John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

The anger and incomprehension with which Bolshevik leaders greeted the Workers’ Opposition, Menshevik trade unionists and non-party workers derived from their heroic-simplistic conception of an “advanced” or “conscious” worker. As Sheila Fitzpatrick astutely observed, “a ‘conscious’ worker was a worker who fitted the intellectuals’ idea of what a worker ought to be”, 13and Bolshevism, for all its rhetoric, was led by intellectuals. For Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin the disappearance by 1921 of conscious or advanced workers–all, apparently, either killed or promoted–meant there was no longer a Russian working class worth speaking of. But as Koenker’s investigations suggest, its class consciousness “did not so much disappear as migrate from the workplace to the home, the neighborhood, and such proliferating cultural facilities as libraries, schools, and the theatre”. 14

This was real class consciousness, of the kind examined by E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class , a work that valorised the life experience of a young proletariat at the beginning of the 19th century which–like its Russian counterpart one hundred years later–did not slot neatly into Marxist theoretical categories. In a later work Thompson dismissed these categories, observing “Classes do not exist as separate entities”. Class, he suggested, is a relationship, a process, a mutual inter-action within specific social circumstances. In that sense, “Class eventuates as men and women live their productive relations… and as they handle these experiences in cultural ways” 15. The class consciousness of the Russian working class of 1917 to 1930 was rooted in the productive relations of a revolution gone wrong. It lived and breathed in a world of tenements, street vendors, deserters, black markets and pubs as much as Rosta Windows, Red Guards and Soviets. It resisted being turned into Soviet marble. In 1926 the Bolshevik economist Preobrazhenski noted of the party’s failed attempts to divert off-duty workers, especially young workers, away from the wildly popular Foxtrot craze towards politically elevating activity, “Our clubs are empty but the pubs are full”. 16

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat predictably failed, but was there ever a realistic chance of a successful democratic socialist settlement in Russia in 1917? It is not as impossible as many claim. The policies of the liberal Kadets and moderate Mensheviks of the Provisional Government were often inept and badly communicated, above all the decision to remain in the war as a form of “revolutionary defencism” against the Kaiser’s imperialism. Kerensky’s offensive of June 1917 was doomed to failure and was perhaps the major reason for the Provisional Government’s eclipse. Postponing immediate elections for a Constituent Assembly also provided the Bolsheviks with an excuse to accuse the government of soft-peddling on democracy and allowed the reactionary right led by Kornilov time to mobilise. Caught in between, the Kadets and Mensheviks seemed paralysed.

Yet the policies of the Bolsheviks after October 1917 emphasised what intractable problems had faced the Provisional Government. Sovnarcom’s decision in March 1918 to take any peace offered led to the loss of great swathes of vital territory and a mass rebellion on the left that was, in essence, the same revolutionary defencism assailed the year before. The closure of the Constituent Assembly after a national election in which the SRs emerged as the majority party, and the suppression of Soviets that did not return Bolshevik majorities, also put the efforts of the Kadet-Menshevik-SR alliance of 1917 in a more positive light.

The hypothetical scenario of a more inclusive and disciplined democratic left government before and after October 1917 bears examination. Had one existed from April 1917, when the conservatives departed the Provisional Government, October may never have occurred. At various moments in 1917 the SRs led by Chernov, the Menshevik-Internationalists led by Martov and the Bolshevik “centre” led by Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov and Lunacharsky almost reached agreement. After October 1917 there was a widespread feeling that the best way to safeguard the Soviet system and protect the Constituent Assembly, bodies which need not have been mutually exclusive, was to form a socialist coalition government. Most delegates at the Second Congress of Soviets voted for this. Most trade unions supported it.

To have any chance of legitimacy and longevity any democratic left government that emerged from the revolutionary process, either from the overthrow of Tsarist autocracy in February 1917 or post-October 1917, would have had to integrate and protect large parts of the social revolution that had swept Russian society. Above all it would have needed to find a compromise solution, a governance model or constitutional settlement that allowed the Soviets, urban and rural, significant control over policy. Significantly, in his one speech as President of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, Victor Chernov indicated that such a settlement was acceptable. With good will and necessary compromise it could have been reached. Had it been, the worst of the Civil War might have been avoided and some form of democracy retained.

As Russia veered from autocracy to autocracy, the political space in which a progressive democratic government could survive quickly shrunk to nothing. Not until 1927 did Trotsky advance a rounded critique of the Soviet system of the mid-1920s, and even then it was an attack on bureaucratic degeneration and lack of centralised economic planning, not a call for political pluralism. The Declaration of the United Opposition of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, in Tony Cliff’s words, “embraced the essential principles of the Opposition case for the whole period 1923-27”. 17The Declaration identified “bureaucratism”, not the political system which had produced it, as the cause of the crisis within the party. It also called for rapid industrialisation to offset what it saw as the damage inflicted on Soviet society by the NEP and the revival of the Kulaks.

In late 1927 the Opposition’s Platform, whilst it demanded “working-class democracy”, made clear that the Opposition “will fight with all our power against the idea of two parties, because the Dictatorship of the Proletariat demands at its very core a single proletarian party”. 18Stalin could live with that. Despite a few supportive rallies in the factories of Moscow and Petrograd, the Opposition was easily dispersed and Trotsky was sent into internal exile. External exile followed in 1929.

Trotsky never rejected the concept of central planning carried out on a grand scale. One of his key allies in the Opposition, the economist Evgeny Preobrazhenski, advocated a policy of “Primitive Socialist Accumulation”. He argued that capitalism in England took off during the Industrial Revolution of 1770-1830 through the rapid accumulation of surplus value and excess capital. Socialism, especially a socialism that had arisen in an economically backward country, must do the same. Because a socialist country could not (in theory) exploit the working class, the resource to drive this process had to come from the economic surplus produced by the peasants. This meant maintaining the state’s monopoly of trade and artificially fixing prices to drain resources from agriculture and concentrate them in industry. The massive Soviet industrialisation of the Five Year Plans, the first of which began in 1928, rested on this concept.

Socialist Accumulation was the antithesis of the NEP that had delivered Soviet Russia relative prosperity and stability since 1921. For that reason, the NEP’s primary advocate, Bukharin, completely opposed it and assumed that Stalin, his partner in the leadership between 1925 and 1928, did also. Between 1921 and 1926 the NEP had restored Russia’s productivity to its pre-war years. It had also spread wealth, though not equitably. The notorious “Nepmen” skimmed off a lot of it, to the anger of urban workers whose wages did not keep pace. But Bukharin, traumatised by the mass alienation of the peasantry from the regime during the Civil War, was convinced that the Soviet Union could not survive unless it accommodated the majority of its population in this way. He believed that after the enormous wounds inflicted on the social fabric of the country by the Civil War, socialism must now avoid “catastrophic programmes” and must “proceed upon an evolutionary path”. 19