A People’s Tragedy

Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924. Jonathan Cape, 1996

Of Tsarism, the bourgeois liberals under Tsarism, the Provisional Government in 1917, the Whites in the Civil War, and even the Mensheviks and the SRs, what Figes has to say is pretty much what the Bolsheviks said of them.

Thus, for example: “Trotsky described Martov as the ‘Hamlet of Democratic Socialism’ - and this is just about the sum of it… [His qualities] made him soft and indecisive when just the opposite was required”.

The Mensheviks, Figes notes, “had practically ceased to exist in Petrograd by the end of September [1917]: the last all-city party conference was unable to meet for lack of a quorum… Blind by their own commitment to the state, which made them defend the coalition principle at all costs, they ceased to act or think like revolutionaries and dismissed the workers’ growing radicalism and support for the Bolsheviks as a manifestation of their ‘ignorance’ and ‘immaturity’…”

About Kerensky he is more scornful than anyone else I’ve read. Kerensky actively fomented a personality cult around himself, equating himself with Napoleon. He would visit the front dressed in the finest uniforms, and “even wore his right arm in a sling, although there was no record that the arm had ever been hurt…”

Figes does not even have much more than scorn for the Constituent Assembly dispersed under the influence of the Bolsheviks and Left SRs in January 1918.

When Figes wants a pithy summing up of something or someone - as of Martov, above - it is usually Trotsky he turns to for the telling phrase. Yet Figes is vehemently hostile to Trotsky and the Bolsheviks. Discussing the civil war, he makes equations of them with Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War as frequent as they are nonsensical.

He especially hates Lenin. His first major reference to Lenin [p.129] is a claim that: “During the famine of 1891 he opposed the idea of humanitarian relief on the grounds that the famine would force millions of destitute peasants to flee to the cities and join the ranks of the proletariat: this would bring the revolution one step closer… In this contempt for the living conditions of the common people were the roots of the authoritarianism to which the revolution had such a tragic propensity…”

Figes cites no source. The story comes from one Vodovozov, later a Trudovik, writing 34 years later, in 1925. It was put into wider circulation by the biography of Lenin by the Menshevik David Shub. Bertram Wolfe criticised Shub, citing a discussion of Vodovozov’s story by Trotsky in his book The Young Lenin. Shub offered no reply other than that he considered Vodovozov “one of the outstanding Russian publicists, who devoted his life to the struggle for freedom and humanism” [Russian Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan., 1950), pp. 74-76].

Trotsky comments: “Vodovozov’s reminiscences on the subject represent not so much Ulyanov’s [Lenin's] views as their distorted reflection in the minds of liberals and Populists. The idea that the ruination and decimation of the peasants could promote the industrialisation of the country is too absurd in itself…

“The Marxists [not just Lenin, who then was not yet politically active, but edging through his studies from populism towards Marxism] of course opposed not aid to the starving, but the illusion that a sea of need could be emptied with the teaspoon of philanthropy… The Marxist Akselrod, then an émigré, was not alone in championing the view that ‘for the socialist… a genuine struggle against hunger is possibly only within the framework of the struggle against the autocracy’.

“Even the old moralist of the revolution, Lavrov, proclaimed in print: ‘Yes, the only “good cause” we can possibly embrace is not the philanthropic but the revolutionary cause’…

“When famine recurred seven years later, there were immeasurably fewer political illusions… A very moderate liberal journal wrote… that [the officially permitted relief operations were] a ‘pitiful measure’, whereas ‘general measures’ were needed…”

Figes goes on to claim that in his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Lenin wrote: “Socialist consciousness cannot exist among the workers. This can be introduced only from without” (p.152). Figes then refers back to this claimed assertion by Lenin as an explanation for Lenin’s actions in the civil war. In general he believes: “In everything he did, Lenin’s ultimate purpose was the pursuit of power. [Personal power, presumably]. Power for him was not a means - it was the end in itself” (p.504).

The simplest facts of Lenin’s life make nonsense of that claim. As a man with outstanding academic qualifications from a relatively well-off background, he could easily have sought “power” through rising through official society. Tsarist repression was not so vindictive as to bar careers to people with radical pasts. Lev Tikhomirov, the former leader of the terrorist Narodnaya Volya, recanted in 1888, in a big book entitled Why I Ceased To Be A Revolutionary, and within a year had a comfortable and influential position as editor of a right-wing paper.

Maybe Lenin was unconfident of Tsarism’s stability? But why then, among all the opposition parties, join Russian Social Democracy, and then the Bolshevik Party? One thing that marked off those parties from almost all opposition parties in history, paradoxically, was their belief that it was impossible for them to come to power! At most they aspired to a temporary minority place in a temporary “provisional revolutionary government” in the revolution they strove for. More, they believed, was impossible.

In What Is To Be Done? Lenin did not write what Figes claims. He wrote that in the absence of vigorous political intervention “from without” (i.e. by already-organised socialist activists), and in the presence of the vast array of bourgeois ideological influences in capitalist society, workers’ trade union struggles would lead only to “trade-unionist” consciousness and not to socialist consciousness. He admonished the socialist activists not to treat the workers like infants, to be talked to only on narrow economic issues, but to understand that the workers were fully capable of absorbing and developing the most advanced socialist ideas, but could not do so unless those ideas were presented to them energetically and vividly.

Later [p.550] Figes claims: “After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk [March 1918] there was no real prospect of the revolution spreading to the West. Lenin was quite adamant about this” - when? where? in fact Lenin said the exact opposite! - “To all intents and purposes, the ‘permanent revolution’ had come to an end, and from this point on, in Lenin’s famous phrase” - in fact Stalin’s, not Lenin’s! - “the aim of the regime would be limited to the consolidation of Socialism in One Country”.

If we were to grant all Figes’ demonisation of Lenin, we would face a mystery. Why did the Bolsheviks back him? Figes is candid enough to write:

“It was more than the dominance of Lenin’s personality that ensured the victory of his ideas in the party. The Bolshevik rank and file were not simply Lenin’s puppets… The idea that the Bolshevik Party in 1917 was a monolithic organisation tightly controlled by Lenin is a myth… In fact the party was quite undisciplined; it had many different factions… If in the end [Lenin] always got his way [in fact he didn't], this was due not just to his domination of the party but also to his many political skills, including persuasion…” [p.393].

The nearest that Figes comes to reconciling these strands is the thesis that the Bolsheviks were mostly “peasant sons, literate young men… who had left the village to work in industry or to join the army before 1917, and who in the process came to reject the ‘dark’ and ‘backward’ ways of the old peasant Russia” (p.813), and that this made them believe in the mission of a city-based bureaucracy, including themselves, to impose progress on the Russian countryside.

When Figes comes to 1917, he makes a great deal of the drunkenness and vandalism which followed the workers’ seizure of power in October. “The Bolshevik insurrection was not so much the culmination of a social revolution… more the result of the degeneration of the urban revolution, and in particular of the workers’ movement, as an organised and constructive force, with vandalism, crime, generalised violence and drunken looting as the main expressions…” [p.495].

He is scarcely warmer about the February revolution. Dismissing the claims of the liberals, Mensheviks, and SRs, he points out that those events too were accompanied by much violence, looting and disorder.

Presenting the story “warts and all”? Maybe. Figes explicitly rejects the idea that Russia could instead have progressed by quiet liberal reform. But the book, excellently written and full of vivid snippets of fact as it is, is curiously uncertain in tone, sometimes furiously denouncing the Bolsheviks, sometimes seeming ruefully to admit that for all their shortcomings they represented a heroic force of progress.

Figes’ chief source of indictments of the Bolsheviks is, of course, the brutalities of civil war. The Bolsheviks never claimed not to have been authoritarian, ruthless, and brutal in the civil war, and the bulk of Figes’ account is not very different from that given by the Bolshevik-friendly historian Jean-Jacques Marie in La Guerre Civile Russe. Figes offers occasional extra “atrocity stories”. Given the way Figes describes Lenin’s ideas, I give little credit to those “extras”.

But even, incongruously, while comparing the Red Army to Franco’s fascist army in the Spanish Civil War, Figes recognises that the Reds won the civil war primarily because of politics. Both Reds and Whites started with no army to hand - except the Czech Legion in the hands of the Whites - and had to build one. The war was decided by the ability of each side to “tap mass support or at least exploit mass opposition to the enemy”.

Figes himself gives a telling example. Late in 1920, the White army in the south, under Wrangel, decided that to win they had to try to “make a leftist policy with rightist hands”, as Wrangel himself put it. They evolved a land-reform programme.

But then they went to the villages with that programme in the form of a thick pamphlet, full of bureaucratic limitations to the land reform, trying to sell that pamphlet for 100 roubles. The Bolsheviks, meanwhile, were distributing the short, clear Decree on Land adopted by the Soviet government soon after October 1917 in millions of free leaflets. Leaflets and speeches won the civil war as much as guns did.

The reading book used to teach Red soldiers how to read, and later in primary schools, started with the line: “We are not slaves, slaves we are not!”

The figures whom Figes treats with most sympathy are the liberal aristocrat Prince Lvov, who became the head of the first Provisional Government in 1917, and the talented Tsarist general Brusilov. As Figes himself records, Brusilov joined the Red Army in 1920, and continued to serve the Bolshevik regime as Chief Inspector of Cavalry until he retired in 1924. He died in 1926, his coffin carried with full Red Army honours to a Russian Orthodox monastery (Brusilov had remained pious throughout).

Lvov went into exile but ended up half-endorsing the Bolsheviks. “The people and the power are, as usual, two different things. But Russia more than ever before belongs to the people… The people supports Soviet power. That does not mean that they are happy with it. But at the same time as they feel their oppression they also see that their own type of people are entering into the apparatus, and this makes them feel that the regime is ‘their own’.”

Figes himself, after eight hundred pages frequently equating Lenin not only with Stalin but also with Hitler and Franco, remarks that: “there were fundamental differences between Lenin’s regime and that of Stalin” (p.807). Does Figes subconsciously feel the same admiration that Bolshevism compelled from old Brusilov and Lvov? If so, he does not openly admit it. His conclusions are so philistine as to make Martov seem a hero of revolutionary decisiveness.

“The Russian Revolution launched a vast experiment in social engineering - perhaps the grandest in the history of mankind. It was arguably an experiment which the human race was bound to make at some point in its evolution, the logical conclusion of humanity’s historic striving for social justice and comradeship…

“The experiment went horribly wrong, not so much because of the malice of its leaders, most of whom had started out with the highest ideals” - this is what Figes says in his final pages, but in earlier pages he has freely equated Lenin, even early in his political activity, with Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, and Stalin! - “but because their ideals were themselves impossible… [for reasons] more to do with principles than contingencies.

“The state, however big, cannot make people equal or better human beings. All it can do is to treat is citizens equally, and strive to ensure that their free activities are directed towards the general good… We must try to strengthen our democracy”.