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

The Phoenix Programme, COINTELPRO and the persecution of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden demonstrate how far the security organs of Western capitalist states will go to crush major threats to ruling elites. If today they resort less to these methods it is because genuine threats have receded. When they do arise–as with WikiLeaks or the election of a socialist government in a strategically important country like Venezuela–the full panoply of state surveillance, fabrication, repression and subversion is quickly brought to bear. 5

The record of the CIA and MI6 in organising and supporting coups against democratic left governments that threaten American and British geo-strategic and business interests is too long to summarise here, running from Mexico, the Philippines and Cuba early in the 20th century to Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Greece in 1967, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, Venezuela under Chavez and Honduras in 2010; not to mention active complicity in murderous, sometimes genocidal policies in Malaya, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Africa, East Timor, El Salvador, Iraq and Palestine. It is a record that in total number of victims easily matches that of the Cheka/NKVD/KGB across the same time period.

The Cheka was a secret police with powers similar to those of the CIA or FBI but under far less scrutiny and restraint. As Isaac Deutscher acknowledged, when considering the activities of the Cheka (by then the GPU) in 1923, long after they had turned their attention to breaking strikes and arresting trade unionists, “the attitude of the Bolsheviks to the GPU had nothing in it of that haughty distaste with which the good bourgeois democrat normally views any political police”. 6Some haughty distaste might have been in order. Although many Bolsheviks believed that the Cheka was the “sword of the revolution”, it was in all essentials their Okhrana. It demonstrated how far they had departed from the generous, libertarian tradition of the Russian revolutionary left.

The survivors of that left saw this intimately. In a private letter to Axelrod (who was living abroad) of 1st December, 1917, Martov analysed the current state and likely future of Bolshevik rule. “Even though the mass of workers are behind Lenin”, Martov recorded, “his regime is becoming more and more a regime based on terror”. Martov had a clear sense of where this was heading:

The regime of terror, the trampling of civil liberties, and the outrages against the Constituent Assembly in the name of class dictatorship are nipping in the bud the seeds of democratic education that the people had acquired during the eight months between February and October, and preparing fertile soil for any kind of Bonapartism.

Martov rejected the idea that the Mensheviks should join a bloc of those opposed to Lenin. But he stressed:

we now have to concentrate all our efforts on denouncing and exposing Leninist policy in the hope that the best elements among the workers following him will understand whence they have been led, and will form a nucleus capable of directing the course of the dictatorship along a different path.

He concluded with a rueful acknowledgement to Axelrod that “only now can we clearly see the Jacobin nature of Leninism that you revealed in your 1903 article in no. 65 of Iskra ”. 7

Bolshevism’s Jacobin nature found its greatest expression in the Cheka and those who worked for it. Its head, Dzerzhinsky, a minor Polish nobleman who turned to Bolshevism as a replacement for Catholicism, was “a man not excessively endowed with intellect but of personal probity and great loyalty to Lenin”. 8From the creation of the Cheka he knew it had no relation whatsoever to a police force bound by laws or the requirements of evidence tested in open court. It was a paramilitary force in a war against any who opposed the Bolsheviks. “We need to send to that front”, he said at the Sovnarcom meeting that authorised its creation, “determined, hard, dedicated comrades ready to do anything in defence of the Revolution. Do not think I seek forms of revolutionary justice. We are not now in need of justice. It is war now. Face to face–a fight to the finish. Life or death!” 9

By January 1918 Dzerzhinsky’s original investigatory Commission of eight men had ballooned to a staff of 120. By the end of the year Cheka HQ run from a converted office block in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, had nearly 5,000 staff, although these were greatly supplemented by local Chekas that operated in every major city and town with carte blanche to arrest, detain and execute. There were counter-revolutionaries, before and after October. The ring of industrialists who had manipulated Kornilov were the first, and the White Armies the most savage. Given the chance they would have imposed a military dictatorship whose bloodlust would have matched that of the vengeful French bourgeoisie who massacred 30,000 Parisian workers after the fall of the Paris Commune. Some kind of security force was needed to prevent this. If the Cheka had operated within a framework of civil and criminal law it might have conducted legitimate operations, but there was no such framework.

Bolsheviks with a more civilised conscience than Lenin feared where it would lead. Trotsky’s great friend Adolph Joffe had the job of representing the new regime abroad and knew the damage being done to its reputation by the Cheka’s activities. In July 1918 he asked for it to be abolished, but was ignored. At the same time the pro-Bolshevik lawyer A.D. Zhadanov wrote to Lenin’s secretary Bonch-Bruevich complaining about “the absence of control, the right to decide cases, the absence of defence, publicity or the right of appeal, the use of provocation”, and concluding, “the activity of the Cheka will inevitably be the strongest element discrediting Soviet power”. 10

Lenin had no time for such concerns. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat scorned the independence of the law as a hypocritical bourgeois concept used to disguise class rule. But Lenin saw only the corruption of the concept and not its use as a bulwark against despotism. Even in Tsarist Russia there had been space for radical lawyers to save revolutionaries from exile and execution. That could only happen because underneath naked state power there was a concept of independent law that could, in certain circumstances and with enough publicity and countervailing power, defy the political agenda of the ruling class. Without this possibility there existed a power vacuum filled by untouchable policemen and bureaucrats. Lenin, whose final days were filled with rage at the massive unaccountable bureaucracy that dominated the USSR, never once considered that without at least a theoretically independent judiciary and legislature, based on universal rights, there would only be bureaucracy.

Although the Cheka initially focused its attentions on the Kadets and any who might plausibly be engaged in physical resistance to the regime, it soon expanded its attention to socialists like the Mensheviks and SRs, most of whom were not. In April 1918 it moved to crush the anarchists. After Lenin returned to Russia and published the April Theses, most Russian anarchists sensed common ground with Bolshevism, assuming that it was what it appeared to be–a departure from classical Marxism, a radical anti-statist philosophy that sought to replace the structures of centralised government with local Soviet democracy and workers’ control. But immediately after the Bolshevik insurrection, which they supported, the anarchists began to issue warnings.

On 3rd November the anarchist newspaper Golos Truda wrote:

We summon the workers of the world to self-organisation and self-determination […] We call on them to reject any new master. We call on them to create their own non-party labour organisations, freely united in the cities, villages, districts and provinces. We call on them to help each other create a cooperative union of free cities and free villages.