Before Stalinism (part 2)

Click here for part 1 of this post.
By early 1921, the civil war had finished, and so there was no good reason for relaxing the emergency measures?
If Martov’s Mensheviks had been re-legalised in November 1918, and pro-Soviet SRs re-legalised in February 1919, surely all “soviet” parties could easily have been re-legalised in 1921?
Unfortunately, things were not so easy.
Jean-Jacques Marie’s recent book on the civil war is titled “The Russian civil war, 1917-22″. Without making any special polemic on the point, Marie makes clear that large-scale armed conflict continued after the defeat of the main organised counter-revolutionary armies in early 1921. There were very large anti-Bolshevik peasant uprisings in mid-1921, for example.
Meanwhile the country was exhausted, and ravaged by drought, famine, and disease.
The Bolsheviks knew the history of the French Thermidor. They knew about the overthrow of Robespierre - initially, by what presented itself as merely a dissident Jacobin faction, committed to continuing revolutionary government, only with a relaxation and repudiation of Robespierre’s rigour - on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794). They knew it had been followed within a few months, in a gradual and smooth but speedy slide, by a full-scale White Terror, the definitive expulsion of the sans-culottes from serious political influence, and the formal replacement of the revolutionary 1793 constitution by a new, conservative template.
They knew also that Thermidor had been triggered, paradoxically, by the great French victory at Fleurus (26 June 1794). The Fleurus victory produced a desire for relaxation, a backlash against the rigours of the revolutionary regime.
We saw something of the same sort in Nicaragua in 1988-90. The Sandinistas, essentially, won the war against the US-backed Contras, who finally laid down arms in 1988. The electorate, exhausted and strung out, then in 1990 voted in the candidate of UNO, the Contras’ political front. In Nicaragua the 1990 overturn was not followed by a White Terror as in France. The Bolsheviks knew from many examples - Finland, Hungary - that a Thermidor in Russia would be followed by a White Terror vastly greater than that in France in 1795 and after.
They did not believe in exact analogies; and they knew, too, that Marx and Engels had criticised the follies of the Jacobin Terror. But they sought to learn from revolutionary experience. Rakovsky wrote about this in 1928, not to excuse the Bolshevik policies of the early 1920s, or the slowness of the Left Opposition to rebel, but to understand the whole process, from exile.
“Babeuf, after his emergence from the prison at Abbaye, looking about him, began by asking himself what had happened to the people of Paris… In one single phrase, in which can be felt the bitterness of the revolutionary, he gave his observation: ‘It is more difficult to re-educate the people in the love of liberty than to conquer it’.
“We have seen why the people of Paris forgot the attraction of liberty. Famine, unemployment, the liquidation of revolutionary cades (numbers of these had been guillotined), the elimination of the masses from the leadership of the country, all this brought about such an overwhelming moral and physical weariness of the masses that the people of Paris and the rest of France needed 37 years’ rest before starting a new revolution…
“I have never let myself be lulled by the illusion that it would be sufficient for the leaders of the Opposition to present themselves in party rallies and in workers’ meetings in order to make the masses come over to the opposition… the premise should have been that the work of educating the party and the working class was a long and difficult task…”
The Bolsheviks in 1921 faced a far greater mass exhaustion than the Jacobins in 1793. Fourteen million dead since 1914! Four and a half million dead in the civil war! Seven million abandoned children! Industrial production collapsed!
Lenin’s health, so it turned out, had been fatally undermined by the strain of 1917-21. Trotsky was ill for many of the following years: evidently he was at the point of exhaustion too.
“A political reaction set in after the prodigious strain of the Revolution and the Civil War”, wrote Trotsky in Stalin. The Bolsheviks knew at the time that there was a grave danger of reaction.
Harassed, exhausted, they were nevertheless determined to keep the revolutionary possibilities open. They wanted to stave off Thermidor long enough to keep open the possibility of reconstituting the working class and “re-educating in the love of liberty”, and the possibility of victorious workers’ revolution in Western Europe, on which, they knew, any long-term prospects depended. They knew that a Thermidor in Russia, like the defeat of Paris Commune, would disperse and dissipate the new revolutionary parties in the West, removing any possibility of early revolution in the West. The only reliable instrument they had for warding off collapse into the chaos was the tempered working-class vanguard organised in the Bolshevik party.
So, they emphasised closing ranks, keeping the party solid against the triple threat posed to it by the large surviving corps of Tsarist officials, the exhaustion and revolution-weariness of the mass of workers and peasants, and the new layers of merchants and rich peasants who they knew would emerge with NEP.
They were defeated. The party was unable to hold out. It was crushed between the stones of officialdom and mass disillusion, with the assimilation of a part of the party into the officialdom on the one hand, and the Lenin levy on the other.
To say with hindsight that all their emergency measures, whether in 1918-21 or in 1921 itself, were right would be foolish. Trotsky in later years certainly seems not to have thought so. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote earlier, in less dire circumstances: “Surely nothing can be farther from their thoughts [Lenin's and Trotsky's] than to believe that all the things they have done or left undone under the conditions of bitter compulsion and necessity in the midst of the roaring whirlpool of events should be regarded by the International as a shining example of socialist policy…”
Some measures seem unambiguously damaging, for example the invasion of Georgia in February 1921. Trotsky, in Stalin, argues that the peace deal between Menshevik Georgia and Bolshevik Russia could not have held for very long anyway, but offers no sustained argument for why. And even so, as he himself cogently argued, the “premature” invasion had enormous damaging effects.
Trotsky in his later years also pointedly refrained from positively defending the 1921 ban on factions in the Bolshevik party, and the blanket ban on non-Bolshevik parties. In fact, we now know, that ban did not stop a dangerous faction (or “party”) growing up within the Bolshevik party, and indeed around its Secretariat, a faction that merged with the old ex-Tsarist officialdom.
We also know that the loyal Bolsheviks had a wrong idea about where the main Thermidorian danger lay - for long they tended to see the Bukharin-Rykov-Tomsky faction, with its advocacy of going easy on the rich peasants and slow on industrialisation, as the main danger - and a wrong idea about the shape of the Thermidorian reaction.
But all that is different from saying that the Bolsheviks erred by not understanding democracy. They had a better general schooling in democracy than any socialist is likely to have today. They were not immune to pressures. As Trotsky wrote (again in Stalin):
“The three years of Civil War laid an indelible impress on the Soviet government itself by virtue of the fact that very many of the administrators, a considerable layer of them, had become accustomed to command and demand unconditional submission to their orders… Stalin, like many others, was moulded by the environment and circumstances of the Civil War, along with the entire group that later helped him to establish his personal dictatorship…”
It is entirely arguable, for example, that the abject failure of the Bolshevik emissary Kuzmin to win over the Kronstadters in February 1921 - whereas in many cases in 1917-21, though surely it cannot have been all, Bolshevik agitators did win over vacillating or rebelling fighters - was to do with a peremptory, impatient tone in what he said, the result in him (and other Bolsheviks) of those years of civil war pressure and habituation.
The Bolsheviks knew about democracy. They knew - to some extent: in such cases it is surely impossible to know completely - about the reshaping effect on them of the huge pressures of the civil war. They knew - in general, though as it would turn out, with errors about identifying the exact shape of it - about the danger of Thermidor. Knowing all those generalities, they had to make judgements on the spot about what emergency measures to take.
Their picture of the situation they were in is summed up in Lenin’s letter to Miasnikov in August 1921:
“We have many maladies. Mistakes… have greatly aggravated the maladies springing from our situation… Want and calamity abound… They have been terribly intensified by the famine of 1921.
“It will cost us a supreme effort to extricate ourselves, but we will get out, and have already begun to do so… We will extricate ourselves because we do not try to make our position look better than it is. We realise all the difficulties”.
In that letter, Lenin also wrote: “Revive the Soviets; secure the co-operation of non-Party people; let non-Party people verify the work of Party members: this is absolutely right. No end of work there, and it has hardly been started”.
Such comments indicate that, despite this or that remark, it was not the case that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had come to see the conversion of the Soviets into rubber-stamps for the party - which they knew had happened on a large scale during the civil war - as a norm, or not a problem. Only, they thought, and not without some reason, that, for fear of Thermidor, the relaxation of civil war tension could only be carried out cautiously or carefully.
It seems to me that the programme of the Workers’ Opposition, with their idea of shifting power from the party to the trade unions, could only have accelerated Thermidor. But it is hardly likely all the emergency measures were just the right ones, or even that all the oppositions of 1920-1 were wrong on every point.
But the general injunction “more democracy” - and the general head-shaking - “the Bolsheviks had their good points, but they didn’t quite get there on the question of democracy” - would not and could not have been sufficient to make better judgements.
Farber’s complaint about the various oppositional groups in the Bolshevik party, “right” and “left”, not supporting each other reflects, I suggest, an misappreciation of the problem. All the groupings in the Bolshevik party knew, more or less, that they faced “many maladies”, already made worse by many “mistakes”, and they needed emergency measures of some sort. They differed, reasonably enough, on the emergency measures. But, rightly, they were not inclined to make a catch-all coalition against Lenin between all those who wanted a set of emergency measures in some way more “democratic” than Lenin’s preference. They could all see that “do anything, as long as it is more democratic than Lenin’s preference” was no answer.
Farber conflates this issue with the different one of the advisability of alliances between the Left Opposition and the Bukharin-Rykov-Tomsky Right later on, when the Stalinist group had already become a proto ruling class.
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For the future, it seems, Farber wants a socialist movement with, to be sure, some of the vigour of the Bolsheviks, but different from the Bolsheviks in being less ruthless - more careful about the formal and procedural stipulations of democracy, and with “a greater sensitivity to majority wishes”.
Yet the older Bolsheviks, as we have seen, had spent all their pre-1917 political lives fighting above all for the formal and procedural stipulations of democracy. They had probably the liveliest, most genuinely democratic, political party in history, a party vastly different from the Stalinist and cod-Trotskyist models of alleged “Bolshevism”. They had carried out one of the most democratic revolutions in history, and then, in the struggle to convert the Soviet congress vote into an effective revolutionary power, one of the most courageous and daring exercises in winning a majority ever seen in history. That did not guarantee to them correct judgement on emergency measures.
The search for guarantees, outside time and circumstance, that we will be more democratic than the Bolsheviks, is fruitless. In practice it seems to lead to diffuseness and diffidence of organisation, as in the US socialist group Solidarity, where many important political issues are blurred by an overwhelming desire to achieve consensus and avoid sharp conflict. Sam Farber, when I have spoken to him, has been critical of that blurring-for-consensus in Solidarity; yet he himself is not even formally a member of Solidarity, let alone an active fighter for a more militant organisation.
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In Farber’s introduction the question is already begged by posing the question as “democracy” in general. It is of course possible to argue that the contrast between workers’ democracy and bourgeois democracy is a false counterposition, serving only to license abrogations of supposedly “bourgeois” but actually general-democratic rights; the point here is that Farber does not make the argument, but only assumes it.
The question is further begged by insisting that China, Cuba, and Vietnam “cannot be considered independent revolutionary experiments” because they followed “the Russian model” - and by equating that “Russian model”, in different sentences in one and the same paragraph, with “the Russian Revolution” and “Stalinist Russia”. There is a slight demur, in which Farber says he is referring to “the eventual outcome of the revolution” rather than to “the October 1917 upheaval”; but no word about an actual counter-revolution coming between the two.
The autocracies in China, Cuba, and Vietnam are explained by “the political upbringing of the revolutionary leaderships”, their “conscious political and ideological choices”, without any word of the social (non-working-class) character of those revolutions. The “key question” is defined - in advance - as “if, and to what degree and for how long, objective obstacles and crises confronting a successful revolutionary movement can justifiably be claimed as reasons to abridge democratic freedoms”.
All that presumes that the Stalinists and Castroites were the same sort of movement, in basic social terms, as the Bolsheviks, but led astray by the malign influence of “the Russian model” which in turn is malign because it reflects bad choices about emergency measures. If given better models to follow on what to do in emergency, they might have installed workers’ democracies.
It is - to give the nearest, though very imperfect, analogy I can think of - as if one were to discuss the repressive measures of France’s Second Empire (which took some models from the First Empire) in terms of the excessive or misguided emergency measures of the Jacobins in 1793-4. The Jacobins may indeed have made bad choices of emergency measures in 1793-4; those bad choices may have contributed to revolutionary exhaustion and demoralisation, and made it easier for the Directory and then the Empire to impose their authoritarian rule. But the point is that both First Empire and Second Empire represented different social forces from the Jacobins of 1793-4.
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So the question is mis-posed from the start. In Farber’s whole presentation, there is an assumption that the defining problem, the problem to be addressed, is that the Bolshevik party, starting with emergency measures to save the revolution in dire straits, ended up consolidating those measures into a vicious system of dictatorial rule by itself - a somewhat transformed self, to be sure, but essentially, itself. That is not what happened except in the most nominal sense that Stalin took the old names of Bolshevism to apply to his very different machine. Rather, as Trotsky put it:
“The limitation of the party as a historical instrument is expressed in the fact that at a certain point, at a given moment, it begins to disintegrate. Under the tension of external and internal pressures, cracks appear, fissures develop, organs begin to atrophy.
“This process of decomposition set in, slowly at first, in 1923 [yes, one can reasonably argue that Trotsky should have dated the start earlier], and rapidly increased in tempo. The old Bolshevik party and its old heroic cadres went the way of all flesh: shaken by fevers and spasms and excruciatingly painful attacks, it finally died.
“In order to establish the regime that is justly called Stalinist, what was necessary was not a Bolshevik party, but the extermination of the Bolshevik party”.