100 Years After The Bolshevik Revolution

Anyone who is sceptical about claims made of the Bolshevik Revolution by its supporters ,but who has also been reluctant to accept the accounts of it by right wing and Cold War historians, will find much of value in John Medhurst’s ‘ No Less Than Mystic’ ( 2017) 

An active socialist and trade unionist, Medhurst takes the title of the book from Martov’s description of the Bolshevik Revolution . Martov was the  leader of the Mensheviks, opponents of the revolution and advocates of a more gradualist approach. Medhurst summarises Martov's view of Bolshevik political strategy as  "a cocktail of utopian desire and adventurism lacking solid plans for creating a socialist society and likely to degenerate into its opposite" and concludes that it “is a judgment supported by history".

For Medhurst the real revolution of 1917 took place in February not October, " led by a wide alliance of socialists, trade unionists, peasants and populists in which the Bolshevik Party played only a minor role". It was this revolution which, despite the enormous difficulties it faced and the divisions which it exposed, "contained great potential for social and cultural liberation and a far better future for the Russian people than they had suffered under three hundred years of Tsarism or would endure under Leninism and Stalinism".

The October Revolution itself was " a localised event coordinated and carried out by a relatively small group of men with no mandate to do so". The Bolshevik’s claimed their legitimacy from the support given the day after they ‘ took power’ from a Congress of Soviets, dominated by Bolsheviks from Petrograd. The 600  delegates  present had been elected in a haphazard and irregular fashion. There was minimal representation for peasants, the bulk of the population, and almost no representation for women, urban or rural. Classical Marxist theory held that the revolution would be led by a mature working class, constituting a majority of the population. In Russia in October 1917 the vast majority of the population did not even know it was taking place.  

The seizure of power pre-empted elections to a Constituent Assembly and although these did subsequently take place, with the Bolsheviks winning less than a third of the seats, the assembly only met for a single day before being closed down by the new rulers.

Within six weeks a dictatorship was in place and dissent suppressed. "It had been established that it was not what a person had done (i.e. specific evidence of a crime or treasonable activity) that determined their guilt, but their supposed sociological position and political opinion as defined by the state police". February 1918 saw  the introduction of execution without trial and in June 1919, on the recommendation of Lenin, the first camps with the expressed purpose of using prisoners for industrial slave labour were opened. 

 Meanwhile in industry the initial degree introducing workers control had been replaced a few months later by the re-introduction of one man management, whilst in the countryside the legitimisation of the land seizures which peasants were undertaking under their own initiative rapidly turned into a seizure of their so-called surpluses under ‘war communism’.

By way of explanation Medhurst regards  the failings, inadequacies and indeed amateurishness of Lenin as of  central importance. He had spent long years in exile but had failed to engage with the politics of contemporary  European Marxists. Theses leaders and thinkers had recognised that the reforms which the bourgeoisie had been forced to carry out had impacted  on  political consciousness and perspectives. Far from wanting to  "smash the state" as Lenin had demanded, these reforms, including the beginnings of welfare states , had led to "a lessening of the distance between the state and ordinary people and an expectation that they could influence and occasionally direct it".

Lenin and fellow Bolsheviks are also viewed as guilty of  focussing on the issue of seizing state power rather using it effectively thereafter. Reliant on revolutions happening elsewhere,and in Germany in particular, they resorted to a ‘ productivism’ of the worst kind when these revolutions failed to happen. The Bolsheviks“did not question the value of unrestrained industrial growth, or demonstrate the distaste for its moral and aesthetic squalor found in the socialism of Morris, Carpenter and Kropotkin. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin all saw the salvation and achievement of socialism in the development of the economy’s productive forces...... Socialist rhetoric aside, their conception of work reflected the Protestant Work Ethic and unquestioning acceptance of the need for daily, routine, compulsory work performed in order to secure the means of subsistence”

Medhurst’s verdict is clear "Leninism and the Bolshevik Revolution are a cautionary tale, a warning from history,an example of how not to overturn power and privilege and establish a healthy democratic alternative"  

An alternative view is to be found in The Russian Revolution: When  Workers Took Power ( 2017), written by Paul Vernadsky and published by the Alliance for Workers Liberty. For Vernadsky  " The Russian revolution remains the high point of working class history. In October 1917, the Russian working class, led by the Bolshevik Party, made a revolution, took power, smashed the old state and proceeded to build a new state based on workers' democracy".

The above has been said before of course and, to be fair, the book does not claim originality. Interestingly however it does refer to recent research by a wide range of authors, claiming to draw  on new material following the opening of the Russian archives from the 1990s. In reality the book concentrates on debates that took place before and after  October 1917.It does not give much insight into the power that workers supposedly wielded after the revolution, whilst asserting that in 1917 "working- class democracy flourished as never before".

In the absence of supporting evidence I turned to the work of a historian, Steve Smith ( who is referenced favourably by Vernadsky) and, in particular, his book Red Petrograd Revolution in the Factories 1917-18 ( 1983) Smith’s book focuses on events prior to October 1917, describing the growth of trade union organisation and the soviets in Petrograd in the years prior to 1917 and in the period between February and October of that year.  There is little about post revolutionary workers power and this appears to be  because there is little to tell. 

Smith is clear that a big majority of workers in Petrograd, tired of Kerensky’s "government of swindlers", welcomed the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the Decree on Workers Control which it published three weeks later. This essentially legalised the de facto control which workers had established in factories across Petrograd between February and October.The importance of the decree was largely symbolic however, since it failed to spell out in concrete terms how workers control was to be implemented, leaving local soviets ,trade unions and Factory Committee Conferences to work out the details ( instructions) . According to Smith the instructions issued by the Petrograd  Factory Committee Conference ( CCFC ) were “ remarkable for the radicalism with which they tackle the questions of workers control".Prior to October the concept was envisaged as involving workers having the ‘right to inspect’. Post October the demand was for active intervention in production.

 Lenin "never developed a conception of worker’s self management ". For him the transformation of capitalist relations of production would take place at central- state level rather than at the level of the enterprise. "Progress to socialism was guaranteed by the character of the state.....not by the degree of power exercised by workers on the shop floor". Against a background of economic chaos and collapse, with business owners closing down rather than agreeing to workers control, he rapidly gave up notions of workers autonomy in favour of  the need for strict discipline and centralism and a restoration of one man management. Issues of workplace organisation "had no bearing for Lenin on the question of the socialist character of the soviet state....Because a government representing the interests of workers and poor peasants now presided over Russia, it was possible to organise production in any manner which would ensure maximum productivity". 

Ultimately all notions of workers control were undermined by economic collapse. The war  was central to Petrograd’s economy."As soon as the Bolsheviks sued for peace, the bottom fell out of the capital's economy". Whilst peace was being negotiated the German army had moved in on Petrograd, causing widespread panic, starvation and a mass evacuation from the city. By April 1918 the factory workforce of Petrograd had shrunk to 40% of its January 1917 level. “ Within a matter of months the proletariat of Petrograd had been decimated” 

The revolution had been curtailed by the ‘objective forces’ of economic reality ( ie economic collapse) as early as January 1918. Smith is as damming as Medhurst. Writing elsewhere in his book 'The Russian Revolution A Very Short Introduction' ( 2002) he notes that the Bolsheviks, upon coming to power "faced a huge array of problems for which Marxism-Leninism left them ill-equipped. Ideology could not tell them, for instance, whether or not to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Policy, therefore, was frequently the outcome of improvisation and pragmatism as much as of the hallowed tenets of ideology".He concludes that "As early as January 1918, key components of the 1917 revolution –power to the soviets, workers’ control of production, the abolition of the standing army –were jettisoned ".

Returning to Medhurst, it should be mentioned that he attempts to bring debate about the October Revolution up to date, noting that the dilemmas and difficulties faced by socialists and, in particular ,what to do with political power rather than simply how to acquire it, remain relevant 100 years later.  What is required he says is a modern, fit for purpose 21st century movement for socialism. "Corporate capitalism should be opposed not with a set of revolutionary formulations which were questionable one hundred years ago and have even less relevance now, but with popular social movements built on people’s needs and experience". 

Here’s to that.