Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Stalin’s only genuinely original contribution to revolutionary theory was to overturn this dogma. Stalin’s concept of ‘socialism in one country’ refuted what virtually all Russian Marxists before him considered fundamental: the imperative need for universal revolution. Stalin argued that socialism could be achieved in Russia even when surrounded by the forces of global capitalism. This novel theory not only enraged Trotsky and his purist supporters; it also involved Stalin removing chunks of his own book The Foundations of Leninism, which contradicted his new line. (The Foundations of Leninism, a justification of communist autocracy published shortly after Lenin’s death, was Stalin’s attempt to prove that he was a genuine theoretician. It is now clear that, like Henry Ford’s Encyclopaedia Britannica article, Stalin’s work was ghost-written for him; unlike Ford, Stalin was able to protect his secret by later having his ghost-writer shot.) Of course Stalin interpreted his new position as being fully compatible with Marxism-Leninism, quoting odd bits of Lenin in its support just as the proponents of slavery quoted chunks of the Bill of Rights to support their case.

  The new line did not stop Stalin trying to export revolution but it did mean that when the time came to ally himself with Hitler or Churchill there was no ideological barrier stopping him. It also meant that Stalin had no difficulty with the idea of imposing communism on other countries. Lenin and most of his contemporaries had believed that the industrial proletariat would be the engine of revolution wherever it occurred; there was something counter-intuitive about the very idea of using imperial military might to impose a form of government that was supposed to represent the ultimate manifestation of popular will. Stalin simply did not recognise this as an issue, any more than American presidents saw any conflict in using their imperial military might to impose democracy.

  Although the ideological contortion of ‘socialism in one country’ represented Stalin’s recognition that spreading communist revolution across the globe was not an immediately realistic objective, it did not stop him trying; more importantly it did not stop many in the west believing that they were in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by the Red Peril. This fear was particularly prevalent in America, and it was not as ludicrous as hindsight makes it appear – as the citizens of Seattle were to discover when a workers’ soviet tried to take over their milk deliveries.

  The Red Menace

  After Woodrow Wilson presidential politics in the United States relapsed into the slough of sleaze in which many of the nation’s major cities had long wallowed. When Wilson’s successor died unexpectedly in 1923 a stream of scandals suddenly surfaced: the secretary of the interior had accepted loans from a man trying to gain control of government-owned oilfields at Teapot Dome, Wyoming; the head of the Veterans’ Administration was embroiled in all sorts of corrupt activities; and even the attorney general had been selling his political services for hard cash. One of the few honest men in government turned out to be the vice-president, Calvin Coolidge, an old fashioned Massachusetts Puritan who set about restoring integrity to political life. He had a hard task as, in the wake of the First World War, America was yet again experiencing Russian history writ small.

  The country was racked by social and political turmoil. In 1919, the year after the war ended, more Americans went on strike than in any year in American history other than 1946, the year after the Second World War. Race riots flared up and a revived Ku Klux Klan rampaged in the south. There were a series of anarchist bombings, including an attack on Wall Street. Widespread industrial unrest spread to those supposed to suppress it when the Boston police went on strike. Two anarchists – Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – were convicted of murder and executed in Massachusetts on the thinnest of evidence in America’s own miniature show trial. Most traumatic of all for the average American, the Chicago White Sox baseball team were discovered to have accepted bribes to lose the world series.

  In America the establishment was far more firmly entrenched than the Romanovs. The attorney general led a witch-hunt against the left, with hundreds of anarchists, socialists and communists being rounded up; many were exiled to Russia. Five elected members of the New York legislature were expelled for the grave offence of being socialists.

  The pre-war world had gone for ever, and the war itself was just one indication that, like it or not, the United States could not stand aside from the rest of the world.

  The American Revolution was part of an international ideological ferment that drew in men like Thomas Paine, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Johan de Kalb and the Marquis de Lafayette from all over Europe. Even so the principles of American democracy were distinctively British, and it would be misleading to imagine some sort of international revolutionary movement dedicated to the ideology of democracy. By the time of the Russian Revolution this had changed. Socialist and anarchist ideologies were sweeping across borders as freely as Islamic militancy travels today. And as if that was not enough, what some conservatives found particularly perplexing was that the peripatetic revolutionaries were not exclusively male. Women like Rosa Luxemburg became infamous as much for their gender as for their politics. The Russian revolutionaries were overwhelmingly male, but by the standards of their time the fact that women like Vera Zasulich and Sophia Perovskaya played such active roles was itself revolutionary. One woman in particular emerged on to the international stage not only in the vanguard of political change but as a champion of a feminism that was to lie largely dormant for most of the twentieth century. Her story encapsulates the political turbulence that swept back and forth across the Atlantic, just as the story of Tadeusz Kosciuszko exemplified an earlier era of revolution.

  Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in a Jewish ghetto in Russia. At fifteen she refused an arranged marriage and was packed off to America, where she was almost immediately caught up in the outcry that followed the Haymarket case. Four anarchists were convicted on the flimsiest evidence of throwing a bomb at the police during a workers’ rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Emma Goldman later declared that she became a revolutionary on the day they were hanged. She divorced the husband she had just married and threw herself into anarchist campaigning, proving herself to be a formidable orator. She developed her own brand of anarchist ideology, moving away from demands for the immediate and total overthrow of capitalism to championing individual freedom and personal dignity. Goldman took part in the conspiracy to assassinate one of the most rapacious of the robber barons, Henry Clay Frick, who had violently suppressed strikes in the Homestead factory in Pennsylvania, and the next year she was jailed for allegedly urging the unemployed to take bread ‘by force’, the first of a number of prison sentences for such crimes as distributing birth control literature and campaigning against the First World War. (It was part of much left-wing dogma that the First World War was a capitalist plot designed to increase corporate profits, a view not unique to the left; after the war a US Senate investigation – the Nye Committee – ‘proved’ that Wall Street had dragged the US into the conflict.)

  Goldman was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in 1917 for conspiring to obstruct the draft and, after more than thirty years in the United States, was stripped of her citizenship and deported. J. Edgar Hoover, who managed her deportation, described Goldman as one of the most dangerous women in America. She arrived back in Russia an ardent advocate of the revolution but, like Vera Zasulich, became totally disillusioned by the Bolsheviks. As previously mentioned she met Lenin, and pleaded for free speech and toleration of dissent to no avail. After the anarchist-inclined Kronstadt sailors and soldiers sided with striking workers and were crushed by Trotsky and the Red Army, Goldman left Russia for Britain, describing her feelings of betrayal in two works with the uncompromising titles My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia. Her anarchism became less violent, and her virulent opposition to the Russian Revolution left her virtually isolated on the left.

  Goldman had unsuccessfully tried prostitution as a way of raising the money needed to finan
ce the assassination attempt on Frick, and her sexual politics were way ahead of her time. She argued that the unequal and exploitative relationship between the sexes was not just a political issue but required wholesale change in personal values, not least among women themselves. Eventually she married a Welsh miner, and ironically her anti-communism and new British passport made her welcome in America, where she gave a lecture tour in 1934. Her old fervour remained. At the age of sixty-seven she went to Spain to support the anarchists, simultaneously facing Franco’s fascists and protecting their backs against Stalin’s communists before returning once again to her adopted homeland. She died in Chicago in 1940.

  The wandering Jewish radical who had treasured such hopes for the Russian Revolution and harboured such fear of American corporatism lived to see the world sliding into a war in which Stalin and Hitler were conspiring to destroy the freedoms she had championed all her life, freedoms that now depended on the might of American industry for protection. The twists and turns of her life had mirrored the times she lived through in both Russia and America: the idealism of late nineteenth-century radicals, the internationalisation of political struggle, the suppression of dissent, the hesitant beginnings of what would much later flower into feminism, and finally the triumph of traditional autocracy in the land of her birth and corporatism in the land of her death.

  As corporatism became the dominant ideology in mainstream America, the arrival on the political scene of women and men like Emma Goldman illustrated how opposition to the ruling establishment had become more ideological. The quixotic Molly Maguires and Knights of Labor gave way to the American Federation of Labor and the revolutionary Industrial Workers of The World. The IWW, known as the Wobblies, were totally opposed to capitalism and advocated public ownership, factories managed through what they called ‘industrial democracy’ and opposition to all forms of nationalism. At its height in 1923 the IWW had a membership of around 40,000, and was a powerful force in places like the south-western oilfields and among the Philadelphia dockworkers.

  In 1919, 120,000 workers went on strike in the New England and New Jersey textile industries and perhaps three times as many steelworkers took part in strikes in Pennsylvania. Employers responded by importing tens of thousands of un-unionised blacks from the south. Labour disputes in the coalfields degenerated into pitched battles, which continued on and off for years. Left-wing groups were also particularly strong in the shipyards of the north-west.

  In 1889 US naval policy had officially moved away from coastal defence, with the decision to create two huge battle fleets to patrol the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in a determined effort to establish the largest navy in the hemisphere (a position held until then by Chile). The move was seen by others as a clear sign of imperial intent but, just as Adams II portrayed the conquest of Florida as self-defence, senators argued that a strong navy was needed to stop Spain trying to regain Florida or Chile attacking California. In reality neither power had the slightest intention of doing anything so suicidal; Spain was barely holding on to Cuba and American ‘fear’ of Chile was less influenced by any aggressive intent on Chile’s part than the uncomfortable fact that Chile was the only serious regional rival to the United States. (Despite the pretensions of the Monroe Doctrine in the 1867 war between Spain and Chile, the US had stood aside as the Spanish destroyed Valparaiso.)

  The US naval build-up established definitively who was top dog in the western hemisphere. In 1891 a popular revolution overthrew the pro-American regime in Chile, and the US sent a battleship to overawe the new government. When American sailors went ashore two were killed in a brawl with locals, who were incensed by US intervention in their affairs. US public opinion ignored its own government’s meddling, and popular outrage was such that only an abject Chilean apology prevented war. Three years later, when rebel troops threatened the pro-American government in Brazil, the US navy blockaded their ports to emphasise who was now in charge of the hemisphere.

  The naval build-up funnelled government funds into shipyards owned by supporters of the governing party. That party changed four times between 1884 and 1896, causing major disruptions to American shipbuilders – who had thrived in the age of wooden ships but had not kept up with the emerging technologies of steel and steam because of the high prices charged by the American steel cartel. By the First World War most American exports were transported in foreign ships, which suffered at the hands of German submarine attacks and the Royal Navy’s blockade of German shipping. Corporate pressure for government funding led to the creation of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, which promoted the construction of new shipyards and purchased the ships they made. In the following few years 647 ships were built and $2.9bn of federal funds was given to the shipbuilding and shipping industries. Although the government owned the ships and bore most of the economic risks, private corporations made huge profits.

  The state of Washington on America’s Pacific coast was a prime beneficiary. In 1914 there was only one shipyard in Seattle manufacturing steel-hulled vessels; by the end of 1918 there were five. Subsidies were also available for new wooden ships, and owing to the ready availability of timber in the region by 1918 the city boasted twelve yards producing wooden ships. Conflict between the newly powerful bosses and the streams of new workers, many immigrants from northern Europe, was sharp and the bosses had powerful supporters. In one well-documented case in June 1917 hundreds of men on leave from the navy base in Bremerton, Washington, wrecked the IWW hall in Seattle (the local paper reporting in advance that the sailors would be given special leave in order to expel the IWW from the city).

  The federal government had imposed strict wage controls during the war, and when it refused to make up for that in 1919, 35,000 workers in the Seattle shipyards went on strike; contemporary anarchist accounts claimed that the government and employers locked the workers out. Most of the city’s 110 unions soon joined the strike and by 6 February 1919, 100,000 workers were reportedly out in a general strike that paralysed Seattle for five days. A workers’ soviet, in the form of a 300 member General Strike Committee with a fifteen-member executive, claimed to be running key services from hospital laundries to refuse collection. The strikers consciously modelled themselves on what they – and naïve idealists like Emma Goldman – thought was happening in Russia. One of the strikers’ leaflets even bore the slogan ‘Russia Did It’. And yet the reality is that conditions were totally different.

  The ideology of democracy had taken root in America in a way that had no parallel in Russia. In both countries militant strikers held mass meetings and passed motions demanding that mines and factories be turned over to the workers, but whereas in Russia this was accompanied by calls for violent revolution, in America strikers called upon Congress to amend the Constitution. The leaders of the Seattle soviet may have wanted revolution, but the vast mass of strikers just wanted a pay rise. There was not even the slightest possibility of an armed uprising, and within days the strike fizzled out under a barrage of abuse from most of the local and national press. The one daily newspaper to support the strike was closed by federal agents and key staff were arrested. Faced with armed police and the threat of martial law enforced by federal troops, most of the strikers capitulated within a couple of days. Police and vigilantes rounded up dangerous ‘Reds’ and the local mayor (who had been elected with the support of organised labour) proclaimed the victory of ‘Americanism’ over ‘Bolshevism’. A few days earlier Lenin had probably been proclaiming just the opposite, as Bolshevik troops defeated US infantry from the Polar Bear expedition at the battle of Ust Padenga.

  Corporatism v. Communism

  In Russia a tiny radical minority had seized power in the October Revolution and created an apparatus that managed to hold on to that power for most of the twentieth century. In America there was also a tiny radical minority dedicated to socialist revolution, and it might not seem unreasonable for their opponents to have feared that the Russian experience would be repeated. But ideologically c
onditions were fundamentally different in the two empires. By definition autocracy placed all power in Russia in one set of hands: chop off those hands and power would fall to whoever could catch and hold it. By contrast, in America power was shared and dispersed; even a successful soviet revolution in Seattle (and in reality it never came anywhere near that) or a putsch in Washington DC would have left most of the country’s formal political institutions intact. Add to that the entrenched authority of the nation’s informal corporate power structures, and the overwhelming appeal that the traditional ideology of democracy had to most Americans, and it is plain that whatever its opponents may have feared and its proponents may have wanted, socialist revolution in America was never a realistic possibility.