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

Later, after the New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced in 1921, Lenin would seek to portray War Communism as a regrettable necessity that had sadly led to the alienation of the peasantry from the regime. But as Victor Serge recalled in his memoirs, War Communism was accepted at the time as the permanent, intentional policy of the government and only accrued its title retrospectively. “At the time it was called simply ‘Communism’”, he wrote of the period 1918-21, “and anyone who, like myself, went so far as to consider it purely temporary was looked upon with disdain”. 27In 1919 Lenin said explicitly that “the organisation of the communist activity of the proletariat, and the entire policy of the Communists, have now acquired a final, lasting form”. 28This was not a policy reluctantly pursued or forced upon the Bolsheviks against their will. It was Lenin’s preferred policy, the essence of his socialism.

In the end it was only massive industrial and agrarian resistance that led to the abandonment of War Communism. As late as early 1920 Lenin heartily endorsed Bukharin’s The Economics of the Transition Period (1920), the supreme theoretical expression of War Communism as the means to create a new society . After 1921 Bukharin, an intelligent and sensitive man who was not personally attracted to violent coercion in the same way that Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky were, would become the most eloquent and effective proponent of the NEP’s “mixed economy” and the relative liberalisation of social and cultural life. For three years from 1925 he was effectively co-leader of the USSR with Stalin, until the latter’s volte-face on the NEP and mass collectivisation of the peasantry. But in 1918-20 he was still attracted to the radical vision of War Communism, which he saw not as a tactical necessity but a specific economic programme to effect the transition between capitalism and communism.

Bukharin offered a Marxist analysis of the “disequilibrium” which arose from the transition to communism. In his view the transition was not sustained by deep-seated organic economic processes and their reflection in institutional and legal forms, such as had characterised the relatively slow transition from feudalism to capitalism, but by the collective desire of the working class engaged in political action. “While the process of the creation of capitalism was spontaneous”, he wrote, “the process of building communism is to a large decree a conscious, i.e. organised process”. 29This was not only true in the specific circumstances (if one believed that what was being built was communism), but it also justified the voluntarism of the Bolsheviks in jump-starting and force-feeding the historical process.

In a chapter titled “Extra-Economic Coercion in the Transition Period”, Bukharin explicitly endorsed terror as a method of economic reconstruction. “Proletarian coercion in all its forms”, he wrote, “beginning with shooting and ending with labour conscription, is a method of creating communist mankind out of the human materials of the transition period”. 30This was an astonishingly naïve conclusion based on the premise that the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. rule by Sovnarcom, could not exploit the working class because it was a regime in which the working class was itself in control. It entirely ignored the messy reality of who really controlled the levers of power and coercion, and the lack of input the masses had to Soviets now dominated by one political party. Bukharin also linked coercion to the need to bring the peasantry into the production process, juxtaposing the “organised tendencies of the proletariat and the commodity-anarchical tendencies of the peasantry”.

Reviewing the book, Lenin made many annotations in the margins, which are a guide to his own thinking. He peppered his copy with violent dismissals (e.g. “rubbish!”) of any references to modern sociological concepts or any concepts beyond those of Marx and Engels, even though he himself ruefully admitted Marx and Engels had said nothing about organising a socialist society after the revolution. But he adored the chapter which explained and justified the most extreme form of state coercion. “Now this chapter is superb!” he wrote, and heavily underlined. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin’s usually sympathetic biographer, tartly summarised the implications: “Left unclear was whether the extreme measures used to forge a new equilibrium would continue to be the norm after equilibrium was established”. 31

That War Communism could attract a civilised man like Bukharin explains much about how the Red Terror took hold in Russia. Clothed in rationalisations about the survival of the revolution, the Terror was Bolshevism’s id unleashed. But Bolshevism was fuelled as much by a passion for working-class freedom and social justice as by revenge, command and control. With the revolution and the concept of Soviet democracy on the defensive, with its forces pulled back to defend Petrograd and Moscow from the advancing White Army, whose savagery easily matched that of the Cheka, nearly all variants of socialists, from Menshevik Internationalists to Council Communists to anarcho-syndicalists, rallied to the proletarian revolution and to the Bolshevik government.

Although many anarchists refused to work with the Bolsheviks, preferring instead partisan anti-government activity or supporting Makhno in Ukraine, some made different choices. The former anarchist and IWW organiser Bill Shatov returned to his native Russia in 1917 with the American socialist John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World . Although he never repudiated his anarchist convictions or joined the Communist Party, he helped the Bolsheviks defend their regime and directed a division of the 10th Red Army outside the city. Inside the city his anarchosyndicalist friend Victor Serge, freezing and almost starving, worked on Bolshevik propaganda material. Serge’s wife served in a Red Guard field ambulance.

The Anarchist Federation of Petrograd, a band of partisans under the Russian anarchist Kolokushkin, decided, “not without reservations and not without friction”, 32to stand with the Bolsheviks against White counter-revolution. By great irony they ended up taking up armed defence of the printing works of Pravda , a paper which routinely attacked them. Many Petrograd Mensheviks, although politically alienated from the Bolsheviks by the events of 1917 and 1918, volunteered to defend the city from the Whites.

In August 1918 the Menshevik Central Committee under Martov’s direction spelt out its position on the Civil War and foreign intervention. “Notwithstanding the terrors of the Bolshevik regime”, the CC resolution stated,

the socialist working class of Russia rejects any intervention by capitalist governments for the purpose of delivering it from the bloody Bolshevik dictatorship, and relies solely on its own strength, the strength of the democratic masses, and the support of the international proletariat for the removal of this regime. 33

In July 1918, when the Left SRs launched their anti-Bolshevik rebellion, the Menshevik Central Committee issued instructions that under no circumstances were Mensheviks to join or support it. Their task was to organise workers into “an independent third force” whose goal was the “reconstruction of the democratic organs of local self-government” and the “cessation of bloodshed and reprisals”. 34

When the Menshevik leader Ivan Maisky travelled to Samara to work with Komuch, he was instantly expelled from the party’s Central Committee. This gained the Mensheviks very little. In the next few months the government stepped up its persecution of the party and its press. Even Martov was arrested, although Lenin had him quickly released. Under this pressure the Mensheviks almost split, with those like ex-Bundist leader Mark Liber wishing to ally with Komuch and the SRs to fight the government, and Martov holding that whatever the provocation this would be to turn against the working class. Faced with these defections, Martov laid down a new, firmer position that dispensed with illusions about a “third force” and asserted socialist unity in the face of White counter-revolution.