*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-Did the Bolsheviks Seize Power by Deception?By Paul Flewers

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Did the Bolsheviks Seize Power by Deception?By Paul Flewers

The contrast between the promises and the end result of Bolshevism has often led its critics to claim that the Bolsheviks seized power by deception. By and large, these observers fall into two schools of thought. One school is largely comprised of an unlikely combination of conservative historians and libertarian left wingers, whose ideas on this subject coincide to a surprising degree, whatever their profound disagreements on other matters. They view the Bolsheviks as conscious deceivers, as power-hungry intellectual zealots posing as the friends of the oppressed, taking advantage of social problems and the discontent of the masses, in order to seize power and impose their authoritarian rule, irrespective of their lack of support amongst the population as a whole.

The other school of thought also combines different political outlooks within a common conceptual framework on this particular issue. This school sees the basis of Bolshevik practice in a combination of a problematic political theory and a highly over-optimistic estimation of the national and international situation. In short, the Bolsheviks were fooling themselves, and were victims of their own illusions, although it must be emphasised that with some adherents to this school, the charge of deception is implicit rather than stated. [1]


I. Bolshevism as Manipulation
The conservative and libertarian critics of Bolshevism consider that the Bolsheviks manipulated their way into positions of leadership within the Russian working class. A leading exponent of the conservative school, John Keep, says that the workers’ militias and the factory councils were established by workers in order to protect their neighbourhoods from unsocial elements, and to defend their jobs and wages, but they were infiltrated by Bolsheviks, who used them as weapons ‘of a single political party which made no secret of its intention to seize state power by insurrectionary means’:

‘Many ordinary red guardsmen, and also members of the factory committees, will scarcely have been able to comprehend the import of this transformation. Driven to near despair by the economic crisis, their nerves kept on edge by incessant propaganda, they responded uncritically to the appeals of a party that promised untold blessings once "soviet power" had been achieved.’ [2]

Keep says that intellectuals played a predominant role within the Bolshevik party due to ‘their natural self-assertiveness, nourished by the traditions of clandestine struggle, [which] encouraged these men to take advantage of their commanding position’, and this enabled them to form a new elite after the October Revolution. [3]

For the Russian anarchist Peter Arshinov, the October Revolution represented the accession to power of the intellectuals, the ‘socialist democracy’, of whom the Bolsheviks were merely the most artful. Comprising ‘a well-defined socio-economic group’, the intellectuals promoted a statist system as ‘the ideology of the new ruling caste’, and the Soviet system was ‘nothing other than the construction of a new class domination over the producers, the establishment of a new socialist power over them’, the plans for which having been ‘elaborated and prepared during several decades by the leaders of the socialist democracy’. [4]

The Bolsheviks promised that this revolution would lead directly ‘to the free realm of socialism and communism’, which seemed plausible to the masses, who were ‘inexperienced in politics’:

‘The participation of the Communist Party [sic] in the destruction of the capitalist regime gave rise to enormous confidence in it. The stratum of intellectual workers who were the carriers of the ideals of the democracy was always so thin and sparse that the masses knew nothing of its existence as a specific economic category. Consequently, at the moment of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the masses saw no one other than themselves who might replace the bourgeoisie. And it was precisely at this moment that the bourgeoisie was in fact replaced by these accidental leaders, the deceitful Bolsheviks, experienced in political demagogy …

‘Thanks to its revolutionary energy and its demagogic confusion of the revolutionary idea of the workers with its own idea of political domination, Bolshevism drew the masses to itself, and made extensive use of their confidence.’ [5]

The Bolsheviks keyed into the sentiments and demands of the popular masses, in order to impose upon them a new form of exploitative society, and used the political inexperience of the masses for their own ends. The Bolsheviks, therefore, hijacked the Russian Revolution in order to become a new ruling elite.

Opportunism, deception, duplicity, dishonesty: these are the reasons given by conservative and libertarian critics of Bolshevism. The conclusion to be drawn is that the Russian masses were suffering from some form of collective naivety in order for them to have believed and followed the Bolsheviks. Despite – or rather because of – the fact that he has amassed considerable evidence to show the rise of the Bolsheviks within the Russian working class, Keep is obliged to explain their success by producing an image of the Russian workers as, on the one hand, essentially naive, gullible and simple-minded, and, on the other hand, scheming, narrow-minded and selfish. Not only were the workers unable to understand that their organisations had been hijacked, they were not really interested in anything outwith the factory gates. Referring to the support for the concept of workers’ control at the All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees in October 1917, he asserts:

‘There is little doubt that the majority of the delegates took this slogan in its literal sense as meaning a real transfer of power within the enterprise to the men’s chosen representatives, who were to exercise the function of management in the interests of their electors. Needless to add, they showed no concern whatever for the effects which the full "democratisation" of industrial relations would be bound to have on productivity and the national economy as a whole.’ [6]

And for all the celebration by his political current of the spontaneity of the masses, the anarchist Arshinov is obliged to refer, albeit delicately, to the politically ‘inexperienced’ masses. [7]

Recent scholarship has gone far to dispel many of the orthodoxies of the conspiratorial school, and is able to present a more rational and realistic view of the rise of Bolshevism, especially in respect of the Russian working class. In his study of Petrograd factory workers, Steven Smith considers that ‘it was the struggles of workers in the world of work, and the activities of the work-based organisations, such as the factory committees and trade unions, which were of central importance in promoting revolutionary consciousness in 1917’. He does not deny the ‘crucial part’ played in that development by Bolshevik propaganda and activity, but ‘the Bolsheviks did not themselves create revolutionary feeling; it developed primarily out of attempts by workers to grapple with problems of survival’. [8] Workers’ control developed very rapidly in some sectors, particularly in metalworking (engineering). It was initiated in a spontaneous manner, for various purposes, and developed to varying degrees in different localities and industries. It became more politically aware, especially after May 1917, when the condition of the economy deteriorated, and employers started to take a hard line.

Not having prior to 1917 any idea of actually leading a proletarian seizure of power in the immediate future, and having developed within the traditions of the Second International, the Bolsheviks had no practical theories of workers’ control when it started to appear in the factories. In late May, however, Lenin drafted a resolution which recognised the growth of workers’ control, particularly in Petrograd, and connected it with the need for popular control over not merely industry, but the finance sector, and therefore the economy as a whole, in order to stave off economic collapse. [9] He elaborated this in later pieces, in which he looked at the need for the nationalisation of big business, centralised state control of the economy, and workers’ control of production. [10]

The Bolsheviks were therefore developing a strategy that aimed to shift the concept of workers’ control in individual factories towards popular control of the national economy, which necessitated the soviet seizure of state power. They were attempting to develop a revolutionary consciousness amongst the working class by engaging with them in their struggles over issues within the factories, and showing the workers that the resolution of their problems both at work and in the wider political field could only be solved through their seizing of state power.

Like any political theory, this would be rejected by its audience unless it actually meant something to them. Smith shows how the experiences of many workers made them receptive to the ideas of the Bolsheviks:

‘Strikes were a politicising experience for those who took part in them: they saw with their own eyes how employers were going on investment strike, engaging in lockouts, refusing to accept new contracts or to repair plant; how the government was colluding with the employers, curbing the factory committees and sending troops to quell disorder in the Donbass. The strikes were important, therefore, in making hundreds and thousands of workers aware of political matters and in making the policies of the Bolshevik party attractive to them.’ [11]

In other words, workers were drawn to the Bolsheviks because Bolshevik politics started to make sense. What seemed outlandish or irrelevant during and just after the February Revolution, now increasingly appeared to be quite rational.

Modern scholars do not overlook the less positive features of the workers’ movement. They would not dispute Keep’s statement that some committees tried to keep their factories open by preventing work being sent to provincial enterprises. But they would not move on, as Keep does, from this example to say that the committees in general were only interested in their own factory and not with the working class as a whole. [12] Even if some factory committees were parochially minded, many were forced by necessity to take a broader view. Many workers drew political conclusions from this. Ziva Galili says:

‘These actions implied a two-part position: first, that the state could and should take over the economy in order to regulate it, ensure production and jobs, and redress the imbalance in the apportionment of wealth between workers and employers; and second, that only under the guidance of a government dedicated to the interests of the revolution and democracy would the state perform these functions.’ [13]

These workers recognised that their control of an individual factory would be pointless if there was no overall state administration of industry as a whole:

‘It is thus clear that the issue of industrial order raised that of political order, and the practice of "kontrol", whatever its origins, gave rise to a concept of what the new political order should be. Of course, the connection between the industrial and political orders did not appear with equal clarity to all workers; to some it was merely a dim perception, but the Bolsheviks were ready to articulate, legitimise and exploit it.’ [14]

Bolsheviks had won leading positions in certain trade unions and many factory committees quite early on, and they steadily gained ground at the expense of the moderate socialists, especially in organisations where representatives were directly elected by the workers. Although the Bolsheviks lost popularity after the July Days, they soon revived, and support for the moderate socialists within the working class and the armed forces was soon to start an irreversible slide. The hostility of the moderate socialists to the factory committees, their continued attempts to act as arbitrators under conditions of sharpening class polarisation, their continued support for the war, and their ever louder calls for a coalition government, led to a steady rise in support for the Bolsheviks in the factory committee, union, soviet and municipal elections. [15] An analogous trend, if less developed and defined, was occurring within the armed forces around the demands of the soldiers. [16]

The Bolsheviks’ numerical size and influence grew considerably during 1917, and the rise of the party paralleled the deepening politicisation of the working class, and was indeed part of that process. In her study of the Moscow workers, Diane Koenker says that ‘the process by which the majority of workers identified their interests with the Bolshevik party programme was a product of rational, logical choices that corresponded to the changing political and economic nexus’. [17] This process, which occurred to varying degrees in most urban centres in Russia and its former empire, ultimately brought the overwhelming majority of workers to accept the need for a government based upon the soviets, as they demanded a government that would introduce economic management which they could trust, and make a real effort to gain peace:

‘By October, a wide spectrum of workers favoured soviet power; but since only the Bolshevik party advocated this power as part of their political programme, support for soviet power inevitably translated into support for the Bolshevik party.’ [18]

The Bolsheviks won support within the mass institutions thrown up in 1917 because their policies coincided with the desires and experiences of large numbers of people, particularly amongst the urban working class. Unlike those of other organisations, their policies appeared to correspond to reality, and to show a way forward.

Lenin’s State and Revolution comes under heavy criticism from the conservative-libertarian axis. The council communist Paul Mattick sees the book as an example of gross opportunism:

‘Everything Lenin wrote prior to State and Revolution, and every step taken after the seizure of power, turns the apparent radicalism displayed in this pamphlet into a mere opportunistic move to support the immediate aim of gaining power for the Bolshevik party … It was … not a momentary emotional aberration on the part of Lenin that induced him to grant so much revolutionary self-determination to the workers, but a pragmatic move in the manipulation of the revolution in accordance with his own party concept of the socialist state.’ [19]

A prominent conservative historian, Adam Ulam, says of State and Revolution that ‘no work could be more unrepresentative of its author’s political philosophy and his general state of mind’. But it is not surprising that this work – ‘almost a straightforward profession of anarchism’ – bore so little relationship to his political practice:

‘How indeed could the Bolsheviks come to power if they chose to remind the peasant that Marxism demanded that he forsake his small plot and work as a hired hand on a state-run farm? Or the worker that he must submit to the state-appointed factory director, the soldier that the proletarian dictatorship would not tolerate the lax discipline of the post-February army?’ [20]

It is true that State and Revolution stands in marked contrast with much of Lenin’s other writings. But does that make it a work of mere opportunism or trickery? If anything, State and Revolution is a theoretical work that is extremely abstract in its approach. Most of it consists of a polemic against the orthodox Marxism of the Second International. Lenin never managed to write the chapter that dealt with Russia, and its practical use in the October Revolution was ruled out as it was not published until 1918.

Its theoretical nature is clear as it does not refer to the specific features of Russia in 1917. The only references to Russia are brief criticisms of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. [21] If anything, it was aimed at a country more suited for a ‘classical’ socialist revolution. State and Revolution investigates the question of socialist revolution in the abstract. Whilst it is unwarranted to consider it as a work of deception on Lenin’s part, it was not – nor could be – a blueprint for Bolshevism in Russia. [22]


II. Bolshevism as Self-Delusion
Bolshevism underwent a dramatic change in early 1917. The experience of the February Revolution led Lenin to re-evaluate the Bolsheviks’ strategy. Up until then, the party had considered that the bourgeois revolution in Russia would lead to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry within the confines of a bourgeois republic, a theory which Hal Draper has rightly described as ‘an invitation to a muddle’. [23] In his April Theses Lenin declared that the Provisional Government could not be supported as it could not solve the problems facing Russia, and that power must reside in a government based upon the soviets. Despite encountering opposition from various leading Bolsheviks (not to mention the bemusement of most other Russian socialists), his call for a soviet government struck a positive chord with many party members [24], and the Bolshevik conference in April 1917 endorsed this position.

EH Carr refers to the ‘real problem’ flowing from the Bolsheviks’ political re-evaluation:

‘It may well have been true, as the rapid disintegration of the February Revolution seemed to show, that bourgeois democracy and bourgeois capitalism on the Western model, which was what the Mensheviks wanted and expected, could not be rooted in Russian soil, so that Lenin’s policy was the only conceivable one in the empirical terms of current Russian politics … But what this policy committed its sponsors to was nothing less than to make a direct transition from the most backward to the most advanced forms of political and economic organisation.’ [25]

It is this question which, to a large degree, forms the basis of the criticisms of Bolshevism presented by the second school of thought, rather than a preoccupation with political manipulation.

The Mensheviks’ paper Rabochaia Gazeta responded to Lenin’s April Theses by saying that counter-revolution could only be staved off so long as the Russian Revolution was ‘able to remain within the limits’ which were ‘predetermined by the objective necessity (the state of the productive forces, the level of mentality of the masses of people corresponding to it, etc)’. Lenin’s ultra-radicalism, whilst appealing to ‘the most cherished aspirations of the proletariat’, was playing into the hands of reaction, as the possibility of bringing those aspirations into being was ‘illusory’, and ‘the backward majority’ of Russia would be roused against the gains of the February Revolution. [26] In July 1917 the Mensheviks’ leadership denied that the ‘internal chaos’ in Russia, the disruption of the economy, the imminent famine and unemployment could be countered by the Bolsheviks seizing power: ‘No, because no seizure whatever will furnish bread to the people; on the contrary it will merely aggravate the general disorganisation, will create a panic, that is, an absurd, senseless fear, mutual distrust and bitterness.’ The statement condemned the slogan of ‘All power to the Soviets’ as they were supported by only a minority of the population, and it was essential to retain the support of ‘those bourgeois elements’ who still wished ‘to defend … the conquests of the revolution’. [27] The Mensheviks considered that the October Revolution represented the foisting upon Russia of ‘a utopian programme’ that was ‘radically out of keeping with the backward state of the country’, and which could only be pursued in opposition to the majority of the population. [28]

In early 1919 the left wing Menshevik Yuli Martov produced a substantial critique of Bolshevism. He said that the Bolsheviks’ methods were derived from their political impatience. Wishing ‘to jump over the historic inertia of the masses’, their desire to find ‘political instruments that might best express the genuine will of the majority’ resulted in ‘the organisation of a minority dictatorship’. [29] Their impatience was greatly reinforced by the ‘economic retrogression’ that had occurred during the war. The organisation of society appeared to be an easy task, and the most militant workers had reverted to a crude anarchistic conception of the transition towards socialism through ‘the destruction of the state and not by the conquest of the state’. Although ‘Lenin himself did not realise it’, this would lead to the creation of a bureaucratic and repressive state, which would be presented to the masses ‘as the destruction of the old state machinery, as the rise of a society based on a minimum of repression and discipline, as the birth of a stateless society’:

‘On the one hand, such illusions are manipulated by certain extremist minorities of the socialist proletariat. On the other hand, these groups are themselves the slaves of these illusions. It is under the influence of this double factor that these minorities act when they seek to find a practical medium by which they might elude the difficulties connected with the realisation of a real class dictatorship… Fundamentally, this anarchist illusion of the destruction of the state covers up the tendency to concentrate all the state power of constraint in the hands of a minority, which believes neither in the objective logic of the revolution nor in the class consciousness of the proletarian majority and, with still greater reason, that of the national majority.’ [30]

Martov considered that the Bolsheviks did manipulate their constituency, but this was due more to their own illusions than to purely political manoeuvring. Dubious tactics were not the main problem, there was a deeper factor. As part of a long-standing tradition of revolutionary impatience, they reflected the consciousness of part of the working class. Martov considered Bolshevism to be a dangerous political deviation, which could only be a disaster for the Russian working class and for the cause of socialism in general.

The international dimension of the October Revolution is of prime importance, indeed, it is the axis around which Bolshevik policies revolved in 1917, and their whole political orientation during this period cannot be understood unless the international dimension is taken into account. The Bolsheviks recognised that the inability of a government based upon parliamentary democracy to deal with the deepening problems which it was confronting meant that the choice of government for Russia was between one based upon the organisations thrown up from below during and after the February Revolution, and some form of right wing authoritarian administration.

Trotsky recognised shortly after the 1905 Revolution that the leading role played by the working class in any future revolution in Russia would necessarily present it with the need to seize state power. However, he also recognised that proletarian power could only be guaranteed through the proletariat seizing power in the advanced capitalist countries. The Russian proletariat would ‘have no alternative but to link the fate of its political rule, and hence the fate of the whole Russian revolution, with the fate of the socialist revolution in Europe’. [31] The adoption by the Bolsheviks of Trotsky’s schema meant that whilst they were impelled to seize power in Russia, their regime could only survive through proletarian revolutions occurring in the advanced capitalist countries.

This was a high risk strategy, but, as Alexander Rabinowitch says, Lenin ‘was obsessed by the thought that all of the major European countries were on the threshold of socialist revolution and that a proletarian insurrection in Russia would be the spark that would spur desperate, peace-hungry workers everywhere to rise against their governments’. [32] Everything ultimately hinged upon this, and the Bolsheviks’ rivals appeared not to have recognised its centrality. [33] Isaac Deutscher speaks of the Bolsheviks’ ‘passionate, almost Messianic, belief’ in this, and how ‘the dazzling blaze of this great vision brightened in their eyes even the darkest aspects of the legacy they were taking over’. [34] Robert Service says that Lenin was hopelessly over-optimistic, and ‘was mistaking war-weariness and political discontent for a pan-European revolutionary situation’, although he recognises that conservatives and liberals across Europe thought much the same. [35]

Whilst many scholars reject the conspiratorial view of the Bolsheviks’ relationship with the working class, they do not overlook the problems involved with it, and with the closely related issue of the Bolsheviks’ industrial policy. Service considers that Lenin gravely underestimated the depth of the economic crisis in Russia during 1917, and that his statements that the economic problems in Russia could easily be rectified by a soviet regime were due to his own underestimation of the problems. [36] He concludes: ‘If Lenin fooled the workers in 1917, it was partly because he fooled himself to a considerable extent. The same could be said for many other leading Bolsheviks.’ [37]

Whilst the Bolsheviks played an active part in the factory committees and other mass institutions, and help to widen the scope of workers’ control into the quest for the regulation of the national economy by a soviet regime, they were unable to devise an economic strategy that could combine local initiative with central planning. Lenin’s writings on the subject show, as Marcel Liebman says, a ‘deeply democratic inspiration’ [38], but they are not much more than a statement of intent, and are only a little more substantial than the abstractions of State and Revolution. In 1917 Lenin saw the basis of a new society in the activity of the masses and in the vast array of institutions they had formed. As Liebman says:

‘The men and women whom he called upon to govern independently, and to whom he wished to see entrusted the conduct of public affairs, were the same working men and women who had succeeded in breaking through the innumerable forms of conservative conditioning …’ [39]

In the rising tide of mass activity in 1917, it was as if Lenin could only see the positive side of the masses, and was temporarily blind to the negative aspects: the low cultural level (illiteracy, drunkenness, etc.). The Bolsheviks were to find that the running of the economy was far more problematic than they had anticipated.

Nevertheless, it would be one-sided to see this purely as self-delusion. It was also a political problem. The Bolsheviks were faced with issues which had never been a practical matter for the socialist movement. Smith says that the general industrial theory of the Second International, from which the Bolsheviks had not broken, had limited its conception of production to its technical aspects, and ignored the wider social issues involved in modern industry. [40] Sam Farber dismisses the idea that the Bolsheviks were cynically using the factory committees as a means to help them to seize power, and says:

‘In the last analysis, the key political problem was that Lenin and the mainstream of the Bolshevik party, or for that matter the Mensheviks, paid little if any attention to the need for a transformation and democratisation of the daily life of the working class on the shopfloor and in the community. These political traditions were even less likely to see this transformation and democratisation as an essential part of the process by which that class could indeed become the ruling class.’ [41]

In power with the economy in a state of collapse and the working class starting to disintegrate, with no common policy or concrete ideas within the party on how to combine local industrial initiatives with central economic administration, not to mention a whole host of other problems, the Bolsheviks took the easy option of imposing a strictly centralised industrial policy, and restricting the scope of activity of factory committees.


III. The Sins of Omission
The Bolsheviks have been accused of deliberate chicanery or short-term opportunism in policy formulation, and of failing to point out the longer-term consequences of their policies. Most observers, including many modern scholars, consider that the Bolsheviks promoted an opportunist agrarian policy. Lenin’s policy shifted in 1917, moving away from the demand to nationalise the land towards permitting the entire peasantry to divide it up amongst themselves. Indeed, he lifted his entire agrarian programme from the Socialist Revolutionaries. Service says that Lenin ‘was not at all disconcerted by the accusation that he had stolen another party’s policy’:

‘The result was not intellectual coherence… He desired theoretical consistency and Marxist justification if he could obtain it; but it was not his absolute priority. He had a revolutionary’s urgent sense that something needed to be done and that mistakes and uncertainties had to be accepted as an unavoidable cost.’ [42]

And yet it can be legitimately argued that the Bolsheviks had little choice in this matter. As Deutscher says, ‘they sanctioned the share-out accomplished by the peasantry itself’. [43] The Bolsheviks were not in a position to influence to any real degree the peasants’ redistribution of the land.

The Bolsheviks have been accused of hiding their ultimate policy of agricultural collectivisation, so as not to alienate the peasantry. [44] Carr’s explanation is a little more ambiguous, saying that ‘in the turbulent atmosphere of revolutionary tactics a proposition of little immediate relevance and no appeal to the peasant easily dropped into the background’. [45] Nevertheless, whatever the short-term benefits to the Bolsheviks of their adaptation to and endorsement of the peasants’ struggle for land during 1917, the consequences of these tactics were soon to pose severe problems for them.

Similarly, the Bolsheviks have been accused of opportunism in respect of the national question, although modern scholars see it as being due to political expediency, rather than to pure deception and dishonesty. Richard Pipes, a leading conservative writer, says that the inability of the Provisional Government to assert its authority within the non-Russian areas of the former empire permitted the Bolsheviks, who were ‘concentrating on the seizure of power and unhampered by any moral scruples or constitutional considerations’, to manipulate the aspirations of the non-Russian masses for their own advantage, as they ‘had no intention of respecting the principle of national self-determination’ once in power. Lenin saw national struggles ‘as something to exploit’, as ‘a psychological weapon’. [46] Service, on the other hand, says that Lenin considered it ‘wiser to leave the non-Russian areas’ of the former empire ‘to stoke up their own anger against the Provisional Government and to await further developments’. [47]

Here too it can be argued that the situation was largely outwith their control, as although, as Stephen Jones says, ‘non-Russian perceptions of the Bolshevik stance on the national question, involving a commitment to national self-determination and to the defence of national rights, were probably not unfavourable’ [48], they were weak in many non-Russian areas, and the party was more divided on this issue than on any other. Once again, however, once in power, democratic slogans, however sincerely believed in, and tactics based upon short-term political expediency, were soon to clash with policies based upon reasons of state.

Conservative and libertarian commentators customarily claim that the Bolsheviks deliberately concealed their real intentions of one party rule. Others would dispute this conspiratorial view, yet they would concur with this statement from Keep:

‘Most ordinary members of urban soviets, and even the political activists to whom they looked for guidance, expected the overthrow of the "bourgeois" Provisional Government to lead to the creation of a coalition regime representing all those factions and tendencies that stood for immediate peace and radical social change. Hardly anyone wanted single party rule.’ [49]

It is true that many of those who supported the concept of a soviet government visualised it as some kind of coalition of the various socialist parties, but it is equally true, as we have seen, that as 1917 drew by the Bolsheviks were increasingly seen as the only party that would bring about a soviet government.

But were the Bolsheviks intending to introduce a one party state? Whilst Lenin and Trotsky did not wish to share power with the mainstream Menshevik and right wing Socialist Revolutionary leaders, other party leaders called for a broad coalition after the establishment of a Soviet regime, and even resigned from the government when this failed to materialise. The mainstream Mensheviks and right wing Socialist Revolutionaries, in a move which Keep calls ‘politically short-sighted’ [50], walked out of the national Soviet congress that was held subsequent to the overthrow of the Provisional Government, followed by the Menshevik Internationalists, thus giving the Bolsheviks more or less full sway to form a government of their choice. The Mensheviks and right wing Socialist Revolutionaries then proposed a government with the conditions that Lenin and Trotsky be excluded, key posts be held by non-Bolsheviks, no single party to have a majority, and that it be responsible to an assembly along the lines of the State Conference, which would not reflect the true strength of the Bolsheviks. Such conditions, as Deutscher puts it, ‘amounted to a demand that the Bolsheviks should declare the October Revolution null and void, that they should disarm themselves in the face of their enemies, and that they themselves should ostracise the inspirer and leader of the insurrection’, [51] things which were unacceptable even to the most moderate Bolshevik.

A coalition Soviet government was established with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Its members played important roles in both the government and state apparatus, including the secret police. They resigned from the government after the signing of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, they were not expelled from it, and they only fell into direct conflict with the Bolsheviks after they had staged an armed uprising against the government.

Rather than envisaging a one party state, the evidence points to Lenin and Trotsky seeking a soviet government in which the Bolsheviks, as the party which enjoyed mass support in increasing numbers of soviets and committees and was the main driving force for a soviet government, would play a predominant role, but which would work with other parties that wholeheartedly supported the concept of a soviet government. This explains both their hostility towards the Mensheviks and the right wing Socialist Revolutionaries, and their willingness to work with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. This is not to deny that by the fact of being the party that most consistently demanded and fought for a soviet government, the Bolsheviks identified the revolution with their political pre-eminence, and predicated the survival of the revolution upon it, and this, especially under the increasingly difficult conditions after the October Revolution, led to them monopolising political power. But it is wrong to assume that this course of events was either premeditated or preordained.

Some commentators have pointed to the gaps in Lenin’s public statements during the period between the February and October Revolutions. Service, for example, says that ‘Lenin cannot have wanted to upset popular sensibilities unnecessarily’ with talk about terror and dictatorship, and he ‘never satisfactorily explained precisely how to effect’ his political strategy of ‘a combination of the revolution from above with the revolution from below’, although he does not think that this was necessarily due to deviousness on Lenin’s part. [52]

There were many significant lacunae in Lenin’s writings. Many of the problems involved in the seizure of power by a proletarian party and in the exercise of power under a soviet regime could not be addressed in advance. The quest for a soviet government in 1917 was very much a step into the dark. The Bolsheviks had no historical precedents apart from the short-lived Paris Commune on which they could base themselves and from which they could learn. The Second International, from which the Bolsheviks had only recently broken, had had no experience of leading a revolution, let alone wielding power. The lack on the part of the Bolsheviks of any worked out theories in respect of the issues involved during 1917 and afterwards – not least the crucial factors of the relationship between the revolutionary party and the working class, and the mechanics of a regime based upon mass organisations – was not accidental. It was not a deceitful attempt to hide the future subordination of the proletariat to the ruling party, rather, it was a question of imponderables.


IV. Conclusion: Time For an Objective Assessment
The re-evaluation of Bolshevik strategy in early 1917 shifted the further development of the revolution in Russia from a national to an international dimension. The establishment of the Soviet regime in backward Russia was in response to the inability of the Provisional Government to deal with domestic problems, and was to be a detonator for proletarian revolutions in the advanced countries of Western Europe. Indeed, Trotsky said that Lenin ‘regarded the very conquest of power in Russia primarily as the impetus for a European revolution, a thing which, as he often repeated, was to have incomparably more importance for the fate of humanity than the revolution in backward Russia’. [53] It was this factor that encouraged the Bolsheviks to work for the seizure of power in a country which was backward and unready in itself for a socialist transformation, and it was the urgency of firing this detonator which encouraged them to take all manner of short cuts to weaken the political and administrative authority of the Provisional Government. That is why they encouraged the struggles of the peasants for land redistribution and the nationalities for autonomy and independence, irrespective of the longer-term problems that would ensue.

Nobody can deny that the Bolsheviks employed opportunist tactics in their day to day work, politicians invariably do, and the other parties in Russia were by no means innocent in this respect. But it is incorrect to claim, as the conservative and libertarian observers do, that this constituted the entirety of Bolshevik practice. The Bolsheviks’ push for state power was not based upon a narrow quest for power as such. They saw themselves as the only organisation that could seize power in Russia and thus spark off the European revolutionary upsurge. In many respects, Bolshevism in power was a holding operation, clinging onto state power under very difficult conditions whilst waiting for proletarian revolutions to occur in Western Europe. In doing so, the consequences of their opportunist tactics became clear as discontent arose amongst the peasantry and the non-Russian nationalities. Similarly, their political shortcomings in respect of the relationship between the party and the working class led them to tackle economic problems through bureaucratic centralising measures, which alienated sections of their working class constituency, and brought to the forefront a paternalistic attitude that had been transcended to a large extent during 1917.

The Bolsheviks considered that their relationship with the working class was unproblematic, and they had no idea as to what they should do if their support within the working class fell away once they had taken power. But their holding onto power when disaffection amongst the working class became evident cannot be explained by a crude lust for power on their part. The Bolsheviks viewed their seizure of power as a qualitative historical shift forwards, not merely as part of the to and fro of a parliamentary regime. They assumed that the tide of history was running in their favour, and felt that any relinquishing of power would be disastrous, set the course of history into reverse, and cause great demoralisation within the proletariat on an international level. It was these factors, rather than any specific desire for power and predilection for manipulation and deceit, that lay behind the contrast between the aims of the Bolsheviks and the manner in which they came to power and subsequently acted.

Having long been confronted by a deluge of anti-Bolshevik material from the conspiratorial school, anti-Stalinist Marxists, particularly but not exclusively those in and around the Trotskyist movement, have clung to a rather romantic, uncritical view of Bolshevism, which does not challenge except in detail the Stalinist view of an unproblematic relationship between the Bolsheviks and the Soviet state and the proletariat during the period of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Sufficient scholarship on the subject has now been produced to undermine the conspiratorial school, specifically by proving the existence of a conscious mass base for the Bolsheviks in 1917. However, these very same commentators have brought into relief the problems that arose in respect of the relationship between the party and state and the proletariat once the Bolsheviks had taken power. If some of these problems were specific to the Russian experience, and are therefore of historical interest, then others are no less relevant to the development of a Marxian movement today, and need to be discussed.

The Russian Revolution remains a major landmark both in history in general and for the Marxian movement. We must neither demonise nor sanctify the Bolsheviks, but attempt to understand both their positive and negative aspects. Recent scholarship permits us to go beyond the traditional clichés and mythologies, and to attempt to construct a truly objective appraisal. This article is only a start, and I am sure that other contributors to New Interventions will develop the discussion.



Notes
1. The two schools of thought are by no means homogenous, and there are considerable differences of opinion and emphasis within them. Neither are they totally separate, and adherents to one school may well concur with ideas more generally associated with the other. Cf. R. Service, The Industrial Workers, and E. Acton, Epilogue, in R. Service (ed.), Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution, Basingstoke 1992, pp.147ff., 167ff.

2. J.L.H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilisation, London, 1976, p.95. ‘Mass Manipulation’ would be a more suitable subtitle.

3. Ibid., p.123.

4. P Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement 1918-1921, London 1987, pp.34-5.

5. Ibid., pp.76-7.

6. Keep, op. cit., p.89.

7. Arshinov, op. cit., p.76.

8. S.A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917-1918, Cambridge 1983, p.3.

9. V.I. Lenin, Resolution on Measures to Cope with Economic Disorganisation, Collected Works, Volume 24, Moscow 1977, pp.513-5.

10. V.I. Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, Collected Works, Volume 25, Moscow 1977, pp.327ff., and Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, Collected Works, Volume 26, Moscow 1977, pp.89ff.

11. Smith, op. cit., pp.116-8. Diane Koenker’s study of the Moscow workers makes the same point. She says that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries lost support amongst the workers due to their conciliatory approach to the employers:

‘The Bolsheviks… had offered the most consistent class interpretation of the revolution, and by late summer their interpretation appeared more and more to correspond to reality. The language of class struggle provided workers who had no theoretical understanding of Marx with a familiar conceptual tool with which to understand the actions of the Provisional Government… The combination of theory and experience had produced Moscow’s class consciousness.’ (D. Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, Princeton, 1981, p.364)

In his study of the red guards and workers’ militias, Rex Wade clearly shows the relationship between their politicisation and the rising influence of Bolshevism amongst them (cf. R.A. Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution, Stamford 1984, pp.285ff.).

12. Keep, op. cit., p.88.

13. Z. Galili, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: Social Realities and Political Strategies, Princeton 1989, p.377.

14. Ibid.

15. For evidence of this cf. D. Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918, London 1984, pp.221ff., 345ff.; A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, London 1979, pp.154ff; T. Cliff, Lenin: All Power to the Soviets, London 1976, pp.285ff.; O.H. Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917, New York 1958, pp.430, 433.

16. Marc Ferro says that after July, ‘there was a Bolshevisation of slogans, watchwords and arguments’ in the army: ‘In both front and rear, the popularity of Lenin’s party went up, since he was thought to want an immediate peace, all power for the soviets, and a social revolution.’ (M. Ferro, October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution, London 1980, p.80)

17. Koenker, op. cit., p.362.

18. Ibid.

19. P. Mattick, Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie?, London 1983, pp.233-4.

20. A. Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia, London 1966, pp.353-4, original emphasis.

21. V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, Collected Works, Volume 25, op. cit., p.408, 421, 428.

22. In the second volume of his biography of Lenin, Tony Cliff describes State and Revolution as ‘a perfect synthesis of theory and practice’:

‘In State and Revolution there is a remarkable combination of scientific sobriety and real will for action. It is the apex of Lenin’s writing – his real testament. It became the guide for the first victorious proletarian revolution and is bound to grow in importance in future revolutionary struggles.’ (Cliff, op. cit., p.327)

Cliff overlooks the fact that on the practical level State and Revolution does not go beyond generalities, and ones which were to prove extremely difficult to adhere to in the harsh realities of Russia in 1917. Paul LeBlanc similarly overlooks the abstract nature of Lenin’s book (P. LeBlanc, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, New Jersey, 1990, pp.393-4). Marcel Liebman, however, says that State and Revolution ‘shows glaring weaknesses where one of the most important and most difficult problems is concerned, namely, that of the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (M. Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, London 1980, p.193).

23. H. Draper, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin, New York 1987, p.86.

24. Cf. R. Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organisational Change 1917-1923, London 1979, p.39.

25. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Part 1, Harmondsworth 1977, pp.110-1.

26. Rabochaia Gazeta, 6 April 1917, cited in A Ascher (ed.), The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, London 1976, p.94.

27. Statement of the RSDLP Organising Committee, July 1917, cited in ibid., p.98.

28. RSDLP Party Conference Resolution, 27 December 1918-1 January 1919, cited in ibid., p.109.

29. Y. Martov, Decomposition or Conquest of the State, The State and the Socialist Revolution, London, 1977, p.27.

30. Ibid., pp.47-8.

31. L.D. Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, New York 1974, p.115.

32. Rabinowitch, op. cit., p.xix.

33. Draper says that in his polemics against the Bolsheviks, Kautsky also repeatedly ‘posed the problems of socialist revolution in Russia in its national isolation’ (Draper, op. cit., p.132).

34. I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, Oxford 1979, p.318. But he also speaks of Trotsky’s ‘ever-recurring dialogue with the sceptic’ who doubted that Western Europe was on the verge of revolutionary upheavals (ibid., p.266).

35. R. Service, Lenin: A Political Life, Volume 2, Basingstoke 1991, p.242.

36. Ibid., p.233.

37. Service, The Industrial Workers, op. cit., p.160.

38. Liebman, op. cit., p.195.

39. Ibid., p.208, original emphasis.

40. Smith, op. cit., p.263.

41. S. Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy, London 1990, pp.72-3, original emphasis. Maurice Brinton, a libertarian who has transcended the usual conspiracy theories of his political current, says that ‘the “proletarian” nature of the [Bolshevik] regime was seen by nearly all the Bolshevik leaders as hinging on the proletarian nature of the party that had taken state power’:

‘None of them saw the proletarian nature of the Russian regime as primarily and crucially dependent on the exercise of workers’ power at the point of production … The Bolshevik leaders saw the capitalist organisation of production as something which, in itself, was socially useful … What was wrong with capitalist methods of production, in Lenin’s eyes, was that they had in the past served the bourgeoisie. They were now going to be used by the workers’ state and would thereby become "one of the conditions of socialism".’ (M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917-1921: The State and Counter-Revolution, London 1970, pp.42-3, original emphasis)

42. Service, Lenin: A Political Life, Volume 2, op. cit., p.237.

43. Deutscher, op. cit., p.315.

44. L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, London 1970, p.189.

45. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Part 2, Harmondsworth 1966, p.37.

46. R. Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism 1917-1923, Cambridge 1957, pp.49, 51, 53.

47. Service, Lenin: A Political Life, Volume 2, op. cit., p.232.

48. S. Jones, The Non-Russian Nationalities, in Service (ed.), Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution, op. cit., p.41.

49. Keep, op. cit., p.306. Cf. Rabinowitch, op. cit., p.314.

50. Keep, op. cit., p.313.

51. Deutscher, op. cit., p.331.

52. Service, Lenin: A Political Life, Volume 2, op. cit., pp.226. In respect of the first factor, he adds that Lenin may well have thought that ‘resistance to Bolshevism would be small and that he would “need” to use little violence’ (ibid., p.291), and that, in respect of the second factor, his ‘general strategy’ of revolution, ‘for all its theoretical gaps and subterfuges, did not lack sincerity’ (ibid., p.298).

53. L.D. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, London 1977, p.980.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-Walter Seeland and the German Brandlerites

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
Some information on the present Brandlerite tendency in Germany derived from their press and an obituary of one of their militants. It was contributed by Mike Jones.


The most recent issue of Arbeiterstimme (April 1993) has an obituary of a member of theirs, Walter Seeland, which tells of his tragic life of which the material below is a summary.

Walter Seeland

Born in Erfurt 30.8.14, his father Paul was a class conscious worker who went from the USPD to the KPD and then to the KPO. The family had close personal links with Alfred Schmidt who became the chief KPOer in Erfurt. Walter became a brickie and was active in the TU Youth section and active in the Friends of Nature Youth. He joined the KJO, the KPO youth, in 1930 and attended the Second National Conference of the KPO in Weimar as a youth representative. He became close to Paul Elflein, the Erfurt KPO chairman at the time and kept in contact until Elflein’s death in 1983.

He was denounced to the Gestapo in November 1933 and jailed, free after six weeks, but kept under observation and employed building barracks in Erfurt. When the war began he was called up and stationed in France but in 1941-1944 was sent to Russia where he was wounded four times and sent home on leave to recuperate. After Christmas 1944 he was sent to the western front and ended up as a POW in a US camp. In 1947 he returned to Erfurt, went to a Trade School to finish his education as a Trade Teacher and in 1948 married a nursery nurse, Ursel Seitz.

In December 1948 Walter and his comrades were sentenced to death for anti-Soviet activities and propaganda by the Soviet Military Tribunal in Weimar. The charges were in Russian and thus incomprehensible. It was, he said, a Punch and Judy show at which they just grinned. He was charged with anti-Soviet attitudes from 1938 – when he was thirteen! Later the death sentences were commuted for twenty-five years in the labour camp. They were sent to the notorious prison at Bautzen near Dresden and five of the nine, including Walter, contracted TB because of the inhuman conditions. After Stalin’s death he was released on 18.1.54 and Alfred Schmidt on 27.7.56. But “Ulbricht’s people” kept him under observation. Walter and Ursel decided to leave the DDR and go to Berlin and from thence to the BRD when she was well enough as she had been hospitalised when he had been jailed and so had been unable to help him when he was in Bautzen.

After the Stalin-Tito split a witch-hunt got under way in the SBZ against declared or potential opponents of Soviet policy. Walter was arrested together with Alfred Schmidt and seven other comrades. After 14 days isolation in the cellar of the Erfurt GPU building the first interrogation took place. Walter was asked about his father on a number of occasions who was known as a KPOer in Erfurt though apparently Walter’s own membership of the KPO was unknown them. They also asked about Alfred Schmidt who had been the leader of the local Food and Restaurant workers Union and both a KPD and SPD member in the past. Without explicitly saying so they were both charged with ‘Titoism’.

Though they got to the BRD, because of his TB, Walter could not get a job as a Trade Teacher and he was unemployed for a while and then did a variety of different jobs. They did not succeed in having a long life together as Ursel died in 1959 after a long stay in a clinic caused by the psychological effects of her sufferings. Walter settled and worked in Heidelberg and was active in IG Metall and, for tactical reasons, the SPD. He was in contact with the Arbeiterpolitik tendency but after the founding of the Arbeiterstimme group he joined that along with most of the older comrades. He belonged to that group for over two decades and always attended its national conferences.

Walter had been affected by his imprisonment in Bautzen and afterwards always had a feeling of being threatened and persecuted. When he spoke about it he did so with anger and incomprehension at its injustice. He used to describe the political leaders of the DDR as “Stalinist lumpens” who had profoundly discredited socialism. His angst was so deep that for a long time after the Wall had fallen he avoided visiting his beloved home town of Erfurt. A visit to Erfurt in the New Year resulted in a lung problem which led to pneumonia though this was apparently cleared up with antibiotics.

Mike Jones 1993


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Brandlerism today
There are two Brandlerite groups. What divides them is, first of all Russia together with generational and social distinctions. In the broadest terms the Arbeiterstimme is composed of the generation of ’48, Arbeiterpolitik of the generation of ’68. The older members have a more Brandler position on the ex-USSR, that is they are more pro-Soviet while the younger are almost semi-Shachtmanite. The Brandlerite base was skilled metal workers, often “Meisters”, in Berlin and Baden in small and medium size shops. Baden and Nuremburg are still the Arbeiterstimme centres while the others are in Bremen and Hamburg. The guru of Arbeiterpolitik is Theo Bergmann’s brother.

There are stories of their role in the Berlin uprising of 1953 but it is all hearsay. The GDR oppositionists were of course denounced as Trotskyite wreckers and Brandlerites but that means nothing. After the banning of the CP in the FDR the Brandlerites played a local role, particularly in the Baden area, of the left lower level bureaucrat oppositionists in the Metal Workers Union. In a sense they protected the Stalinists and may have had some division of labour, they were the TU officials, the Stalinists the stewards. As they died off and retired they were, by and large, replaced by Stalinists if by anyone – they failed to recruit anybody.

I am told that the paper in Hamburg consists of lots of reports of struggles and so on but it is difficult to discover where they stand on particular issues.

No More Wisconsins!-Anti-Union “Mission Creep” In Massachusetts- State House Of Representatives Votes To Eliminate Bargaining Over Health Care

Click on the headline to link to a Boston Globe article, dated April 26, 2011, detailing a vote on a bill by the State House of Representatives essentially eliminating heath care issues as bargaining items in public union contracts.

Markin comment:

Okay, one more time by the numbers. Unions exist to bargain over wages, conditions of work, and benefits. Bargain in good or bad faith, but bargain. The defeat in Wisconsin over the right to collectively bargain on, in reality, anything has found echoes in other states using a slow fuse method to attain the same results-break the unions’ task as bargaining agent and go back to the good old days of workers taking what you get, and like it. The Massachusetts House of Representatives recent vote, in a so-called liberal, pro-labor state, on a bill to essentially take heath care issues off the bargaining table is a prime example of this latter strategy. If we do not want unions, public and private, to become mere company unions (or mere dues-paying fraternal organizations, like the Elks)then we had better do a better job of fighting to save the collective bargaining process before there is nothing left. And work under the slogan- No More Wisconsins! No More Massachusetts’! An injury to one is an injury to all!

From The Boston May Day Committee-Boston May Day 2011 at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Park-All Out In Boston On Our International Working Class Holiday!-Honor The Haymarket Martyrs!

From The Boston May Day Committee-Boston May Day 2011 at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Park-All Out In Boston On Our International Working Class Holiday!-Honor The Haymarket Martyrs!

When: Sunday, May 1, 2011, 12:00 pm

Where: Rose Kennedy Greenway Park • Cross St. and Hanover St. • across from the Haymarket T Station corner • Boston

Start: 2011 May 1 - 12:00pm
*******

Boston May Day 2011 at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Park
Let's commemorate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Park, across from the Haymarket T Station, in the corner of Cross and Hanover streets in Boston.

After the rally we will take the T to East Boston to join in the East Boston March to the May 1 rally in Chelsea.

We demand:

1. Stop attacks on workers!

2. Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!

3. No racist profiling Secure Communities programs!

4. Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!

5. Unity of all workers to defend our rights!

6. International unity for immigrant rights.

Special performance by the radical theater group Bread and Puppet

This event is initiated and sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee.

For organizational endorsements please write to info[@]bostonmayday.org

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-"The Origins of the Stalinist Bureaucracy"

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
The following article by Podsheldolkin was published in En defensa del Marxismo, No.1, 1991, Argentina. It appears to be his contribution to the symposium on Trotsky in Sao Paulo, Brazil in September 1990. The article is simply prefaced by a note pointing out that the author is an historian and senior investigator at the Institute of Marxist-Leninism, Moscow, and was at the time engaged in investigating the documents in the secret archives of the CPSU. It was translated by Mike Jones.

The Origins of the Stalinist Bureaucracy
Some New Historical Facts
by Alexander Podsheldolkin

We know that the history of the Soviet people, the State and the Communist Party has been very falsified. One of the most prominent historians of the USSR, Yuri Afanasiev, wrote that no people or State have a more falsified history than the Soviet people and the Soviet State. The Stalinist period was a tragedy for all the peoples inhabiting the USSR. My professional interest is in the precise beginning of this phenomenon, in its roots, because historiography usually states that Stalinism, or the so-called Stalinist society as such, started to reveal itself from 1929 with the so-called collectivisation. I believes that the roots go much deeper and are caused by events much further back and, therefore, I investigated the period 1921-24, the period I consider most important. Today there is much talk, even in our press, about the Bukharin’s so-called alternative in 1929, and of other alternatives too. In my opinion, there was already no alternative in 1929, as everything had already been decided between the years 1923 and ’24.

As I am one of the few historians of the USSR with access to the secret archives of the party, I can examine extremely important documents, including those of Leon Trotsky, which are now being published in the SU. I will mention one of them straight away: the letter of Trotsky of 8.10.23 (Izvestia, News from the Central Committee). At the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, we consider that the most important thing is to gather and publish documents from the archives, giving to the public the maximum possible information and, after a few years and the publication of many documents, we will be able to see historical reality and truth with greater clarity and thus understand the roots of the society which existed in the USSR until 1985 and which, to some extent, still exists today.

I will try to present some facts and figures from 1923 and 1924. When I read the letter by Trotsky, I was surprised by the sharpness of its criticism of the Politburo, concerning the crisis in the country and the party, and the matter of the bureaucracy. At the same time, reading the papers of this period, such as Pravda and Izvestia, one could see that the country was calm and quiet and that everything went on as normal. The press did not reflect the very sharp struggle already taking place inside the party in the Central Committee and the Politburo.

The first plenum of the Central Committee after the XI. Congress, on 3rd April 1922, with open voting and with the participation of Lenin, unanimously accepted the proposal of Kamenev naming Stalin as the General Secretary of the Central Committee. This post was created in order to direct the work of the Secretariat of the CC, which, above all, involved the sending of reports together with the selection and distribution of party cadres. A defined hierarchy already existed in the party, with directives coming from above and a military discipline concerning their fulfilment. Only at the higher level of political decision making, with Lenin in the Politburo, was relative collegiality maintained. The post of General Secretary objectively turned itself into the control centre and linking point for the hierarchy. As Tucker correctly stated: “Lenin didn’t think that the post of Secretary had the capability of converting all power in the hands of only one person … The Secretariat, meanwhile, could influence the order of debate and the political direction, which enabled it to have an important strategic position in relation to the orders of the leadership, as well as the right to fill posts, which made the Secretariat an ideal instrument for political manipulation” (1).

Not much time passed – less than nine months – and already in December 1922, Lenin proposed to remove Stalin from this post, alleging that “he had concentrated an enormous power in his hands”. (2)What happened in those months? What facts led Lenin to this opinion?

The process of concentration of ‘unlimited power’ in the hands of Stalin, his temporary allies and personally loyal functionaries, manifested itself in various ways in 1922:

A growth of the apparatus of both party and state, which came to be the same thing;
The creation of a rigid mechanism of submission to the centre, not to the CC nor the Organisation Buro, but directly to the Secretariat of the CC;
An increase of the powers and privileges of the apparatus, and consequently, the bureaucratic transformation of its majority.
We will consider some aspects of this process.

As is known, on 23rd May, Lenin went to Gorky, where two days later he had his first stroke, which led to partial paralysis of his right arm and difficulty in speaking. Lenin stayed in Gorky until 2nd October. During this period he took hardly any part in political life, and was largely isolated (the new General Secretary visited him five days after the stroke, and did not return again for fifteen days).

It seems that Lenin’s condition was one of the reasons which led Stalin to act with resolution and rapidity. Ensuring himself the support of Kamenev and Zinoviev, he began the process of creating the nomenklatura – (partidocracy). Already on 6th June, the text by Molotov, approved by the Secretariat (Stalin, Kuibishev and Molotov) called ‘Situation of the Central Committee Instructors’, was distributed in some places, according to which the instructor was granted widespread rights over the election of local party organs, the instructors themselves being subordinated to the Organisation Secretariat of the CC, or rather, to the apparatus. Rapidly, a system analogous to the leadership of instructors was created within the lower party cells. According to the text, “the instructor analyses and leads the functioning of the committees of the party, helps them strictly to follow the directives of the Central Party organs” (3). In the course of 1922 the CC instructors investigated more than two thirds of the regional organisations, and although it is officially stated that “they do not have rights of an administrative and decisive type”, there was practically no case in which the regional committee did not accept the main proposals which were normally made by the CC instructors.

In July, as a part of the Secretariat, the Organisation Department of the CC was created. LM Kaganovich, an associate of Stalin, was put in charge of it. Among the tasks of the department listed were “the observation and vetting of the party organisations and their instruction, the creation of directives of an organisational character” (4), etc. The practice then began of convening secretaries in order to give declarations before the higher organisation, seeking “to avoid possible errors in the important questions on the periphery” (5). A flow of written reports from below upwards began to be regularly sent in. Thus, the provincial committees were advised to send to the CC Secretariat, three different reports: secret, informative and statistical. Thus the mechanism of influence and control over the local organisations by the central apparatus, or more exactly by the Secretariat and Stalin personally, was created.

On 31st July, the Org Buro approved a document on The Improvement of the Living Conditions of the Active Functionaries of the Party – a document which merits special attention and commentary, since it was partially published. According to this, a strict hierarchy of wages for all party functionaries was created. Thus, the minimum salary for the secretaries of cells in the enterprises and in the countryside was fixed at the level of the 12th classification (30 roubles). For a CC member and the secretaries of regional committees, it was 43 roubles. These were, approximately, the wages of the Communists working in the economic organs and in the Soviet. A bonus was established, exclusively for party functionaries, of 50% for a family of 3 persons, and another 50% in addition for extraordinary work. Taxes on the higher salaries were symbolic, they constituted 25-50% of the excess, which begun to be taken into account from the 17th Classification, that is to say, 67 roubles (6). The average monthly salary in society was 6 roubles and 88 kopeks.

Together with their money ‘the active functionaries of the party’, plus their family members, received a special distribution of goods. During the summer of 1922 for example, this monthly distribution in the central Soviet organs included: 12 kilos of meat, 1.2 kilos of sugar, 4.8 kilos of rice, 100 grammes of tea, etc. For the functionaries at the regional level the ration was much less: 4.6 kilos of meat or fish, 400 grammes of sugar, 162 cigarettes, 3 boxes of matches etc. Besides this, the former received (together with their family members) free housing, clothes, medical aid and even, according to the post, personal transport. (7)

The most ‘responsible’ functionaries enjoyed their regular holidays, (from one to three months a year), in rest homes abroad. They journeyed there, on grounds of health, generally accompanied by their family and by personal doctors, also at the expense of the party. Lacking proper statistics, we will cite some examples. According to the decision of the Secretariat of 5.5.22, transport costs to the place of rest equalled 100-150 gold roubles. During the first month of stay in a sanatorium, it was 100 gold roubles for lodging. For small charges, also 100 gold roubles. For each succeeding month, another 100 gold roubles. (8) In each particular case the decision about such relaxation was taken by the Secretariat.

In general, it gave a great and continuous attention to resting. Thus, in July, a special commission presided over by the Peoples Commissar for health, N.A. Semachco, considered the maintenance of two rest homes abroad very expensive and proposed to substitute two similar ones in the Crimea. On 11th July, the Org. Buro (which approved the recommendations of the Secretariat almost mechanically) decided against closing the rest home abroad and opening the new ones in the Crimea. We will also mention a decision of the Org. Buro on 4th October, according to which an agreement was reached to reserve 1200 beds, as a minimum, in the rest homes, for the party functionaries during the winter season and to grant 100 roubles (pre-war ones) extra for each ‘party bed’.(9)

The basis was thus laid for the system of privileges, by bribing functionaries, whose leadership – as we previously showed – belonged to the Secretariat, or rather, was in the hands of Stalin.

In order to illustrate the contrast between the life style of the ‘responsible functionaries of the party’ and the population in 1922, we will quote from the memoirs of a contemporary: “I remember how, in 1922, our family returned from Poltava to Moscow. My Aunt, an old Bolshevik, with the help of M. Frunze, obtained places for us in the special coach, in which the representatives of the new elite travelled – functionaries of the party, chiefs and Commissars of the Red Army. The coach smelled of leather, cologne and expensive cigars. After two years of hunger, we were dressed like beggars. The passengers of the elite looked at us with curiosity, drank wine, ate delicacies (in a situation of general hunger in the country) but none of them offered me, a child looking like a skeleton, even a morsel of bread, not to speak of chocolate, which could generally be obtained by the new ‘lords of life’” (10).

In the summer of 1922 it was revealed that the number of functionaries who received their salary and budgetary necessities from the party (the party leadership) was 15,325, and with their families, 74,470. To this must be added 1920 members of the party, functionaries of the Soviets and central organs.

According to the decision of the Org. Buro of 27.9.22, the number of functionaries increased to 20,000 persons, and the number of support personnel, including technicians, who also received special supplies, up to 40,000 persons. After December, in the Secretariat of the CC itself, there were 275 ‘posts of responsiblity’ and 372 ‘technical staff’. (11)

From the summer of 1922, Stalin was able, through the Secretariat, actively to select and impose elements loyal to him personally, a policy he formulated thus a year later, at the XII. Congress: “The cadre must be selected in such a way that posts will be taken up by people capable of following the line, who can assume those orientations as if they were their own and are capable of carrying them out in practice”. (12) With the passing of years, the majority of the secretaries of the district and provincial committees was changed – sometimes through direct control, generally by means of ‘recommendation’ and ‘re-election’.

A similar process unfolded in the lower cells of the party, and not only in the party apparatus as such. In a report concerning party work for the year 1922, Kuibishev wrote that “each important nomination, whether at the centre or the periphery, whether concerning some enterprise leader or the election (!) of the secretary of the provincial committee or members of the Buro, is accompanied, each time with greater frequency, by a previous process of selection (…) The party has the possibility of naming even the secretaries of the district committees, of the organisation, and even the secretaries of the cells”. (13)

In the XII. Congress, Proebrazhenski, worriedly pointed out that “approximately 30% of the secretaries are, as one is accustomed to say, ‘recommended by the Central Committee’. I do not know how far this process has gone”. (14) And ‘it went’, in reality, very far. For example, in my opinion (based on secret statistics), of 191 persons occupying the post of secretary of provincial committees from the summer of 1922 until the autumn of 1923, scarcely 97 were elected, and the rest were ‘recommended’ or directly appointed. (15)

From August, the nomination of the secretaries was converted, in fact, into a regulated norm: a new ruling was created, approved by the XII. Conference of the party, according to which, from that time on, the secretaries of the district and provincial committees had to be approved by superior bodies. The rapid strangulation of any element of internal democracy in the party also occurred in another way. Thus, according to the new ruling, parallel to the provincial committees (elections subordinated to the provincial conference), provincial bureaux were created (but appointed by the CC and subordinated only to it). The new bodies were the result of a decision of the X. Congress: but it had aimed to put the bureaux under the control of the committees. A gradual abolition of the discussion clubs of the party also took place, etc.

In December 1922, on the initiative of L. Kaganovich, and as a follow-up to the ‘Central Committee Circulars’, previously published, a new type of orientation was introduced – ‘The circular letters of the Central Committee’. A month later, also the circular orientation of the Central Committee, which had to be fulfilled in the same ‘rapid and exact’ way as the circulars. These orientations were usually drafted by one of the secretaries (Molotov or Kuibishev) and were approved by the Secretariat (also by Stalin) usually without any coordination with the members of the CC. Nevertheless, they began with the phrase “The Central Committee decided …”. Thus, the Secretariat (and in a great measure Stalin himself) definitively usurped some functions of the CC plenum. Two and a half years later again, Kamenev recognised that the Secretariat had converted itself into a superior organ to the Politburo and said that “in fact it decided the policies”. (16)

A repressive apparatus was put at the service of the newly born monster of totalitarianism. Starting from the summer of 1922, it is clear that the functions and competence of the General Secretary were broadened into what, at the start, was originally under the control of the CC. Thus, in August, the resolution of the XII. Conference of the party on The Parties and the Anti-Soviet Wave gave the green light to the repression against the Mensheviks and SRs, but also against the non-party intelligentsia. The resolutions of 3rd August on The Registration of the Associations and Unions meant the prohibition of all the parties but the Bolsheviks.

The decree of 10th August, on The Forced Carrying Out Adminstrative Decisions created a precedent for the establishment of special commissions for the settling of accounts with those who thought differently. At the end of September, the Politburo decided upon a further expansion of the rights of the General Secretary, and according to the decision of the Politburo of 16th October, he received, in fact, the right to operate independently of judicial norms. So the first steps in the direction of totalitarian state were taken.

As we saw, for the sick Lenin, to a considerable extent divorced from political life, in part thanks to the efforts of the General-Secretary, there were more than enough reasons for dictating his words about the ‘unlimited power’ of Stalin. However, it was too late. At the end of 1922, the real power in the party was already, in great measure, in the hands of the partidocracy – ‘hierarchy of secretaries’ – at the peak of which one could find the Secretariat of the Central Committee and, personally, Stalin.



References
1. Tucker, Robert, Stalin’s Road to Power – 1879-1929, History and Personality, 1990, p.270. (All sources given are in Spanish without any place of publication so presumably they are from Russian sources – Note by translator.)

2. Lenin, VI, Obras Completas, Vol.45, p.345. It is unclear whether this is the Russian or Spanish version.

3. Book for the Party Functionary, Course 3, m 1923, p.108/118.

4. In 1922 the Org. Dept. demanded reports from 16 secretaries of district committees, but during the first months of 1923, the number had risen to 39.

5. Book for …, p.118-119.

6. Book for …, p.126.

7. Argumenti i fakti, 1990, No.27. We cannot find the facts about the supplies to the workers.

8. The same applies.

9. 100 roubles pre-war were equal to 500 gold roubles.

10. Kondratiev, V. We Speak of Ideals, Literaturnaya Gazeta.

11. Argumenti i fakti, 1990, No.27.

12. XII Congress of the Communist Party (Bolshevik), shorthand minutes version, 1968, p.63.

13. Recommendations on party work for the year, 1923, p.50.

14. XII Congress, p.146.

15. After the massive reshuffling of local party functionaries in the summer of 1923, the whole apparatus was under the control of the Secretariat by the autumn. Thus at the start of the discussion in 1923, the Stalinist nomenklatura hierarchy was already fully formed and subsequently it only developed and perfected itself.

16. XIV Congress of the Communist Party (Bolshevik), shorthand minutes version 1926, p.274

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Introduction to C.L.R. James' "World Revolution 1917-1936"

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
Introduction to World Revolution 1917-1936

This Introduction for the new edition of World Revolution 1917-1936 by C.L.R. James was written by Al Richardson the editor of Revolutionary History. The new edition was published by Humanities Press in 1993.

Introduction to World Revolution

C.L.R. James’ World Revolution, here presented in a new edition, was one of the few attempts made at the time to synthesise the experience of the revolutionary movement following the First World War. In judging its significance, both in its own time and for ours, it is worth bearing in mind the circumstances that gave rise to it.

The sheer weight of the apparatus of the Soviet Union and of the Comintern had established a virtual monopoly over Marxist thought by the mid 1930s. Dissident currents, whether of ‘right’ (Bukharinist or Brandlerite) or of ‘left’ coloration (Bordigist, Korschite or Trotskyist) had been successfully marginalised and reduced to small group existence by massive propaganda, gangsterism or terror.

Early in 1934 a dozen or so members of the Communist League, the first British Trotskyist organisation, at the instigation of Denzil Harber and Stewart Kirby and with Trotsky’s support, had left the parent body to set up a faction, later called the Marxist Group, inside the Independent Labour Party, which had itself parted company with the Labour Party a couple of years earlier. By this time C.L.R. James had already arrived in Britain and had made contact with members of the Labour Party in Nelson in Lancashire, but when he came down to live in Boundary Road in north west London he was recruited into the Trotskyist movement and joined the Marxist Group working in the ILP.1

In both groups the British Trotskyists were very few in number at the time he encountered them, and whilst the main body had with difficulty been able to sustain a monthly printed paper from 1933 onwards, the entrist organisation in the ILP had only been able to issue a few duplicated pamphlets, and, to put over their viewpoint, had been obliged to sell the Militant, a journal published by their American co-thinkers.

Trotskyism was not a popular standpoint during the mid 1930s in Britain. The wider Labour movement was more defensive than ever and was still recovering painfully from the split in the Labour Party at the time of the formation of the National Government in 1931. At the same time the Communist party was itself just recuperating from its reduction to the rank of a tiny sect during the “Third Period” of the Comintern, and was enjoying a period of rapid growth. The increase in the power of Nazi Germany made the USSR seem an attractive ally, even in some establishment circles, and the adoption of the policy of the Popular Front enabled the party to make a far wider appeal than it had ever done before, setting the tone for the ideological life of the left for the next decade. The Communist Party was able to infiltrate or take over existing organisations, such as the Labour Party’s student and youth groups, and to form a number of satellite bodies catering for the different interest groups in society.

The most effective of these was the Left Book Club, which came to enjoy a circulation of 57,000 and which was founded in May 1936 in partnership with the publisher Gollancz. Many of its titles were pure Soviet propaganda at its most mendacious, and of a virulently anti-Trotskyist character into the bargain, such books as Dudley Collard’s Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others, the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, and J.R. Campbell’s Soviet Policy and Its Critics.

The Club’s major programmatic book justifying the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, World Politics, 1918-1936, written by the Communist Party’s most cynical theorist, R. Palme Dutt, appeared in 1936. Unable to match anything like these resources, the British Trotskyists felt very much on the defensive, so C.L.R. James decided to use his contacts with a rival publisher to try to mount a counter-operation. As he later described it,

“There were no books in English, only pamphlets, so after a time I said ‘Why haven’t we a book in English?’, and they said that it was about time they had one. I finally picked myself up and got hold of Frederick Warburg ... I told Warburg and he thought that there was scope for the publication of books that were Marxist but not C.P. So I went away to Brighton and wrote this book in three or four months”.2

Although oral tradition in South Wales in the 1960s still pointed to a house where allegedly James worked on the book while campaigning down there for the ILP at the time of the Abyssinian War, it was largely put together, as he says, on the south coast. The local Communist Party bookshop in Brighton served as the basis for some of his material, though for many of his earlier sources he had to rely upon French and American non-Stalinist Marxists, and particularly upon the rich collection brought back by Harry Wicks from his course at the Lenin School in Moscow, whose expertise he thanks in his preface.3

The book finally came out in early 19374 to a less than enthusiastic reception. In the press dominated by them the Communist Party refused even to allow advertisements for it5 and, where in the nature of the case they were obliged to recognise its existence, such as in Gollancz’s Left Book Club, they attacked it with great hostility.6 No less hostile was the reaction of the British colonial authorities, who forbade the export of copies to India.7 This did not prevent it from being smuggled in and exercising some influence. G Selvarajatnan, later leader of the great strike in the Madras textile mills was converted to Trotskyism upon reading it, and Leslie Goonewardene’s Rise and Fall of the Comintern published ten years afterwards in Bombay was largely based on it.8

It has continued to suffer from neglect, being the least disseminated and commented upon of all James’ full length works, and the residue of Stalinist hostility towards it remains, even in New Left circles who are otherwise inclined to idolise its author. For James’ biographer, Paul Buhl, it is “James’ least original major work”, its “dogmatic weakness” being that it makes Stalinism “the deus ex machina for the failure of world revolution”.9

Such criticisms are based upon the view that World Revolution is largely a summary of the world view of Trotsky and the movement that followed him, Buhl for example seeing only in James’ treatment of the German crisis any differences with Trotsky.10 As a matter of fact, the book is far more original than it is given credit for, and neither James nor Trotsky regarded themselves as being in agreement over the basic argument contained in it. As James himself recalled,

“When I began to attack the Trotskyist position, some people in the United States said, ‘when we read your book World Revolution we said that it won’t be long before James is attacking the Trotskyist movement’. In this book it was pointed out to me in a particular paragraph. I agreed with the interpretation. I was told, ‘James, when some of us read that quotation, we said that ultimately James will go’”.11

These doubts were also shared by Trotsky himself. Whilst calling World Revolution “a very good book”, he criticised it for “a lack of dialectical approach”, considering that James’ theory of the development of Soviet politics wanted “to begin with the degeneration complete”. Whilst James’ chapter on the German events of 1923 is entitled Stalin Kills the German Revolution, Trotsky argued to the contrary that “the German revolution had more influence on Stalin than Stalin on the German Revolution. In 1923 the whole party was in a fever over the coming revolution”. Whilst considering the incredible policy of the German Communist Party during the accession of Hitler to power ten years later, James asks himself “Why did Stalin persist in this policy? How could the Soviet bureaucracy possibly conceive that any useful purpose could be served by letting Hitler into Power?”. Trotsky on the other hand argued that in fact “Stalin hoped that the German Communist Party would win a victory, and to think that he had a ‘plan’ to allow Fascism to come to power is absurd”.12 This suggestion, that the blunders of the Comintern and the KPD during 1930-3 were part of a deliberate plan was to occasion considerable embarrassment to the British Trotskyists, for it was immediately seized upon by their Communist opponents to discredit the book.13 Trotsky thus considered that the weakness of James’ book consisted in its not allowing for the development of Soviet politics, of allowing no movement within them, and of telescoping effect and intention, a sort of historical post hoc propter hoc argument.

The reason for this difference becomes apparent when we examine the secondary sources used by James in the construction of the book, and the major models that influenced his thought world at the time. We can dismiss straight away the suggestion made in Paul Buhl’s book, that he was indebted in any way to the “proletarian science” developed in the British Communist Party.14 These were precisely the people against whom he was polemicising. His main historical models were the classical historians, and the great modern historians of the classical world, such as Grote, whose works remained upon his bookshelf up to his death. They also included the classic Marxist histories, particularly The Eighteenth Brumaire which James regarded as “an indispensable book for the student of any period of History” (p.32n.1 below), and Trotsky’s My Life and the History of the Russian Revolution. We know that at the same time he was reading the works of the great French radical historians about the revolution of 1789 as preliminary research for his own future book, Black Jacobins (cf. pp.22-5 below). He must also have been acquainted with the historical labours of FA Ridley, for whom he maintained an affection to the end of his life, since they were both being published by Secker and Warburg at about the same time.

But it is the literature of the French and American non-Stalinist and non-Trotskyist left that supplies the key to understanding the distinctive features of World Revolution in that it shares the common assumption that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution began much earlier and proceeded at a more rapid rate that Trotsky would allow. One reference shows that James was acquainted with the literature of the Que Faire15 group, and we may note that Souvarine’s book, which he often cites, supported the Kronstadt insurrection against Soviet power as early as 1921.16 We know from other indications that at this time James was already acquainted with the “State Capitalist” theories about the USSR held by the French Union Communiste group led by Henri Chazé,17 as well as being in touch with some of BJ Field’s supporters in Canada, and conversant with the material of Weisbord, Oehler, and Erwin Ackernecht.18 James was particularly open to theories of the sort dismissed at the time by Trotskyists as “ultra left”, for after a long and sterile experience with entry activity within the ILP he had come to reject the tactic of entry altogether, refused to join the group that was pursuing such a course in the Labour Party, and had entered into a dispute with the Trotskyist International Secretariat on this basis.19 After a fragile unity was forced upon the British groups in 1938 he was sent to the USA, partly to give a free run to his longstanding opponent Denzil Harber, and partly to “straighten him out”.20 The distinctive position of World Revolution thus lies in the fact that its author was already in the process of rejecting Trotskyism, and his ideas were about to evolve towards the position he assumed during the Cannon-Shachtman conflict of 1939-40, and later in his State Capitalism and World Revolution of 1950, a political stance described by Robin Blackburn as “Anarcho-Bolshevism” (whatever that means).21 During the period that James was writing this book, there was, in fact, in both the United States and France, an entire left-wing thought world of groups who vied with each other to place the degeneration of Bolshevism and Marxism as early in time as possible (Oehlerites, Stammites, Eiffelites, Marlenites, etc, in the USA and in France, Cahiers Spartacus, Que Faire and the Union Communiste). It was a natural result of the disillusion produced among the left at the time by the rise of both Stalinism and Nazism, a pessimistic feeling that there was something deeply wrong with Marxism as they had inherited it. Although World Revolution is still quite close to the more recognisably ‘Trotskyist’ approach to these questions, it shows significant influences from this spectrum of ideas, and in effect stands at the beginning of C.L.R. James’ own gradual evolution in this direction.

A proper assessment of the value of the book can only be made in the light of historical experience, both of that which took place at the time and of later developments, for this is the only valid test of any social theory. Like any other book it is by no means infallible and our increased understanding of some of these past events inevitably shows shortcomings. In spite of the views of some modern commentators22 the subsequent history of the German USPD shows that Rosa Luxemburg was not “mistaken” in arguing that the Spartakists should remain inside it.23 James’ description of the foundation of the Comintern (p.112-3) can no longer be accepted as it stands. Whilst admitting that “the delegates were dissatisfied”, and that it was formed “due primarily to Lenin”, he comes to the strange conclusion that, at the time, “Lenin had almost been betrayed against his better judgement into a weak and vacillating position”. In the light of evidence that has since emerged it now seems clear that the dramatic appearance and speech of Gruber (Steinhardt) had been arranged in order to stampede the delegates into reaching the required decision.24 James’ endorsement of the Comintern’s verdict upon Paul Levi, because the latter condemned the 1921 “March Action” as a putsch, does that revolutionary less than justice.25 James’ view that Stalin was responsible for holding back the German Communist Party no longer receives uncritical support from historians of the Comintern,26 and there is some evidence that Trotsky himself came to have doubts about fixing the blame for any national errors on Brandler for the failure of October 1923 (p.187).27 Another of the myths of vulgar Trotskyism repeated here is that it was the Troika who were responsible for sending the Chinese Communist Party into the Guomindang, that “had Lenin been sitting as Chairman such an entry would never have taken place”28, and that Trotsky had voted against it from the very first (pp.236-7, 248).29 Count Stenbock-Fermoy, (p.331) a great-nephew of Prince Kropotkin, wrote to Trotsky to deny that he had joined the working-class movement to promote revanchist ideas.30 James’ description of Nin, Maurin and Andrade as “prominent leaders of the Spanish Revolution” (p.308) would in retrospect appear over optimistic.31 His acceptance of the production figures of the first Five Year Plan (p.292) appears as naive in hindsight, while time has dealt rather harshly with his remark that “if ever the Soviet Union goes down, that is to say back to capitalism, collective ownership has demonstrated how much capitalism retards the possibility of production”. Here however he was in good company, for not merely most socialists thought this but even a conservative such as Harold Macmillan, as late as 1961, feared the dynamism of the Soviet economy.

Much more problematic remains James’ view that the leaders of the Soviet Union were, as already noted above, carrying through a conscious policy in encouraging the suicidal behaviour of the German Communist Party in 1930-3. James links the deliberate policy of undermining Social Democracy to the fact that its foreign policy orientation was favourable to the “western” powers (p.337), whereas, as is well known, traditionally it is the more right wing elements in German society who have favoured an alliance with Russia. This is the view still supported by some historians - admittedly a minority, today.32

On the other hand when we consider the knowledge available at the time, the basic thesis supported by the book stands up surprisingly well. Its opponents of the day, Dutt, Strachey and the Webbs, could not be reprinted today without courting immediate ridicule. Scarcely half a dozen of the huge output of the Left Book Club during the same period is worth the shelf space in any Socialist library, and generally they pile up in the dustier sections of second hand bookshops where they remain unsold. James’ careful handling of his documentation stands him in good stead. At one point he notes, “the writer has used an (sic) Mss translation. Many of the most important articles by Lenin, written after 1918, have to be tracked down in obscure publications or translated afresh. The present Soviet regime does not publish them, or, when it does so, truncates them” (p.132n.1). Since the revelations of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Union in 1956 we are much better informed about these documents.33 Yet a comparison of James’ account of Lenin’s last conflict with Stalin and any modern treatment of the same subject, such as those of Moshe Lewin or Marcel Liebman34 would not modify the picture presented by James (pp.134-140) in any substantial way. He perceptively defines Trotskyism as a creation of Stalinism (p.151), and marshals his facts carefully to establish the existence of the massive famine caused by forced collectivisation (p.303), denied by virtually the entire range of left wing thought at the time.

Even some of his short-term predictions are found to be surprisingly accurate. “The long cold vistas of Siberia opened before Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky” he notes in 1929 (p.296), and, a year before the Trial of the Twenty-One, he asks “what insurance company would risk a penny on Bukharin’s life?” (p.199) Only a month after the appearance of World Revolution the events of the first week of May 1937 in Barcelona bore out his contention that “the day is near when the Stalinists will join reactionary governments in shooting revolutionary workers. They cannot avoid it” (p.389). The first section of the introduction to the book bears the subtitle The Coming War,35 and he prophesies that Trotsky “may be murdered in Mexico” (p.407). Many of the main events that come later in the wartime and post-war periods are sketched out quite adequately, such as that “the victory of Fascism in Germany would mean inevitably war against the Soviet Union” (p.320) and that “British capitalism, may despite all its efforts, be drawn into a war against Germany side by side with the Soviet Union” (p.408). The end of the Comintern is accurately foreseen as

“Stalin may even liquidate it altogether to assure the bourgeoisie that he will leave them alone, if only they will leave him and his bureaucracy in peace. But he dare not do this while Trotsky guides the Fourth International” (p.403).

Looking beyond the end of the Second World War James notes wisely that “the last war brought the partial freedom of Ireland, a loosening of the chains of Egypt and an upheaval in India which has seriously crippled the merciless exploitation of centuries. How long could Britain’s grip on India survive another war?” (p.10) For a brief moment the veil of the future is even drawn aside for China, Korea and Indo-China: “in China and the Far East, where Britain has so much at stake, capitalism is more unstable than anywhere else in the world” (ibid.).

Finally James’ analysis of the Soviet Union bears an amazing freshness in view of the events of the last three years. Speaking of the Soviet economy, he comments, “the whole system would stand or fall by the increased productivity of labour ... if Lenin returned today, he would not waste a minute on Stalin’s propaganda, but would calculate the income and expenditure per head of population and from it grasp at once the social and political character of the regime” (p.122). Examining the presuppositions behind Lenin’s theory of imperialism, he goes on to say:

“If capitalism proved to be still progressive, then the Soviet Union was premature and would undoubtedly fail. It was simple Marxism that the new Society could not exist for any length of time unless the old had reached its limits. But the conflict was not a conflict of entities already fixed. Capitalism in decay might still be powerful enough to overthrow the first Socialist State, whence it would gain a longer lease of life” (pp.119-120).

We can only await the confirmation (or otherwise) of the grim prophecy that flows from this: “If the Soviet Union goes down, then Socialism receives a blow which will cripple it for a generation” (pp.418-19).

Thus it emerges that a book dismissed for its “dogmatic weakness”, despite being written fifty-five years ago, still has lessons to teach us today if we read it in a fresh and critical spirit, and we warmly recommend a careful study of it as we place it in the hands of a public that, we are sure, will give it a better reception than when it first appeared.

Al Richardson



Footnotes
1. C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism: An Interview, London, 1987, p.1. An amusing picture of James’ influence upon middle class opinion in the ILP at this time is to be found in Ethel Mannin, Comrade, O Comrade, ch.x, pp.133-5.

2. C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism, p.1. Among the non-Stalinist books that James was able to influence Warburg to publish at this time were, in addition to his own, his translation of Boris Souvarine’s Stalin (1939), Mary Low and Juan Brea’s Red Spanish Notebook, recently republished unfortunately without James’ original preface, Harold Isaacs’ Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1938) and Albert Weisbord’s Conquest of Power (1938). Warburg of course, far more than Gollancz, was open to texts which came from the general left or ILP milieu and among his list at this period were Brockway’s Workers Front and both Next Year’s War and the Papacy and Fascism by F.A. Ridley, as well as the first edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which Gollancz had rejected as being too critical of the Communist Party’s line

3. Below, p.xii; cf. Harry Wicks, 1905-1989: A Memorial, London 1989, pp.3, 8, & 14. For examples of the sort of material provided, cf. below, p.132n.1 and 179n.1.

4. It is advertised in Fight, Vol.i, no.5 for April 1937.

5. Martin Secker and Warburg, “Letter to the Editor”, 30th April 1937, in Fight, Vol.i, no.7, June 1937.

6. R.F. Andrews (Andrew Rothstein), “Leninism Trotskified” in Left News, June 1937, pp.291-8. Gollancz’s own opinion was that “a Trotskyist book falls as obviously outside the scope of the Club’s publications as does a Nazi or Fascist book” (New Leader, vol.xxi, new series no.178, 11th June, 1937).

7. George Padmore, letter to Tribune, 10th September, 1937, p.13.

8. K. Tilak, Rise and Fall of the Comintern, Spark Syndicate, Bombay, December 1947.

9. Paul Buhl C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, London 1988, pp.51-2. Contrast with this James comment on p.159, below: “There is a tendency among Trotskyists to exaggerate the economic and social influences at work in the Trotsky-Stalin struggle in 1923”. Other examples of Buhl’s anti-Trotskyist bias need not detain us here (“A paroxysm of rage at Stalin”, “overly subjective, obsessed with details at the expense of the larger picture”, “with minor possible exceptions such as Trotskyists in Ceylon, only the activity of James himself forcefully joined anti-imperialism with Trotskyism”, etc). They have been commented upon by Charles van Gelderen in C.L.R., Socialist Outlook, April 1989.

10. op. cit., Note 9 above, p.52.

11. op. cit., Note 1 above, p.9.

12. L.D. Trotsky “On the History of the Left Opposition”, April 1939 in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, New York, 1974, pp.260-66. cf. C.L.R. James below, pp.164-201, 335.

13. JR Campbell, in Controversy, vol.i, no.8, May 1937, p.36.

14. Buhl, op. cit., Note 9 above, pp.45-47. Here, as is evident from his preface, he has been misled by his English informants, principally Robin Blackburn of New Left Review. Even less relevant are references (p.58) to Christopher Hill, who in spite of his expressed admiration for Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution today (Sunday Times, 18 August, 1985), was busy, at the time indicated, writing a book about Lenin and the Russian Revolution which effectively censored Trotsky out of it.

15. The Que Faire group was formed in France in 1934 from ex-Stalinists and ex-Trotskyists, such as Kurt Landau, and set out to trace back the degeneration of the Russian Revolution from its earliest stages. The group finally united with Social Democracy in 1939.

16. Souvarine talks about the “Kronstadt commune” and “the legitimate character of the rebels’ claims” on pp.276 and 279 of Stalin. Trotsky described Souvarine’s theory as a “search for an independent line running directly from Marx to himself, bypassing Lenin and Bolshevism” (letter to Victor Serge, 29th April, 1936, in Writings of Leon Trotsky: A Supplement, 1934-40, New York, 1979, p.659), and Souvarine himself as the archetype of a “gangrenous sceptic”. James himself notes Souvarine’s “anarchist bias against the dictatorship of the proletariat” (below p.140n.2; cf. also p.309).

17. Description of a meeting with C.L.R. James on 10th October, 1937 by Ernie Rogers, “Letter to Jimmy Allen” in The Trotskyist Movement and the Leninist League, London, 1986, p.7.

18. Op. cit., Note 17 above; Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson Against the Stream, London, 1986, pp.256, 287.

19. Op. cit., Note 17 above: “there would have to be a struggle in the International League; efforts would have to be made to alter the line of the I(nternational) S(ecretariat). I told him that this had already been attempted and had been met with Stalinist methods; suppression, hooliganism. He (James) interjected and said that there was nothing we could say against the I.S. with which he could not agree. He knew all about them ... He asked Frost (Max Basch), a member of the EC, to provide him with the documents published by Oehler on the question, also the internal bulletin published by the Sec. on the French turn”.

20. Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson War and the International, London, 1986, p.24.

21. Robin Blackburn, C.L.R. James (Obituary), in The Independent, 2nd June, 1989. Cf. the remark made by James about Trotsky’s rejection of democratic centralism in 1903 on p.49 below: “He has since admitted that he was wrong; too generously, for the question is not so simple”. In view of Trotsky’s stated opinion about this conflict, the whole discussion that follows this comment (p.49-53) shows how far James was, already by 1937, at variance with Trotsky.

22. Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918 to 1923, London, 1982, pp.19-20, 88, 95.

23. Cf. Rob Sewell, Germany: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, London 1988, pp.33-4; Mike Jones, The Decline, Disorientation and Decomposition of a Leadership: The German Communist Party; From Revolutionary Marxism to Centrism, in Revolutionary History, Vol.ii, no.3, p.2. Cf. below, p.95.

24. Referring to Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin, Ann Arbour, 1968, pp.69-70, Walter Kendall comes to the conclusion that “the whole affair is so dramatic as to suggest stage management” (The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-1921, London, 1969, p.226). The case is established beyond all reasonable doubt in his as yet unpublished MSS, World Revolution: The Russian Revolution and the Communist International, 1898-1935, to which I am greatly indebted.

25. “Mere condemnation of thousands of proletarians who risk their lives against the bourgeoisie has never been tolerated by Marxists”, p.169 below. Cf. Mike Jones, op. cit., Note 23 above pp.5-7.

26. Pierre Broué, The Communist International and the German Crisis of 1923, address to the AGM of Revolutionary History, 20th May, 1989 (as yet unpublished); cf. LD Trotsky, op. cit., Note 12 above, p.260.

27. Cf Mike Jones, op. cit., Note 23, pp.8-9; He refers to Jacob Walcher’s Notes on Discussions with Trotsky, 17th-20th August 1933, published in the Oeuvres, vol.ii. This text recently came to light in the SAP archives in Sweden and only became known after the publication of the Pathfinder English edition of the works of Trotsky’s last exile. It is hoped to put an English translation into general circulation in the near future. For Trotsky’s later return to his original opinion, cf. On the History of the Left Opposition, April 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1938-39, New York, 1974, p.261.

28. On the strategy as a whole cf. Michael Cox’s verdict: “The general strategy developed by the Comintern by 1923 and 1924 was unambiguously bourgeois democratic. I can find no suggestion of any serious attempt to pose or even discuss the possibility of proletarian dictatorship, as a solution to the tasks of the anti-imperialist struggle in the colonies. That is, a well developed stages conception of the colonial revolution preceded Stalinism”, See The National and Colonial Question - The First Five Years on the Comintern, 1919-22, in Searchlight South Africa, no.4, February 1990, p.38.

29. Trotsky himself put various dates upon his support for the withdrawal of the Chinese Communists from the Guomindang. In a letter written in December 1930 he claimed that he had done so “from the very beginning, that is, from 1923” (Letter to Max Shachtman, 10th December 1930 in Leon Trotsky on China, New York 1976, p.490), but in My Life written a year earlier he says that it was “since 1925” (Penguin edition, Harmondsworth, 1975, p.552). “As a matter of fact” notes Paolo Casciola, “despite these assertions, no documents preceding the spring of 1927 are available in which Trotsky called for a withdrawal of the Chinese Communist Party from the Kuomintang” Trotsky and the Struggles of the Colonial Peoples, Centro Pietro Tresso, Foligno, 1990, pp.11-12.

30. Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.36, Dec 1968, pp.51-3.

31. Cf. The Spanish Civil War: The View from the Left, Socialist Platform, 1992, for rather damning counter evidence.

32. Thomas Wiengartner, Stalin und der Aufstieg Hitlers, Berlin 1970, cf. the references given in A. Westoby, Communism since World War II, Brighton 1981, p.410n.28, especially Robert Black, Fascism in Germany, London, 1975, vol.ii, pp.749-55, 858-60.

33. Mostly to be found in vol.xxxiii of the 1966 English edition of Lenin’s Collected Works, along with the material in L. Fotieva’s Pages from Lenin’s Life, Moscow, 1960.

34. Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, London, 1969; Marcel Liebman, Leninism under Lenin, London 1975, pp.417-25.

35. Obviously many of these forecasts derive from the common stock of analyses James had at his disposal in the Trotskyist movement. We should remind ourselves that Trotsky himself, two years before the Second World War broke out, prophesied its outbreak to within a month (Daniel Guérin, Trotsky and the Second World War part.ii, in Revolutionary History, vol.iii, no.4, p.13), and that other writers acquainted with Trotskyist ideas such as F.A. Ridley, had sketched out the main lines of the coming conflict in such books as Next Years’s War, which Secker and Warburg had published a year before James’ book appeared.