A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  What had happened was momentous. In 1792–93 the working masses of Paris had pushed the most radical section of the middle class into power, only to see that power turned against themselves and then its holders ousted by self-seeking conservatives. In 1848 the children of those masses had forced a couple of their own representatives into the government in February, only to be butchered on the barricades in June. In 1871 they had gone further and briefly taken power – but only in one city and only for two months. Now a congress of workers, soldiers and peasants had taken state power in a country of 160 million, stretching from the Pacific coast to the Baltic. World socialism did indeed seem on the agenda.

  The revolution besieged

  The leaders of the revolution were only too aware that they faced immense problems so long as the revolution remained confined to the lands of the old Russian Empire. The revolution had been successful because the working class of Petrograd and a few other cities was concentrated in some of the biggest factories in the world, right at the centres of administration and communication. But it was, nevertheless, a small minority of the population. The mass of peasants supported the revolution not because they were socialists, but because it offered the same gains as a classic bourgeois revolution – the division of land. The economic crisis produced by the war was already crippling industry and causing hunger in the cities. The bread ration was down to 300 grams, and the average daily energy intake for the masses was just 1,500 calories. 76 Reorganising industrial production to turn out the goods which could persuade the peasants to provide the towns with food was the Herculean task facing the committees of workers overseeing the managers of every factory. It could hardly be achieved unless the revolution received assistance from other revolutions in more industrially advanced countries.

  It was the belief that the war would give rise to such revolutions that had persuaded Lenin to abandon his old contention that the revolution in Russia could only be a bourgeois revolution. In 1906 he had denounced

  the absurd and semi-anarchist idea of … the conquest of power for a socialist revolution. The degree of Russia’s economic development and the organisation of the broad mass of the proletariat make the immediate and complete emancipation of the working class impossible … Whoever tries to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary. 77

  He had changed his mind because the war which had driven all of Russia to revolt was having the same impact elsewhere in Europe. But, as Lenin insisted in January 1918, ‘Without the German Revolution we are ruined’. 78 The belief in international revolution was not a fantasy. The war had already led to upsurges of revolt similar to those in Russia, if on a considerably smaller scale – the mutinies of 1917 in the armies of France and Britain and in the German navy, a strike by 200,000 German metal workers against a cut in the bread ration, five days of fighting between workers and soldiers in Turin in August 1917, 79 illegal engineering and mining strikes in Britain, and a republican rising in Dublin during Easter 1916.

  Opposition to the war was now widespread across the continent. In Germany the pro-war SPD had expelled a large proportion of its own parliamentary party for expressing peace sentiments – leading them to form a party of their own, the Independent Social Democrats. In Britain the future Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald chaired a convention in Leeds of workers’ delegates wanting peace.

  But revolutions do not occur according to synchronised timetables. The general pressures of a system in crisis produce similar eruptions of bitterness in different places. However, the exact forms these take and their timing depend upon local circumstances and traditions. Russia’s backward peasant economy and its archaic state structure led its giant empire to crack in 1917, before the states of western and central Europe. They had already been at least partially modernised and industrialised as a result of the chain of revolutions from 1649 to 1848. They all possessed, to varying degrees, something lacking in Russia – established parliamentary socialist parties and trade union bureaucracies enmeshed in the structures of existing society but retaining credibility with wide layers of workers.

  In January 1918 a wave of strikes swept through Austria-Hungary and Germany, involving half a million metal workers in Vienna and Berlin. The strikers were to a considerable degree inspired by the Russian Revolution, and they were subject to vicious police attacks. Yet the Berlin workers still had enough illusions in the pro-war SPD leaders Ebert and Scheidemann to give them places on the strike committee. They used their influence to undermine the strike and ensure its defeat, with massive levels of victimisation.

  Rosa Luxemburg, in prison in Breslau, had foreseen the dangers facing Russia in a letter to Karl Kautsky’s wife, Luise, on 24 November:

  Are you happy about the Russians? Of course they will not be able to maintain themselves in this witches’ sabbath, not because statistics show economic development in Russia to be too backward, as your clever husband has figured out, but because social democracy in the highly developed West consists of miserable and wretched cowards who will look quietly on and let the Russians bleed to death. 80

  The behaviour of the SPD in January confirmed her warnings. The German high command had given the revolutionary government an ultimatum in negotiations at the Polish border town of Brest-Litovsk. If it did not allow Germany to take over vast areas of the Russian Ukraine, then the German army would advance right into Russia. The revolutionary government appealed over the head of the generals to Germany’s workers and soldiers, distributing hundreds of thousands of leaflets in German across the front line. But the defeat of the strike movement ruled out any chance of an immediate revolutionary break-up of the German army, and its troops advanced hundreds of miles. There were bitter arguments throughout the Bolshevik Party and the soviets as to what to do. Both Bukharin and the Left Social Revolutionaries argued for revolutionary war against Germany. Lenin argued for accepting the ultimatum since the Bolsheviks had no forces with which to fight a revolutionary war. Trotsky argued against both revolutionary war and accepting the ultimatum in the hope that events in Germany would resolve the dilemma. In the end Lenin persuaded most other Bolsheviks that accepting the ultimatum was the only realistic option. The Left Social Revolutionaries resigned from the government, leaving the Bolsheviks to govern alone.

  The punitive terms imposed by Germany in return for peace rounded off the damage done to the Russian economy by the war. The Ukraine contained the bulk of Russia’s coal, and was the source of much of its grain. Industrial production collapsed through lack of fuel, and the food shortages in the cities grew even worse than before. In Petrograd the bread ration was cut to 150 grams on 27 January, and a mere 50 grams (less than two ounces) on 28 February. The impact on the working class of Petrograd who had made the revolution was devastating. By April the factory workforce of the city was 40 per cent of its level in January 1917. The big metal factories, which had been the backbone of the workers’ movement since 1905, suffered most. In the first six months of 1918 over a million people migrated from the city in the hope of finding food elsewhere: ‘Within a matter of months, the proletariat of Red Petrograd, renowned throughout Russia for its outstanding role in the revolution, had been decimated’. 81

  The workers who had been able to lead the rest of Russia into revolution because of their strategic role in the process of production no longer occupied that role. The institutions they had thrown up – the soviets – still existed, but had lost their organic ties to the workplaces.

  The enthusiasm for the revolution persisted, leading to an influx of eager workers, soldiers and peasants into the Bolshevik Party, where the ideals of working-class socialism inspired heroic deeds. This enthusiasm enabled Trotsky to conjure up a new millions-strong Red Army, building round the solid committed core provided by the workers’ militias of 1917. But the soviets, the party and the Red Army were no longer part of a living, labouring working class. Rather they were something
akin to an updated version of Jacobinism – although where the 1790s version had been driven by the ideals of the radical wing of the bourgeoisie, the new version was motivated by the ideals of working-class socialism and world revolution.

  The task of fighting for these ideals became more difficult as 1918 progressed. The German seizure of the Ukraine was followed in June and July by attacks orchestrated by the British and French governments. Some 30,000 Czechoslovak troops (prisoners from the Austro-Hungarian army who had been organised by Czech nationalists to fight on the Anglo-French-Russian side) seized control of towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway, cutting Russia in half. Under their protection Right Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks formed a government in Saratov which massacred in the street anyone suspected of being a Bolshevik. 82 Japanese forces seized control of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. British troops landed in Murmansk in the north, and also took control of Baku in the south. In the same months, the Left Social Revolutionaries assassinated the German ambassador in Petrograd in an effort to destroy the peace of Brest-Litovsk and seize power by force, while Right Social Revolutionaries assassinated the Bolshevik orator Volodarsky and wounded Lenin.

  External encirclement on the one hand and internal attempts at terrorism and counter-revolution on the other brought a shift in the character of the revolutionary regime. Victor Serge, an anarchist turned Bolshevik, described the change in his Year One of the Russian Revolution , written in 1928. Until June, he wrote:

  The republic has a whole system of internal democracy. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not yet the dictatorship of a party or of a central committee or of certain individuals. Its mechanism is complex. Each soviet, each revolutionary committee, each committee of the Bolshevik Party or the Left Social Revolutionary Party holds a portion of it, and operates it after its own fashion … All the decrees are debated during sessions [of the all-Russian soviet executive] which are often of tremendous interest. Here the enemies of the regime enjoy free speech with more than parliamentary latitude. 83

  Now all this began to change:

  The Allied intervention, striking simultaneously with the rebellion of the kulaks [rich peasants] and the collapse of the soviet alliance [with the Left Social Revolutionaries], poses an unmistakable threat to the survival of the republic. The proletarian dictatorship is forced to throw off its democratic paraphernalia forthwith. Famine and local anarchy compel a rigorous concentration of powers in the hands of the appropriate commissariats … Conspiracy compels the introduction of a powerful apparatus of internal defence. Assassinations, peasant risings and mortal danger compel the use of terror. The outlawing of the socialists of counter-revolution and the split with the anarchists and Left Social Revolutionaries have as their consequence the political monopoly of the Communist Party … Soviet institutions, beginning with the local soviets and ending with the Vee-Tsik [all-Russian executive] and the council of people’s commissars now function in a vacuum. 84

  It was at this point that the revolutionary government turned, for the first time, to the systematic use of terror. The ‘White’ counterrevolutionaries had shown their willingness to shoot suspected revolutionaries out of hand. They had done so in October, as they fought to cling on to Moscow, and Whites in Finland had killed 23,000 ‘Reds’ after putting down a Social Democrat rising in January. 85 Now the revolutionaries felt they had no choice but to respond in kind. The shooting of suspected counter-revolutionaries, the taking of bourgeois hostages, the adoption of methods designed to strike fear into the heart of every opponent of the revolution now became an accepted part of revolutionary activity. Yet despite the impression created by works such as Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago , the terror was very different from that employed by Stalin from 1929 onwards. It was a reaction to real, not imaginary, actions of counter-revolution and it ended in 1921 once the civil war was over.

  The revolutionary regime held out against all odds because it was able, despite terrible hardship, to draw support from the poorer classes right across the old Russian Empire. It alone offered any hope to the workers, guaranteed land to the poorer peasants, resisted the anti-Semitic gangs working with the White armies, and had no fear of self-determination for the non-Russian nationalities.

  Yet all the time those who led the revolutionary regime – and the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who risked their lives to carry its message – looked west, to the industrialised countries of Europe, in the hope of desperately needed relief.

  Chapter 3

  Europe in turmoil

  The German November

  The revolutionary upsurge in the West was not long coming in historical terms. It followed just 12 months after the Russian October – although these were very long months for starving, war-torn Russia.

  The extortionate terms the German Empire imposed at Brest-Litovsk provided its rulers with a breathing space, but only a brief one. A great and bloody offensive in March 1918 took its armies further into France than at any time since 1914 but then ground to a halt. A second attempt to push forward in August failed, and then it was the German army’s turn to retreat. It was running out of reserves of manpower, while US entry into the war the year before had provided the Anglo-French side with fresh troops and access to vast supplies of equipment. The German high command panicked, and Ludendorff suffered some sort of nervous breakdown. 86 In late September he decided that there had to be an immediate armistice and sought to avoid responsibility for this by persuading the Kaiser to appoint a new government containing a couple of Social Democrat ministers. But it was not possible simply to switch off the war which had convulsed all of Europe for four years. The rival imperialisms, particularly that of France, wanted a pound of flesh similar to that which German imperialism had demanded of Russia earlier in the year. For a month the German government tried desperately to avoid paying such a price and the war continued, as bloody as ever. British, French and US troops pushed into German-held territory in France and Belgium. In the Balkans a combined British, French, Serbian, Greek and Italian force routed the Austrian army.

  The pressure was too much for the rickety multinational Austro-Hungarian monarchy, heir to the Holy Roman Empire born 1,200 years before. Its army collapsed and the middle-class leaders of the national minorities seized control of the major cities: Czechs and Slovaks took over Prague, Brno and Bratislava; supporters of a unified ‘Yugoslav’ south Slav state took over Zagreb and Sarajevo; Hungarians under the liberal aristocrat Michael Karoly held Budapest; and Poles took Cracow. As huge crowds stormed through the streets of Vienna, demanding a republic and tearing down imperial emblems, 87 power in the German-speaking part of Austria passed into the hands of a Social Democrat–led coalition with the bourgeois parties.

  Germany’s own high command, desperate to rescue something from the debacle, ordered its fleet to sail against Britain in the hope of a sudden, redeeming, naval victory. But its sailors were not prepared to accept certain death. Their mutiny the year before had been crushed and its leaders executed because it had been too passive – they had simply gone on strike, allowing the officers and military police to hit back at them. This time they did not make the same mistake. Sailors in Kiel armed themselves, marched through the town alongside striking dockers, disarmed their opponents and established a soldiers’ council. They lit a fuse for the whole of Germany.

  Huge demonstrations of workers and soldiers took control of Bremen, Hamburg, Hanover, Cologne, Leipzig, Dresden and scores of other towns. In Munich they took over the royal palace and proclaimed an anti-war reformist socialist, Kurt Eisner, prime minister of a ‘Bavarian Free State’. On 9 November it was Berlin’s turn. As vast processions of workers and soldiers with guns and red flags swarmed through the capital, the recently released anti-war revolutionary Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a ‘socialist republic’ and the ‘world revolution’ from the balcony of the imperial palace. Not to be outdone, the pro-war SPD minister in the Kaiser’s last government, Scheidemann, proclaimed a ‘republic
’ from the balcony of the imperial parliament. The Kaiser fled to Holland, and the two Social Democrat parties presented a ‘revolutionary government’ of ‘people’s commissars’ for endorsement by an assembly of 1,500 workers’ and soldiers’ delegates. It symbolised the fact that soldiers’ and workers’ councils were now the arbiters of political power everywhere in Germany and in German-occupied Belgium. The forces of revolution embodied in such councils, or soviets, seemed to be sweeping across the whole of northern Eurasia, from the North Sea to the north Pacific.

  But the German councils had given revolutionary power to men determined not to use it for revolutionary ends. Ebert, the new prime minister, was on the phone to General Groener of the military high command within 24 hours. The pair agreed to work together – with the support of Hindenburg, the wartime ‘dictator’ – to restore order in the army so that the army could restore order in society as a whole. 88

  Social Democrat politicians who had stood for reform via the capitalist state had logically supported that state when it went to war in 1914. Now, just as logically, they tried to re-establish the power of that state in the face of revolution. For them the old structures of repression and class power were ‘order’; the challenge to those structures from the exploited and dispossessed represented ‘anarchy’ and ‘chaos’.