Before the October Revolution which bestowed power to the soviets, it was clear that the mass of workers considered them ‘their’ government. “No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented” John Reed, an eyewitness to the revolution said in 1918.6 The pervasive attitude of the workers was summed up by Boris Sokolov, one of the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party; “what do we need some Constituent Assembly for when we have our soviets?”7 Sokolov continues to reports that a congress of soldiers on the south western front (where Bolshevik influence was much less than on the north western front) that the soldiers, after much debate, came to the conclusion that all power should go to the soviets and not the Constituent Assembly. “It spoke out for power to the soviets - essentially for Bolshevik power” he continues.8 These soldiers had learned something incredible through their revolutionary experience. Something Marx himself learned from the Paris Commune: “that the soviet is a superior form of democracy because it unifies political and economic power”.9 This is important because it takes away the bourgeoisie’s most important strength, the economy. The Constituent Assembly could become a rallying point for the bourgeoisie if only because it is aimed at political power alone. Just before the Constituent Assembly was closed it was indeed becoming a rallying point of the right. The SRs planned a counter-revolution to coincide with the opening of the Constituent Assembly:
Everything was in place to transform the event into an insurrection. Thirty armored cars were to advance against the Smolny [the Bolshevik headquarters]; SR regiments would have supported the coup.10
This insurrection was called of by the SR leadership at the last possible moment, but the terrorist fraction still planned to kidnap Lenin and Trotsky three days before the Assembly was due to open, January 2nd 1918.11 To open the Assembly was quickly becoming an invitation to counter-revolution. In southern Russia the first White ‘volunteer army’ with General Kaledin was already, in the name of the Constituent Assembly, fighting Soviet power.12 To let this invitation to counter-revolution remain open would have been a fatal mistake. They were left with no choice but to dissolve the Assembly.
If the Constituent Assembly, and not the Soviets, were seen by the mass of people as ‘their’ institution through which they controlled the government, they’re surely would have been outrage at the Bolsheviks actions. This is the key to understanding were popular support rested. If the Soviets had been dissolved by the Constituent Assembly, the gains of the October Revolution would have been wiped away and their would have been widespread outrage.13 So as the people of Russia watch the pinnacle of bourgeoisie democracy fade into memory, what did they think? Victor Serge notes that, “The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly made a great sensation abroad. In Russia, it passed almost unnoticed”.14 Leonard Shapiro says “Its dispersal caused little stir in the country and was reported with indifference in the army”.15 Richard Pipes even agrees that “the dissolution of the Assembly met with surprising indifference”.16 This ‘indifference’ that was displayed only goes to show that the Assembly was not seen as the people’s government and that the Soviets were. In Chomsky’s criticism of the Bolshevik’s decision to dissolve the Assembly he appeals to Rosa Luxembourg’s criticism at the time. He fails to inform his readers that one year later, when confronted with the exact situation of ‘Assembly of Soviets’, she totally abandoned her criticism of the Bolsheviks. In her paper Rote Fahme she declares even more vehemently than did the Bolsheviks that the National Assembly was an attempt to assassinate the revolution along with the workers and soldiers councils. She continues “For or against socialism, for or against the National Assembly. There is no third choice!”.17 Germany provides a prime example of a situation of ‘dual power’ being resolved in favour of the bourgeoisie. The Freikorps who were armed bands of right wing troops, who killed 3,000 workers in Berlin alone, were the result.18 Under the banner of the National Assembly with the swastika on their arms they instituted a reign of terror that cost the lives of Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Liebknecht and many other German revolutionaries. The German revolution was crushed with unbelievable brutality and without its success the Russian Revolution delved into its darkest hours.
The Rise of Stalinism
Four months after the October Revolution, Lenin repeated: “The absolute truth is that without a revolution in Germany we shall perish”.19 And this is exactly what happened to the revolution. Prior to the Russian Revolution it wasn’t believed that socialism could be achieved in Russia, even among the Bolsheviks. What led them to alter their position on the matter was two things: the confidence and organization of the Russian proletariat and the possibility of socialist revolutions abroad. After the civil war, the collapse of the economy and the growing weight of the bureaucracy neither of these objective factors continued to exist.
The civil war in Russia lasted from 1918 to 1921. Russia was blockaded by the largest imperial powers of the day, cutting off supplies and trade. The capitalist powers went even farther to ensure the workers’ revolution would be strangled in its cradle. They invaded (anywhere from 14 to 19 capitalist countries) and forced the embattled Red Army to fight on multiple fronts.20 The Bolsheviks emerged victorious in the civil war, but they paid for that ‘victory’ with several million lives and the complete destruction of the country. By 1920 the Russian working class was reduced to 43% of its former size.21 Tony Cliff notes that the Bolsheviks “paid for victory with the destruction of the proletariat that had made the revolution”.22 The civil war had a disastrous effect on production, indeed it fell to 18% of its 1913 level.23 All these factors coupled with the failure of the revolution to spread left the workers state in an extremely precarious position. John Rees, a British socialist states:
The bureaucracy of the workers’ state was left suspended in mid-air, its class base eroded and demoralised. Such conditions could not help but have an effect on the machinery of the state and organisation of the Bolshevik Party.24
As the months and years dragged on, with no support from successful revolutions abroad, the Bolshevik Party became increasingly top-heavy.
At the time of the revolution the Bolshevik Party was a genuine mass workers’ party, with one worker out of every ten as a member.25 During the civil war many Bolsheviks had defended the revolution acting as troops in the Red Guard. Over 200,000 revolutionary workers died in combat.26 By 1919 the make-up of the party had shifted drastically, party members working in factories had declined to 11%, soldiers and trade union officials made up 35%, and the majority - 53% of membership - was working in the government.27 Joseph Stalin, who had played a very small role in the Russian Revolution,28 represented the wing of the party that encouraged this growing bureaucratization. They began to silence opposition that threatened their bureaucratic privileges and state authority. They adopted the contradictory line of ‘socialism in one country’ and put all the old Bolsheviks on trial. Trotsky, in reference to Stalinism growing out of Bolshevism said: “Stalinism originated not as a organic growth out of Bolshevism but as a negation of Bolshevism consummated in blood”.29 While continuing to spout the rhetoric of the revolution the new ruling class turned Russia into a bureaucratic state capitalist country, capitalism’s evil twin. To understand what this term means, one must first understand what being a ‘capitalist’ country entails.
Capitalism involves two separations. The first, the separation of the workers from the means of production. Second, the division of the economy into competing chunks of capital. The first separation was brought about by forced collectivization and industrialization by the late 1930s. Stalin set Russia out to achieve what Marx called “primitive accumulation”, when “Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.30 The problem was that Stalin set out to achieve in five years what it had taken other capitalist countries more than a hundred years to do. Stalin’s first ‘five year plan’, announced in 1928 set the country down the road of rapid ‘primitive accumulation’.31 The workers didn’t willingly traverse this road, millions starved to death and state repression was brutal. This is how Stalin achieved the first separation - workers from the means of production. But what about the second? The division of the economy into competing chunks of capital?
Well, first Russia must be placed into the proper context - a global capitalist system. The Soviet state became subject to the pressures of this system and also became an integral part of it. It began to compete, not only economically, but militarily - devoting an enormous 12-14 percent of its gross national product to military production.32 To compete effectively, Russia had a lot of catching up to do. Capitalism is a global system, constantly looking for new markets, raw materials and cheap labour power. Once the new ruling class defined itself as such, a new class - with distinct interests, against those of the peasants and workers - competing with the Western capitalist became a matter of survival. Stalin himself was acutely aware of this:
To slacken pace (of industrialization) would mean to lag behind; and those who lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. No we do not want to ... We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.33
This fear of being ‘beaten’, was the pressure of international capitalism and it is what drove the Russian economy to accumulate for the sake of accumulation. In order to keep production competitive every increase in efficiency that the West produced had to be matched by the East, and vice-versa. In Capital Marx states that: “Competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist as external, coercive laws”.34 This is why improvements to the living conditions of the Russian working class were held back, the money had to be reinvested into the means of production to increase their productivity. With genuine socialist planning of the economy, the only determining factor would be the needs of the population. Under state capitalism the economy is ‘planned’ to compete with international capitalism. Instead of continuing the tradition of the Bolshevik revolution, Stalinism was a complete negation of what October initially stood for.
The Relevance of the October Revolution today
History “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.35 The weight of Stalinism was enormous. Up until 1989 a massive stumbling block has undermined those who want to fight for a better world. This stumbling block was the idea that socialism already existed. People were disillusioned by border wars between ‘socialist’ countries (Russia and China, China and Vietnam), the use of ‘socialist armies’ to conquer other countries (Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan) and a host of other atrocities committed in the name of socialism. These atrocities further embedded the notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds and any attempt to change it will lead to tyranny. Every genuine socialist, following the tradition of Marx and Engels, sincerely rejoiced when the Berlin wall fell over ten years ago.
The ‘collapse of communism’ and the triumph of the market failed to bring about the peace and prosperity that it had promised. The Gulf War was followed by devastating sanctions that have killed over 1 million Iraqi’s, including 750,000 children.36 The ‘shock therapy’ applied to the former Stalinist countries has been devastating. And NATO’s recent assault of Yugoslavia has left the country completely destroyed.37 Mass unemployment, third world starvation, poverty, homelessness, war and imperialism, racism and sexism have put a genuine challenge to the system back on the table. It is the duty of the next generation of socialists, who believe in socialism from below, to reclaim the history that has been stolen from us. To reclaim the idea that we can do better than this. The October Revolution is an extremely important, maybe even the most important, weapon we have in the struggle for a better world. Not only is October about the masses on the stage of history, as the subject not the object of it, it is a blueprint for future change.
Socialists should not be afraid to relate October to Seattle. To make the argument that if you hate capitalism - than you should be a socialist. For it is, as the October Revolution proves, the most effective way to challenge the barbarity that surrounds us.
“everything is possible, everything”
-Victor Serge describing the mood that the Russian Revolution produced.38
By: Dave Steele
NOTES
1 Richard Pipes, Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (Vintage Books, New York,
1997)
2 As quoted in John Rees, Robert Service, Sam Farber and Robin Blackburn, In Defense
of October: A debate on the Russian Revolution (Bookmarks, London, 1997), p32.
3 As quoted in Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New (New York, Columbia
University Press, 1996), p35.
4 Ibid, p37.
5 Ibid, p38. Chomsky fails to discuss the circumstances surrounding the Bolsheviks
decision, dismissing the Russian Revolution as a socialist revolution entirely.
6 Ahmed Shawki, “80 Years Since the Russian Revolution” International Socialist
Review, 3 (Winter 1997), p15.
7 As quoted in John Rees, op cit, p31. This opinion was not that of the SR Party at all.
Indeed, they planned to counter the October Revolution on the day that the Constituent
Assembly opened.
8 Ibid, p32. As quoted in.
9 Ibid, p32.
10 V Serge, Year One Of the Russian Revolution (London, 1972), p130.
11 J Rees, op cit, p33.
12 Ibid, p33.
13 The Bolsheviks understood that the Assembly was not the vehicle that represented the
interests of the working class and that that vehicle was the soviets. The Bolsheviks
alone constituted 66% of the all-Russian congress 5 July 1918. This fact alone proves
that had the situation been reversed and the Soviets were dissolved a mass uprising
would have followed. This uprising would have, necessarily been followed by a
‘justified’ repression of the mass of workers, peasants and soldiers by the Assembly.
14 V Serge, op cit, p130-131.
15 L Shapiro, 1917: The Russian Revolutions and the Origins of Present-Day
Communism (London, 1984), p149.
16 R Pipes, op cit, p35.
17 As quoted in J Rees, op cit, p35.
18 Ibid, p36.
19 A joint publication of the International Socialist (Canada) and the Socialist Workers
Party (Britain). As quoted in A Bakan, The Great Lie! (Toronto: Workers’ Action
Books, 1981), p8.
20 A Arnove, “The Fall of Stalinism: Ten Years On” International Socialist Review, 10
(Winter, 2000), p44.
21 A Bakan, op cit, p9.
22 Tony Cliff, The Revolution Besieged: Lenin 1917-1923 (Chicago: Bookmarks, 1987),
p204.
23 A Arnove, op cit, p45.
24 J Rees, op cit, p77.
25 A Bakan, op cit, p10.
26 Ibid, p11.
27 Ibid, p11.
28 Stalin had played such a small role that he banned John Reed’s excellent book Ten
Days That Shook The World. An excellent account of the revolution that Lenin
recommended to workers the world over.
29 Leon Trotsky, “A Graphic History of Bolshevism,” in Writings of Leon Trotsky
(1938-39) (New York: Pathfinder, 1974), p337.
30 As quoted in A Arnove, op cit, p45.
31 Ibid.
32 Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (London: Bookmarks, 1996),
p208.
33 I Deutscher, Stalin (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1966), p328.
34 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (Moscow: Progress Publishers)
35 As quoted in A Arnove, op cit, p51.
36 Ibid, p55.
37 Dave Steele, “Environmental Fallout” Z magazine (November, 1999), p19.
38 Victor Serge, op cit, p325
