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Title: Workers Against Lenin
Author: Anarcho
Date: July 16, 2008
Language: en
Topics: book review, workers’ opposition, anti-Bolshevism, Lenin
Source: Retrieved on 28th January 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=101
Notes: A short review of a book which discusses labour protest under Lenin. Essential reading.

Anarcho

Workers Against Lenin

Jonathan Aves, Tauris Academic Studies, I.B. Tauris Publishers

Published in 1996 by an academic publishers, Aves book is essential

reading for anyone interested in the outcome of the Russian Revolution.

For decades Trotskyists have been arguing that the Russian working class

had been decimated during the Civil War period and was incapable of

collective decision making and organisation, so necessitating Bolshevik

Party dictatorship over them. Workers Against Lenin provides extensive

evidence to refute those claims.

In his work Aves provides an extremely well researched and readable

account of labour protests during the period of 1920 to 1922. Rather

than a working class which, according to many Trotskyists “did not

exist,” the actuality was that workers under Lenin were more than

capable of collective action and organisation. Perhaps it is because

this struggle was directed against the Bolsheviks that explains this

blind spot? In this they simply follow Lenin: “As discontent amongst

workers became more and more difficult to ignore, Lenin ... began to

argue that ... workers had become ‘declassed.’”

The most famous expression of collective workers struggle during this

period was, of course, the general strike in Petrograd which set off the

Kronstadt revolt. Due to Kronstadt, this strike wave is often downplayed

or even ignored but, in fact, general strikes or very widespread unrest

took place nation-wide. Faced with this mass wave of protest, the

Bolsheviks used a combination of concessions (on the economic demands

raised, not the political ones like free soviet elections and freedom of

speech and organisation for workers) and repression. They also called it

the “yolynka” (which means “go slow”) rather than a strike movement to

hide its real nature and size.

As Aves discusses, this was hardly an isolated event. Strike action, he

notes, “remained endemic in the first nine months of 1920” as well. In

Petrograd province, 85,642 people were involved in strikes, which is a

high figure indeed as, according to one set of figures, there were only

109,100 workers there at the time! Rather than this being an isolated

and atomised working class, what comes comes through clearly from Aves’

work is that the workers, usually drawing on pre-1918 experiences and

modes of struggle, could and did take collective action and decisions in

the face of state repression. As the Bolsheviks clamped down on all

independent working class activity and organisation, it is hardly

surprising that the workers became marginal to the revolution. Moreover,

let us not forget that it was during this period that the Bolsheviks

raised the dictatorship of the party to both a practical and ideological

truism. Given workers opposition to the Bolsheviks, this was the only

way they could remain in power. This implies that a key factor in rise

of Stalinism was political — the simple fact that the workers would not

vote Bolshevik in free soviet and union elections and so they were not

allowed to. As one Soviet historian put it in his account of the

“yolynka,” “taking the account of the mood of the workers, the demand

for free elections to the soviets meant the implementation in practice

of the infamous slogan of soviets without communists.”

Needless to say, this review cannot hope to cover all the important

information contained in this book. Aves’ discussion on the

intensification of war communism and Trotsky’s “militarisation of

labour” is excellent, placing it in the period of peace at the beginning

of 1920 and noting its ideological basis. Also of interest is his

account of the “mini-Kronstadt” in the Ukrainian town of Ekaterinoslavl

in June 1921, where workers raised resolutions very similar to those

raised at Kronstadt, including the demand for “free soviets” popularised

by the Makhnovists.

Simply put, its hard to claim that, as all Leninists do, the Russian

working class had “ceased to exist in any meaningful sense” in such

circumstances. As such, Workers Against Lenin helps to undermine the

various forms of the Bolshevik myth and, as such, is a key resource for

studying the Russian Revolution. Being an academic book, it is expensive

and will need to be ordered from a bookshop or from a library. However,

the wealth of information contained in it, the social context in which

it places protest and developments in Bolshevik policies and ideas, make

it a must-read for all revolutionaries who want a revolution to be more

than changing who the boss is.