4 The Peasant-in-Uniform

Grappling with the problems of substitutionism and searching for a self-emancipationist approach have deep roots in the Russian Left of the era. According to Leopold Haimson, “samoupravlenie, samostoiatel’nost’ samodeiatel’nost’ [lit. self-government, autonomy, self-activity] were terms used by the Mensheviks to express the need for the ‘active involvement’ of workers in public affairs” and “were developed by the Menshevik editors of Iskra following their 1903 split with Lenin.”1 Menshevik leader Pavel Axelrod, in an influential article, of which the first part was published in late 1903 and the second in early 1904, outlined these ideas at some length, arguing that “the development of class self-awareness [class-consciousness] and the self-activity of the proletariat is a process of self-development and self-education of the working class,” the indispensable foundation for the “process of social-democratic self-development and self-education.”2

Leon Trotsky’s first major work, Our Political Tasks, appeared a few months after Axelrod’s article, and was dedicated, by the then twenty-four-year-old Trotsky, to his “dear teacher Pavel Borisovich Axelrod.”3 Trotsky argues that the publication of Axelrod’s article marks “the beginning of a new era [epoch] in our movement.”4 I quoted earlier, from this first book of Trotsky’s, his scathing deconstruction of what he saw as Lenin’s substitutionist methods. The book also offers a positive alternative to substitutionism (zamestitel’stvo), deploying all the terms outlined by Haimson and adding a fourth, self-determination (samopredeleniia). A term normally deployed in discussions of movements of oppressed nations against imperialism, Trotsky deploys it here to discuss the emergence of an independent working-class movement. Tactically, he suggests that participating in elections can be a “starting point for the self-determination of the proletariat”5—this in a book that is framed by the idea that the key task facing the Russian movement was to prepare an insurrection against tsarism! He also puts this concept at the centre of his strategic orientation. He takes it as a given that the Russian movement “will triumph as a workers’ movement or it will not triumph at all.” However, he argues, “this exhausts only one side of the question. The other can be formulated as follows: the Russian revolutionary movement must, when it has triumphed as a workers’ movement, be transformed without delay into a process of political self-determination of the proletariat,” a process that he summarizes as involving “putting the workers forward as the main revolutionary force and making the revolution their political schooling.”6 The unifying concept in all this is the idea of the self-activity of the proletarian masses. Coming out of the devastating split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the 1903 congress, “the basic task,” Trotsky argues, “may in general be formulated as consisting of the development of the self-activity of the proletariat.”

It took the Second Congress, an infinitude of palace revolutions in the Party organisation, and a whole series of bitter frictions in all fields—before the cry (the howl almost) “Towards the masses! Into the masses!” burst out from the Party, and the watchword “self-activity of the proletariat” became a living and, let us hope, life-giving slogan.

The questions of social democratic tactics based totally on politically conscious and active masses, are today placed on the agenda by the whole of the previous development of our Party, a development which…. has created all the necessary material and ideological conditions; and one can be assured that now, all publishing or practical work concerned to develop the political self-activity of the working class, will not be without issue and will not be crushed.7

The concepts of self-activity and substitutionism can help us navigate the complicated contours of the Russian Revolution. The introduction to this book presented the binary of hope and horror—the hope that exploded in the revolution of 1917, and the horror that has variously been called Stalinism, Thermidorian reaction, and counter-revolution. There is a compelling if grotesque symmetry to these two extremes. Hope crystallized as a mass emotion on 8 March, with the demonstration-turned-strike on Women’s Day in 1917. Here, self-activity took centre stage. Horror crystallized as a mass emotion exactly four years later, when Women’s Day in 1921 was marked by the opening of the Red Army attack on the rebel sailors of Kronstadt. Here, substitutionism was on full, grotesque—and tragic—display. Isaac Steinberg recounts the details of this initial failed attack, quoting a “Bolshevik historian of that period, N. Pukhoff,” who recalled that a blizzard was raging on the night of the attack and “described the Red Armists dressed in long white overalls (like shrouds) to camouflage them in the snow”:

“At the very beginning of the operation,” Pukhoff reported, “the Second Battalion refused to go into action. Only with great difficulties, and the help of the Communist Commissars, were they persuaded to step on to the ice. But they no sooner reached the first southern battery of Kronstadt, than an entire company of that battalion surrendered to the enemy, and only the officers returned…. Soon it was learned that another military unit, the Third Battalion, had done the same…. All, except the Commissar and three or four soldiers, surrendered.”8

The Bolsheviks turned to drastic measures. They mobilized hundreds of communists from the Tenth Party Congress, then convening in Moscow, to act as agitators. “And to intimidate the rest of the soldiers,” writes Steinberg, “the ‘revolutionary’ tribunals were set working at full speed.”9 The drastic measures worked, and Kronstadt fell to the Bolsheviks. The fortunate rebels escaped, while “the others fell into the hands of the Cheka and military tribunals.”10

Let us reflect for a minute on the revenge taken by the Cheka on the defeated rebels. “Every night groups of imprisoned sailors were taken from the Petrograd jails and shot,” Steinberg tells us.11 This kind of extrajudicial use of terror and violence had become routine. Victor Serge, who rallied to the Bolshevik cause during the years of civil war, and who makes it very clear that the terror of the counter-revolution was far worse than that of the Bolsheviks, nonetheless maintains that “the formation of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918, when plots, blockades, and interventions made them lose their heads.” Serge uses the plural, Chekas, because, in reality, throughout the vast expanse of Russia there were many local Chekas, and “these gradually came to select their personnel by virtue of their psychological inclinations.” The recruits were “characterized by suspicion, embitterment, harshness, and sadism.” As Serge recalls: “In every prison there were quarters reserved for Chekists, judges, police of all sorts, informers, and executioners. The executioners, who used Nagan revolvers, generally ended by being executed themselves. They would begin to drink, to wander around and fire unexpectedly at anybody.” As well as being morally degenerate, the Chekas were also (or therefore) a complete failure as a tool with which to build a new society. “All evidence indicates that revolutionary tribunals, functioning in the light of day (without excluding secret sessions in particular cases) and admitting the right of defense, would have attained the same efficiency with far less abuse and depravity,” Serge argues. “Was it so necessary to revert to the procedures of the Inquisition?”12

In any case, these “procedures of the Inquisition” were used to complete the work of defeating the Kronstadt rebellion, marking the elimination of the last hopes of emancipation emanating from 1917. A state had been consolidated. Tsarism and the old regime were gone, but the new state, from March 1921 on, had nothing in common with anything that could be called a “progressive alternative,” let alone a socialist one.

“The Population Slept Peacefully”

Another binary, this one concerning views of the October Revolution, is described in the introduction to this book: the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 is seen either as the final consolidation of soviet power (Trotsky) or as a coup d’état (Souvarine’s). Karl Radek, in 1922, offered another interpretation. His analysis begins very much in the manner of Trotsky, by describing November 1917 as a moment “when the working class took power.” However, he immediately modifies this notion of workers’ power—not by shifting to Souvarine’s notion of a coup but by introducing a third, more subtle perspective: “The Revolutionary Military Committee … had taken the power in the name of the soviet of the workers and soldiers of Petrograd.”13

Let us explore this for a moment. The Military Revolutionary Committee (as it is more commonly called) was established in October 1917 by the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, its purpose being to organize the defence of the capital from potential right-wing threats. As an institution of the Petrograd Soviet, the committee can be characterized as an instrument of the nascent workers’ state. However, because it was in fact dominated by the Bolsheviks, it was an instrument of just one party in that nascent workers’ state. It was also the instrument that Trotsky used to direct the insurrection and seizure of power.

What were the elements deployed by the Military Revolutionary Committee to ensure the success of that insurrection? The key to everything was in Petrograd, which, at the time of the revolution, was a wartime city. China Miéville describes it as two cities—“a city of workers, swollen by the war to around 400,000” and “a city of soldiers, of whom 160,000 were stationed there in reserve.”14 The soldiers were not organic to the city: they were present only because of war mobilization. They were also overwhelmingly from rural, peasant backgrounds and had little familiarity with city life. And, finally, they were massively radicalized by the joint effects of the catastrophe of war and the land seizures that were sweeping the empire. These 160,000 peasants-in-uniform understandably played a key role in the revolution. According to Alexander Rabinowitch, they played the central role: “The main forces designated to take part in these operations were the Pavlovsky Regiment; Red Guard detachments from the Vyborg, Petrograd, and Vasilevsky Island districts; the Keksgolmsky Regiment; the naval elements arriving from Kronstadt and Helsingfors; and sailors from the Petrograd-based Second Baltic Fleet Detachment.”15

The relative weight of workers in the active forces is difficult to quantify. The Red Guard described itself as follows: “The workers’ Red Guard is an organization of the armed forces of the proletariat for struggle with counterrevolution and defense of the conquests of the proletariat. The workers’ Red Guard consists of workers who are recommended by Socialist parties, factory committees and trade-unions.”16 According to William Chamberlin, the sailors were “less numerous” than the Red Guards, but together the two—Red Guards and sailors—“constituted the more active part of the forces of insurrection.” Chamberlin describes the Red Guards as “factory workers, who had been drilling and training with special vigor after the defeat of Kornilov. According to the most reliable sources, about twenty thousand Red Guards were available for service on the eve of the uprising.”17

Raphael Abramovitch paints a very different picture. “The main forces in the ‘proletarian’ revolt,” he writes, “were soldiers and sailors, armored cars and guns. The famed workers’ Red Guard acted only as a police force.”18 And, even if the sailors were “less numerous” than the proletarian Red Guards, Chamberlain nonetheless underlines their central importance, noting that the final act of the uprising, “the attack on the Winter Palace, … occurred much later than the scheduled time, because the Kronstadt sailors arrived many hours after they had been expected.”19

Insight into the relative weight of workers and peasants-in-uniform within the Bolshevik movement can be gleaned from the voting statistics related to the ill-fated Constituent Assembly, which is examined in the conclusion to this book. Of the nearly 10.6 million votes won by the Bolsheviks, close to 1.7 million came from sailors and soldiers at the front—evidence, perhaps, of a working-class movement with auxiliary support from peasants-in-uniform.20 However, Oliver Radkey, from whom these statistics are drawn, says that it is very difficult to determine “whether the garrison vote has been included in the vote for a city. Garrisons did not have their own commissions but they had separate polling stations and so usually the result is totaled up and announced in a bloc. But whether it has then been fused with the civilian vote or left segregated is the question that bedevils the investigator.”21

Why does this matter? The insurrection of the fall of 1917 has gone down in history as a proletarian revolution that created a workers’ state. If the principal force was a proletarian Red Guard, assisted by peasant-soldiers and sailors, then that characterization would make reasonable sense. However, if the proletarian Red Guard was simply a “police force” and the bulk of the heavy lifting was done by the sailors and soldiers, then we have a problem. Is it really possible for peasants from distant rural villages to engage in mass actions resulting in the creation of a proletarian state based in the major urban centres? In stating that the Military Revolutionary Committee took power “in the name of the soviet,” Radek acknowledges substitution at one level—the substitution of the committee for the soviet as a whole. However, if the key active element in that taking of power was the peasant-in-uniform, then we have another level of substitution: a workers’ state captured for the workers by thousands of armed peasants.

In later years, both Lenin and Trotsky would develop narratives about the deformation of the revolution. In December 1920, Lenin famously wrote that the very notion of the Soviet Union as a workers’ state was “an abstraction.” As he went on to point out: “Ours is not actually a workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state.” He then added a further qualification: “Ours is a workers’ state with a bureaucratic twist to it.”22 Trotsky would famously come to analyze the “bureaucratic degeneration of the state”23 in the Soviet Union, its transformation into a state controlled by a bureaucratic clique rather than through direct democracy exercised by the working class—a degenerated workers’ state. Both believed that the revolution had been knocked off the rails after a strong beginning. But if the beginning (at least the October/November beginning) involved substitution on the scale described here—an active element comprising predominantly peasants-in-uniform substituting for a largely passive working-class mass—then we have to incorporate the flawed beginning of what came to be called a “workers’ state” into the conceptions of both Lenin and Trotsky.

What do we know of the dynamics at work within both the peasants-in-uniform and the urban proletariat? The revolutionary ferment among the peasants-in-uniform was clear—the disastrous summer offensive had broken the Russian army as a fighting force. The overwhelming desire of peasant-soldiers and sailors was to be released from duty and begin the long walk home to participate in these ongoing seizures of land. According to Leonard Schapiro, once the Petrograd Soviet established the Military Revolutionary Committee on 22 October, it soon garnered the support of troops garrisoned in Petrograd, who “were united to a man in their determination to resist any proposal to send them to the front.”24 Schapiro describes what followed:

By 3 November, when the Commander of the Northern Front and Kerensky attempted to transfer some troops from Petrograd, a series of conferences of units of the Petrograd garrison passed resolutions recognizing the Petrograd Soviet as the only authority which had power to issue orders to the troops. It seemed scarcely an exaggeration to say that the “Provisional Government was on that date already overthrown,” at any rate in Petrograd.25

But what of the urban working class? It was, after all, their actions that had launched the whole revolutionary process eight months earlier, when workers arose in protest on Women’s Day. That a revolutionary ferment still existed among urban workers in Petrograd is clear from the role of the Red Guards in the October insurrection. Nikolai Sukhanov, one of the great chroniclers of the revolution, puts it like this: “The workers’ districts of Petersburg were boiling over before everyone’s eyes. Only the Bolsheviks were listened to.”26 The question remains, however, whether these workers were prepared for an overnight military action “giving” their class power. The picture that Sukhanov paints needs to be seen alongside others.

Just days prior to the insurrection, Bolshevik delegates from other localities reported on their situation to the Petrograd Committee of their party. Some reports were encouraging: “In the Vyborg region, the masses will support us.” In “Obukhov factory: a decisive change in our favour.” In “Finland district: the quicker the better.” But reports from elsewhere were mixed:

• Krasnoe Selo … Out of (our organization of) 5000, 500 will come here, the rest will remain in Krasnoe Selo to see what happens.
• In Kronstadt, morale has dropped considerably…. Among the postal and telegraph workers … we have few sympathizers.
• In Vasil’evsky Ostrov … there is no mood for insurrection.
• Moscow district: the masses will come out at the bidding of the Soviet, but few at the bidding of our party.
• Schlüsselburg district: the masses will rise at the bidding of the Soviet.
• Lettish district: the comrades will come out at the bidding of the Petersburg Bolshevik Committee, but not of the Soviet … Estonia: the same.
• Narva district: in general … no urge to insurrection.
• Okhta district: there is no mood for insurrection among the workers.
• Trade Unions: in case of a counter-revolutionary attack, the masses will resist, but they will not come out of their own accord.27

At a Bolshevik Central Committee meeting just nine days before the insurrection, committee members were equally equivocal. According to Abramovitch, the Bolshevik leader Volodarsky, “who enjoyed great popularity in the factories,” said that “in factories in which he had occasion to address the workers, ‘the masses received our call with bewilderment.’” Another key Bolshevik, Shlyapnikov, speaking for the steel workers’ union, said that “the rising planned by the Bolsheviks is not popular; rumors about an imminent rising even started a panic.”28

Leon Trotsky addressed an emergency session of the Petrograd Soviet as the insurrection was unfolding. Parts of his statement are riveting. “On behalf of the Military Revolutionary Committee…. I declare that the Provisional Government no longer exists.” In Rabinowitch’s vivid description:

To storms of applause and shouts of “Long live the Military Revolutionary Committee!” he announced, in rapid order, that the Preparliament had been dispersed, that individual government ministers had been arrested, and that the rail stations, the post office, the central telegraph, the Petrograd Telegraph Agency, and the state bank had been occupied by forces of the Military Revolutionary Committee. “The Winter Palace has not been taken,” he reported, “but its fate will be decided momentarily…. In the history of the revolutionary movement I know of no other examples in which such huge masses were involved and which developed so bloodlessly.”29

But another part of his statement is simply astonishing: “The population slept peacefully and did not know that at this time one power was replaced by another.”30 A city’s population can sleep while power is transferred from one class to another? Raphael Abramovitch makes a similar point, but puts it in a much more negative light: “The ‘proletarian revolution’ was accomplished while the working masses of the capital stood by passively. The struggle for the ‘world socialist revolution’ was won by war-weary peasant lads in soldiers’ or sailors’ uniforms.”31

A Temporary New Class

The Russian Revolution has entered the history books as a socialist workers’ revolution. And without question, the city that was the centre of the revolution, Petrograd, was also the centre of working-class life in the Russian empire. But a more complex reality was revealed when the first session of the newly formed Petrograd Soviet met in the days after the outbreak of the February (March) Revolution. According to Orlando Figes: “Of the 3,000 delegates, more than two-thirds were servicemen—and this in a city where workers outnumbered soldiers by three or four to one…. Most of the soldiers were peasants.”32 It was not for nothing, then, that the full name of the Petrograd Soviet was the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Some consideration must be given to the similarities—and differences—in the experiences and dynamics essential to, on the one hand, the urban working class, and on the other, the peasants-in-uniform, who, by their thousands, were temporarily housed inside the cities.

A swirl of controversy has developed around the role of these two groups in the revolutionary events of 1917. Richard Pipes argues emphatically that, despite its standard depiction as a workers’ revolt, the February Revolution “was, first and foremost, a mutiny of peasant soldiers whom, to save money, the authorities had billeted in overcrowded facilities in the Empire’s capital city.”33 Abramovitch places a similar emphasis on the military angle, but he argues that these “peasant soldiers” were unlike ordinary soldiers. Mass war and mass slaughter had led to what he calls “the birth of a new ‘class.’”34 The first years of the war had seen mobilization “on a scale that was unprecedented in Russian history”:

Between 12 and 15 million peasant lads, from villages in remote Siberia and other far-flung districts of the vast empire, had been put in military uniforms and crowded into urban areas, most of them along the northwestern and southern frontiers…. Here then, was an enormous new social formation—a soldiery that had ceased to be peasants in the social and economic sense, that was falling under the influence of urban political ideas, and yet had no material roots in the working class. Toward the end of 1916, vague ideas of revolution and socialism had come to permeate these young men. But their basic concern was peace; they wished to be free of the haunting menace of death or mutilation and to return to normal life, either in the towns or in their distant villages, where their families and land awaited them.35

Abramovitch sees this new—and temporary—social formation (or class) as “the main force of the revolution. The pressure from millions of soldiers, the only armed force in the country, proved overwhelming.” Indeed, “without or against them, nothing could be done even by those socialist parties which were closest to them—the Mensheviks and the S-R’s [Social-Revolutionaries] before the autumn of 1917 and the Bolsheviks thereafter.”36

Throughout this book, I frequently use the shorthand “peasant-soldiers and sailors.” The inclusion of sailors in this shorthand needs to be qualified. Israel Getzler writes that by February 1917, the Kronstadt sailors “were probably the most literate, technically skilled and modern, the most ethnically Russian, least servile and the most disaffected of all Russia’s armed forces.” Getzler says that the tsarist authorities “faced a recruitment problem and found that ‘in view of the special complexity of the modern battleship, the Russian peasant, straight from the sokha [wooden plough] cannot immediately become a sailor, while it is the working element that is somewhat prepared for the handling of machines.’”37 That said, the profound link between the countryside and the sailors was brought into sharp relief during the Kronstadt revolt of 1921. And, for Iulii Martov, the key factor creating a distance between the mass of soldiers and sailors and the working class in the cities was the brutal phenomenon of four years of war.

In a prescient 1919 monograph titled World Bolshevism, Martov argues that when Bolshevism first made its appearance as a mass phenomenon in the Russian empire, European left-wing commentators were unanimous in the view that its roots were in the agrarian nature of that empire and that a similar “maximalist” socialist movement was unlikely, if not inconceivable, in the very different urban settings of Germany or France. However, “it became obvious after the experience of the first three months of revolution in Germany that Bolshevism was not only the product of an agrarian revolution.” He says that “of course, the characteristics of Bolshevism in Russia are largely explained by our agrarian relations,” but argues that “World Bolshevism” “must clearly be derived from other social factors.”38

Martov begins by pointing to the relationship between Bolshevism and wartime mobilization and the resulting “influence of the soldier and the army environment on the revolution in Russia.”

The role that the army plays in social life, thanks to the world war, is without any doubt the first common factor that is manifested in the revolutionary processes of countries as socially different as Russia, Germany, England, and France. There is an undeniable connection between the role of soldiers in the revolution and the Bolshevik element in that revolution. Bolshevism is not simply a “soldiers’ revolution,” but the influence of Bolshevism on the course of the revolution in each country is proportional to the participation of armed soldier masses in this revolution.39

Martov goes on to differentiate the socialist consciousness typically associated with the proletariat, which is developed through struggles in the workplace and the socialist consciousness emerging from soldiers in the trenches. “From the very first days of the Bolshevik wave,” he writes, “Marxists identified the ‘communism of the consumer’ as the only social interest binding together social elements that are very different in their class composition and even declassed—that is, detached from their natural social milieu.”40 With the phrases “communism of the consumer” or “consumption communism,” Martov is emphasizing the distance between soldiers in revolution and workers in revolution. For the latter, the central question is control of the means of production in the workplace. This is an absolutely collective concept: modern workplaces, with their complex division of labour, can only be taken over collectively. For the soldier, the emphasis shifts. Soldiers, as such, are divorced from production: their only relationship to the economy consists in the consumption of the products of labour. That consumption is overlaid by the horrifying experience of war, an experience putting the oppressed soldier mass up against military hierarchy and officer caste privilege. There is a “band of brothers” communism that does emerge in such circumstances, but its focus is not on controlling the means of production but rather on equalizing or levelling access to consumption.

The soldier’s desire for a radical levelling—to make the position of the soldier mass equal to or level with the officer corps—is closely related to the historical appetite of the Russian peasantry for an end to land privilege and a “levelling” of inequalities in the countryside. For a peasantry whose orientation is toward subsistence farming, with little opportunity or motivation to produce a surplus for the market, the impulse toward levelling likewise manifests itself in the realm of consumption, not production. For both soldier and peasant, the goal is a kind of communism—not the communism associated with the workers’ movement, but a different, more ancient notion of consumer or consumption communism. Its historical parallels are to be found in the extreme left wing of the French Revolution or the English Revolution. It is not the same as the communism associated with advanced capitalism in the twentieth century.

The Martov/Abramovitch thesis has other critical dimensions. Martov emphasizes the “social revolutionary psychology” of this new class, “their peculiar ‘anti-parliamentarism.’” Martov sees this as “quite understandable in a social environment not shaped, as in the past, through the school of collective defence of its interests, but in the present drawing its strength and influence exclusively from the possession of weapons.”

English newspapers reported the following curious fact. When English troops on the French front were sent ballots during the most recent parliamentary elections, in many cases soldiers burned masses of them, stating, “When we return to England, we will put things right there.” In both Germany and Russia we have seen many examples of how the soldier masses showed their first active interest in politics by expressing their desire to “put things right” through force of arms—whether that be “from the Right,” as happened in the first months of the Russian revolution and the first weeks of the German one, or “from the Left.”

Martov describes this “anti-parliamentarism” as “a particular corporate consciousness nourished by the certainty that possession of weapons and the ability to use them makes it possible to control the destinies of the state”—an outlook that “comes into fatal, irreconcilable conflict with the ideas of democracy and with parliamentary forms of government.”41

In addition, both Martov and Abramovitch call attention to the recomposition of the working class on the home front. Abramovitch argues that the urban workers of 1917 were very different from the urban workers of 1913. The intervening years had witnessed an exodus of older, experienced militants and an influx of peasants:

Quite a number of the older workers, who had been part of the Revolution of 1905 or who had been acquainted with the Social Democratic parties or the trade-union movement under the semi-constitutional regime, had been absorbed into the army and lost to industry. Meanwhile, the defense industries, greatly expanded, had received an enormous influx of new workers. Some of these came from among the urban poor, but many more came from the peasantry—a politically unschooled mass which knew little of the traditions of an industrial working class. Nor could such traditions be rapidly acquired, since the working-class movement was stifled in war time.42

Martov puts it this way:

The working masses have changed qualitatively. The old cadres, the most class-educated, spent four and a half years at the front. Detached from productive work, they became permeated with the psychology of the trenches, spiritually dissolved into the social milieu of declassed elements. On their return to the ranks of the proletariat, they brought a revolutionary spirit but, at the same time, the spirit of soldiers’ rabble-rousing. During the war, these class-educated cadres were replaced in industry by millions of new workers drawn from ruined artisans and other “little people,” rural proletarians, and working-class women. These new proletarians worked under conditions where the political movement of the proletariat had completely disappeared and the trade union movement had been reduced to pitiful dimensions…. Class consciousness in these new proletarian masses developed extremely slowly, as they had almost no experience in collective struggle alongside more advanced strata of the working class.43

Martov takes seriously the demoralizing effects of the war, not only on workers who were transformed into soldiers but also on those called upon to produce the means of destruction:

While those who had lived in the trenches for many years lost their professional skills, were detached from regular productive labour, and were exhausted by the psychologically and physically inhuman conditions of modern warfare, the masses who took their place in the factories expended tremendous energy working overtime to acquire the bare necessities whose prices had increased massively. Most of this exhausting labour was carried out to produce means of destruction, labour that was, from the social point of view, unproductive and could not contribute to generating in the working masses the consciousness of the indispensability of their labour for the existence of society. But this consciousness constitutes an extremely essential element in the class psychology of the modern proletariat.44

Martov believed that the combination of these two related phenomena—the formation of a temporary new class through the experience of the war, and the concomitant recomposition of the existing working class—provided the social base, not only for Bolshevism in Russia, but for the “essential features of proletarian Bolshevism as a world phenomenon.” So profound was the impact of the trenches that this was even true, according to Martov, in those countries where the armies were not as weighted toward the peasantry as was the Russian army. This “World Bolshevism” had, he says, three features:

The first is maximalism, that is, the desire for immediate, maximum results in the implementation of social improvements without any attention to objective conditions. This maximalism presupposes a dose of naive social optimism, the uncritical belief that the realization of such maximum results may be achieved at any time, that the resources and wealth of the society that the proletariat aspires to acquire are inexhaustible.

The second is a lack of attention to the requirements of social production—the predominance, as with the soldiers, of the consumers’ point of view over that of the producer.

The third is the propensity to resolve all issues of political struggle, the struggle for power, by the direct application of armed force, even in relations between different sections of the proletariat. This propensity arises from a skeptical attitude toward the possibilities of finding a democratic solution to social and political problems.45

The great vision of self-emancipation embedded in the socialism of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and their political generations was based on a profound conviction about the democratic and emancipatory urge essential to the collective working class in the cities. There did exist a parallel emancipatory urge essential to the temporary new class of peasants-in-uniform from the countryside. However, democracy and a respect for rights and justice were completely absent, given the origin of these peasant-soldiers in the patriarchal, cudgel-ruled mir, coupled with their long experience in the trenches. The rough and violent instrument chosen by the Bolsheviks to carry out the revolution carried with it the seeds of the destruction of the essence of that revolution.

Coercion and Consent

So far, the emphasis has been on the adjective “new” in the description of this “temporary new class.” But equally important is its “temporary” nature. Wars do not last forever. Mass armies are eventually demobilized. There is, at some point, a return to life centred on the means of production, not the means of destruction. For Russia, this transformation happened extremely quickly. If, in October and November 1917, the pivotal role of the temporary new class of peasant-soldiers was indisputable, it was already a class in the process of decomposition. As noted earlier, the overwhelming desire of these soldiers was to return to their villages and take part in rural land seizures. By 1918, they had melted away to such an extent that when the German army resumed its offensive, it encountered almost no resistance. The Russian army had evaporated.

Antonio Gramsci argues that a “dual perspective” exists in political life, one whose manifestations may be relatively simple or complex but that ultimately expresses itself at “two fundamental levels”: “the levels of force and of consent, authority and hegemony, violence and civilization.”46 As the temporary new class dissolved, the tens of thousands of peasants-in-uniform left the cities where they had been barracked, and the natural composition of urban populations was gradually restored. Class relations began to return to something resembling normality, and the traditional workers’ movement began to reassert itself. The Bolsheviks stood at a crossroads. One road would lead them to strive for consent by adapting their policies to the demands of a movement now returning to normal—that is, a socialist movement committed to pluralism in government, independence of trade unions, convening the Constituent Assembly, and so on. The other road would lead them toward coercion, holding firm to the rule of a minority and enforcing that rule in the only way that any minority can enforce its rule against the will of the majority—by force. We know now that it was the latter road that was taken.

Many at the time knew exactly what was at stake. Just days after the revolution, several members of the newly formed Council of People’s Commissars resigned their posts in protest against Bolshevik opposition to a coalition government. Among them was veteran Bolshevik leader Viktor Nogin, who “declared on behalf of the secessionists: ‘We hold that it is essential to form a socialist government comprising all the Soviet parties…. We consider that beside this there is only one other path: —the maintenance of a purely Bolshevik government by means of political terror. The Council of People’s Commissars has entered upon that path.’”47

A few weeks later, on 1 (14) December, at an open session of the Soviet Central Executive Committee, an epic confrontation between Steinberg and Trotsky revolved around the same issues. Steinberg reports being in the presence of “some thousand excited delegates—workers, soldiers, sailors—dressed in work clothes, military tunics and peasant garb.”48 At issue was the status of the Kadets—the Constitutional Democrats—a party that, while very much part of the revolutionary bloc in February and March of 1917, had by then become “an outspoken opponent of the October Revolution.” On 28 November (11 December), the new Bolshevik-dominated government had proclaimed all leaders of the Kadets “enemies of the people” subject to immediate arrest.49 Steinberg, when called by the chair of the meeting to speak, argued that “a victorious revolution had no need to condemn its opponents in summary judgement. We, the victors, were strong enough to apply true justice.”

But, I maintained, we could not place an entire group—unspecified anonymous groups of people—outside the pale of human law. We dared not simply and blindly repeat the mistakes of the French Revolution, for after all, we had outgrown it by one hundred and twenty-five years. Withdraw legal protection from the liberals today, and the same is likely to happen to other political groups tomorrow. It is easy to start the terror, but impossible to stop it.50

Steinberg describes Trotsky as he rose to reply: “Pride, power, fury, contempt were in those eyes. He seemed personally insulted.”

“There is not the slightest doubt,” he intoned icily, “that the party of the Kadets is organizing the counter-revolution. Every one of its leaders must be made harmless. They complain—and sentimental socialists join them in the complaint—at being thrown into jail! Let them instead be grateful. In past revolutions their kind was dealt with differently. They would have been taken to the Palace Square and there made … a head shorter!”

Trotsky threw out the last phrase with vicious fervor—and waited for the storm of applause. Was he not speaking in the name of the people, and for their glory? But the expected did not occur, and the silence spoke louder than any applause. I had the firm impression that there was a murmur of dissent against his bloodthirsty phrases from these simple people, fresh from the battlefields of the revolution. They neither liked nor trusted the bourgeois Kadets, but they disliked no less the vulgarity of their own leader.51

How closely balanced were the two positions of Steinberg and Trotsky is evidenced by the fact that, just days later, Steinberg would join the government as People’s Commissar of Justice, for a time sitting at the same leadership table as his opponent, Trotsky. In the end, coercion would overwhelm consent as the revolution and then the counter-revolution unfolded, a story to which we will return in the conclusion of this book.