Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Bolsheviks agreed that they were living in an era when the downtrodden of the earth would become its rulers. Ivan Zalkind, Trotsky’s deputy in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, put it like this:

Our revolution is a revolution belonging completely to the workers. Go to Petrograd and see the district soviets, go and see the Red Guards and you’ll notice that it’s above all a workers’ revolution. The peasants and soldiers come only in second place. The bourgeoisie doesn’t exist in this second revolution. The intellectuals who played the primordial role in 1905 today are only supernumeraries. Lenin and Trotsky are merely the spokesmen of the workers. We are currently carrying out a great experiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s no longer a revolution of the sans culottes [as in the French Revolution] but of the penniless. 2

Bukharin, too, felt sure that the communists had the world at their feet:

People in [the] communist order don’t sit on one another’s neck. Here there are no rich or parvenus, there are no bosses and subordinates; here society is not divided into classes, one of which lords it over another. But once there are no classes, this means that there are no different sorts of people (poor and rich) with one sort sharpening its teeth against another — the oppressors against the oppressed or the oppressed against the oppressors. 3

Lenin admitted that Russia’s factory workers were only a small part of society. Sensing that this infringed his theory of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, he sometimes brandished slogans such as putting power into the hands of ‘the workers and poorest peasants’. Bolshevik writers anyway made clear that the urban ‘proletariat’ did not consist only of the factory workforce. A booklet was issued about domestic servants, who were to be attracted into the revolutionary movement. So too were the unemployed. Communists announced that the days of the privileged few enjoying the ministrations of the poor were coming to an end. 4

Trotsky thought that events had validated the revolutionary strategy he had advocated since 1905. In his booklet What Next? he declared:

Throwing off the manacles of capitalist power, the revolution would become permanent , i.e. uninterrupted; it would apply state power not so as to consolidate a regime of capitalist exploitation materially but on the contrary so as to surmount it. Its definitive success along these lines would depend on the successes of the proletarian revolution in Europe. On the other hand, the Russian revolution has been capable of delivering the more powerful thrust to the revolutionary movement in the West the more decisively and bravely it breaks the resistance of its own bourgeoisie. Such was and remains the only real prospect for the further development of the revolution. 5

Was this utopian? Trotsky answered no. The true idiocy in his eyes had been the doctrines of rivals like the Mensheviks and Socialist- Revolutionaries who went into coalition with ‘capitalist ministers’. They lacked spirit and clear-sightedness; they were double-dealers. The Bolsheviks were not carrying out a ‘national’ or a ‘bourgeois’ revolution but had started an international socialist one. He declared: ‘And the twentieth century is “our fatherland in time”.’ 6Trotsky gave out the slogan: ‘Permanent revolution against permanent carnage!’ 7

Communism would soon change everything, and communists assumed that Europe was where they stood their best chance of political advance. The continent was the cockpit of world war. Surely the deaths and material privations since 1914 had perfected the conditions for the Marxist case to attract popular support. ‘European revolution’ tripped easily off Bolshevik tongues.

Russian communist ideas about Europe in the party were not those of conventional geography. The school textbooks said it stretched from Portugal to the Urals. This was not what Bolsheviks had in mind when they talked of ‘going’ to Europe despite the fact that Russia had its own large European zone. Bolshevik leader I. I. Kutuzov was to write an account of his westward journey by train from Moscow in the early 1920s. The first stage took him to Latvia. He commented that people started calling him mister rather than comrade when he crossed the frontier. He noticed how clean Riga appeared after his experience of Russian cities. Latvia was impressive enough, but when at last he reached German territory at Eidkunen, Kutuzov’s eye was caught by the almost complete absence of dirt and litter. Even the countryside of Germany was remarkable to his eyes — and all this was before he got to Berlin, a city that surpassed his every expectation in its modernity. To Kutuzov it seemed self-evident: ‘This was the beginning of Europe.’ 8And Europe in the Bolshevik imagination was one half of ‘the West’ whose other half lay across the Atlantic in North America.

Bolsheviks took it for granted that socialist revolution in Germany was the key to their survival and success in Russia. Former emigrants like Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin admired the cultural and organizational achievements of the German labour movement. Marx and Engels, the originators of Marxism, had been German. The left wing of the German Social-Democratic Party had broken away to form the Spartakusbund and, as Lenin saw it, proved that the labour movement in Germany retained the potential to effect a seizure of power and a revolutionary transformation. German workers were the flower of the European socialist movement. They were the most educated, skilled labour force in the entire continent. Their discipline at work was legendary. Their commitment to self-improvement at home and at leisure was remarkable. Most of them voted for the socialdemocrats, and the party had 633,000 members in 1909. Bolsheviks were angry when the German Social-Democratic Party’s caucus in the Reichstag voted financial credits for the war effort in mid-1914; but Lenin and his friends put the blame for this ‘betrayal’ on the party leadership. They refused to believe that Germany’s workers would tolerate this situation for ever. The Spartacists, when they obtained their opportunity, would surely prove able to pull them back to the line of revolution — and the great potential of the German proletariat would be fulfilled.

What is more, Bolsheviks were impressed by the steps taken in Germany towards centralized state regulation. Capitalists had never been more closely integrated into planning mechanisms. Trotsky in particular was intrigued by the government’s measures for bringing official order and purpose to the economy. He proposed to use this approach in order to further his revolutionary aims: ‘For the introduction of control over production and distribution the proletariat has had extremely valuable models in the West, above all in the form of Germany’s so-called “war socialism”.’ In Russia this would require the carrying out of ‘an agrarian revolution’. If state economic coordination was going to be introduced it would have to be done in a steady fashion. 9

Yuri Larin, a left-wing Marxist who joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, was equally inspired by what he read about the German situation. He noted how the state had taken food supplies into its hands and compelled agricultural producers to form unions so as to make them easier to control. Each German region and district was strictly supervised. Transport of goods beyond local borders was forbidden except with official permission. Prices were set for basic products. The entire economy was operated according to a central plan. According to Larin, Germany’s government found itself unable to avoid conceding to demands by urban and rural workers. 10Even so, the war had disrupted and lowered output. Most German people were worse off than before the fighting had started, and the effect of this was registered on socialist leaders who began to demand the forcible expropriation of agricultural land for the benefit of consumption in the cities. It was Larin’s belief that the drift of thinking towards the needs of urban residents would soon be seen in Russia too. 11As he pointed out, Germany’s workers had called for a universal compulsory system of food rationing at the outset of war. Fairness had fallen by the wayside as the propertied classes secured greater supplies than the average. The way forward in Russia as in Germany was to introduce a regime corresponding to the requirements of the people as a whole. 12