Kronstadt: The Maturation & Dispersal of a Revolutionary Core
Posted by Mike E on June 3, 2010
Kronstadt Sailors
I am grateful for Green-Red’s question, which leads us deeper into some questions we have been exploring from a number of sides.
“What happened during the Kronstadt incident? Was it all a White [tsarist] conspiracy?”
For those who unfamiliar with the controversy:
There was an uprising at the Kronstadt naval base outside Petrograd — against the new Bolshevik government. This 1921 event has been an important episode for anarchists — who identify with the anti-bolshevik rebellion, and who remain outraged by the Bolshevik decision to send in the Red Army to retake Kronstadt by force.
I would like to sketch a brief analysis — and relate it to the controversies around Nepal, and our own strategic challenges. Feel free to flesh this out further — since I am not going to do more than sketch the details of these events. Feel free to provide links to various accounts. And certainly, jump in if you want to dispute my points below.
The first thing to know about Kronstadt is that this is the story of how a revolutionary core gets displaced and spread too thin — by all the challenges of actually leading a revolution. I’m going to simplify things somewhat by saying that at some point, the advanced in society give rise to a revolutionary people, out of which congeals a partisan revolutionary core.
In order to wage and win a revolution in our era there needs to be the emergence of a revolutionary people — i.e. a section of the people who consciously wants a particular kind of radical change and who (over time) have become more and more deeply connected (in an organic way) to the various currents of organized political trends.
Without that you can’t move from protest and opposition to actually taking power. And without that (even more important) you can’t actually continue the revolution and transform society.
And without finding “successors to the revolutionary cause” — i.e. new and younger waves of a revolutionary people in the midst of new challenges, the revolution itself will degrade, and ultimately reverse.
I think there is value in looking at previous revolutionary history in relation to this concept of a revolutionary people — and its contradictions.
In regard to Kronstadt:
Kronstadt is the island base of the Russian navy at the entrance to Petrograd. As the 1917 revolutionary year unfolded, Kronstadt emerged as a powerful center of radical activity — where anarchists and Bolsheviks had special influence among the militant roughneck sailors. They were among the most radical among the armed forces — at a time when the fight for the Petrograd garrison was a key part of revolutionary preparations.
The days of July involved teams of these sailors arriving armed to demonstrate for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. And it involved the contradictions between Lenin (and the bolshevik leadership) with the impatience of these advanced (who wanted “Revolution Now!” despite the estimation of Lenin that it was ripening but not yet possible). Streetfighting erupted under the leadership of the Bolshevik Military Organization — which whipped the reactionary forces in the capital into a frenzy.
These sailors and of course the Bolshevik Military Organization played a key role in the events that followed — and were naturally very respected among revolutionaries and the more radical sections of the people (concentrated in the many layers of Soviet councils).
click for location of Kronstadt
Flash forward 3 or 4 hard years:
The seizure of power in 1917 was followed by several years of civil war. This had a profound effect on the strongest revolutionary cores. First, they were dispersed from their point of emergence. They went on revolutionary missions the length and bredth of the war front. The most radical workers and sailors became the core (and leaders) of the Red Army.
The other result is that many of the most advanced simply died in battle — as the shocktroops at one key moment after another.
Meanwhile, back behind the front, in places like the Petrograd factory districts and Kronstadt, a parallel set of results was happening: the people there were deprived of their most radical vanguard. And, at the same time, economic conditions worsened — as civil war disrupted the traffic in firewood, coal and food. Plus the horrific burden of civil war was added onto the already horrific years of world war.
Kronstadt, which had been the center of radical activity, was filled with raw recruits from the countryside. And the Petrograd factories were either shut down or their workforce now filled with new workers who had not gone through the storms of 1917.
In other words, the Kronstadt of 1921 was not politically the same as the Kronstadt of 1917. Life is not frozen. Things change.
Quite simply in 1921, the whole burden of civil war brought about a new crisis — this time with the Bolsheviks in power. At the very moment when the white armies were at the brink of defeat a wave of anti-government resistance and strikes broke out in the capital.
There were strikes against the Bolshevik government in the factories. A process of fragmentation happened within the Bolshevik party itself — as organized factions moved to sharper and sharper opposition to the party leadership. And, in the famous base at Kronstadt, a new wave of activists led the sailors to rise in revolt against the revolutionary government.
The demands mainly had to do with the awful conditions — cold, hunger, and continuing death from continuing war. But (not surprisingly give the history of Russia) the revolts were also packaged as a “third wave” of the revolution (i.e. that the February revolution had given rise to the October Revolution, which was now giving rise to an even more radical and authentic third revolution, led by anarchists and other left opponents of the Bolsheviks).
Ii’m simplifying of course, and if we zoom back a major backdrop for all of this was the desperation among peasants broadly through the heartland of Russia. The civil war had disrupted and ruined both harvests and transport. The war had disrupted industry — so the cities had little to give the farmers in exchange for food. And in the extremes of war, the Communists (and their Red Army) had been forced to adopt expropriation from the peasants — i.e. under a doctrine of so-called “war commnism” they simply took what they needed to feed their troops, without having anything to give in exchange. And often whole expeditions went out into the countryside that (using any means necessary) forced the farmers to give up their hidden grain supplies.
This too could only go on for a limited time, and revolts started to become more and more powerful in the countryside — and it was reflected among workers and soldiers (in the cities, and even in the Red Army) who had close connections to the countryside.
Lenin’s government responded to this crisis in several ways:
First, they moved to wrap up the civil war (including accepting the loss of places like Finland, Poland and the Baltic states where they had not yet defeated the white forces). they had bit off all they could chew.
Second, they retreated from the “war communism” phase of the civil war. And in particular, they conceded a great deal to the demands of the peasants — calling off expropriations. Their “New Economic Policy” allowed a great deal of capitalism: opening market conditions in food, allowing foreign investment in state owned Soviet enterprises, allowing the development of a merchant capitalist class (of speculators) called NEP-men to facilitate the movement of goods and food.
Third, the Soviet government defended the revolution and its own existence the full means at its disposal. (And I am asserting here that the defense of the revolution was in separable at that point from the defense of that government.) The famous climax of this was the retaking of Kronstadt by the Red Army soldiers, who crossed the ice of the frozen gulf.
click to enlarge
This fighting was the kind that is hardest for revolutionary soldiers — because they were not facing the Cossaks of Denikin or the Czech reactionary troops of Siberia. They were shooting at soldiers of beloved Kronstadt — it was a fight that had erupted within the revolution, under extreme conditions. And the Red Army suppressed the revolt at Kronstadt. It was said that the soldiers wept as they crossed the ice.
Some remarks on this:
a) Political and military forces start to splinter under extreme stress. In a bitterly fought civil war, all the forces were shattering — the Whites and the Reds. And victory in warfare often belongs to the “last man standing.” In this case, the threatened collapse of the revolution into chaos came (luckily) just as the main forces of Whites had been marginalized. And so Lenin was able to combine new peacetime policies (NEP) along with a vigorous defense of revolutionary power.
b) It is true that left forces fighting the Bolsheviks “objectively” served the victory of the extreme right. No other force was going to continue to press ahead the revolution. Even if the anarchists claimed to want a “third revolution” (and even if they believed that was their goal) — this was impossible. It would not and could not happen. The loss of Red Petrograd to the Bolsheviks, the eruption of chaos and infighting on a grand scale, could only have had one result: the collapse of the 1917 revolution itself, and the emergence (in one form or another) of a Themidorian rightwing restoration.
c) In answer to Green-Red’s original queston: Objective and subjective are not the same thing. Objectively the disturbances of 1921 did represent a last hope of counterrevolution. But this does not mean that the fighters or leaders of this Kronstadt revolt were themselves necessarily subjectively white guard agents. There were probably reactionaries of various kinds agitating at the margins, exploiting the extreme suffering and despair of the people, and taking advantage of the absence and decimation of the most advanced workers and soldiers. But these events were not simply white guard actions or the product of conspiracies of reactionaries. Life is more complex than that. And the Soviet era legacy of equating “objective” impact with “subjective” intent is one we should lay aside. (And we have discussed this repeatedly on this site).
d) In the various disputes of anarchists and communists, Kronstadt is the source of one common theme: Anarchists often argue that “You guys will kill us once the revolution starts.” And this argument is used to justify both crude sectarian posturing and some crude anti-communist politics. In fact, I think it is ahistorical.
The main thing that happened to the many anarchist forces during the Russian revolution is that they became communists. The main thing revolutionary communists do to the most sincere and revolutionary anarchists is recruit them. This was true of the Wobblies and the many currents of syndicalists around the world. The shooting at Kronstadt was not some communist vendetta against anarchists — but an extreme and sorrowfilled defense of the revolution (at a moment when everything threatened to come apart). And I think that we are not stuck on some historical treadmill where we can see the future by reading the past: We ourselves can carve out what our coming revolutionary movement will be like. We ourselves can decide how to cross-pollinate.
Reconception of communist theory requires a reconsideration of old assumptions (about state forms, democracy, political discipline, factionalism among revolutionaries and more) — I don’t mean an abandonment of inherited Marxism-Leninism (I am personally, as i often state, quite serious and firm about my communism and Maoism — understood hopefully in the critical and creative sense that I associated precisely with Mao and Lenin) But I do mean that we should take a time to critically revisit many things we were given as settled orthodoxies — and invite others to reengage with us over these questions.
e) People who think revolution is mainly about “strategic will” are confused when revolutionaries employ complex tactics. The complex revolutionary years of Nepal have been both an example of this — and a wonderful opportunity to unlearn a certain infantilism and naive rigidity.
After the audacious days of October and the bitter combat of the civil war, Lenin (in 1921) suddenly talked openly about instituting “state capitalism” in the newly nationalized industries. He made deals with foreign imperialists (both the German military and then foreign corporations). He reinstituted capitalism in the countryside (when many of his own militants assumed that “war communism” was the wave of the future, not a temporary expediency.) As a historical note, the conservative American president Herbert Hoover made his reputation (and his presidential aspirations) based on his involvement in western “relief efforts” inside Soviet Russia.
At the time, from 1918-`927, the enemies of Bolshevism clucked their tongues, remarking how the ultra-radical Bolsheviks had been forced to retreat to capitalism, and had started shooting their own sailors — and insisting that this proved the impracticality of the October revolution and the opportunist lack of principles of a Lenin. (We have quoted Lenin’s reply to the Kauskyist and Menshevik sniping, earlier on Kasama.)
A related historical note: Fanni Kaplan, the woman who tried to assassinate Lenin at the start of the civil war (1918) explained that she shot him because Lenin (in her opinion) had made deals with foreign imperialists. “you will have read in the newspapers that I shot at Lenin. I do not think I succeeded in killing him. If I regret anything, it is only that. He is a traitor to the Revolution. I lay the responsibility for the treacherous peace with Germany and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly at his feet.”
f) Every capitalist roader in history has elevated and praised the NEP — not as a temporary concession to capitalism (under the duress of seven years of the most horrific war and radical upheaval), but as a rood to socialism. The same way that Liu in China wanted “consolidate New Democracy,” there were those in the Soviet Union who wanted to make the NEP permanent. And so the concessions to capitalism (made by revolutionaries) became a rallying point for restoration of capitalism (proclaimed by capitalist roaders). And here too (as with Kronstadt) there was a process of development — as the market conditions needed by a ruined economy became the basis for the rise of powerful capitalist forces in the countryside, forces that one way or another needed to be engaged by new waves of socialist revolution. (One interesting point made, i believe by my favorite Sheila Fitzpatrick is that the Baptist youth organizations grew more rapidly during the 1920s in the Soviet countryside than the Communist youth organizations Komsomol– a remarkable and revealing fact to understand.)
Back to the Complexities of a Revolutionary People:
* In the July days, the most advanced in the revolution had extreme impatience with Lenin — who refused to allow their mass actions to become an attempt at power (during the summer of 1917), but who then turned around and organized a revolt in October (after the watershed events of September).
* From the victory of the revolution, many of its opponents accused Lenin and the Bolsheviks of selling out (to foreign powers, to foreign capitalists, to state capitalism, etc.)
* There were major necessary concessions of many kinds required in the course of the revolution (that each time seemed shocking, truly shocking, to the advanced and the party members at the beginning).
* Decisions had to be made based on the overall needs of the revolution, not the moods and expectations of the advanced. The Bolsheviks needed a mass line — they needed to bring the advanced with them, and reach the broader population by mobilizing the advanced. But winning the advanced to the policies of each moment was its own complex process, and it is not at all the case that the most advanced and revolutionary workers and sailors automatically understood or embraced the policies of their own party.
* The “revolutionary people” (and the advanced) were a living process — that went through changes. The advanced matured into a revolutionary force — not just in 1905, or during the war, but month by month in 1917. And then they were extracted from their place among the people by the demands of the revolution itself — as they became decimated as shock troops of the fighting, and also came to form the framework of a new state and army. The next advance of the revolution (which came in the late twenties) needed a new generation, and a NEW forging of a revolutionary people — to carry out the collectivization and socialist industrialization of the Soviet Union (and to beat back the NEP-men and aspiring capitalists of agriculture both politically and economically).
There is more… but I’ll let others comment first.
land said
“Decisions had o be made based on the overall needs of the revolution, not the moods and expectations of the advanced.”
Then there is reference to the mass line and the living process which are the changes where the advanced become a revolutionary people.
I think decisions always have to be made on the needs of the revolution. How else can you decide?
But if people are not with you and that means winning them over the decisions kind of hang in the air.
Reading over the articles from Jed on Nepal there is such great emphasis on the revolutionary people. And the pictures of the revolutionary people.
You said that the next advance needed and needs a new generation
Many of the youth today are anarchists. In the city I am in there is a line struggle going on among the anarchists – who is going to call themselves a communist and who isn’t.
How do we get this revolutionary people?
It is not going to look like Nepal.
But there is something there I recognize.
anarchist communist said
I think that this piece is completely divorced from the real context of the Kronstadt rebellion. The rebellion was based originally in an investigation of the working class dispute with the Bosheviks in Petrograd. The vast majority of the Kronstadt sailors were there before 1917, not before so they weren’t divorced the revolutionary veterans in 1921. The Bolsheviks had to slander the Kronstadt sailors as a white plot in order to build up support to fight them. The problem that the Bosheviks had with the Kronstadt rebels is that they were actually for revolution based on the self-activity of the working and popular classes rather than top-down centralized control from the Bolshevik party that held back revolution. For a more extensive debunking of the arguments presented above with citations (including direct quotes from Bolsheviks themselves contradicting the pieces– such as Trotsky being worried about the veteran revolutionaries of Kronstadt that he states hadn’t changed much), check out: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/append4.html#app42
Doug said
I found these articles on Krondstad that may be of interest. The articles are part of a debate between Trotsky and Victor Serge in the late 1930s over Krondstadt. The first two are by Trotsky in the late 1930s defending his handling of Krondstadt.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/01/kronstadt.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/07/kronstadt2.htm
The second two are by Victor Serge (anarchist turned communist), who was critical of Trotsky’s handling of Krondstadt.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1938/04/kronstadt.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1938/10/25.htm
Green Red said
My friend, self proclaimed Trotskyite but in my more Marxist than that, said that during one of the conferences he, Earl Gilman once in a conference in Russia during the downfall of the revisionist soviet empire was at a meeting and, during reviewing the problems of the history of Russia he happened to – to my understanding while he and others were trying to draw clear line vs. Stalinist new born party (as far as i recall his saying but, he has to testify) – he happened to mention Kronstadt and boom, Trotskists and anarchists started pointing their fingers upon each other and blaming everything, relatively correctly – toward one another. To stand the pain of reality i imagine satirist images. Hence i was imagining them (a bit life Far Side…) people throwing pictures of Kropotkin and Trotsky – shaped as paper aero planes – toward each other.
You can laugh at it, or at me. why should i care? A day i lost a big part of my trust to communists was when i heard many supporting Abimael Guzman’s saying i do not have friends, i only have comrades…
but to make things more serious i invite those who have time to read, to read this one that took me and other translation parties long, long time to translate as best as i could for an Iranian group. For English version, go to:
http://en.cwiran.com/index.php/archives/367
for Farsi, since it has been published in Farsi within one of the Be Sooye Enghelab, feel free to write to proletariat1871@gmail.com and ask the party to provide you with direct address of that article (i’m still using dial up so, forgive my low organized style)
This is the text (it includes Serge) and, as i recall, if i am not mistaken, at some point Bukharin points out that comrades, we have won the war but, we have lost the proletariat.
And at some point, Lenin acknowledged that statement.
Someday maybe Kasama Project will have the time to point out that Stalin did unite with Bukharin to use his refinery machine to clean up Zineviev and Kamenov (if i am wrong please indicate. not a soul indicated when i wrongly had marked Lenin assasination attempt by a Narodnik and not, by a SR. If we do not kindly bring each others’ mistakes to attention then what difference is there between us and Amerikan anti communists?)
While, due to those two Menshvik’s earlier action, if i am not mistaken, revealing the Bolshvik’s plan to do the October action, i had already once, as a believer of a short history of the revolution booklet was a form of treason; or was it not?
Sorry for the weight of questions and, in the world of reality, i can understand people saying something like when it comes down to dealing with the great enemy we oppose, s/he takes the form of Mao/Stalin rather than any say acting alike Teng Xiaoping or, Leo Shao Chi or…and i will abide since, i don’t presume or imagine, i gather that looking at the failure of the two indicated, neither Kasama comrades, nor…. Naxalites will act stupid or, wrong as the past. The won’t digest La Marquian fallacious theories (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism)of which, luckily, our great and sharp writer Mike Ely did mention the matter in a small footnote of one of the nine letters. see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
T Lysenko, Killing Birds and Mixing Metals are things of the past. They of course must be someday exposed and, summed up but, knowing they were wrong attempts with right intentions, gives nowadays leaders broader understanding to evade risking people’s power without doing a careful research.
Back on the Kronstadt, let’s read the text and, please also pay attention to the part that indicates it was not matter of Stalin or Trotsky in the vision of the authors and so therefore was socialism/communism in one country…
My vision? I don’t condemn or condone things as right and wrong. I wasn’t in neither of those two. I care for what we do now or, next. Good or bad, we have lots of things to learn from (and i am still a sophmore,) but, objective truth remains there, said, or unsaid.
Yes. Kronstadt was in a way related to Petrograde crisis. And also related with many, other elements indicated in this following text (that is present as a whole.)
Green Red said
My friend, self proclaimed Trotskyite but in my more Marxist than that, said that during one of the conferences he, Earl Gilman once in a conference in Russia during the downfall of the revisionist soviet empire was at a meeting and, during reviewing the problems of the history of Russia he happened to – to my understanding while he and others were trying to draw clear line vs. Stalinist new born party (as far as i recall his saying but, he has to testify) – he happened to mention Kronstadt and boom, Trotskists and anarchists started pointing their fingers upon each other and blaming everything, relatively correctly – toward one another. To stand the pain of reality i imagine satirist images. Hence i was imagining them (a bit life Far Side…) people throwing pictures of Kropotkin and Trotsky – shaped as paper aero planes – toward each other.
You can laugh at it, or at me. why should i care? A day i lost a big part of my trust to communists was when i heard many supporting Abimael Guzman’s saying i do not have friends, i only have comrades…
but to make things more serious i invite those who have time to read, to read this one that took me and other translation parties long, long time to translate as best as i could for an Iranian group. For English version, go to:
http://en.cwiran.com/index.php/archives/367
for Farsi, since it has been published in Farsi within one of the Be Sooye Enghelab, feel free to write to proletariat1871@gmail.com and ask the party to provide you with direct address of that article (i’m still using dial up so, forgive my low organized style)
This is the text (it includes Serge) and, as i recall, if i am not mistaken, at some point Bukharin points out that comrades, we have won the war but, we have lost the proletariat.
And at some point, Lenin acknowledged that statement.
Someday maybe Kasama Project will have the time to point out that Stalin did unite with Bukharin to use his refinery machine to clean up Zineviev and Kamenov (if i am wrong please indicate. not a soul indicated when i wrongly had marked Lenin assasination attempt by a Narodnik and not, by a SR. If we do not kindly bring each others’ mistakes to attention then what difference is there between us and Amerikan anti communists?)
While, due to those two Menshvik’s earlier action, if i am not mistaken, revealing the Bolshvik’s plan to do the October action, i had already once, as a believer of a short history of the revolution booklet was a form of treason; or was it not?
Sorry for the weight of questions and, in the world of reality, i can understand people saying something like when it comes down to dealing with the great enemy we oppose, s/he takes the form of Mao/Stalin rather than any say acting alike Teng Xiaoping or, Leo Shao Chi or…and i will abide since, i don’t presume or imagine, i gather that looking at the failure of the two indicated, neither Kasama comrades, nor…. Naxalites will act stupid or, wrong as the past. The won’t digest La Marquian fallacious theories (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism)of which, luckily, our great and sharp writer Mike Ely did mention the matter in a small footnote of one of the nine letters. see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
T Lysenko, Killing Birds and Mixing Metals are things of the past. They of course must be someday exposed and, summed up but, knowing they were wrong attempts with right intentions, gives nowadays leaders broader understanding to evade risking people’s power without doing a careful research.
Yes. Kronstadt was in a way related to Petrograde crisis. And also related with many, other elements indicated in this following text (that is present as a whole.)
Back on the Kronstadt, let’s read the text and, please also pay attention to the part that indicates it was not matter of Stalin or Trotsky in the vision of the authors and so therefore was socialism/communism in one country…
My vision? I don’t condemn or condone things as right and wrong. I wasn’t in neither of those two. I care for what we do now or, next. Good or bad, we have lots of things to learn from (and i am still a sophmore,) but, objective truth remains there, said, or unsaid.
1921 – Kronstadt: Beginning of the Counter-revolution
January 10, 2010
By admin
Source: Internationalist Communist Tendency
” Today we are the witnesses of a tragedy of a social revolution being contained within national frontiers, as a result of the passivity of the peoples of Europe faced with intelligent and well-armed reactionary forces. It is thus stifled and reduced to playing for time with the enemy within and without. We have seen many mistakes made, many errors revealed and from the libertarian point of view, many precious truths have been confirmed.”
Thus wrote Victor Serge in June 1921 in the preface to his essay The Anarchists and the Experience of the Russian Revolution. The essay [1] was an appeal to the anarchists to recognise what was proletarian and positive about the October Revolution. Although it was written before the rising at Kronstadt in March 1921 against the Bolsheviks, Serge makes no reference to that tragedy in his introduction written a few months later. Indeed he states that his conclusions are “more true now than they were a year ago”. What the quotation highlights is the fact that the isolation of the “social revolution” to one territory was now becoming an unbearable burden. Not only did Kronstadt throw a “flash of light which illuminated reality” as Lenin said, but the events of the Tenth Party Congress (adoption of the NEP and the banning of factions), the failure of the March Action in Germany and the adoption of the united front policy, in all but name, at the Third Congress of the Comintern, made 1921 a highly significant year in the degeneration of both the Russian and international revolution. This article is aimed at weighing up the significance of that decline eighty-five years ago.
135 years ago, the Paris Commune of 1871 gave a glimpse of what the working class could achieve and how it could run society for itself. But after 74 days, the Commune was crushed by the bourgeois government of Thiers backed by the international power of the capitalist class. Confined to a single city it was isolated and defeated with 20,000 Parisian workers massacred in cold blood in a single week in May 1871. In response, the Communards shot their bourgeois hostages. The number of ruling class victims of the Commune was 84. Thus it is always the white terror of the ruling class that exceeds in numbers and horrors the red terror of the working class. As Marx noted, the problem of the Commune was that it was isolated to a single city. The problem of the Russian proletariat was that their revolution was isolated to a single country.
The Russian Revolution of October 1917 remains the only occasion in history when a contingent of workers actually overthrew the capitalist state power over an entire territory. For this reason we continue to examine and try to understand it. The fundamental question is to explain how a revolution which began by offering the widest liberation to the working class and thus to humanity, could have become by 1928 one of the greatest tyrannies of the twentieth century. Looking back on the events of eighty-five years ago with the benefit of hindsight, we can understand that 1921 was a significant turning point on the road to defeat for the revolution. At the time it did not appear so to many of the participants. That 1921 was a year of crisis they could plainly see; over one million dead from famine, with many more from typhus and other diseases. The outbreak of strikes against the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) and the Kronstadt Revolt brought home the harshness of the situation. And to add to the woe, the international revolution not only failed to occur as the Bolshevik leaders expected but suffered a hammer blow with the defeat of the March Action in Germany.
Our task here is not simply to chronicle what went on but to explain what it means for us today. We are aware that there will be no revolution like the Russian experience again. Nor are we using “the condescension of the present” as E.P. Thompson called it. Any revolutionaries who seek simply to slavishly replicate what happened in Russia deserve only ridicule (as do those Trotskyists who consider the question of leadership to be just a question of the right individuals in strategic positions). We need to avoid the trap into which so many so-called Marxists and revolutionaries fall in seeing the past as a blueprint for the future. However, only by learning from what really happened can we arm ourselves for the struggles ahead. And the first step in this learning process is to debate what the significance of the past is.
1918-21
Already some “libertarian Marxists” [2] and anarchists will be screaming that the revolution was lost long before 1921. We don’t deny that soviet power in the territory of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic (the name USSR was not adopted until 1923) was already an empty shell by the end of 1920 (although there were healthy pockets of it in 1919) [3]. Nor do we deny the excesses of the Cheka during the Civil War where it became a state within the state. But the Red Terror arose out of the Civil War. In November 1917, the Bolsheviks were letting former tsarist generals go free if they promised not to take up arms against them. A few months later the same Tsarist generals were not only leading invasions of Russia, armed by British and French imperialism but were literally crucifying any workers they suspected of Bolshevik sympathies. Although both sides resorted to terror in this class war it was hardly on the same scale. Here we can point to the evidence of the US Commander in Siberia, General William S. Graves who reported that:
I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia to every one killed by the Bolsheviks. [4]
Nor do we claim that the revolution had abolished capitalist relations of production, except in so far as there had been a total economic collapse as soon as the Bolsheviks came to power. Since at least 60% of industry was devoted to war production, achieving peace meant unemployment. As Edward Acton observed:
In the aftermath of October, the country suffered an economic collapse on the scale of a modern Black Death… The capital lost no less than a million inhabitants in the first six months after October as workers streamed from the capital in search of bread. [5]
Even those workers who had jobs still had to spend their time looking for food and demoralisation was compounded by mass absenteeism. Attempts by Bolsheviks on the factory committees at this time to increase labour discipline led to new delegates being elected who were more compliant with the workers’ demands. Eventually though even these factory committees began to be more concerned with labour discipline and output. In the anarchist/libertarian demonology this was, of course because the Bolsheviks had suppressed the workers’ initiative in the factory committees. But this is too simplistic as S.Smith showed in his Red Petrograd.
…one cannot see in this the triumph of the Bolshevik Party over the factory committees. From the first the committees had been committed both to maintaining production and to democratising factory life, but the condition of industry was such that these two objectives now conflicted with one another.
pp.250-1
But the Civil War was taking further toll on the revolution. The Bolshevik Party had been a party predominantly of workers in 1917. By 1920, these workers had become officials in the Red Army, the Cheka and the bureaucracy. By 1922, over two thirds of the party membership were administrators of one kind or another. At the same time the fight against imperialist invasion and the Whites had led to a closing of ranks. Inner party discussions declined and increasingly, the local elected posts were filled by the local party secretary simply appointing delegates to higher bodies. The practice of democratic centralism within the Party (where lower bodies elected all higher bodies) had virtually collapsed. What was left was only centralism. It needed only a Stalin to become the Party Secretary in charge of these local secretaries to have in his hands the levers of power. But that was still some time in the future. When Serge arrived back in Petrograd after being deported from France in January 1919 he reported,
We were entering a world frozen to death… At a reception centre we were issued with bread and dried fish. Never until now had any of us known such a horrid diet. Girls with red headbands joined with young bespectacled agitators to give us a summary of the state of affairs: “Famine, typhus and counter-revolution everywhere. But the world revolution is bound to save us”. [6]
And it was this belief in the world revolution which lay at the heart of the hopes of the Russian working class even at the beginning of 1921 when they had suffered and were suffering so much. Serge was asked “what is the French proletariat waiting for” by his young hosts but it was the German proletariat that most Bolsheviks had the highest hopes in.
The Third (Communist) International
The whole Bolshevik programme cannot be understood without reference to its international character. The insistence on outright opposition to the imperialist war in 1914 distinguished the Bolshevik party as the only major European party to oppose the war with revolutionary demands [7]. It was the Bolsheviks who led the split at the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences with the centrist and pacifist socialist majority. And when the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia they shared exactly the sentiment of Rosa Luxemburg that
The question of socialism has been posed in Russia. It cannot be solved in Russia.
At the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918 Lenin stated:
The final victory of socialism in a single country is, of course, impossible. Our contingent of workers and peasants which is upholding Soviet power is one of the contingents of the great world army. [8]
And in March, at the time of the acceptance of Brest-Litovsk he repeated this:
It is the absolute truth that without a German revolution we are doomed. [9]
In his April Theses of 1917, Lenin had posed the need for a new International to replace the Second which had gone over to imperialism in August 1914. The war itself began to provide the material basis for this international as workers and former social-democrats stepped up their resistance to their own governments. The First World War’s end was hastened by the strikes in Vienna, in Hamburg and Bremen and all across Germany. When news reached Moscow of the Vienna rising, Radek, one of the Bolshevik leaders, recorded the spontaneous demonstration that occurred outside the Kremlin.
I have never seen such a sight. Workers, both men and women, and Red Army soldiers filed past until late evening The world revolution had arrived. The masses of the people were listening to its iron step. Our isolation had ended. [10]
This was a bit premature. Although many workers and ex-soldiers around Europe were increasingly supportive of the soviet idea, this had not taken the concrete form of new communist parties in most countries. Even in a place like Germany the revolutionaries had failed to distinguish themselves clearly from the social-chauvinist Socialists. Although Luxemburg and Liebknecht had formed the Spartakus League, they remained inside the German centrist USPD (which included Kautsky and Bernstein) as they feared isolation from the mass of the class. This only confused the workers and isolated the Spartakists from the smaller but politically clearer groups such as the Bremen Left and the International Socialists (IKD). Given too that the social-democrats did not openly oppose soviets but worked behind the scenes to destroy them, it meant that the Spartakists were not seen as the only supporters of workers councils (as had been the case with the Bolsheviks in Russia). If we return to the Victor Serge quote at the top of this text, the greater sophistication of the Western European bourgeoisie which incorporated so-called socialists into their defence, was a major factor in defeating the spread of revolution in Germany and beyond.
As it was, the news that the Second International was reforming in January 1919 forced the Bolsheviks to send out feelers for a new international which they intended would meet in Berlin. Before it could meet, Liebknecht had precipitated the Spartakist uprising which was crushed by the Social-Democrats in alliance with the proto-fascist Freikorps. In the reprisals which followed hundreds of workers were shot in cold blood and Liebknecht and Luxemburg were brutally murdered. The planned first meeting of the new International was now moved to Moscow. The move was meant to be temporary until revolution broke out in the West. However this was the first step in the process of intertwining of the fate of the Russian Revolution and the International. And because it was the Russian party which physically and ideologically dominated the International, it very quickly became an organ for defending soviet power in Russia whatever problems it was going through. In the event, the First Congress of the Communist International did little more than declare its existence. The fifty delegates who assembled in Moscow did not all have formal mandates, a factor which only led to further Bolshevik dominance of the new body. This wasn’t quite how Lenin saw it when he announced in Communist International that:
The new third “International Workingmen’s Association” has already begun to coincide in a certain measure with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. [11]
By this he meant that the process of unfolding of the world revolution would also be accompanied by the advance of socialism in Russia. Unfortunately for the proletariat the process was to go in the opposite direction. The growing counter-revolution in the USSR would also destroy the revolutionary aim of the Third International.
However this could not be seen in 1919, when world revolution and capitalist counter-revolution were locked in deadly embrace and the existence (however feeble) of the Third International was a banner around which workers everywhere could rally. Early in the year, revolution had broken out in Bavaria and Hungary where Soviet Republics were proclaimed. The Allied powers (Britain, France and the USA) were faced with mutinies in their own armies in Russia. Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister announced that the British intervention was not only finished but the revolts on the Clyde and in South Wales were alarming the British state at home.
… if a military enterprise were started against the Bolsheviki, that would make England Bolshevist and there would be a Soviet in London. [12]
Lenin was talking about July 1919 as “our last difficult July” since within a year there would be the victory of “the international Soviet republic”. However the heady atmosphere which so threatened capitalism did not last. By the end of May, the Bavarian Soviet Republic, isolated even in Germany, had collapsed. It was followed in August by the Hungarian Soviet Republic which succumbed due to internal squabbles and the invasion of a Romanian Army supplied by the Allies. By the autumn, the Whites in Russia had reached their most threatening. Yudenich was at the gates of Petrograd, Kolchak was moving from Siberia and Denikin from the Ukraine. In October and November…
the continued existence of the regime hung by a thread. [13]
To add to the misery the young German Communist Party, which had lost its best leaders in the murders of January to March 1919, was split by Paul Levi at its Heidelberg Congress in October 1919. The Party had adopted the tactics of using existing parliamentary and trades union means to increase its influence but only by the narrowest of votes. Not content with this victory Levi (against the advice of the Bolsheviks) proposed the expulsion of all those who had voted against the majority. The Left wing which constituted half the party and controlled its North German sections (including Berlin) went away to form the German Communist Workers Party (KAPD). Similar difficulties occurred in different forms in other countries. Lenin tried to win all those who rejected social-democratic reformism to the Third International, including anarcho-syndicalists. At this time he also told the British groups negotiating to form a party that he himself was in favour of using trade unions and parliamentary tactics but did not condemn those who called for different tactics.
By the end of 1920, the civil war had been won but Russia remained isolated and the price of victory was, as we saw at the start of this article, almost a Pyrrhic one. Industrial production was only a fifth of that of 1913 and agricultural production had declined by a half. The Bolshevik economist, L. Kritsman described the situation as one of economic collapse “unparalleled in the history of humanity”. [14] The policy of sending out military detachments to the countryside during the Civil War to forcibly requisition grain had led to 113 peasant revolts (50,000 followed the ex-SR Antonov in the Tambov region alone). The Bolsheviks had succeeded in retaining state power but as Bukharin (and other leading Bolsheviks, including Lenin] later acknowledged in 1921, they had held on to state power but had lost the proletariat in the process. For Lenin this material fact was the single most important reason for the Kronstadt Revolt of March 1921.
The Petrograd Strikes and Kronstadt
There is no more emotive name in the history of the Russian Revolution than Kronstadt. It is the litmus test of everyone’s understanding of the way in which the revolution slid to defeat. For most Trotskyists and Stalinists it was either a plot of the White reaction who took advantage of the terrible conditions at the end of the civil war to incite a revolt against the proletariat or it was (in the Socialist Workers’ Party version) [15] because the Kronstadt sailors were now all peasants and this was a revolt of the petty bourgeoisie. For anarchists it was the real “third revolution” against the Bolshevik dictatorship and for the historians of the capitalist class it has been a gleeful episode to demonstrate that any alternative to their system ends in bloodshed. E.H Carr devotes only two one line references to the Kronstadt Revolt in his The Bolshevik Revolution Volume 1. This only underlines that his is a history of the Soviet state and not of the revolutionary proletariat. For revolutionaries today the issue cannot so easily be ducked since it frames how we answer the questions posed by the last revolutionary experience.
By 1921, soviet power had become an empty shell. Elections to the soviets were under the watchful eye of the Cheka. Similarly armed guards patrolled the factories as Taylorism and one-man management were imposed on the most revolutionary working class in history. The workers accepted this as long as the Civil War against the Whites created an exceptional situation. At the same time they had also accepted the abandonment of the election of officers in the armed forces as Trotsky brought in members of the old officer class to defeat the Whites. But by the time the last White General had been run out of Russia in December 1920 there were already signs that the emergency regime was to continue. Grain requisitioning carried on, Trotsky had even announced that his Red Army methods should be imposed on the whole workforce (the militarisation of labour debate) and there were no new elections for the Soviets. Everywhere the talk was of “iron discipline” and more dictatorship. Little wonder that the Party, now increasingly a party of functionaries rather than workers was prey to bureaucratisation. This bureaucratisation in turn led to the emergence of opposition from proletarian groups within the Bolshevik Party: groups like the Democratic Centralists led by Ossinsky and Sapronov, the Workers’ Opposition led by Shlyapnikov and Kollontai and Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group. These oppositions, whatever their weaknesses and errors, wanted a return to the revolutionary principles of 1917. No wonder Lenin could say in February 1921,
We must have the courage to look in the face of harsh reality. The Party is sick, the Party is shaken by fever. And unless it succeeds in quickly and radically curing its own illness, a break will occur which will have fatal consequences for the revolution. [16]
But before the Party debates could begin at the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in March the workers of Petrograd and Moscow went on strike. In Petrograd the strikes were mass affairs demanding freedom of the press, release of political prisoners and a return to democracy in the state. Some demanded the opening of local food markets to counter growing shortages (which would eventually become famine in 1921). Counter-revolutionaries also tried to take advantage of the situation by putting forward demands for a return of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks’ reaction was one of panic. Troops were sent in to break up strike meetings and the leaders arrested. The Cheka put around the lie that the movement was dominated by peasant elements (since only the hardcore proletariat was left in Petrograd by this time). The clinching factor in the ending of strikes was the arrival of new bread supplies since it was the announcement of cuts in the bread ration which had sparked the strikes in the first place.
The Kronstadt Revolt that broke out in the naval base was a direct response to the strikes in Petrograd and the repression that followed. On 28th February, delegates from Petrograd reported on the situation and the programme of the sailors of the battleship Petropavlovsk was adopted. It called for new Soviet elections and for freedom for all socialists and anarchists. It is noticeable that the programme did not call for freedom for the bourgeoisie and the sailors overwhelmingly rejected a reactionary proposal to recall the Constituent Assembly. Economically the programme advocated fairer rationing, limited handicraft production and the peasants to produce freely so long as they did not use hired labour. It was in fact far less “capitalist” than the New Economic Policy which Lenin had already begun to float before the revolt broke out.
Kalinin, later Stalinist President of the USSR, was sent to Kronstadt where he simply denounced the sailors (who were not yet in open revolt). The response was the production of the Kronstadt Izvestia (Kronstadt News) which declared:
The Communist Party, master of the state, has detached itself from the masses. It has shown itself incapable of getting the country out of its mess. Countless incidents have recently occurred in Petrograd and Moscow which show that the party has lost the confidence of the masses. [17]
The response of the Bolshevik Government was to announce that it was “a White Guard plot” led by an ex-tsarist general called Kozlovsky. The fact that émigré papers in Paris had spoken of trouble at Kronstadt earlier helped furnish the proof that was needed, despite the known rejection of the counter-revolution by the Kronstadters. Fundamentally, the Bolsheviks saw counter-revolution as something which could only come from abroad and therefore the Kronstadters must objectively be working for that counter-revolution. There were very important strategic considerations which heightened the panic in government circles. As long as the sea around Kronstadt was frozen it could be reached, but once the ice melted as the spring thaw took hold then Kronstadt would be out of reach and potentially become a base from which a foreign capitalist force could operate. This is why there was no possibility of lengthy negotiations. Trotsky sent the Kronstadters an ultimatum (which incidentally did not include the phrase that the sailors would be “shot like partridges”. This was in fact in a leaflet sent by the Petrograd Defence Committee under Zinoviev). This was rejected on March 7th 1921, when the Kronstadt Izvestia denounced Trotsky as “the dictator of Soviet Russia”. The first attack took place the next day but failed with 500 government troops killed.
There now came a hiatus as the Tenth Party Congress of the Russian Communist party (Bolshevik) began on the same day. If further evidence was needed to suggest that 1921 was a significant turning point in the fate of the Soviet revolution then it was duly provided by the Tenth Congress. There were three big issues at this conference. The first was the role of the trades unions in the Soviet system, the second was the policy to be adopted towards the peasantry, given that the emergency system of the Civil War period had reduced agricultural production to half that of 1913 and the third was the banning of factions in the Party.
The trade union issue was dominated by the debate with the Workers Opposition led by Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapnikov. The Workers Opposition wanted the trade unions to take over the running of production, but as they only had the support of about fifty delegates the final resolution “On the role and tasks of trade unions” rejected this. Instead it was decided that the unions would be “schools of communism”, therefore they could not be part of the state apparatus. In this light it was also agreed that the trade unions “are the one place… where the selection of leaders should be done by the organised masses themselves.” This itself is evidence of the extent of the decline of soviet power since it implies that there is to be no revival of Soviet democracy.
On the 15th of March, the Congress also accepted the need for a New Economic Policy so that the grain requisitions would be replaced with a tax in kind. In practice this was even more of a concession to the peasants than the Kronstadters themselves were demanding. Many Bolsheviks opposed it, including Ossinsky of the Democratic Centralist group. Riazanov described it as the “peasant Brest” meaning that it was another concession to a class enemy. Lenin’s reply was that, “only an agreement with the peasantry can save the revolution”.
In fact NEP presaged a full-scale attack on the working class since it led to the privatisation of smaller firms. Without state support they laid off workers and this led to a rapid rise in unemployment and a fall in wages. The Bolshevik Party was now both the ruling party of a state which was attempting to hold on until the world revolution and carrying out the peasant counter-revolution at the same time. Despite this, as long as the Bolshevik Party remained true to its traditions of open debate revolutionaries could still preserve some hope for the future. The final resolution of the Tenth Party Congress, however, called for the banning of factions (and the Workers’ Opposition and Democratic Centralists were mentioned by name in the resolution). Whilst it did not have the effect that was perhaps intended (factions continued to re-appear until 1927) it did commit Bolsheviks to defend the Party more strongly than ever. Indeed Lenin seems to have over-reacted to the threat posed by the various tendencies over the trade union debate. He mistakenly thought the Workers Opposition was supporting the idea of the unions against that of the party. Just how far he was mistaken was demonstrated by the fact that whilst Bolsheviks in Kronstadt defended the Kronstadt Naval base, the rest of the Party rallied together to suppress it. This included the oppositions who comprised part of the 300 strong contingent of party delegates which took part in the final storming of Kronstadt and which was ultimately successful on March 18th. Ironically the crushing of the Kronstadt Commune came exactly fifty years after the Paris Commune had been formed. Serge found the celebrations of the Paris Commune a little sickening given that 10,000 of the attackers lost their lives on the ice whilst 1,500 defenders died and a further 2,500 were captured. Some of these were shot by the Cheka. Serge though supported the attack himself. His agonised appraisal of the situation was as good as any contemporary could give us.
After many hesitations, and with unutterable anguish, my Communist friends and I declared ourselves on the side of the Party. This is why. Kronstadt had right on its side. Kronstadt was the beginning of a fresh liberating revolution for popular democracy; “The Third Revolution!” it was called by certain anarchists whose heads were stuffed with infantile illusions. However the country was absolutely exhausted, and production practically at a standstill; there were no reserves of any kind, not even reserves of stamina in the hearts of the masses. The working class elite that had been moulded in the struggle against the old regime was literally decimated. The party, swollen by the influx of power seekers, inspired little confidence. Of the other parties only minute nuclei existed, whose character was highly questionable…
If the Bolshevik dictatorship fell, it was only a short step to chaos, and through chaos to a peasant rising, the massacre of the Communists, the return of the émigrés, and in the end, through sheer force of events, another dictatorship, this time anti-proletarian. [18]
Much the same was later said by Bolshevik leaders even if they repeated the Cheka lie that Kronstadt was “a White Guard plot” before it was crushed. Bukharin wrote that it was no such thing but that they had to stamp out the revolt of “our erring proletarian brothers”. Lenin later stated more accurately that the Kronstadters neither wanted the government of the Whites nor of the Bolsheviks but “there is no other”. And this was accepted internationally at the time. Even the KAPD who was already moving into opposition to the Third International accepted in 1921 that the suppression of Kronstadt was necessary.
However, it is one thing to say that all internationalists at the time supported the crushing of Kronstadt and another not to draw lessons from it. Whilst Trotsky could still write in his biography of Stalin in August 1940 that the suppression of Kronstadt was “a tragic necessity”, today we can take a rather longer look at its historical lessons. Here we cannot look at Kronstadt in isolation. As it turned out, whichever side won was a victory for the counter-revolution. However, whilst the defeat of the Kronstadt sailors was a defeat for soviet power inside Russia, the prospect of international revolution still lay open and this was the critical factor in the opinions of the revolutionaries of the time.
The real problem lay in the fact that the Party was the state. The lesson is that the Party has to be the party of the international proletariat whatever its members do inside the soviets of a particular territory. It may be in the future that there will be occasions where party members clash again in a revolutionary situation due to material privation, as in 1921, but the Party of the future as a body will be international. And this does not just mean in spirit. It will not be physically tied to one territorial entity. If soviet power means what it says then the soviets in each territory may vote for Party delegates and remove them but the Party itself stands only for the programme of international proletarian revolution. It is not the state nor does it wield state power even in the temporary workers’ state of the transition from capitalism to communism. [19] For revolutionaries at the time, the young workers’ state had survived a critical moment. For us, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that whatever happened at Kronstadt, the counter-revolution was on the march. We are still suffering the consequences of that today.
The March Action and the Third Congress of the Communist International
Kronstadt was not the only event in that month that indicated the ebbing of the revolutionary wave. In Germany, as we saw above the Communists had split between the KAPD and the KPD in 1919 and all attempts to re-unite them fell on deaf ears on both sides. For its part the KPD oscillated from its birth between putschism and passivity. Its participation in the so-called March Action was a disaster which not only cost it two thirds of its membership (falling from 450,000 to 180,000 in three months) but really sapped the morale and revolutionary will of the working class. Partly the KPD responded to a provocation of the Army (which tried to disarm workers), partly to the encouragement of Radek and Bela Kun to help break the isolation of soviet Russia and partly to be seen to act more decisively than it had done during the Kapp Putsch where it had let the SPD organise the strikes which overthrew that right wing attempt at a coup. At the end of the Action the KPD leader Eberlein tried to stimulate the workers to carry on fighting by blowing up KPD buildings — a tactic which backfired when it was exposed by the ruling class. The final fiasco came when workers in Hamburg who wanted to carry on ended up fighting workers who saw the Action was over.
Long before the defeat of the March Action in Germany, Soviet Russia was negotiating its survival in the post-war imperialist set up. This did not mean the automatic abandonment of the world revolution, simply a recognition of the weakness of the soviet economy and the need to re-establish foreign trade. On March 16th 1921, two days before the final suppression of Kronstadt, the British Government signed the Anglo-Soviet Trade agreement which involved de facto recognition of the Bolshevik government in return for the suspension of all propaganda against the British in Afghanistan and India. However, secret negotiations had being going on longer with the German Army and Government so that even though the March Action was taking place a German trade mission under Rathenau came to Moscow. Krasin, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Trade even warned German workers at this critical point that striking would impede deliveries to the Soviet Union!
Further evidence that the revolutionary wave was dying out came at the Third Congress of the Third (Communist) International in June — July of 1921. Here Trotsky told the delegates that in 1919 they had expected world revolution in a matter of months. Now they were talking about “a question of years”. The debacle of the March Action and the Kronstadt Revolt lay heavy on the minds of the Bolshevik leaders who organised the main debates. No longer was the framework one of intransigent defence of revolutionary positions in the 21 Conditions adopted by the Second Congress. At this point the main concern was how to achieve a mass basis for Communist parties. Given that the revolutionary wave was ebbing this meant seeking alliance with the very Social Democrats who had joined the imperialist camp in 1914 and had connived at the murder of hundreds of communist by the crypto-fascists. The Third Congress of the International was thus another watershed in the counter-revolutionary turn of 1921. It also indicated how the fate of the International would remain bound up with the course of the counter-revolution in Russia. This first became clear in the debate on what had previously been called “the national and colonial question”. Previously, the International had had an exaggerated policy of seeing national struggles against imperialism as linked to the struggle for communism. Now (only nine months after the Baku Congerence) it did not even refer to “national and colonial struggles” but to the “eastern question”. A Russian trade treaty with the British Empire plus treaties with Persia (Iran) and Turkey meant that these governments were not to be offended. Small wonder that the Indian Communist, M.N. Roy delivered the only really heavyweight verdict on the debate by denouncing Comintern policy as “pure opportunism” “more suitable for a congress of the Second International” [20].
The same thing was also true of the shift in policy towards social democracy in general. The united front with the butchers of the working class would have been proclaimed at the Third Congress if it had not already been associated with the disgraced German KPD leader Paul Levi who had been expelled at the beginning of the year. Instead the exhortation of the Bolshevik leaders in the Third Congress was “to the masses”. But the Communists had already been using this idea even when trying to split the social democratic parties. So what could the new slogan mean? Nothing other than a rapprochement with social democracy at all levels. Whilst our political ancestors who then led the Italian Communist Party had no trouble with the slogan, they did choose to apply it differently. To them going “to the masses” meant joining in strikes and other actions with workers in the social democratic parties but continuing to oppose the class collaborationism of their leaders. By December when the Russian Party adopted the slogan of the “united front” for the first time, it was clear that the idea was not about working with the rank and file but with the leaders — this was the first step in abandoning the revolutionary path on an international scale. It was not announced as such but de facto it was already that. If 1921 showed that the revolution inside Russia had now swung against the working class, it was also the beginning of the process that led to abandoning the proletarian principles of internationalism. In the verdict of our comrades in the Internationalist Communist Party the Third Congress was the turning point in the history of the Communist International:
The contradictions which loomed on a global scale continued to grip the first revolutionary experience. To have made the revolution in any country, to have momentarily defeated in armed conflict its own bourgeoisie did not mean socialism was being built but only the establishment of the necessary political conditions for it. It is absolutely essential to destroy the political instrument through which the bourgeoisie exercises its class domination and to replace it with another, proletarian one, organised on the basis of an iron class dictatorship but this, in itself, is not enough.
In order to have gone on effectively towards socialism, the revolution needed a sufficiently developed political structure and an economy which was totally autonomous from the world market, conditions which Russia in those years lacked. Which is why the only salvation from Russia’s backwardness lay in revolutionary victory in some western, or better still, some industrially advanced country. It followed from this that the Communist International and the Bolshevik Party which, like it or not, was the backbone of the Comintern, had to make every effort to accelerate or at least promote, uncompromising revolutionary solutions on the basis of the first two Congresses.
However it was dressed up, abandoning the political autonomy of the class party and the dictatorship of the proletariat served neither to convince the leaders of social democracy nor to re-unite the masses around a programme of revolutionary compromise but only to confuse the international proletariat, blunt its political weapon of struggle and obscure its goals. The legitimate doubt arises that behind the official analysis of the Bolshevik leaders, and the Comintern itself, there was the idea that the situation was less favourable than previously foreseen. It was thus deemed worthwhile assisting the still-precarious Russian situation by an international alliance with social democracy to give it a firmer guarantee of safety than extend the revolution. Only in this way can we understand how the tactical adjustments to the united front and the workers’ government emerged from ambiguity to assume their real shape. [21]
On May Day 1922, the slogan of “world revolution” was missed out for the first time from the slogans issued by the Russian Communist Party.
To the revolutionaries of the time however the significance of this was not so obvious. Setbacks will always occur in any process and revolutionaries have to maintain a rational optimism that such setbacks can be reversed. Trotsky defended the adoption of “to the masses” as “the strategy of temporary retreat” but how long is “temporary”? By 1922 Bordiga was openly criticising “the danger of seeing the united front degenerate into a communist revisionism” [22]. By 1924, he was demanding the abandonment of the “united front” and the “workers’ government” slogans as total confusions. By this time however, further degeneration had set in with all the Communist Parties affiliated to the International subject to “bolshevisation” i.e. their leaders were chosen for their compliance to Moscow and to the interests of the Soviet state’s foreign policy. Gramsci replaced Bordiga on Moscow’s insistence and he used various organisational means to destroy the hold that the Italian Communist Left held over the Communist Party of Italy (even if it did take until the Lyons Congress of 1926) [23]. By this time our political ancestors in the Communist Left had formed the Committee of Intesa (alliance) whose Platform summed up their verdict on the whole fiasco of the Comintern’s policy.
It is mistaken to think that in every situation expedients and tactical manoeuvres can widen the Party base since relations between the party and the masses depend in large part on the objective situation [24].
Revolution is an Affair of the Masses
To conclude then, 1921 was not just a chain of disconnected setbacks but represented the real end of the revolutionary wave and the definitive beginning of the reversal of the process which had put world proletarian revolution on the historical agenda. To the revolutionaries of the time it was obvious that a massive retreat on an international scale was taking place. The Bolsheviks took the view that they had to hold the original proletarian bastion together until the world revolution arrived. But the weakness of the Russian proletariat meant that increasingly the Bolshevik Party transformed itself not simply into the director of the state but into the state itself. And this state was increasingly one of nascent Soviet capitalism against the working class. Thus we have one of the most confusing counter-revolutions in history where the party that had been the highest expression of working class consciousness in 1917 was transformed by the historical circumstance of the Russian proletariat’s isolated war against imperialism into the agent of proletarian defeat. None of this went unremarked by the oppositions inside the Bolshevik Party and even by Lenin himself. At the Eleventh Congress of the Russian Communist Party in March 1922 he told delegates:
[…] and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can be truthfully said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth they are not directing, they are being directed. [25]
However, only with the enormous benefit of hindsight can we see that 1921 was the year in which the revolution was lost and this has to be part of our balance sheet of the Russian experience. What we draw from that experience is not the councilist one that all parties are bourgeois (as Otto Ruhle concluded, before running off to work for the Mexican Government of the Party of the Institutionalised Revolution!). Because the working class has no property to defend, its consciousness (encapsulated in its programme) can only take form as a collective body. And because some workers, by virtue of their experience, will come to revolutionary ideas before others they have to take the lead in organising themselves. This means a political body which is not based on compromise with the capitalist class but is its constant adversary. This to us can only imply a revolutionary party. What 1921 and the decline of the revolution demonstrate, however, is the need for that party to be international and centralised prior to the revolutionary outbreak. That same party remains outside all governmental or statist functions as a body whatever its local membership have to do. At a local level, power is wielded by the armed workers’ councils. They are the only state bodies until the bourgeoisie is suppressed world wide. The Party is a political vanguard which defends the programme of communism rather than any territory claiming to be en route to communism. There may be those who would argue that this is as utopian as it is idealist but we have to remember that in 1921 itself, at the Tenth Party Congress:
For a brief moment Lenin flirted with the idea of effecting a separation between Party and state. He briefly urged a clear specification and demarcation of the respective spheres of each and proposed that the organs of the state be given much greater autonomy and freedom from Party interference. [26]
Harding later tells us that Lenin recognised “almost instantly” that his proposal would not work. But this was because the situation in 1921 made it impossible to re-write the past. The Bolsheviks could not abandon state power because the soviets were already empty shells. Had this proposal been made in November 1917 and had the soviets retained political life, then it would have been possible. In 1921, the Bolsheviks were reduced to the Micawber position of holding on to state power in the hope that “something would turn up” in the shape of world revolution.
All this is simply utopian if the working class is not moving en masse and breathing life into the international party and the workers’ councils. Ultimately the only guarantee of victory is the relatively rapid extension of the revolution to at least the major imperialist countries, for, until they are paralysed they have the capacity to destroy any revolutionary initiative. By imposing an international civil war on an already exhausted soviet republic they were able to destroy it materially. Whilst the Bolsheviks won militarily on Russian territory the failure of the world revolution elsewhere meant that the class struggle was lost politically. The adoption of NEP and the united front in 1921 were the epitaphs of that political defeat. The working class is still living with the consequences.
IBRP
[1] See Victor Serge, The Revolution in Danger [translated by Ian Birchall] (Redwords,1997)
[2] We don’t accept the term “libertarian Marxist” as for real Marxists, Marxism is libertarian or it is nothing. Stalinism etc. is not Marxism. For our wider views on the Russian Revolution see our pamphlet 1917 [£2 from the Sheffield address]. A new version which has been extended to take in the counter-revolution is in preparation.
[3] See the contrast between Arthur Ransome’s, Six Weeks in Russia 1919 and The Crisis in Russia 1920 [both published by Redwords,1992]
[4] Quoted in W.P. and Z. K. Coates, Armed Intervention in Russia 1918-22 [London 1935] p.229.
[5] Rethinking the Russian Revolution [Edward Arnold,1990] p.204.
[6] Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Oxford,1963) pp.70-1.
[7] Although the heroic opposition of the smaller Balkan Socialist parties in Serbia and Bulgaria should also be recorded.
[8] Lenin, Selected Works, Vol.2 p.505.
[9] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.33 p.98.
[10] Quoted in The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power (ed. John Riddell, Pathfinder Press, New York 1986 p.33).
[11] Quoted in E.H.Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution Vol.3 (Pelican edition,1966) p.133.
[12] Carr, ibid. British troops were not withdrawn for another six months and not before London dockers had refused to load the Jolly George supply ship bound for Archangel and Murmansk.
[13] Carr, op. cit. p.138.
[14] L. Kritsman, The Heroic Period in the Great October Revolution (1926) p.166.
[15] See P. Binns, T. Cliff and C. Harman, Russia: From Workers’ State to State Capitalism, (Bookmarks 1987) p.20. They are doing no more than repeating Trotsky’s own false accusations in his 1938 article, Hue and Cry over Kronstadt.
[16] Quoted in Kronstadt 1921 Analysis of Popular Uprising in the time of Lenin in Revolutionary Perspectives 23 p.22.
[17] Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Commune.
[18] Serge, op.cit. pp.128-9
[19] We also reject the idealism of the International Communist Current which thinks that it is enough to say that “all actions of violence within the proletariat are to be outlawed” (see International Review 100, p.21) as if this solves the problem. Not only is this simply a pious resolution with which anyone can agree but it does also pose another question. The decision of who is proletarian and who is not, still has to be made, and we certainly would be nervous of passing any test imposed by the ICC!
[20] See E.H.Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution Vol.3 p.386.
[21] I nodi irrisolti dello stalinismo alla base della perestrojka (Edizioni Prometeo 1989) pp.20-21[L.It 18,000 from our Milano address — see page 2].
[22] See G. Williams, Proletarian Order, p.213
[23] See our phamplet Platform of the Committee of Intesa 1925, [2 pounds from CWO address — see page 2].
[24] ibid. p.18.
[25] Lenin, Collected Works,Volume 33.
[26] N. Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought [MacMillian 1977] p.296.
Andrei Kuznetsov said
I must ask: how much of the Kronstadt rebellion really was specifically Anarchist-led, or at least how many of the sailors who were fighting the Red Army probably considered themselves “Anarchist”?
I’ve always wondered just how “Anarchist” Kronstadt really was, and why Anarchists leap onto it so much as compared to other left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks in 1921…
21st century anarchist said
Does it really matter, what matters is anarchistic tendencies, Hungary for example did not have anarchists leading the charge in 56, but the tendencies on a species level were there. There will never be a balance of anarchists or any revolutionary tendency in any objective sense, this is something that is beyond you or Is control.
Andrei Kuznetsov said
“There will never be a balance of anarchists or any revolutionary tendency in any objective sense, this is something that is beyond you or Is control.”
Will it be led by maaaaaaagiiiiiic?~
What do you mean by “beyond our control”? What’s beyond our control? Is ideology unnecessary to achieve revolution?
21st century anarchist said
Ideology is based on base level behavior patterns which in an ambiguous species like ours does throw a lot of things out of control, I don’t think that civilization for example was a very intentional event, there were psychologies that reflected that trend just like the antithesis made up of peeps like myself, but ultimately there is something beyond our control that tips the scales.
Green Red said
Dear Anarchist Friend,
Talking about our ambigious species behaviour reminds me of … the Russian author’s book, Mutual Aid i think it was called. It was written by Peter Kropotkin i think. tell me if i am wrong but, while understanding the book’s concept, i looked at it as a mechanical summing up. Have you read it?
Nothing is perfect in humanity but, nothing is perfect in any living entity. Yes. I wish Kronstadt had never happened. But did everything the Russian revolution brought up was absolutely bad?
And, where are your idol samples of true communism? Please be specific. Thanks