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

The sanction given to the proletariat to enter bourgeois and municipal property and take what they felt they needed to survive, allied to continuous government propaganda that all middle-class Kadets were counter-revolutionaries attempting to reverse the freedoms gained since February 1917, led inevitably to assault and murder. In mid-November 1917 the homes of prominent Kadets were ransacked by the Cheka. On 28th November the Kadet Party as a whole was outlawed, and many of its leaders were arrested and imprisoned. In December Sofia Panina, a member of the Kadet Central Committee and a well-known liberal reformer who had been Minister for Education in the Provisional Government, was brought before a Revolutionary Tribunal on spurious charges. On 7th January, 1918 two ex-Kadet Ministers, Andrei Shingarev and Fyodor Kokoshkin, active in the 1905 Revolution and elected as deputies to the Constituent Assembly just before the Kadets were outlawed, were brutally murdered in their hospital beds by vengeful Baltic sailors. The murders were not ordered by the Cheka, but the local Red Guard had stood by and let them happen. While not directly state-sanctioned, the murders flowed from state policy towards the Kadets and the entire structure of revolutionary justice.

That structure was enhanced by a Sovnarcom Decree of 21st February, 1918 titled: “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger!” The Decree was issued as the German army crossed into Russia and approached Petrograd, before the Bolsheviks hurriedly signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It exhorted, “All Soviets and revolutionary organizations are ordered to defend every position to the last drop of blood”, and laid out a series of urgent measures, including a scorched-earth policy on railway tracks and food and grain stocks. It demanded that Petrograd, Kiev and towns and villages along the new frontline mobilise and dig trenches, adding that “these battalions are to include all able-bodied members of the bourgeois class, men and women, under the supervision of Red Guards; those who resist are to be shot”. It concluded that “enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators and German spies are to be shot on the spot”. 20It laid out no procedures for proof of guilt before people were shot on the spot, nor what constituted “counter-revolutionary agitation”. Even E.H. Carr conceded that from the promulgation of the Decree the Cheka carried out executions “without any regular or public judicial process”. 21

It had been doing so almost from its inception, restrained initially only by its limited resources. Isaac Steinberg, the Left SR People’s Commissar for Justice to whom the Cheka was theoretically answerable, knew exactly in what direction it was travelling. Upon his appointment he tried to subordinate the Cheka to the courts and to due process of law, but with little success. Although he headed the Commissariat of Justice he was not consulted on the “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger!” and its sanction to shoot entire categories of people such as hooligans, profiteers and counter-revolutionaries without a trial. When it was published Steinberg took the matter directly to Lenin. “Why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice at all?” he asked him. “Why not call it frankly the Commissariat of Social Extermination and be done with it?” Lenin seemed excited by the idea. “Well put”, he said, “that’s exactly what it should be called! But of course we can’t say that”. 22

In a report to the Soviet Executive of 17th February, 1919, Dzerzhinsky prepared the ground for the systematic use of political prisoners as slave labour. He told the Executive:

Even today the labour of those under arrest is far from being utilized in public works, and so I recommend that we retain these concentration camps for the exploitation of labour of persons under arrest: gentlemen who live without any occupation and those incapable of doing work without some compulsion […] In this way we will create schools of labour.

Following his recommendation, the Soviet Executive passed a resolution with a clear instruction: “The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) is empowered to confine to concentration camps, under the guidance of precise instructions concerning the rules of imprisonment in a concentration camp approved by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee”.

A further cec decree of 12th May, 1919 ordered every provincial capital city to set up a concentration camp to hold 300 or more inmates for forced labour. 23By the end of 1919, 21 official labour camps had been set up in Soviet Russia. By the end of 1920 there were 84 camps in 43 provinces, including the first “camp of special significance”, i.e. the first one to use slave labour as part of national economic policy, on Solovetsky Island in the White Sea.

Lenin and Trotsky were set free by the civil war. The opportunity it gave them to use political terror against all who did not support their government was openly welcomed. Lenin expanded his case for political terror in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky , written in 1918 in response to Karl Kautsky’s The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (also 1918), a sustained attack on the Bolshevik concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat from the perspective of democratic Marxism. The works are strikingly different. Kautsky’s is balanced and reasonable, methodically building a persuasive case, dry in tone but occasionally breaking into forceful criticism of what he saw as Lenin’s perversion of Marxism. Lenin’s response is an unrelenting screed of hostile sarcasm in which a crude, simplistic argument is presented in the mocking tone of a frustrated adolescent. Despite repeatedly labeling Kautsky an “imbecile”, Lenin’s intellectual inferiority complex towards the older man is palpable.

Kautsky denied that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat had to be based on one-party rule or denial of democratic rights to others. For Kautsky it was essential that socialism be achieved through democratic methods or it would cease to be socialism. “Thus democracy and socialism do not differ in the sense that one is a means and one is an end”, he wrote.

Both are means to the same end […] For us, socialism is unthinkable without democracy. By modern socialism we mean not only a social organisation of production but also a democratic organisation of society […] There is no socialism without democracy. 24

From this perspective, Bolshevism was “not an insufficiently mature socialism, but a non-socialism.” 25He predicted that if the small Russian working class attempted to lead the transition to socialism it would be compelled to do so through a minority dictatorship using methods of extreme bureaucratic and police control. Given that this is exactly what came about it is difficult to understand the airy confidence with which Lenin’s defenders routinely dismiss Kautsky’s critique.

Kautsky went further and questioned whether the working class was actually governing in Russia, and the validity of Bolshevik claims to represent it. Immediately after October 1917, Lenin had claimed that as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution “the transfer of government power from one Soviet party to another is guaranteed without any revolution, simply by a decision of the Soviets, simply by new elections of deputies to the Soviets”. 26After the multiple closures of Soviets that dared to elect deputies from other parties this was clearly not a sustainable argument. By mid-1918 Lenin had changed the terms of the argument by asserting that the Bolshevik Party was the only party that could represent the working masses, no matter what the working masses themselves thought. Thus there could no longer be a “transfer of power from one Soviet party to another”.