"Truth Behind Bars"

Reflections on the Fate of the Russian Revolution

Paul Kellogg

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781771992473
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, the arctic settlement of Vorkuta was the site of a notorious Gulag that held former Trotsky followers and members of the Left Opposition. This coal-mining town was a witness, first to the last stand of the Russian oppositional socialists, and second to a strike wave that sounded the death knell for the Stalinist forced labour system, overturned in 1991.Kellogg uses the backdrop of Vorkuta to argue for a return to the work of Iulii Martov—a contemporary of Lenin—and his analysis of a temporary class of peasants-in-uniform produced by the Great War. Coming from the trenches, Kellogg demonstrates that this class, led by Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, often relied on undemocratic and substitutionist policies to advance the revolutionary project. Ultimately, their actions thwarted the efforts made to establish an alternative to capitalism in the USSR and explain why democratic governance failed to become integrated into the Bolsheviks' theoretical perspectives and political practice.

Part 1 Vorkuta: Anvil of the Working Class

Anvil—A heavy block on which metal can be hammered and shaped, typically of iron or (now) steel, having a flat top, concave sides, and (typically) a pointed or tapering projection at one end … in figurative contexts, esp. with reference to the use of an anvil as a block on which something is forged or shaped. (Oxford English Dictionary)

The Arctic settlement of Vorkuta was in every respect an anvil, a block on which was forged the emergent postrevolutionary working class. Letting fall into the background for a moment the received wisdom and theories about communism and the Russian Revolution and instead bringing to the fore issues of class formation and class struggle can assist mightily in understanding revolution and counter-revolution in the territories of the former Russian empire. In the chapters of part 1, I develop this class formation through an examination of three pivotal moments of class struggle in and around Vorkuta.

Chapter 1 examines Vorkuta in the 1930s, when the town was fast becoming one of the Soviet Union’s most important sources of coal. In the years from 1936 to 1938, Vorkuta also became the final resting place of Stalin’s political opponents—the same radicalized workers who had raised the Bolsheviks to power in 1917. Before their extermination, the political prisoners at Vorkuta—many being followers of Leon Trotsky, who had formerly constituted the Left Opposition within the Communist Party—organized a mass hunger strike, which became the stuff of whispered legend in the following decades.

In chapter 2, we move to the 1950s, by which point, as was indicated earlier, the forced labour camps at Vorkuta had seen “approximately half a million prisoners pass through their gates.” Vorkuta had grown to become a major mining centre and the principal supplier of coal to Leningrad, a city of well over three million people. In 1953, in the period following Stalin’s death, thousands of Vorkuta’s forced labourers organized a massive strike in protest against the Gulag labour system, demanding improvements to their living and working conditions. The strike, which ended in violent repression, nonetheless played a pivotal role in ending the forced labour system in the Soviet Union.

Chapter 3 focuses on the late 1980s and an even more massive strike. By then, the mines of Vorkuta were employing “free” wage labourers, some of them the grandchildren of those imprisoned at Vorkuta during the 1930s. In July 1989, the thousands labouring in Vorkuta’s coal pits were central to the wave of strikes that were instrumental in the collapse of the Soviet Union. From its origins as a graveyard for revolutionaries, then, Vorkuta gave birth to the gravediggers, first, of the forced labour system and, eventually, of the Stalinist state system itself.

1 One Long Night, 1936–38

Above the Arctic Circle, in a lost corner of the world,

The earth is shrouded by coal-black eternal night.

The wind howls like a wolf and will not let us sleep.

Oh, for just a glimmer of dawn in this oppressive gloom!

A sinister presence floats in the shadows.

We are alone with our anguish and our sense of doom.

Above the Arctic Circle, there is no joy my friend.

A furious blizzard erases all our tracks.

Don’t come for us, don’t be tormented by us, save yourself.

But maybe, if you find a moment … remember me, my friend.1

An anonymous historian identifies the author of these haunting lines as Lyova Dranovsky, an old communist and prisoner in the Gulag who, some time prior to 1938, “began to write some very fine and moving poetry … sitting by the stove in the tent, by the bank of the Vorkuta River.”2 Truth be told, we cannot be sure of the exact name of the poet. From another account by Hryhory Kostiuk, one of the very few eyewitnesses who survived the events to be described here, we learn of another poet with a slightly different name—Comrade Granovsky. Kostiuk remembers prisoners reading, and even singing, Granovsky’s poems.3 Comparing that with our first eyewitness, who says that Dranovsky’s “poems became the common property of the whole Vorkuta camp and were set to music, to sad and mournful tunes,”4 it is likely that Lyova Dranovsky and Comrade Granovsky were the same person. Even if they were two different people, however, they met the same fate. Granovsky was “doomed to die in Stalin’s camps.”5 Dranovsky “was shot at Syr-Yaga in 1938.”6

Our knowledge of Comrade Granovsky comes from a standard peer-reviewed, scholarly source. Our knowledge of Lyova Dranovsky has a quite different pedigree. It derives from a remarkable memoir, circulated as part of the underground anti-Stalinist literature known as samizdat. The memoir was “written over a period of years and completed in the late sixties” and “became known to the world in 1970.” Its anonymous author was one of the only survivors of the 1936–38 massacres visited upon anti-Stalinist socialists.7 The Granovsky/Dranovsky poem was written on the banks of the Vorkuta River. Near the source of that river, two hundred kilometres from where it drains into the Pechora and more than one hundred kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, lies the town of Vorkuta, epicentre of the 1936–38 Great Terror.

The Arc of Repression

Located at the extreme northern tip of what is today the Komi Republic, roughly two hundred kilometres south of Baydaratskaya Bay on the Kara Sea, Vorkuta is further north than Great Bear Lake, Repulse Bay, or Bathurst Inlet in Canada.8 As a settled area in the far reaches of the Arctic, Inuvik, on the Mackenzie River delta, might be offered as a point of comparison. But Inuvik remains an administrative centre, the population of which has rarely exceeded 3,500. In contrast, by 1993, Vorkuta had a population of 217,000, with most of its workers employed in the 13 coal mines that surrounded the city.9 By 2013, the population of the town had plummeted to just 96,000, but this was still far greater than any comparable Arctic settlement in Canada.10

Vorkuta is a forbidding place. Some of its inhabitants in 1993 described the climate as “twelve months of winter, followed by summer.” In the words of one resident, “after ten years here you stop being human because of the cold, depression, polar nights, tough work.”11 Joseph Scholmer—a German communist arrested in 1949 and sent to Vorkuta—recalled the “old hands” telling him: “You mustn’t stay here too long. It’s a murderous climate. Anyone who stays here too long gets the guts knocked out of him.”12 So grim are the environs that, when advisors to Tsar Nicholas I proposed that “he should make the territory around the rivers Petchora and Vorkuta into a colony for exiles, he sent for a report on conditions there and decided that it was ‘too much to demand of any man that he should live there.’”13

Vorkuta first entered the pages of history as prison ground and massacre site for thousands of socialists who opposed the rise to power of Stalin and his bureaucracy. The introductory chapter laid out the horrendous statistics of repression for 1937 and 1938—681,692 “documentable” executions carried out by the Stalinist state in those terrible years.14 Vorkuta was a principal site of that state-organized terror. In impossible conditions, anti-Stalinist socialists—many of them followers of Leon Trotsky—fought to uphold the ideals of the Russian Revolution. They fought with their bodies, launching a series of mass hunger strikes, some of which they actually won—at least in the near term.

In fact, their victories were the very definition of pyrrhic. Almost to a person, these anti-Stalinist socialists were executed, most in what came to be known as the “Kashketin executions,” so called because they were overseen by Efim Iosifovich Kashketin, a senior staff member with the NKVD, or People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.15 Robert Conquest tells us that only children aged twelve and under escaped execution.16 This is confirmed by the account of an extraordinary eyewitness to these awful events, Ivan Mitrofanovich Khoroshev, writing under one of his several pseudonyms “M.B.” The real identity of M.B. was only discovered after Khoroshev’s death in early 1991.17 Born in 1904, he had been sentenced in 1936 to six years in the Gulag on charges of “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities.” In October 1991, just months after his death, he was officially rehabilitated. Khoroshev writes: “At the time of execution of a male prisoner, his imprisoned wife was automatically liable to capital punishment; and when it was a question of well-known members of the Opposition, this applied equally to any of his children over the age of twelve.”18 Once Kashketin’s work was done, he was in turn imprisoned and executed, a fate that befell many of those who were instruments of the terror. Mikhail Baitalsky captures the terrible irony, saying that several months after overseeing the slaughter in Vorkuta, Kashketin was heard shouting from a prison in the area: “Tell the people that I am Kashketin! I am the one who shot all the enemies of the people at Vorkuta! Tell the people!”19

The victims of this slaughter were part of a whole layer of Russian socialists who opposed the Stalin regime. Arriving at estimates for the size of this opposition is difficult, but the numbers clearly ran into the thousands. In October 1923, the “Declaration of the 46,” one of the first opposition documents, was supported by half the party cells in Moscow, one-third of the cells in the army, and a majority of the students in the communist cells of Moscow’s institutions of higher learning.20 The years 1924 and 1925 were years of stalemate, when Trotsky’s advice was “do nothing, don’t reveal ourselves at all, maintain our connections, protect our cadres from 1923, let Zinoviev wear himself out.”21 According to Pierre Broué, during those years, the Trotskyist opposition in Leningrad might have numbered “just a few dozen,” but “it was something else altogether” in Moscow, where the opposition claimed some “five hundred members, very well organized. There, the Bolshevik-Leninists [Trotskyists] knew that they had an absolute majority in the factory and army cells.”22 Roland Gaucher estimates that from 1926 to 1928, the United Opposition—now including Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had been pushed into opposition to Stalin—had some seven to eight thousand activists across the whole Soviet Union, much the same as th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: On Forgetting to Read Solzhenitsyn
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Translations and Transliterations
• Introduction: Hope and Horror
• Part 1 Vorkuta: Anvil of the Working Class
• Part 2 Self-Emancipation Versus Substitutionism
• Part 3 The Rear-View Mirror
• Conclusion: Ends and Means
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index