Dictatorship, he thought, was crucially desirable. Reviewing the party’s strategy in April 1918 in his booklet The Current Tasks of Soviet Power, he acknowledged that external threats to the country’s security persisted and that there were massive and growing internal difficulties increased in food supplies, transport, industrial production and administrative efficiency; and he insisted: ‘But dictatorship is a big word. And big words should not simply be thrown up into the wind. Dictatorship is iron authority, authority that is revolutionarily audacious as well as rapid and merciless in its suppression of both exploiters and hooligans.’15 He followed this assertion with an analysis that shocked many of his closest associates of earlier months. Lenin declared that ‘guilt for the torments of hunger and unemployment is borne by all who break labour discipline in any factory, on any farm, in any enterprise’. The solution was the application of truly dictatorial methods. He explained that it was ‘necessary to learn how to discover those guilty of this and to hand them over to the courts and punish them pitilessly’.16
The Constituent Assembly’s dispersal and the signature of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk’s confirmed Lenin’s will to stay in power even if every other political party, group and individual in the country remained opposed. The Bolshevik party under his leadership had driven even the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries away. This was not the only result. The movements and clarifications of governmental policy had done much to alienate broad sections of opinion in society. Workers and, when they heard about the October Revolution, peasants had welcomed Sovnarkom’s decrees; but, as Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee developed policy, they encountered hostility in many quarters. Equally importantly, they met with apathy. The Bolsheviks were ruling what was left of the Russian Empire, which was mainly the Russian-inhabited regions, as a beleaguered political minority. And their awareness of this led them to harden their attitudes. They felt that the best way to deal with trouble was to get tougher rather than offer compromises. This common attitude brought Lenin and the Bolshevik Left Communists back together even though, after Brest-Litovsk, they could not flaunt their growing collaboration.
Their rapprochement was assisted by the way Lenin stiffened the element of state ownership and regulation in industry and agriculture. An increasing segment of public opinion called on Sovnarkom to scrap the state grain-trade monopoly and allow the peasants to sell their produce on the open markets. There was plenty of evidence that the peasantry was hoarding grain. In order to resuscitate economic exchange between town and countryside it was widely proposed that concessions to private trade were vital. The Kadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Provisional Government had approved and maintained the state grain-trade monopoly. Out of office, as the economic collapse reached the abyss, they urged that a drastic reversal of policy was required.
But the Bolshevik leaders would not contemplate this; they had made a ‘socialist revolution’ and would not countenance removing the anti-capitalist elements in policy that even a ‘government of capitalists’ – the Provisional Government – had consolidated. Indeed the internal differences of Bolsheviks on the measures needed to stave off utter economic disintegration were steadily disappearing. For some months after Bukharin, Osinski and their associates had criticised Lenin for his caution in organising the rapid transformation of the entire economy along socialist lines; they demanded the total nationalisation of industry, agriculture, trade, finance, transport and communication. Some of them believed that this was also Lenin’s requirement; but if they had carefully read his work between the February and October Revolutions, they would not have misled themselves. Certainly Lenin had argued that Russia was ready for and indeed badly needed a ‘transition to socialism’, and he postulated that all power should be transferred to class-based mass organisations such as the soviets. But, despite wanting a complete immediate transformation of politics, he urged that the economy should be handled more cautiously. According to Lenin, only those enterprises ought to be nationalised which were already run on large-scale capitalist lines.
In Russia this would mean the banks, the railways, the biggest factories and mines and some of the landed estates; but it should not involve the rest of the economy – and, although he had not spelled this out, the rest of the economy in fact involved most of the country’s working population. Russia was a country of peasants, artisans and stallholders. The bank, the large factory and the intensively cultivated estate were still the exceptions among the tens of thousands of enterprises in the general economy.
Consequently Lenin wanted Sovnarkom to expropriate only the most ‘advanced’ enterprises. The remainder needed to be organised into larger units and equipped with up-to-date technology before they were to be nationalised; and Lenin believed that this task would best be undertaken by capitalism. The revolutionary socialist state would have to protect private sectors in industry and agriculture and foster their growth. He referred to this symbiotic relationship of Bolshevik politics and capitalist economics as ‘state capitalism’. It was a phrase that satisfied his wish to stay within conventional Marxist notions about the necessary stages of economic development (even though he had abandoned those notions as regards political development). But of course it offended those many Bolsheviks – probably most of them – who had made the October Revolution with a view towards turning the world upside down. Lenin’s stipulation that capitalism should be widely maintained was simply incomprehensible to them. Nor was their anger mollified by his insistence that his scheme was a method of exploiting capitalism. They wanted a more direct and uncompromising revolutionary strategy. Bukharin and his friends wanted to take not only banks and metallurgical plants but also workshops, market stalls and peasant plots into governmental ownership.
They put their arguments against Lenin in terms of doctrine: in their opinion, he was offering a strategy that made too many compromises with capitalism. What they omitted to mention was that his strategy was simply unworkable. Lenin had announced that his intention was to exploit capitalists and then get rid of capitalism. Already he had nationalised banks and many factories and mines; he had introduced a system of heavy state regulation of foreign trade; he had repudiated his government’s obligation to pay its debtors at home and abroad. He had abrogated the civic rights of the wealthier citizens and established the Cheka. He had established a class dictatorship. In such circumstances it is surprising that he was able to find any industrialists who would agree to have dealings with him. One such man of business, V. P. Meshcherski, was discovered. But negotiations quickly broke down; the terms of Leninist ‘state capitalism’ proved altogether too socialistic for Meshcherski.
By then all Lenin’s instincts were pointing him away from compromise. As he came to appreciate the enormity of the difficulties ahead, he was already inclined to tip the balance in his thought ever more heavily on the side of state command and control. He had not come to power in order to lessen the degree of intervention by the public authorities in the economy or any other aspect of social life. If difficulties existed, they had to be tackled by increasing the intensity of regulation. His theory of Revolution before 1917 had been marked by inconsistencies and contradictions. In power, he had to resolve this tension by practical means: he had to make his abstract formulae operational. This entailed an ever greater accentuation of the themes of dictatorship and violence. Also important, as his thought became clarified, was his commitment to centralism, hierarchy and discipline. Lenin essentially wanted the state to act, under the Bolshevik party’s control, as an engine of co-ordination and indoctrination. He still saw it as being important to release popular initiative; but the increasingly unpopularity of his party had jolted him into assuming that, if it came to a choice, he preferred to prescribe and impose policy rather than to let others – whether the entire people or a section such as the working class – take a course of action that annoyed him.
Not that the social bias in Lenin’s thought had disappeared. Far from it. He cont
inued to stress the need to build up a state that gave favour to the working class. Enhanced opportunities for workers to be promoted to administrative office had to be guaranteed – and the assumption remained that the prime task facing the regime was the establishment of an efficient administration. His socialism was also avowedly and unashamedly urban in orientation. Villages had to be industrialised, peasants had to be turned into labourers and managers of collective farms. Small organisational units, furthermore, had to be phased out generally in society. Activity on a large scale with a huge number was regarded as inherently superior. Big was thought indisputably beautiful.
The essence of socialism, Lenin repeated ad nauseam, was ‘account-keeping and supervision’. For this purpose it was essential to concentrate on raising much higher the general standards of literacy, numeracy and punctuality. Absent from this vision, however, was a will to nurture altruism, kindliness, tolerance or patience. More fundamental to Leninist ideology was the emphasis on class struggle and civil war. Mercy was adjudged an inexcusable sign of sentimentality. The ruthless pursuit of the party’s aims was thought the supreme task. This had to be carried out dynamically. Leninism placed a high value upon the need for pressure to be exerted on institutions, groups and individuals to achieve its aims. Lenin accepted a great deal intellectually from the heritage of capitalism. Unlike the Left Communists, he thought that it would be helpful to maintain the old ‘specialists’ in their posts in factory, farm, bank and army regiment. ‘Bourgeois’ expertise had to be emulated before the ‘bourgeois’ experts themselves could be sacked. Lenin also accepted that the principle of competition, basic to capitalism, ought to be retained during the ‘transition to socialism’. Ways had to be found to put institution against institution in the fulfilment of the central state organs’ objectives.
Lenin was far from suggesting that the socialist Revolution would succeed merely through functionaries acting according to books of carefully framed rules. He demanded action, frenetic action. Procedural regularity was scoffed at. The ends justified the means in his thought, and there need be no moral criterion but whether a particular action helped or hindered the Revolution; and it was asserted that the Bolsheviks were equipped with scientific knowledge of what needed to be done. And so Lenin claimed unrivalled correctness for his ideology and was uninhibited in aspiring to indoctrinate the whole society with his prescriptions. He had no concept for arbitrariness because his mode of rule was itself essentially arbitrary by nature. His formal philosophy expressed contempt for any absolute commitment to universal goals such as democracy, social fairness and justice.
For many observers, then and later, this was a strange sort of socialism. Initially there were few books analysing the Soviet regime, since the potential writers were too active in political life. But soon they caught their breath and responded studiedly to the October Revolution. Most of the classical works of socialist theory not only in Russia but throughout Europe had started from the premise that socialism’s introduction would involve an immediate expansion of political participation, mass creativity, democratic and legal rights and practices, popular consultation and industrial democracy. Before 1917 there was already plenty of reason to question whether Lenin, the eulogist for dictatorship, was properly categorised as a socialist. He was not the only self-styled socialist who evoked such objections; similar criticism had been made of the whole tradition of advocates of dictatorship: Louis-Auguste Blanqui in France, Wilhelm Weitling in Germany and Pëtr Tkachëv in Russia. But, unlike them, Lenin had come to power; and the castigation of him was all the fiercer. In the eyes of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries at home and most socialists abroad, his Sovnarkom had unjustly called itself a ‘socialist’ government and had besmirched the name of ‘socialism’.
Lenin had also introduced huge confusion into general understandings about politics. Whereas his enemies tried to deny his membership of the fraternity of world socialism, he refused to accept that they were genuine socialists; and in order to demarcate himself from them he got the Bolshevik Seventh Congress in March 1918 to rename the Bolsheviks as the Russian Communist Party. Thus he hoped to point out to everybody that Bolshevism was aiming to achieve the ultimate goal: a communist society. But this had the effect of baffling most people. They noted that this ‘communist’ leader continued to call himself a socialist and to refer to the need to promote the ‘European socialist Revolution’. For those who were willing to read The State and Revolution, which had finally appeared (albeit in unfinished form since Lenin did not have time to write the last chapter before the October Revolution), a solution to this perplexing matter was available. Lenin had argued that socialism was the first great stage in the post-capitalist advance towards communism. It was possible, according to Lenin, to be both a socialist and a communist simultaneously. Such a conflation mortified non-Leninist socialists since it resulted in conservatives and liberals everywhere claiming that the inevitable consequence of any conceivable socialist government would be the sort of political, social and economic oppression that characterised Lenin’s Russia.
21. AT GUNPOINT
May to August 1918
In 1918 Lenin liked to remind people of the Bolshevik party’s achievements:1
And so this policy, this slogan of ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ implanted by us in the consciousness of the broadest popular masses, gave us the opportunity in October [1917] to win so easily in Petersburg [and] turned the last months of the Russian Revolution into a single total triumphal procession.
The civil war has become a fact. What we predicted at the start of the revolution and even at the start of the war was greeted by a significant segment of socialist circles with distrust and even ridicule: the transformation of the imperialist war into civil war. On 25 October 1917 it became a fact for one of the largest and most backward countries taking part in the war. In this civil war the overwhelming majority of the population proved to be on our side and consequently victory came to us extremely easily.
In his estimation, the ideas inspiring the Petrograd seizure of power had been vindicated.
Once the party entered government, Lenin ceased to be as coy about those aspects of his thought that might annoy workers, soldiers and peasants – and indeed his party members. He publicly rehearsed his favourite topics: dictatorship, terror, civil war and imperialist war. He was still confident; it remained his premise that the amount of armed violence needed to protect the Revolution at home would be small. This assumption strikes us as peculiar only because we know what was about to occur: the Civil War. But Lenin’s mistake has to be understood in relation to his assumptions about socialist Revolution. Like other revolutionaries, he had read about the civil wars in Britain in the mid-seventeenth century and in France at the end of the eighteenth; but his interest was always in how the armies represented the interests of contemporary social classes. Civil war, for Lenin, was a more or less intensive class struggle. The ‘civil war’ he most studied was the large political struggle initiated in 1871 by the Paris Commune. In Lenin’s opinion, the Commune offered a rudimentary model for popular self-administration; repeatedly he expressed admiration for what it had achieved before being suppressed by the government forces of Adolphe Thiers.
Lenin in his simplistic way judged that the Paris Commune had come to grief mainly because it failed to impose a tight internal regime and to organise adequate military contingents. From this he drew the cheering conclusion that, if the ‘toiling classes’ of Russia avoided the Commune’s error, their numerical and organisational superiority would guarantee victory. And he persuaded himself that the period of ‘civil war’ that followed the October Revolution was coming to an end.
The odd little trouble spot survived. ‘But, in the main,’ he suggested:2
The task of suppressing the resistance of the exploiters was already resolved in the period from 25 October 1917 to (approximately) February 1918 or to the surrender of Bogaevski.
Next on to the agenda there com
es… the task – the task that is urgent and constitutes the peculiarity of the current moment – to organise the administering of Russia.
Who was this Bogaevski? His name is recorded only in recondite accounts of the military actions in southern Russia in 1918–19. Afrikan Bogaevski was a Cossack commander who fought the Bolshevik-led forces, was captured after a minor engagement, but was allowed his freedom on condition that he refrained from further military activity. Lenin’s assessment was hugely amiss. He utterly failed to anticipate the intensity of the fighting about to engulf Russia. Even in southern Russia the Civil War was not ending but beginning as a Volunteer Army was being readied for action by Generals Alexeev and Kornilov, and this Volunteer Army was just one of three large forces being assembled by self-designated White officers pledged to overthrow the government in Moscow.
These were not the only groups aiming at the overthrow of Bolshevism. The Socialist-Revolutionaries, after the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, had reconvened in the city of Samara in the river Volga region and had founded an administration claiming to be the rightful government of all Russia. This administration called itself Komuch (which was the acronym of the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly), and was socialist in orientation. Elsewhere even the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were contemplating uprisings against Sovnarkom. Massive armed conflict was on the point of exploding across Russia. Lenin was famous for his strategic intuition in advance of the October Revolution. He had no such instincts about the Civil War.
Lenin: A Biography Page 47