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Title: Review: The Russian Tragedy
Author: Myles Kennedy
Date: Summer 1988
Language: en
Topics: USSR, book review, Alexander Berkman, Workers Solidarity
Source: Retrieved on 9th October 2021 from http://struggle.ws/ws88_89/ws28_berkman.html
Notes: Published in Workers Solidarity No. 28 — Summer 1988

Myles Kennedy

Review: The Russian Tragedy

ALEXANDER BERKMAN was no mere theorist. All his life he was an active

anarchist militant. Born in Russia, by the age of fifteen he had been

expelled from school for membership of a group which met to read radical

books. By the age of nineteen he was in America and active in a

revolutionary anarchist group.

In 1892 during the Homestead Steel strike the industrialist H C. Frick

hired Pinkerton detectives who murdered eleven strikers, including a ten

year old child. He then declared that he would sooner see every striker

dead than accede to a single one of their demands. For his part in an

attempt to assassinate Frick, Berkman was sentenced to seventeen years

in jail.

REVOLUTION

He second American jail sentence was for work with the No Conscription

League during the First World War. Following this he went to Russia

where the revolution had begun. While initially supportive, he was soon

sickened by the Bolshevik duplicity and especially the events around the

Kronstadt revolt in 1921. Forced to leave Russia he went to France where

he remained active until his death at the age of sixty six in 1936.

This book is a must for anyone who is confused as to why the Russian

Revolution went wrong, for anyone who feels that to explain the

aberrations and atrocities perpetrated by the Bolsheviks as necessitated

by imperialist blockades or ‘objective circumstances’, when the USSR

spans half the Northern hemisphere, is a bit incredible. This book is a

must for anyone who has bought the lie that Stalin single handedly

changed the essential ideology of bolshevism.

DISILLUSIONMENT

This book is made up of a recent introduction, which places the essays

in context, and three essays written by Berkman in the immediate

aftermath of his intense disillusionment with the way in which the

Bolsheviks steadily rolled back the gains of the Revolution &emdash; on

the way making more concessions to the pressures of international

imperialism than to the Russian proletariat who had made the Revolution.

In broad sweeps, the introduction charts the period from early 1917 when

the peasants seized the land and the workers the factories to October

1917, when the Bolsheviks used the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” to

mobilise the masses behind them and from there to the establishment of

secret police forces under the control of the ‘Cheka’ which in turn

ruthlessly destroyed the power of the same soviets they had

opportunistically supported, culminating in the savage suppression of

the Kronstadt Revolt (1921) which made such mild demands as free

elections to the soviets.

STATE CAPITALISM

Feeling secure in their dictatorship, they then denounced the previous

excesses of “War Communism” and proceeded to establish the New Economic

Policy which amounted to a reinstatement of capitalism &emdash; though

this time in a Stateist rather than a Private guise. Not that this made

much difference to the organisation of work: from early 1918 on (when

they dissolved the Constituent Assembly which they had first opposed and

then supported), the Bolsheviks had been replacing the workers councils

with individual managers, often the identical managers who had run the

factories in the Tsarist period!

The Russian Tragedy is the essay in which Berkman charts his progress

from one who arrived in Russia ‘not to teach but to learn; to learn and

to help’ to one who left Russia believing that ‘the Revolution in Russia

had become a mirage, a dangerous deception’ The key to Berkman’s

analysis is his understanding that revolutions are made ‘not by any

political party, but by the people themselves’ This is the understanding

which enabled him to perceive the root cause of the Revolution’s decay

in Bolshevik ideology and action &emdash; rather than in the

backwardness of the Russian people or external circumstances.

BEST COMMUNIST?

One of the guises under which the Bolsheviks fooled people into

accepting their dictatorship of all-powerful secret Police’ increasingly

powerless soviets, mass executions and imprisonments etc. etc. was the

label War Communism. Yet, when the USSR was no longer threatened by

internal reaction or imperialist aggression, the long awaited fruits of

the Social Revolution proved to be the reintroduction of private

ownership and the reestablishment of free trade (10^(th) Congress,

1921). In Lenin’s own words, ‘Henceforth, the best communist is he who

can drive the best bargain’ The final section of this essay looks

towards a new Revolution in Russia, which unhappily we are still

awaiting 70 years later.

The second essay. The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party, deals

in much greater depth with Bolshevik ideology and the changing

pronouncements of Lenin. Again, it puts the blame for the Revolution’s

failure firmly where it belongs. It will give the reader an

understanding of the real nature of Bolshevism which is hidden by those

Trotskyists of today who describe Russia as a “deformed workers’ state”.

The third essay, The Kronstadt Rebellion deals with events that occurred

in that garrison town, near Leningrad (then Petrograd). Anyone who read

of how under the direct command of Trotsky, the demands of the

Revolutionary Committee (for such democratic rights as free speech, free

elections to the soviets etc.) were portrayed to the Russian working

class as White reaction and the Rebellion was crushed with brutal and

bloody force, will understand that Stalinism is not a radical break with

Leninism/Trotskyism but rather a logical continuation.