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

To continue steadily the exile of the anti-Soviet intelligentsia (and of the Mensheviks most of all) abroad. To draft lists and thoroughly check them. Seek out literature specialists and have them furnish reviews. Divide between them the entire literature. To draft lists of cooperative leaders inimical to us. 32

Dzerzhinsky compiled lists of all intellectuals who might not support the government and divided them by categories: political commentators; economists; technicians and engineers; doctors; teachers; and literary critics. “Data must be gathered on all of them by our gpu departments”, he wrote to his subordinates. One off-shoot of this policy was the quite literal brain-drain of the “Philosophy Steamer” on which, in September 1922, 160 prominent but “unreliable” academics, writers, and philosophers were deported from Russia on Lenin’s express orders. In an article on the deportation in Pravda , Trotsky wrote, “There aren’t many takers to shake up the neo-religious liquid distilled before the war in the little apothecaries of Berdyaev and others”. 33He did not explain why, if this were so, they needed to be expelled from the country.

St Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad–the hub of the Russian intelligentsia’s cultural vivacity between 1890 and 1917 and the living symbol of Russia’s engagement with Europe’s liberal, cosmopolitan culture–was gradually drained of its life-blood from 1917 to 1922. Much of this was due to economic collapse and the Civil War. But from 1918, when Sovnarcom transferred to socially conservative Moscow and settled behind the walls of the Kremlin, Russia’s entire culture began to isolate itself from everything that distinguished St Petersburg from the enormous hinterland to its east, and the government began to resemble the paranoid, anti-intellectual Tsarist autarky it had replaced.

After 1922, in the era of the New Economic Policy (NEP), Soviet cultural life underwent a temporary revitalisation. But the undeniable energy of Soviet culture in the mid-1920s took place within, not against, the confines of Soviet art and Socialist Realism, i.e. in cinema, theatre and the general iconography of Constructivism, Futurism and Agit-Prop. Those artists who could not accommodate this did not flourish. The great innovations of early-20th-century Russian art–pre-Revolutionary Suprematism and post-revolutionary Constructivism–had an enormous impact on the culture of post-war Europe. Yet at the same time as the avant-garde of Berlin, London and New York began to develop the edifice of modern art, Soviet Russia shut down cultural experimentation. The cultural tolerance of the NEP years, provisional and limited as it was, was curtailed in 1929 when Bukharin was politically destroyed and Lunacharsky removed from Nakompros.

In 1934 Bukharin was allowed to address the inaugural Congress of Soviet Writers. Taking this rare opportunity, he warned against “the bureaucratisation of creative processes” and told delegates that socialism required a “powerful, rich and variegated art” driven by “humanism” and “diversity and quality”. 34Although his speech received rapturous applause, it had no wider impact. In the 1930s Soviet culture froze into a nightmare version of bourgeois philistinism–a retreat to the safety of the Classics, suspicion and dismissal of all modernity and innovation, and a filtering of every new novel, poem, film, play, symphony or opera through a dull and occasionally vicious bureaucratic machine. Sometimes the artistic impulse seeped through regardless (as in Yuri Pimenov’s impressionistic New Moscow , which matched the best American paintings of urban life), but it was marred by the servitude under which it laboured. For all its grandiosity, Stalinist art was a chocolate-box cover on an ocean of dead peasants and political prisoners.

From the first days of the Bolshevik Revolution, the justification for the system of governance it introduced was that it was a new form of state run by and for the working class. It was not and never intended to be a parliamentary republic, no matter how progressive that might be or the extent of its suffrage. It was the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” in action and not to be judged in terms of qualitatively different regimes. But what, exactly, was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat? Did Sovnarcom’s version measure up to the ideal? And even if it did, was that ideal defencible?

For Lenin and Trotsky, the concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was central to Marx’s thought, although Marx himself only used the phrase a few times in personal correspondence and never in any work intended for publication. In The State and Revolution Lenin quoted from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme on the post-revolutionary state. Published in 1891, eight years after Marx’s death, the Critique was a work put together from a private letter about the first common programme of German socialists in 1875. In it Marx said that whatever functions similar to the present-day state that will still exist in a communist society cannot be foreseen. His only reference to a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was in the context of “a period of revolutionary transformation”, during which time “the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”. 1Although Marx did not elaborate further, Lenin based an entire section of The State and Revolution , called “Presentation of the Question by Marx”, on this brief reference.

By contrast, the first generation of major Marxist theorists–Bebel, Kautsky, Hilferding and Plekhanov–saw Marx’s comment as simply a vivid metaphor for a society run by and for the majority of the population, i.e. the working class. So did their successors Martov and Luxemburg. Lenin and Trotsky imagined a different version, a disciplinarian regime based on the suppression and denial of democratic rights to those deemed non-proletarian. The Bolshevik concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was that it embodied the will of the enfranchised working class through their revolutionary organs of governance, the Soviets. It existed to oversee and implement a forcible transfer of socioeconomic power from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat, from the rich to the poor.

This was brutally simplistic and fundamentally anti-democratic. It withheld democratic and civil rights from huge numbers of people based on a crude categorisation of employment and income. Its central flaw was the assumption that the “real” and legitimate working class was epitomised by the Bolshevik militants of the Putilov Works or the Kronstadt naval base, and that other workers such as the Menshevik trade unionists of the Printers Union or the SRs of the Moscow Metal Works had a false consciousness. The Bolsheviks were therefore stunned when many workers who had supported them during 1917 began to return to the Mensheviks and SRs during 1918 and 1919. Elections to the Soviets in these years produced clear Menshevik and SR majorities. In these circumstances the Bolsheviks could either abandon rule by one party or renege on the core principle of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, i.e. that the will of the working class was expressed through the Soviets. They chose the latter.

Their attitude was perfectly encapsulated by Trotsky at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, when confronted by the criticisms of the “Workers’ Opposition” that the party no longer represented the working class. In response, Trotsky condemned the Opposition for “fetishising the principles of democracy”. In doing so

they seemed to place workers’ voting rights above the party, as if the party did not have right to defend its dictatorship, even if that dictatorship were to collide for a time with the transitory mood of the workers’ democracy. 2