by Lars T. Lih
Lenin’s ‘hold-out scenario’ displays something of his old confidence, although in a more subdued tone. Yet the enforced dependence on international capitalism injected a new anxiety into his outlook. Old Bolshevism had fought for political freedom in Russia as a central goal because the Bolsheviks had been confident that the Social Democratic message could win the loyalty of the workers in an open fight. But now the fear of international capitalism made political freedom in Soviet Russia seem equivalent to suicide. As he wrote in 1921 to a party comrade who advocated full freedom of speech:
Freedom of the press in the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic], surrounded by bourgeois enemies of the entire world, means providing freedom of political organization to the bourgeoisie and their most loyal servants, the Mensheviks and the SRS.
This is an incontrovertible fact.
The bourgeoisie (on a global scale) are still stronger than us by many orders of magnitude. To give it another such weapon as freedom of political organization (= freedom of the press, for the press is the core and basis of political organization) means making the enemy’s job easier and helping the class enemy.
We do not wish to do away with ourselves by suicide and therefore we will not do this.28
Lenin’s remarks show his old respect for ‘freedom of the press’ as the essence of ‘freedom of political organization’, but combined now with a new sense of vulnerability.
Kto-Kovo (Who-Whom)
Lenin’s second justification for ‘steps toward socialism’ in Russia was the class war within the peasantry. From his very first writings in 1894 Lenin had seen the peasantry splitting apart into two poles, a majority of exploited proto-proletarians at one pole and a minority of exploiter proto-bourgeois at the other. The democratic revolution against the tsar would be fought alongside the entire peasantry, since the tsar’s oppressive rule violated the interests of rich and poor peasant alike. The political freedom made possible by the tsar’s overthrow would give the socialists access to the exploited rural majority. Support for a socialist revolution against capitalism would be forthcoming only from the exploited majority, not from the ‘petty bourgeoisie’.
Lenin was still operating with this scenario when he announced in late 1918 that class conflict in the Russian village was leading to a rural October that was even more significant than the 1917 October revolution carried out by the urban workers. The socialist credentials of the Bolshevik revolution were vulnerable as long as the Bolsheviks were supported by the whole peasantry and not just the exploited majority.
Alas, the mismatch between scenario and reality could not long be ignored and Lenin was again forced to adjust. Before 1919 Lenin focused on the polar extremes within the peasantry: the rural poor (bednota) versus the kulak. In 1919 the official focus moved toward the centre of the spectrum: the mass of the peasantry that had not yet been polarized. More and more, steps toward socialism depended on enticing the middle peasant – the peasant as peasant – to follow the lead of the proletariat. Accordingly, Lenin’s adjustments can be followed in a series of parallel processes: disillusion with the leadership qualities of the rural poor, soft-pedalling the conflict with the kulak and searching for ways to convince the middle peasant of the virtues of socialism.
Lenin addresses a conference of socialist communes in December 1918, when he is still relatively sanguine about the prospects of communes and state farms.
In Lenin’s original scenario the rural poor were assigned a specific mission: to spearhead the transition from small-scale individual production to large-scale collective production. Impelled by the economic breakdown caused by the war, the poorest peasants would realize the impossibility of farming in the old ways. They would pool together their land to form communes (kommuny) or take over landowner estates and run them as ‘state farms’ (sovkhozy). These collective enterprises would reveal the advantages of socialism to the rest of the peasantry, and voilà! slow but steady and perceptible progress down the path to socialist transformation of the countryside. Such was Lenin’s vision.
The only problem – as Lenin realized with growing dismay – was that the actual communes and state farms were negative examples that pushed the peasantry away from socialism. From early 1919 on we have a ceaseless litany of complaints that only increase in volume and bitterness. Lenin’s vitriol on this issue stemmed from his enormous emotional investment in his original scenario.
April 1919: ‘The peasants say: long live the Soviet vlast, long live the Bolsheviks, but down with kommuniia! They curse the kommuniia when it is organized in a stupid way and forced upon them. They are suspicious of everything that is imposed upon them, and quite rightly so. We must go to the middle peasants, we must help them, teach them, but only in the field of science and socialism. In the area of farm management we must learn from them.’29
December 1919: ‘the communes have only succeeded in provoking a negative attitude among the peasantry, and the word “commune” has even at times become a slogan in the fight against communism’.30
December 1920: Lenin states derisively that collectively organized farms were in such pathetic condition that they were justifiably termed almshouses.31
March 1921: ‘The experience of this collective farming shows us only an example of how not to farm: the surrounding peasants laugh or are filled with indignation.’32
Parallel to Lenin’s progressive disillusionment with the rural poor as class leaders is a definite soft-pedalling of the frenetic anti-kulak rhetoric of 1918. In 1919 he emphasized the distinction between the kulak and the bourgeoisie in general: kulak resistance would be crushed but kulaks would not be expropriated like urban capitalists.33 Later in the year he noted with some wonderment that the pitiless logic of ‘ili-ili’ – either the dictatorship of the workers or the dictatorship of the landowners – meant that kulaks in Siberia supported soviet power against Admiral Kolchak (the ‘supreme leader’ of the anti-Bolshevik White movement). In December 1920 an irritated Lenin told Bolshevik questioners that the Central Committee had unanimously agreed that ‘we got carried away with the struggle against the kulak and lost all sense of measure’. By this time, in fact, the Bolsheviks were openly relying on the economic exertions of the kulak, although he had been rechristened for this purpose as ‘the industrious owner’.34
As we see, Lenin had abandoned his original ‘class war in the villages’ scenario long before the introduction of NEP in early 1921. In its place arose a scenario whose protagonist was the previous walk-on role of the middle peasant. An official ‘shift to the middle peasant’ was inaugurated with much fanfare in early 1919. According to émigré economist Leo Pasvolsky, the open letters to the peasants written by Lenin and Trotsky, the various official decrees, and ‘the dozens of articles that were devoted to the subject in the whole Soviet press for weeks after that… constitute the most elaborate scheme of agitation ever used for any one purpose by the Soviet regime’.35 The peasants were quick to grasp that the soviet power was seeking a new base of social support and that the bednota (the poor peasants) were no longer unchallenged masters in the villages. Despite the prominence of this campaign at the time, it has disappeared from the present-day historian’s horizon, because it does not fit into prevailing stereotypes about Bolshevism during the civil war.
Gradually Lenin worked out a new and more ambitious scenario: enlist the middle peasant directly into the socialist cause. But how? What could convince the middle peasant of the advantages of socialism? Existing models of collective agricultural production – the kommuny and state farms run by poor peasants – were embarrassing failures. Furthermore, the use of violence to transform production relations was a non-option. This point needs to be brought out, precisely because there was a lot of state violence against the peasantry during the civil war, both to extract needed resources and to crush peasant rebels. But these traditional forms of state violence were sharply distinguished in Lenin’s mind – and no doubt in peasant consciousness as well – from v
iolence used to transform production methods. From a Marxist point of view coercing people to adopt a higher form of production was not so much wrong as absurd.
Lenin is fascinated by a presentation of an electric plough, a new way of demonstrating the advantages of socialism to the peasants (October 1921).
As he watched his hopes for state farms and kommuny crumble Lenin only became more insistent on the inadmissibility of using force – a fundamental contrast with Stalin. Precisely in 1919, at the height of the civil war, we find Lenin’s most emphatic pronouncements on this subject. ‘Before anything else, we must base ourselves on this truth: violent methods will achieve nothing here, due to the very essence of the matter… There is nothing more stupid than the very idea of violence in the area of property relations of the middle peasantry.’36 ‘The absurdity of [any use of violence to install kommuny] is so obvious that the Soviet government long ago forbade it’. Soon ‘the last trace of this outrage [bezobrazie] will be swept from the face of the Soviet Republic’.37
Lenin finally decided that the advantages of socialism would be demonstrated to the middle peasants, not directly by collective experiments within the village, but indirectly. Instead of propagating ‘oases of collective production’ in the petty-bourgeois desert, the new path to socialist transformation in the countryside would rely on the transforming power of socialist industry. In January 1920, at the height of his disillusionment with sovkhozy and kommuny, Lenin read an article by the Bolshevik engineer Gleb Krzhizhanovsky on the vast potential of Russia’s electrification. Lenin himself was electrified: here was a way out of his dilemma. For him, the plan for electrification represented ‘a second party program’ (symbolically taking the place of the aborted ‘second October’). This new peasant strategy is the inner meaning of Lenin’s famous slogan from late 1920: ‘Communism is soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.’38
Another and even more direct way of way of revealing the advantages of socialism was providing the peasants with equipment, clothing, medical supplies and other necessary items through state channels. As with the issue of violence, a common misunderstanding makes it imperative to stress that even during the civil war Lenin insisted on the need to provide material incentives to the countryside. He hardly needed to wait for NEP to realize this. Of course, during the civil war, material items to exchange with the peasants were far and few between:
August 1919:
It’s not hard to understand that the workers’ government cannot now give the peasant goods, because industry is at a standstill. There’s no bread, no fuel, no industry. Every reasonable peasant will agree that it is necessary to give his surplus grain to the starving worker as a loan to be paid off by industrial items.39
March 1920:
The imperialist war and then the war against counterrevolution, however, have laid waste to and ruined the entire country. We must bend all efforts to conquer the chaos, to restore industry and agriculture, and to give the peasants the goods they need in exchange for grain.40
Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised to provide the peasants with exchange items, but they wanted to provide these goods via state channels. Lenin admitted that the state organs of distribution still had many defects ‘of which the workers’ government is very well aware, but which cannot be eliminated in the first period of the transition to socialism’.41 Nevertheless, Lenin looked forward to steady progress toward genuinely socialist distribution. Hostilities would cease, industry would revive and the socialist state would get its act together by improving its own organizations.
The decriminalization of the private grain trade in 1921 ended this scenario of steady progress toward socialist distribution. The reliance on long-term projects such as electrification also meant that socialist transformation of the countryside had to be put on hold. In spring 1921 Lenin justified the introduction of NEP by remarking that ‘as long as we have not remade [the peasant], as long as large-scale machinery has not remade him, we have to assure him the possibility of being his own boss’.42 The key economic link between town and country was no longer the state, but once again the market and the private merchant. This was indeed a severe setback, a retreat on the road to socialism. Therefore, in one of his final articles, Lenin urged his readers not to forget about the original project of using state-controlled channels such as the cooperatives to gradually crowd out private trade.43
NEP did not change Lenin’s strategy for enlisting the support of the middle peasant for socialism – it merely changed the dimensions of the problem. The basic goal remained, as before, to provide abundant material goods through state channels. Before NEP, the enemy to be overcome was the pervasive underground market. After NEP, it was the decriminalized private grain market – the same enemy, with a different legal status.
Lenin’s strategy can be labelled the kto-kovo scenario. This label may strike some readers as paradoxical, because the phrase kto-kovo, or ‘who-whom’, has entered educated folklore as Lenin’s favourite phrase and an expression of his essentially hard-line outlook. ‘Who-whom’ is therefore usually glossed as something on the order of ‘who shall destroy whom?’ In reality Lenin only used the phrase two or three times at the very end of his career, and even then did not give it any prominence. If kto-kovo had not been picked up, first by Zinoviev and then by other Bolshevik leaders, the phrase would have been long forgotten. Kto-kovo was adopted as a pithy expression of the logic of NEP – not usually considered Lenin at his most hard-line.44 The phrase should be glossed as something like the following: ‘which class will succeed in winning the loyalty of the peasants: the proletariat or the now-tolerated bourgeoisie (the so-called nepman)?’ Although Lenin only let drop the phrase kto-kovo a couple of offhand times, he expressed often and forcefully the scenario to which the term later became attached. Perhaps the most eloquent version is found in the concluding words of one of his last articles:
In the final analysis, the fate of our republic will depend on whether the peasant masses will stand by the working class, loyal to their alliance, or whether they will permit the ‘nepmen’, that is, the new bourgeoisie, to drive a wedge between them and the working class, to create a schism between them and the working class. The more clearly we see this alternative, the more clearly all our workers and peasants understand it, the greater are the chances that we shall avoid a schism that would be fatal for the Soviet republic.45
The nepman or new bourgeoisie had now replaced the liberal bourgeoisie in the role of rival leadership. Although kto-kovo was a late coinage to express what Lenin saw as the class logic of NEP, it also reflected the basic logic of Lenin’s heroic scenario. The kto-kovo scenario is the Old Bolshevik scenario dusted off and applied to the realities of NEP.
And so it appears that Lenin came up with a new scenario that still reflected the optimistic spirit of his original one of inspiring class leadership. But the adjustment did not come without cost. As in the case of international revolution, the new scenario had a built-in anxiety factor that had previously been absent. One of Lenin’s fundamental axioms had always been that individual small-scale production for the market will inevitably give rise to full-scale capitalism. This axiom was not a source of anxiety for the original Old Bolshevik scenario. On the contrary, capitalist transformation of Russia was seen as a progressive factor, creating indefatigable fighters for the democratic revolution and later for the socialist revolution. But circumstances had altered. Now the capitalism created by the ‘petty-bourgeois peasantry’ was a threat to steady steps to socialism and therefore to the whole legitimacy of socialist revolution in Russia.
Lenin expressed this anxiety with great intensity after 1919. It shows up in his diatribes against ‘free trade’ during the civil war. The amorphous but mighty force of peasant capitalism was fighting a war against the grain monopoly – and in so doing it was condemning the cities to starvation. As he expostulated in the summer of 1920:46
The abolition of classes not only means driving out the landl
ords and capitalists – something we accomplished with comparative ease – it means abolishing the small commodity producers [= those who produce for the market], and they cannot be driven out; we must live in harmony them; they can (and must) by remoulded and re-educated only by very prolonged, slow, cautious organizational work.
They encircle the proletariat on every side with a petty-bourgeois atmosphere, which permeates and corrupts the proletariat and causes constant relapses among the proletariat into petty-bourgeois spinelessness, disunity, individualism, and alternate moods of exaltation and dejection… Millions of millions of small producers, by their ordinary, everyday, imperceptible, elusive, demoralizing activity achieve the very results which the bourgeoisie need and which restore the bourgeoisie.47
The retreat associated with NEP only intensified this anxiety. Lenin’s obsessing about the abstract force of ‘petty-bourgeois individual production’ sits uneasily next to his optimistic hopes for class leadership of the middle peasant. Yet both have deep roots in his lifelong heroic scenario.
The Cultural Deficit
In late 1920 Lenin’s long-time associate Grigory Zinoviev recalled the hopes placed in 1917 on ‘soviet democracy’. The democratically elected soviets were supposed to be ‘organs in which the creativity of the masses finds for itself the most free and most organized path, the soviets as organs that guaranteed a constant stream of fresh forces from below, the soviets as organs where the masses learned at one and the same time to legislate and to carry out their own laws’.48 Zinoviev contrasted these dreams with the bleak reality that by late 1920 ‘the most elementary demands of democratism’ were being ignored.49