The Soviet Union

Peter Waldron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815398271
• eBook ISBN: 9781351145183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Soviet Union was one of the most significant historical phenomena of the twentieth century. This volume brings together key articles that analyse its birth in the 1917 revolution, the development of Stalin's tyranny and Soviet decline from the 1960s onwards. The collection includes scholarship of the highest quality that illuminates this key episode in the history of both Europe and the wider world.

Part I
The Bolshevik Seizure and Consolidation of Power

[1]
Lenin's Conception of Revolution As Civil War

ISRAEL GETZLER

CHARACTERIZATIONS of Lenin as 'power-crazed' and 'a fanatical believer in a Communist Utopia',¹ do not quite convince me. In an attempt to find a further key to an understanding of Lenin's historical role, I have had a closer look at some of his private drafts and jottings, particularly those of 1905-06 and 1919. These were not intended for publication and seem to me to be more revealing than his largely polemical writings, especially when interpreted in the light of evidence newly available with the opening up of the Russian archives.

That evidence, already absorbed into a number of works on the Russian revolution and on Lenin,² suggests that Lenin was both much more of an internationalist a la Trotskii than had been assumed and even more of a ruthless state terrorist than had been believed — his bite was often as bad as his bark. The new evidence, if further evidence were needed, also confirms that he was a 'revolutionary of genius'.³

My findings suggest that what distinguished Lenin from other revolutionaries (for example Martov — his 'repressed alter ego') was not so much his intense revolutionism or his absolute conviction that a European socialist revolution was within reach, but rather his simplistic, narrow and brutal understanding of revolution as civil war tout court. It was that understanding, and the corresponding strategy and tactics, mentality and modus operandi, which he injected into his 'belligerent party' of Bolsheviks.⁴ With that credo of civil war he marched the Bolsheviks into the October revolution and the construction of the Soviet state. And it was that revolutionary Soviet state power, which he defined as merely 'a tool of the proletariat in its class struggle, a special bludgeon, rien deplus!',⁵ that he bequeathed to his Bolshevik heirs.

Civil war is what Lenin wanted and civil war is what he got, as he boasted on 11 January 1918 at the third Congress of Soviets:

In answer to all reproaches and accusations of terror, dictatorship and civil war, we say: yes, we have openly proclaimed what no other government would ever proclaim: we are the first government in the world which openly speaks of civil war; yes, we started and continue to wage war against the exploiters.⁶

And more than two years later, when the Civil War was at its height, he reaffirmed Bolshevik responsibility:

We brought the Civil War upon ourselves: we have never concealed from the people that we were taking that risk.⁷

And again, even as late as December 1922, he was still applauding civil war, as he jotted down for a speech to the Tenth Congress of Soviets:

The Civil War has welded together the working class and the peasantry and this is the guarantee of our invincible strength. The Civil War has taught and tempered us (Denikin etc. were good teachers, good ones, they taught seriously).⁸

Lenin began to develop his understanding of revolution in 1905-06 when all revolutionary parties were busy formulating their revolutionary strategies. Lenin set this down in two private drafts — 'Scenario of the Provisional Revolutionary Government'⁹ of June 1905 and 'Phases, Direction and Perspectives of the Revolution'¹⁰ of December 1905 (both were published only twenty years later).

He expected the 'final destruction of tsardom' to take the form and be the final outcome of 'full-scale civil war'. Similarly, he envisaged a second even fiercer civil war between the bourgeoisie — 'strengthened by the gigantic development of capitalist progress' — on the one hand, and the 'revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry' which would result from elections to the Constituent Assembly on the other. In that contest, the 'fortress' (state) was likely to change hands and the bourgeoisie might well overthrow the revolutionary government unless the latter 'sets Europe on fire'; and 'what then?' he asks. The answer came half a year later when he urged that in the second civil war, when the liberal bourgeoisie, the well-off peasantry and a fair section of the middling peasantry would join to do battle against the revolutionary democratic dictatorship, then

the proletariat, left on its own would prove almost hopeless in such a contest and would inevitably be defeated (like the German revolutionary party in 1848/50, or the French proletariat in 1871) if the European socialist proletariat does not come to the assistance of the Russian proletariat.¹¹

If these were his private drafts, he gave public expression to the last point in May 1906 at the Fourth Congress of the RSDRP in London when he countered Plekhanov's argument that Lenin's project of land nationalization would strengthen a despotic state if ever there were to be a restoration. Whether the land was 'municipalized' or nationalized would make no difference, Lenin told Plekhanov: 'the only guarantee against restoration is a socialist revolution in the West.'¹²

Predictably, the chief lesson that Lenin drew in 1908 from the Paris Commune of 1871 was that 'it demonstrated the power of civil war', while one of its major mistakes was 'its uncalled-for magnanimity': 'it ought to have annihilated its enemies rather than attempt to influence them morally [. . .] it underestimated the importance of purely military operations in civil war':¹³

For the proletariat must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle turns into armed struggle and civil war and that there are times when the interests of the proletariat demand the merciless annihilation of the enemy in open military engagements.¹⁴

And, turning against the Menshevik denunciation of Bolshevik 'partisan warfare' and bank 'expropriations', he wrote:

Any moral condemnation of [civil war] is absolutely impermissible from the point of view of Marxism [. . .] For us, the sole acceptable critique of the various forms of civil war is that advanced from the point of view of military expediency. In an epoch of civil war, the ideal of the party of the proletariat must be that of a belligerent party.¹⁵

It was at the same time that Lenin (who as early as 1902 had managed to saddle the RSDRP with a programmatic commitment to the 'dictatorship of the proletariat') spelled out clearly and precisely what he understood by dictatorship. 'An unlimited state power based on force in the most literal sense of the word, and not on law.'¹⁶ This he linked to his understanding of civil war and revolution: 'In times of civil war any victorious state power can be nothing but a dictatorship.'¹⁷

It was to this intimate connection between class struggle, civil war, revolution, dictatorship and European socialist revolution as an indispensable part of a victorious Russian revolution that Lenin was committed right to the end of his life.

With the coming of World War I, Lenin turned his civil war conception of revolution into an appeal to 'transform' the imperialist war into civil war: 'Let us hoist the banner of civil war!'¹⁸ was his answer to Martov's call for 'Peace and peace at any price!'¹⁹ He also insisted later that there was no longer any validity whatever to exceptions that Marx, Engels and their disciples may have envisaged as providing a parliamentary non-violent road from bourgeois capitalism to proletarian socialism in some Western countries. All states were now tarred with the same imperialist, militarist brush.²⁰

Stranded in Switzerland in February 1917, Lenin enjoined on Bolsheviks a party-minded 'separateness'. His sharp letter to Anatolii Lunacharskii of 14 March is telling:

The independence and separateness of our party — no rapprochement whatever with other parties — these are, as I see it, ultimative demands. Without them it will be impossible to take the proletariat through the democratic revolution to the commune, and I am prepared to serve no other aims.²¹

(And, as evidenced by Lenin's copious notes of January/February 1917 'Marxism on the State',²² following Marx and Engels, for him, too, commune equalled dictatorship of the proletariat.)

Upon his arrival in Petrograd, he told his Bolsheviks that although 'the first civil war has already ended in Russia, and we are now proceeding to the second — that between imperialism and the armed people' — they must in the first place engage 'in peaceful, sustained and patient class propaganda': 'We stand for civil war, but only when it is waged by a politically conscious class.'²³ In his private notes, he spelt out his programme for the transition:

To be rock-hard in the proletarian line against petty-bourgeois waverings. To prepare for a Krach and a revolution a thousand times more powerful than February.²⁴

In August and September, preparing for the plunge into the October revolution, Lenin again raised the banner of civil war. Taking advantage of Martov's warning against civil war, he told him that such a self-denying ordinance would be tantamount to

a manifest rejection of any form of class struggle, of any revolution [. ..] who does not know that the world history of all revolutions shows that class struggle turns inevitably and not just by accident to civil war.²⁵

Almost at the same time, he repeated that point in 'The Russian Revolution and Civil War', where he extolled the blessings of civil war:

Gentlemen, do not frighten us with civil war [...] it is inevitable [...] it gives victory over the exploiters, land to the peasants, peace to the nations, it opens up the road that leads to the victorious revolution of the international socialist proletariat.²⁶

It was with that credo of civil war and revolutionary dictatorship that Lenin took his Bolsheviks into the October revolution and into a 'homogeneous', that is, a one-party Bolshevik government. He overcame the resistance of the Bolshevik moderates in the night session of the Central Committee on 2 November which, from the outset, he dubbed 'a session of historic importance' — the moderates, he urged, were sabotaging 'the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the poorest peasantry' with their hankering after a broadly-based, multi-party, socialist government.²⁷ In December, he dismissed the Bolshevik members of the commission of the Constituent Assembly who, 'obliv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I THE BOLSHEVIK SEIZURE AND CONSOLIDATION OF POWER
• PART II STALIN AND STALINISM
• PART III WAR AND POST-WAR RECOVERY
• PART IV STAGNATION: KHRUSHCHEV AND BREZHNEV
• PART V GORBACHEV AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION
• Name Index