Conclusion Ends and Means

“The Very Cruelest Revolutionary Terror”

By mid-1918, state-sanctioned Red Terror came to define the Bolshevik regime. What do we know about the terror deployed by the Bolshevik state? We know that the state justified it as a response to the terror of the Bolsheviks’ opponents, the White Armies—and that those White Armies did engage in the most appalling atrocities. China Miéville quotes an “unlikely source, Major General William Graves, who commanded US forces in Siberia,” as saying that he “considers himself ‘well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks.’”9 During the Civil War, Elias Heifetz was the chair of the All-Ukrainian Relief Committee for the Victims of Pogroms, and with those pogroms still fresh in his mind, he published, in 1920, the extraordinary Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine.10 His chronicle of murder, rape, and humiliation unleashed by the counter-revolutionary armies in Ukraine against that country’s Jewish population is almost unreadable, the deeds are so horrible. Those events would stand as the most horrific moment in the history of Jewish oppression, until the Nazi holocaust of World War II.

If we assume that 120,000 deaths were due directly to the pogroms, we shall not be guilty of exaggeration. To these must be added the injured and wounded, those suffering from nervous and mental shock and the violated women. The pogroms swept the Ukraine like a hurricane, and it was impossible to undertake a census of such cases. The number, however, must be prodigious, running into the tens of thousands.

… The Jewish population of the villages and hamlets visited by the pogroms left everything behind as it was, and fled without further thought to a larger place. The roads were covered with the bodies of old men, women and children, and in the larger places the same horrible death awaited the fugitives.11

The pro-Bolshevik forces were not all innocents in this process. “To the nightmare of Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine belong also the anti-Jewish excesses and pogroms by bands calling themselves ‘Reds’ and belonging … to the Ukrainian Red Soviet army,” Heifetz tells us.12 He gives an unflattering portrayal of the Soviet rank and file, composed, for the most part, of “insurrectionist bands of freebooters” who had an “antipathy to strangers, especially Jews.”13 However, Heifetz clearly differentiates the Reds from the Whites: “In proportion to the entire number of Jewish persecutions the excesses of these people play an insignificant role.”14 The Red Terror was in very large part a reaction to the horrendous terror of the counter-revolutionary forces.

But it was also in part an inevitable product of the terrible oppression and suffering experienced for generations by a downtrodden, impoverished people, a point developed persuasively by Orlando Figes: “The Terror erupted from below. It was an integral element of the social revolution from the start. The Bolsheviks encouraged but did not create this mass terror.”15

If our goal is simply to explain the terror, we can leave our discussion here. But if our goal is to assess the attitude that political actors should take to terror, we have to go further. There is the question of how to approach terror as a matter not of strategy and tactics but of principle. Steinberg quotes from the January 1919 program manifesto of the fledgling German Communist Party, a manifesto written by Rosa Luxemburg: “The proletarian revolution requires no terror for its aims. It hates and despises killing. It does not need these weapons because it does not combat individuals but institutions.”16

Let us return to the issue of the death penalty, that horrifying instrument of state policy whose restoration for use at the front in 1917 did so much to undermine confidence in the Kerensky government and led directly to mass radicalization and the events of the October Revolution. By the summer of 1918, Iulii Martov was denouncing the death penalty not of Kerensky and the right-wing generals but of the Bolsheviks and the workers’ state:

The death penalty had been declared abolished, but in every city, in every county, various “Extraordinary Commissions” [Chekas] and “Military-Revolutionary Committees” ordered the shooting of hundreds and hundreds of people. Some were killed as counterrevolutionaries, others as speculators, and yet others as robbers. No court established whether those sentenced were really guilty, nobody can know whether the person executed was really guilty…. How many innocent people have been killed like that all over Russia! With the tacit approval of the Council of People’s Commissars, nameless individuals are sitting in Chekas passing death sentences. Among these individuals giving orders for executions, we from time to time discover criminals, bribe-takers, people who themselves are on the run from the law, and former tsarist provocateurs.17

Clearly, Martov had a moral objection to the Red Terror and to capital punishment. We can feel it in the passion of these lines. His opposition, like Luxemburg’s, was also one of political principle.

We social-democrats are opposed to all terror, both from above and from below.

Therefore, we are against the death penalty—this extreme means of terror, to which all rulers resort to intimidate people when they have lost their trust.

The struggle against the death penalty was inscribed on the banners of all those who struggled for the freedom and happiness of the Russian people, all those who struggled for socialism.18

Lenin’s view was the opposite. He saw terror, including recourse to the death penalty, as an embedded part of the transition to socialism. This at first put him in opposition to his own comrades. One of the first, if not the first, decrees of the Military Revolutionary Committee after the seizure of power was to abolish the death penalty for troops at the front. Trotsky was present at the vote, but Lenin was not. According to Trotsky, when Lenin heard of this decision, “his anger was unbounded. ‘Nonsense,’ he kept on repeating. ‘How can one make a revolution without firing squads?’”19 In the introduction to this book, I outlined the despair and shock that engulfed the Russian masses when the death penalty was reintroduced for use by the officer corps against the peasants-in-uniform, who were their cannon fodder. Lenin’s fierce embrace of precisely this instrument as essential to his revolution was a sign of the problems embedded in his approach. It was a position from which Lenin never flinched, and that Trotsky was shortly to embrace. When, in early 1918, the German army resumed its offensive, Trotsky drafted an appeal, which, as Steinberg notes, included “the threat that all who opposed Government orders would be ‘destroyed on the spot.’” Steinberg, still the People’s Commissar for Justice, “objected that this cruel threat killed the whole pathos of the manifesto. Lenin replied with derision, ‘On the contrary, herein lies true revolutionary pathos. Do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very cruelest revolutionary terror?’”20

Lenin was not alone among the Bolshevik leadership in his embrace of the necessity of terror on a mass scale. One of the most chilling statements of that time came from his chief lieutenant, Grigory Zinoviev. In a September 1918 speech, Zinoviev said: “To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”21 But Zinoviev is a handy scapegoat, someone who today has very few followers. Lenin, by contrast, is still an icon in sections of the Left. That icon frequently exhorted his comrades to intensify the terror. When Bolshevik rule was threatened in one region, he urged the local communists to “organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like.”22 In August 1918, he sent a telegram to communists in Penza, saying: “Essential to organise a reinforced guard of selected and reliable people, to carry out a campaign of ruthless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and whiteguards; suspects to be shut up in a detention camp outside the city.”23 After the assassination of Volodarsky, he rebuked the communist authorities who had tried to restrain the crowds from vigilante “justice” in Petrograd: “I protest most emphatically! We are discrediting ourselves: we threaten mass terror, even in resolutions of the Soviet of Deputies, yet when it comes to action we obstruct the revolutionary initiative of the masses, a quite correct one. This is im-poss-ible! The terrorists will consider us old women.”24

This cannot be reduced to a position to which Lenin had been pushed by force of circumstances. Already in the context of the 1905 revolution he had a very clear position that mass terror would be a necessary, embedded part of any revolution in Russia. In February 1905, he wrote: “All the forces of every party should be mobilised. All should have a single technical plan of action. Bombs and dynamite, individual and mass terror— everything that can help the popular uprising.”25 And in August of the following year, he declared, “Social-Democracy must recognise this mass terror and incorporate it into its tactics.” He did qualify this conception of mass terror, saying that a key task would be “organising and controlling it … subordinating it to the interests and conditions of the working-class movement and the general revolutionary struggle, while eliminating and ruthlessly lopping off the ‘hooligan’ perversion of this guerrilla warfare.”26 But that is not the point. For Lenin, the use of mass terror in the transition to socialism was a principle. For Luxemburg and Martov, opposition to the use of mass terror by the socialists was a principle.

The key organ for administering the terror was the infamous Cheka, the predecessor to the KGB. An important insight into the psychology of this instrument of terror comes from articles printed in a short-lived publication known either as Cheka Weekly or Bulletin of the Cheka, which for six weeks in 1918, “was openly intended to vaunt the merits of the secret police and to encourage ‘the just desire of the masses for revenge.’”27 A letter that makes for chilling reading was published in its September 1918 issue. “In times of fierce civil war you cannot be soft,” said the several high-ranking officials from Nolinsk in Vyatka Province who authored the letter. “We declared mass terror against our enemies and … we decided to make this mass terror not a paper thing, but a reality. Mass shootings of hostages took place in many cities after this. And this was good.” It gets worse. The authors chastise one regional Cheka for releasing British diplomatic representative Bruce Lockhart. “Tell us,” they remonstrate. “Why didn’t you subject this Lockhart to the most refined tortures, in order to get information and addresses? … Do you suppose that to inflict terrible tortures upon a man is more inhuman than to blow up bridges and food stores in order to find in the pangs of hunger an ally for the overthrow of the Soviet regime?”28 The editors of Cheka Weekly did not denounce this open advocacy of torture. In fact, they were at pains to point out that they did not object “in substance to this letter.” Their only objection was that such terror was “not at all in our interest.”29 However, the letter’s matter-of-fact call for torture led to the editors being rebuked by the Central Committee. Cheka Weekly was discontinued.30 Innumerable other sources indicate that, in fact, torture was part of the toolkit of Cheka-organized terror. Steinberg’s cataloguing of just some of these, quoting from “a series of peasant reports and Government documents for the year 1919,” makes for grim reading.31 In the village of Uranj in the province of Kostroma, “the beating of petitioners in the Soviet was customary and flogging was carried on in all villages of the province. In Beryozovka, for instance, peasants were beaten with fists as well as sticks. They were forced to take off their boots and sit for hours in the snow.” Steinberg reports a Red Army soldier saying: “Makhov gave us orders to give it good to the arrested peasants, that is to whip them thoroughly. Instead of dragging them along with us, he said, whip them and let them remember the Soviet regime.” The stories of abuse go on and on. “In some villages,” Steinberg writes, “the Cheka locked masses of peasants in cold warehouses, stripped them and beat them with gun butts.”32

“Let this be enough,” Steinberg concludes. “We have not reached the limit, but then we never shall. Such descriptions could be continued indefinitely: they are so many, so varied, so cruelly eloquent. We shall not return to them. Let our memory, retaining these words and these acts, help our minds and our consciences later to draw the final conclusions about terror, the Bolshevik terror.”33

Bolsheviks Against Workers

In late 1917 and early 1918, as the temporary new class of peasants-in-uniform melted into the countryside, there was a return in the cities to something approaching “normal” class relations. This re-emergence of a “traditional” workers’ movement is a story steeped in obscurity. Tony Cliff notes that, immediately after the November revolution, the Bolsheviks “had to deal with another enemy no less dangerous” than the counter-revolutionaries who were set to march on the capital. He refers to this enemy as “the saboteurs within.” Cliff was a lifelong supporter of workers’ action and strikes. However, without commenting on the irony of his observation, he attaches the term “saboteur” to the story of a mass strike movement:

On 27 October (9 November) a general strike of all state employees was called in Petrograd, and almost all the officials and clerks of public institutions came out.

The employees of the Ministries of Agriculture, Labour, Posts and Telegraphs, Food, Finance and Foreign Affairs went on strike. So did the teachers. By 15 (28) December, more than 30,000 Petrograd teachers were on strike. They were joined by the workers in the public libraries and the People’s Houses and by 50,000 bank clerks. These strikes confronted the new rulers with grave difficulties.

The telegraphists and telephonists also stopped work. Telegraphy was the only quick means of communication across the huge distances of Russia. These workers were very much under the influence of the Mensheviks and Socialist [Social] Revolutionaries. Most of the telegraphists refused to work for the Bolshevik intruders.34

Steinberg, one of the harshest critics of the Bolsheviks, similarly saw this strike in a very negative light. “In the first months after October, 1917,” he writes, “large sections of officialdom and the professional intelligentsia sabotaged the new Government. Under the influence of the embittered moderates (to say nothing of the open reactionaries), they sacrificed the interests of country and people to their hatred of the new regime. They stayed away from their offices or refused to carry out their functions in public institutions.”35

Others describe this “general strike of white-collar personnel (sluzhashchie),” as Richard Pipes calls it, with a completely different emphasis.36 George Leggett says that within hours of the Bolshevik seizure of power, “the Committee for Salvation of Country and Revolution (KSRiR) had been formed in the City Duma Building, with the participation of members of the Executive of Peasants’ Soviets, and of Menshevik and SR leaders such as Dan and Gotz.”37 The strike that ensued was “co-ordinated by the Union of Unions,” which “disposed of formidable financial resources, out of which the strikers were advanced wages up to 1 January 1918.”38 Richard Pipes devotes considerable attention to this strike action, calling it “a grandiose, non-violent act of protest by the nation’s civil servants and employees of private enterprises against the destruction of democracy,” and going on to describe its participants and structure:

It quickly acquired an organizational structure, first in the shape of strike committees in the ministries, banks, and other public institutions and then in a coordinating body called the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution (Komitet Spaseniia Rodiny i Revoliutsii). The committee originally consisted of Municipal Duma officials, members of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets dissolved by the Bolsheviks, representatives of the All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets, the Union of Unions of Government Employees, and several clerical unions, including that of postal workers. Gradually, representatives of Russian socialist parties, the Left SRs excepted, also joined.39

After the Union of Unions of Government Employees in Petrograd called on its members, on 29 October, to join the strike, “work in all the ministries in Petrograd ground to a halt. Except for porters and some secretarial staff, their personnel either failed to come to work or came and sat doing nothing.”40 Pipes describes the growth of the action in the ten days that followed:

The strike spread to non-governmental institutions. Private banks had shut their doors as early as October 26–27. On November 1, the All-Russian Union of Postal and Telegraph Employees announced that unless the Bolshevik Government gave way to a coalition cabinet it would order its membership to stop work. Soon telegraph and telephone workers walked out in Petrograd, Moscow, and some provincial towns. On November 2, Petrograd’s pharmacists went on strike; on November 7, water transport workers followed suit as did schoolteachers. On November 8, the Union of Printers in Petrograd announced that if the Bolsheviks carried out their Press Decree they, too, would strike.41

At the core of these protests was a simple political position—against the imposition of a one-party state and for the creation of a pluralist, multiparty socialist government. This, in fact, represented the overwhelming common sense of the Left. At the Second Congress of the Soviets, which convened as the Military Revolutionary Committee insurrection was underway, the Bolsheviks were in a strong but not overwhelming position. Out of 670 delegates, they had 300—a plurality but not a majority.42 Furthermore, according to China Miéville, in matters of voting, their influence was bolstered by “somewhat lax organisational arrangements that had given them more than their proportional share.”43 As John Gooding points out, “of the 366 soviet committees represented at the congress,” just over two-thirds “had sent delegates on the assumption that power would be shared among the various socialist groupings.”44

But with the exception of the brief coalition between the Bolsheviks and the Left Social-Revolutionaries, there was to be no multiparty government. The new government used force to end the strike, in which the call for a coalition socialist government had been the principal demand. From mid-November on, the Bolsheviks operated “a counter-offensive,” writes Pipes. “The Bolsheviks now physically occupied, one by one, every public institution in Petrograd and compelled their employees, under threat of severe punishment, to work for them.”45 The strikes were defeated, and along with them, any hopes for a pluralist, multiparty, socialist government.

This is a confusing story. Without question, the call for a coalition socialist government animated much of the strike movement, but it is also true that sections of the leadership of this strike movement comprised open reactionaries who were determined to overthrow the new regime by force. The Committee for Salvation of Country and Revolution included in its leadership individuals who, according to Alexander Rabinowitch, “drew up plans to coordinate an uprising in Petrograd with the entry into the capital of Krasnov’s Cossacks, expected momentarily.” A successful entry of Cossack troops into Petrograd would have undoubtedly ended in bloodshed and repression. In the end, only a thousand troops could be mustered for the effort, and they confronted a pro-Bolshevik “motley army approximately ten times larger, made up of workers’ detachments, soldiers of the Petrograd garrison, and Baltic sailors.”46 The Cossacks were beaten back, and the military threat, for a time, receded. But in our assessment of these events, we need to engage with both aspects of the post-insurrectionary turmoil—the reactionary attempt to use military force against the new regime and the democratic urge of much of the strike movement, animated by a sense of the need for coalition and compromise.

The Cheka and Strikebreaking

The Bolshevik response to this strike movement played a critical role in shaping the institutions of terror that were to corrupt Bolshevik rule in subsequent years. The Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), the central institution that organized the November insurrection, became the key force repressing the strike movement. “On 9 November, the MRC ordered the arrest of KSRiR [Committee for Salvation of Country and Revolution] members,” writes George Leggett. Eleven days later, “the MRC took steps to wind up the dissolved Duma and the KSRiR. And on 26 November, the MRC declared all employees of public departments who sabotaged the national economy to be ‘enemies of the people’. The MRC effort to suppress the strike was directed by [Felix] Dzerzhinsky.”47

As the MRC was winding down its operations in December, reports reached the government’s leading body, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), of new threats on a country-wide scale. Minutes from a 7 (20) December meeting of the Sovnarkom indicate that council members were concerned with “the possibility of a Russia-wide postal and telegraph strike and about the possibility of a Russia-wide general strike of all government agency employees.”48 The Sovnarkom thus “resolved ‘to charge Comrade Dzerzhinsky to establish a special commission to examine the possibility of combating such a strike by the most energetic revolutionary measures, and to determine methods of suppressing malicious sabotage.’”49 As Leggett writes: “The urgency of the public service strike crisis was such that, at its meeting on 7 (20) December (attended by Lenin as chairman, by Stalin, Petrovskii, and others), the Sovnarkom decided not to disperse until Dzerzhinsky’s improvised special commission, then still in session, had presented its proposals. That same evening, Dzerzhinsky made his report to the Sovnarkom.”50 Dzerzhinsky proposed the creation of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, the institution that we now know as the Cheka, and the Sovnarkom approved his recommendation. Pipes agrees that it was in an effort “to break the resistance of financial personnel that Lenin initially created, in December 1917, his security police, the Cheka.”51 Nicolas Werth describes the Cheka’s first action, breaking “a strike by state employees in Petrograd”:

The method was swift and effective—all its leaders were arrested—and the justification simple: “Anyone who no longer wishes to work with the people has no place among them,” declared Dzerzhinsky, who also arrested a number of the Menshevik and Socialist [Social] Revolutionary deputies elected to the Constituent Assembly. This arbitrary act was immediately condemned by Isaac Steinberg, the people’s commissar of justice, who was himself a left Socialist Revolutionary.52

The anti-strike mandate of the Cheka was not explicit in the records of its birth, which outlined the liquidation of “all counterrevolutionary and sabotage politics throughout Russia” as its raison d’être.53 The official announcement in the daily press, however, was explicit: “The commission is to watch the press, saboteurs, strikers, and the Socialist [Social] Revolutionists of the Right.”54 Surely it is important to know that this repressive institution had its origin as a tool of strikebreaking.

Perhaps the actions of these white-collar workers can be put in the category of “backward consciousness.” The strikers were almost all in the category of “mental labourers,” a category that most socialists at the time incorrectly called “petit-bourgeois” and did not consider part of the working class. We now know, however, that this distinction between mental labourers and manual labourers is unhelpful in characterizing the proletariat, at the forefront of whose ranks are frequently literate mental labourers—in an earlier period, typesetters and printers, postal and telegraph workers; in the contemporary movement, teachers, civil servants, and nurses. But in analyses of the Russian Revolution, there is an embedded bias that restricts the notion of “the proletariat” to manual factory labourers and categorizes mental labourers as “middle class” or “petit-bourgeois.” Laura Engelstein, in her very helpful history of the 1905 revolution in Moscow, makes exactly this mistake.

Another group that made a vital contribution to the labor movement in 1905 was the white-collar employees in the non-manufacturing sector. They identified with the working-class cause, provided organizational guidance, and joined their blue-collar fellows in the meeting hall and on the street. Without them, no coherent movement would have emerged among either railroad workers or municipal employees, two groups indispensable to the success of the revolution in Moscow.

However, rather than saying that this shows how our understanding of the working class must change to incorporate mental labourers, Engelstein says that this shows how our understanding of the revolution must change to incorporate “non-working class” forces. “The Moscow labor movement of 1905 was not, strictly speaking, a ‘proletarian’ affair” because “it depended for its success on the support and participation of non-working class groups.”55 A more reasonable conclusion would be that our notion of the working class must expand to include manual and mental labourers.

Earlier, I cited Victor Serge, who on most issues was a strong supporter of the Bolsheviks, insisting that “the formation of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918.”56 But here we see that the first Cheka was called into existence in 1917. This displacement of one year is perhaps explained by the fact that Serge, too, labelled the 1917 anti-Bolshevik strikers as petit-bourgeois (or, in his words “middle class”). He in fact devotes an entire chapter in his Year One of the Russian Revolution to the subject, titled “The urban middle classes against the proletariat.”57 He characterizes the strike movement of the autumn and winter of 1917 as being part of a revolt by the “middle classes in the towns,” who he describes as “the students of the military colleges, the youth of the high schools, the officials, the senior staffs, the technicians, the intellectuals, the socialists, all of them people of the middling sort, more or less exploited but highly privileged within the system of exploitation and participating in it.”58 Left there, this is quite unpersuasive. The category “people of the middling sort” is extremely imprecise. His approach does become more precise when, invoking Kritsman, he suggests that the “technical intelligentsia” is “simultaneously the organiser of production and of exploitation: it is thereby led to identify itself with the system, and to conceive of the capitalist mode of production as the only one possible.”59 But does this accord with the facts?

It is in fact extremely difficult to argue that the mass opposition to the Bolsheviks was restricted to middle-class, petit-bourgeois forces. Serge himself acknowledges that big sections of workers were a part of the strike movement—16,000 municipal employees and a “number of sections of skilled workers.”60 Among those skilled workers would be, presumably, the telegraph operators listed earlier. The telegraph—the indispensable connecting tissue linking the far-flung cities of the Russian empire—was intimately connected with the railways. The communication network depended on the physical transportation network, with the telegraph lines typically following the miles of track winding their way through the empire. Although undeveloped by Western European standards, the rail system was enormous and growing. Roger Pethybridge, the expert on this question, notes that “by October 1916 there were no less than 1,001,522 personnel employed on the Tsarist railways, as compared with 432,000 in 1898.”61 The workers on the rails were also central to the union movement: “the Railway Union became the largest of the workers’ organizations prior to 1917, embracing manual, clerical and administrative staff.”62 We saw in the introduction to this book the critical role the rail workers played in the events of that revolution. In Trotsky’s account of the events of 1917, he points out that when General Kornilov attempted to march on Petrograd and overturn the provisional government, “the railroad workers tore up and barricaded the tracks in order to hold back Kornilov’s army.”63 Steinberg saw this through a wider lens: “As on a signal, workers, soldiers, railway men, postal officials armed themselves, occupied all danger points, cut off the military headquarters from the rest of the country and forced them to complete capitulation.”64

Without question, the label “petit-bourgeois” cannot be used for the rail workers, who quickly became the main group of workers opposed to the Bolshevik seizure of power, as Leggett tells us: “On 29 October [11 November], Vikzhel, the Menshevik-influenced All-Russian Executive Committee of the Union of Railwaymen, delivered an ultimatum demanding—under threat of a general rail strike—that all socialist parties should negotiate for the formation of a widely based coalition government.”65 These critical members of the working class did not strike, as the mental labourers did, but they did threaten a general strike, with the same demand as their white-collar counterparts—for a multiparty, as opposed to one-party, state. Theirs was a force that the Bolsheviks could not ignore. Vikzhel mediated talks in order to try and transition toward a multiparty state. Leggett provides some details:

Under threat of a strike that would halt the delivery of food to Petrograd, Vikzhel demanded the creation of a democratic coalition government (often called in those days a homogenous socialist government) that ranged from the Popular Socialists to the Bolsheviks. Martov was not only the soul of this undertaking but actually extracted an agreement to hold talks from the Central Committee of the RSDLP (Unified), which up to that point had been denying that any agreement with the Bolsheviks was even feasible.66

The response from the Bolsheviks was to split the union. Unable to win a majority at the Railwaymen’s Congress, Bolshevik rail workers divided from Vikzhel and formed “a new Bolshevik-controlled executive body, Vikzhedor, composed from the unsuccessful minority at the Railwaymen’s Congress.” The job of supervising the railways was given to this new body. Economically, it was a disaster, resulting in what Pethybridge calls “chaos on the railways.”67 Politically, however, it was a success, creating a lever for the Bolsheviks among the rail workers that was capable of deflecting their threat.

Steve Smith argues that “most groups of workers—with the exception of certain ‘labor aristocrats’ and white-collar workers” supported the Bolshevik seizure of power.68 “Labor aristocrats” presumably refers to the rail workers, and “white-collar workers” to the public-sector strikers. Perhaps this is an adequate characterization of these big events—this class struggle against Bolshevism of late 1917 and early 1918. Perhaps, however, we need to say more. Perhaps this working-class opposition to Bolshevism can be seen as the attempt to reassert workers’ agency over a revolution that had taken an increasingly substitutionist turn. Perhaps this was the attempt of the workers at the point of production to put their stamp on a revolution that had been initiated by the “temporary new class” described by Martov and Abramovitch, and that was increasingly under the control of the Cheka and other institutions of terror emanating from the minoritarian Bolsheviks.

There is a compelling logic to this latter interpretation, especially when we examine working-class support—or lack thereof—for Bolshevik rule in the subsequent years and months. Grégoire (Grigorii) Aronson describes the process of weakening support for the Bolsheviks within the working class:

The October Revolution was barely a month and a half old, when large masses no longer believed the slogans and promises of the Bolsheviks. Any sympathy for them was gone, and the benevolent neutrality of the previous weeks gave way to growing opposition. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (and local government bodies), in early January 1918, had almost everywhere the effect of estranging the mass of workers from the Bolsheviks and changing their attitude towards them. After the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, the convening of the Constituent Assembly became a popular slogan. The need for a democratic state authority qualified to speak for the whole country became increasingly felt. And in the working class areas, sympathy for the Mensheviks and SRs, previously in decline, began to revive.69

The Constituent Assembly has been referred to periodically throughout this book. The convening of such an assembly had been a demand of the anti-tsarist movement for a generation—to gather democratically elected representatives from every region of the empire, to formally construct a new political order, and to address and try to solve the great problems of that empire, in particular the agrarian or land question. The election happened in November 1917, just three weeks after the Bolsheviks seized power. The assembly held one session on 5 (18) January, but was dispersed by armed sailors and never allowed to meet again. Oliver Radkey is the indispensable source for any study of this assembly. He argues that: “The election to the Constituent Assembly has two outstanding features: a uniqueness without parallel in the fortunes of other great peoples, and a death that makes it all but impossible to reassemble its shattered fragments.”70 To the extent that it is possible, Radkey has reassembled those fragments. Table 1 provides a summary of his key findings.

NOTE: Percentages do not add up to 100 because there were many smaller categories of parties that are not included in this table.

SOURCE: Compiled from statistics available in Oliver Henry Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917, 148–60.

No party won a majority in the election. The Social-Revolutionaries received the greatest share of the vote (38.6 percent), but they put forward their lists of candidates before that party divided and the Left Social-Revolutionaries (Left SRs) emerged as a separate party. It is impossible to tell what portion of the overall SR vote would have gone to the Left SRs. Based on Radkey’s research, I have made a very rough approximation for areas we know were Left SR strongholds, thus reducing the SR totals to 34.2 percent. Still, this certainly overstates SR support and understates Left SR support. The Bolsheviks came second, with 23.9 percent.

As important as the overall totals are the votes by region. In the two great urban centres of the Russian empire, St. Petersburg and Moscow, the Bolsheviks were dominant, winning close to half the vote. Their big rival in these cities was the liberal party—the Constitutional Democrats, or Kadets—which captured one-third of the vote. In the other industrial areas of the country, the Bolsheviks were similarly dominant, and the Kadets a non-factor. The sailors in the fleet voted 45.9 percent for the Bolsheviks, and the peasants-in-uniform on the northern and western fronts gave the Bolsheviks an astonishing 61.9 percent support. Soldiers on fronts further away from urban and industrial Russia backed the Social-Revolutionaries. The SR was also overwhelmingly dominant in the Russian peasant villages, outpolling the Bolsheviks 52.6 percent to 17.6 percent.

The non-Russian parts of the empire require separate treatment. Two of them—the areas that are today Belarus and the Baltic states—strongly supported the Bolsheviks. But in two others—today, Transcaucasus and Ukraine—Bolshevik support was risible: 4.6 percent and 10.6 percent, respectively. In Transcaucasus, of which Georgia is a part, national parties classified as “Turko-Tatar” by Radkey won 24.3 percent of the vote, and the Mensheviks—hegemonic among Georgian-speaking people—polled 30.2 percent.

Any democratic government to emerge from this complex election would have had to take the form of a coalition. Could the Bolsheviks have positioned themselves at the centre of such a coalition? Certainly, a portion of the SR vote would have been willing to participate—that portion that was, in essence, Left SR, a party whose program was almost identical to the Bolsheviks. In table 1, I have identified 4.4 percent of the vote as going to the Left SR. That figure is based as much on guesswork as on statistical analysis and without question underestimates the Left SR’s real support, which was certainly far higher. And, interestingly, the very large bloc of votes that went to nationalist parties in Ukraine cannot, by any means, be written off as “bourgeois nationalist.” In at least three places—Poltava, Kharkiv, and Kherson—the Ukrainian Social-Revolutionaries mounted a joint list with the Bolsheviks’ closest allies—the Left SRs—and these joint lists polled well over one million votes.71 In other words, a whole section of the Ukrainian nationalist vote should, in theory, have been amenable to coalition with the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs. It would, of course, have required a staunch defence of Ukraine’s national rights—something that, as we have seen, was not to characterize Bolshevik rule. It might, however, have led to an unfolding of different Russia–Ukraine relations than the appalling near genocide and artificially produced famine whose story was outlined in the introduction to this book.

In any case, coalition was not the road chosen. The Bolsheviks argued that the vote was illegitimate because its candidates were selected before the overthrow of the provisional government and before the emergence of the Left Social-Revolutionaries as a separate party. Rosa Luxemburg, from her prison cell, puzzled over why “such clever people as Lenin and Trotsky” didn’t pursue a different path:

Since the Constituent Assembly was elected long before the decisive turning point, the October Revolution, and its composition reflected the picture of the vanished past and not of the new state of affairs, then it follows automatically that the outgrown and therefore still-born Constituent Assembly should have been annulled, and without delay, new elections to a new Constituent Assembly should have been arranged.72

No new elections were called, however, and the assembly was forcibly suppressed. The manner in which it was suppressed became itself a factor in working-class opposition to the Bolsheviks. A demonstration of some thousands, “workers with banners, office workers, and intellectuals,” marched to welcome the delegates to the Constituent Assembly, only to be fired upon by soldiers. The official death toll from this incident was twenty-one.73 Inna Rakitnikov, in a report on the demonstration prepared for the International Socialist Bureau, said: “On all the streets leading to the palace, groups of Red Guards had been established; they received the order, ‘Not to spare the cartridges.’ On that day at Petrograd there were one hundred killed and wounded.”74

When the assembly finally did convene, the Bolsheviks were in a distinct minority, and, as Chamberlin writes, “the soldiers and sailors in the galleries were the deciding force,” interrupting speeches from other parties “with hoots, jeers and hostile interjections.”75 Until stopped by Lenin, “impatient sailors in the gallery amused themselves by aiming their guns” at the head of SR leader Viktor Chernov.76 In the wee hours of the morning, after just one sitting, the assembly was dispersed, never to reconvene. Ironically, it was sailors from Kronstadt—the same Kronstadt that three years later became iconic as the last stand against one-party Bolshevik rule—who played a key role in dispersing the assembly. According to Israel Getzler, six hundred Kronstadt sailors were dispatched to be present when the assembly met. Kronstadt veteran Pavel Dybenko, who, as we earlier saw, was implicated in the assassination of the Kadet ministers, spoke for the sailors at the assembly. Another leader from Kronstadt, Fiodor Raskolnikov, led the walkout by the Bolshevik delegates. And it fell to Kronstadt sailor Anatolii Zhelezniakov to order the Assembly members to get out “because the guards are tired.”77

Contrary to some reports, this dispersal of the assembly by armed soldiers, and the violence that preceded it, did not go unnoticed. William Rosenberg writes of a “major outbreak of worker protest in Petrograd…. Thousands had gathered at the Obukhov works in the southeastern district of the city and at nearby plants in the Nevskii district, including the important Aleksandrovsk locomotive works. There were also protests at several plants in the Vyborg district, and at the Trubochnyi works on Vasil’evskii Island.”78

Rosenberg tells us how this working-class opposition to Bolshevism took organizational form:

It is largely in this context that one needs to understand the emergence of the Conference of Factory and Plant Representatives as a center of worker dissidence. In mid-January [1918] a meeting described in the press as a “Workers’ Conference of the Union to Defend the Constituent Assembly” took place in Petrograd, organized in the main, apparently, by self-described “Right” Mensheviks disaffected from their Central Committee over the question of cooperation with the Bolsheviks. They were determined to build a new, representative movement “from below,” shedding formal party affiliations. Workers from a number of plants soon joined them in forming the conference as a broad-based assembly, hoping among other things to counter what one observer lamented as the Petrograd workers’ new “passivity and indifference.” The first “extraordinary” meeting of the conference convened in Petrograd on March 13 in the midst of new protests over the evacuation, which occurred most intensively just before Brest Litovsk, when it seemed the city might fall under German control.79

This working-class opposition also took political form. Vladimir Brovkin says that: “The Menshevik platform—which insisted that the unions must be independent from the employer, be it a ‘workers’ state’ or a private entrepreneur; that the soviets had to remain what they had been in 1917: workers’ political organizations and not agencies to run municipal services—was gaining wide popular support.”80

Finally, the working-class opposition took the form of direct action—strikes, demonstrations, and campaigns to take control of local soviets. The response from the Bolsheviks was increased repression. “In 1918,” writes Brovkin, “a wave of general strikes rolled across European Russia.”

General strikes took place in Tula, Nizhnii Novgorod, Kaluga, Tver’, Iaroslavl’, and other cities. The Bolsheviks arrested strike committees, imposed curfews, and declared a state of emergency. Violent clashes took place between the Cheka and the workers. The general pattern in the escalation of conflict between the Bolsheviks and the workers repeated itself over and over: the workers, angered by the Bolsheviks’ disbanding of the newly elected soviet, where the opposition had won, or by the postponement of elections, resorted to strikes and protest marches. The Bolsheviks responded with arrests and shootings, which in turn led to general strikes and uprisings, and on the part of the Bolsheviks to mass arrests, the complete shutdown of the opposition press, and terror by August 1918.81

Working-class anger at the Bolsheviks coincided with growing peasant discontent:

By June [1918] the peasants, who in October had welcomed the redivision of land, were angered by grain requisitioning. The army had disintegrated, and the soldiers, formerly the backbone of Bolshevik support, had become peasants, bagmen on the roads, and unemployed—groups not friendly to the Bolsheviks. Even the sailors, whose intervention into politics had been decisive for the Bolshevik victory in October, had begun to turn against the Bolsheviks. This was the beginning of a long road that was to lead to the sailors’ revolts in 1919 and Kronstadt in 1921.82

The story of the great Kronstadt revolt of 1921 has been told eloquently elsewhere.83 It was the culmination of mass peasant and workers’ movements against Bolshevik policies. Orlando Figes documents the great peasant uprising against forced requisitioning, an uprising centred in Tambov, which began in August 1920 and was not finally suppressed until the summer of 1921. In Tambov and elsewhere, “much of the rural state infrastructure was swept aside by a huge tidal wave of peasant anger and destruction.”84 Jonathan Aves puts the uprising in Kronstadt in the context of a working-class uprising in Petrograd that was rooted in deep disaffection with Bolshevik rule. “By the end of 1920,” writes Aves, “a mood of extreme hostility amongst workers to the Communist Party dictatorship was developing.” This hostility was well-known to the leadership of the party. The Workers’ Opposition had proposed that a Congress of Producers should run the economy; Zinoviev, in March 1921, suggested that if such a plan went forward, “the Communist Party would receive only one per cent of the delegates.”85

The workers’ protests in Petrograd in the run-up to the Kronstadt rebellion have often been characterized as a “go slow,” or volynka, movement. But Aves maintains that “the industrial unrest of February-March 1921” needs to be seen as “a strike movement,” and that “the decision to abandon the policy of grain requisitioning was first made public” in response not to the Kronstadt rebellion but to this movement.86 However we evaluate these events, the fact of massive subaltern unrest against the Bolsheviks seems undeniable. The repression against the Kronstadt rebels was fierce. And while economic concessions were made (in particular, abandoning war communism and allowing free trade in grain), they were accompanied by a harsh political clampdown, “what Martov denounced as … ‘purely economic concessions without a change in the political order.’”87 Israel Getzler’s judgment is harsh. The suppression of Kronstadt, he says, “marked a turning point, if not the terminal point, in the history of the Russian revolution. Lenin’s response blocked what was still left of the revolution’s political open-endedness, completed the formation of the highly centralized and bureaucratized single-party dictatorship, and put Russia firmly on the road to Stalinism.”88 By 1921, the new state carved out of the old Russian empire bore no resemblance to that envisaged by any of the participants in the 1917 revolution. “Barbarous methods” had not proved fruitful in achieving any of the ends imagined by that generation.

Their Ethics and Ours

The question of ethics—of interrogating the relationship between ends and means—is deeply related to the tension between self-emancipation and substitutionism. Put another way, the constant evacuation of self-emancipation from the criteria by which political means are selected, and the resulting drift into substitutionist methods, has a clear ethical or moral dimension, on exactly the same plane as an “end justifies means” ethic. Self-emancipation is a means to an end—but for the Machiavellian, it is only one of many possible means. If that end can be achieved through other means, however unethical, so be it.

Unless of course, the ends we achieve are completely shaped by the means we employ. In fact, this is almost self-evident common sense. It takes a sophisticated theorist to make the opposite case. One who made the attempt was Leon Trotsky. His oft-cited Their Morals and Ours provides a coherent and digestible summary of what he saw as a historical-materialist approach to ethics. He accepts the charge, levelled at the Bolsheviks, that they saw the means employed as justified by the ends achieved. He denies, however, that this involved an expulsion of ethics from the question of political activity:

A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in turn needs to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of humanity over nature and to the abolition of the power of one person over another.89

Rather than being sophisticated, this is just sophistry. Specifically, it is not clear at what point we would identify the “historical interests of the proletariat” as being served by the actions taken during the revolution. Their historical interests were certainly not served by mass internment in the Gulag. They were also not served by the mass depopulation of Leningrad in 1934 and 1935, nor by the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. The historical interests of the German proletariat in 1921 were ill-served by the instrument created by the Russian Revolution, the Communist International. More generally, Trotsky’s claim that actions in the present can be ethically justified by results that make themselves visible only in the future perhaps provides a “rear-view mirror” standard for historians by which we can assess the justness of means employed, but it provides very little help for assessing actions in the present. But surely the very reason we have a field of study called “ethics” is because we realize that even if understanding is always retrospective, that is of little help when we peer into the future and try to assess what actions to take now. The Owl of Minerva and the rear-view mirror will do when we are writing our memoirs, but not when we are contemplating party or state policy.

Put it this way—we do not and cannot know the long-term, or even immediate term, consequences of our actions. The very nature of ethics is to provide guidance as to what actions to take in the present, precisely when we are not aware of how things will work out in the future. This dilemma can only be resolved by resorting to a deus ex machina—displacing one’s own assessment of future possibilities to a far-seeing, omnipotent being. But whether this displacement is to an oracle, as in ancient times, or to a party or party leader in the modern era, it is a solution to the ethical dilemma in form only and is unsatisfying to any with an interest in self-determination and self-emancipation.

For the One Who Thinks Differently

In chapter 8, we saw that Souvarine and Trotsky assessed the evolution of the Russian Revolution within two key frameworks: the control of the surplus and the dynamics essential to a hierarchical political party machine. In chapter 4, we saw Martov and Abramovitch introduce another, namely, the dynamics essential to the temporary new peasant-soldier class created from the horrors of the Great War. The essence of the politics within the industrial workers’ movement on which the socialist project had been based in Marx’s time was a battle for the extension of democracy—hence the name “social democracy.” In contrast, the politics within the movement characteristic of the temporary new peasant-soldier class had, at its core, impatience with democracy and a tendency toward “direct action” through force of arms to settle disputes. This core aspect of the Martov/Abramovitch thesis enriches our ability to understand the tragic degeneration of the revolution of 1917—the move from hope to horror.

Rosa Luxemburg, in 1918, wrote a piece specifically to criticize the Bolsheviks’ forcible suppression of the Constituent Assembly:

Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of “justice” but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when “freedom” becomes a special privilege.90

Martov was one who was not afraid to “think differently”—opposing the governments of his day, opposing the leadership of his own party when it collapsed into pro-war social patriotism, opposing the Bolsheviks’ use of barbarous methods to try and achieve socialist ends. Luxemburg’s defence of “the one who thinks differently” and Martov’s historical-materialist exploration of the role of the temporary new class of peasants-in-uniform, along with the view they both shared, that ends cannot be separated from means—these can allow us to understand the big events we call the Russian Revolution.

The fact that Martov and Luxemburg are historical materialists in a classic sense is critically important. It means that we need not be restricted to “psychological factors” in explaining the Leninist distrust of self-activity and embrace of terror. It is helpful, in this regard, to return to the previously cited January 1919 program manifesto of the young German Communist Party and quote it at greater length.

During the bourgeois revolutions bloodshed, terror, and political murder were an indispensable weapon in the hands of the rising classes.

The proletarian revolution requires no terror to realize its aims. It hates and despises killing. It does not need these weapons because it does not combat individuals but institutions, because it does not enter the arena with naïve illusions whose disappointment it would seek to revenge. It is not the desperate attempt of a minority to mold the world forcibly according to its ideal, but the action of the great massive millions of the people, destined to fulfill a historic mission and to transform historical necessity into reality.91

These were some of the last published words of Luxemburg, and they remain to this day one of the best short summaries of the key self-emancipation lessons from the Russian revolutionary era.

The very framing of this excerpt from Luxemburg takes us back to a theme touched on in part 2 of this book. The Russian revolutionaries aspired to straddle two revolutionary processes: the bourgeois (or, to use more contemporary language, “modernizing”) revolution against tsarism, and the working-class socialist revolution against capitalism. Oliver Cromwell and Maximilien Robespierre both became agents of their respective country’s modernizing revolutions; both ended up being covered with the blood of victims from their own use of terror. Lenin, as a modernizing revolutionary, is in their company. We can make that historical parallel and in that sense understand what happened in the years following 1917. But doing so—putting Lenin and Trotsky at least to some extent in the same category as Cromwell and Robespierre—should serve as a warning sign should we attempt to look uncritically at these historical figures as models for contemporary, urban social movements. Clearly, the approach of Cromwell and Robespierre are of historical interest only. And this is how we should approach Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Clearly, their attempt to combine mass terror with a transition to socialism ended in abject failure—not to speak of moral degeneration on a colossal scale.

The Bolshevik Jacobins proved adept at constructing a weapon with which to raise money and build a party, and later, to overthrow the provisional government and build a new state. But Luxemburg’s point in the manifesto quoted above is the theme of this concluding chapter—what is achieved from certain actions depends very much on how those actions are carried out.

It is not a matter of indifference that making a fetish of professional staff as the core of a party, with all that implies, created a belief in hierarchy inside the Bolshevik Party. That approach to party-building reflected a conspiratorial approach to politics and a distrust of openness that would repeatedly be an obstacle to the forward movement of the Left. The distrust of the soviets in 1905 is a clear example of this. It was not the staff-driven Bolsheviks who were able to respond in a positive manner, but rather the scholar-activists (or journalist/scholar/organizers) in and around the Mensheviks. The “money question” that flowed from the staff model intersected with the emphasis on hierarchy to create the catastrophe of the period of expropriations, almost wrecking the party in the process. All of this generated a “bureaucratic type,” of which Stalin was the epitome. He could not consolidate his rule until the entire generation with which he had grown up had been eliminated. However, his political physiognomy was shaped by the particularly negative features of that generation’s experience.

Part 1 of this book suggested that to get to the heart of that experience, we have to let ourselves listen to the experience of workers’ struggles that, at key moments, have defined the future of post-revolutionary Russia. Part 2 suggested that we have to put aside anti-Menshevik prejudices and read and study the great contributions of Martov and Abramovitch. Part 3 suggested that, throughout this whole process, we cannot tolerate either a casual or a systematic anti-intellectualism that puts a wall of prejudice and shunning between ourselves and the subjects of our research—an anti-intellectualism into which Lenin descended after his divide from the Mensheviks in 1903. We have to let ourselves read Trotsky’s last book and try to let his intellectual journey speak to us on its own terms. We have to read Solzhenitsyn—perhaps disagree with him politically, but listen to his story of zek resistance to the hell of the Gulag. And we have to fully abandon a standpoint of reverence in our approach to Lenin—and for that matter, to all individuals associated with the Russian experience—and let history speak to us dispassionately and without filters of preconception. If we do so, we can see, for instance, the debates inside the Comintern as real debates reflecting real tensions between a substitutionist politics (which, if attempted in the twenty-first century, would end as badly as they did in the twentieth) and a politics of self-emancipation. In the end, it is the latter that is the only meaningful approach to social progress in this or any generation.