Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The Soviet leadership tried to make light of its difficulties. The Constituent Assembly election took place in late November and resulted in defeat for the Bolsheviks, who gained less than a quarter of the votes. Lenin had wanted to call off the election rather than risk this outcome, but his advice was rejected because he and his comrades had made great play of being the only party that would convoke the Assembly. The Bolsheviks would have done better if the electoral lists had been drawn up after the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries split organizationally from the rest of their party and entered Sovnarkom. In fact no single party achieved an absolute majority. But the rump of the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries emerged with easily the biggest number of seats. When the Constituent Assembly met on 18 January 1918, the Socialist-Revolutionaries took control. Sovnarkom reacted by ordering closure of the proceedings a day later, and Red Guards enforced Lenin’s orders. Lacking the troops to resist, the Socialist-Revolutionary leaders moved off to their political stronghold in the Volga region. In the provincial capital Samara they established the government they had wanted to create in Petrograd. Its name was the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly, or Komuch in its Russian acronym. Komuch resolved to take power back from Sovnarkom by armed force.

The Bolsheviks remained calm about this state of affairs even though it was bound to lead to civil war. They had made their revolution. They could not know how long they would last in power. They and their families were aware that danger could be in store for them in Petrograd. Bolshevik leaders joked that they kept their suitcases packed for fear that they might suddenly have to flee. But they were determined to fight to the end for the revolutionary power they had established.

The Bolshevik leaders saw themselves instead as the advance guard of Marxist science and revolutionary progress — they hated being thought of as mere politicians. Abroad, in the months before their propaganda reached foreign far-left socialists, they remained something of a mystery; and unsympathetic newspapers — as the vast majority were in the West — depicted them as a gang of vandals who had exploited the unusual circumstances of Russia’s wartime travail. The Russian adversaries of Bolshevism generally offered the same analysis. The few among them who accepted that Lenin and Trotsky were bright and intelligent nonetheless insisted that they had taken leave of their senses. The general prediction was that Bolshevik rule would be ephemeral. No one thought they stood much chance of holding on to power. Although the Bolsheviks themselves shared the suspicion that their days in government might be numbered, they still believed that their example would be followed elsewhere even if they went down to defeat. They were willing to lay down their lives in the revolutionary cause, convinced that history was on their side — and it was about to be shown that only those observers who took account of the communist mental universe could properly plan ways to counteract it.

Nikolai Bukharin, Bolshevik Central Committee member and young philosopher of communism, offered an ecstatic hymn to the glorious communist future:

The human race is not broken up into warring camps: it is united here by common work and the common struggle with the external forces of nature. Border posts are dug out. Individual fatherlands are eliminated. All humanity without national distinctions is bound together in all its parts and organized into one single whole. Here all the peoples are one great friendly working family. 1

Like the Old Testament prophet Isaiah who had rhapsodized about the wolf dwelling with the lamb and the leopard lying down with the kid, Bukharin clearly felt that a great and perfect epoch lay ahead for humankind.

Communist thinkers swaddled their ideas in global clothing. They believed that the Great War was no accident of dynastic rivalries or personal misjudgements. The slaughterhouse of 1914 was the result of economic development reaching a level where profits were insecure without conquest of new foreign markets. European states had scrambled to colonize Africa and Asia in the last years of the nineteenth century. Rising powers like Germany had arrived too late to seize what they thought they deserved, and their governments were under pressure by banks and industries to adopt a belligerent policy towards the established empires. Capitalist economic development required the taking of gambles with assets and elbowing competitors aside. Cabinets had to satisfy the demands of their most powerful businessmen. ‘Finance capitalism’ was the dominant force in the world economy, a case powerfully made by the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding in his 1910 book Finance Capital . Bolsheviks had welcomed the book as scientific proof that capitalism had reached its highest possible stage of development. Economic crises and world wars would occur until such time as socialism took control. It did not matter to the communists in Russia that Hilferding did not share their ideas on violent revolution and dictatorship. They praised his economics while rejecting his politics.

They spat out contemporary European socialism in disgust. They honoured Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and continued to subscribe to the usefulness of earlier writings by Georgi Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky. But they believed that Plekhanov and Kautsky had turned traitors to Europe’s labour movement by their actions since 1914. Plekhanov had supported the Russian military effort and Kautsky had failed to call for Germany’s defeat. Unconditional opposition to the war was shared by the entire Bolshevik leadership.

Bolsheviks marked out their position by calling themselves communists and denouncing most other socialists as ‘social-traitors’ while claiming that they were the only true socialists. Which were they? Communists or socialists? Lenin tried to clear up the confusion in The State and Revolution , which he wrote in 1917 and published the following year. He had no time for any kind of socialism other than Marxism. He also insisted that Marxists for decades had misinterpreted Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and allowed their essential ideas to fall into abeyance. Genuine Marxism according to Lenin was founded on the need for violent revolution and a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ so that capitalism might be supplanted. The dictatorial structure would only be temporary. It would establish a socialist order enshrining the principle of ‘an equal amount of products for an equal amount of labour’. As support grew throughout society, the reliance on force would steadily decrease. A second stage would then begin that would be the ultimate stage in human history: communism. No compulsion at all would be required in communist society. There would be no army, no bureaucracy and no state. Social classes would disappear. Life would proceed on lines set by the people of the entire world with the common good in mind. Although Lenin was not someone who often displayed his poetic side, he looked forward keenly to a time when the universal principle would be ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.

Lenin pinned his arguments to the coat-tails of Marx and Engels. If he could prove to his own satisfaction that his was the correct interpretation of Marxist doctrine, that was quite enough for him. Trotsky and Bukharin were uncomfortable about this. Bukharin felt it important to subject the recent technological and social changes in contemporary capitalism to close scrutiny. Witnessing the latest profusion of inventions, he insisted that well-being and stability would remain out of reach for most people until after a socialist revolution. Trotsky too disdained to hark back endlessly to the founders of Marxism. His forte was to highlight the unfettered profiteering and bottomless human misery brought about by the war.