, much less advocate the popular Bolshevik slogan-‘land to the tiller’
to resolve the agrarian question. The need to split the armed forces, however,
remains.
Not all revolutions exhibit the massive breakdown in discipline that occurred
in the Russian army- the armed organ that defends any state- but it played an
exceptional role here. However, in order for a revolution to be successful it
is almost universally true that the existing governmental authority can no
longer rely on normal troop discipline. If this did not occasionally occur
revolution generally would be impossible as untrained plebeians are no match
for trained soldiers. Moreover, the Russian peasant army reserves were
exceptional in that they responded to the general democratic demand for
"land to the tiller" that the Bolsheviks were the only party to
endorse and, moreover, were willing to carry out to the end. In the normal
course of events the peasant, as a peasant on the land, cannot lead a modern
revolution in even a marginally developed industrial state. It has more often
been the bulwark for reaction; witness its role in the Paris Commune and
Bulgaria in 1923, for examples, more than it has been a reliable ally of the
urban masses. However, World War I put the peasant youth of Russia in uniform
and gave them discipline, for a time at least, that they would not have
otherwise had to play even a subordinate role in the revolution. Later
revolutions based on peasant armies, such as China, Cuba and Vietnam, confirm
this notion that only exceptional circumstances, mainly as part of a military
formation, permit the peasantry a progressive role in a modern revolution.
Trotsky is politically merciless toward the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary
leaderships that provided the crucial support for the Provisional Governments
between February and October in their various guises and through their various
crises. Part of the support of these parties for the Provisional Government
stemmed from their joint perspectives that the current revolution was a limited
bourgeois one and so therefore they could go no further than the decrepit
bourgeoisie of Russia was willing to go. Given its relationships with foreign
capital that was not very far. Let us face it, these allegedly socialist
organizations in the period from February to October betrayed the interest of
their ranks on the question of immediate peace, of the redistribution of the
land, and a democratic representative government.
This is particularly true after their clamor for the start of the ill-fated
summer offensive on the Eastern Front and their evasive refusal to convene a
Constituent Assembly to ratify the redistribution of the land. One can chart
the slow but then rapid rise of Bolsheviks influence in places when they did
not really exist when the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, formerly the
influential parties of those areas, moved to the right. All those workers,
peasants, soldiers, whatever political organizations they adhered to formally,
who wanted to make a socialist revolution naturally gravitated to the
Bolsheviks. Such movement to the left by the masses is always the case in times
of crisis in a period of revolutionary upswing. The point is to channel that
energy for the seizure of power.
The ‘August Days’ when the ex-Czarist General Kornilov attempted a
counterrevolutionary coup and Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, in
desperation asked the Bolsheviks to use their influence to get the Kronstadt
sailors to defend that government points to the ingenuity of the Bolshevik
strategy. A point that has been much misunderstood since then, sometimes
willfully, by many leftist groups is the Bolshevik tactic of military support-
without giving political support- to bourgeois democratic forces in the
struggle against right wing forces ready to overthrow democracy. The Bolsheviks
gave Kerensky military support while at the same time politically agitating,
particularly in the Soviets and within the garrison, to overthrow the
Provisional Government.
Today, an approximation of this position would take the form of not supporting
capitalist war budgets, parliamentary votes of no confidence, independent
extra-parliamentary agitation and action, etc. Granted this principled policy
on the part of the Bolsheviks is a very subtle maneuver but it is miles away
from giving blanket military and political support to forces that you will
eventually have to overthrow. The Spanish revolutionaries in the 1930’s, even
the most honest grouped in the Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) learned this
lesson the hard way when that party, despite its equivocal political attitude
toward the popular front, was suppressed and the leadership jailed by the
Negrin government despite having military units at the front in the fight
against Franco.
As I write this review we are in the fourth year of the American-led Iraq war.
For those who opposed that war from the beginning or have come to oppose it the
victory of the Bolshevik Revolution shows the way to really end a fruitless and
devastating war. In the final analysis if one really wants to end an
imperialist war one has to overthrow the imperialist powers. This is a hard
truth that most of even the best of today’s anti-war activists have been unable
to grasp. It is not enough to plead, petition or come out in massive numbers to
ask politely that the government stop its obvious irrational behavior. Those
efforts are helpful for organizing the opposition but not to end the conflict
on just terms. The Bolsheviks latched onto and unleashed the greatest anti-war
movement in history to overthrow a government which was still committed to the
Allied war effort against all reason. After taking power in the name of the
Soviets, in which it had a majority, the Bolsheviks in one of its first acts
pulled Russia out of the war. History provides no other way for us to stop
imperialist war. Learn this lesson.
The Soviets, or workers councils, which sprang up first in the Revolution of
1905 and then almost automatically were resurrected after the February 1917
overturn of the monarchy, are merely a convenient and appropriate organization
form for the structure of workers power. Communists and other pro-Communist
militants, including this writer, have at times made a fetish of this
organizational form because of its success in history. As an antidote to such
fetishism a good way to look at this form is to note, as Trotsky did, that a
Soviet led by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries does not lead to the
seizure of power. That tells the tale. This is why Lenin, in the summer of
1917, was looking to the factory committees as an alternative to jump-start the
second phase of the revolution.
Contrary to the anarchist notion of merely local federated forms of
organization or no organization, national Soviets are the necessary form of
government in the post- seizure of power period. However, they may not be
adequate for the task of seizing power. Each revolution necessarily develops
its own forms of organization. In the Paris Commune of 1871 the Central
Committee of the National Guard was the logical locus of governmental power. In
the Spanish Civil War of 1936 the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist
Militias and the factory committees could have provided such a focus. Enough
said.
For obvious tactical reasons it is better for a revolutionary party to take
power in the name of a pan-class organization, like the Soviets, than in the
name of a single party like the Bolsheviks. This brings up an interesting point
because, as Trotsky notes, Lenin was willing to take power in the name of the
party if conditions warranted it. Under the circumstances I believe that the
Bolsheviks could have taken it in their own name but, and here I agree with
Trotsky, that it would have been harder for them to keep it. Moreover, they had
the majority in the All Russian Soviet and so it would be inexplicable if they
took power solely in their own name. That, after a short and unsuccessful
alliance with the Left Social Revolutionary Party in government, it came down
to a single party does not negate this conclusion. Naturally, a pro-Soviet
multi-party system where conflicting ideas of social organization along
socialist lines can compete is the best situation. However, history is a cruel
taskmaster at times. That, moreover, as the scholars say, is beyond the scope
this review and the subject for further discussion.
The question of whether to seize power is a practical one for which no hard and
fast rules apply. An exception is that it important to have the masses ready to
go when the decision is made. In fact, it is probably not a bad idea to have
the masses a little overeager to insurrect. One mistaken assumption, however,
is that power can be taken at any time in a revolutionary period. As the events
of the Russian Revolution demonstrate this is not true because the failure to
have a revolutionary party ready to roll means that there is a fairly short
window of opportunity. In Trotsky’s analysis this can come down to a period of
days. In the actual case of Russia he postulated that that time was probably
between late September and December. That analysis seems reasonable. In any case,
one must have a feel for timing in revolution as well as in any other form of
politics. The roll call of unsuccessful socialist revolutions in the 20th
century in Germany, Hungary, Finland, Bulgaria, Spain, etc. only painfully
highlights this point.
Many historians and political commentators have declared the Bolshevik seizure
of power in October a coup d’état. That is facile commentary. If one wants to
do harm to the notion of a coup d’état in the classic sense of a closed
military conspiracy a la Blanqui this cannot stand up to examination. First,
the Bolsheviks were an urban civilian party with at best tenuous ties to
military knowledge and resources. Even simple military operations like the
famous bank expropriations after the 1905 Revolution were mainly botched and
gave them nothing but headaches with the leadership of the pre- World War I
international social democracy. Secondly, and decisively, Bolshevik influence
over the garrison in Petrograd and eventually elsewhere precluded such a
necessity. Although, as Trotsky noted, conspiracy is an element of any
insurrection this was in fact an ‘open’ conspiracy that even the Kerensky
government had to realize was taking place. The Bolsheviks relied on the masses
just as we should.
With almost a century of hindsight and knowing what we know now it is easy to
see that the slender social basis for the establishment of Soviet power by the
Bolsheviks in Russia was bound to create problems. Absent international working
class revolution, particularly in Germany, which the Bolsheviks factored into
their decisions to seize power, meant, of necessity, that there were going to
be deformations even under a healthy workers regime. One, as we have painfully
found out, cannot after all build socialism in one country. Nevertheless this
begs the question whether at the time the Bolsheviks should have taken power. A
quick look at the history of revolutions clearly points out those opportunities
are infrequent. You do not get that many opportunities to seize power and try
to change world history for the better so you best take advantage of the
opportunities when they present themselves.
As mentioned above, revolutionary history is mainly a chronicle of failed
revolutionary opportunities. No, the hell with all that. Take working class
power when you can and let the devil take the hinder post. Let us learn more
than previous generations of revolutionaries, but be ready. This is one of the
political textbooks you need to read if you want to change the world. Read it.
