In May Lenin gained an ally when Leon Trotsky, a leading figure of Russian socialism, returned from exile in the United States and joined the Bolshevik Party. By June Lenin and Trotsky had formed an alliance and begun to plot the overthrow of the provisional government.
On October 24, 1917, the Bolsheviks staged a relatively bloodless coup, with soldiers from the Soviet taking control of strategic points throughout Petrograd. The following day the all-Russian Congress of Soviets approved the formation of a revolutionary Bolshevik government with Lenin at its head.
SOCIALISM IN POWER
Innovation and Struggles
The new Bolshevik regime started out well. On October 26 the temporary ruling council passed a series of decrees that addressed popular concerns with land distribution, economic equality, and the shape of the new government. The great estates would be partitioned and distributed to the peasant communes with compensation to the former owners. Workers were given control over factories. Banks were nationalized. Plans were put forward to elect a constituent assembly to replace the temporary council. The long-awaited socialist revolution was on its way.
On October 27 the revolution took a detour when the ruling council passed the Decree on the Press, censoring all Russian publications. In the coming weeks the temporary council passed further restrictive measures.
In December the Cheka (secret police) was established to discover and suppress any attempts at counterrevolution. When election results for the proposed constituent assembly were tallied in January 1918, the Bolsheviks found that they had won only 21 percent of the vote. Lenin followed the precedent set by Nicholas II and dissolved the assembly, saying that the choices were Bolshevik rule or the return of the extreme right.
Each new extension of power was justified as a temporary measure. After all, Russia was at war. Lenin understood that if his party were to have any hope of holding on to power, they would have to withdraw from the war.
Trotsky, appointed minister of foreign affairs, attempted to negotiate a favorable treaty with Germany. At last, under heavy pressure from Germany on one side and Lenin on the other, he signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918. The treaty made vast concessions to Germany:
• Russia withdrew its claims to the Baltic states of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
• Much of western Russia was occupied by German and Austro-Hungarian troops.
• Areas of the Caucasus to the south were also ceded to Germany.
Lenin was willing to give in on these points, partly because he saw it as essential to have peace at any price and partly because both he and Trotsky believed that in the aftermath of the war a socialist revolution would break out in Germany, making any territorial concessions meaningless.
The Workers’ Flag Is Deepest Red
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The identification of socialists as “reds” began with the flag of the Paris Commune of 1871. The Commune chose red in memory of the blood that was shed by French workers during one hundred years of revolution. It was also a symbol of equality, based on the idea that all men’s blood is red.
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As soon as Lenin signed a treaty with Germany, however, the newly formed Soviet Union found itself fighting a civil war against the counterrevolutionary Whites, made up of nationalists, aristocrats, and remnants of the tsarist army, financed by Russia’s former allies.
Leon Trotsky was charged by the Soviet government with forming an army to counter the Whites’ attacks. Using a combination of tsarist troops and commanders and volunteer workers and peasants, he forged the Red Army. Trotsky traveled with the army in a specially constructed armored train. Under his leadership, the Whites were defeated by 1921, though at tremendous cost to the new state. Starvation was widespread, and atrocities were committed by both sides during the war.
Foreign Troops in the Soviet Union
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In addition to the White armies, foreign troops took part in the fighting during the civil war, although on a very limited scale. Forces from France, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States fought the communists before withdrawing by 1921.
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When a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party nearly succeeded in an attempt to assassinate Lenin in August 1918, the war against counterrevolutionaries was unleashed on the population as a whole in the form of the Red Terror. On Lenin’s orders, the Cheka executed thousands of “opponents of the state” without trial.
WAR COMMUNISM
During the civil war, with the support of both Lenin and Trotsky, the Soviet Union experimented with a system called War Communism. The intention was to make sure that the cities, where the Bolsheviks believed their political strength lay, were supplied with food, even if this meant forcibly taking food from peasant families. As well, the government attempted to quickly implement a series of socialist policies:
• All industries were nationalized.
• Strikes were outlawed as being harmful during a time a war.
• There was rationing of food.
• Workers and peasants were required to work. “He who does not work shall not eat,” Lenin wrote, adapting a verse from the Bible.
Following the war, the Bolsheviks admitted that the system had been largely a disaster. It spiked the resentment of the peasantry and made the gap between urban and rural areas wider. It also led to a severe drop in productivity (aided by the disruption of the civil war), and this was accompanied by malnutrition in many parts of the country.
Normal or Emergency
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While Lenin saw War Communism as a temporary measure, designed to help the war effort, others, including Trotsky and party leader Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938), believed that the country could transition through War Communism to the basic forms of socialist production, and that it could do so quickly.
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THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY
In 1921, recognizing that the situation was dire, Lenin proposed what became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). Under the NEP, small businesses would be allowed but on a limited and strictly state-regulated basis. The Soviet government hoped to attract a measure of foreign investment through this policy, though this had limited success.
In the field of agriculture attempts at collectivization of peasant holdings were discontinued, and private ownership of land was allowed. The Soviet government was, however, extremely cautious about this. Peasants who acquired substantial tracts of land were called kulaks, and they were watched carefully to make sure they did not become a social force capable of challenging the state.
Kulaks
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The term kulak dates back to the Russian empire; however, exactly what defined a kulak varied over time. Under the Bolsheviks, kulaks were deemed “class enemies” even as they were tolerated during the NEP. When Joseph Stalin began his campaign of peasant collectivization in the 1930s, kulak took on a more sinister meaning, and many thousands were sent to labor camps or killed outright.
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During the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, which took up much of party life in the late 1920s, Trotsky and the faction within the Bolshevik Party known as the Left Opposition expressed hostility toward the NEP, which they felt had the power to create a small capitalist center of opposition to Soviet rule. Stalin was generally supportive of the NEP (along with the much more enthusiastic Bukharin) but abruptly turned against it in the late 1920s after Trotsky had been defeated and sent into exile. In 1928 he launched the first Five-Year Plan, signaling the onset of a strictly centralized economy, and the NEP ceased to exist.
THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL
Formation of the Comintern
The Russian Revolution tore the socialist community in two. Many European socialists doubted whether the Bolshevik Revolution was really socialist. Lenin declared that democratic socialists were traitors and renegades. In January 1918 the Bolshevik party formally acknowledged the break between social democrats and communists b
y changing its name from the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party to the Russian Communist Party.
Zinoviev, Leader of the International
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Although Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders played a significant role in the founding of the Comintern, responsibility for running the organization largely fell to Grigory Zinoviev (1883–1936). Zinoviev had been one of the central leaders of the party, though he had strongly opposed the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In the forthcoming conflict between Trotsky and Stalin he initially sided with Stalin and was forced out of the party in disgrace after Stalin triumphed. He was put on trial in 1936, found guilty of treason, and shot.
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In 1919 Lenin preempted efforts by moderate socialist leaders to revive the Second International by creating his own international organization. In May 1919 Russia hosted the first meeting of the Communist International, also known as the Comintern, in Moscow. Unlike the First and Second Internationals, the Comintern accepted no variations in socialist philosophy. The organization’s stated purpose was to promote the spread of the socialist revolution across the industrialized world. In order to be admitted to the Comintern, socialist parties were required to model themselves on the Bolshevik party pattern and expel moderate socialists and pacifists from their membership rolls.
Some thirty-seven organizations were invited to the founding conference. In some cases these included more than one organization from the same country. For example, from the United States delegates represented the Socialist Labor Party, left-leaning members of the Socialist Party (these would shortly break from the SP to form the Communist Party of the United States), the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Workers’ International Industrial Union.
Bolshevik Leadership
As a successful revolutionary party possessing immense moral authority over the International, the Bolsheviks used their own experience in Russia to guide the delegates. In the underdeveloped world, for instance, they stressed the importance of forming an alliance with the peasantry, as they had tried to do in Russia.
Comintern agents were sent to various countries to foment revolution, generally without much success.
Béla Kun
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Among the most widely known of the Comintern’s agents was the Hungarian revolutionary Béla Kun (1886–1938). Kun was a prominent figure in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, formed in 1919. However, the Republic never controlled more than a third of Hungary’s territory, and it collapsed after less than five months. Kun later took part in the governing of Crimea. During Stalin’s purge trials in the 1930s he was tried for treason and shot.
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After the battle between Stalin and Trotsky had been resolved in the former’s favor, the Comintern became largely a means for the Soviet Union to impose its line on foreign communist parties. This led to disaster in Germany in the early 1930s, when Stalin was convinced that the social democrats represented a far greater threat than the Nazis (the German Communist Party referred scornfully to the social democrats as “social fascists”).
During World War II the Comintern, having initially called for communists to take no position in the conflict between the Western allies and Hitler, switched its position literally overnight when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. As a gesture of goodwill to his now-allies in 1943, Stalin dissolved the Comintern; it was succeeded by the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform).
STALIN VERSUS TROTSKY
The Defeat of the Left Opposition
Prior to 1923 Leon Trotsky was seen by most Soviet citizens as one of the most prominent leaders of the Soviet Union. In 1917 he had led the Military Revolutionary Committee, which carried out the Bolshevik insurrection against the provisional government. He had negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, had formed and led the Red Army to victory in the civil war, and was an important voice within the Soviet government concerning domestic and foreign affairs. To many, he seemed a natural successor to Lenin, whose health in 1923 took a sharp turn for the worse.
A NON-BOLSHEVIK BACKGROUND
However, Trotsky’s enemies within the party were able to point to certain aspects of his past that made him seem “suspicious”:
• Trotsky had opposed Lenin at the 1903 congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and had written a harsh polemic against him in “The Report of the Siberian Delegation.” Lenin had replied in kind, and the two men were estranged until the summer of 1917.
• Trotsky was regarded by many party members as arrogant and out of touch with ordinary workers and peasants.
• Trotsky was Jewish, and there was a strain of anti-Semitism—often hidden but sometimes open—within both the party and the Soviet workers and peasants.
Trotsky himself did not take Stalin seriously as a political threat; he scorned him as merely a functionary of mediocre intelligence. He was far more preoccupied with opponents such as Bukharin and Zinoviev.
Lenin’s Testament
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In late 1922 and early 1923 Lenin, knowing his health was poor, wrote a short note to the party leadership, which was kept secret. In it, he evaluated the personalities of some of the top leaders, including Trotsky and Stalin:
Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggles against the C.C. on the question of the People’s Commissariat for Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.
These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present C.C. can inadvertently lead to a split, and if our Party does not take steps to avert this, the split may come unexpectedly.
In a final note written shortly before his stroke Lenin recommended the removal of Stalin from his position as secretary-general of the party.
The note was read to the Political Committee, the central governing authority of the Communist Party, following Lenin’s death in 1924, but for the sake of party unity those present, including Trotsky and Stalin, agreed to keep it secret.
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By 1925 the party was embroiled in a full-scale faction fight between Trotsky, whose followers styled themselves the Left Opposition, and a triumvirate made up of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev (1883–1936), another important party leader. Despite his best efforts, Trotsky found himself outmaneuvered by Stalin, who had full control of the party apparatus. The dispute took many forms, chiefly, in its early stages, regarding the degree to which the New Economic Policy should be continued. The Left Opposition called for putting reins on it, while the triumvirate advocated continuing it indefinitely.
By 1926 the triumvirate had broken apart, and Zinoviev and Kamenev had allied with Trotsky to form the United Opposition. Trotsky denounced Stalin, particularly over the latter’s position on the situation in China. On Stalin’s insistence the Chinese Communist Party offered an alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, a bourgeois party. In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek turned on his erstwhile allies and massacred the communists in Shanghai.
EXPULSION AND EXILE
In late 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party. Trotsky was exiled, first to Kazakhstan and then to Turkey. Without their leader, the Left Opposition collapsed, and many of its members capitulated to the new regime.
Stalin was quick to consolidate his power. In the 1930s he launched a series of show trials, accusing prominent party members of treason and collaboration with the exiled Trotsky. By 1937 virtually all the members of the Bolshevik Central Committee at the time of the revolution were dead, were in exile, or had been executed—except for Stalin.
Trotsky in Exile
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THE SOVIET UNION UNDER STALIN
Socialism in One Country
Before continuing, we need to examine the background of the man who, by the end of the 1930s, was the supreme ruler of the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) was the son of an alcoholic cobbler. Stalin enrolled in the Orthodox seminary to please his mother, who wanted him to be a priest. He was soon expelled for revolutionary activity and joined the political underground in the Caucasus, where he served more as an instigator of violent clashes than an organizer. In a party dominated by the self-proclaimed “bourgeois intelligentsia,” he soon earned a reputation for a practical approach to revolution. (Lenin thought of him as a useful thug.) Once the Bolsheviks were in power, Stalin was the man who took care of the dull details of party and state administration.
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