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

This was a vision very different from the popular, plant-level self-management of the Factory Committees, rooted in democratic decision-making in the workplace. It had nothing in common with the workers’control of industry seen in Italy in 1922 or Spain in 1936. It was an accountant’s vision of socialism. As Maurice Brinton pointed out, “Nowhere in Lenin’s writings is workers’ control ever equated with fundamental decision-making (i.e. with the initiation of decisions) relating to production”. 8

Lenin buried his ideas on the limitations of workers’control in the sub-sections of the Decree, which made clear that any decisions by Factory Committees could be “annulled by trade unions and congresses”, and that elected delegates from enterprises “of importance to the State” were “answerable to the State for the maintenance of the strictest order and discipline and the protection of property”. As “enterprises of importance to the State” were defined as those engaged in defence work or producing articles necessary for the existence of the population, this meant that virtually every enterprise, under workers’control or not, was now answerable to the state. And the state was run by Sovnarcom.

The conflict of interest was demonstrated almost immediately. On 28th November the Moscow Printers Union took strike action after Sovnarcom closed the liberal newspaper Russkoe Slovo and the new owner, the Moscow Soviet, ordered the printers to go home. The printers struck in protest, whereupon the union leadership persuaded the Soviet to employ the printers to print the Soviet’s newspaper. However, the Soviet failed to pay the workers, who went on strike again. The Soviet’s reaction to this was to order Red Guards to occupy the print shop and dismiss the 1,500 printers, who were labeled “counter-revolutionary” for taking part in a “political strike”. In the next round of internal union elections in early 1918, the printers turned heavily against the Bolsheviks and elected Mensheviks to head the union. 9

These were early rumblings. Those with a vested interest in the decrees (e.g. peasants who had seized land, workers on Factory Committees, and nationalists declaring independence from the Empire) took them literally, as the law or framework of law of the future socialist society. They were not told at the time what Lenin admitted to the Eighth Congress of the party in March 1919. “Let us assume that Decrees contain much that is useless”, he said, “much that in practice cannot be put into effect; but they contain much material for practical action, and the purpose of a decree is to teach practical steps to the hundreds, thousands and millions of people who heed the voice of the Soviet Government”.

In some instances, such as the abolition of the judiciary and the existing marriage and divorce laws, instituting civil marriage and the separation of church and state, the effects were real and immediate. In other areas the illusion of massive, revolutionary change was fostered more by the removal of existing codes and laws than by their replacement. Shortly after October the new government simply abolished the entire Criminal Code of the Russian Empire, which automatically de-criminalised many actions and lifestyles that had been illegal before, such as homosexuality. But this was not the same as approving them.

Despite later claims that the Bolsheviks had a principled support for same-sex relationships there is no evidence to support this. In contrast to the German SPD, which had long opposed Imperial Germany’s anti-gay Paragraph 175 law and whose most “reformist” leader Eduard Bernstein publicly defended Oscar Wilde in the pages of Neue Zeit , they had no policy on the matter at all. There were no “out” gay men or lesbians amongst the Bolshevik leadership, although given the social mores of the time that would have been unusual. Even Alexandra Kollontai did not mention the subject in her seminal 1921 essay “Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle”. As with workers’ control and national self-determination, when Lenin proclaimed on 25th October “We shall now proceed to build, on the space cleared of historical rubbish, the airy, towering edifice of socialist society”, he and his party underestimated the amount of historical rubbish they themselves brought with them.

A Decree of 2nd November abolished the five legal “estates” of citizenship granted under Tsarism and created one single legal category of citizen. But as Bolshevik doctrine decreed that equality of citizenship could only occur in a classless society, this was meaningless. Post-October Russia was not a classless society. According to its new government it was passing through a period in which class power–defined as the power of the working class expressed through the Soviets–was to be used to eradicate the hitherto dominant class, i.e. the bourgeoisie. The constitution of the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics (RSFSR), adopted in late 1918, specifically stated: “In the general interest of the working class the RSFSR deprives individuals or separate groups of any privileges which may be used by them to the detriment of the socialist revolution”. 10The constitution was clear that “the franchise ceases to be a right and is transformed into a social function of the electors”. As a result, whole categories of people–i.e. private-sector businessmen, those who employed others, those who lived on unearned income, monks and priests–were excluded.

One could argue that this simply reversed centuries of similar exclusion during which an indifferent ruling class denied working people any say in their destiny. The Bolsheviks did argue this and asserted that “Soviet democracy” was superior to the formal yet politically cosmetic democracy of bourgeois societies (most of which still excluded whole categories of working men and nearly all women). Other socialists like Martov pointed out that the flipside of oppression was still oppression and that granting Sovnarcom the power to remove civic and legal rights from “individuals and separate groups” of whom it disapproved was a recipe for state tyranny and self-perpetuating one-party rule.

For all their careful and progressive verbiage, the new constitution, Code of Law and Revolutionary Tribunals were essentially fronts for state power wielded by violent men. Lenin, seldom a hypocrite, was honest enough to admit this. “The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”, he wrote in 1918, “is power unrestricted by any law”. In 1920 he was confident enough to elaborate and explain that “the scientific concept of dictatorship means nothing else but this–power without limits, resting directly upon force, restrained by no law, absolutely unrestricted by rules”. 11This was both naïve and dangerous. Not only was the concept not remotely “scientific”, but its essence–power without limits, unrestricted by rules–was the perfect seedbed for Stalinism.

On 29th October the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Union of Railwaymen, known as the Vikzhel, offered to host talks to create what Rabinowitch described as “an all-inclusive, homogeneous socialist government from the Bolsheviks on the extreme left to the popular socialists on the right”. 12Vikzhel threatened to call a national strike unless the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks/SRs/Trudoviks halted what it called a “fratricidal war”. The majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee were keen to participate in these talks. With Lenin and Trotsky busy elsewhere the CC unanimously declared that it wished to broaden the composition of Sovnarcom to include all Soviet parties, and that Sovnarcom itself be answerable to the Central Executive of the All-Russia Soviet Congress. On that basis talks began immediately with the other socialist parties.