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Title: Four October Myths Author: Andrew Flood Date: October 1997 Language: en Topics: Russian Revolution, myths, anti-Bolshevism Source: Retrieved on 27th October 2021 from http://struggle.ws/talks/myths.html
In 1922 Emma Goldman complained Soviet Russia, had become âthe modern
socialist Lourdes, to which the blind and the lame, the deaf and the
dumb were flocking for miraculous curesâ. And like most religious events
that claim a historical validity many of the myths of the October
revolution rather then being historical accounts are written instead to
create a blind faith in the leadership of the party.
Here I am going to look at four myths, widely accepted by the left and
right alike on the October revolution and its aftermath, these are
Bolshevik party that transformed Russia from a capitalism to communism
imperialist intervention (Recently this has begun to replace the later
myth that the failure was somehow due to Stalin rather then Trotsky
being made the boss of all Russia in 1928.)
dictatorship were a consequence of this Civil War
specifically for us that the anarchist alternative was inevitably
defeated by state terror alone
Many of the photographs and film people believe they have seen of the
Russian revolution are in fact taken from films by the Soviet Director
Eisenstein after the event. For instance Iâve seen Socialist Worker
(Ireland) use a still from his recreation of the storming of the Winter
Palace alongside an article on the Russian Revolution. These along with
rather glib accounts have created an entirely false view of what the
Revolution was, one at odds even with the longer Bolshevik histories.
These accounts universally depict a few demonstrations between the
February and October revolutions accompanied by a political debate which
the Bolsheviks won by October and so launched a carefully planned
serious of military assaults on the government. Not only is this a
completely inaccurate picture of this revolution, itâs a completely
inaccurate picture of any revolution. This example is typical
âthe bolsheviks..in the hour of crisis put aside all their indignation
at the governmental persecutions and concentrated on the task of saving
the revolution. The victory before the gates of Petrograd set free the
energies of the masses throughout the country. Peasants revolted against
their landlords, and in far-away industrial centres Soviets took power.â
There are two ways in which this is wrong, the first and more
fundamental is that October was not the culmination of a political
debate alone but rather the culmination of several months of working
class and peasant activity that drove such the debate.
In an article written in 1927, 10 years after the revolution Pitor
Arshinov, an anarchist participant explains what was happening in the
period before October
âit was well before October that the revolutionary workers destroyed the
base of capitalism. All that was left was the superstructure. If there
had not been this general expropriation of the capitalists by the
workers, the destruction of the bourgeois state machine â the political
revolution â would not have succeeded in any way. The resistance of the
owners would have been much stronger. On the other hand, the objectives
of the social revolution in October were not limited to the overthrow of
capitalist power. A long period of practical development in social
self-management was before the workers,
The big rural landowners began everywhere to evacuate the countryside,
fleeing from the insurgent peasantry and seeking protection for their
possessions and their persons in the towns. Meanwhile, the peasantry
proceeded to a direct re-distribution of land, and did not want to hear
of peaceful co-existence with the landlords. In the towns as well a
sudden change took place between the workers and the owners of
enterprises. Thanks to the efforts of the collective genius of the
masses, workersâ committees sprang up in every industry, intervening
directly in production, putting aside the admonishments of the owners
and concentrating on eliminating them from production. Thus in different
parts of the country, the workers got down to the socialisation of
industry.
Simultaneously, all of revolutionary Russia was covered with a vast
network of workersâ and peasant soviets, which began to function as
organs of self management.
Therefore, in considering the evolution of the Russian socialist
Revolution as a whole, October appears only as a stage â a powerful and
decisive stage, it is true.â
By October all over Russia workers had either taken over or began to
âinterfereâ in the way there workplaces were run by setting up factory
committees. These committees sought to compete with the boss in the
management of the enterprize or as time went on replaced him altogether.
These committees as they grew began to aim at running not just the local
factory but creating a national way of administering the national
economy.
In August 1917 the Second Conference of Factory Committees took this so
seriously that they resolved to devote a quarter of their wages to
support a central Soviet of Factory Committees.
They declared:
âThe economic life of the country â agriculture, industry, commerce and
transport must be subject to one unified plan, constructed so as to
satisfy the individual and social requirements of the wide masses of the
peopleâ.
In short capitalism was considerably undermined before the October
Revolution.
The Bolsheviks did not set a date for revolution until it was in
progress (the day before the Winter palace fell). This was when the
revolutionaries found themselves holding the rest of Petrograd after
Kerenskyâs forces, ordered on the offensive in the city, (to gain
control of the city bridges) instead melted away. The Winter Palace far
from being stormed in a massive military offensive was in fact taken as
soldiers, workers and peasants entered through the basement only to be
taken prisoner. However before long the âprisonersâ outnumbered the
soldiers loyal to the government who recognising this surrendered to
them. In fact the front of the Palace was so quiet that Kerensky, the
head of the government was able to escape by driving out in his car.
Those revolutionary soldiers who did recognise him reacted not by
arresting him (as they would if this was a planned procedure) but by
saluting and standing aside for the car to pass.
After they came to power in October the Bolsheviks passed all sorts of
decrees legalising aspects of workers control but as Maurice Brinton,
author of the Bolsheviks and Workers control points out
âThese...provisions in fact only listed and legalised what had already
been achieved and implemented in many places by the working class in the
course of the struggles of the previous monthsâ
So instead of the Bolsheviks seizing power and then handing out gains to
grateful worker and peasants we have the reality of the Bolsheviks
falling into power and listing and legalising the gains already won.
Another account of the October revolution was given by Sergei
Mstislavskii, a leader of the Left SRâs (peasant-based party which
briefly entered a coalition with the Bolsheviks). He describes being
woken up on the morning before the revolution by the cheerful tapping of
rifles. On waking he was told âGird up your loins boss. Thereâs a smell
of gunpowder in the city..â Actually, he said âthe city did not smell of
gunpowder; power lay in the gutter, anyone could pick it up. One did not
have to gird oneâs loins, one needed only to stoop down and pick it upâ
The Civil War and the intervention of 17 foreign armies is the next
aspect of the myth to be tackled. This is not to deny that there was a
long and bloody Civil War or that all the imperialist powers did get
involved at some level. Rather what we need to be clear on is at what
created the Civil War and to what extent it can be considered to have
altered Bolshevik Policy.
It is true that the imperialists hated the revolution and that they
harboured and equipped the white armies. But they actually stayed out of
most of the fighting. Only limited numbers of imperialist troops were
landed, the Japanese in Vladivostock, the US and Britain at Mumansk and
the French and others in the Crimea. But huge areas of land were
captured by whites during the Civil War, if the whites were just
capitalists and former generals who are we to believe did the fighting
for them. What force created the white armies.
We have already seen that before the revolution the peasants were
seizing the land, and expelled and sometimes killed the landlords. They
set up soviets and identified with the workers Soviets of Moscow and
Petrograd even if they favoured the Socialist Revolutionaries while the
workers backed the Bolsheviks. Yet it was these same peasants who were
to form the backbone of the White armies.
This happened because the Bolsheviks refused to except that the mass of
peasants could be pro-revolution. So right from the start they treated
them as enemies of the revolution. In place of the collective ownership
of land by the peasants they tried to take the land into state control.
They sent armed detachments out into the countryside to seize the
peasants food rather then allowing the workers and peasants to construct
a mutual distribution system. They crudely tried to stir up internal
conflict in the community between peasants with a little land and those
with none. All of this had the effect of making the peasants hostile to
Bolshevik rule.
The white on the other hand claimed to be against all this. So they were
able to briefly recruit or conscript large numbers of dissatisfied
peasants into the white armies. These were the soldiers who fought with
the two white interventions, those of Wrangel and Denkin that threatened
to overwhelm the revolution. The Bolsheviks were saved because although
the whites were clever enough to pretend to be on the side of the
peasants as soon as they captured a piece of land the land lord would
arrive and start demanding his back rent. As soon as this news got to
the front the soldiers would lose all will to fight and start to desert
in droves.
Bolshevik policy also lead to the formation of what were called the
green armies which were peasant movements that responded to Bolshevik
and white repression by taking to the woods and attacking both sides.
These bands in general had little political theory, some were little
more then bandits, others were anti-semites but had the Bolsheviks not
alienated them most would have been on the side of the revolution.
Towards the end of the Civil War there were many large scale peasant
uprisings against Bolshevik rule, again by peasants who a few years
before had seized land and so should have been pro-revolution.
In the cities the situation was almost as bad. Bolshevik attacks on
workers control resulted by 1919 in workers leaving the party in huge
numbers showing the level of demoralisation most workers felt in the
party. This demoralisation could not but effect the will of the Red Army
to fight and more and more the army turned to execution and other
mechanisms of bourgeoise discipline to force its soldiers to fight. But
this was only half the problem. Bolsheviks attempts at one man
management were not just demoraling workers in the Red Army had also
destroyed production and created a Soviet bureaucracy where credit was
based on ability to lie about how much you were producing.
The Civil War and the allied blockade meant desperate shortages but
those trying to fix those shortages were bureaucrats. The war conduced
by these bureaucrats against the peasants resulted in famine in many
areas and a further reduction in food supplies of the cities. In many
cases the workers tried to take the initiative, sometimes simply as when
Peterograd was faced with a fuel shortage and Emma Goldman asked why far
from being mobilised to do so workers were being stopped gathering fuel
from the surrounding forests. But the following illustration from the
anarchist Voline shows how with the creativity and knowledge which could
have got production going and supplied the front was blocked even at the
level of the individual workplace.
The Bolsheviks ordered the Nobel oil refinery closed in 1918 as they
were unable to organise the maintenance of production. A mass meeting
was called at which the workers outlined how they could continue
production using the skills and contacts they had acquired over the
years working there. The Bolshevik response was simple, the workers were
told the factory was closing and that if they made any attempt to keep
it open they would lose their compensation and would be forced to close
by the army. Far from dictatorship saving the economy it finished its
destruction, both because it was unable to organise production and
because it alienated workers and peasants alike.
Russia got out of WWI when it signed the Brest Livitisok treaty on March
3^(rd). The rights or wrongs of abandoning the revolutionary Ukraine
aside it is significant that the decision to sign this controversial
treaty was made at a Bolshevik Central Committee meeting by the
narrowest of margins and not by the Soviets.
The start date of the Civil War is difficult to be exact but the
earliest reasonable starting date is probably the revolt of the Czech
legion who the Bolsheviks were transporting by train across Siberia to
be sent back to the Western front to continue the war. This happened on
May 25 and because this regiment was strung out all along the railway
meant the Bolsheviks lost all control of the transport system East and
allowed local white units to form, ally with the Czechs and attack the
local revolutionaries. This is not to say there was no local fighting at
all before this, but what there was did not appear to present any sort
of real threat to the revolution.
Yet surprisingly in this 10 week interval of relative peace between
these two events it is that we see the introduction of measures most
Leninists now try and pretend were necessitated by the Civil War itself.
For instance on March 30^(th) Trotsky as Commissar of Military Affairs
set about reorganising the army. The death penalty for disobedience
under fire was reintroduced, as was saluting officers, special forms of
address, separate living quarters and privileges for officers. Officers
were no longer elected. Trotsky wrote âThe elective basis is politically
pointless and technically inexpedient and has already been set aside by
decreeâ
It was also in this time period that the Bolsheviks first used the
secret police to attack the anarchists, killing or wounding 40 and
jailing 500 in raids on April 11 and 12 in Moscow and Petrograd. In May
Burevestnik, Anarkhia, Golos Truda and other leading anarchist
periodicals closed down.
Again it in this period that Lenin advocates that the revolution was his
dictatorship, as least we presume it was himself he had in mind from the
following quote from âThe Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Governmentâ
published April 28.
âThe irrefutable experience of history has shown that the dictatorship
of individual persons was very often the vehicle, the channel of the
dictatorship of the revolutionary classesâ. In the same article he
advocates the use of Taylorism and says that in the factories the way
forward is not collective management by the workers but that â..the
masses unquestioningly obey the single will (emphasis in original) of
the leaders of the labour processâ.
On May 5 he identifies state capitalism as the immediate goal of the
revolution in âLeft wing childishness and petty bourgeois mentalityâ
when he says the major aim must be âto study the state capitalism of the
Germans, to spare no effort at copying itâ. and furthermore that they
shouldnât âshrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the
copying of itâ.
In the light of this it is bizarre that some later day Leninists claim
that the Bolsheviks only introduced one man management because of the
Civil War. All the more bizarre when Trotsky spelled out the effects the
Civil War had actually had on the introduction of state capitalism for
them in 1920 when he wrote inâWar, Communism and terrorâ
âI consider that if the civil war had not plundered our economic organs
of all that was strongest, most independent. most endowed with
initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man
management in the sphere of economic administration much sooner and much
less painfullyâ.
Yet Tony Cliff, leader of the SWP can claim
Lenin certainly did not call for a dictatorship of the party over the
proletariat, even less for that of a bureaucratised party over a
decimated proletariat. But fate â the desperate condition of a backward
country besieged by world capitalism â led to precisely this.
[Tony Cliff, Lenin, Vol.3, page 111]
Even here though Lenin already answered this excuse for had he had
written
â ...those who believe that socialism will be built at a time of peace
and tranquillity are profoundly mistaken: it will everywhere be built at
a time of disruption, at a time of famine.â
Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.27 page 517.
The final myth I want to cover is for anarchists the most harmful. That
is that faced with such ruthless repression the anarchists were doomed
to defeat. To often anarchists talk of the Bolshevik repression in terms
of the failure of the Bolsheviks alone but there success was also a
measure of our failure.
That the anarchists were repressed in undeniable, it started on April 11
and 12 1918 when armed detachments of Cheka raid 26 anarchist centres in
Moscow and Petrograd. Forty anarchists were killed or wounded, over 500
taken prisoner. At the start of May 1918 Burevestnik, Anarkhia, Golos
Truda and other leading anarchist periodicals were closed down.
Documents dating from the 13^(th) June outlined that the department for
counter revolution investigative section and intelligence unit had
sections allocated to dealing with anarchists.
Thousands of anarchists ended up jailed, exiled or executed. Tens of
thousands of workers and peasants who fought alongside them suffered the
same faith. At the time of the third treaty between the Makhnovists and
the Bolsheviks in 1920 one of the provisions was that the Bolsheviks
should release âleftâ prisoners. The Makhnovists estimated their number
at this time to be 200,000, mostly peasants who had fought with or been
sympathetic to the Makhnovists but also the anarchist activists of every
region and city.
But was this inevitable or was the fact the Bolsheviks were put in a
position to crush the anarchists due in part to the anarchists allowing
them to get there. At the beginning of 1917 the Bolsheviks were tiny,
with roughly 2,000 members in Moscow and 23,000 nation-wide in a
population of 160 million. There were probably fewer anarchists, typical
estimates are for 5,000 to 10,000 but not all that many fewer.
In addition while the Bolsheviks had to pretend to support the slogans
of the masses as when they took up the slogan of all power to the
Soviets, this slogans were in fact the slogans many anarchists had been
using since 1905.
At the begining I quoted Piotor Arshinov and it is to him that I now
return for an explanation
âRevolutionary Anarchism was the only politico social-current to extol
the idea of a social revolution by the workers and peasants, as much
during the 1905 Revolution as from the first days of the October
Revolution. In fact, the role they could have played would have been
colossal, and so could have been the means of struggle employed by the
masses themselves. Likewise, no politico-social theory could have
blended so harmoniously with the spirit and orientation of the
Revolution. The interventions of the Anarchist orators in 1917 were
listened to with a rare trust and attention by the workers. One could
have said that the revolutionary potential of the workers and peasants,
together with the ideological and tactical power of Anarchism could have
represented a force to which nothing could be opposed. Unhappily, this
fusion did not take place. Some isolated anarchists occasionally led
intense revolutionary activity among the workers, but there was not an
Anarchist organisation of great size to lead more continuous and
co-ordinated actions. Only such an organisation could have united the
Anarchists and the millions of workers. During such an important and
advantageous revolutionary period, the Anarchists limited themselves to
the restricted activities of small groups instead of orientating
themselves to mass political action. They preferred to drown themselves
in the sea of their internal quarrels, not attempting to pose the
problem of a common policy and tactic of Anarchism By this deficiency,
they condemned themselves to inaction and sterility during the most
important moments of the Revolution.
The causes of this catastrophic state of the Anarchist movement resided
in the dispersion, the disorganisation and the absence of a collective
tactic â things which have nearly always been raised as principles among
Anarchists, preventing them making a single organisational step so that
they could orientate the social revolution in a decisive fashion. There
is no actual advantage in denouncing those who,... contributed to create
this situation. But the tragic experience: which led the working masses
to defeat, and Anarchism to the edge of the abyss, should be assimilated
as from now.â
Arshinov points out that the Makhnovist movement proved the anarchists
could have acted differently Over the four years 1918â1921 the anarchist
Makhno commanded militias who fought against the forces of the Hetman,
White Generals Denikin and Wrangel, nationalists like Petliura and
Grigorâev and, of course, the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine. At its height
it had 30,000 volunteer combatants and liberated an area of some seven
million people.
The Russian Revolution was one of the most vital moments of working
class history. It showed what was possible. We should celebrate this but
in our celebration we must ditch the myths and instead look at ways to
avoid the mistakes made so that the next time things will be different.
According to John Rees at the end of the civil war Bolshevik party
members were 10% factory workers, 25% army and 60% in âthe government or
party machineâ. A note at the back says even of those classed as factory
workers âmost were in administrationâ.
Rees also attempts blame the decline in the number of Bolshevik party
members in Kronstadt to the Civil war but in fact the fall in numbers in
1920 was due to purges and resignations from the party. The attitude of
the remaining party members is demonstrated by the fact that during the
rising three veteran Kronstadt Bolsheviks formed a Preparatory Committee
of the Russian Communist party which called upon local communists not to
sabotage the efforts of the Revolutionary committee. A further 497
members of the party resigned from the party2.
Socialism is merely the next step forward from state capitalist
monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state capitalist
monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and
has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly Lenin, Ibid, Vol. 25
page 358.
The Cheka was meant to be a temporary organisation, at first it was an
administrative body designed to carry out investigative functions. It
was not initially judicial and had no powers of arrest, however it grew
up quickly. Nine days after its birth, it was granted the power of
arrest. In January 1918 it was being assigned armed units, in February
it was granted the power of summary trials and execution of sentences
(which included the death sentence). At the end of 1917 it had 23
personnel, by mid 1918 it had over 10,000.
On 17^(th) January 1920, The Bolshevik government abolished the death
penalty except in districts where there were military operations taking
place. To circumvent this order, the Cheka routinely transferred
prisoners to the military areas for execution. In the following passage,
the Bolshevik Victor Serge, describes how the Chekas reacted to the
abolition of the death penalty
while the newspapers were printing the decree, the Petrograd Chekas were
liquidating their stock! Cartload after cartload of suspects had been
driven outside the city during the night, and then shot, heap upon heap.
How many? In Petrograd between 150 and 200; in Moscow it was said
between 200 and 300.
There are many other examples but lets next look at the faith of one
anarchist revolutionary who left the USA to join the revolution in
Russia. This was Bogush.
He was one of the anarchists of Russian origin expelled from America to
Russia in 1921 for his part in opposing the imperialist slaughter of
world war one. Soon after arriving he went to see the area controlled by
the Makhnovists at a time when they were in their third treaty with the
Bolsheviks. He was a few hours there when the Bolsheviks for the third
time betrayed this treaty, attacking the Makhnovists without warning. He
immediately returned to Khrakov where he was arrested by the Cheka, and
shot in March of 1921.
In Can the Bolsheviks retain State Power? Lenin outlined his conception
of âworkers controlâ:
When we say workers control, always associating that slogan to the
dictatorship of the proletariat, and always putting it after the latter,
we thereby make plain what state we have in mind.. if it is a
proletarian state we are referring to (i.e. dictatorship of the
proletariat) then workers control can become a national, all-embracing,
omnipresent, extremely precise and extremely scrupulous accounting
(emphasis in the original) of the production and distribution of goods.
Comments made by Trotsky in âTerrorism and Communismâ (1918)
âThe very principle of compulsory labour is for the Communist quite
unquestionable ... the only solution to economic difficulties that is
correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to
treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the
necessary labour power â an almost inexhaustible reservoir â and to
introduce strict order into the work of its registration, mobilisation
and utilisationâ. (p. 135)
âThe introduction of compulsory labour service is unthinkable without
the application, to a greater or lesser degree, of the methods of
militarisation of labourâ. (p. 137)
In 1919, 10.8% of enterprises were under one-man management, by December
1920, 2,183 out of 2,483 factories were no longer under collective
management.
The paper of the Red Army wrote after an assassination attempt against
Lenin; Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in
scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in
their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritskii...let there be
floods of blood of the bourgeois â more blood, as much as possible.