Unlike Orlando Figes, Robert Service notices Lenin stating in 1920: “We’ve always emphasised that a thing such a socialist revolution in a single country can’t be completed”. “Lenin’s zeal for spreading the October Revolution was undiminished… The prospects for an isolated Russia were pathetic”.

Service also knows – from his own unsympathetic but far from worthless book, The Bolshevik Party In Revolution, 1917-1923 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1979) – that “the Bolshevik party was not [a] well-oiled machine of command… Organisationally the party was as anarchic as any other contemporary political party. It was also equally subject to the vagaries of the post and telegraph services…”

He gives, for example, a much more plausible account of Lenin in the July days of 1917 than does Figes.

Service: “Out on to the balcony he went, and told the crowd to stay calm. He asserted that the anti-governmental demonstration should above all be peaceful. This did not go down well… But his judgement held sway…”

Figes: “When [Lenin] was finally persuaded to make an appearance on the balcony, [he] gave an ambiguous speech, lasting no more than a few seconds… He did not even make it clear if he wanted the crowd to continue the demonstration… Perhaps Lenin lost his nerve…”

Service rejects Figes’s ludicrous claim that when Lenin was expelled from Kazan University in 1887 because of a small student demonstration, “this effectively ended Lenin’s chance of making a successful career for himself within the existing social order, and it is reasonable to suppose that much of his hatred for that order stemmed for this experience of rejection”. (Actually, Lenin secured permission to complete his legal studies as an external student, qualified, and practised law, before he became an active revolutionary. But, in any case, the idea that someone devotes their whole life to overthrowing the state just because of a student mishap…)

Service gives an account of What Is To Be Done? which, though flimsy and uncomprehending, at least steers away from the myth that the pamphlet is a blueprint for authoritarian rule.

Service’s Lenin is, in short, less of a caricature demon than Figes’s. In some respects his book gives genuine information.

We learn, for example, that Lenin’s health was collapsing as early as early 1920 – “the headaches, the insomnia and the heart attacks continued to give him trouble”.

“By mid-1921… his health, which had never been wonderful, was in drastic decline. He could no longer put in a full day’s work. The chronic headaches and insomnia had got worse, and he had suffered a series of ‘small’ heart attacks… he was seriously ill”.

When we analyse the Bolsheviks’ deeds and misdeeds in 1921 – as we should do, and as anti-Bolsheviks often do with immense sneering at the Bolsheviks’ supposed incomprehension of the democratic principle that the critics can champion so well from their armchairs – we should bear in mind that this was a government not only beset by economic collapse, famine, and mass peasant rebellion, but also run by people exhausted and with their nerves mangled by three years of strain such as we cannot imagine.

It was not just that Lenin was desperately ill long before his stroke in May 1922. Trotsky was much diminished in vitality, and invalid much of the time, from the end of the civil war to about 1926. Other leading Bolsheviks must have felt the same strain.

But Service never looks at the Bolsheviks’ actions in the civil war and 1921 as those of revolutionaries desperately trying to maintain their revolutionary bridgehead until the workers in the West can make their own revolutions; revolutionaries concerned that if they slacken, weaken, and fall, then the result will be not only the massacre of themselves and vast numbers of class-conscious workers in the former Tsarist Empire, but the collapse and disintegration of the revolutionary possibilities brewing in the West.

His method is to work backwards from every ill-tempered and exasperated comment made by Lenin in times of extremity, and the shortage of recorded comments by Lenin that he regretted the brutalities of the civil war (whom, one wonders, should Lenin have asked to record such comments in order to convince Service eighty years later that he “really cared”?). From those things, Service works backwards to a general claim that “the Leninists” believed that they had “irrefutable knowledge of the world – past, present and future” and therefore could and should use any methods to impose their ideas on the population. “Lenin eliminated concern for ethics”.

Service completes the chain with Vodovozov’s story about Lenin’s supposed welcome for the famine of 1891 (which I’ve discussed in my notes on Figes’s book).

Service’s case in brief, is that Lenin was a tense, imperious, highly-strung, short-tempered, self-confident, arrogant character, and to deduce his alleged amoral, authoritarian politics directly from that.

To be sure, all accounts other than Stalinist hagiography suggest that Lenin was anything but an easy-going character.

But Service seems to be brainwashed by the prevailing culture which would have us consider all political choices in function of the supposed personal qualities of Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and the rest of them. He seems unable to understand that politics have autonomy from personality. The leadership of a revolutionary party cannot be exercised effectively by anyone other than people with strong and forceful, even peremptory characters; but to condemn it on those grounds is no more than to sit on the sidelines of history wringing one’s hands and exclaiming: “Oh, if only history were made by nice, gentle, easy-going people!”

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”.

Reformist socialism? Who is there, who could there be, who would hold to such a doctrine today? As a positive scheme for a society of free and democratic cooperation, rather than as a negative hesitation at greater radicalism?
The entrenched Establishment of New Labour, the supposedly reformist party in Britain, will not even submit peacefully and constitutionally to a vote of their own conference to raise pensions a little, or to hold off on privatisation. They will not agree quietly even to have a debate in Parliament before taking Britain to war in Afghanistan, let alone a vote. They will allow no leeway to councils run by their own party on what they submit to their local voters and then carry out.
After all that, who can believe that the big Establishment behind that small Establishment – the big-business class which the Blair faction serves – would ever wait quietly while socialists won a majority in Parliament and then carried out our measures one by one, shaking hands with us as we expropriate them and congratulating us on a good clean fight?
Few active socialists do believe that. Many, however, hesitate at the stark alternative of committing themselves to revolutionary socialism. The great merit of Texier’s book is that he spells out as theory the half-thought ideas which must often underpin such hesitation.
Texier is an expert on Gramsci and a not-exceptionally-left-wing member of the French Communist Party. He defines his hesitation thus: “The 20th century saw a whole series of glorious revolutions… 1917… Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban… Algerian… They all failed to install a socialist system capable of functioning normally. Our revolutionary enthusiasm, without having disappeared, is accompanied by doubts about the capacity of revolutionary violence alone to give birth to a social system superior to capitalism”.
He pursues the question, not by analysing those 20th century revolutions, but by studying the ideas of Marx and Engels on revolution and democracy, and their interpretation by Lenin and Trotsky. His account is lucid and unpretentious, as good as summary of the ideas of Marx and Engels on the question as you will find anywhere.
His conclusion is that, despite the good and generous impulses behind it, the idea of permanent revolution – sketched by Marx and Engels, developed by Trotsky, then tacitly adopted by Lenin – is a snare.
Texier does not counterpose revolution to democracy in general. He recognises plainly that, contrary to liberal myth, historically it has taken revolutionary action to win democracy. But, he notes: “Effectively, it is hardly a question of democratic procedures during revolutionary confrontations”. So the question arises: “We can always wonder, ‘How long does a permanent revolution last?’ And the Stalinist despot has his reply ready: ‘As long as it takes, that is, a long time, or for ever’.”
Permanent revolution, argues Texier, was a tactic advocated by Marx and Engels for a particular time and place – continental Europe between 1848 and 1871. For Britain and the USA they saw a different perspective, peaceful revolution through a working-class parliamentary majority. Moreover, in his later years, Engels saw his and Marx’s “point of view of that time [1848-50] to have been an illusion”. He emphasised peaceful methods of struggle, and defined a democratic republic as “the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Texier knows that Engels never renounced the right of revolution, and emphasised, even when writing about the possibility of a peaceful working-class victory in Britain, that he “hardly expected the English ruling classes to submit, without a ‘pro-slavery rebellion’ [i.e. without violent clashes], to this peaceful and legal revolution”. Nevertheless, he believes that, in part because of defects in Lenin’s presentation in State and Revolution, the legacy of Marx and Engels has been transmitted in a one-sided way.
Where many “orthodox” neo-Trotskyists have argued that the Maoist revolution in China, for example, was a form of permanent revolution, because the Maoists started with a broad democratic alliance against the Japanese invaders and then pushed on to undivided “communist” power, Texier implicitly agrees. Only where the neo-Trotskyists saw credit for Mao, Texier sees discredit for permanent revolution.
In fact the Maoist road to power was not permanent revolution in any Marxist sense. Whatever the formal similarities, it was different in substance because the agency was a hierarchical military machine, ready to transform itself into the core of a state-centred exploitative ruling class against the workers, not the working class. The answer to the ensuing Stalinist despotism is a new revolution — only a working-class one.
But is it any wonder that activists hesitate to declare themselves “revolutionary” in general? Successful revolutions in the 20th century were generally operations by which a military force, building itself up by guerrilla war and by broad-bush democratic agitation, eventually went on the attack against a decrepit old power and replaced it by its own rule. Some were more benign (Nicaragua, for example), some were horrific (Cambodia), but Texier is right: none produced anything like a functioning socialist democracy.
The Russian revolution of October 1917 was something qualitatively different, a successful workers’ revolution, but the constraints of its isolation in poverty and its civil war against counter-revolution of 1918-21 make it look not so very different when viewed “backwards”, through the lenses of the ensuing Stalinist degeneration. (Texier knows that Stalinism was qualitatively different from Lenin’s regime. He believes, however, that Lenin’s revolutionary daring in 1917, and the ensuing emergency regime, laid the basis for Stalinism).
“Revolutionary” is no less ambiguous a word than “communist” or “socialist”, after the experience of Stalinism. Working-class democratic revolutionaries? Yes, that’s us! “Revolutionaries” in general? Tell us what sort of revolution you mean.
The problem is compounded by traits of the anti-Stalinist left. Too often, instead of denouncing revolutionary Stalinists for the sort of revolution they went for, we would denounce them for being too slow about that revolution, wanting to do it in “stages” for example.
From a working-class point of view, a revolutionary perspective means aiming to change society drastically and thoroughly – replacing the rule of the capitalist class by that of the working class, which is something that cannot be done quietly and bit-by-bit any more than a person can turn a somersault in gradual stages. That revolutionary perspective is not counterposed to reform. Only by struggles for reform can the working class gain the organisation, confidence and awareness necessary for revolution. It is counterposed only to reformism, meaning a doctrine which sees no further than piecemeal changes within the framework of status quo, and imagines that the working-class can be liberated just by the accumulation of those pieces.
This argument is quite distinct from the one about violence. Reformism can be violent, too! Can hard-fought strikes for better wages be won without pickets willing to use force if necessary? Can oppressed minorities resist fascist and racist violence without militant defence squads? You can answer no – that is, you can recognise that working-class and democratic fighters must sometimes use violence – while still being a reformist.
It is also distinct from the one about fetishising democratic forms above the substance of mass popular self-assertion. No militant trade unionist needs to be a revolutionary in order to recognise that successful strike leadership may sometimes clash with prissy punctilio about democratic procedures.

Like Clive Bradley in his review on the Workers’ Liberty website, I’m very glad that a book as combatively atheist as this has become a best-seller.

And it’s not a bad book. But I regret that the “opening” for a best-seller advocating atheism was not taken by a better book, and I think Dawkins himself could have done better.

The way it compares with Dawkins’ earlier books reminds me of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s comment on the contrast between Bertrand Russell’s later, more popular, writings (many of them, as Ray Monk’s biography of Russell shows, churned out to raise money, and with little regard for consistency and coherence) and his earlier work. “Russell isn’t going to kill himself doing philosophy now”, said Wittgenstein, with a sad smile.

Dawkins’ earlier books, like The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, are taut, closely-argued, conscious attempts to subvert common sense. You feel that the author stretched and challenged (if not quite killed) himself in order to construct the argument. That The Selfish Gene brought great hostility on Dawkins from many left-wingers (wrongly, I think) is in itself testimony to its ability to champion assumptions.

The God Delusion is much more knockabout, much more slackly written.

I do not at all object to the vehemence of the style. But it is not like the vigour you get, for example, in 19th century writers taking on a Church which smothered much of social life. Take Charles Bradlaugh for example, or Samuel Butler’s splendid, sharp though quiet, debunking of the New Testament in chapters 59 and following of The Way Of All Flesh.

Dawkins’ manner is more that of the knowing wink to his co-thinkers: “Well, as intelligent people, you and I can see that all this is rubbish, can’t we?”

He is good on the argument that God must exist because there must be some prior cause, something “before” the material world. He points out that if you accept this argument, then you must equally be driven to the conclusion that there was something or someone “before” God, a “cause” for God.

He comments that it is no reason beyond convention to find the idea of one God somehow less irrational than that of the sky, the sun, rocks, trees, etc. all containing their own diverse indwelling spirits or Gods. In fact, if you think about it, supposedly “primitive” many-spirits religion is far more reasonable than the ludicrous farrago believed by many people under the name Christianity.

However, he is wrong, I think, to equate the idea of religion too tightly with the idea of God. Doing so, he comments somewhere that he does not really consider Buddhism (in which there is no God, as such) to be a religion. But why let the Buddhists off the hook?

Logically, there is not much connection between religion and the idea of God. You can believe, if you like, that there was some being (“God”) which existed before the Big Bang and was in some way responsible for the creation and design of the universe.

Nothing “religious” – no idea that this “God” is concerned about your sex life, your diet, your haircut, your clothes, your attendance and behaviour at temples of one sort or another, and will punish you for faults in those respects – logically follows. On the face of it, it is no more likely this creator-”God” will take any interest in those things than that the sky, or the force of gravity, or electrons, will take such an interest.

Equally, if you say that you feel “God” inside you, giving you instructions about your sex life, diet, and so on, that amounts to no more than plain ordinary “hearing voices”, unless you can claim that these “instructions” are more than your individual hallucination.

What is religion? It is the belief that a defined book (Bible, Koran, etc.) and/or a defined hierarchy of officials (popes, dalai lamas, ayatollahs) have authority above and beyond any capacity of human reason or logic to instruct you about your sex life, your diet, your haircut, your clothes, your attendance and behaviour at temples of one sort or another; and to warn you credibly that, either in life or in some hypothetical existence beyond death, you will be punished terribly for getting those things wrong (eternal damnation, unfavourable reincarnation, etc.)

“God” is simply the prop that the officials may or may not use to bolster their claims. Emotionally, it is easy to see why it is tied with religion. Logically, the link is very loose.

Time for a book on “the religion delusion”.

Bosworth evidently has leftish sympathies, and his book gives a basic account of fascist Italy from Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922 down to his last stand in the Nazi-backed “Salo Republic” in northern Italy in 1943-5. Along the way it offers many interesting snippets of fact.

All that is good. The blurbs, however, describe the book as “beautifully written”, which it is not. A mannered, orotund style makes the book much longer than it need be, and sometimes leaves you in doubt as to what Bosworth is actually saying.

The book concerns itself much with polemic against other historians. Which is fine: except that either Bosworth is drastically oversimplifying those other historians’ views, or (if he is accurate) what they say is so daft that refutation is not very interesting.

Bosworth’s polemic is, on the one side, against those who claim that the fascist regime was basically good and sound, and not at all heavy-handed; and, on the other, against those who would claim that it was able to make enthusiastic, or at least fully compliant, fascists out of all Italians; that it could make a full and complete reality of the term “totalitarian” (first used in politics, apparently, as a term of self-praise by the fascists).

We already know that the fascists killed hundreds of workers in their preliminary “squadrist” sallies before they took power, and that opponents of the regime like the Marxist Antonio Gramsci were jailed (in Gramsci’s case, driven to death by jail conditions), or fled the country.

We also know that Mussolini’s regime was much slower than similar dictatorships to exert its full pressure. Trade unions and opposition parties were not fully crushed until 1926, four years after Mussolini took power. The full apparatus of the “corporate state” was not introduced until the mid 1930s.

Even then, political dissidents were generally only jailed or exiled to remote villages in Italy, not sent to death camps or shot out of hand as they were in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Amadeo Bordiga, Gramsci’s predecessor as leader of the Communist Party, was released from jail in 1930. He pursued his (presumably well-paid) career as an engineer, and as long as he kept quiet about politics, which he did, the government did not trouble him. He was not asked to renounce his views, and didn’t; from 1944, he returned to political activity as an unrepentant revolutionary anti-Stalinist communist.

The philosopher Benedetto Croce – though, like many other liberals, including some like Gaetano Salvemini who became well-known agitators against fascism from exile – he at first welcomed Mussolini’s seizure of power, soon became an unashamed opponent of the regime. He remained living in Italy. He had no access to the mass media, but the government did not try to stop him expressing his views in private conversation.

On top of all that, we know that even under Stalin’s vastly more bloodthirsty regime, “totalitarianism” was never complete, but always supplemented “at the bottom” by all sorts of dodges, work-arounds, and evasions. See, for example, Lynne Viola (editor), Contending With Stalinism (Cornell University Press, 2002).

It seems obvious common sense, then, to conclude that Mussolini’s Italy must have been riddled with vastly more dodges, work-arounds, evasions, and “reinterpretations” of fascism. Sometimes what seems obvious common sense is not true, and in such cases it is of great value to have our assumptions refuted. But Bosworth’s lengthy exercises in demonstrating that what we would have thought anyway, from naive common sense, is actually true, and exercising much sarcasm at the expense of other historians who allegedly argue differently, are not so helpful.

Obviously there were some enthusiastic, “fully-converted” fascists. Bosworth would help us if he could identify who they were.

In fact he only offers hints. The fascist movement pre-1922 was heavily based on world-war veterans, indignant at the anti-war attitude of the big majority of the Italian labour movement, and on activists of “border fascism” in such areas as Trieste.

Its membership was almost entirely confined to the northern cities. Paradoxically, when Mussolini, in power, called referendums, fascism would appear stronger in the south. In the northern cities a small minority would still dare to cast votes against Mussolini; in the south, almost no-one.

In July 1943 the Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini and, soon afterwards, went over from alliance with the Nazis to the Anglo-American side in the war. For two years Italy was divided between a Nazi-occupied north, nominally ruled by Mussolini (the Salo Republic), and a south, under the monarchy and a “post-fascist” government, aligned with the Allies. German and Anglo-American troops fought to hold or shift the border between north and south.

The north, then, had once again become the “more fascist” part of Italy, and the south the “less fascist”. Except that Bosworth’s detailed account indicates that support for Mussolini in the north was miniscule, his nominal rule upheld only by Nazi firepower; in the south, there was virtually no “de-fascist-isation”. Often the same elites – nominally Liberal before 1922, nominally Fascist between 1922 and 1943, and then nominally Christian Democrat after 1943 – ruled with very little change.

The post-1945 fascist movement, the MSI – long by far the strongest fascist movement in Western Europe, now given a “post-fascist” makeover by Gianfranco Fini and integrated into Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance – had its base in the south, not in the north.

Bosworth notes, interestingly but without making any summary or comment, that a lot of the initial fascist cadres came from the revolutionary syndicalist movement.

Mussolini himself had been a well-known figure on the left of the Italian Socialist Party, splitting early in World War 1 over his support for the war. Not many people came from the Socialist Party with him.

The syndicalist movement, however, had a full-scale split over the war. A new union federation, the USI, was formed by those who went with the French CGT in, first, advocating Italy’s entry into the World War on the side of the Allies, and, then, supporting the war once Italy was in it.

Some of those syndicalists had also supported Italy’s seizure of Libya as a colony in 1911.

Their chief argument, and one that was taken up as a frequent theme of fascist ideology, was that Italy was a “proletarian nation” by contrast with the “plutocratic” greater powers.

Notice the dates: 1917-22. J-J Marie establishes that the conventional account, according to which the civil war was over by the start of 1921, and all the “emergency” measures by the Bolsheviks after that stemmed only from the Bolsheviks’ supposed lack of democratic understanding, is false.

In spring and summer 1921, the Bolsheviks faced huge peasant uprisings in Tambov and other areas, as well as the Kronstadt revolt. And this in a country exhausted by years of war, with a total of maybe 14 million deaths since the start of World War 1, over four million in the civil war alone, seven million abandoned children, and raging drought, famine, and disease.

The Bolsheviks used ruthless force. Marie glosses over none of the horrors. He also shows that, for the Bolsheviks, force was always the second resort, in cases where they had failed to convince, and accompanied by attempts to convince.

To try to “turn” the Tambov peasant rising in spring 1921, for example, the Bolsheviks printed 326,000 leaflets, 11 pamphlets, and 28 issues of a special magazine.

In that way they continued as they had started the civil war. On 31 October, only a few days after the Soviets took power, General Krasnov attempted to lead his Cossacks against the new government.

Two Bolsheviks smuggled themselves into the Cossack barracks at 3am, spent five hours talking and arguing with the Cossacks, and eventually won them over to a neutral position.

The next day, the Bolsheviks were able to arrest Krasnov. Not yet hardened by civil war, they released him when he gave his word of honour not to raise new counter-revolutionary risings. Krasnov immediately went south to raise new White forces to fight Soviet power.

The Soviet government at that time rested almost exclusively on the power of political agitation. The Russian army was officially demobilised by the Soviet government on 12 February 1917, but in any case could not possibly have been used by the Soviets as their instrument. Police, civil service, courts – all had disintegrated or were hostile.

As a military power, the Soviet government did not exist – not until such time as it managed to build up a Red Army, and a minimal apparatus of administration and supply, by convincing workers and peasants to join the Bolsheviks in that effort. The early months of the Civil War went badly for the Bolsheviks mostly because of successive triumphs won by the Czech Legion – some 35,000 to 40,000 troops from the Austro-Hungarian Imperial army, taken prisoner under the Tsar, who, freed after the Revolution, decided to back the Whites. Even such a small “regular” force could at first overwhelm the improvised Red Guards.

The civil war was won only by heroic efforts of agitation – as when, a bit later, Trotsky single-handedly convinced 15,000 deserters in Riazan to adhere to the Red Army – but, as the war went on, it was coupled with increased ruthlessness.

The end result was a ruined, exhausted country, and a Bolshevik Party with its nerves wrecked. But the Bolsheviks had no choice, about the war, about the invasions by no fewer than 14 countries, or about the defeats and delays of the revolutions in Western Europe to which they looked for a way out.

This is a book worth reading, even though the style is curiously distant, and you will have to draw “the lessons” yourself from facts presented in the manner of a “flat” narrative.

Marie, a well-known academic supporter of the “Lambertist” strand of would-be Trotskyism, scarcely “editorialises” at all, except in the last couple of pages, where he adds on, without explanation, an “interpretation” much at odds with the rest of the book.

The civil war, he says, was about “two opposed and irreconcilable systems of property: private property and collective property in the means of production”; and then he goes on to bemoan the collapse of Stalinism in 1991 as signifying the defeat of the good side in that civil war and the “liquidation” of “almost all the social gains which had been linked, despite the total absence of political and trade-union freedoms imposed by the bureaucracy, to the collective property in the means of production”.

Actually, as E H Carr notes in his big History, the Bolshevik government in its early days rarely described itself as socialist. It called itself a “soviet” government, a “workers’ and peasants’ government”, and justified its decrees in terms of “workers’ and peasants’ power” or “democracy”. It did not nationalise industry until forced to, from below, in late 1918.

The Bolsheviks believed that any substantial advances in the way of socialism would depend on the victory of workers’ revolution in Western Europe, way beyond the narrow bridgehead they had established so heroically and so precariously in Russia. They would have rejected as nonsense any idea that “collective property in the means of production” – formally “collective”, but actually, as Marie well knows, ownership by a privileged bureaucracy at least as walled off from the workers and peasants as is the corps of big shareholders in Western capitalist corporations – could in itself, in abstract, in abstraction from any form of working-class political power, guarantee “social gains”.

Alfred Rosmer was a leading figure on the left of the revolutionary syndicalist movement in France before World War 1.

At the start of the war, the majority leadership of that revolutionary syndicalist movement collapsed into support for the French imperialist government’s war effort as dramatically as the German Social Democracy famously collapsed. In fact, perhaps even more dramatically, since anti-militarist agitation had been one of the key themes of syndicalist militancy. The CGT (France’s trade-union confederation, then under revolutionary syndicalist leadership), operating in relatively democratic France, had been much more flamboyant in its anti-militarism and its revolutionism than the cautious German Social Democrats, who operated in a semi-dictatorship.

In fact, one of the CGT leadership’s main excuses for their rallying to the “union sacree” (sacred union) with the French bourgeoisie was their claim that they had pressed the German unions for joint action against the war, and found them unwilling. (Rosmer shows in detail how hollow that excuse was).
The CGT, like the majority of the French Socialist Party, then justified France’s war as one against “imperialism and militarism”, identifying “imperialism” and “militarism” as being uniquely or primarily German (in much the same way as some leftists today identify “imperialism” as being uniquely or primarily American).

Rosmer was one of the minority of revolutionary syndicalists who remained true to their principles. Over the war years, bit by bit, they regrouped and organised the internationalists – from the old syndicalist movement, and also from the old Socialist Party – and prepared the way for the creation of the French Communist Party after the war.

Rosmer also worked closely with Trotsky, who spent a part of the war in Paris, working on the Russian-language internationalist paper Nashe Slovo.

Rosmer was expelled from the Communist Party in 1924, as part of a purge of those in France who sympathised with Trotsky and the Left Opposition in Russia. In 1929-30 he worked with Trotsky (who was now in exile) on bringing together as much as possible of the diverse Oppositionist groups in France into a coherent Trotskyist organisation, the Communist League.

In his 40s by then, and a quiet, cultured man by temperament – the pre-1914 revolutionary syndicalists, despite their strident “workerism”, were also a notably literary, studious lot – Rosmer found other Communist League leaders such as Raymond Molinier too uncouth to work with. He stepped aside.

In the 1930s, he re-knit his friendship with Trotsky. The founding conference of the Fourth International was held in Rosmer’s home, and he worked with the Trotskyists to try to expose the Moscow Trials.

He published volume 1 of Le mouvement ouvrier pendant la premiere guerre mondiale (The workers’ movement during the first world war) in 1936. Trotsky received it with high praise. Rosmer had almost finished volume 2 in 1939; then the German army invaded France and burned all his drafts and notes.

In the 1950s, Rosmer returned to the task, finding to his surprise that sufficient sources still remained for him to construct an adequate history. He published volume 2 in 1959, just five years before he died, in 1964.

Rosmer’s book achieves its effect by the quiet, dispassionate, meticulous accumulation of facts and documents, with only the most minimal commentary, and very little reference to his own personal role in events.

He shows how dramatic the CGT’s political collapse at the start of war was, and helps us understand how it happened. With the CGT, it was not so much that a fat, cautious bureaucracy had developed which could not cope with the idea of sharp conflict with the government. The pro-war swing of the German trade union leaders – which probably gave the decisive push turning the majority of the German Social Democratic leadership pro-war – was in large part of that character. The CGT was a bit different.

Before 1914, the CGT had no large army of officials. You can see a photo of its headquarters, the Maison des Federations, on page 194 of Alain Rustenholz’s Paris Ouvrier (Parigramme, 2003): it is a small, shabby building, and yet the acquiring of it (with money from a rich sympathiser: the CGT itself was nowhere near having the funds) had caused a major row in the organisation. The leading figures lived mostly as journalists on the labour movement’s various newspapers and magazines.

Rosmer comments on the Federation of Teachers (which, along with the Federation of Metals, had an anti-war stance from the start, and, unlike the Metals, managed to keep its congresses and journals going throughout the war, without a break) that “then, the workers’ movement managed to do a lot with very little money”. The comment would hold to some extent for the CGT as a whole.

But, being syndicalist, the CGT lacked clear politics. It talked about the idea of a general strike to stop war, but when the war came and it was obviously unable to organise a general strike, did not know what to do. From that intellectual collapse came its political collapse.

In chapter 14 of volume 2, Rosmer discusses in some detail Lenin’s attitude to the war. The conventional account, shaped by Zinoviev’s selection of articles to reprint in the 1920s when he (Zinoviev) wanted to boost his stature as the “intransigent” close comrade of Lenin in the war years, is of a Lenin insistent on his formula of “revolutionary defeatism”, and utterly scornful of any anti-war socialist who rejected the formula.

Rosmer shows, quietly but meticulously, that it isn’t true. The building-up of an internationalist current in France required constant collaboration and debate with the semi-internationalists, and Lenin did not object. Moreover, there is good reason to suppose that those, like <a href=”http://www.workersliberty.org/node/4507″>Trotsky and Luxemburg, who objected to the “defeatist” formula at the time</a>, were right, and that Lenin redefined his “defeatism” to make it almost meaningless in the later years of the war.

That debate has been covered in detail in a <a href=”http://www.workersliberty.org/node/4507″>book by Hal Draper</a>, and was covered earlier by articles by Draper and by Brian Pearce. Rosmer’s chapter suggests to me that Rosmer was the original source for such writers as Draper and Pearce.

Sam Farber, justly respected for his critical Marxist writings on Cuba, sums up his attitude in this book by quoting Victor Serge, an anarchist who rallied to the Bolsheviks after October 1917, became an activist in the Left Opposition, and then parted ways with Trotsky over his, Serge’s, rejection of Trotsky’s criticisms of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War.
“It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs… To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse.. is this very sensible?”
Farber amplifies and, I think, subtly skews and transmutes this assessment. His case, in brief, is that Lenin had a consistently and increasingly “flawed” understanding of the importance of democratic checks and balances, and that a better outcome in Russia could have been secured by some amalgam of the propositions of the various “left” and “right” Bolshevik oppositions, and by a will of those diverse oppositions to form a common bloc rather than (as they did do) arguing with each other as sharply as they did with Lenin.
In his chapter 1, mainly discussing developments in late 1917 and in 1918, Farber sums up by saying that an oppositional movement under an old regime can and should (in conditions of ferment) seek to create majority support by bold revolutionary tactics, rather than wait for majority support before it attempts any revolutionary tactics. But, he says, the rights and wrongs change when the revolutionaries are “holding the monopoly of the means of violence in a whole society”.
As a comment on Bolshevik considerations in 1917 and 1918, this is startlingly wide of the mark.
In the weeks after 25 October 1917, the Bolshevik (and then Bolshevik/ Left SR) government had essentially no means to implement its policies other than power and cogency of its political agitation.
It inherited no functioning state machine. On 12 February 1918 the Soviet government officially decreed the total demobilisation of the army, which was anyway in collapse.
Most government officials at first refused to cooperate. The new People’s Commissars had to scrabble just to find an office, a table, some chairs, some ready cash, to begin even nominal operation.
The Red Army was officially inaugurated on 20 February, but at first it could be built into an actual army only by persuasion and agitation.
The Bolshevik party was a functioning, coherent organisation. But, contrary to myth, it had no highly centralised party machine. The central “machine” consisted essentially of Sverdlov, carrying the “files” in his pockets and in his head, and at most half a dozen assistants. Their ability to impose strict organisational discipline on party members and units was slight even in St Petersburg and Moscow, let alone in outside areas with which even basic communication was difficult.
The Bolshevik party was a powerful revolutionary factor because of the force of its ideas and its revolutionary will, not because of any special strength of its organisational machine. Far from the Bolshevik party imposing a centralised structure of its own on the new state, the Bolshevik party acquired a strong centralised machine only as a by-product of its effects to construct a new state centralised enough to fight a civil war. Dangerously, and ultimately tragically, the centralisation of the Bolshevik party was “nested” inside the centralism of the state machine, rather than standing beside it. But there was no way round that.
Arguably, the whole tragedy of the civil war could have been diminished if the Bolshevik party in October 1917 had been more stereotypically “Bolshevik” – ruthless, organisationally tight, capable of having its own centralised machine apart from and alongside any state centralism. In fact, many of the best-known Bolshevik leaders resigned from their positions soon after the revolution in protest at the Bolshevik majority’s refusal to accept the Mensheviks’ and SRs’ conditions for a coalition government (namely, the Bolsheviks to have only a minority in the government, and that minority to exclude Lenin and Trotsky). Lunacharsky, the Bolsheviks’ best-known mass orator in 1917 after Trotsky, resigned because he had heard (inaccurate) reports that the Bolsheviks in Moscow, fighting to take power there, had damaged St Basil’s Cathedral.
Those episodes of wavering cannot but have encouraged all those who hoped to overthrow the new Soviet power by force.
The first attempt at armed overthrow of the Soviet government was set in motion on 31 October, by General Krasnov, leading a body of cossacks. It was defeated by two Bolsheviks smuggling themselves into the cossack barracks at 3am and arguing with the soldiers for five hours until they finally persuaded them to stay neutral and wait and see.
The next day, Bolsheviks were able to arrest Krasnov. They released him as soon as he gave his word of honour not to attempt counter-revolution again. The freed Krasnov immediately headed for the south in order to mobilise a counter-revolutionary army there!
It would be as foolish to mock the Bolsheviks’ “softness” in late 1917 as it would be to recoil in horror from their “hardness” in 1921. In neither era could the Bolsheviks jump over the head of history. Tsarist Russia simply did not give them the possibility of organising a party that could be “ideally” efficient, centralised, and ruthless.
In 1918 maybe the biggest factor in the civil war was the Czech Legion, a body of some 35,000 to 40,000 troops from the former Austro-Hungarian Imperial army who had been taken prisoner by the Tsar’s army. It regained freedom of operation in the ferment of revolution, and decided to throw its lot in with the Whites.
On the scale of the organised, established armies deployed in the World War, it was a tiny splinter. But in the conditions of 1917 and 1918 where there was no consolidated state machine at all – where no-one, least of all the Bolsheviks, had a “monopoly of violence” – that tiny splinter could loom as the most formidable military force in the country.
The Red Army was built, and the civil war was won, only by repeated episodes of daring comparable to that of the Bolsheviks who won over Krasnov’s cossacks. As the Red Army acquired some military clout and structure, the Bolsheviks did indeed use it ruthlessly. But throughout, and right through to the peasant revolts in 1921, agitation, by voice, leaflets, and pamphlets, was primary.
They could only have won the civil war by that agitation being successful. All the advantages of pre-established force were on the side of the Whites, who had most of the old Tsarist generals and top officers, and who had the backing of substantial foreign forces (from no fewer than 14 countries) including the Czech Legion.
***
Farber presents war communism as a folly of Bolshevik over-confidence. It is true that many follies were committed under war communism; that there was much misguided making virtue out of necessity during it (though it should be born in mind that many of those inventing those “virtues” will have seen them as flowering – soon – with the extension of the revolution to the West, rather than being self-sufficient); that Trotsky’s call for a proto-NEP in early 1920 was surely not too early, possibly would have been better made even earlier, and arguably would more advisedly have been adopted instead of “war communism” right from the start in 1918.
Nevertheless, Farber’s picture is radically skewed.
War communism and the Red Terror were inaugurated following the Left SRs’ assassination of the German ambassador (designed to provoke renewed war with Germany) and abortive insurrection of July 1918; the assassination by SRs of the Bolsheviks Volodarsky (June 1918) and Uritsky (August 1918), and their attempt to assassinate Lenin on 30 August 1918. As Trotsky put it: “It was in those tragic days that something snapped in the heart of the Revolution”. The Bolsheviks were not “over-confident”, except in their hopes of revolution in the West. They were trying to maintain the workers’ revolutionary bridgehead against huge odds.
Significantly for those who think that the inauguration of the Cheka was already dictatorship in embryo, the assassination of the German ambassador was carried out by Left SRs who were also leading figures in the Cheka. Despite withdrawing from the government in March 1918, in protest against the Brest-Litovsk peace, the Left SRs still had a very large role in the Cheka.
War communism and the Red Terror were emergency measures by a government which had just seen even those who had previously been its closest allies attempt an armed uprising against it, and try to tip the country into a new disastrous war with Germany.
Yes, there were examples of Terror before August 1918. Many of these were “from below”. For example, Jean-Jacques Marie reports a massacre of five thousand officers by rank and file soldiers in two incidents in January 1918, which was neither decreed nor agitated for by the Bolsheviks.
Russian peasant life before the Revolution was extremely violent. Not only were the landlords violent: under the village elders’ own justice, for example, “horse thieves could be castrated, beaten, branded with hot irons, or hacked to death with sickles” (Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p.96).
Part of the mission of the revolution, of course, was to end that culture of violence. As Trotsky put it: “Where the aristocratic culture introduced into world parlance such barbarisms as czar, pogrom, knout, October has internationalised such words as Bolshevik, soviet, and piatiletka. This alone justifies the proletarian revolution, if you imagine that it needs justification”.
But first the revolution had to happen, and consolidate itself if only for a short while. It had to do that with people as they were.
The Red Terror was partly designed to control and restrain the terror “from below” (there was something of the same with the Terror in the French Revolution, which also started “from below”), and was partly motivated by the fact that, where persuasion could not work – and it couldn’t always – and where you needed to terrify the enemy – and in war you do – mild measures could not work with a population accustomed over generations to such high levels of violence.
***
Right up until 1917, the Bolsheviks’ practical political programme had essentially been one of radical formal democracy. They did not believe that anything more was possible in Russia than maximum radicalism in clearing away the old Tsarist lumber and instituting a democratic republic.
Far from the Bolsheviks’ motives being a drive to institute “state socialism” without regard for democracy, or (as right-wing writers have it) simply to seek power for its own sake, they had conducted their long and hard struggle on the perspective that the maximum possible was that they might play a brief minority role in a provisional revolutionary government instituting radical democracy.
Formal and procedural democracy was no incidental for them. It was the centre of their agitation for decades.
They were also trained in its importance by the model of German Social Democracy, a great number of whose biggest political campaigns were about formal and procedural democracy in still semi-absolutist Germany.
In 1917 Lenin wrote State and Revolution to argue that there was another dimension to democracy besides the formal and procedural one; that a workers’ government would be not just a radical democratic republic, but a democracy of a different sort because materially more accessible to the workers and peasants than the best bourgeois republic. There is absolutely no reason to suppose he forgot his life-long struggle for formal and procedural democracy while doing so.
After 25 October, the Bolsheviks busied themselves with a very rapid flurry of decrees. They also drafted and adopted a Soviet constitution at high speed (by July 1918 – contrast the 12 years it took the American Revolution to move to a constitution, and the four years it took the French Revolution to move to the constitution of 1793).
They knew those decrees, at first, had virtually no force other than their power as instruments of political agitation.
But that is why they issued them. The priority was to agitate, to mobilise people to build up a new machinery of government. They were also agitating for an audience abroad – in the Western countries whose revolutionisation they considered vital to any hope of survival for the Russian revolution – and for the future.
They knew that the Paris Commune had inspired workers more for the tendency and intentions of its decrees than for its practical ability to push them through in detail. They knew that the French constitution of 1793 had been suspended immediately after its formal adoption, and in fact never implemented before it was replaced by the more conservative constitution of 1795, yet had become, for many years afterwards, the chief manifesto of radical revolutionaries.
They wanted to put down markers for the future.
And those were markers for democracy, for workers’ democracy. As E H Carr notes, the early Bolshevik government very rarely described itself as socialist. It described itself as a “soviet” power, as “workers’ and peasants’ power”, or justified its decrees in terms of “democracy”.
The Bolsheviks knew that Marx had criticised the Paris Commune for its lack of revolutionary ruthlessness, and that the Jacobin Republic of 1793-4 had only been able to maintain itself, even briefly, by the Terror. So they knew already – though they could not yet have envisaged the full horrors of the civil war – that after putting down their markers they would prove unable to live up to some of them.
But, precisely because they valued the formal and programmatic, they laid down those markers.
***
The Bolsheviks were unclear on whether they would accept being voted out, and failed to express regret about the limitations on democracy?
But “being voted out” in Russia in 1917-21 was not a matter like being voted out in regular parliamentary elections. The Bolsheviks believed, and on the evidence of Hungary, for example, there is little reason to doubt, that their ousting would not lead to some moderate regime but to a Russian version of fascism, with a huge slaughter not only of Bolsheviks but also of class-conscious workers in general and of Jews. It would also lead to a crushing of the prospects of revolution in the West.
So their determination was to hold on as long as they could, which they were sure would not be very long. You can, I suppose, argue that if they had let the counter-revolution happen earlier and more “easily” than it happened with Stalin, then the ensuing fascism would have been milder than Stalin’s regime. But how could they calculate on that basis, in advance?
The remarkable thing about the stories of the Bolsheviks manipulating or delaying soviet votes in 1918 is how high the standards were which they had set themselves, and which they felt they had to infringe on.
For governments in all-consuming war, war which threatens the very existence of the polity, to allow elections at all is rather rare. The British government in World War 2 counts historically as a rare example of relative wartime democracy because it allowed debates in Parliament and a fair degree of press freedom. Yet it pretty much suppressed popular votes – there were no general elections between 1935 and 1945, and in wartime the big parties agreed to renounce all contests in by-elections. Newspapers and politicians (including MPs) favouring the enemy, even implicitly, were banned or jailed (as, for example, the Daily Worker was banned in January 1941).
The Union side in the US civil war also ranks as a rare example of wartime democracy, in that Abraham Lincoln contested a presidential election, which at first it looked as if he would lose, in 1864, three years into the war. Yet Lincoln regularly jailed Copperheads without charge or trial; and the Union was never at any risk of being overrun by the South.
The Bolsheviks, fighting a war in much more desperate circumstances, face critical scrutiny because sometimes they postponed elections, not for ten years, not for three years, not even for the eight months for which the unelected Provisional Government postponed Constituent Assembly elections – but for a few weeks or months, and because they used ambiguities in election procedure to their advantage. Yes, critical scrutiny is a good thing. But it should be remembered that the standards with which we are conducting that scrutiny are standards set by the Bolsheviks themselves, and they are standards higher than any others in history.

Click here for part 2 of this post.