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

1919 was a crucial year. The Mensheviks, taking advantage of the partial freedom granted them in 1918, began to win local and Soviet elections. So too did the Left SRs. Kevin Murphy records that in May 1919 the Left SRs won a majority on the Factory Committee of Moscow’s Hammer and Sickle Metal Works, explaining that “the Left SR electoral success derived in part from the persistence of democracy in the factory elections”, a democracy being killed off elsewhere. In Petrograd there were fewer alternatives. As the Whites closed in on the city, over a fifth of Petrograd Bolsheviks were ordered to report for service at the front. Those that went tended to be the veterans of 1917, those who believed in autonomous Soviets and Factory Committees. Those that remained saw the Soviets as just another organ of one-party rule. 20Party cells grafted themselves on to Factory Committees and used them as transmission belts for party directives. The number of workers taking part in Soviet elections plummeted. Working-class engagement with the party-state began to dry up. Even the editors of Pravda expressed concern that workers were too afraid to write to the paper without first securing approval from their local party. 21

The Bolshevik Party had justified the fears of those who predicted that the concept of a vanguard party would lead to “substitutionism”, i.e. the party organisation would replace the class it was supposed to serve. The standard Leninist explanation for this is that during the Civil War the best working-class activists had gone to the front or taken up administrative tasks within the new state bodies, leaving a “declassed” residue behind. Many militant workers had, of course, volunteered service–some for noble reasons, some not. The Party and the Red Army offered career and other rewards. But the mass of workers who did not move into Party or Army positions remained where and what they had always been. They remained workers. By 1919 the Bolsheviks were becoming exasperated with them. Many Communist Party functionaries considered that, in the words of a Communist cell leader in the Duks factory in Moscow, “the majority of workers had counter-revolutionary views”. 22

The legendary Left SR leader Maria Spiridonova was particularly well received when she visited factories in Petrograd. Spiridonova had a long history of revolutionary heroism. In 1905, after her home province of Tambov was subject to brutal repression by the troops of General Luzhenovsky, she had walked up to the general at a railway station and shot him in the face. She was brutally beaten by his soldiers, became an international cause célèbre and was sentenced to exile in Siberia. After eleven years in the women’s prison of Chita she was released following the February Revolution. She ordered the entire prison blown up. Its ruins behind her, she set out for Petrograd to continue SR agitation. Initially she had some sympathy with the Bolsheviks, but the suppression of the Soviets and the activities of the Grain Requisition Squads turned her against them. Following the Left SR uprising of July 1918 she was arrested and imprisoned.

Such was Spiridonova’s fame on the Russian left that she was granted amnesty a few months later. She returned to the factories to hold rallies and to support the strikes against the regime that erupted at the beginning of 1919 (or as the pro-Bolshevik historian Kevin Murphy described the activities of the Left SRs at the time, “to fan the flames of labour discontent”). Frightened by her immense popularity, the government re-arrested Spiridonova at the end of February. A Revolutionary Tribunal charged her with slandering Soviet, i.e. government, power and she was sentenced to one year’s isolation in a “hospital”. After this she was periodically in and out of prison. In 1937 she was sent permanently to the Gulag. In 1941 she was executed, with many others, in an arctic forest.

At the end of February 1919 working-class discontent exploded in a strike at the Aleksandrovskii railway workshop, caused by failure to honour back-pay. A 3,000-man rally demanded the pay and also asked for rations equal to that of Red Army soldiers. After a few days the Cheka swept in and arrested the strike leaders. This escalated the strike as workers demanded the release of their comrades. The strike coincided with elections to the Moscow Soviet. Not surprisingly the Aleksandrovskii workers elected Menshevik and SR delegates to represent them. The Bolsheviks’ response was to send in troops to occupy the plant, evict the strikers and sack the entire workforce. Strike leaders were tried by Revolutionary Tribunal and exiled to Murmansk. Pravda announced that new workers were to be hired and the sacked workers could reapply. From then on any meeting of workers at the plant had to be approved by the Cheka in advance. If a meeting took place the minutes had to be submitted to the Cheka. 23

The strike at the Aleksandrovskii was followed in March by protests at what had been the beating heart of Bolshevik Petrograd, the huge Putilov Works. By 1919, the Putilov workers’ anger with the regime was so intense that when Zinoviev tried to address them he was physically ejected. On 10th March the factory convened a mass meeting and passed by a huge margin a Resolution which began:

We, the workmen of the Putilov works and the wharf, declare before the laboring classes of Russia and the world, that the Bolshevik government has betrayed the high ideals of the October Revolution, and thus betrayed and deceived the workers and peasants of Russia; the Bolshevik Government, acting in our name, is not the authority of the proletariat and the peasants, but the authority of the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, self-governing with the aid of Extraordinary Commissions, Communists and police.

The Resolution put a series of demands: the immediate transfer of authority to freely elected Soviets; immediate reestablishment of freedom of elections “at factories and plants, barracks, ships, railways, everywhere”; transfer of management to the trade unions; transfer of food supply to workers’ and peasants’ cooperatives; immediate release of arrested Left SR members; and immediate release of Maria Spiridnova. 24The Resolution sparked off a strike wave that spread throughout Petrograd, resulting in nearly half of the city’s workforce coming out on strike. Lenin himself personally came to Petrograd to address workers, but he was greeted with heckling and calls for his resignation. Workers demanded the Putilov Resolution be printed in communist newspapers. Street clashes with the Cheka escalated. For a few days it seemed that the workers of Petrograd might rise up and depose the Bolsheviks.

On 14th March the Bolsheviks used their majority in the Petrograd City Soviet to pass a resolution that resolved to “clear the Putilov of the White Guardists and bagmen”. Any workers who refused to work would be fired. All workers’ meetings were banned. Any worker found with a copy of the Putilov Resolution would be arrested. Any workers who stayed on strike would be evicted from their homes and have their ration cards removed. After this, those strikes still running (at the Putilov, the Truegolnik rubber factory and the Rozhdestvenskii trampark) were put down by force. When the Putilov workers barricaded themselves in, the factory was stormed and occupied, with several workers shot on the spot. Over three hundred were arrested. Executions followed after a summary trial. 25Estimates of the total number of strikers shot varies from dozens to hundreds. Gordon Leggett records that mass executions took place outside the city where blindfolded workers were put against a wall and mowed down by machine guns. 26

Despite this, disturbances spread beyond Petrograd and Moscow, with more revolts occurring in Tula, Briansk, Tver, Sormorvo, Orel, Smolensk and Astrakhan. A strike at the armaments plant in Tula broke out in February after the arrest of workers who had complained that local commissars, and Cheka and Red Army men received better rations. Although it was repressed more strikes broke out again in March and these escalated to a general strike in the city. This was put down by the army who imposed military discipline in Tula’s factories. Strike leaders were identified and sacked.