The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution

Illiberal Liberation, 1917-41

Lara Douds, James Harris, Peter Whitewood

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350117921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

How did a regime that promised utopian-style freedom end up delivering terror and tyranny? For some, the Bolsheviks were totalitarian and the descent was inevitable; for others, Stalin was responsible; for others still, this period in Russian history was a microcosm of the Cold War. The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution reasons that these arguments are too simplistic. Rather, the journey from Bolshevik liberation to totalitarianism was riddled with unsuccessful experiments, compromises, confusion, panic, self-interest and over-optimism. As this book reveals, the emergence (and persistence) of the Bolshevik dictatorship was, in fact, the complicated product of a failed democratic transition. Drawing on long-ignored archival sources and original research, this fascinating volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to reconsider one of the most important and controversial questions of 20th-century history: how to explain the rise of the repressive Stalinist dictatorship.

PART I

BOLSHEVIK IDEOLOGY AND PRACTICE

CHAPTER 1

DICTATORSHIP UNLIMITED: LENIN ON THE STATE, MARCH–NOVEMBER 1917

Erik van Ree

Today few would deny that, whatever their original intentions, the Bolsheviks ended up creating an autocratic power. Much less clear, however, is the relative weight of the factor of circumstance – socio-economic backwardness, isolation, civil war and so on – and of the Leninist frame of mind and mentality. Was this a case of broadly democratic intent that, given highly unfavourable circumstances, just could not be effected, or was Lenin’s radical democracy flawed to begin with?

This chapter hopes to contribute to the latter reading of the events, but it is not my intention to deny the significance of circumstance. My point is that Lenin’s ideas on the state as they crystallized in the course of 1917 were conducive to the autocratic formation of the Soviet Union. This chapter focuses on Lenin’s writings in the months March to November 1917, when he was preparing his party to overthrow the Provisional Government and to seize power for itself.¹

Lenin imagined the proletarian state as a radical democracy of soviets underpinned by workers’ control and workers’ militia. He wrote his most systematic exposé on State and Revolution in August–September, when he was hiding in Finland from the Provisional Government that had issued a warrant for his arrest. The text, which was published only after the Bolshevik takeover, announced the ‘most extensive democracy’.² The population would have to participate in ‘day-today administration’³ as well as in the ‘governing (upravlenii) of the state’.⁴

The existing literature offers a wide range of interpretations of Lenin’s plans. Neil Harding suggests that Marx and Engels bequeathed not one but two views of the state to him. Whereas prior to 1871 Marx would have advocated proletarian state centralization, the Paris Commune allowed him to reframe the revolutionary state as radically decentralized workers’ autonomy. In Harding’s reading, what Lenin wrote in 1917 was indebted to Marx’s democratic model. After 1917 he returned to Marx’s state centralism. In this interpretation, his early speculations about the proletarian state were in no way responsible for the Bolshevik autocracy that followed. On the contrary, this unfortunate turn of events came about only because these speculations were being discarded.⁵ Kevin Anderson likewise casts Lenin as an adherent of ‘direct mass self-rule’ and ‘direct, or council, democracy’.⁶

But it has long been established in the scholarly literature that the Lenin of State and Revolution was no crystal-pure proletarian democrat. Christopher Read characterizes his 1917 model as an ‘ultra-democratic’ structure geared towards protecting the common people against oppression.⁷ Read points however to flaws in Lenin’s argumentation, mainly that he regarded workers not following his guidelines as a bourgeois force.⁸ According to James Ryan, State and Revolution advocated a ‘direct democracy of proletarian self-rule.’ But Lenin also advocated leadership by the ‘vanguard party’ and, in advocating strict control, coercion and violence he to some extent expressed ‘the ideological and cultural bases in embryo of dictatorial rule.’⁹

Even before he assumed the chairmanship of the Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin understood the need of a proper administrative state machinery. His armed workers could do only so much. Christopher Hill pointed out in 1947 that the Bolshevik leader did not fully accept Marx’s call to smash the old state apparatus: he exempted the economic state bureaucracy from that fate. The administrative machinery of the banks and syndicates would have to be taken over by the soviets rather than be dismantled.¹⁰ According to Alain Besançon, Lenin advocated that the state ‘not be reduced but rather immeasurably extended’.¹¹

Several authors point to the influence of Rudolf Hilferding and Nikolai Bukharin on Lenin. These fellow-Social Democrats suggested that the new administrative structures of trusts, syndicates and banks would allow a smoother transition to planned, socialist regulation.¹² Lars Lih argues that Lenin did not advocate the smashing of the bourgeois state machinery, but only that it be ‘thoroughly democratized’. Lenin hoped to copy and perfect the bourgeois ‘wartime state’ as a ‘ready-made tool’. According to Lih, he especially admired Germany’s Waffen- und Munitionsbeschaffungsamt. ‘Lenin’s vision of socialist revolution can be paraphrased as “WUMBA for the people”’.¹³ This is as far as we can possibly get from Lenin the workers’ democrat.

Another important contribution focused on the one-sidedly administrative as opposed to political orientation of Lenin’s conception of the proletarian state. A. J. Polan argues that, for all the ink he wasted on workers’ control and workers’ militia, Lenin had nothing like a political democracy in mind – not even for the workers. He was uninterested in creating a political structure that would allow them free deliberation and decision-making. Lenin identified workers’ participation with ‘a right to partake in the monitoring of administrative processes’. His was a technocratic conception, with politics collapsing into administration.¹⁴

Recently, Tamás Krausz staged a powerful defence of Lenin’s radical-democratic credentials. In Krausz’s reading, the latter was motivated by the obvious defects of bourgeois parliamentarism in the early twentieth century, which he regarded as inevitably tied up with this form of democracy.¹⁵ Krausz flatly denies that Lenin’s alternative democratic model suffered from any sort of authoritarian or violent leanings.¹⁶ He defended hierarchical, state-capitalist arrangements only for a short transitional period.¹⁷

Most importantly, Krausz finds Polan and other liberal critics of Lenin’s alleged democratic deficit to be ahistorical and ‘presentist’: in his eyes such critics are retrospectively imposing their own present-day political views upon history.¹⁸

It seems to me that this critique is misguided. Undeniably, Lenin’s taste for dictatorship stands out more starkly against present-day realities than against those of his own days, when Krausz points out much of Europe’s adult population still was excluded from the vote. But the values of equal rights for all were widely available even at that time. International Social Democracy, the party Lenin officially still adhered to, defended these values; they were not the only ones to do so. No doubt, critical analysis of historical personalities must be tied in with contemporary perspectives available to them. It wouldn’t make much sense to accuse Lenin of not having taken LGBT identities into account in State and Revolution. But I see nothing ahistorical in exploring the Bolshevik leader’s views from a perspective of liberal universalism, if he was perfectly acquainted with that perspective and was even polemicizing against it himself.

Lenin regarded himself as a radical democrat, and measured against a definition of democracy narrowly centring on popular participation that is what he was. But I will argue that, for all his overwrought and feverish infatuation with armed workers monitoring the state, his thinking was fundamentally anti-democratic. Lenin’s outlines of the Soviet state foreshadowed the autocratic pattern of the Bolshevik dictatorship in all important respects. Nobody who would have been in a position carefully to study what this man was writing could have doubted that, if he ever came to power, the only remaining sensible thing to do was to board the first train north from Finland Station.

Social democratic thinking on the state

Lenin’s interest in the question of the state was triggered in 1915, when Bukharin submitted an article called ‘Toward a Theory of the Imperialist State’ for publication in Sbornik sotsial-demokrata.¹⁹ Lenin as journal editor rejected the piece.²⁰ A shorter version, ‘The Imperialist Robber State’, was however allowed to appear in the journal Jugend-Internationale the next year.²¹

In December 1916 Lenin, the exile in Zürich, wrote that Bukharin was mistaken in assuming that socialists want to ‘blow up’ the state. On the contrary, they want to capture and use it for their own purposes. The proletarian dictatorship would be subjected to a process of gradual ‘withering away’ only after its task of creating a classless society would be fulfilled.²²

This would have been incomprehensible for readers unacquainted with the subtleties of Marxist thought. Bukharin and Lenin were referring to certain key passages in the works of Marx and Engels.

The two fathers of modern communism began their political careers as democratic republicans, an ideal they never abandoned. The Communist Manifesto defined the ‘establishment of democracy’ as the first goal of the proletarian revolution – not altogether unreasonable at a time when the workers were mostly excluded from the vote.²³ Marx and Engels expected the newly established democracy to expropriate the means of production, thus ushering in communism.

When the revolutions of 1848 ended in defeat and in France ended in Emperor Louis Bonaparte, Marx concluded in 1852 that the bureaucratic state machineries and standing armies functioned as bulwarks of the counter-revolution. Victorious revolutionaries must not simply capture these institutions and set them to work but ‘smash [brechen]’ them.²⁴ Later, the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 suggested to him that workers’ governments need only a small apparatus of elected civil servants close to the people, subject to recall at all times and working for workers’ wages.²⁵

Marx and Engels furthermore defined states in terms of class and as instruments of violent repression of particular classes.²⁶ Upon the disappearance of class differences, the state logically would lose its raison d’être. In the formulation of the Communist Manifesto, it then ‘loses […] its political character’.²⁷ As Engels wrote in 1874, only ‘simple administrative functions’ will remain.²⁸ It was also Engels who concluded that, once government will be reduced to ‘the administration of things and the management of production processes’, the state ‘withers away’.²⁹

In early 1917 Lenin would tie these scattered observations made over a number of decades together into one simple sequence: the triumphant proletariat will first smash the bourgeois state machinery; then create a state of its own that is at once repressive and radically democratic; and then, finally, allow that new proletarian state to wither away as the classless society is realized.

But in December 1916 Lenin did not yet see things in this light. Marx’s and Engels’s views on the state had not been self-evidently accepted in the international Social Democratic movement. For Karl Kautsky, the main German party ideologue and a man deeply admired by Lenin until they fell out over the issue of the war, the proletarian renovation of the state apparatus would essentially mean bringing it under parliamentary control.³⁰ In 1912, Kautsky argued against the Dutch Social Democrat Anton Pannekoek that it was in the nature of modern production to fall under a ‘bureaucratic organization’. Bureaucracies must be controlled, not reduced, let alone destroyed.³¹

Obviously, Lenin was still in sympathy with Kautsky when he berated Bukharin for anarchism in December 1916. But apparently he was not sure of his case. He plunged himself into an intense reading programme. His January–February 1917 notebooks with excerpts from and comments on works by Marx, Engels and Kautsky testify to a fundamental change of mind. He now came to accept that the bourgeois state-apparatus could not be set to work but would have to be destroyed.³² He admitted to Aleksandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand that Bukharin had been closer to the truth than Kautsky.³³

To smash or not to smash, that’s the question

When the tsar was overthrown, Lenin immediately recognized the potential of the soviets to evolve into a new government. But it would not have been a foregone conclusion that the revolutionaries must dismantle the existing bureaucracies.

Lenin’s reading programme had immersed him in Marx’s radical-democratic formulas, which clearly thrilled and exhilarated him. But once a transition to socialism of sorts actually began to look feasible for the relatively near future, he was sober enough to recognize that ‘smashing the state apparatus’ alone could not bring him very far. Russia’s bureaucratic realities could not be ignored.

Lenin was faced with a peculiar dilemma that he shared with all Social Democrats of the time. In his very authoritative Anti-Dühring, Engels had noted that the scale of capitalist production was all the time increasing and that establishments such as railways, post and telegraph could only be properly managed by the state. Engels believed nationalizations by the capitalist state would facilitate the transition to socialism.³⁴ In 1891 he observed that joint-stock companies and trusts, monopolizing whole branches of industry, effectively put an end to the ‘absence of planning [Planlosigkeit]’.³⁵ Shortly before his death Engels concluded that the transition to socialism had become so much easier that it could be effected ‘overnight’.³⁶ The celebrated Austrian economist and Social Democratic Party ideologue Hilferding concluded in 1910 that the ban...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Contributors
• Introduction: Illiberal Liberation, 1917–41
• Part I Bolshevik Ideology and Practice
• Part II Workers’ Democracy and Soviet State-Building
• Part III Internal Party Democracy
• Part IV Repression and Moderation
• Part V National Tensions and International Threats
• Part VI Culture and Society: Experimentation and Control
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint