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

The centre of gravity of our struggle against the bourgeoisie is shifting to the organisation of such accounting and control. Only with this as our starting point will it be possible to determine the immediate tasks of economic and financial policy in the sphere of nationlisation of the banks, monopolisation of foreign trade, the state control of money circulation […] and the introduction of compulsory labour service.

The key problem was indiscipline and lack of order. “It is now particularly clear to us”, he wrote, “how correct is the Marxist thesis that anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are bourgeois trends, how irreconcilably opposed they are to socialism, proletarian dictatorship and communism”. On top of this, he wrote, “The Russian is a bad worker compared with people in advanced countries”, and so the productivity of labour was low. The solution was “unity of will”. Lenin considered that

the technical, economic and historical necessity of this is obvious, and all those who have thought about socialism have always regarded it as one of the conditions of socialism. But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one.

Lenin lamented that Sovnarcom was “late in introducing compulsory labour service”. He was adamant that workers demonstrate “obedience, and unquestioning obedience at that, during work to the one-man decisions of Soviet Directors, of the dictators elected or appointed by Soviet institutions, vested with dictatorial powers”. Outside the factories, in the Soviets, the need was the same. For Lenin, “The fight against the bureaucratic distortion of the Soviet form of organisation is assured by the firmness of the connection between the Soviets and the people, meaning by this the working and exploited people”. 42

By the time Lenin wrote this there was hardly any connection left. The Soviets were hollow shells, administrative bodies drained of democratic life-blood. In 1920 Trotsky felt confident enough to reveal his real opinion of the Soviets. “The dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party”, he wrote .

It is thanks to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary organisation that the party has afforded to the Soviets the possibility of becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labour into the apparatus of the supremacy of labour. 43

The Soviets’ original form was now dismissed by the ultimate Bolshevik intellectual as undisciplined talking shops that required the orders of a one-party dictatorship to give them focus and direction. As a direct result of this policy, and not because of the terrible pressures of a civil war that had not yet begun, by June 1918 the Soviets were effectively dead.

On 7th December, 1917, six weeks after the Bolshevik insurrection, Sovnarcom created the All–Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against Counter–Revolution and Sabotage, popularly known by its Russian initials–Cheka. The Cheka was answerable only to the Council of People’s Commissars, not to the Soviet Executive. In his biography of Lenin, Tony Cliff emphasised how small the Cheka was to begin with and that the few death sentences it passed “were on common criminals” (he then barely mentioned it again except for a few pages on the civil war). In reality, by the end of 1917 the Cheka were releasing common criminals from Petrograd jails in order to make room for political prisoners.

It is true that immediately after 25th October the Bolsheviks released many of those who had fought against the Insurrection and, at Martov’s request, the Menshevik and SR Ministers who had been arrested. There was an element of genuine idealism in this, although the main reason was the urgent need to assuage the Soviet Congress and the Left SRs. It was also why the post of People’s Commissar for Justice was given to the Left SR Isaac Steinberg when his party joined Sovnarcom. Steinberg would attempt, unsuccessfully, to control and regulate the Cheka.

Cheka officers, under their feared chief Felix Dzerzhinsky, had wide discretionary powers to enter premises and arrest any they suspected of “counter–revolutionary” activity. With the Kadet Party declared illegal in November 1917 and all who supported the convoking of the Constituent Assembly smeared as counter-revolutionary, this was in effect anybody beyond the ranks of the Bolshevik Party. Very quickly the Cheka began to arrest and execute political opponents. The nature of the Cheka’s work, its untrammeled powers, its special ethos and identity (down to the leather overcoats Dzerzhinsky secured for his men as protection from the typhus virus which bred easily in woolen clothes) attracted a certain type of man, one who found satisfaction in investigation, surveillance, intimidation and coercion. Dzerzhinsky’s deputies Unschlicht, Peters and Katsis reflected the force they commanded: a mix of puritanical political activists, secret policemen and bullying sadists. The “Special Purpose Units” led by Unschlict grew in time to a paramilitary force of 300,000 men authorised to detain and execute as they pleased.

Western commentators and historians who condemn the Cheka invariably ignore the activities of their own state’s political police. At the same time as Russia was convulsed by revolutionary upheaval the US Congress passed the 1917 Espionage Act and 1918 Sedition Act. The Espionage Act removed the right of free speech against the war. The US Postal Service immediately stopped delivery of the Socialist Party’s magazine, The American Socialist , followed shortly after by almost every other radical publication. Socialist Party offices were raided and ransacked and the Chicago office was occupied for three days by federal agents. The socialist Kate O’Hara was sentenced to five years in prison for the crime of making a speech in which she said, “the women of the United States are nothing more nor less than brood sows, to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer”. 1The US’s leading socialist and Presidential candidate Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years (later commuted to three). The Espionage Act’s clauses against undermining the military or the security services are still in use today and were deployed against Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

The Sedition Act outlawed “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government, its flag and its armed forces. The Industrial Workers of the World (Iww), whose organizers had always been viciously persecuted by state police, was outlawed for “criminal syndicalism”. Its leader Big Bill Haywood escaped and fled to Russia. In November 1919 the US Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer, ordered Justice Department agents to raid the offices of socialist organisations in twelve cities. New York State declared the Socialist Party illegal. On 2nd January, 1920 raids against socialist and communist organisations were launched in a further 33 cities. 2Over 5,000 people were arrested in their offices and homes–400 in NewYork, 500 in New Jersey, 700 in Detroit. In Boston hundreds of socialists were shackled together and paraded through the streets. In 1920 thousands of political “undesirables” were deported, following the 249 immigrants of Russian birth (including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman) already deported to Russia in December 1919. The ensuing “Red Scare” was the Invisible Worm of 20th-century American history. It engendered the FBI, the CIA and the American Security State.

From here the atrocities multiplied. The cia’s Phoenix programme kidnapped, tortured and murdered 20, 000 Vietnamese civilians in the late 1960s suspected of supporting the Viet Cong. At home the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter–Intelligence Programme) against domestic “subversives” such as the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Black Civil Rights groups, the New Left, and feminist and anti-Vietnam War activists aimed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate” leading political dissidents. It targeted individuals such as Martin Luther King, of whom FBI Deputy Director William Sullivan wrote in 1963, “In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech […] we must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security”. 3Sullivan later admitted that COINTELPRO’s activities were illegal. Carrying on this tradition, on 17th September, 2001 President George W. Bush ordered the CIA to “hunt, capture, imprison and interrogate” suspected terrorists anywhere in the world. In his history of the CIA, Tim Weiner concluded, “It was the foundation for a system of secret prisons where CIA officers and contractors used techniques that included torture […] This was not the role of a civilian intelligence service in a democratic society”. 4