Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I
II
84
Published Sep.tember 19
I Socialists, GP0 Box 147 ,
"' ... ,........ona 3N Melbourne 3001
d , Australia.
~
"',~~.,~
.. GPO Box 1473N, Melbourne
2 3001. .
.onal Socialists, x 82, London E. nto, Ontario. .
AUSTRAUA, lnt...... ...rs •• rt" PO.. 339 Station E, T.", R;.IIo, Duhl. ...
"".go,
"'E~':;' ':':::,::W''':~,=':'::,i~"'''''''',", PO..
'RlTA'N, ... Soclallsts, PO ':"/.4; Nerberto':" i608S,
leaders. Like many Labour leaders today, they talked socialist but
when it came down to it, they preferred what they had to the great
gamble of revolution. In some countries, like Germany, they even
10 went so far as to have their left-wing opponents murdered. 11
Capitalism gained a breathing space, but it was by no means
out of danger. The new Communist Parties might not be ready to
take power but they were rapidly growing in strength. The new
Communist International, uniting the Communist Parties of the THE BOLSHEVIKS WON the Civil War. Trotsky was the Bolshevik
world, soon commanded the support of hundreds of thousands, even leader entrusted with the task of creating a new revolutionary
millions of workers. army, the Red Army. When the forces of the workers' republic were
The Bolsheviks could not, however, wait for the European everywhere on the retreat, he and many of the most devoted
workers to take power. Defence of the revolution at home and its Bolsheviks arrived at the front to rally them. The ideal which had
extension abroad became inseparable. What the Bolsheviks did spurred the workers to revolution carried them to victory on the
next was dictated by the international capitalist powers. Sixteen battlefield. Trotsky travelled the length and breadth of Russia in a
foreign armies, including the British and Americans, invaded special armoured train, urging the Red Army to ever greater feats of
Russia and equipped the White Armies of the deposed ruling class. heroism and courage. Eventually, under his leadership the forces of
The capitalist countries, and not the Russian people, began the the counter-revolution were driven back and defeated.
bloody civil war which followed. Before the Bolsheviks could even But the price paid in lives and in material terms was appalling.
think of implementing their policies they had first to drive back the The already shattered economy was delivered blow after crushing
White and foreign armies. Every effort was thrown into the defence blow. By May 1919 Russian industry was reduced to 10 percent of its
of the Soviet Republic. The economy of the country was geared to normal fuel supply. Production of all manufactured goods had
the needs of the armies of the workers' republic. This strict, fallen to 13 per cent of the already miserable 1913 level. In a country
militarised system of sacrifice and rationing the Bolsheviks called where motor transport was hardly known, 79 per cent ofthe railway
'War Communism'. lines were out of action. Such simple things as thread, matches and
paraffin had disappeared from the shops. Trotsky even reported
occurrences of cannibalism in some provinces!
The number of workers in the towns fell from three million to
just 1 % million. Historian E H Carr wrote that there had been a
'mass flight of industrial workers from the towns and reversion to
the status and occupation of peasants.' For to stay was to starve. By
1921, Petrograd, the heart of the revolution, had lost57.5 per cent of
its total population, and Moscow 44.5 per cent. The working class
which led the revolution had made tremendous sacrifices.
Thousands of the best members of the Bolshevik Party perished on
the battlefield.
The working class which made the October Revolution had
been decimated.
It was no longer the living core of Soviet power. Desperate to
stay alive in the famine-ridden cities of the Civil War, workers sold
what they had for food. Some even stole machinery from their
workplaces to barter. The black market ruled their lives. A bitter
individual struggle for existence replaced the collective democracy
of the revolutionary days of 1917.
Every gain of the revolution was imperilled by the sheer
!lOW THE IU:VOLUTION WAS LOST THE RESULTS OF THE CIVIL WAR
r-
':".
,I
The single-party state was not born out of individu'allust for I But Kronstadt in 1921 was not the Kronstadt of the revolution.
power. As we have seen, every retreat, every concession was forced Many of its best fighters had gone to fight in the army in the front
by the pressure of events and was intended to be purely temporary.,. - line. Many had died in the defence of the revolution. In their place
14 The erosion of democracy was the direct result of the holocaust of had come peasant recruits, their loyalty only ensured by fear of a 15
war, responsibility for which must belaid at the doorofthe Western.' return to the landlords. The Kronstadt uprising was a reflection of
capitalist powers. They had been unable to crush the workers' state the peasants' break with the socialist aims of the Bolsheviks.
from outside, but they had now created the conditions for de'(;ay Consider their demands: Soviets without Bolsheviks and a free
from within. market in agriculture. To accept the demands ofKronstadt would be
to surrender the socialist revolution.
Victor Serge, an anarchist who had come over to the Bolsheviks
after the October Revolution, had great sympathy with the
Kronstadt sailors and was very critical of the ruthlessness with
which they were put down. But, in the end, he knew that the
Bolsheviks were right. Socialist Russia was in peril. There were at
the time no fewer than fifty outbreaks of peasant insurrection. He
wrote:
THE END OF THE Civil War gave no respite to the Bolsheviks. The 'After many hesitations, and with unutterable anguish, my
almost uninterrupted cycle of war, revolution, and again more war Communist friends and I finally d~clared ourselves on the side of
had exhausted a country already so backward that it often the Party ... The country was absolutely exhausted, and production
resembled 18th century France rather than advanced twentieth practically at a standstill: there were no reserves of any kind, not
century society. even reserves of stamina in the hearts of the masses. The working
Once the immediate threat of counter-revolution had been class elite that had been moulded in the struggle against the old
beaten back, the potential conflict between the two classes which regimes was literally decimated.
made the revolution - the workers and the peasants - erupted. The 'The Party, swollen by the influx of power-seekers, inspired little
peasants had wanted one thing and one thing only from the confidence. Of the other parties, only minute nuclei existed, whose
revolution - land. Now that the White Armies were driven from character was highly questionable. It seemed clear that these
Russia, there was no chance of a restoration of the landowners. The groupings could come back to life in a matter of weeks, but only by
peasants were confident that their land was safe. The alliance with incorporating embittered, malcontented and inflammatory
the workers was over. Their interests now stretched no further than elements in their thousands, no longer, as in 1917, enthusiasts for
their own little piece of property. Many peasants saw a new enemy: the young revolution. Soviet democracy lacked leadership,
the Bolshevik regime, with its demands for the grain and the taxes institutions and inspiration; at its back there were only masses of
it needed to ensure the survival of the cities. When the Bolsheviks starving and desperate men.
changed their name to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 'The popular counter-revolution translated the demand for freely-
many peasants summed up their feelings like this: elected Soviets into one for "Soviets without Communists". If the
'The Bolsheviks were OK. They gave us land. But these Commu- ' Bolshevik dictatorship fell, it was only a short step to chaos, and
nists ... they take everything from the countryside and give it to the through chaos to a peasant uprising, the massacre of the Commu-
towns.' nists, the return of the emigres, and in the end, through the sheer
force of events, another dictatorship, this time anti-proletarian.'
This new opposition to the Bolsheviks came to a head with the
Kroristadt mutiny of 1921. The Kronstadt fortress guarded the The Bolsheviks could not relinquish state power. To do so
approaches to Petrograd. In October 1917 the Kronstadt sailors had would, as Serge says, open the way to full-blooded counter-
been at the very storm centre of the revolution. Many Bolsheviks revolution. Nor could they continue the austerity policies of 'W Hr
were horrified when they heard the news that the sailors had now Communism', whose harshness had driven the peasants to revolt.
risen in revolt. If Kronstadt is not ours then we are surely doomed! It was time to change course. As Lenin said: 'The Kronstadt events
16
were like a flash of lightning which threw more of a ~lare upon
reality than anything else.'
The Bolsheviks decided to call a temporary retreat in order to
save workers' Russia from certain death. This retreat they called
the New Economic Policy, or NEP, which aimed to reconcile the
peasants by making concessions, while at the same time maintain-
,
J
members of the old Tsarist bureaucracy in order to maintain a fun-
ctioning government administration. Lenin saw the dangers ofthis
when he spoke at the 1922 Party Congress:
'What we lack is clear enough. The ruling stratum of the
Communists is lacking in culture. Let us look at Moscow. This mass
of bureaucrats - who is leading whom? The 4,700 responsible
17
Yet even that is a hopelessly optimistic account of events. By } and freeloaders whose expulsion Lenin repeatedly demanded. But
still they flooded into the party. Membership grew from 200,000 in
the end of1920, there were a staggering 5,880,000 state officials; five early 1918 to 650,000 in October 1921. Nine-tenths of party members
times as many as the number of industrial workers! And as ifthat had not held party cards in October 1917.
was not gloomy enough, of those millions only a minority were The Bolshevik Party was born, developed, grew strong and
Bolsheviks. Of the rest, few could be relied upon to remain faithful came to power as a party of workers, steeled in workers' struggles,
to the revolution. The party had been forced to employ thousands of fired by the workers' hopes. But now that the best members of the
atmosphere could be felt in the party. Gone was the free dis~ussion In the towns, the bureaucracy was determined to force down the
of past years. Now the chairperson would ask: 'Anyone disagree?' standard of living of the workers. U nti11929, the workers had hung
Nobody did. on to some of the gains of October. Through a body known as the
'troika', the trade unions and Communist workers influenced 25
24 The leaders of the October Revolution were driven out and
replaced with people who had come later, functionaries whose i r-
management policy. Workers still had the right to strike and won a
loyalty was to the bureaucracy. Between 1923 and 1929 the bureau- third of strikes. The wage of a party official was still the same as
cracy became aware that its interests differed from those of the that of a skilled worker. The state might have slipped from the
workers. In ousting the Old Guard of the revolution, the bureau- hands of the workers, but traces of workers' power lingered still.
cracy was crushing the last of the people who were keeping alive the At the end of 1928 the powers of the troika were reduced. Strikes
tradition of workers' democracy. Stalin's 'theory' of 'Socialism in were no longer permitted or even reported in the press. From the end
One Country' was not just a different, more cautious road to the goal of 1930, workers couldn't even change jobs without permission.
of international socialism; it set itself a different goal. In the programme of the Left Opposition, industrialisation had
meant reviving workers' power and the Soviets. Trotsky had
spoken of a 20 per cent rate of growth. Now Stalin drove it up to 40
per cent. And nowhere was there any mention of greater democracy
or of internationalism. In the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy,
the policy of industrialisation meant subordinating everything to
the national interests of the Russian state.
What Stalin and the bureaucracy had achieved was no palace
coup, no minor change at the top. The virtual destruction of the
1929 WAS THE year of reckoning. In response to grain strikes by rich
working class by a decade of war, counter-revolution, siege and
peasants, the Stalinist bureaucracy now made a sharp turn in starvation had left them in control of the state. They successfully
policy. Everything was to be sacrificed to the aim of competition crushed all opposition, whether from the peasants or from the
people in the party still faithful to the ideals of October. The burea-
with the west. As Stalin himself said:
cracy was the new ruling class. From 1929 onwards, the bureau-
'To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind and those who lag cracy turned every gain of the revolution on its head. As Isaac
behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. No, we don't want Deutscher has put it:
to. The history of old Russia ... she was ceaselessly beaten for her
backwardness ... by the Monghol Khans ... by the Turkish Beys by 'In 1929, five years after Lenin's death, Soviet Russia embarked
Polish-Lithuanian Panz ... by Angle-French capitalists by upon her second revolution, which was directed solely and ex-
Japanese barons, she was beaten by all- for her backwardness, for clusively by Stalin.'
military backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for Stalin's supporters were in control of industry, the civil service,
agricultural backwardness ... We are fifty or a hundred years the police and the army. They faced no significant opposition. They
behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten controlled the state. They didn't have to seize political power. It was
years.' already theirs. They had purged their opponents within the party,
In the countryside the bureaucracy set out to break the they had destroyed the last vestiges of workers' democracy, they
economic power of the peasantry. They set about the 'liquidation of had broken the power of the peasantry. They were the only power in
the Kulaks [rich peasants] as a class.'Armed detachments were Russia.
sent into the villages to seize grain to feed the growing towns. They It was full-blooded counter-revolution. Wages between the
enforced state control, or 'collectivisation', of agriculture, breaking years 1930 and 1937 were cut by half. Wage differentials were in-
up the peasants' holdings. The peasants inevitably resisted and creased. Abortion and divorce reforms were withdrawn. Education
were suppressed with unprecedented savagery. Literally millions of was forced back into its authoritarian straitjacket. Revolutionaries
peasants died, and they were by no means all members of the abroad were forced to follow suicidal strategies decided by the
wealthy Kulak class. Russian state, culminating tragically in the victory of Nazism in
International
Socialists
MELBOURNE
Phone 663 3080
5th Floor, 252 Swanston St
Melbourne
SYDNEY
Phone 2673822
1st Floor, 362 Pitt St
Sydney
BRISBANE.
Phone 229 8832
1st Floor, 369 George St
Brisbane
CANBERRA
Write to GPO Box 1667,
ACT 2601
PERTH
Phone 443 3040
NATIONAL OFFICE
GPO Box 1473N,
Melbourne
BATTLER OFFICE
Phone 376 3307
PO Box 46,
Flemington, Vie. 3031
i
~
SUBSCRIBEI
WORKERS OF THE~ORLO UIITEI
To subscribe to The Battler send
*510 for 20 issues
*525 supporting subscription
to Battler Subs, GPO Box 1473 N, Melbourne
. ,
3001
VIC.