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Title: The Russian Counterrevolution Author: CrimethInc. Date: 11th May 2018 Language: en Topics: Russian Revolution, Counterrevolution, anti-Bolshevism Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-10 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/05/11/new-book-the-russian-counterrevolution
Since the mid-19^(th) century, anarchists have maintained that the key
to liberation is not to seize the state but to abolish it. From Paris to
St. Petersburg, from Barcelona to Beijing, one generation of
revolutionaries after another has had to learn this lesson the hard way.
Shuffling politicians in and out of power changes nothing. What matters
are the instruments of rule â the police, the military, the courts, the
prison system, the bureaucracy. Whether it is a king, a dictator, or a
Congress that directs these instruments, the experience on the receiving
end remains roughly the same.
This explains why the outcome of the Egyptian revolution of 2011â2013
was not all that different from the outcome of the Russian Revolution of
1917â1921 or the French Revolution of 1848â1851. In each case, as soon
as the people who made the revolution stopped attempting to carry out
social change directly and shifted to investing their hopes in political
representatives, power consolidated in the hands of a new autocracy.
Whether the new tyrants hailed from the military, the aristocracy, or
the underclass, whether they promised to restore order or to incarnate
the power of the proletariat, the end result was roughly the same.
Government itself is a class relation. You canât abolish class society
without abolishing the asymmetry between ruler and ruled . The first
condition for any government is that it must achieve a monopoly on
coercive force. In struggling to achieve this monopoly, fascist
despotisms, communist dictatorships, and liberal democracies come to
resemble each other. And in order to achieve it, even the most
ostensibly radical party must ultimately collude with other power
players. This explains why the Bolsheviks employed tsarist officers and
counterinsurgency methods, why they repeatedly took the side of the
petite bourgeoisie against anarchists, first in Russia and later in
Spain and elsewhere. History gives the lie to the old alibi that
Bolshevik repression was necessary to abolish capitalism. The problem
with Bolshevism was not that it used brutal force to push through a
revolutionary agenda, but that it used brutal force to crush it.
Itâs not particularly popular to acknowledge any of this today, when the
flag of the Soviet Union has become a dim, receding screen onto which
people can project whatever they wish. A generation that grew up after
the fall of the Soviet Union has renewed the pipe dream that the state
could solve all our problems if the right people were in charge.
Apologists for Lenin and Stalin make exactly the same excuses for them
that we hear from the proponents of capitalism, pointing to the ways
consumers benefitted under their reign or arguing that the millions they
exploited, imprisoned, and killed had it coming.
In any case, a return to 20^(th) century state socialism is impossible.
As the old Eastern Bloc joke goes, socialism is the painful transition
between capitalism and capitalism. From this vantage point, we can see
that the temporary ascendancy of socialism in the 20^(th) century was
not the culmination of world history foretold by Marx, but a stage in
the spread and development of capitalism. âReal existing socialismâ
served to industrialize post-feudal economies for the world market; it
stabilized restless workforces through this transition the same way that
the Fordist compromise did in the West. State socialism and Fordism were
both expressions of a temporary truce between labor and capital that
neoliberal globalization has rendered impossible. Unfettered free-market
capitalism is about to swallow up the last islands of social-democratic
stability, like Sweden and France.
The future may hold neoliberal immiseration, nationalist enclaves,
totalitarian command economies, or the anarchist abolition of property
itselfâor all of thoseâbut it will be increasingly difficult to preserve
the illusion that any government could solve the problems of capitalism
for any but a privileged few. Fascists and other nationalists are eager
to capitalize on this disillusionment to advance their own brands of
exclusive socialism; we should not smooth the way for them by
legitimizing the idea that the state could serve working people if only
it were properly administered.
Some have argued that we should suspend conflicts with proponents of
authoritarian communism in order to focus on more immediate threats,
such as fascism. Yet widespread fear of left totalitarianism has given
fascist recruiters their chief talking points. In the contest for the
hearts and minds of those who have not yet chosen a side, it could only
help to distinguish our proposals for social change from the ones
advanced by Stalinists and other authoritarians.
Within popular struggles against capitalism, state oppression, and
fascism, we should grant equal weight to the struggle between different
visions of the future. Not doing so means assuming defeat in advance.
Anarchists, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, and others learned
this the hard way after 1917.
The good news is that revolutionary movements donât have to end the way
the Russian Revolution did. There is another way. Rather than seeking
state power, we can open up spaces of autonomy, stripping legitimacy
from the state and building the capacity to meet our needs directly.
Instead of dictatorships and armies, we can create grassroots networks
to defend ourselves against anyone who wants to wield power over us.
Rather than looking to new representatives, we can create horizontal
networks of cooperation and mutual aid. This is the anarchist
alternative, which would have succeeded in Spain in the 1930s had it not
been stomped out by Franco on one side and Stalin on the other. From
Chiapas and Kabylia to Athens and Rojava, all of the inspiring movements
and uprisings of the past three decades have incorporated elements of
the anarchist model.
As the crises of our era intensify, more revolutions are bound to break
out. Anarchism is the only proposition for revolutionary change that has
not sullied itself in a sea of blood. Itâs up to us to update it for the
new millennium, lest we be condemned to repeat the past.
This book brings together two texts published on the 100-year
anniversary of the October Revolution.
The first part, âThe Bolshevik Counterrevolution,â originally appeared
in Catalunya,[1] where outrage about the Stalinist betrayal of the 1936
revolution still simmers. An admittedly partisan and cursory overview,
it has the virtue of summarizing a vast subject.[2]
The second part, âRestless Specters of the Anarchist Dead,â is our own
collection, though we owe the scholarship to our predecessors. We kneel,
as the saying goes, on the shoulders of giants.
Together, they offer a brief survey of a century-old catastrophe that is
still impacting our struggles today.
The counterrevolutionary drift of the USSR was predictable. Bakunin
foresaw just how a âdictatorship of the proletariatâ would quickly turn
into yet another dictatorship over the proletariat, 50 years before it
occurred. In the following years, many other anti-capitalists arrived at
the same conclusion. It was a pretty safe bet, considering how the
leaders of the new dictatorship found their inspiration in another
counterrevolutionary figure, Karl Marx.
We donât make this assertion lightly, denouncing as
âcounterrevolutionaryâ a person who, beyond any doubt, was important in
anti-capitalist struggles. We wouldnât ever take such a step over simple
disagreements in theoretical matters. It is only after a painstaking
survey of the consequences of Marxâsactionsthat we arrive at this
conclusion.
Marx implanted colonial and white supremacist attitudes in the heart of
the anti-capitalist movement, and he broke the autonomy of this movement
so completely that 150 years later we still havenât recovered.
To name a single example, Marx celebrated the US conquest of Mexico,
using openly racist terms to contrast the âenergeticâ Yankees with the
lazy and âprimitiveâ Mexicans. His idea of dialectical progress shared
the element of white supremacy with the liberalism of the day. He was
convinced that the Western nations were the most advanced in the world
and that all the other peoples would have to emulate Europe and follow
the same path to liberate themselves. As such, he was an unapologetic
defender of colonialism, which he recognized as an exercise of
capitalist violence, but which he also believed was vital to the
progress of âprimitiveâ peoples.
Apart from his racism, Marx was an authoritarian complicit with
bourgeois institutions. One of the strongest features of the workersâ
movement in the 19^(th) century was its autonomy. It was a movement
built by the workers themselves and within it the institutions of the
class enemy had no place. Marx ruined all that with his obstinate
insistence that in order to win, according to his theoryâa theory which
history has torn to shreds, a theory that predicted the anti-capitalist
revolutions would occur in Germany and the UK, definitely not in Russia
or Spainâthe working class had to adopt the political forms of its
enemy, organizing itself in political parties and entering the bourgeois
institutions, the parliaments where monarchists and capitalists
struggled for control of a power based solely in the subordination of
the peasants and workers, a power that could not even exist without the
continued domination of these classes.
Marx was accustomed to being sur-rounded by lackeys. When he realized
that there were independent minds and contrary opinions within the
International Workingmenâs Association, that it was no longer his
personal fan club, he conspired and made use of all the dirty tricks
that have since become well-known methods of manipulating assem-blies in
order to kick out all those who differed with him and who opposed the
obviously erroneous tactic of creating political parties. This was not
merely a conflict between two positions, Marxist and anarchist, nor was
it a duel between Marx and Bakunin. Marx excluded not only anarchists
but anyone who disagreed with him, including feminists like André Leó,
participant in the Paris Commune.
As a result of the split, the majority of the International broke with
the Marxist faction. Many people who are only familiar with
oversimplified accounts centered on Marx assume that as soon as the
headquarters of the International were moved to New York, the
organization was effectively finished, but in fact it was only the
smaller Marxist splinter group that immediately became moribund. The
majority of the International continued organizing together according to
anarchist principles for half a decade more, as the Marxist historian
Steklov was forced to recount in his History of The First International.
It took five more years of continuous state repression to destroy the
organization, and that only succeeded because Marxists and other statist
elements of the labor movement refused to act in solidarity with
genuinely revolutionary labor organizing.
Marxâs controversial strategyâto convert the International into a tool
for entry into bourgeois institutions via social-democratic partiesâwas
an embarrassing failure, just as his critics predicted. The new parties
wasted no time in selling out the working class to their new
professional colleagues, the bourgeoisie. Whatâs more, Marxâs chief
heirs, such as the Socialist Workersâ Party of Germany, sent the working
class off to the counterrevolutionary slaughterhouse that was World War
I.
From early on, Lenin was a leader of the Bolshevik (âmajorityâ) faction
of the Russian Social Democratic Workersâ Party, which would later
become the Communist Party.[3]
He was an intellectual from a bourgeois family who never stopped playing
the role of manager. We canât deny that a person doesnât choose where
they are born, and can decide to renounce their privilege and fight
alongside the oppressed. But Lenin was the architect of a
pseudo-revolutionary state that would be directed by his class. From the
beginning, the USSR was a dictatorship of intellectuals and bureaucrats
oppressing the exploited classes.
Lenin never abandoned his class interests. He called on the workers and
peasants to rise up for the same reason that during the Revolution he
appropriated anarchist discourses (in The State and Revolution, which
scandalized the members of his own party who didnât understand that the
text was simply a manipulative attempt to win the support of the masses
and an alliance with the anarchists, who constituted a key force in the
October insurrection). All of this was calculated to motivate the masses
to serve as cannon fodder for his ambitions.
Lenin was even more authoritarian than Marx. As the leader of the
Bolsheviks, he maneuvered to expel the Mensheviks, Bogdanovists, and
other currents from the Party. He differed with the former because they
favored freedom of opinion, whereas he believed that the entire Party
must adhere to their leadersâ dogmas and decisions. He differed with the
latter simply because they represented a threat to his control of the
Party. He alleged that Bogdanov wasnât an orthodox Marxist, but neither
was Lenin; for years, he had appropriated the idea of the anarchists and
the esery (Socialist Revolutionaries or SRs) that a revolution could be
made in Russia without passing through a constitutional period.
On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Lenin was in contact with the
secret police of the German Empire. It was only thanks to them that he
was able to return to Russia amid the tumult of the World War. They also
gave financial aid to his Party. In exchange, they expected Lenin to
pull Russia out of the war, freeing up the Germansâ eastern front.
In the end, Lenin was more faithful to the German imperialists than to
the workers and peasants. Even though many other Bolsheviks were
horrified by his proposed collaboration with Germany, the dictatorship
that Lenin had already established within his Party prevailed. Without
consulting the Polish and Ukrainian peoples, historically occupied by
Tsarist Russia, Lenin ceded those territories to the German imperialists
along with a huge bounty in money and raw materials that contributed to
the slaughter of the working class on the Western front.
Contrary to the Leninist or Trotskyist version, which attributes all the
brutality of the USSR to Joseph Stalin, the bloody repression of the
worker and peasant classes and the effort to rebuild capitalism began in
the first year of the dictatorship when Lenin was still in charge.
The February Revolution of 1917 resulted in a parliamentary government
immobilized by the unrealistic attempt to reform the old regime while
protecting dominant interests. The October Revolution (which began on
November 7, according to the modern calendar), was supposed to put an
end to the power of the bourgeoisie and aristocrats and allow the
self-organization of society via the soviets , assemblies of workers,
peasants, and soldiers, which had appeared spontaneously in the 1905
Revolution and reemerged with the February Revolution.
On November 7, 1917,the Bolsheviks and their allies rose up in
Petrograd, beginning the second revolution. On November 8, a detachment
of anarchist sailors from Kronstadt, led by the anarchist Zhelezniakov
and in coordination with the Bolsheviks, captured the Winter Palace,
abolishing the Provisional Government.
The same Zhelezniakov was also chosen to lead a detachment that seized
and abolished the Constituent Assembly in January of the following year.
He led a flotilla and then an armored train battalion against the White
Army during the Civil War. Although he protested the Bolsheviksâ
imposition of hierarchical measures and the restoration of tsarist
officers within the Red Army, he was too valu-able as a military
strategist to cast aside. The Bolsheviks invited him to rejoin themâhe
had gone to Crimea to fight against the Whites in an autonomous
formationâand they assigned him the command of the armored train
campaign to halt the advance of the White General, Denikin. He died in
combat in 1919.
Subsequently, it became clear that the Bolsheviks did not coordinate
with anarchists out of a spirit of solidarity. On the contrary, they
systematically assigned anarchists the most dangerous roles so that they
would assume the physical and political consequences if things went
poorly.
In November 1917, the Bolsheviks took advantage of a temporary majority
they had in the Second Pan-Russian Congress of Soviets, thanks to the
disorganization of the other parties after the coup against the
Provisional Government, the Bolsheviksâ able propaganda, and their
political and intellectual profile (they didnât represent a majority
within the working class, but they did get a majority of chosen
delegates). At the Congress, they converted the Central Executive
Committee into a largely independent government organ standing over the
soviets. Previously, the Committee had been an organ devoid of state
power that was only supposed to give continuity to the tasks of the
Congress of Soviets. The Bolsheviksâ maneuver turned it into the
executive power of a new state. And this Committee, formed by delegates
elected by delegates elected by delegates (the three layers of
representation were the local soviets, the Congress of Soviets, and the
Central Executive Committee) was controlledâinevitablyânot by the people
but by the most Machiavellian and opportunistic bureaucrats, which is to
say: the Bolsheviks. Subsequently, the Party under Leninâs intransigent
dictatorship had the new Central Executive Committee form the Council of
Peopleâs Commissars, or Sovnarkom, which quickly became the supreme
authority of the new state, in charge of reorganizing the economy and
administering state affairs. And its chairman wasâwhat a surpriseâLenin!
The Bolsheviks did not honor any of the other decisions of the Second
Pan-Russian Congress of Soviets. They abandoned the entire opportunistic
program they had used to attain a majority of delegatesâthe agrarian
program, the proposal for seeking a dignified withdrawal from the war,
the decision to create a Constituent Assembly. Now that they had created
the bureaucratic layers capable of legitimating their dictatorship, they
no longer had to fight for the interests of the workers and peasants.
Subsequently, the Congress of Soviets would do little more than rubber
stamp the decisions of the Sovnarkom.
On December 5, 1917, the Bolsheviks established the Cheka, the secret
police, who directed their activity against other revolutionary currents
from the very beginning. The Cheka were led by Dzerzhinsky, a Polish
aristocrat.
On December 22, 1917, the Bolsheviks began to negotiate with Germany and
the other Central Powers, arrogating the authority to speak in the name
of the whole of Russian society, as well as the peoples occupied by the
Russian Empire.
On December 30, 1917, the Bolsheviks carried out their first operation
of political repression. The Cheka arrested a small group of SRs,
ostensible allies, including a delegate of the Constituent Assembly, who
formed a part of the opposition.
In January 1918, the Bolsheviks abandoned the Constituent Assembly and
orchestrated its suppression, together with the anarchists. Whereas the
anarchists opposed the Assembly as a bourgeois organ that counter-acted
the power of the soviets, the Bolsheviks had demanded the creation of
the Assembly after the February Revolution and they had stood in the
elections. They only turned against the Assembly once they were unable
to win a majority.
In March 1918, the Bolsheviks signed a humiliating peace treaty with
Germany that went against all the working class proposals for ending the
war. They paid a massive war compensation and ceded control over various
nations previously under tsarist domination (in effect, the Baltic
countries, Poland, and Ukraine). In Ukraine, the peasants organized a
guerrilla war and won many battles against the German imperialists,
proving the viability of the proposal of anarchists and others for
âneither war nor peace,â by which they meant ending the imperialist war
but resisting any military occupation through revolutionary guerrilla
tactics. Lenin imposed his rejection of this option, probably because he
knew his elitist Party would be incapable of controlling a decentralized
guerrilla campaign. He preferred the defeat and occupation of Ukraine
over an uncontrolled revolution.
As a consequence, the SRs, an import-ant ally of the Bolsheviks,
declared that the latter were German proxies and left the government.
In April 1918, the Cheka began its first extra-judicial executions in an
operation against anarchists in Petrograd and Moscow. By the end of the
operation, they had executed 800 without trials. Their rhetoric was to
attack âclass enemies,â but their secret orders were to liquidate all
anarchist organizations in the two principal cities.
On April 12, 1918, the Bolsheviks attacked 26 anarchist centers in
Moscow, killing dozens and arresting 500. Threatened by the dramatic
growth of the anarchist movement in Moscow, Trotsky and the Bolshevik
press had carried out a media campaign in collaboration with the local
bourgeoisie, accusing veteran revolutionaries of being âbanditsâ and
âcriminalsâ for expropriating bourgeois properties, even though these
were put to the use of the revolution.
In June 1918, Trotsky abolished any kind of worker control over the Red
Army, destroying the proletarian tradition that allowed soldiers to
elect their officers and enjoy real equality. He restored the old
hierarchies in the armyâof aristocratic originâand complemented them
with a new ideological hierarchy upheld through the sinister presence of
the Cheka at every level, destroying the capacity of the Red Army to
function as a bastion of revolutionary ideas and turning it into a mere
tool of the Party.
As before, officers received status and high pay while the common
soldiers became thralls, and anyoneâofficer or soldierâwho spoke out
against the regime would be shot.
Simultaneously, Trotsky carried out a mass recruitment of officers from
the old Tsarist army. Under Bolshevik dominion, the Red Army became an
aristocratic army. As a result of this initiative, in 1918 75% of the
officers were former tsarists, and by the end of the Civil War that
figure had climbed to 83%. Rather than fomenting leadership among the
masses, the Bolsheviks returned authority to an elite.
On the contrary, all the prominent leaders of the anarchist formations
in the Civil WarâMaria Nikiforova, Nestor Makhno, Fyodor Shchuss, Olga
Taratuta, Anatoli Zhelezniakov, Novoselov, Lubkovâwere chosen by their
comrades according to their abilities, and they were workers or
peasants, in contrast to the bourgeoisie, aristocrats, and
intelligentsia who dominated in the Bolshevik camp. And they were among
the most effective on the battlefield. While Trotsky suffered one defeat
after another, Zhelezniakov and Makhno played decisive roles in the
defeat of the White Army General Denikin. Subsequently, it was Makhno
and his guerrillas who seized the Perekop Isthmus, the key stronghold of
the Crimean Peninsula, the loss of which spelled defeat for White Army
General Pyotr Wrangel. And in wide swaths of Siberia, anarchist
guerrilla detachments, like those of Lubkov and Novoselov, played a key
role in stopping the advance of the White Army in 1918 and 1919, even
though it was the Red Army that shot them in the end.
In the same month, June 1918, the Party implemented their policy of âwar
communism.â There was nothing communist about it; rather, it constituted
the Partyâs monopolization of the entire economy. It wasnât workers and
peasants who controlled the factories and the land, but bureaucrats
ruling from faraway offices. This policy, aside from the nationalization
of all industry, imposed a strict discipline on the workers, a worsening
of labor conditions and a lengthening of the workday; it turned striking
into an offense punishable by firing squad; it established state control
over international commerce; it legalized the forcible appropriation of
all the peasantsâ goods and properties, thus inaugurating an agrarian
policy even harsher and more exploitative than that of tsarist serfdom.
This, of course, led to millions of deaths among the peasants and
provoked constant rural rebellions against Bolshevik power.
It would be the new aristocratic Red Army that would crush these
revolts, just as during the tsarist dictatorship. Another important
factor in the evolution of the bureaucratic dictatorship: starting in
the same month, the Party arrogated to itself the right to veto the
decisions of any soviet.
In July 1918, the left SRs initiated an insurrection against Bolshevik
power. They were defeated, illegalized, and expelled from the soviet
government. As a consequence, the Bolsheviks ended up with an absolute
monopoly on state power and prohibited the participation of other
parties in the soviets.
At some point in 1918, acting under orders from Lenin, the Bolsheviks
established their first concentration camps, which would give rise to
the gulag system that claimed millions of lives during Stalinâs reign.
In August 1918, Lenin ordered the use of âmass terrorâ against a
rebellion in the city of Nizhny Novgorod and against a peas-ant revolt
in the Penza region. The rebellions were protests against the new policy
of âwar communism.â Lenin founded a long Communist tradition of accusing
any critic or dissident of being a secret right-wing agent (rather
hypocritical of him, considering he had worked as an agent of
imperialist interests, and just that summer had personally apologized to
the German government after revolutionaries had assassinated the German
ambassador). He ordered mass executions of those suspected of
disloyalty, the execution of prostitutes, whom he blamed for the lack of
discipline in his army, and the execution of a hundred random peasants
in order to send a message so that âall the people in many miles see it,
understand, and tremble.â
On September 5, 1918, the Cheka were assigned the policy of the âRed
Terror.â They claimed that this was directed against the Whites and
counterrevolutionaries, but it was an immediate response to two
assassina-tion attempts (one successful) carried out by left-wing
revolutionariesâFanya Kaplan and Leonid Kannegisserâagainst Bolshevik
leaders to avenge their repressive policies. The âRed Terrorâ was
clearly a policy of liquidation aimed at any enemy or critic of
Bolshevik power; they themselves declared in their newspaper on
September 3, âWe must crush the counterrevo-lutionary hydra through mass
terror [...] anyone who dares spread the slightest rumor against the
Soviet regime will be immediately arrested and sent to the concentration
camps.â In the first two months, they killed between 10,000 and 15,000
people, many of them members of other revolutionary currents. By 1922,
they had killed as many as 1.5 million, some of them Whites and
tsarists, but the great majority peasants, workers, dissidents, and
revolutionaries.
It must be said that the White Army was the first to practice mass
executionsâagainst Red Army prisonersâbut the Bolsheviks took advantage
of the situation to organize an unprecedented repression against all the
other currents of the Revolution.
In November 1918, throughout a large ter-ritory in south Ukraine
comprising 7 million inhabitants, primarily peasants, locals founded the
Volnaya Territoriya or âFree Territory,â an anarchist society based on
communes, free and decentralized militias, land collectiviza-tion
without intermediaries and direct worker control of industry, universal
education based on the modern pedagogy of Francesc Ferrer i Guardia, and
soviets free from party control but open to participation from any
current of the worker and peasant classes and federated in a
decentralized way.
The movement was rooted in the anarchist militias that had fought
against the German occupiers to whom Lenin had handed over the entire
country. The peasant militias imme-diately began holding the line
against General Denikin of the White Army, but Lenin and Trotsky kept
them from receiving munitions and functioning weapons, effectively
sabotag-ing the front and causing many deaths. In the rearguard, the
peasants prevented the Bolshe-viks from taking over the revolution.
Throughout the whole of 1919, the Cheka continued and expanded a policy
initiated the year before to execute Red Army deserters. As an
authoritarian, involuntary army, the Red Army was plagued with
desertions, of which there were more than a million in a year. Many
conscripted soldiers tried to go home, and many others joined up with
âGreen Armiesâ of peasants who were trying to defend their lands from
plundering by the Whites or the Communists. In Ukraine, tens of
thousands joined up with the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the
anarchists.
In cases of mass desertion, the Cheka fell back on the tactic of holding
family members hostage and executing them one by one until the soldiers
returned (and then executing an exemplary number of the deserters).
In February 1919, the Bolsheviks granted an amnesty to the SRs. The
White Army was advancing on all fronts, and the Communists desperately
needed allies (the previous November, they had re-legalized the
Mensheviks after these declared their support for the government). When
the SRs came out of clandestinity and set up offices in Moscow, the
Cheka began arresting successive waves of SR leadership, accusing them
of conspiracy, in order to bring about the fracturing and then
destruction of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
Between March 12 and 14, 1919, in the city of Astrakhan, the Cheka
executed between 2000 and 4000 striking workers and Red Army soldiers
who had joined them. Many were thrown into the river with stones tied to
their necks, while the rest were killed by firing squad. To give an idea
of the primarily anti-worker and counterrevolutionary scope of the
Communistsâ activities, during the same repressive campaign they killed
a significantly smaller number of the bourgeoisie, between 600 and 1000.
The primary victims of the Bolsheviks were from the popular classes.
On March 16, 1919, in Petrograd, the Cheka assaulted the Putilov
factory, where starving workers had begun a strike demanding larger food
rations, freedom of the press, the end of the Red Terror, and the
elimination of the privileges held by Communist Party members. 900 were
arrested and 200 executed without trial.
The Cheka also repressed strikes in the cities of Orel, Tver, Tula, and
Ivanovo. In the course of the repression, the Cheka developed methods of
torture surpassing those of the Inquisition. They slowly fed prisoners
into ovens or vats of boiling water, they flayed prisoners, they buried
peasants alive, they put rats in metal tubes against prisonersâ bodies
and put flames under the tubes so that the rats would eat their way
through the prisoners to escape.
In June 1919, the Bolsheviks began their first attempt to illegalize and
liquidate the peasant anarchists of Ukraine fighting alongside Makhno.
Already in May, they had made a failed attempt to assassinate Makhno.
Trotsky stated that he preferred for all of Ukraine to fall to the White
Army than to leave the anarchists to carry out their activity. The
campaign intensified after the defeat of Denikin, the White leader, in
the fall. The anarchist fighters played a key role in his defeat and
afterwards the Bolsheviks didnât have as much need for an alliance with
the anarchists... until Communist incompetence produced a new threat to
the Soviet regime just one year later.
Between May 1 and 3, 1920, a peasant and anarchist insurrection broke
out in the regions of Altai and Tomsk, with the eventual participation
of 10,000 combatants. It was principally directed against the White
Army, but their support for decentralized, local control ran them afoul
of the Communists, who sought to crush the rebellion, illegalizing and
destroying the Altai Anarchist Federation. The resistance continued
until the end of 1921.
In June 1920, women workers in Tula went on strike for the right to have
a day off on Sundays. They were sent to the concentration camps.
On August 19, 1920, the Tambov peasant rebellion began when a
ârequisitioningâ squad of the Red Army beat the old men of a small
village to force the inhabitants to surrender more grain to the
government. By October, the peasants had fielded 50,000 combatants to
fight the Communist authority. They functioned as an autonomous,
self-organized force fighting the Whites and the Bolsheviks. There were
also several veteran revolutionaries from the left SRs who rose to
leadership positions in the rebellion. By January 1921, the uprising had
extended to include Samara, Astrakhan, Saratov, and parts of Siberia.
With 70,000 combatants, they defended their territory from the
Communists until victories on other fronts enabled the deployment of
100,000 Red Army soldiers. To crush the revolt, the Communists used
chemical weapons for approximately three months in 1921, killing many
civilians. They sent 50,000 peasantsâmostly women and the elderlyâto
concentration camps as hostages. The majority died. Between the war, the
concentration camps, and the executions, the region lost some 240,000
inhabitants, the great majority peas-ants and non-combatants.
In November 1920, the Bolsheviks initiated a major campaign against
Makhnoâs Revolutionary Insurgent Army in Ukraine, mobilizing tens of
thousands of troops, many of which deserted to join the anarchists. The
campaign began as a surprise attack. The day after anarchist forces
managed to seize the Perekop Isthmus, the fortified pass into the
Crimean Peninsula where Wrangel was based, and which the Red Army had
been unable to take, the Bolsheviks began arresting and executing their
supposed allies, the anarchists. Their treachery began ten months of
intense guerrilla warfare before the Communists finally crushed the
insurgent peasants.
On February 28, 1921, delegates of the revolutionary sailors and workers
from the Kronstadt naval base published a declaration in solidarity with
the workers of Petrograd, recently repressed after going on strike
against the starvation conditions. The Bolsheviks responded with more
repression, provoking a rebellion on Kronstadt. The Kronstadt rebels,
long recognized as the heart of the revolution, demanded free soviets,
an end to the Bolshevik dictatorship, and the recovery of the
Revolutionâs principles. Trotsky, âthe butcher of Kronstadt,â led a
military expedition that ended with the total suppression of the soviet
on March 19, the day after the 50-year anniversary of the Paris Commune.
The Red Army played the role of the Versailles troops, executing more
than 2000 people. They sent several thousand more to the gulag, where
the majority died. Afterwards, the Bolshevik repression only increased.
At the Party congress in April of that same year, as Emma Goldman and
Alexander Berkman related in a letter, Lenin promoted the total
liquidation of the anarchist movement, including those participating in
the soviet government who had allied with the Bolsheviks.
In March 1921, the Bolsheviks adopted the âNew Economic Policy,â putting
an end to âWar Communism.â As Lenin himself recognized, the NEP
represented âstate capitalism,â a âfree market and capitalism, both
subject to state control.â The NEP gave rise to a new social class, the
nepmaniâmen of the NEP or nouveaux riches âwho enriched themselves
thanks to the new conditions and at the expense of the working classes.
It goes without saying that all of them were Communist Party
bureaucrats. The NEP also resulted in treaties and trade relations with
the main capitalist countries, starting with Great Britain (1921)
followed by Germany (1922), and then the US and France.
The Communist Party at no point installed communism. Their first era
consti-tuted a bureaucratic monopoly based on the hyper-exploitation of
workers and peasants, whereas the era of the NEP constituted a
capitalist system with a higher degree of planning and centralization
than the Western capitalist systems. That is, the Communists unleashed
an insane level of repression against all the other revolutionary
currents, drowning worker and peasant struggles in blood and lead, and
in the end, all that sacrifice didnât serve for anything more than
establishing capitalism. In a country where the capitalists themselves
had been unable to implant capitalism, the Communists did, thanks to
their obsession with holding power at any price.
And contrary to later leftist revisionism, all this brutality and
exploitation wasnât Stalinâs fault; it started earlier, from their very
first weeks in power and always under the direction of Lenin and
Trotsky. From the beginning, the Bolsheviks operated as an intellectual
vanguard independent of the soviets and the workersâ and peasantsâ
struggles. They used the soviets as a tool to conquer power, and when
the soviets were no longer convenient, they suppressed them, just as
they had repressed any expression of popular struggles. The Bolsheviksâa
current of the Social Democratic Russian Workersâ Party, who went on to
become the Communist Partyâwere the principal incarnation of the
counterrevolution within the Russian Revolution.
The outcome of other putatively communist states demonstrates that,
while Leninâs party was especially bloodthirsty, the problem was the
model itself. Far from achieving communism through state power, each
attempt at authoritarian communism managed to implant capitalism in a
country where the bourgeoisie hadnât been able to. China, today, is the
largest capitalist market in the world and may soon be the leading
capitalist economy on the planet, an evolution aided in large part
thanks to the industrialization and bureaucratization carried out under
Maoâs leadership. Vietnam is following the same path on a smaller scale.
As for Cuba, in the first years of the revolution (after executing the
anarcho-syndicalists and dissident socialists), Che and Fidel abandoned
the plan of creating true communism in order to construct a sort of
export colony with a more equitable distribution of resources (like a
Costa Rica with a Swedish government). They maintained the islandâs old
role as a producer and exporter of sugar for the international market.
As the first of these capitalist revolutions, the USSR stands out for
the harm it caused to anti-capitalist movements worldwide. Itâs true
that they supported many revolutionary movements, but always
prioritizing their interests above the interests of the revolution
itself. Itâs significant that most communist movements distanced
themselves from the USSR the moment they no longer depended on Soviet
aid, as was the case with China and in certain periods with Cuba. Soviet
intervention in the Spanish Civil War demon-strates how badly Soviet
âaidâ could destroy a struggle.
The international policy of the Comintern can be divided into two
phases. In the first phase, they aimed to export revolution, but only if
they could monopolize it. Between 1919 and around 1926, Comintern agents
were charged with imposing Bolshevik control over all worker and
anti-colonial organizations. They did this with funding, âentryismâ
(implanting charismatic agents who climbed the ranks in a particular
organization without revealing their affiliation with the Communist
Party), attacks against non-Bolshevik currents, and other tactics. One
preferred method was to organize apparently neutral international
conferences, with fake delegates (they sometimes paid people to act as
delegates from supposedly massive organizations that didnât actually
exist), a script and a choreography in order to approve decisions that
had already been made.
In the case of organizations that refused to accept Communist
domination, Comintern agents were dedicated to neutralizing them via
false rumors, the provocation of internal conflicts, turning the
authorities against them through snitching, and even murder. In this way
they destroyed a number of workersâ movements.
In the second phase, representing the triumph of the line promoted by
Stalin and Bukharin, the Communist Party abandoned the pretense of
exporting revolution and adopted the watchword âSocialism in One
Country.â Subsequently, all anti-capitalist movements worldwide served
only to pro-tect the geopolitical interests of the Soviet Union.
In effect, there wasnât that much difference between the two phases.
Both of them resulted in failed insurrections and revolutionsâin the
first phase, because the Communistsâ lack of solidarity and obsession
with power obstructed revolutionary processes in other countries, and in
the second, because the USSR continued encouraging unviable
insurrections in other countries when it might weaken an enemy power.
For the first phase, we have the example of the Hamburg Uprising of
1923. Soviet leaders like Trotsky were pressuring the KPDâthe German
Communist Party, the strongest in the world outside of the USSRâto stage
an insurrection, but the German leaders thought it was too early. Due to
poor organization, the plan was initiated only in one district of
Hamburg. The failed attempt unleashed a strong repression and worsened
relations between Communists and Socialists in Germany.
Thereâs also the example of the failed revolution in Indonesia. In 1925,
the Comintern ordered the Indonesian Communist Party to join with
anti-colonial but not anti-capitalist forces (they imposed the same
strategy in China and elsewhere). In 1926, the Communist unions were
ordered to spark a revolution, but the plan was green and the
coordination with other sectors of the united front failed. The
repression claimed many lives.
Of the second phase, we have the example of the mutiny on the Dutch
warship, Die Zeven Provinciën, provoked by a Communist cell, while the
ship was sailing near the Indonesian colonies. The intention was to
destabilize the colonial power. There is also the similar example of the
mutiny and failed revolution in Chile in 1931.
A German Comintern agent described how his bosses ordered him to
organize a dockworkersâ and sailorsâ strike in the major German port
cities like Bremen and Hamburg. Once all the port workers were on
strike, the Comintern instructed trusted agents to scab, sabotaging the
strike. Many workers who demonstrated solidarity lost their jobs, but
the Comintern got their agents in key positions on many boats and ports,
increasing the efficiency of their smuggling network (which they used to
supply the USSR, transport agents, and smuggle materials to countries
across the world). Maneuvers like that increased the cynicism of the
German working class, cost the Communist Party a good deal of support,
and gave more legitimacy to the Nazi argument that all the âredsâ were
agents of Moscow.
The German Communist Party aided the Nazi Party in much more direct
ways, as well. Between 1928 and 1935âthe critical era in the rise of the
Nazi movement, when it grew from a small party into one capable of
taking powerâthe Comintern, following Stalinâs directives, declared that
social democracy was equal to fascism, but that communists had to ignore
fascism in order to dedicate all their efforts to combating other
left-wing currents. The KPD followed this line with enthusiasm. On many
occasions, Communist militants joined with Nazi stormtroopers to smash
up the events of Socialists.
It is true that the Socialists used state power wherever they were in
the government to repress the Communists, just as the SRs in the Russian
Revolution also maneuvered to try and gain power, just as leftist
statists across the planet seek to dominate others. The state is
essentially a tool of domination and repression. But, on the one hand,
collaboration with the Nazis represented an extreme of reprehensible
practices, surpassing the dirty tricks used by the Socialists. And, on
the other hand, the currents that didnât seek to conquer state
powerâanarchists and othersârejected such tactics.
In Prussia, the largest state in Germany, the Communists openly
collaborated with the Nazis in 1931 to try to revoke the Socialist
government. They said the Nazis were âwork-ing class comrades.â In 1933,
the year the Nazis rose to power, the Communists effec-tively let them
win. If they had joined forces with other left-wing forces, the Nazis
would not have achieved a majority. But they were obsessed with
destroying the Left in order to monopolize it, believing that they would
rise to power after a Nazi government. ThÀlmann, leader of the KPD,
coined the slogan, âAfter Hitler, itâs our turn!â
Contrary to the slogan denouncing âsocial fascism,â it wasnât the
Socialists who had much in common with the Nazis, but the Communists
themselves. The Nazisâ racial ideology was an import from the US, as is
widely known. But not so many people remember that the organizational
model of the Nazi dictatorship came from the Soviet Union itself. In
order to set up their Gestapoâthe secret police charged with political
repression and counter-espionageâthe Nazis studied the Cheka and the
NKVD (successor to the Cheka estab-lished by Stalin). The Soviet secret
police, which inherited many techniques from the tsarist Okhrana, were
the most advanced in the world, with the possible exception of the
British intelligence agencies. But these used techniques that were much
too soft for Nazi needs. Many times, the Nazis arrested and tortured
Soviet agents in order to learn how their counterespionage apparatus
functioned, with the purpose of copying the model.
In 1935, when the KPD had been almost completely destroyed, suffering
thousands of arrests and executions, the Comintern inau-gurated their
next strategy without ever accepting responsibility for the Nazisâ rise
to power. The new strategy was the âPopular Front.â But this was just as
disastrous for revolutionary movements.
The prime example is the Soviet interven-tion in the Spanish Civil War.
The USSR was slow to begin sending aid to the anti-fascist side. This
was due in part to the fact that the Communist Party in Spain was tiny,
even smaller than the non-Stalinist Workersâ Party for Marxist
Unification, or POUM.They werenât attentive to the fascist threat in
Spain because they had few interests in Spain. Before sending aid, they
wanted to make sure they could control the situation and profit from it
in some way. To be precise, they didnât give military aid to the
Republic; rather, they sold it, appropriating the entirety of the
Spanish gold reserves, the fourth largest in the world at the time. And
to a large extent, they sabotaged the war efforts. For the Stalinists,
the Spanish Civil War was an opportunity to destroy what was then the
strongest anarchist movement in the world (they and the Japanese
imperialists had already destroyed the movement in Korea), and also to
liquidate dissident communist currents, above all the Trotskyists. Given
that fascism had already arrived in Germany and Italy, Spain was an
important refuge and a field of action for communists who had fled those
countries.
For that reason, the NKVDâthe Soviet secret policeâbegan a feverish
activity in Spain, liquidating thousands of Trotskyists, other dissident
communists, and anarchists. Far from the romantic legends, the
International Brigades were in large part a machine for attracting these
dissidents and killing them in the most discreet context possible: on
the battlefield. The Brigades were also used to repress peasant
collectives in AragĂłn.
Whatâs more, the Communists directly sabotaged anarchist and Trotskyist
militias with the purpose of reducing their influence and feeding their
propaganda campaigns in favor of âmilitarizationâ: the imposition of
elitist and counterrevolutionary hierarchies in one of the most
important spheres of the social revolution. The obstruction and
withholding of weapons carried out by all the forces on the Left were
responsible for the militias get-ting bogged down on the Huesca and
Teruel fronts. If those cities had been takenâa reasonable
accomplishment given sufficient weap-onsâthen Zaragoza probably also
would have fallen to the antifascists, potentially turning the tide of
the war. Dirty tricks and lack of solidarity on the part of the
Communists also played a part in the fall of Mallorca, another decisive
moment in the Republican defeat.
We can also add to the list the Commu-nistsâ arrest of Maroto, an
effective guerrilla leader operating around Granada, and the Communistsâ
blocking of the anarchist pro-posals to launch a large scale guerrilla
war in the fascistsâ rear and to create an alliance with the
anticolonial resistance in the Rif (Morocco), which would have
undermined Francoâs most important base. The Communists rejected the
first proposal because they knew they couldnât control a guerrilla war
and such a conflict would have given the anarchists an important
advantage, and they blocked the second to avoid upsetting the French
government, which also had interests in Northern Africa. In both cases,
Communist interests were not defeating fascism nor carry-ing out the
revolution, but maintaining power and sabotaging their adversaries.
After winning the counterrevolution and installing a leader who would be
faithful to them, NegrĂn, in May 1937, the USSR no longer had
significant interests in Spain.
For that reason, starting in June 1937, they began drawing down their
military assistance to the Republic. The tragic truth is that Stalin
didnât want the Republic to win the war. On the one hand, he didnât want
to trouble relations with France and Britain, who promoted a
ânon-interventionâ policy designed to favor the fascists. And on the
other hand, he wanted to prolong the conflict in order to convince
Hitler of the need for a non-aggression pact.
The negotiations for the Molotov-Ribben-trop Pact began in April of
1939, just at the end of the Spanish Civil War. It was what Stalin
needed to protect the USSR from a Nazi attack, and what Hitler needed to
be able to attack France and avoid a two-front war. The Nazi-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact was an important prerequisite for World War II and
another example of Nazi-Stalinist collaboration.
Recovering this historical memory is important for a variety of reasons.
To begin with, it is important to remember our dead, to carry them with
us, and to cast down the thrones their murderers have built atop their
gravesâto stop honoring as heroes those who betrayed revolutions and
served as executioner to the oppressed.
This is important because historical memory is our library of
revolutionary lessons, the communal apprenticeship that brings us closer
to freedom. And if we store falsified volumes within this library,
histories of lies, victories that never occurred, we will repeat the
same mistakes time after time. By turning the people and the parties who
strangled revolutions into heroes, we preserve completely unrealistic
ideas about what revolution is and how to achieve it. If we think the
state could beâor has ever beenâa tool of the people capable of
defeating capitalism, we create the perfect recipe for defeat: a
revolutionary movement in which it is impossible to distin-guish between
the naĂŻve and enthusiastic and the opportunists who are trying to climb
the rungs of power.
A worrisome pattern exists on the Left. They sell off the future of the
revolution by signing deals with the devil. Time after time, the
authoritarian Left obstructs revolution-ary movements by implementing
strategies that are predictable failures. The advantage of these
strategies is that they permit those who use them to monopolize the
struggle. If they win a partial victory, they impose their monopoly by
capturing state institutions that can serve to buy out or repress all
the other sectors of the struggle. And if they fail, by having created a
spectacular struggle in which they are the tragic protagonists, they can
turn everyone else into spectators watching a mediatized combat between
two hierarchical poles.
Liberation must be carried out by the oppressed. Revolution, by
definition, must be self-organized, and above all the popular classes
need to maintain the autonomy of their struggles with respect to the
institutions of power.
We hold close all the revolutionaries and fighters who sacrificed
everything in the struggles that came before us. We spit on the memory
of those who took advantage of those struggles to rise to power, and
those who tried to impose their unquestionable truth on everyone else,
obstructing the self-activity of the very class that, hypocritically,
they pretended to liberate.
Long live the Revolution of 1917! Down with all dictators,
representatives, and politicians!
In the wake of the failure of authoritarian socialism, we should
remember the undead of 1917, the anarchists who strove to warn humanity
that statist paths towards social change will never bring us to freedom.
Some of them, like Fanya and Aron Baron, were murdered in cold blood by
authoritarian com-munists in the so-called Soviet Union. Others managed
to survive, betrayed by their sup-posed comrades, to witness the
totalitarian results of the Bolshevik coup.
Their voices cry out to us today from the grave. Letâs listen.
Although Bakunin passed away more than 40 years before the Russian
Revolution, he predicted exactly what would come of Marxâs authoritarian
prescriptions for socialism. Those who attempt to excuse Marx,
suggesting that Lenin failed to apply his instructions correctly, should
take note that Bakunin saw the trage-dies of 1917 coming a half century
in advance.
Scrutinizing Marxâs conduct in the revolutionary struggles of the
19^(th) century, rather than the books he wrote, we can see today what
Bakunin saw then. Marx began his career in the 1840s by attempting to
form revolutionary cabals, then purging everyone who did not toe his
ideological lineâespecially working class thinkers like Wilhelm Weitling
and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who were more suspicious of the state than he
was. Marx mocked Bakunin for attempting to foment an uprising in Lyons
in 1870, though it was precisely the absence of other revolutionary
footholds in France that doomed the Paris Commune in 1871. During the
Paris Commune, Marx sent Elisabeth Dmitrieff, a twenty-year-old with no
experience, to assume control of womenâs organizing in Paris, intending
to supplant organizers like Louise Michel who had been active for
decades. (After the Commune, Dmitrieff disappeared from radical
politics, a casualty of authoritarian burnout.) After the Commune fell,
Marx took advantage of the fact that the participantsâmost of whom did
not subscribe to his politicsâwere slaughtered or in hiding to speak on
their behalf, announcing that the Commune confirmed all of his theories.
In the First International, Marx passed unpopular resolutions in
closed-door meetings while the opposition were imprisoned or in exile,
rigged majorities at the congresses, and finally attempted to kill off
the organization entirely by moving its headquarters to New York when it
became clear he could not control it. Afterwards, from the safety of his
study in London, Marx con-tinued to mock Bakunin and others who risked
their lives in uprisings while emphasizing that workers should join
political parties and subject themselves to party leadership. Marx was
no enemy of state oppression.
With the 20^(th) century behind us, Bakunin appears to us as the
Cassandra of the 19^(th) century, warning us against the butcheries,
betrayals, and gulags to come. Whatever his own shortcomings, he remains
a voice from the grave, urging us to beware of anyone who proposes that
the state could render us equal or give us freedom.
âLiberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without
liberty is slavery and brutality.â
âMikhail Bakunin, addressing the League of Peace and Freedom, September
1867
âI hate Communism because it is the negation of liberty and because
humanity is for me unthinkable without liberty. I am not a Communist,
because Communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit
of the State all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to
the concentration of property in the hands of the State, whereas I want
the abolition of the State, the final eradication of the principle of
authority and the patronage proper to the State, which under the pretext
of moralizing and civilizing men has hitherto only enslaved, persecuted,
exploited and corrupted them. I want to see society and collective or
social property organized from below upwards, by way of free
association, not from above downwards, by means of any kind of authority
whatsoever.â
âMikhail Bakunin, addressing the League of Peace and Freedom, September
1868
Leon Trotsky himself deserves no tears from those who love freedom and
egalitarianism, as he personally oversaw the butchery of count-less
thousands of anarchists and other reb-els during the Bolshevik conquest
of power. But early in his career, before he joined the Bolsheviks, he
foresaw presciently exactly how Stalinism would arise from Leninâs
approachâhow the party would substitute its own conquest of power for
the proletariat, and a ruthless dictator then substitute himself for the
party. The All-Russian Congress of Food Industry Workers later confirmed
this in March 1920, on the basis of experience: âThe so-called
dictatorship of the proletariat is really the dictatorship over the
proletariat by the party and even by individual persons.â
Despite this foresight, Trotsky still joined the Bolsheviks as a
consequence of their appar-ent success in the revolution. When Stalinâs
lackeys butchered Trotsky with an icepick, it was poetic justice.
Trotsky died because he failed to heed his own insights and above all
because he broke solidarity with other foes of capitalism. He died
because, like so many after him, he substituted pragmatism for
principles, believing it would be more expedient to go rapidly in the
wrong direction than to proceed slowly towards genuine liberation.
We can hardly remember him as a tragic figure, as millions suffered at
his handsâbut we can take his example as a cautionary tale.
âIn the internal politics of the Party these methods lead, as we shall
see, to the Party organization âsubstitutingâ itself for the Party, the
Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organization, and
finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee.â
ââOur Political Tasks,â Trotsky, 1904
An anarchist sailor from Kronstadt, Anatoli Zhelezniakov first entered
the stage of history in June 1917 during the defense of the Dacha
Durnovo, a villa in St. Petersburg that anarchists had squatted to serve
as a social center. The villa had belonged to the man who served as
Governor-General of Moscow during the repression of the 1905 uprising,
and the anarchists had opened it up to serve a wide range of working
people including a bakersâ union and the children of the surrounding
neighborhood; nevertheless, the Provisional Government and the St.
Petersburg Soviet opposed the occupation. Zhelezniakov was captured
during a police raid on the villa and sentenced to 14 years in prison. A
few weeks later, he escaped and resumed his participation in
revolutionary activity, cooperating with the Bolsheviks and leading the
actions that broke up the Provisional Government in the October
Revolution of 1917 and dispersed the Constituent Assembly in January
1918. Aspiring to abolish all state structures, he got this far, at
least.
When Trotsky imposed military discipline on the Red Army, putting
tsarist officers in positions of authority and eliminating the system of
self-government among the rank and file, Zhelezniakov rebelled and broke
with the Bolsheviks. However, the Bolsheviks made peace with him when
the White Army invaded Russia, just as they struck a temporary and
opportunistic peace with Makhno.
Zhelezniakov was killed in the struggle against the White Army on July
26, 1919. After his death, the Bolsheviks dishonestly claimed him as one
of their own.
âWhatever may happen to me, and whatever they may say of me, know well
that I am an anarchist, that I fight as one, and thatwhatever my fate, I
will die an anarchist.â
quoted in Voline, The Unknown Revolution
Golos Truda was a Russian-language anarchist newspaper founded by
Russian expatriates in New York City in 1911. After the February
Revolution toppled the Tsar, the Provisional Government declared a
general amnesty for exiles, and the entire staff of Golos Truda agreed
to move the periodical to St. Petersburg. They left Vancouver on May 26,
1917 on a ship bound for Japan. During the trip, the anarchists
performed music, gave lectures, staged plays, and even published a
revolutionary newspaper, The Float. From Japan, they made their way
toSiberia and thence St. Petersburg. Their first issue in Russia
appeared on August 11, 1917. The staff included Voline, future author of
The Unknown Revolution , and Gregori Maksimov, who later authored The
Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia.
The Bolsheviks banned Golos Truda in August 1918. The group founded
another paper, but the secret police suppressed the group definitively
in March 1921 with a wave of arrests.
Immediately after the October revolution, the editors of Golos Truda
foresaw precisely how the Bolshevik seizure of power would end:
âOnce their power is consolidated and âlegalized,â the Bolsheviksâwho
are Social Democrats, that is, men of centralist and authoritarian
actionâwill begin to rearrange the life of the country and of the people
by governmental and dictatorial methods, imposed by the center. Their
seat in St. Petersburg will dictate the will of the party to all Russia
and command the whole nation.Your Soviets and your other local
organizations will become, little by little, simply executive organs of
the will of the central government.In place of healthy, constructive
work by the laboring masses, in place of free unification from the
bottom, we will see the installation of an authoritarian and statist
apparatus which will act from above and set about wiping out everything
that stands in its way with an iron hand. The Soviets and other
organizations will have to obey and do its will. That will be called
âdiscipline.â Too bad for those who are not in agreement with the
central power and who do not consider it correct to obey it! Strong by
reason of the âgeneral approbationâ of the populace, that power will
force them to submit.âBe on guard, comrades!âWatch carefully and
remember.âThe more the success of the Bolsheviks becomes established,
and the firmer their situation, the more their action will take on an
authoritarian aspect, and the more clear-cut will be their consolidation
and defense of their political power. They will begin to give more and
more categorical orders to the Soviets and other local organizations.
They will put into effect from above their own policies without
hesitating to use armed force in case of resistance.âThe more their
success is upheld, the more that danger will exist, for the actions of
the Bolsheviks will become all the more secure and certain. Each new
success will turn their heads further. Every additional day of
achievement by Leninâs party will mean increasing peril to the
Revolution.â
Peter Kropotkin was an old man by the time of the 1917 revolution.
Desiring to legitimize Bolshevik authority with the reputation of a
universally respected anarchist, Lenin maintained cordial relations with
Kropotkin; Communist Party propagandists[4] took advantage of this to
publicize the lie that Kropotkin was more or less in favor of Leninâs
program. In fact, Kropotkin opposed their authoritarian program, as he
made clear in a series of statements and protests. Far from endorsing
Leninâs seizure of state power, Kropotkin is quoted as saying
âRevolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none.â
Kropotkinâs funeral, on February 13, 1921, was arguably the last
anarchist demonstration in Russia until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and many other prominent anarchists
participated. They managed to exert enough pressure on the Bolshevik
authorities to compel them to release seven anarchist prisoners for the
day; the Bolsheviks claimed they that would have released more but the
others supposedly refused to leave prison. Victor Serge recounts how
Aron Baron, one of the anarchists who was temporarily released,addressed
the mourners from Kropotkinâs graveside before vanishing forever into
the jaws of the Soviet carceral system.
âIs there really no one around you to remind your comrades and to
persuade them that such measures represent a return to the worst period
of the Middle Ages and religious wars, and are undeserving of people who
have taken it upon themselves to create a future society on communist
principles? Whoever holds dear the future of communism cannot embark
upon such measures... âWonât this be regarded as a sign that you
consider your communist experiment unsuccessful, and that you are not
saving the system that is so dear to you but only saving yourselves?â
âPeter Kropotkin, Letter to Lenin, December 21, 1920
After seven years in the Tsarâs prisons, Makhno was released from prison
by the upheavals of 1917. He eventually became a leader in the anarchist
forces that fought in turn against Ukrainian Nationalists, German and
Austro-German occupiers, the reactionary Russian White Army, the Soviet
Red Army, and various Ukrainian warlords in order to open a space in
which anarchist collective experiments could take place. Makhno and his
comrades repeatedly bore the brunt of the White Army attacks, while
Trotsky alternated between attacking them with the Red Army and signing
treaties with them when the Soviets needed them to keep the reactionary
White Army at bay. On November 26, 1920, a few days after Makhno had
helped to definitively defeat the White Army, the Red Army summoned him
and his comrades to a conference. Makhno did not go; the Bolsheviks
summarily murdered all of his comrades who went.
Authoritarian socialists have expendedriv-ers of ink attempting to
discredit Makhno and those who fought at his side in order to excuse
this cold-blooded betrayal. They accuse Makhno of authoritarianism in
hopes of justifying a far more authoritarian state. They accuse him of
appropriating resourcesâwhen the Bolsheviks intended to appropriate all
the resources of Ukraine for themselves. They suggest that his struggle
contributed nothing to the liberation of the proletariatâyet Makhno
continued fighting against capitalism in the Ukraine even when the
Soviet author-ities sold it away to the reactionary German government in
return for a peace treaty.[5] Makhno was a thoroughgoing and persistent
revolutionary, while the Bolsheviks were treacherous and opportunistic.
In fighting against the Bolshevik attempt to impose their dictatorship
on Ukraine, Makhno was struggling against those who ultimately
discredited the notion of revolution itself. He was fighting against
those who ensured that Russian and Ukrainian workers would remain in
subjugation for at least another century.
Makhno and his comrades surely were not perfect; Emma Goldman records
that some Russian anarchists questioned whether the Ukrainian uprising
was properly anarchist. But history is written by the victors: there is
so little information about Makhnoâs achievements precisely because the
Bolsheviks and other reactionaries sought to erase them from the
historical record, just as Ukrainian nationalists have recently sought
to appropriate and distort them. Fortunately, we can still
readstatements from the Makhnovist rebels in their own wordsdescribing
their values and goals, and historical accounts from participants such
as Peter Arshinov.
âState-socialists of all denominations, including Bolsheviks, are busy
swapping the names of bourgeois rule with those of their own invention,
while leaving its structure essentially unchanged. They are therefore
trying to salvage the Master/Slave relationship with all its
contradictions...
âWhile a bourgeois government strings a revolutionary up on the gallows,
socialist or Bolshevik-communist governments will creep up and strangle
him in his sleep or kill him by trickery. Both acts are depraved. But
the socialists are more depraved because of their methods.
âGovernment power will never let workers tread the road to freedom; it
is the instrument of the lazy who want to dominate others, and it does
not matter if the power is in the hand of the bourgeois, the socialists,
or the Bolsheviks, it is degrading. There is no government without
teeth, teeth to tear any man who longs for a free and just life.â
âThe Anarchist Revolution, Nestor Makhno
âWhat do we mean by emancipation?The overthrow of the monarchist,
coalition, republican, and Social-Democratic Communist-Bolshevik party
governments, which must give place to a free and independent soviet
order of toilers, without rulers and their arbitrary laws. For the true
soviet order is not the rule of the Social-Democratic
Communist-Bolsheviks which now calls itself the soviet power, but a
higher form of anti-authoritarian and anti-statist socialism,
manifesting itself in the organisation of a free, happy and independent
structure for the social life of the toilers, in which all individual
toilers as well as society as a whole can build by themselves their
happiness and well-being according to the principles of solidarity,
friendship and equality.
âHow do the Makhnovists understand the soviet system?The toilers
themselves must freely choose their soviets, which will carry out the
will and desires of the toilers â that is,administrativesoviets, not
state soviets. The land, factories, mills, mines, railways and other
popular riches must belong to the toilers who work in them, that is,
they must be socialized.
âBy what road can the aims of the Makhnovists be realized?An
uncompromising revolution and a direct struggle with all arbitrariness,
lies, and oppression, whatever their source; a struggle to the death, a
struggle for free speech and for the righteous cause, a struggle with
weapons in hand. Only through the abolition of all rulers, through the
destruction of the whole foundation of their lies, in state as we as
political and economic affairs, only through the destruction of the
state by means of a social revolution can we attain a genuine
worker-peasant soviet order and arrive atsocialism.â
ââWho Are the Makhnovists and What Are They Fighting for?â
Cultural-Educational Section of the Insurgent Army (Makhnovists), April
27, 1920
After serving a decade in prison under the Tsar, Lev Chernyi was
released in 1917 and participated passionately in anarchist organizing.
On March 5, 1918, foreseeing that the Bolsheviks were about to launch a
wave of attacks against anarchist organizing in Moscow, Chernyi
denounced the Bolshevik government, arguing that it was essential to
paralyze the mechanisms of government itself. In April 1918, the Soviet
secret police raided anarchist social centers around Moscow, gunning
down at least forty people and arresting many more. The Bolsheviks
claimed that the anarchists were engaged in âbanditryâ on account of
their efforts to redistribute wealth and set up social centers around
the cityâaccusing them of precisely the same activities that the Soviet
government was carrying out on a much larger scale.
Chernyi was later captured and charged with counterfeiting in order to
discredit him and take him off the streets. In August 1921, an official
report announced that Chernyi and nine other âanarchist banditsâ had
been shot without hearing or trial. The authorities refused to release
his body, leading many to conclude that Chernyi had actually been
tortured to death.
After seven years in exile from Tsarist Russia, Fanya Baron returned to
her homeland in 1917. She was part of the Ukrainian group that published
the anarchist paper Nabat. In late 1920, during another crackdown on
anarchists, she was arrested by the Cheka, the Soviet secret police,
along with her husband Aron Baron. She managed to escape in early July
1921, but was recaptured.
Fanya Baron was among thirteen anarchists held at Taganka prison without
charges. They organized a hunger strike that attracted the attention of
visiting French, Spanish, and Russiansyndicalists. Leon Trotsky
dismissed the visitorsâ concerns: âWe do not imprison the real
anarchists, but criminals and bandits who cover themselves by claiming
to be anarchists.â On September 29, 1921, the Cheka shot Fanya Baron
without a trial.
âThis big-hearted woman, who had served the Social Revolution all her
life, was done to, death by the people who pretended to be the advance
guard of revolution. Not content with the crime of killing Fanya Baron,
the Soviet Government put the stigma of banditism on the memory of their
dead victim.â
âMy Further Disillusionment in Russia, Emma Goldman
A Jewish exile from the Ukraine, Aron Baron organized with the
Industrial Workers of the World and worked with Lucy Parsons in the
United States before returning to revolutionary Russia. He fought
alongside Nestor Makhno and edited the anarchist paperNabat.After two
decades of harassment, arrests, imprisonment, and internal exile,he was
shot on August 12, 1937in Tobolsk along with many other anarchists,
including Prokop Evdokimovich Budakov, Zinaida Alekseevna Budakova,
Avram Venetsky, Ivan Golovchanskii, Vsevolod Grigorievich Denisov,
Nikolai Desyatkov, Ivan Dudarin, Andrei Zolotarev, Andrei Pavlovich
Kislitsin, Alexander Pastukhov, Anna Aronovna Sangorodetskaya, Mikhail
G. Tvelnev, Vladimir Khudolei-Gradin, Yuri I. Hometovsky-Izgodin, and
Nahum Aaronovch Eppelbaum.
âAron Baron, arrested in the Ukraine, due to return that evening to a
prison from which he would never again emerge, lifted his emaciated,
bearded, gold-spectacled profile to cry relentless protests against the
new despotism; the butchers at work in their cellars, the dishonor shed
upon socialism, the official violence that was trampling the Revolution
underfoot. Fearless and impetuous, he seemed to be sowing the seeds of
new tempests.â
âVictor Serge recalling Baronâs speech at Kropotkinâs funeral in Memoirs
of a Revolutionary
In February 1921, in response to Soviet crackdowns on labor organizing
and peasantsâ autonomy, the crews of two Russian battleships stationed
at the island naval fortress of Kronstadt held an emergency meeting.
Many of these were the same sailors who had been on the front lines of
the revolution of 1917. They agreed on fifteen demands.
On the first day of March, 15,000 seamen, soldiers and workers assembled
for an appearance by Kalinin, the President of the Soviet Republic. The
crowd shouted Kalinin down and seized the rostrum, from which ordinary
workers and sailors proclaimed their grievances. In the end, the
participants overwhelmingly endorsed the fifteen demands, including the
majority of rank-and-file Communist Party members; only a few Bolshevik
officials objected. A conference of delegates from ships, military
units, workshops and trade unions met the next day, and Kronstadt rose
in revolt against the Soviet authorities.
The Bolsheviks attempted to portray the rising as the work of foreign
reactionaries. Read their demands for yourself and decide whether this
was the work of counter-revolutionary capitalists:
express the wishes of the workers and peasants. The new elections should
be held by secret ballot, and should be preceded by free electoral
propaganda for all workers and peasants before the elections.
Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.
associations.4. The organization, at the latest on March 10, 1921, of a
Conference of non-Party workers, soldiers, and sailors of Petrograd,
Kronstadt, and the Petrograd District.
and of all imprisoned workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors
belonging to working class and peasant organizations.
detained in prisons and concentration camps.
political party should have privileges for the propagation of its ideas,
or receive State subsidies to this end. In place of the political
section, various cultural groups should be set up, deriving resources
from the State.
towns and countryside.
dangerous or unhealthy jobs.
abolition of Party guards in factories and enterprises. If guards are
required, they should be nominated, taking into account the views of the
workers.
and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves
and do not employ hired labor.
associate themselves with this resolution.
not utilize wage labor.
Two weeks later, on the 50-year anniversary of the Paris Commune, 60,000
Red Army troops captured Kronstadt, murdering and imprisoning thousands.
Just as the bourgeois republic that came to power in France in 1870
stabilized its reign by slaughtering the rebels of the Paris Commune,
the Bolsheviks stabilized their reactionary seizure of the Russian
revolution with the bloodbath at Kronstadt.
Apologists for the Bolsheviks have argued that it was necessary to
slaughter the Kronstadt rebels to consolidate power for the Soviet
state. Perhaps so, but that is no argument in favor of any state! If it
was admirable and appropriate for the Kronstadt sailors to rise against
the Tsar, it was equally admirable and appropriate for them to rise
against the new tyrants.
The failure of the Kronstadt upris-ing is above all a lesson in
solidarity: if the Kronstadt rebels had asserted themselves in April
1918 when the Bolsheviks were carrying out their first attacks against
anarchists in Moscow, the entire story might have ended differently.
What is done to the least of us will be done to the rest of us sooner or
later. This is why solidarity is such an important value to anarchists.
âSince you are from Kronstadt with which they frighten us all the time,
and you want to know the truth, here it is: we are starving. We have no
shoes and no clothes. We are physically and morally terrorized. Each and
every one of our requests and demands is met by the authorities with
terror, terror, endless terror. Look at the prisons of Petrograd and you
will see how many of our comrades sit there after being arrested in the
last three days. No, comrades, the time has come to tell the Communists
openlyâyou have spoken enough on our behalf. Down with your
dictatorship, which has landed us in this blind alley. Make way for
non-party men. Long live freely elected Soviets! They alone can take us
out of this mess!â
âA worker in a factory in St. Petersburg addressing a delegation of 32
sailors from Kronstadt on February 27, 1921, as recorded by Stepan
Petrichenko in O prichinakh Kronshtadtskogo vosstaniia. Revelations like
these motivated the rebels of Kronstadt to rise up and call for a âthird
revolution.â
âToday is a worldwide holiday, the Day of Working Women. We the people
of Kronstadt, under the thunder of cannons, under the explosions of
shells sent at us by the enemies of the laboring people, the Communists,
send our fraternal greetings to you, the working women of the world. We
send greetings from Red Kronstadt, from the Kingdom of Liberty. Let our
enemies try to destroy us. We are strong; we are undefeatable.â
âFrom a statement commemorating Inter-national Womenâs Day on March 8,
1921. This appeared in issue 6 of Kronstadt Izvestia, a paper published
by the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, the day after the
bombardment of Kronstadt began under the orders of Leon Trotsky.
Alexander Berkman, an anar-chist who served 14 years in prison in the US
for an act of vengeance against the union-busting industrialist Henry
Clay Frick, set out enthusiastically for Russia after the Bolshevik
revolution, only to discover that the state was just as authoritarian
under Lenin as it had been under the Tsar. He was fortunate to escape
alive. He summarized his experiences in The Bolshevik Myth, and also
assisted with Letters from Russian Prisons, documenting Bolshevik
oppression.
âGrey are the passing days. One by one the embers of hope have died out.
Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October. The slogans
of the Revolution are forsworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the
people. The breath of yesterday is dooming millions to death; the shadow
of today hangs like a black pall over the country. Dictatorship is
trampling the masses under foot. The Revolution is dead; its spirit
cries in the wilderness... I have decided to leave Russia.â
â The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920â22), Alexander Berkman
Emma Goldman shared Alexander Berkmanâs enthusiasm for the initial
apparent triumph of the October Revolution and his dismay at its dismal
results. She traveled with him to Russia, witnessed the first years of
the revolution firsthand, and afterwards shared his conviction that
Bolshevik authoritarianism was responsible for the results.
âLenin had very little concern in the Revolution... Communism to him was
a very remote thing. The centralized political State was Leninâs deity,
to which everything else was to be sacrificed. Someone said that Lenin
would sacrifice the Revolution to save Russia. Leninâs policies,
however, have proven that he was willing to sacrifice both the
Revolution and the country, or at least part of the latter, in order to
realize his political scheme with what was left of Russia.â
â My Disillusionment in Russia, Emma Goldman
Malatesta began his career as a revolutionary in Italy in the 1870s,
working with Bakunin within the famously insurrectionist Italian section
of the First Internationalâarguably the first properly anarchist
movement on record. From the start, he opposed statist models for social
change, having seen how republican nationalism had only brought a new
regime to power in Italy and reinforced existing social inequalities. He
went to jail and prison again and again in the course of his efforts to
open the way to freedom.
In the 1880s, when Malatestaâs former comrade Andrea Costa renounced
anarchism, entered the Italian Parliament, and set out to convince the
movement that electoral politics were the best way to seek social
change, Malatesta sneaked back into Italy, despite facing a variety of
unresolved criminal charges in his homeland, and challenged Costa to a
public debate. Costa attempted to weasel his way out of it, but was
ultimately compelled to meet with Malatesta, then fled the city after
being trounced in the discussion. Having won the argument, Malatesta
went directly to jail.
Later, after escaping Italy concealed in a box of sewing machines,
surviving an assassinâs bullet in New Jersey, and organizing one
clandestine newspaper and uprising after another, Malatesta witnessed
the 1917 revolution and the mass defection of anarchists to the
Communist Party when the state communist model suddenly appeared more
âeffectiveâ and âpragmatic.â If not for these wrongheaded conversions,
there might still have been hope for emancipatory revolutions in the
20^(th) century.
âIt seems unbelievable that even today, after everything that has
happened & is happening in Russia, there are people who still imagine
that the difference between socialists & anarchists is only that of
wanting revolution gradually or quickly.â
âErrico Malatesta in Umanita Nova, September 3, 1921
Born in 1897, in a Russian village, Mollie Steimer immigrated to the
United States in 1913 with her parents and siblings. At fifteen, she
went to work in a garment factory to support her family. In 1917, while
still a teenager, she became an anarchist, and soon joined a collective
that published a clandestine journal called Frayhayt (Freedom).
In 1918, when US troops were landed on Russian soil to intervene in the
Russian Civil War, their collective published a leaflet calling for
workers to launch a general strike in protest. After a violent police
raid, Steimer and five of her colleagues were arrested and indicted on
charges of conspiracy to violate the Sedition Act; one of her
codefendants died during the trial, most likely as a consequence of the
brutal beating inflicted by the police.
Steimer was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but
lawyers appealed the conviction to the Supreme Court. Released on bail
while awaiting the ruling, she was arrested eight more times over the
next eleven months and ultimately deported to Russia. She arrived in
December 1921, when anarchist organizing in Russia had been all but
destroyed.
She met Semya Fleshin, who had been active in the Golos Truda group in
St. Petersburg and the Nabat Confederation in the Ukraine and had been
incarcerated under the Bolsheviks alongside Voline and Aron and Fanny
Baron. The two organized a Society to Help Anarchist Prisoners. On
November 1, 1922, they were themselves arrested on charges of aiding
criminal elements in Russia and maintaining ties with anarchists
abroadâthey had been corresponding with Alexander Berkman and Emma
Goldman, who had already left Russia. Sentenced to two yearsâ exile in
Siberia, they declared a hunger strike and were released the next day,
on the condition that they check in with the authorities every 48 hours.
On July 9, 1923, they were arrested again, and declared a hunger strike
once more. This time, they were expelled from the Soviet Union,
departing for Berlin on September 27, 1923. For the next 25 years, they
lived without citizenship in any country, utilizing the passports that
the Norwegian arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen arranged for stateless
people.
âOn March 5, 1923, the Central Government Clothing Factory in Petrograd
reduced the wages of its employees 30 per cent, without giving notice or
making any explanation to any of them. When the salaries were handed
out, each of the workers was under the impression that it was a clerical
mistake, and went for an explanation to the office, with the result that
1200 employees went simultaneously to ask why so much of their pay was
missing. To this the factory director replied that the people ought to
be satisfied with what they get and ought to thank them (the directors
and the government) for supplying them with work at all. Amazed at such
an answer and boiling with indignation, they decided not to resume work
until they got a satisfactory explanation. Union representatives were
thereupon called, but those officials refused to come until the workers
went back to their machines. The factory manager told them also that if
they dared to strike, all of them would be considered
counter-revolutionists and dealt with accordingly. Immediately the
workers called a meeting. While they were discussing their grievances,
the union representatives entered. But instead of sympathizing with the
workers, one of these âdefenders of laborâ pounded on the table with his
fist and called in a thundering voice: âI order you back towork.â
âNaturally, such behavior only aroused all present to the highest pitch
of excitement. The order was bitterly resented and the meeting
continued. An old workingman got up and related the conditions under
which he and his family were forced to live, and asked how on earth he
could keep from starvation with the miserable wages he received. The
description of his own life being the very mirror of the life they all
led, resulted in the most pitiful scene. Everybody suddenly burst into
tears. Young and old, men and women, all were crying, and several in the
audiencefainted.
âA few hours after this came several chiefs representing the GPU, the
Union and together with the head director of the Petrograd Clothing
factories, announced that the wages would be reduced only 18 per cent
instead of 30 per cent. The workers, thereupon decided to resume work
and quietude prevailed in the factory. But at the end of the next week
120 workers, who were considered to be more outspoken and determined
than the others, were discharged from the factory, thrown out of the
Union, and put on the blacklist; that is, on their passports were
written: âCitizen... discharged from the Central Government Clothing
Factory for mutiny against the Workers and Peasants Government, with the
purpose of taking over thefactory.â[...] âNo, I am NOT happy to be out
of Russia. I would rather be there helping the workers combat the
tyrannical deeds of the hypocritical Communists.â
âMollie Steimer, in a letter written from Berlin in 1923, published in
Freedom, January 1924
Victor Serge started adulthood as an anarchist. However, after the
Bolshevik seizure of power, he joined the Party and served them as a
journalist, dutifully excusing the imprisonment of honest anarchists,
the butchery of the Kronstadt rebels,[6] and many other steps in the
Bolshevik counterrevolution. In this regard, he is an example of the
millions of rebels and common laborers shifted their allegiance from
anarchists to statists after the apparent victory of the Bolsheviks in
Russia. Once more, so much for pragmatism.
How did it work out for Serge? A few years later, he was expelled from
the Communist Party, thrown in jail, sentenced to internal exile, and in
the end barely managed to escape the Soviet Union with his life. Had he
remained faithful to his anarchist politics, he might have saved himself
a lot of griefâand above all, he would not have been complicit in
setting the stage for the slaughter and imprisonment of millions.
âWhen [Victor Serge] was asked why he, as a party member, did not raise
his voice in protest [against the attack on Kronstadt] in the party
session, his reply was that that would not help the sailors and would
mark him for the Cheka and even for silent disappearance. The only
excuse for Victor Serge at the time was a young wife and a small baby.
But for him to state now, after seventeen years, that âthe Bolsheviki
once confronted with the mutiny had no other recourse except to crush
it,â is, to say the least, inexcusable. Victor Serge knows as well as I
do that there was no mutiny in Kronstadt, that the sailors actually did
not use their arms in any shape or form until the bombardment of
Kronstadt began.â
ââTrotsky Protests Too Much,â Emma Goldman, 1938
âOn one of these black days [during the Kronstadt uprising], Lenin said
to a friend of mine (I use his exact words): âThis is Thermidor. But we
shall not let ourselves be guillotined. Weâll be our own Thermidor.ââ
â Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge. Thermidor was the11th month
ofthe calendar introduced under the French Revolution in 1793. In 1794,
during Thermidor, a reactionary backlash overthrew the radical Jacobins
and guillotined their leader, Robespierre.
Peter Arshinov participated in the anarchist uprising in the Ukraine
alongside Nestor Makhno between 1919 and 1921, at which point he
narrowly escaped the Bolshevik counterrevolution with his life. Fleeing
west into Germany, he authored the History of the Makhnovist Movement
(1918â1921) and co-authored the âOrganizational Platform of the
Libertarian Communists.â Eventually, he renounced anarchism and returned
to the Soviet Union to join the Communist Party, only to be purged and
executed. If not even the original Bolsheviks were safe from Stalinâs
Terror, it was foolish to imagine a former anarchist might be.
âPrisons are the symbol of the servitude of the people. They are always
built only to subjugate the people, the workers and peasants. Throughout
the centuries, the bourgeoisie in all countries crushed the spirit of
rebellion or resistance of the masses by means of execution and
imprisonment. And in our time, in the Communist and Socialist State,
prisons devour mainly the proletariat of the city and the countryside.
Free people have no use for prisons. Wherever prisons exist, the people
are not free.â
â History of the Makhnovist Movement (1918â1921) , Peter Arshinov.
Once the Bolshevik Terror was underway, it became increasingly difficult
to get information about what was happening to anarchists and other
rebels behind the borders of the Soviet Union. Fedor Mochanovsky was one
of countless anarchists who vanished in the course of this repression.
By 1928, the Soviet authorities had moved Mochanovsky from the Butyrka
prison in order to cut off international support, effectively
disappearing him. He almost certainly died in the hands of the Stalinist
state.
âThe real antagonism between the anarchists and the Bolshevists is
nothing new as far as anarchists are concerned. That antagonism has
existed since the days when Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin set out their
ideas. The former embraced the State and government whereas the latter
rejected them, even in embryo. That antagonism became very clear at the
congress of Marxists chaired by Engels and Liebknecht and held in The
Hague [September 2â7, 1872], at which they pledged to string up
anarchists as soon as they camepower.
âIn which all they were doing was talking in the same terms as the
Bolshevists talk in Russiatoday.
âIn 1918, the Bolshevists organized an anti-anarchist front to seek the
destruction of the anarchists in Russia. Throughout the land and in
every sphere of life across the territory of the soviet republic, they
took up arms against the anarchists. They shut down their presses and
their literature. They shut down anarchist clubs and bookshops. They
resorted to all sorts of means in order to undo the organization of
their congresses and they arrested the anarchists. And when the
opportunity presented itself, they shot them down on one pretext or
another.â
âSpeech of the anarchist Fedor Mochanovsky before the Petrograd
Revolutionary Court on December 13, 1922, published in La Antorcha
(Argentina), September 23, 1923. Translated by Paul Sharkey.
Born in Russia, Voline dropped out of the university in 1904. He
participated in the uprising of 1905 as a member of the
Socialist-Revolutionary Party and an organizer of the Soviet of Workers
and Peasants; sentenced to internal exile afterwards, he escaped from
Russia and joined the anarchist movement in France. When the First World
War began, the French government intended to put him in a concentration
camp, but he escaped to New York, where he joined the staff of Golos
Truda. After the Revolution, he returned to St. Petersburg with the rest
of the staff.
In fall 1918, following the Bolshevik crackdown on Golos Truda, he
traveled the Ukraine, where he helped to organize the Anarchist
Federation of the Ukraine and the editorial group Nabat (Tocsin). Nabat
published several papers throughout the region. Nabat entrusted him with
the responsibility of drafting a Synthetic Declaration of Principles
that would enable anarchists and libertarian socialists of all stripes
to work together throughout the Soviet Union. Later on, along with
Mollie Steimer and Senya Fleshin and several other longtime anarchists,
he published a critical response to Arshinovâs âOrganizational Platform
of the Libertarian Communists,â arguing that it had too much in common
with Bolshevism.
Organizing alongside Makhnoâs insurgents in the Ukraine, he was captured
by Bolsheviks; Trotsky had already ordered his execution, but Makhno was
eventually able to broker his release as part of a treaty with the
Bolsheviksâwhich they violated almost immediately afterwards. Voline
organized a Congress of Russian Anarchists; the Bolsheviks pretended to
offer permission for it, then interrupted it and arrested the
participants. They languished in the Taganka prison in Moscow until an
international labor congress furnished them the opportunity to go on
hunger strike. In the end, they were deported to Germany.
Voline spent the rest of his life in France, where he worked with
anarchists in the CNT during the Spanish Civil War and published his
exhaustive work, The Unknown Revolution, 1917â1921.
âAny school of thought that countenances dictatorshipâbe it of all-out
or kid-glove, âright wingâ or âleft wingâ varietyâis, deep down,
objectively and essentially fascist. In my eyes, fascism is primarily
the notion of the masses being led by some âminority,â some political
party, some dictator. In terms of psychology and ideology, fascism is
the idea of dictatorship. That idea articulated, spread or implemented
by the propertied classes is readily understood. But when that same idea
is taken up and implemented by ideologues from the working class as the
road to emancipation, that should be deemed a poisonous aberration, a
shortsighted, silly nonsense, a dangerous deviation. For, being
essentially fascist, that idea, if put into effect, leads inevitably to
a profoundly fascist social organization.âThis truth has been
comprehensiblyâand incontrovertiblyâborne out by the âRussian
experience.â The notion of dictatorship as a means of emancipating the
working class has been put into practice there. Well, its implementation
has inevitably brought forth an effect which these days is becoming
plainer and plainer and which soon even the most ignorant, short-sighted
and pig-headed will be forced to acknowledge:instead of leading to the
emancipation of the working class, the victorious revolution actually
and despite all the theorizing of the dictator-liberators, brought forth
the most comprehensive, ghastliest enslavement and exploitation of that
working class at the hands of a privileged ruling class.â
â âRed Fascism,â Voline, 1934
Near the end of his life, Max Nettlau, one of the greatest historians of
the classical anarchist movement, having witnessed the Bolshevik victory
and the subsequent nightmares of Leninism and Stalinism, summarized the
essence of Marxâs political incoherence in a letter to a friend. This
little-known excerpt casts considerable light on the contradictions
within Marxâs thought, which have been the cause of so much misfortune:
âI call Marx âtriple-faced,â because with his particularly grasping
spirit he laid a claim on exactly three tactics and his originality no
doubt resides in these pan-grasping gests. He encouraged electoral
socialism, the conquest of parliaments, social democracy and, though he
often sneered at it, the Peopleâs State and State Socialism. He
encouraged revolutionary dictatorship. He encouraged simple confidence
and abiding, letting âevolutionâ do the work, self-reduction, almost
self-evaporation of the capitalists until the pyramid tumbled over by
mathematical laws of his own growth, as if triangular bodies
automatically turned somersaults. He copied the first tactics from Louis
Blanc, the second from Blanqui,[7] whilst the third correspond to his
feeling of being somehow the economic dictator of the universe, as Hegel
had been its spiritual dictator. His grasping went further. He hated
instinctively libertarian thought and tried to destroy the free thinkers
wherever he met them, from Feuerbach and Max Stirner to Proudhon,
Bakunin and others. But he wished to add the essence of their teaching
as spoils to his other borrowed feathers, and so he relegated at the end
of days, after all dictatorship, the prospect of a Stateless, an
Anarchist world. The Economic Cagliostro hunted thus with all hounds and
ran with all hares, and imposed thusâand his followers after himâan
incredible confusion on socialism which, almost a century after 1844,
has not yet ended. The social-democrats pray by him; the dictatorial
socialists swear by him; the evolutionary socialists sit still and
listen to hear evolution evolve, as others listen to the growing of the
grass; and some very frugal people drink weak tea and are glad, that at
the end of days by Marxâs ipse dixit Anarchy will at last be permitted
to unfold. Marx has been like a blight that creeps in and kills
everything it touches to European socialism, an immense power for evil,
numbing self-thought, insinuating false confidence, stirring up
animosity, hatred, absolute intolerance, beginning with his own arrogant
literary squabbles and leading to inter-murdering socialism as in
Russia, since 1917, which has so very soon permitted reaction to
galvanize the undeveloped strata and to cultivate the âReinkulturenâ of
such authoritarianism, the Fascists and their followers. There was, in
spite of their personal enmity, some monstrous âinter-breedingâ between
the two most fatal men of the 19^(th) century, Marx and Mazzini,[8] and
their issue are Mussolini and all the others who disgrace this poor
20^(th) century.â
âcorrespondence with a comrade, c. 1936.
The tragedies brought about by the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917
did not end in Russia. Once there was a state that supposedly
represented the revolutionary socialist agenda, revolutions and
revolutionaries all around the world were sacrificed in cold blood to
advance the imperatives that drive all states. As his temporary pact
with Hitler illustrates, âStalinismâ was not a coherent ideology but a
mishmash of all the things Stalin had to do to continuously pursue power
for himself and the Soviet Union.
Not wishing any revolutionary movement to triumph that did not answer to
his Comintern, Stalin made sure to undermine the anarchist and
Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. The Stalinist faction within
the struggle against Franco was small, but because they controlled
access to resources from outside Spain and did not shrink from open
betrayal, they were able to centralize control of the defense in their
hands. In the end, many Spanish anarchists were murdered by Stalinists
rather than by the fascists they were supposedly fighting together.
An associate of Malatesta and fierce critic of Trotsky as well as
Stalin, Luigi Berneri was a well-known Italian anarchist organizer who
traveled to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He was offered a
position in the Council of the Economy, but refused to participate in
the government on principle.
When clashes between anarchists and the Stalin-controlled Communist
Party broke out in Republican Spain, the house Bern-eri shared with
several other anarchists was attacked. He and his comrades were labeled
âcounter-revolutionaries,â disarmed, deprived of their papers, and
forbidden to go out into the street. On May 5, 1937, Stalinists murdered
Bernerialong with another Italian anarchist, Francisco Barbieri.
What evil the Communists are doing here too! It is almost 2 oâclock and
I am going to bed. The house is on its guard tonight. I offered to stay
awake to let the others go to sleep, and everyone laughed, saying that I
would not even hear the cannon! But afterwards, one by one, they fell
asleep, and I am watchful over all of them, while working for those who
are to come. It is the only completely beautiful thing.â
âBerneriâs last letter to his family, May 3â4, 1937; translation
published in The Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review #4, 1978
When proponents of state socialism accuse anarchists of being sectarian
for not desiring to work together for common ends, we have to ask:dowe
share the same goals, really? What can we have in common with those who
believe that guillotines, courts, judges, prisons, gulags, and firing
squads can do the work of liberation?
If history is any guide, partisans of the state will not hesitate to use
those against any-one who hinders their pursuit of centralized power.
Tens of millions murdered by the state cry out to us from the 20^(th)
century, urging us to heed their warnings so their deaths might not be
in vain.
AmorĂłs, Miguel. Los incontrolados de 1937: memorias militantes de los
Amigos de Durruti. Barcelona: Aldarull Edicions, 2016.
AmorĂłs, Miguel. JosĂ© Pellicer, el anarquista Ăntegro: vida y obra del
fundador de la heroica Columna de Hierro. Barcelona: Virus Editorial,
2009.
Arshinov, P. History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918â1921. London:
Freedom Press, 2005.
Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America.
Edinburgh: AK, 2006.
Avrich, Paul. The Russian Anarchists. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.
Avrich, Paul. Kronstadt 1921. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1970.
Avrich, Paul, ed. The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Berkman, Alexander. The Bolshevik Myth. London: Active Distribution,
2017.
Bluestein, Abe, Mollie Steimer, and Senya Fleshin. Fighters for
Anarchism: Mollie Steimer and Senya Fleshin. [Place of publication not
identified]: Libertarian Pub. Group, 1983.
Carr, Edward Hallett. Michael Bakunin. New York: Vintage Books, 1961.
Goldman, Emma. My Disillusionment in Russia. London: Active
Distribution, 2017.
Graham, Robert. We Do Not Fear Anarchy â We Invoke It: The First
International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement. Oakland, CA: AK
Press, 2015.
Getzler, Israel. Kronstadt, 1917â1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
GuillamĂłn, AgustĂn. El terror estalinista en Barcelona (1938).
Barcelona: Aldarull, 2013.
Guillaume, James. LâInternationale: documents et souvenirs (1864â1878).
3. New York: Franklin, 1969.
âKronstadt Izvestia, #1â14 (1921).â Marxists Internet Archive, accessed
January 12, 2018,
https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/events/kronstadt/izves-tia/index.htm
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Kropotkin, Peter. Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution. Edited
and translated by Martin A. Miller. Cambridge, M.A.: The M.I.T. Press,
1975.
Makhno, Nestor, Malcolm Archibald, and Will Firth. The Ukrainian
Revolution (July â December 1918). Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2011.
Makhno, Nestor, Malcolm Archibald, and Sean McInally-Boomer. The Russian
Revolution in Ukraine (March 1917 â April 1918). Edmonton, Alberta:
Black Cat Press, 2009.
Makhno, Nestor, Voline, and Malcolm Archibald. Under the Blows of the
Counterrevolution, April-June 1918. Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2009.
Cultural-Educational Section of the Insurgent Army (Makhnovists). âWho
Are the Makhnovists and What Are They Fighting for?â 27 April 1920. In
Avrich, Paul, ed. The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Makhno, Nestor, and Mike Jones. The Anarchist Revolution. Petersham,
N.S.W.: Jura Books, 1995. BenĂtez MartĂnez, Erick. La traiciĂłn de la hoz
y el martillo. [Chile]: Ediciones Sin Nombre, 2011.
Maximoff, Gregory Petrovich. The Guillotine at Work, Vol. I: the
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Documents. Somerville, M.A.: Black Thorn Books, 1979.
Mochanovsky, Fedor. âFacing the Bolshevik judges: Speech of the
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.
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Our Own Authority! Pub, 2013.
For light reading, Bakuninâs Critique of State Socialism is available in
our online archivesas a charming comic book reviewing how the history of
authoritarian communism throughout the 20^(th) century bore out his
analysis:
For obscure archival material, we also recommend:
[1] It was published at segadores.alscarrers.org as âA cent anys de la
contrarevoluciĂł Bolxevic: memĂČria histĂČrica a prop de la destrucciĂł de
les nostres lluites.â
[2] It leaves off at the opening of the Second World War, when most of
the anarchists had been exterminated. For the rest of the story, we are
forced to rely on conservatives like Aleksandr Solzhenitsynâhimself a
twice-decorated war veteran and adherent of Marxism before his stint in
the gulags embittered him. To those who celebrate Stalin for his part in
defeating Hitler, we answer that the struggle against fascism would
surely have gone better if all the anarchists and other anti-fascists
Stalin and his cronies killed, incarcerated, or undermined had been able
to participate. The fact that fascism was defeated by superpowers rather
than by grassroots social movements took revolutionary social change off
the table for several decades.
[3] Even the name, Bolshevik, is derived from a historical
misrepresentation. It derives from a vote that took place in 1903 at the
second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Leninâs
faction of the party was calling for a more exclusive membership policy;
they lost the vote 28 to 23, but later, after the Jewish Labor Bund and
other participants walked out, Lenin described his faction as âthe
majority.â
[4] For example, V. D. Bonc-Brujevic, who included a highly suspect
account of Kropotkinâs meeting with Lenin in his Reminiscences of Lenin
1917â24.
[5] Throughout 1918, Makhno and his comrades fought alone against the
capitalist class and the German occupation, after the Bolsheviks had
abandoned the revolution in the Ukraine for the sake of statecraft. In
the end, the Bolsheviks only reentered Ukraine in order to seize it from
anarchists and other Ukrainian revolutionaries.
[6] Two decades afterwards, in his memoirs, Serge acknowledged that at
the time of the Kronstadt uprising, he had written, âIn spite of its
faults, in spite of its abuses, in spite of everything, the Bolshevik
party, because of its size, its insight, its stability, is the organized
force to which we must pin our faith. The Revolution has at its disposal
no other weapon, and it is no longer capable of genuine renewal from
within.â
[7] Throughout half a century, Louis-Auguste Blanqui was imprisoned by
one government after another for his efforts to overthrow the French
government and institute communism by means of revolutionary
dictatorship. Bakunin borrowed some of Blanquiâs framework of organizing
in conspiratorial groups, but asserted that the only proper activity for
such groups is to seek to render government impossible, not to institute
a new one.
[8] Before âItalyâ existed as a single nation, Mazzini founded Young
Italy, a group demanding the uni-fication of all Italian-speaking
countries under a Republican government, and Young Europe, a coalition
of analogous groups around Europe. (The expression âYoung Turkâ is
derived from the equiva-lent Turkish group.) Revolutionary republicans
like Giuseppe Garibaldi bore the brunt of the bloody work of bringing
about Italian unification, but King Victor Emmanuel took control of the
new nation of Italy: Mazzinian nationalism did not pro-duce a democratic
republic but a monarchy. Victor Emmanuelâs successor put Mussolini in
power.
As so often occurs, nationalism was initially associated with Left
movements for âliberation,â yet ultimately became a reactionary
phenomenon. This explains the outcome of ânational liberationâ movements
throughout the 20^(th) century that op-posed European colonialism in
order to establish nation-states according to the European model, of-ten
producing bloody ethnic conflicts like the ones in India and Pakistan.
From its origins as a social movement, anarchism distinguished itself
from authoritarian socialism, as represented by Marx, and from
nationalism, as rep-resented by Mazzini. Marx and Mazzini were the most
influential figures associated with the forma-tion of the International,
though Marx swiftly forced Mazzini out. Early Italian anarchists like
Malatesta started their careers as disciples of Mazzini, then rejected
his thinking after the Paris Commune.