The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Workers, therefore, increasingly demanded that organizations of the ordinary people, such as the soviets and factory, soldiers’ and village committees take power, whilst excluding the upper classes from politics. This did not mean they were necessarily opposed to the power of the state. In fact they commonly demanded that the state take harsh, dictatorial measures in the interests of the people against ‘enemies’; as the delegates of the sixth army corps declared in October, ‘the country needs a firm and democratic authority founded on and responsible to the popular masses’.71 At a time of food shortages, collapsing transport and disorder, it is not surprising that people should have sought a stronger state and berated the Provisional Government for its weakness.

  This popular worldview, that the ‘people’ should engage in a struggle against the privileged, and build a powerful, centralized people’s state, may not have been Marxist in origin, but it seemed to coincide with Lenin’s ideas, at least for a short time in mid-1917. He presented his political agenda most clearly in his powerful synthesis, State and Revolution, written during his temporary exile in Finland. In this crucial work, he reconciled the Modernist Marxism of planning and centralization with the Radical Marxism of proletarian democracy and class struggle. He first used Hilferding’s ideas to claim that the war had forged the economy into a single, centralized machine.72 At the same time, though, Lenin went back to the egalitarian Marx of 1848 and 1871. Workers, he claimed, would soon be able to run this simplified economy by themselves; in his famous phrase, any female cook could run the state. Granting special privileges to technical specialists was no longer justified. Marx’s dream – the merging of ‘mental and manual labour’ – would soon become a reality.

  Lenin’s vision was therefore one of complete equality, not only economic and legal, but also social and political. Liberal democracy, where citizens elected deputies who in turn controlled officials, was not enough. Officials had to be directly elected by the masses, as had happened in the Paris Commune – the model for Lenin’s new ‘commune-state’. The state would then start to merge with the people, and all hierarchies would start to disappear. The vanguard party was barely mentioned.

  Lenin, then, talked a great deal about ‘democracy’ in State and Revolution, but this was not a democracy of universal rights. Democracy for the proletariat was perfectly compatible with a violent repression of its enemies. Lenin’s commune-state was rather like a group of vigilante volunteers: it could suppress the ‘exploiters’ ‘as simply and readily as any crowd of civilized people… interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or prevent a woman from being assaulted’.73 Lenin had no qualms about violence, and described the proletariat as the ‘“Jacobins” of the twentieth century’.74 But he denied extensive repression would be necessary. Only a few demonstrative arrests, he insisted, would be required. Whilst the vigilante volunteers might initially be a minority, they would very soon expand into a ‘militia embracing the whole people’.75 This form of socialism, then, had a martial style, but it harked back to the barricades of 1848 and 1871; it had little in common with the conventional armies of World War I.

  Did Lenin, a hard-nosed revolutionary, really take the utopian vision of State and Revolution seriously? Did he really believe that it would be so straightforward for workers to run the economy and the state? His language is ambiguous, and he may have planned a less egalitarian outcome. But as a Marxist ideologue, he was convinced that classes had single, coherent interests. If proletarians ran the state, there was no reason why it could not forge a consensus with the working class as a whole.

  Of course, it soon became clear after the October Revolution that Lenin was wrong. Inevitably unity disintegrated into conflicts between the regime and society, within society, and amongst workers themselves. But in the radicalized Russia of 1917, the idea that a popular, revolutionary ‘General Will’ existed, and that it could rule through a state both ‘democratic’ and centralized, was not Lenin’s alone. It seemed to make sense, not only to him, but to large sections of the Russian working class.76

  Lenin returned to Russia from exile in April 1917 determined to impose his uncompromising vision of class struggle on his party. Against the doubts of many of his fellow Bolsheviks Lenin insisted that power be transferred from the Provisional Government to the soviets. The time was not yet ripe for the end of the market, but the workers and peasants, not the bourgeoisie, had to lead and build the ‘commune-state’; meanwhile the soviets had to supervise the production and distribution of goods.

  The Bolsheviks, therefore, were the only major party outside the government, and they were calling for rule by the lower classes and an end to the war. The Menshevik high command continued to argue that a proletarian revolution would fail in a backward country like Russia, as did Kautsky and the Second International. In July, when the Provisional Government cracked down on the Bolsheviks and Lenin was again forced into exile, it looked as if he had miscalculated. But conditions were more similar to the France of 1789 than that of 1848 or 1871, and the middle-class forces of order could not rely on a peasant army to resist urban revolution. The Commander-in-Chief of the army, Kornilov, tried to use the army to restore discipline, and believed that he had Kerenskii’s support for the ‘coup’. But many of his soldiers would not obey, Kerenskii denied he was involved, and the episode undermined the Provisional Government as a whole.

  The Bolsheviks’ popularity, conversely, increased. Even if most were unaware of the detailed policies of the party, it seemed to many that it was the only force that might save the revolution. It won formal majorities in both the Moscow and Petrograd soviets, and Lenin used this evidence of support to argue for the immediate seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. On 25 October the Petrograd Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee, led by Trotsky and other Bolsheviks, readily took control of the poorly defended Winter Palace. This was, then, a coup of sorts. The famous scene in Eisenstein’s film October of thousands swarming over the gates and invading the palace is pure fiction, but the Provisional Government’s failure to rally forces to defend itself, and the ease with which the Bolsheviks took over the major cities, shows how far the Bolshevik approach to politics in 1917 was in tune with the radicalism of many of the urban population. The Bolsheviks never won an all-Russia election. They were an urban party in an overwhelmingly rural country. But in the elections to the Constituent Assembly towards the end of 1917 they gained a majority of workers’ and 42 per cent of soldiers’ votes, and took 10.9 million votes out of 48.4 million. They also shared much of the programme of the victors of the election – the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Left SRs). So this was not, properly speaking, a ‘Bolshevik revolution’. It was a Bolshevik insurrection amidst a radical populist revolution, whose values were partly endorsed, for a very short time, by the Bolsheviks. The liberal alternative – of class compromise and the rule of law – supported by most of propertied and educated Russia, had little chance of victory, for the mass of the population was simply too wedded to the radical redistribution of property and power. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were soon to retreat from their populism towards a much more authoritarian politics, and ultimately they only secured their power by force of arms in a civil war. The Bolshevik victory was therefore by no means inevitable, but some radical socialist outcome was likely. And once the Bolsheviks had taken power, however unpopular they might become, there was little desire for the return of the old order.

  VI

  In 1923, the writer Isaak Babel published Red Cavalry, a series of stories about his experiences as a Bolshevik political agitator with Budennyi’s Cossack cavalry in the Polish war of 1920. The book received instant acclaim and was widely read. In one story, entitled ‘A Letter’, Babel told of the civil war within one peasant family through a fictional letter from the red cavalryman Vasilii Kordiukov to his mother. It is a peculiar document, poorly written, bland and matter-of-fact, peppered with banal descriptions of the places he has visited. But its subject matter is horrific: the bloody strug
gle between Vasilii’s father Timofei, a former tsarist policeman fighting with General Denikin’s anti-Bolshevik Whites, and his brothers Fedor and Semen, fellow soldiers with the Bolsheviks. His father, finding Fedor among Red prisoners of war, hacks him to death, only to be pursued by his other sons, intent on revenge. They finally find him. Semen, nicknamed ‘the wild one’, declares: ‘Papa… if I fell into your hands, I would find no mercy. So now, Papa, we will finish you off!’, and proceeds to slaughter him. The story ends with Vasilii showing the narrator a photograph of the whole family. Timofei, ‘a wide-shouldered police constable in a policeman’s cap… was stiff, with wide cheekbones and sparkling, colourless vacant eyes’; beside him sat his wife, a ‘tiny peasant woman… with small, bright, timid features’.

  And against this provincial photographer’s pitiful backdrop, with its flowers and doves, towered two boys, amazingly big, blunt, broad-faced, goggle-eyed, and frozen as if standing to attention: the Kordiukov brothers, Fedor and Semen.77

  Many of Babel’s stories were about the gruesome violence he witnessed, and participated in, during the civil war, and his attempts to come to terms with it. As a Jewish intellectual among martial Cossack peasants, he was appalled by the casual brutality (and anti-Semitism) of men like the Kordiukov brothers. And yet he admired their bravery, and at times an unattractive Nietzschean power-worship creeps into his writing. The result is disconcerting – a deliberately distanced account of his cruel heroes, a firm refusal to judge.78 He cannot understand them; they are opaque with ‘vacant eyes’, as in a photograph. They are forces of nature, Aeschylean furies, seeking revenge for past wrongs.

  This was, of course, not the world Lenin had expected to inherit. Lenin, whilst not a Nietzschean revelling in violence, was perfectly prepared to use it, and from early on he embraced class revenge. But he soon found it difficult to control; he insisted that the ‘masses’ had to be both revolutionary and disciplined. It was clear from the beginning that the transition to the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ would not go as smoothly as Lenin hoped.

  The first challenge came from moderate socialists who objected to soviet, class power as opposed to liberal parliamentary rule. The delegates to the Constituent Assembly, 85 per cent of whom were socialists, insisted that they represented the Russian people, but Lenin denounced them as an example of ‘bourgeois parliamentarism’. Red Guards shot several supporters demonstrating in favour of the Assembly just before it convened in Petrograd’s Tauride Palace – the first time since February 1917 that troops had fired at unarmed crowds – and the Assembly was later broken up. The Left SRs survived in coalition with the Bolsheviks for four months, but by March 1918 it was clear to everybody that all power was being transferred to the Bolsheviks, not the soviets.

  Lenin had claimed that power was to be passed to the soviets as a whole, but he never pretended to be a pluralist democrat, and it was no surprise that he refused to work with rival parties. At the same time, however, he seems to have taken his promises for some kind of ‘democracy’ within the working class seriously, and during the first months of Bolshevik rule, Lenin may have believed that the ambitious plans of State and Revolution were realistic: popular initiative and centralization could coexist; or he may have merely been giving workers what they wanted when the party was weak. He continued to call for ‘workers’ democracy’, knowing how popular it was in the factories, and in November 1917 issued a Decree on Workers’ Control, which gave considerable powers to elected factory committees. The army also continued to be run in a ‘democratic’, or ‘citizens’ militia’ style, with soldiers electing officers. Lenin’s approach towards the peasantry was less Marxist, but it also gave in to the demands of the masses. Rather than creating large-scale, collective farms, as Marxist theory (and earlier Bolshevik policy) dictated, his Decree on Land gave the peasants what they wanted – they could keep their small plots and subsistence agriculture.

  As Isaak Babel observed, for many ordinary people, the flip-side of ‘democracy’, or power to the masses, was ‘class struggle’, or revenge against the ‘bourgeoisie’ – as it had been for the sans-culottes. And in the first few months of the revolution Lenin was prepared to encourage this ‘popular’ terror. ‘Loot the Looters’ was the slogan of the moment, and in December 1917 Lenin declared a ‘war to the death against the rich, the idlers, the parasites’.79 However, he was happy to delegate the conduct of the struggle to local communities. Each town or village was to decide how to ‘cleanse’ Russia of these ‘vermin’: they might imprison them, put them to work cleaning latrines, give them special documents or ‘yellow tickets’ so that everybody could keep an eye on them (a treatment traditionally meted out to prostitutes), or shoot one in every ten.80

  Lenin’s principles were embraced enthusiastically by party activists in Russia’s regions. Bolsheviks seized the goods of the rich, imposed special taxes on them, and took members of ‘bourgeois’ classes – the so-called ‘former people’ – as hostages. Anna Litveiko herself took part in a detachment to seize bourgeois property:

  The slogan was ‘Peace for the huts, war on the palaces!’ It was important to demonstrate to the people right away what the revolution would bring to the huts…

  We would enter the [rich] apartments and say: ‘This building is being nationalized. You have twenty-four hours to move out.’ Some obeyed immediately while others cursed us – the Bolsheviks in general or Soviet rule.81

  The experience of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie was, of course, traumatic, even for those who were not arrested or physically abused. Princess Sofia Volkonskaia remembered how the authorities forced her to accept lodgers to live in her flat:

  The couple thus forced on us – a young man and his wife – seemed quite nice, but… they were Communists… Nothing could be more disagreeable than this living in close contact (having to cook our dinners on the same stove, to use the bathroom devoid of hot water, etc.) with people who considered themselves a priori and in principle as our foes… ‘Take care’, ‘Shut the door’, ‘Do not talk so loud; the Communists may hear you.’ Pin-pricks? Yes, of course. But in that nightmare life of ours every pin-prick took the proportion of a serious wound.82

  In the early months, ‘class struggle’ permeated all aspects of life, including the symbolic world, and the Bolsheviks, like their Jacobin predecessors, were determined to create a new culture that would propagate their values. Petrograd, in particular, was the home to several mass theatrical events, echoing the plays and festivals of the Paris of 1793. One, ‘The Mystery of Liberated Labour’, was staged on May Day 1920. In front of the Petrograd Stock Exchange, a group of debauched kings and capitalists indulged in a drunken orgy, whilst toilers slaved to the sounds of ‘moans, curses, sad songs, the scrape of chains’. Waves of revolutionaries, from Spartacus and his slaves to the sans-culottes in their Phrygian caps, mounted attacks on the potentates’ banquet table, but were repulsed, until the star of the Red Army rose in the East. Finally the gates to the Kingdom of Peace, Freedom and Joyful Labour were destroyed, and within was revealed the liberty tree, around which the people danced, in the style of David. Huge numbers participated – 4,000 actors, workers and soldiers, merging at the end with 35,000 spectators.83

  Lenin himself, however, had little interest in the carnivalesque theatre of class struggle. As Bely would have predicted, his view of the new revolutionary culture was much closer to Apollon Apollonovich’s. Moscow, the new capital of the revolution, was to be filled with statues of the revolutionary heroes and plaques bearing the principles of Marxism. Yet the conservative neo-classical taste favoured by Lenin, and much of the Muscovite populace, clashed with the modernism of some of the sculptors. A cubo-futurist statue of Bakunin had to be hidden by wooden boards for fear of popular disapproval; when the partitions were stolen for firewood and the statue revealed, the authorities, fearing a riot, had to demolish it. The project, moreover, suffered from shortages of materials. In the end several temporary plaster and cement figures w
ere erected, many of which were washed away by the rain.84 One statue of Robespierre suffered a different fate – destruction by a terrorist bomb. Bizarrely, one of the few to have survived to this day was originally built by the ancien régime: a marble obelisk constructed outside the Kremlin to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanovs in 1913, its inscription replaced with a remarkably eclectic list of Bolshevik ‘forefathers’, including Thomas More, Gerrard Winstanley, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Chernyshevskii and Marx.85

  Given Lenin’s love of order, it was perhaps predictable that he would eventually abandon his brief flirtation with Radical Marxism. But it was the near destruction of the regime at the beginning of 1918 that forced his volte-face. The Bolsheviks had expected that revolution in Russia would be accompanied by a world revolution, and Germany’s proletariat would help the backward Russians to achieve socialism. Instead, however, German militarists were still in power, and were imposing humiliating peace terms. Lenin realized how weak his new state was and counselled acceptance, but he was outvoted on the Central Committee. As the Germans marched into Ukraine, the leaders continued to argue. At the last minute Trotsky changed his mind, and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk averted the almost certain fall of the regime. The hope that the revolution would be rescued by the expected revolution in Germany was clearly a dream.

  It was at this point that Lenin realized that the promises of 1917 were incompatible with the preservation of the new regime. Allowing workers and peasants to control their factories and fields, and encouraging anti-bourgeois pogroms, was only fuelling economic chaos. Food supplies suffered from the expropriation of the gentry’s lands and the break-up of large estates. Meanwhile workers used ‘workers’ control’ to benefit their own factories, rather than the economy as a whole, and harassed the hated managers and engineers. Labour discipline collapsed, a problem only worsened by the food shortages. The ranks of the unemployed swelled and opposition to the Bolsheviks in the soviets grew rapidly.