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

This was not the view of Russian, Polish, Latvian or Ukrainian peasants. The peasants of 1917, once fully engaged and politically active, displayed a similar level of organised self-activity as the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico 85 years later. After the fall of the Tsar’s government, peasant radicals took over the Volost agrarian committees set up by the Provisional Government to maintain order in the absence of the police and army. They then used them as vehicles to approve peasant seizures of landed estates. After February some landowners, anticipating the seizures, parceled up their holdings into smaller allotments to avoid expropriation. Some sold these to foreign owners or untraceable cartels. Others left their estates to grow fallow and then sold them to the more affluent Kulaks , i.e. richer peasants who bought up and combined small holdings and then employed poorer peasants to work them.

The Kulaks were a diffuse class, or subset of a class, whose social status was and remains a matter of enormous controversy. Some were simply peasants who made a profit from their smallholding and rose above their peers in the village. A few became large farmers and merchants, ceasing in the process to be peasants in any meaningful sense. It was these “rich Kulaks” who saw an opportunity in the decline of the landed gentry. As Trotsky put it in his History , “Kulak speculation and landlord trickery threatened to leave nothing of the public land by the time the Constituent Assembly was convoked”. 23

The elemental desires of Russian peasants, who now seemed so close to achieving the vision of personal land ownership that had always animated them, were expressed by the “peasant poet” Pyotr Oreshin in his poem “A Flame of Gold Ablaze”, printed in the SR newspaper Delo Naroda in May 1917 24:

Oreshin, a self-educated itinerant worker-peasant and neopopulist, was inclined to the SRs but knew in his bones that the peasants would support anyone who promised them the land they craved. He would continue to advocate for peasant culture and peasant aspirations until his execution in 1938 in the Great Terror.

Peasant Soviets and temporary land communes now sprung up throughout the country, culminating in the First All-Russian Peasant Assembly on 4th-25th May, whose Executive was dominated by the SRs. Although supportive of land redistribution, SR leaders found themselves in a similar dilemma to the Mensheviks. With Chernov and Kerensky serving as ministers in Lvov’s second coalition government, the SR party was obliged to support the government’s slower approach to rural reform, i.e. to await the convocation of the Constituent Assembly (elections to which the SRs were likely to win) and then legislate for a new national settlement on land ownership. But the peasants were not waiting. Therefore, the SR-led Assembly sanctioned actions already underway, such as the Kazan Assembly’s unilateral announcement that it authorised the transfer of all land in its region to local peasant committees.

Other regional assemblies followed suit. They expected SR support, but the party’s leaders in government were not entirely free agents. Agriculture Minister Chernov drafted a governmental decree forbidding land sales, but the Trudovik Minister of Justice Pereverzev issued instructions to local authorities that land sales should not be prevented. Bolshevik policy on land redistribution was equally incoherent, and would remain so, but in the months before October, Lenin attempted to edge it towards endorsement of peasant land seizures. In theory, as good socialists, the Bolsheviks only supported Volosts who wished to pool their land into collective farms but Lenin–keen to attract peasant support for a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry–produced a policy of support for land seizures as long as they were “organised”.

John L.H. Keep’s essential work on mass mobilization during 1917-18 concluded, “this ambiguous document gave activists carte blanche to commit every kind of excess, while deluding party leaders (Lenin included) as to the ease to which the agrarian movement could be directed into ideologically acceptable channels”. 25While this was useful in stoking a further stage of the revolution, in the long run it presented enormous obstacles to the centralised state socialism Lenin ultimately wished to introduce. When Lenin addressed the Assembly he was not as well received as SR leaders who had spoken for the peasants since 1901. But the Menshevik historian Sukhanov sensed that some poorer peasant delegates sympathised when he declared “If you wait until the law is written, and do not yourself develop revolutionary energy, you will get neither law nor land”. 26

The land seizures were the rural equivalent of the factory occupations convulsing Russian industry. In the same manner that the Volosts took unilateral action to redistribute large landed estates, the Factory Committees did not wait for authorisation by the Provisional Government or from the socialist parties. With the exception of the anarchists and some more imaginative socialists, the Russian left, while offering rhetorical support to the Factory Committees, regarded them with suspicion. On 23rd April Lenin wrote:

Such measures as the nationalisation of the land and of the banks and syndicates of capitalists, or at least the immediate establishment of the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies over them (measures which do not in any way imply the ‘introduction of socialism’) must be absolutely insisted on and whenever possible introduced by revolutionary means.

However he made clear he saw this as a “prelude to nationalization”. 27Under fierce attack for his call in the April Theses to expand the revolution from a liberal-democratic phase to a socialist one, few noticed that his emphasis on state-led socialisation was more akin to an extreme version of Russian Fabianism than the decentralised workers’ control advocated by the Factory Committees.

Like the “Recovered Factories” of Argentina in 2001-03, the Russian Factory Committees of 1917 arose from the failure of capitalist owners to discharge their responsibilities. In 2001 the neoliberal Argentinean economy collapsed, resulting in massive debt, fiscal austerity, cuts to public services and mass privatisation. With half the country driven below the poverty line the Argentine working class took to the streets, setting up roadblocks to commandeer food and fuel deliveries. On December 19th-20th, 2001 a popular insurrection brought down the government of President de la Rua and prevented the imposition of an IMF Structural Adjustment Programme.

From here grew the Fabricas Recuperados –the Recovered Factories–which saw about 200 Argentine companies occupied and run by their workforce as workers’ cooperatives. Not all were factories–the most prominent examples being the Hotel Bauen in Buenos Aires and the transport company Transportes del Oeste. Initially, most worker takeovers were simply to ensure that owners could not liquidate assets before filing for bankruptcy to avoid paying back salaries and redundancy, but over time they grew from a tactic to safeguard jobs into a system of self-management.

The “taken” factories were not utopian havens. They had little capital. The technology left to them was usually second-rate. Their relationship with the public sector was unclear. Many occupied factories, such as Brukman and Zanon, asked for nationalisation under workers’ control, a formulation the government rejected on the same grounds that the post-October Bolshevik government would reject it, i.e. lack of central government control.