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Year One of the Russian Revolution

Name: Year One of the Russian Revolution
Author: Victor Serge, Peter Sedgwick

Victor Serge, Peter Sedgwick

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Year One of the Russian Revolution

Victor Serge, Peter Sedgwick

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Brimming with the honesty and passionate conviction for which he has become famous, Victor Serge’s account of the first year of the Russian Revolution—through all of its achievements and challenges—captures both the heroism of the mass upsurge that gave birth to soviet democracy, and the crippling circumstances that began to chip away at its historic gains. Year One of the Russian Revolution is Serge’s attempt to defend the early days of the revolution against those, like Stalin, who would claim its legacy as justification for the repression of dissent within Russia.

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Publisher

Haymarket Books

Year

2017

ISBN

9781608466092

From Serfdom to Proletarian Revolution

1861: THE EMANCIPATION OF THE SERFS

Sequences in world history are so tightly interconnected that it is often necessary to go back a long while in order to get some more than arbitrary idea of the causes of an event—especially when the event concerned is as grandiose as the Russian revolution.

The close of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century are marked in the history of western Europe by a social transformation which is painful, radical and pregnant with immense possibilities: the bourgeois revolution.

The ancien-régime monarchies were the heirs of the feudal system over which they had triumphed in the bloody struggles of an earlier age, aided by the people of the communes, a revolutionary force of their time. These kingdoms rested on large-scale landed property (noble or feudal), on the bureaucratic absolutism of the royal dynasty, and on the hierarchy of orders in the realm, with the nobility and clergy taking precedence over the bourgeoisie. Of these social classes, the older dominant orders were in a state of decline and the other, the bourgeoisie of commerce, manufacturing, finance and parliament, was sinking powerful roots among the lower artisan classes, and developing traditions of work, thrift, business honesty, dignity and political liberty—the latter, as always, being greatly valued among the subject classes of society. Growing in strength and in the consciousness of its own needs—and principally of the necessity to sweep away all obstacles in the way of its own advancement—the bourgeoisie was making its way towards power. The French Revolution of 1789–93 opened the series of bourgeois revolutions. ‘What is the Third Estate [meaning the bourgeoisie]?’ the Abbé Sieyès, one of the future men of Thermidor and Brumaire, speculated in 1789. ‘Nothing. What must it become? Everything.’

It took until about 1850 to complete the bourgeois revolution in Europe. Napoleon’s armies carried it from Madrid and Lisbon as far as Vienna and Berlin. The revolutions of 1830 and 1848 are its final political convulsions. In the meantime, the industrial revolution had begun, a revolution perhaps even more radical (the first steam-engine, that produced by Watt, dates from 1769; Fulton invents the steam-boat in 1807 and Stephenson the locomotive in 1830; Jacquard’s loom is from 1802). Large-scale mechanized industry, with assistance from the railways, fills the cities of work and misery with a new transforming force: the proletariat. Hot in the steps of the bourgeois revolution—characterized by the abolition of feudal privileges and the system of monarch, nobles and castes, the conquest of the freedoms necessary for industrial growth, the social hegemony of the bourgeoisie and the omnipotence of money—fresh battles break out in the newly won terrain: the proletariat, even before it recognizes its mission as the liberator of humanity, demands its right to a human existence.

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Russia remains outside the influence of the revolutionary convulsions in the West. The ancien regime (serfdom, privileges of nobility and Church, Tsarist autocracy) is here impregnable: the ‘Decembrist’ military conspiracy of 1825 scarcely ruffles it. From 1840 onwards, the need for serious reform does begin to be apparent: agricultural production is poor, grain exports low, the growth of manufacturing industry slowed down through the shortage of labour; capitalist development is being impeded through aristocracy and serfdom. It is a perilous situation, which is given a fairly astute solution in the act of ‘liberation’ of 19 February 1861, abolishing serfdom. The ‘emancipated’ peasant now has to buy up tiny, neatly truncated plots of land, and passes from a feudal subjection to an economic one. He must now work harder, and manufacturing industry will find in the countryside the ‘free’ manpower it needs so badly. With a population of sixty-seven million in this epoch, Russia had twenty-three million serfs belonging to 103,000 landlords. The arable land which the ‘freed’ peasantry had to rent or buy was valued at about double its real value (342 million roubles mstead of 180 million); yesterday’s serfs discovered that, in becoming free, they were now hopelessly in debt. Between this great reform of Alexander II, the ‘Tsar Liberator’, and the revolution of 1905, the lot of Russia’s peasants will worsen uninterruptedly. The reform of 1861 gave them about five hectares1 of land per male inhabitant; by 1900 the rapid population increase will leave the muzhiks with less than three hectares per head—seventy per cent of the farmers possessed an area of cultivation below the minimum needed to support their families. On the other hand, in 1876, fifteen years after the reform, the export sales of Russian grain on the European market had risen by 140 per cent, causing a fall in the world price of cereals. In 1857–9 Russia exports only 8,750,000 quarters (English measure) of cereal crops; in 1871–2 it exports 21,080,000. For commerce, for industry, for landed property and for the governing bureaucracy, the emancipation of the serfs was good business. The peasants simply exchanged one form of slavery for another and became subject to periodic famines.

The abolition of serfdom in Russia coincides with the War of Secession and the abolition of slavery in the United States of America (1861–3). Both in the Old World and the New, the growth of capitalism demands the replacement of the slave or serf by the free worker—free, that is, to sell his toil. The free worker works better, more intensively and more conscientiously. Large mechanized industry is incompatible with primitive methods of compulsion; in their place it substitutes economic constraint, the concealed compulsion of hunger whose efficacy is different in nature from that of naked violence.

1881: THE ‘PEOPLE’S WILL’

At the very time when his great reform was being implemented, in the year 1863, the Tsar Liberator crushed the Polish rising in the blood of its patriots: there were 1,468 executions.

The initial path of capitalist development in Russia may have been cleared by the reform of 1861, but the way ahead for it was not without obstacles. There was no equality of civil rights. Initiative was clogged by a rigid bureaucratic and police apparatus. Privileged castes maintained their position in the State; the bourgeoisie was kept at a distance from the levers of power, and saw its interests (which it sincerely identified with the general interests of progress) constantly misrepresented by reactionary values, or else sacrificed to the demands of the Tsarist court, the nobility or the big landlords.

Disturbances among the peasantry became a constant problem. Within the petty-bourgeoisie, deprived of any rights or assured future, and mauled both by the old regime and by ascendant capitalism, the young intelligentsia had become captivated by the advanced ideas of the West, and promised to be a favourable ground for the seeds of revolution. New reforms, such as the reorganization of the judiciary, the statute on local governments and the abolition of corporal punishment, co-existed with pitiless acts of repression such as the deportation of the thinker Chernyshevsky to Siberia, where he spent twenty years. The first important revolutionary movement in Russia, that of the Narodniki or Populists (from the word narod, meaning ‘people’), was impelled by a number of factors: the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie proper, which constantly tended towards compromise with reaction; the non-existence of any liberal movement; the desperate plight of the peasantry, the common people and the propertyless intellectuals; the rigours of repression and the influence of Western Socialism, with its heritage from the revolutionary tradition of 1848. The Narodniki hoped for a popular revolution and saw the old Russian rural commune, or mir, as the foundation on which a peasant Socialism could be built. They believed that enlightened minorities owed imperious duties towards the people; they had faith in an intellectual élite, in human personality, in ‘critical thought’ and in idealism. Pyotr Lavrov and Mikhailovsky2 equipped the movement with a philosophy, and the indomitable Bakunin gave it the lesson of struggle.

This is the period of ‘going to the people’. In their thousands, young men and women from the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie go to the people, forsaking career and comfort to work in manual labour, to experience hardship, hunger, toil and prison, Siberia and Geneva. Circles of ‘rebels’ are formed, attracting the sympathy of enlightened elements. They are persecuted and repressed. Out of their wreckage, in 1878, comes the secret society ‘Land and Liberty’, which soon splits into two parties, the ‘Black Partition’, which advocates propaganda in the countryside, and the Narodnaya Volya (‘People’s Will’), which promotes terrorism. ‘History is too slow,’ says one of its leaders, Zhelyabov. ‘We must hurry it on, or the nation will have degenerated before the liberals wake up and start work again.’ The party’s programme is somewhat confused: the land to the people, the factories to the workers; a Constituent Assembly and a republic; a constitution. Some of the Narodniki would have been content with a constitutional monarchy. They had a very clear idea of what had to be destroyed: they were far less preoccupied with what had to be built afterwards. In the absence of any other method of action, the men of the ‘People’s Will’ resorted to the assassination of individuals: ‘Our party has no other method it can use,’ one of them wrote a few days before mounting the scaffold. ‘Political assassination is one of our most efficient weapons in the struggle against Russian despotism,’ wrote the party’s organ Land and Liberty. The party numbered fewer than fifty members, but these were heroic and dedicated men, energetic, fearless, intelligent, willing to face death.

The first important attempt was that made by the student Vera Zasulich,3 who shot at General Trepov in 1878. A monster trial had just taken place, in which 193 defendants accused of revolutionary activities had appeared before the judges of St Petersburg. Out of 770 arrested, seventy had died in prison during the preliminary investigation, which had taken several years. The trial, which was a complete farce, ended with ninety-four acquittals, thirty-six deportations and one sentence of ten years’ hard labour. Meanwhile, Trepov, the St Petersburg Chief of Police, had a student who was in prison beaten with sticks. ‘The punishment was quite legal,’ he explained afterwards. ‘After all, B——, the condemned student, was not of noble blood.’ Vera Zasulich was acquitted in her trial. Russian terrorism, as can be seen, came to its fruition in a supercharged atmosphere.

Assassinations soon followed. The dreaded ‘Executive Committee of the People’s Will Party’ met in secret to pass sentences of death, complete with a statement of charges, and these were communicated to the persons concerned: the Tsar duly received his. Then the tribunal carried out sentence. The police chief Mezentsev was stabbed by unknown assailants4 in a St Petersburg street; the governor of Kharkov, a prince of the Kropotkin family, was executed. The Tsar replied to the murder of his servants by referring all political cases before courts-martial and by having gallows erected for any who fell foul of police revenge. The nation was a mute bystander in this duel between the autocracy and a handful of revolutionaries. Between 1872 and 1882 there were six attempted assassinations (three of these successful) against high officials, four against police chiefs, four against Alexander II, nine executions of informers and twenty-four cases of armed resistance to the police. Thirty-one revolutionaries were hanged or shot.

The prime target for the ‘People’s Will’ was the head of the whole system, the ‘king stag’ of the herd. On 14 Apri1 1879, the student Soloviev fired five pistol-shots at Alexander II. On 1 December the same year an explosion derailed the Imperial train not far from Moscow. On 17 February 1880, the dining-room in the Winter Palace exploded seconds before the Imperial family was due to enter it. On 1 March 1881, Alexander II at last met his death in St Petersburg, mangled by bombs. His five executioners, Sophia Perovskaya, Zhelyabov, Kibalchich, Mikhailov and Russakov, were hanged. With these casualties the party lost its finest leaders, some of them the finest revolutionary personalities known to history. The party was decapitated.

Other social forces, as yet unperceived, were now entering the battle.

1885: THE BIRTH OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT

Over the next ten years, from 1881 to 1890, reaction makes a determined counter-attack; serfdom is more than half reinstated. At his accession, the new Tsar, Alexander III, proclaims the autocracy to be ‘unshakable’: the establishment of the Okhrana (‘The Defensive’) follows, a political police armed with extensive powers and funds. A press law lays down preventive censorship for journals suspected by the authorities (1882); they can even be suppressed. In 1889 the legalized servitude of the peasant is sanctified with the creation of headships of rural communes (zemskye nachalniki), chosen from among the nobility on the nomination of the big landlords and endowed with wide authority. The rights of the aristocracy are extended; higher education is reserved by law for the governing classes; students have to wear compulsory uniform and are placed under strict police surveillance. A Nobles’ Rural Credit Bank and a Peasants’ Rural Credit Bank are founded, the first to assist the squirearchy and landed gentry, the second to further the progress of the rich peasants. The Russification of Poland, Finland, the Baltic provinces and the Caucasus is pursued relentlessly. The Jews, who have been harried by the recent pogroms of 1881–2, are now compelled to reside in the gubernias of the south-east and in Poland; residence in the provincial capitals is forbidden to them, and nearly a million and a half Jews, hounded from the cities where they were settled, return to their places of origin (1888). Overcrowding and indescribable misery in the Jewish centres are the results of this legislation; it will not be repealed until 1917. The quota of places permitted to Jews in the universities is limited to ten per cent in so-called ‘Jewish territory’ and to two per cent in the capitals. M. Rambaud has remarked that under Alexander III ‘the fate of the Jews was rather like that inflicted on the Huguenots in France through the revocation of the Edict of Nantes’.5

The causes of this phase of reaction were entirely economic, as M. N. Pokrovsky has demonstrated.6 We have noted the added impetus in corn exports from Russia (i.e. in the development of commercial capital) as the result of the emancipation of the serfs. At that period world corn prices were high: from 1870 onwards they declined. The price of Russian wheat abroad fell from 1 rouble 54 kopeks per pood (a pood being about thirty-seven pounds in weight) to 74 kopeks, or less than half. The export of grain now played a leading role in the Russian economy. The autocracy entered on a protectionist policy and insisted that customs dues had to be paid in gold. The cost of manufactured goods to the peasantry rose sharply; and since the best land had been taken off him after the ‘emancipation’ of 1861, he had to work still harder to make a living, and had to rent land—often the same land that had been wrested from him—at a high charge. (The amount of rented land increased tenfold in the Saratov gubernia between 1860 and 1880.) The pauperization of the peasantry was quick to follow: in eleven years in the province of Orel the number of cattle owned by the peasants fell by one fifth. In 1884 two and a half million peasant families out of a total of nine million did not own a horse (see Pokrovsky). The legal measures taken to prevent the proletarianization of the peasantry, according to the official dream, by attaching him to his plot, were powerless in the face of these economic factors.

It is at this moment that Russian industry begins to expand. Through the impoverishment of the countryside, ten million starving proletarians are placed at its disposal. A vast internal market is assured to it thanks to the more intensive labour of the peasants who are, increasingly, devoting all their time to the farming of grain crops and abandoning the local production of the fabrics, tools, etc. that they consume. Foreign capital gushes in. The total industrial production of Russia, valued in 1877 at 541 million roubles, rises to 1,816 million in 1897; and the stake of foreign capital in it rises to 1,500 million roubles. In ten years, from 1887 to 1897, the number of proletarians in the engineering industry goes up from 103,000 to 151,000 and in the textile industry from 309,000 to 642,000.

The condition of this proletariat was pitiful. The textile workers in the Moscow region usually lived inside the mill itself, sleeping in the workshops. Even in the case of the best-paid workers it was rare for a family to have the use of one whole room; several families would generally be crowded together in a single room. There was an entire population of wretched cellar-dwellers in the cities. Infant mortality was frightful, and the working day was often as long as fourteen hours. In 1899 the weavers of Petrograd, who till then had worked fourteen hours a day, waged a strike which won them a legal day of 111/2 hours. Wages were very irregularly paid. In 1883, in 110 Moscow factories out of a total of 181 the payment of wages was entirely dependent on the employer’s...