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

The Declaration proclaimed that

factories, workshops, mines and other tools and means of production become the property of the working class as a whole, which will run all enterprises themselves, through their trade unions, getting production under way and striving to tie together all industry in the country in a single, unitary organisation.

These aims echoed the rhetorical goals of the Bolsheviks, with the crucial difference that they were underpinned by a federated, democratic “government” that allowed them to develop at their own pace, rather than a centralised dictatorship that imposed economic policy regardless of what workers wanted. The Declaration also supported free worker-peasant Soviets, proscription of the Cheka, abolition of any state militia or police and the “inalienable right” of free expression in newspapers, political parties and trade unions. 15

In January 1919 the Red Army, under Commander Dybenko, attacked and took Kiev from the nationalist government of Petliura. For a brief time, the Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks worked together. In March 1919 Makhno and Dybenko concluded a pact for joint military action and Makhno’s forces held down a major portion of Denikin’s White Army. But Bolshevik policy in Ukraine was to replace local democratic bodies with Revolutionary Committees (i.e. Bolshevik Party cells) and disperse any Soviet that did not elect Bolshevik majorities. In contrast, the Makhnovists allowed free elections to Soviets and all other bodies (the Makhnovist Revolutionary Military Soviet elected at the Congress of Olexandrivske in late 1919 had a variety of socialists, including three Bolsheviks and six Mensheviks). 16Attempts by the Bolsheviks to implant Poor Peasant Committees in southern Ukraine, backed up by Cheka units, were met with armed resistance by Ukrainian peasants who supported Makhno.

In response the Bolsheviks began to insinuate that the Makhnovists were Kulaks and counter-revolutionaries. In April 1919, in response to the calling of the Third Regional Congress of Peasants, Workers, and Insurgents, Dybenko issued a telegram:

Novoalekseevka, No 283, 10th April 2.45pm. Forward to Comrade Makhno, General Staff of the Alexandrovsk Division. Copy to Volnovakha, Mariupol, to transmit to Comrade Makhno, Copy to the Gulyai-Polya Soviet:

Any Congress called in the name of the Revolutionary Military General Staff, which is now dissolved by my order, shall be considered manifestly counter-revolutionary, and its organisers will expose themselves to the severest repressive measures, to the extent of their being declared outlaws. I order that steps be taken immediately so that such measures may not be necessary. (Signed): Dybenko

Makhno ignored the order and the Congress went ahead, with delegates from 72 districts, representing more than two million people, discussing how they wanted to run their society. Later, the response of the Makhnovist Revolutionary Military Council to the Bolsheviks attempt to ban it was simply to re-affirm basic democratic principles. It stated that it “holds itself above the pressure and influence of all parties and only recognises the people who elected it. Its duty is to accomplish what the people have instructed it to do, and to create no obstacles to any left socialist party in the propagation of ideas”. 17

The anarchists of the big Russian cities had far fewer options than Makhno’s forces. The very thing they had fought for–autonomous, local self-management of economy and society–was perverted by authoritarian socialists to produce repressive state organs. Factory Committees were absorbed into big trade unions who were in turn controlled by Vesenka. The Soviets became mini one-party statelets. People’s Militias enforcing revolutionary justice degenerated into vehicles of revenge used not just against the bourgeoisie and war speculators but against all dissidents, including those whom the Bolsheviks considered “petty bourgeois anarcho-syndicalists”.

During 1917 Imperial Russia’s judicial system had collapsed–hardly surprising when in February the police had resorted to indiscriminate shooting of civilian crowds. With the police and courts virtually extinct, justice was increasingly meted out by violent mobs. Thieves, or suspected thieves, were sometimes beaten to death or strung up by enraged crowds, even in the middle of Petrograd and Moscow. The People’s Courts and Revolutionary Tribunals introduced by the Bolshevik government after October 1917 simply institutionalised this. People’s Courts had twelve elected judges, but they were not required to have legal training or qualifications. As the old regime’s Criminal Code had been abolished, the proceedings of the Courts had no set legal procedures and were, in Figes’s description, “formalised mob trials”. 18The Revolutionary Tribunals set up specifically to assist the Cheka in crushing counter-revolution and “crimes against the state” were equally random.

The most famous and emblematic policy of the Bolshevik government was the expropriation and redistribution of the wealth and property of the Russian bourgeoisie and aristocracy to workers and poor peasants. As a principle this policy commanded wide-spread support across the Russian left. The Mensheviks and SRs had always stood for social justice and wealth redistribution–the Mensheviks through progressive social and labour legislation and trade union power, the SRs through the nationalisation of the land and its reallocation to peasant Volosts and to individual peasant owners. It was not the objective of expropriation and redistribution that was at issue, but the means and speed.

Instead of a planned programme of progressive taxation, redistribution of wealth, regulation of banks and socialisation of industry, the Bolsheviks from late 1917 stoked and unleashed what even Lenin’s friend Maxim Gorky called “a mass pogrom”. In December 1917 Lenin wrote an article that encouraged all villages and towns to develop their own methods of “cleansing the Russian land of all vermin, of scoundrel fleas, the bedbug rich and so on”. He ruminated that “in one place they will put in prison a dozen rich men, a dozen scoundrels, half a dozen workers who shirk on the job”, whilst in others these types will be put to cleaning toilets or, sometimes, simply shot. “The more variety the better”, he concluded, “for only practice can devise the best methods of struggle”. 19

The Bolshevik policy on confiscation of bourgeois property was a visceral response to the long-standing injustice of vast comfort and riches for a few resting atop grinding poverty and oppression for the many, but it did so in such an unplanned and irresponsible manner that it achieved little except emotional satisfaction for those enforcing it. The Bolsheviks called such confiscations “looting the looters”, which was more accurate than intended. In theory it was a necessary part of the transition to a more socially just society. In reality, given the circumstances of long-suppressed, exhausted, hungry and embittered worker-peasants trying to survive in conditions of economic collapse, it became mass looting of homes, country estates, shops, churches and museums, which some Soviets tried to prevent or control but which was basically unstoppable.

The emotional impetus behind it was summed up by a Bolshevik decree in Ekaterinslav which instructed workers to take from the local bourgeoisie “the millions taken from the masses, and cunningly turned into silken undergarments, furs, carpets, gold, furniture, paintings, china. We have to take it and give it to the proletariat and then force the bourgeoisie to work for their rations for the Soviet regime”. The affluent bourgeoisie of Petrograd, Moscow and other cities may have been turfed out of their mansions or forced to share them with the displaced and homeless poor, and this may have achieved a measure of rough justice, but it did little in itself to reorganise the economy or heat the (now collective) residences.