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The legacy of the Russian revolution
In 1997, on the 80th anniversary of the Russian
revolution, PETER TAAFFE reviewed Orlando Figes’s book, A People’s
Tragedy, acclaimed as an authoritative history but, in reality, an
attempt to obscure the real significance of the momentous events of
1917. (Socialism Today No.23, November 1997) As the 90th anniversary
approaches we reprint this defence of the October revolution.
FROM THE OUTSET of the Russian revolution the
representatives of the possessing classes, in Russia and worldwide,
predicted the early collapse of what they called the ‘Bolshevik
dictatorship’.
On 9 November 1917, The Times approvingly quoted
Naklukoff, the ambassador to Paris of the recently overthrown Kerensky
government: "The situation must be regarded seriously but not
tragically. Even if the facts be true there is no occasion for undue
alarm... It is better that it should have taken place and be disposed of
once and for all. The maximalist (Bolshevik) movement, by its arbitrary
action, is already doomed. I have no doubt that the movement will be
stopped by the first Cossack regiment that appears on the scene". The
leader of the Social Revolutionary party gave the Bolsheviks ‘no more
than a few days’, while the famous writer, Maxim Gorky, expected them to
stay in power for two weeks. However, once it became clear that the
soviet regime of the Bolsheviks would be more enduring than their
earlier prophecies, the capitalists resorted to lies and slander. This
was insufficient, so a more powerful ‘argument’ was used: arms, tanks,
aeroplanes and interventionist armies to attack and destroy the
revolution.
In the years since, no effort has been spared to
distort what happened in 1917 and to falsify the ideas of the great
leaders of the revolution, particularly Lenin and Trotsky. If the
capitalists’ fear of the contagious effects of the Russian revolution
was justified in 1917 and subsequently, why today do historians like
Orlando Figes still go to such lengths (over 900 pages) to carry out, in
essence, the same role as earlier calumniators of the Russian
revolution? After all, with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-90, the heritage of the
Russian revolution, particularly the planned economy, has apparently
been eradicated ‘forever’. Yet the fact that those, like Figes or the
even more reactionary historian, Richard Pipes, have devoted so much
attention to the revolution’s anniversary, shows its enduring attraction
to workers today. This will be even more so in the future given the
economic, political, social and ecological disasters which loom for
world capitalism. Everything must be done to obscure the lessons of 1917
for today.
Could capitalism have developed Russia?
THE REVOLUTION, AND the introduction of a planned
economy, laid the basis for the transformation of Russia from the
‘India’ of Europe to, at one stage, the second most powerful economy and
country on the globe. In the detail which Figes gives (pp112-113) about
the conditions in the Russian cities, he confirms the backwardness of
Russia at the time of the revolution: "The death rate in this city of
the Tsars (St Petersburg) was the highest of any European capital,
including Constantinople, with a cholera epidemic on average once in
every three years". The same primitiveness and economic backwardness in
the countryside is also elaborated by Figes. However, his mission is to
demonstrate that it was ‘by no means inevitable’ that the revolution
should have ended in the Bolshevik ‘dictatorship’. He argues that a
‘democratic’ path for Russia was possible and that the October
revolution was a ‘coup d’état’ organised by the ‘cowardly’ and
‘dictatorial’ Lenin and his Bolshevik Party.
Others, particularly bourgeois economists, have
complemented Figes to demonstrate that left to itself, without the
intervention of the October revolution, Russia would have developed at a
much greater economic pace than it did through the planned economy. On
the contrary, despite the monstrous, one-party, totalitarian regime
which developed under Stalinism, the planned economy which issued from
the Russian revolution led to a colossal development of industry and
society and also the living standards of the mass of the population,
unrivalled by any other comparable country.
‘Not so’, argue the bourgeois opponents of Marxism,
‘what about the phenomenal growth rates of the Southeast Asian Tigers
and Japan post 1945?’ But these economies developed at a phenomenal rate
because of their unique circumstances and the special measures of US
imperialism and its puppets in the post-war situation. Faced by the
challenge of Stalinism, which rested on the gains of the October
revolution including the planned economy, US imperialism in Korea and
Japan carried through a major part of the bourgeois democratic
revolution, by expropriating the landlords and giving land to the
peasants. The same task was undertaken by the Kuomintang who took the
land of the native Taiwanese landlords when they were driven from the
Chinese mainland. They cleared out of the way the remnants of feudal and
semi-feudal land relations, paving the way for the development of
capitalism. It was this and access to the US market, together with
sweated, slave labour (in Korea and Taiwan) which laid the basis for the
development of the ‘Tigers’. This was not the pattern for the majority
of the countries in the colonial or former colonial world where the
bourgeois democratic revolution remained, and remains, uncompleted.
Even the Scientific American, in December 1968,
after a study of comparative growth rates of Japan and the USSR between
1928-66, concluded: "Taking into account the fact that the USSR’s growth
was set back severely by World War II, its average annual rate for the
38-year period since 1928 nevertheless ranges between 5.4-6.7%: the
Soviet accomplishment appears to be essentially unprecedented". (p21)
The rate of growth of the USSR only slowed down, its potential vitiated
by the one-party, totalitarian Stalinist regime, in the 1970s and 1980s.
The maintenance of Stalinism actually led to a regression in the economy
and society in the immediate period prior to its collapse in 1989-90.
The tasks which confronted Russia in 1917 were those
of the bourgeois democratic revolution, which entailed a thoroughgoing
land reform, with land to the peasants, the solution of the national
question, with the right of self-determination to the oppressed
nationalities, democracy and the development of a modern economy. Basing
himself upon the 1905 revolution, Lenin argued that the liberal
capitalists were incapable of carrying through the capitalist democratic
revolution. Trotsky in his famous theory of the Permanent Revolution,
and Lenin in his April Theses, showed that the industrialists and
bankers were bound with iron hoops to the semi-feudal landlords. The
capitalists invested in land and the landlords invested in industry.
Four thousand million roubles were owed by the landlords to the bankers
and the expropriation of the landlords would endanger the investments of
the bankers and the industrialists.
This, in broad outline, is the situation which still
obtains in much of the former colonial or semi-colonial world, in
Africa, Asia and Latin America. In India, for instance, the landlord and
the capitalist is often one and the same figure, united through bank
capital. A thoroughgoing land reform, giving land to the peasants, would
come up against the opposition of not just the landlords and their armed
detachments but also the capitalists.
1917 - accident or necessity?
IN RUSSIA, THE landlords and the capitalists were
linked to the bureaucracy and the system was crowned by the tsarist
regime which was used to alternately stupefy the masses and crush
opposition. Figes argues that perhaps timely land reform and democratic
concessions from tsarism may have saved the regime. However, in much of
the detail he supplies he shows how utopian is this idea. It is true
that the capitalists had wanted the monarchy to give limited democratic
reforms. But this would not have fundamentally altered the course of the
revolution as the experience of the Spanish revolution between 1931-37
showed. King Alfonso replaced the dictator Primo de Rivera only to
follow him later into exile.
Milyukov, the leader of the capitalist Cadet party,
in urging concessions from the tsar in 1915, declared: "We are treading
the volcano... tension has reached its extreme limit... a carelessly
dropped match will be enough to start a terrible conflagration".
Concession or repression, this was the dilemma for the possessing
classes in 1917. Either road risked igniting a revolution.
The fear of Milyukov in 1915 was well founded.
Russian peasants were groaning under the burdens placed upon them by the
war. Figes and bourgeois historians, even when the material they furnish
contradicts their conclusions, have essentially a conspiratorial view of
history and particularly of revolution. This is certainly their view in
relation to the October revolution. But revolution, as Trotsky points
out, "breaks out when all the antagonisms of a society have reached
their highest tension".
It is not a product of agitation and propaganda
alone but arises when society cannot further progress without a sharp
break. In general, four conditions have to be present before mass
opposition to a regime overflows the bounds of normal protests and
develops into a revolutionary movement. The ruling class has to be
divided, which was quite evident even to Figes prior to February. There
was growing opposition both to the war and the regime in the period
leading up to February 1917.
Amongst the working class, the idea gradually
developed that ‘we cannot live like this any longer’. This is another
vital condition for revolution, the preparedness of the working class to
go the whole way. This mood developed in the months prior to the
February revolution. It is possible that in 1916, if the tsarist regime
had made concessions, events could have developed differently in the
first period of the revolution. But the process would not have been
fundamentally different.
A widespread strike developed in January 1916 in St
Petersburg on the anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’ when workers were
massacred in the 1905 revolution. The number of strikes doubled during
the following year, going from economic strikes to political strikes,
from partial and sectional struggles to the idea of a general strike.
The intermediary layers, particularly in the countryside, were in
ferment, a process enormously speeded up by the slaughter of the first
world war.
But, according to Figes, these were not the reasons
why the Russian workers eagerly embraced the ideas of Marxism. The
acceptance of "this dogmatism has much to do with the relative scarcity
of alternative political ideas, which might at least have caused the
workers to regard the Marxist doctrine with a little more reserve and
scepticism. But it also had its roots in the way most of the workers had
been educated in philosophy. When people learn as adults what children
are normally taught in schools, they often find it difficult to progress
beyond the simplest abstract ideas. These tend to lodge deep in their
minds, making them resistant to the subsequent absorption of knowledge
on a more sophisticated level. They see the world in black-and-white
terms because their narrow learning obscures any other coloration".
So the fact that Russian workers absorbed Marxist
ideas was not because these ideas accurately described their condition
under the Russian landlord/capitalist regime. If only they had passed
through a university, preferably one where Figes was the principal
tutor, the consciousness of the Russian working class would have been
different. When it comes to the social sciences and, in particular, when
dealing with revolution the universities are, in general, institutions
for obscurantism and dust-blowing on a gigantic scale. Bourgeois
academics are utterly incapable of perceiving and understanding the
working class, in particular, its guiding advanced layer, as anything
other than putty in the hands of leaders’ and intellectuals.
Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party prepared for
the Russian revolution by an assiduous study of the French revolution,
the Paris Commune and the first 1905 revolution. They saw their task as
making conscious the unconscious will of the working class to change
society. The agitation and propaganda of the Bolsheviks expressed the
clear class interests of the workers and poor peasants in 1917. As
Trotsky explained: "Not only in the soldiers’ Soviets but also in the
‘workers’ Soviets, the Bolshevik faction generally constituted one to
two per cent, at best five per cent. The leading parties of the petit
bourgeois democracy (Mensheviks and so-called Social Revolutionaries)
had the following of at least 95% of the workers, soldiers and peasants
participating in the struggle" at the beginning of 1917.
The Bolsheviks were denounced as sectarians and then
as agents of the German Kaiser. But "all their attention was directed to
the masses and, moreover, not to their top layer but to the deepest and
most oppressed millions and tens of millions, who parliamentary babblers
usually forget". The whole of the press, including the papers of the
Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, carried on a vicious campaign
against the Bolsheviks. Even in the first months after February, this
torrent of abuse, the suggestion that carloads of gold had been
delivered to the Bolsheviks from Germany, etc, led the sailors and
soldiers to threaten to bayonet Lenin and the other leaders of
Bolshevism.
But the experience of the masses led to their
disillusionment in the other parties, who betrayed the interests of the
workers and peasants, in a bloc with the bourgeois Cadets. It pushed
them into adopting a more sympathetic attitude to the speeches of the
Bolsheviks. As Trotsky comments: "To the worker in the shop, the soldier
in the trench, the starving peasant, it became clear that the
capitalists and their lackeys were slandering the Bolsheviks precisely
because the Bolsheviks were firmly devoted to the interests of the
oppressed. Yesterday’s indignation of the soldier and sailor against the
Bolsheviks became remoulded into passionate devotion to them, an
unselfish readiness to follow them to the very end. And, on the other
hand, the hatred of the masses for the Cadet Party was inevitably
transferred to their allies, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries".
These words, directed to an audience of workers in
the 1930s, are far too ‘simplistic’ for our lofty historians. Yet they
are more accurate than the heavy tomes of Figes and his like in
explaining the triumph of the Bolshevik Party, the soviets and the
October revolution of 1917.
Coup d’état or mass uprising?
FOLLOWING THE FEBRUARY revolution, the Mensheviks
and Social Revolutionaries handed power to the capitalists. Even the
Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd, led by Stalin and Kamenev, gave
‘critical support’ to the capitalist coalition. Only Lenin in
Switzerland and Trotsky in New York understood the significance of the
February events as the beginning not only of the Russian revolution but
of the international revolution.
Lenin demanded that the workers place no trust in
the Provisional Government. However, the Bolsheviks were only 8,000
strong after the February revolution. Lenin explained that it was
necessary for the Bolsheviks to base themselves on the consciousness of
the masses. In the first stage, inevitably, the masses take the line of
least resistance. In Russia they gave massive support to the Mensheviks
and Social Revolutionaries as explained above. Only big events would
teach them the correctness of the perspectives, strategy and tactics of
the Bolsheviks.
The working class learns rapidly in a revolution.
The Bolsheviks grew quickly. They numbered 2,000 members in Petrograd in
February 1917 (Figes puts the figure at 3,000), 16,000 by April (with
79,000 nationally). By July, says Figes, the membership of the Bolshevik
Party stood at 200,000. This had risen, according to him, to 350,000 on
the eve of the October revolution, "the vast majority of these
blue-collar workers". (Most accounts give the membership of the
Bolsheviks as 240,000 in October).
But the revolution did not develop in a straight
line. Between February and October there were many sharp turns in the
situation. In April, with the continuation of the war, the workers of
Petrograd were already becoming disillusioned with the Provisional
Government. The masses, particularly the ten million soldiers exhausted
by the war, yearned for an end to the slaughter. But even the workers’
and peasants’ councils, the soviets, which the masses themselves had
improvised based on the experience of the 1905 revolution, supported the
continuation of the war.
The national soviet congress in April, dominated by
the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, refused to ratify the
eight-hour day. The disappointment and anger of the masses were
reflected in the ‘July days’, which both Pipes and Figes are incapable
of understanding. Against all the evidence of the participants at the
time, from Trotsky to the leaders of the Petrograd Bolsheviks, Pipes
argues that the Bolshevik leaders attempted a ‘power seizure’. Only when
it failed did the Bolsheviks then argue, according to this ‘historian’,
that it was a spontaneous demonstration which they sought to direct into
peaceful channels. Figes adopts a more vacillating view. On the one
side, he quotes Sukhanov in support of Pipes but then implies that the
Bolsheviks were of ‘two minds’ as to whether to use the July
demonstrations to seek power or not. Moreover, Lenin is described as a
hopeless vacillator unable to make up his mind.
On the contrary, the massive 400,000-strong
demonstration of workers and soldiers in July was a stage which has been
seen in all revolutions. Bitterly disappointed at the results of the
revolution so far they called for the eviction of the ten capitalist
ministers from the coalition government: ‘Down with the offensive and
all power to the soviets’. As with the ‘June days’ of 1848, the
‘Spartacist uprising’ in January 1919 and the ‘May days’ in Barcelona in
1937, the July days represented the consciousness of the masses that the
gains of their revolution were being snatched out of their hands. The
mass manifestation in Petrograd was an attempt to prevent the derailment
of the revolution.
The Bolshevik leadership, contrary to Figes’s
account, opposed the July demonstration but were compelled to go along
with it. Already the workers of Petrograd were ready to overthrow the
government but the Bolshevik leadership opposed this. Lenin and Trotsky
warned that the rest of the country, and particularly the peasants and
soldiers at the front, needed time to see through the coalition of
Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. The masses could only learn this
through bitter experience.
Figes’s description of Lenin as a ‘coward’, both
before and during the July days, is itself sufficient to discredit the
whole book as a serious scientific and objective appraisal of 1917
(p385). In July, he has Lenin running away from St Petersburg to Finland
to save his own skin! He writes: "Lenin was always prone to overestimate
the physical danger to himself; in this respect he was something of a
coward. It cannot be said that his life was ever at direct risk during
his summer on the run". Yet, barely a paragraph later, he writes of "the
frenzied anti-Bolshevik atmosphere... a time of lynch law with the
tabloid press full of cartoons showing Lenin on the scaffold".
Lenin’s refusal to appear before a court, which
would have been composed of the bitterest class enemies of the
Bolsheviks, was entirely correct. As Trotsky comments: "It is sufficient
to remember the fate of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg". Lenin went
into hiding not out of concern for himself as an individual but for what
was at stake for the revolution. With Trotsky, Lenin was the ‘brain’ of
the Bolshevik Party and, therefore, of the revolution. It was the
interests of the revolution that were paramount in Lenin’s attitude
during the July days. If neither Lenin nor Trotsky had survived, then
the Russian revolution itself would have been shipwrecked. The murder of
Luxemburg and Liebknecht was a major factor in the derailment of the
German revolution.
The July days led to reaction, with repression
against the Bolsheviks and the imprisonment of Trotsky, while Lenin was
driven underground. The counter-revolution, in the figure of General
Kornilov, attempted a coup in August, which was defeated by the working
class with the Bolsheviks playing the most prominent role. The troops of
Kornilov refused to take action once the real situation was explained to
them by delegates and agitators from the Soviets. The railway workers
completely disintegrated the army of Kornilov by stranding them in
railway sidings, etc.
Revolution sometimes needs the whip of the
counter-revolution. The August events gave an enormous access of support
to the Bolsheviks. In the two months that followed, the majority of the
workers’ and soldiers’ soviets were won over to the Bolsheviks. Using
the Military Revolutionary Committee, set up by the soviets in Petrograd
under the leadership of Trotsky, the working class took power on 25
October.
Figes’s verdict on the October revolution, which
Marxists consider as the single greatest event in human history, is that
it was "in reality such a small-scale event, being in effect no more
than a military coup, that it passed unnoticed by the vast majority of
the inhabitants of Petrograd". Incredibly, he then goes on to comment:
"The whole insurrection, as Trotsky himself acknowledged, was carried
out as a coup d’état". In support of this claim he quotes Trotsky’s
comment that the insurrection was, "a series of small operations,
calculated and prepared in advance".
These claims are made by Figes despite the fact that
Trotsky, in a brilliant chapter in his History of the Russian
Revolution, The Art of Insurrection, goes to considerable lengths to
show that the October revolution and insurrection was entirely different
to the classical idea of a ‘coup d’état’. The latter, pursued by
conspirators from a group or section of the ruling class or army,
usually results in the replacement of one clique of the same ruling
class by another. But, says Trotsky, "only mass insurrection has ever
brought the victory of one social regime over another".
The importance of the Bolshevik Party
THERE WAS A fundamental difference between the
February and October revolutions. The February revolution was a mass
insurrection which overthrew the old power but did not result in the
working class and peasantry taking power into their own hands. The
objective prerequisites have to be there before a successful socialist
revolution and insurrection is possible. But something more than this is
needed for the working class to take power. In October, as opposed to
February, there was the presence of the ‘subjective factor’, a mass
revolutionary party with a far-sighted leadership, capable of leading
the masses to power.
A revolutionary situation is not long lived: the
fate of a revolution can be determined in a two- or three-day struggle.
In Russia, the conditions probably existed for a successful revolution
between September and November, a three-month period. Failure to take
power then would have led Russia back into the noose of a capitalist
dictator like Kornilov.
The active support for the revolution is reflected
in the victory of the Bolsheviks in the soviets and the dramatic swing
towards the left in the peasants’ soviets prior to October. Figes has
the revolution being carried through by a minority. It is true that the
technical military aspect of the seizure of power in October was carried
out by a minority. This is the case in all revolutions; a minority acts
but with the support of the mass. To be successful in October, as
opposed to July, meant that the actions of the Bolsheviks under the
banner of the soviets needed the mass support of the proletariat and the
peasantry. The relatively ‘bloodless’ character of the October overturn,
recognised by Figes, would not have been possible without the mass of
the Petrograd proletariat supporting the insurrection. Conversely, the
virtually nonexistent forces at the disposal of Kerensky’s Provisional
Government reflected the demoralisation of those opposed to the
revolution. The "series of small operations, calculated and prepared in
advance", mentioned by Trotsky, merely dealt with the technical military
aspects of the October revolution and not with its mass support. It is,
moreover, an incontestable historical fact that only in Russia,
following the overturn in October, did the workers take power and
establish real workers’ democracy.
In the years since there have been many
opportunities for the working class to follow in the path of the Russian
workers of 1917. In its sweep, scope and potential for victory of the
working class, the Chinese revolution of 1925-27 was equal to, if not
greater, than even that of Russia. The working class in Spain attempted
not once but on ten occasions between 1931-37 to carry through a
revolution. In 1968 in France, the working class organised a general
strike of ten million; the capitalist bonaparte, De Gaulle, fled to
Germany believing that ‘the game was up’, and yet the French workers
were not able to emulate their Russian counterparts of 50 years before.
The same process developed in the Portuguese revolution in 1974 when the
capitalist state disintegrated. Unlike in the Russian revolution, the
great majority of the Portuguese officer caste were radicalised and were
searching in the direction of ‘socialism’ but, unfortunately, the
capitalist state machine was reassembled and was able to liquidate the
gains of the Portuguese revolution. It was the false policies of the
leadership of the workers’ organisations - the social democracy and the
mass Communist Party - which prevented the revolution from being
completed.
All this stands in stark contrast to what happened
in Russia in 1917. It was the policy and the tactics of the Bolshevik
Party, under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, which led the Russian
workers to victory. This initiated the ‘ten days that shook the world’.
Unbelievably, Figes deals with the creation of the Communist
International in passing and with only slight reference to the
international ramifications of the Russian revolution. The October
revolution led, as Lenin and Trotsky had anticipated, to enormous
revolutionary ferment throughout Europe, America and the world. At one
stage the revolution, because of the intervention of the 21 armies of
imperialism, was reduced to the two major cities of Moscow and
Petrograd, the old province of Muscovy. Most of Russia was in the hands
of the counter-revolutionary White forces backed up by imperialist
bayonets. And yet, impoverished, reduced to cannibalism in certain parts
of Russia, the revolution triumphed not because of superiority of arms
but through appeals to the working class in the armies of imperialism
and throughout the world.
From Bolshevism to Stalinism?
LIKE MANY BEFORE, Figes finds the seeds of Stalinism
in the policies and methods of Lenin and of the Bolshevik Party. He
argues that the Bolsheviks sought to "centralise all power in the hands
of the party and, by the use of terror, to wipe out all political
opposition". Nothing of the kind occurred in the early part of the
revolution. Indeed, the only parties and newspapers which were
suppressed were the bourgeois opposition of the Cadets and the
semi-fascist Black Hundreds. Only when the Mensheviks and Social
Revolutionaries went over to military counter-revolutionary resistance
were measures taken against their press. This is no different to what
occurred in other civil wars, including in capitalist civil wars such as
that of the USA. Did Abraham Lincoln and the north permit the
functioning of newspapers and grant democratic rights to the southern
slaveholders and their supporters in the north? Did Oliver Cromwell, in
the English bourgeois revolution of the 17th century, allow the
royalists to operate freely in areas controlled by the parliamentary
forces? On the contrary, they resorted to military repression, which was
the logic of civil war. The same was true of the Bolsheviks who took
repressive measures only when it was absolutely necessary and who
argued, at the time, that with the spread of the revolution to western
Europe even these military measures and repression would be unnecessary.
Figes, perhaps without intending to, shows the
popularity of the Bolshevik regime and the weakness of the
counter-revolution in the first period when he writes about the
convening of the Constituent Assembly. He gives many useful facts to
show the overwhelming swing of the peasantry towards the Left Social
Revolutionaries, who were then in collaboration with the Bolsheviks. He
even comments about the mood in the cities: "There was no mass reaction
to the closure of the Constituent Assembly". This does not, however,
prevent him from arguing: "The political civilisation of the provincial
towns is not much more advanced than in backward peasant Russia and
outside the capital city there was no real urban middle class to sustain
the democratic revolution. That was the tragedy of 1917".
But that begs the question as to why there was not a
stable ‘urban middle class’ and, if it had existed, whether it would
have prevented the Russian revolution. Firstly, the weakness of the
middle class was itself a reflection of the incapacity of the Russian
bourgeoisie to carry through the bourgeois democratic revolution. This
meant that these tasks fell on the shoulders of the working class who,
having come to power, completed the bourgeois democratic revolution, in
alliance with the peasantry, and then went over to the socialist tasks.
Moreover, in Germany the presence of an ‘urban middle class’ did not
prevent the revolution of 1918-19 which was only not carried through to
a conclusion because, unlike in Russia, the ‘subjective factor’ did not
exist.
The Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky in the
Russian revolution was separated by a river of blood from Stalinism. It
was the most democratic party in history and, at the same time, the most
determined in the pursuit of mobilising the working class for power. The
revolution was conceived as the beginning of the European and world
revolution. Without the victory of the revolution in the west, the
Russian revolution would inevitably be defeated or degenerate. Lenin and
Trotsky argued this many times in advance of the revolution.
Stalinism did not arise from Bolshevism but was
rooted in the isolation of the Russian revolution and the backward
cultural conditions of Russia. This, along with the slaughter of the
flower of the Russian proletariat in the civil war and the
disappointment of the masses in the failure of the European revolution
to come to their assistance, led to the gradual crystallisation of a
privileged stratum. Stalin personified this layer which gradually
usurped power from the proletariat. Rather than issuing from Leninism,
Stalinism rose in mortal combat with Bolshevism. A precondition for the
consolidation of the power and privileges of the rising bureaucracy was
the destruction of all remnants of Bolshevism. The annihilation of the
Left Opposition and all those connected with the heroic period of
Bolshevism culminated in the purges, described by Trotsky as a
‘one-sided civil war’.
Does the degeneration of the Russian revolution and
the rise of Stalinism, which ultimately led to the liquidation of the
planned economy, invalidate the relevance of the Russian revolution? On
the contrary, an assiduous study of the revolution, and of events since,
shows that it is impossible to understand the 20th century, including
the present situation, without understanding the Russian revolution and
its subsequent degeneration. The achievements of the planned economy,
despite Stalinism, give an example of what was possible, particularly if
it had been organised on the basis of workers’ control and management.
A study of the revolution today provides the
advanced layers of workers with the possibility of understanding the
laws of revolution. Of course, events will not develop in exactly the
same fashion, nor with the same speed, as did the Russian revolution.
Nevertheless, the struggles of the working class, despite the inane
claims of bourgeois ideologists that we are at the ‘end of history’,
that ideology has disappeared, etc, are similar in all capitalist
countries.
The class struggle will break out with redoubled
force in the period we are going into. The best representatives of the
workers and youth will look for the ideological and theoretical weapons
that can offer them an explanation of how to act in mobilising the
working class against capitalism. They will find what they need, not in
Figes’s book, but in the works of Marx, Engels and, particularly for
today, of Lenin and Trotsky, and in the immortal work in the Russian
revolution of the Bolsheviks in 1917.
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