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

Even in Berlin, where the KPD secured 200,000 votes the year before, the strike stalled. A mass demonstration in Hamburg tried to seize the docks, giving the government the excuse to impose a State of Emergency. When SPD workers in Berlin’s Krupp Works refused to heed the strike call, the KPD sent in unemployed supporters to physically eject workers from the premises. Fights broke out between SPD workers and KPD thugs. The result was the total collapse of the strike and the resignation of half the KPD’s membership.

Despite this, Ben Lewis concludes that of the two main antagonists at Halle it was Zinoviev who had the best long-term strategy for the German left, and Martov who lacked a viable plan. But Martov did have a plan–establish and build a radical democratic socialist party, like the USPD before the split, to effect a socialist transition. We cannot know if it would have been successful, other than the successful introduction of a progressive and comprehensive welfare state, run in conjunction with the SPD and major German trade unions, after the defeat of Nazism in 1945. Conversely, we do know that the KPD was totally unsuccessful. Firstly, in its failure to stop the triumph of the Nazis, a failure that arose in great part from the tactics forced upon it by the Comintern. Secondly, that when it had a monopoly of state power handed to it by the Red Army in 1945, it proceeded to construct in East Germany a repressive police state that replicated the Soviet model.

Martov was not allowed to return to Russia. He settled in Berlin where he continued to write and campaign for his version of democratic socialism. He died of tuberculosis in 1923, aged 47. Although most of his writings on Marxism and the Russian Revolution remain untranslated, his major essays, particularly those written between 1919 and 1923, were translated and collated together as The State and Socialist Revolution , published in 1939. 23These essays eloquently sum up his analysis of the Bolshevik Revolution and why, for him, it had strayed so far from the rationalistic, democratic Marxism which he practiced all his political life.

Martov felt that Russia in 1917 possessed neither the economic base, nor the social structure, nor the mature working class necessary for a successful socialist transformation. In The State and Socialist Revolution , he wrote, “No less than mystic is the concept of a political form that, by virtue of its particular character, can surmount all economic, social and national conditions”. The “political form” was the Bolshevik Party and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Martov’s characterisation of these as essentially “mystic”, i.e. a cocktail of utopian desire and adventurism lacking solid plans for creating a socialist society and likely to degenerate into its opposite, is a judgment supported by history.

Yet even Martov’s sympathetic biographer Israel Getzler concluded of his political life, “Martov failed”. In one obvious sense this is true. The Menshevik Party did not emerge, as the Bolsheviks did, as the victor in the struggle for state power. But it was not trying to achieve the same thing as Bolshevism. In Menshevism Martov tried to develop a political form that would provide the working class of Russia with the self-confidence and knowledge to transform capitalism into a more civilised and equitable society. He shared many of the intellectual weaknesses of 19th-century Marxists like Kautsky. He also failed to perceive that the state-led, productivist socialism of the Mensheviks had much in common with that of the Bolsheviks, although he supported policies such as mutualism in land ownership that were more democratic and inclusive. On the whole, though, his failure to think beyond the accepted Marxist categories, to merge Left Menshevism with other strands of democratic activism seen in the Factory Committees and a variety of anarchist-inspired social experiments, was a material reason for its eclipse.

One thing remains unarguable. For all his political inadequacies and strategic mistakes, since 1903 Martov had stood utterly opposed to Lenin’s concept of socialism–of vanguardism, substitutionism and one-party rule imposed by violence and repression. He did so without reneging on radical socialism, and provided an inspiring example of political principle and personal integrity in the midst of war and social breakdown. If political leaders are to be judged by the intent, outcome and legacy of their work, then it was Lenin who failed, and disastrously. By this criteria Martov also failed–although as Orwell wrote posthumously of Gandhi, compared to his political contemporaries “how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind”. 24

By 1921 the threat of White counter-revolution had been defeated and all foreign expeditionary forces in Soviet Russia had been withdrawn. After six years of war and Civil War the Russian economy was on its knees. Its transport infrastructure barely existed. Taking the last full year of peace, 1913, as the base, industrial production was down 80% by 1920. Production of coal had fallen 73%, textiles 62% and cast iron an incredible 97.5% (this was mainly due to the loss throughout most of 1917-20 of the coal, iron and steel that used to come from southern Russia). As the Civil War ended the Red Army demobilised, which led to two and a half million men with military experience returning to the villages. Rural uprisings were spreading, often led by trained soldier-peasants.

In early 1920 the brutality of the Grain Requisition Squads led to a mass peasant rebellion in the Tambov province. Led by the charismatic Left SR Alexander Antonov, the revolt involved over 50,000 peasants and spread rapidly to Samara, Tsaritsyn, Saratov and parts of Siberia. With the Red Army engaged in the Soviet-Polish War in an attempt to force Soviet power on unwilling Polish workers and peasants, it could not direct enough men to Tambov to force it on unwilling Russian workers and peasants. The rebellion took a year to suppress. Even then the Red Army had to use chemical weapons and a chain of concentration camps to re-impose Sovnarcom’s authority in the region. 1

Tambov was the flashpoint of a massive, simmering crisis across all Soviet-held territory. When the crop failed in 1920 there were no surplus stores to fall back on and famine re-emerged for the first time in thirty years. People left the cities to try to find food in the country. The population of Petrograd plummeted from 2,400,000 in 1917 to 574,000 in 1920. Of the winter of 1920-21, Victor Serge recorded:

Winter was a torture for the townspeople: no heating, no lighting, and the ravages of famine. Children and feeble old folk died in their thousands […] Inside Petrograds’ grand apartments, now abandoned, people were crowded in one room, living on top of one another around a little stove of brick or cast iron, its flue belching smoke through an opening in the window. Fuel for it would come from the floorboards of rooms nearby, from the last stick of furniture, or else from books […] People dined on a pittance of oatmeal or half-rotten horsemeat. The local Commune did everything it could to keep the children fed, but what it managed was pitiful. 2

From 1917 to 1921 the population of Soviet Russia’s major cities fell by an average of 33%, although Petrograd was a large part of that average. The number of the industrial working class–the ostensible basis of the Soviet regime–also fell. Tens of thousands of workers were killed in the Civil War. Many joined the Communist Party and were promoted into the administration. In 1921 the total number of the industrial working class actually engaged in industry had fallen from 3,024,000 in 1917 to 1,243,000, and these were increasingly resistant to the orders of the Bolshevik government. At the same time as mass peasant revolts broke out in Tambov, Samara, Penza, Belorussia and western Siberia, a wave of strikes erupted in Moscow and Petrograd. Sovnarcom’s greatest fear was that sooner or later working-class and peasant opposition to War Communism would unite.