Socialists talk a lot about the Russian Revolution because it shows that the working class can overthrow capitalism and build a different kind of society—one based on genuine democracy and which meets human needs, rather than the undemocratic, unequal society that we live in today. Opponents of socialism talk a lot about Russia as well. For them, it is proof that communism is evil and/or unworkable—that any attempt to transform society fundamentally will end in dictatorship and human suffering.
What is the reality? It’s clear that the man who became the country’s ruler, Joseph Stalin, instituted a regime that was a far cry from the goals and aspirations of the brave workers who embarked on the revolution in 1917. So how do we explain what went wrong? By starting at the beginning.
The February revolution in 1917 was sparked by the First World War. Almost everyone had a loved one who had died in the conflict. The working class was starving, but the tsar (king) and the wealthy were dancing at balls and making a killing. Leon Trotsky, a key leader of the socialist movement, wrote in his History of the Russian Revolution:
“Enormous fortunes arose out of the bloody foam. The lack of bread and fuel in the capital did not prevent the court jeweller Faberget from boasting that he had never before done such a flourishing business. All came running to grab and gobble, in fear lest the blessed rain should stop. And all rejected with indignation the shameful idea of a premature peace.”
The rich wanted the war to continue; the workers and the oppressed demanded that it end. On International Working Women’s Day, women factory workers took to the streets and called the men out to join them. The revolution had begun. Soon, workers set up factory councils and district councils referred to as soviets, the “embryo” of a new society. Soldiers enforced democracy in the army. Peasants kicked landlords out of manor houses and demanded control over the land. The Romanov monarchy, which had ruled Russia for more than 300 years, was overthrown.
In October, the revolution entered a new stage: workers demanded not just reforms, but to be their own rulers and to form their own government. Critics of the revolution guffawed at the idea of workers running society. One piece in the conservative newspaper Novoe Vremia scoffed at the idea of socialism:
“Who will govern us? The cooks perhaps, those connoisseurs of cutlets and beefsteaks? Or maybe the firemen? The stableboys, the chauffeurs? Or perhaps the nursemaids will rush off to meetings of the Council of State between the diaper-washing sessions?”
In Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, Vladimir Lenin, the key leader of the revolution, said in response: yes, the cooks shall learn to run society. But he wasn’t naive about the challenges:
“We are not utopians. We know that an unskilled labourer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration ... In our opinion, to ease the incredible burdens and miseries of the war and also to heal the terrible wounds the war has inflicted on the people, revolutionary democracy is needed.”
Civil war
The tragedy is that this radical democratic experiment was soon punctuated by a brutal civil war that devastated the working class. In his epic biography of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher conveys the country’s ruination: “Russia stood alone, bled white, starving, shivering with cold, consumed by disease and overcome with gloom”. But this was not the logical result of workers’ democracy; the civil war was initiated by the very people who had ridiculed the idea of workers running the country. It was murderous sabotage.
Russia was invaded by foreign armies determined to destroy the fledgling workers’ democracy. A blockade was implemented, cutting access to food and munitions. Then, former generals of the tsarist army organised themselves into a murderous reactionary force, referred to as the White Army. These forces of reaction mounted an increasingly violent counter-revolution from 1918. In Finland, where another revolution had developed, the White Army crushed it terribly. British socialist John Rees explains in “In defence of October”:
“In Helsinki the Whites made workers’ wives and children walk in front of their troops as they recaptured the city street by street. One hundred of the women and children died. In all, some 300 corpses were found in the streets. Later, 40 women were laid out on the ice and shot. In Tavastehus, 10,000 prisoners were interned and many died in the massacre which followed, during which ‘murder of the wounded was the norm’.”
Rees quotes Kornilov, an army general who had attempted to destroy the revolution in 1917: “‘The greater the terror, the greater our victories’, declared Kornilov. ‘We must save Russia’, he argued, ‘even if we have to set fire to half of it and shed the blood of three-fourths of all the Russians!’”
It was in this context that the workers’ democratic revolution began to founder, and the Cheka, an internal police force later used to destroy genuine revolutionary forces, was established. A range of measures constraining democracy were introduced in Russian society and within the Communist Party (the renamed Bolshevik party). Internal party factions—organised groups that opposed policies of the leadership—were banned. Freedom of the press was restricted. Other parties were outlawed. These measures were not something to be celebrated. They were introduced during a civil war that had claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
The choices open to the Russian revolutionary leaders were limited. In fact, often the choice was between the bad and the worse—the revolution was holding on for dear life. “Any socialist party that came to power in Russia today must pursue the wrong tactics so long as it, as part of the international working-class army, is left in the lurch by the main body of this army”, Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg wrote in late 1918. That is, only the European working class could save the Russian Revolution—by turning it into the first phase of the world revolution.
The crisis of the revolution deepens
The revolutionary forces, the Red Army, led by Trotsky, emerged victorious out of the civil war. But the cost that was exacted on the revolution was high. Red Russia lost most of its industry, food-producing land and the very basis of a revolutionary democracy—the industrial working class itself.
When the civil war began, the most politically dedicated workers volunteered to fight. Workers who had won their revolution perished in the bloody civil war. Those who survived returned to cities in which factories could no longer function because there was not enough fuel or raw materials. Deutscher wrote:
“The dispersal of the old working class created a vacuum in urban Russia. The old, self-reliant and class-conscious labour movement ... which used to ... seethe with political activity—that movement was now an empty shell.”
The possibility of socialism is premised on capitalism having created a social class with both the power and the interest to overthrow the old order, and on capitalism having laid the economic groundwork for abundance—that is, enough productive capacity to fulfil everyone’s needs. Without a working class, and in the midst of material scarcity, the revolution hung in the balance.
From very early on, socialists had argued that they would be condemned without the revolution spreading across Europe. Lenin argued in 1918, at the extraordinary seventh congress of the Communist Party: “It is the absolute truth that without a German revolution we are doomed”. Capitalism is a global system. The causes of a revolution in one country are often present in others. So the same dynamics that led to the overthrow of Russia’s old order were present in countries such as Germany, Italy, France and even Britain.
The only way out of Russia’s internal crisis was through a European revolution. Capitalism is internationally linked through production chains. To build a socialist society, all links in the chain (or at least the most important ones initially) must be brought under workers’ control. As well, the capitalist classes would not allow a socialist state to blossom under their noses. The only way to stop the violence against the fledgling socialist state was for revolutionary workers elsewhere to arrange mutinies in their own armies, as the Russian workers had done to end their participation in the First World War.
There were general strikes, workers’ councils, uprisings and mutinies across Europe in the years after 1917. But what these countries lacked was a party like Lenin’s Bolsheviks. The process of revolution requires the intervention of socialist workers who refuse to settle for concessions and who understand that the only solution to their problems is a new society built after a revolution. So the Russian revolutionaries helped foster the growth of mass communist parties across Europe and in the colonial world, aiming to secure victory beyond Russia’s borders. Ultimately, however, the revolutions elsewhere were defeated.
The rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy
So the revolution was battered, isolated and economically destroyed, and workers sat idle at their workbenches or had moved back to rural areas in search of food. In the face of this, those who led the revolution had to figure out a path out of the quagmire.
Some wanted to continue to fight for the revolution, both inside Russia and internationally. There were attempts to address the situation and repair the economy, such as the introduction of the New Economic Policy—a temporary retreat that allowed limited private trade and businesses in non-core sectors of the economy. Trotsky argued for greater economic planning. There were retreats, but there were also debates within the party about how to face the economic situation.
For example, Trotsky had argued that the trade unions should be integrated into the state. Lenin, by contrast, argued that the process of building a workers’ state and socialism was not complete, and that the working class still needed independent unions to defend its economic interests. Trotsky argued that it was right to reintroduce the private market in some sectors of the economy, but that it was important to plan the state-run sectors so that the private sector did not outstrip them and so that living standards could be improved. Lenin initially opposed these arguments but eventually came to agree.
The debates indicated that the revolutionary leaders were not united on what to do. The economic crisis, like the civil war, produced grave problems. Opponents of the Bolsheviks, such as anarchists, argue that Lenin was power-hungry from the beginning, that he wanted to concentrate political and economic power in his own hands, and that he set the stage for Stalin’s dictatorship.
But Luxemburg, who was often critical of the Bolsheviks, understood better the predicament, attacking “the spineless jelly-fish, the moaners” who couldn’t see that the issue wasn’t Lenin’s self-interest, but the party’s “unshakable resolve to defend by any means possible the power they had gained in Russia, in order to use it for the most energetic and radical changes” while they held out for the European revolution. Above all, she blamed the German socialist leaders for turning their backs on the Russian workers in their hour of greatest need.
The measures that were introduced could provide breathing space to the revolution, but they couldn’t solve the problem of its isolation, or the fact that the working class was exhausted and revolutionary democracy now hardly existed. Lenin had argued in the face of this that it was important always to tell the class the truth; not to lie and say you were building socialism when you weren’t.
Stalin represented something wholly different to this perspective. Stalin became the leader of the Soviet state following Lenin’s death. As the revolution attempted to “hold on”, a layer of bureaucrats, administrators and party functionaries began to form into a social layer with different interests from the workers. The spirit of self-sacrifice gave way to cowardice and careerism. These people wanted to climb the state bureaucracy, and criticising Stalin or party policy would have resulted in their removal from positions of power.
Trotsky wrote that the leadership of the party “lost touch with the lower ranks and had become transformed into a self-sufficient bureaucratic machine”. This bureaucratic machine “evoked the working class as something like a myth”, according to Deutscher. Disagreement and discussion were essentially banned, and purges of oppositionists began. And new theories were developed to justify the bureaucracy’s existence. Chief among them was the theory of “socialism in one country”, pushed by Stalin and his lackeys.
This was a reactionary and anti-Marxist position. That socialism cannot be developed in a single state was previously accepted as a fact. But Stalin used Marxist rhetoric to prettify a brutal increase in the exploitation of the labouring population.
The struggle for socialism continues
In this way, the revolution was crushed from within, and by some of the people who were associated with the revolution itself. It wasn’t inevitable that things would turn out like this. At all times, revolutionaries fought valiantly to forge a different path. From the revolutionaries in western Europe who attempted to win revolutions in their own countries, to the opposition movements that developed within Russia, to Trotsky, who was hounded by Stalinist agents until he was ultimately murdered in exile.
Opponents of the rising bureaucratic regime were purged, exiled and assassinated because they represented a politics that was antithetical to Stalinism—that is, they represented the genuine Marxist tradition. Trotsky and his supporters argued that, to save the revolution, industry needed to be rebuilt, in conjunction with the rebuilding of democracy in society and in the workplaces, and, crucially, with a renewed fight for an international revolution. For the Stalinist regime to survive, these ideas had to be destroyed. Those who resisted kept alive Marxist politics in the face of reactionary Stalinist distortions. In his memoir, Leopold Tropper, a Polish Jewish communist, wrote:
“The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honour. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did ...
“Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not ‘confess’, for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.”
We need to build the forces of the revolutionary left everywhere, so that the next time workers take power, they aren’t isolated in a violent sea of capitalism and imperialism.
