It had been doing so almost from its inception, restrained initially only by its limited resources. Isaac Steinberg, the Left SR People’s Commissar for Justice to whom the Cheka was theoretically answerable, knew exactly in what direction it was travelling. Upon his appointment he tried to subordinate the Cheka to the courts and to due process of law, but with little success. Although he headed the Commissariat of Justice he was not consulted on the “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger!” and its sanction to shoot entire categories of people such as hooligans, profiteers and counter-revolutionaries without a trial. When it was published Steinberg took the matter directly to Lenin. “Why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice at all?” he asked him. “Why not call it frankly the Commissariat of Social Extermination and be done with it?” Lenin seemed excited by the idea. “Well put”, he said, “that’s exactly what it should be called! But of course we can’t say that”.22
In a report to the Soviet Executive of 17th February, 1919, Dzerzhinsky prepared the ground for the systematic use of political prisoners as slave labour. He told the Executive:
Even today the labour of those under arrest is far from being utilized in public works, and so I recommend that we retain these concentration camps for the exploitation of labour of persons under arrest: gentlemen who live without any occupation and those incapable of doing work without some compulsion […] In this way we will create schools of labour.
Following his recommendation, the Soviet Executive passed a resolution with a clear instruction: “The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) is empowered to confine to concentration camps, under the guidance of precise instructions concerning the rules of imprisonment in a concentration camp approved by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee”.
A further cec decree of 12th May, 1919 ordered every provincial capital city to set up a concentration camp to hold 300 or more inmates for forced labour.23 By the end of 1919, 21 official labour camps had been set up in Soviet Russia. By the end of 1920 there were 84 camps in 43 provinces, including the first “camp of special significance”, i.e. the first one to use slave labour as part of national economic policy, on Solovetsky Island in the White Sea.
Lenin and Trotsky were set free by the civil war. The opportunity it gave them to use political terror against all who did not support their government was openly welcomed. Lenin expanded his case for political terror in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, written in 1918 in response to Karl Kautsky’s The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (also 1918), a sustained attack on the Bolshevik concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat from the perspective of democratic Marxism. The works are strikingly different. Kautsky’s is balanced and reasonable, methodically building a persuasive case, dry in tone but occasionally breaking into forceful criticism of what he saw as Lenin’s perversion of Marxism. Lenin’s response is an unrelenting screed of hostile sarcasm in which a crude, simplistic argument is presented in the mocking tone of a frustrated adolescent. Despite repeatedly labeling Kautsky an “imbecile”, Lenin’s intellectual inferiority complex towards the older man is palpable.
Kautsky denied that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat had to be based on one-party rule or denial of democratic rights to others. For Kautsky it was essential that socialism be achieved through democratic methods or it would cease to be socialism. “Thus democracy and socialism do not differ in the sense that one is a means and one is an end”, he wrote.
Both are means to the same end […] For us, socialism is unthinkable without democracy. By modern socialism we mean not only a social organisation of production but also a democratic organisation of society […] There is no socialism without democracy.24
From this perspective, Bolshevism was “not an insufficiently mature socialism, but a non-socialism.”25 He predicted that if the small Russian working class attempted to lead the transition to socialism it would be compelled to do so through a minority dictatorship using methods of extreme bureaucratic and police control. Given that this is exactly what came about it is difficult to understand the airy confidence with which Lenin’s defenders routinely dismiss Kautsky’s critique.
Kautsky went further and questioned whether the working class was actually governing in Russia, and the validity of Bolshevik claims to represent it. Immediately after October 1917, Lenin had claimed that as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution “the transfer of government power from one Soviet party to another is guaranteed without any revolution, simply by a decision of the Soviets, simply by new elections of deputies to the Soviets”.26 After the multiple closures of Soviets that dared to elect deputies from other parties this was clearly not a sustainable argument. By mid-1918 Lenin had changed the terms of the argument by asserting that the Bolshevik Party was the only party that could represent the working masses, no matter what the working masses themselves thought. Thus there could no longer be a “transfer of power from one Soviet party to another”.
Faced with the complete reversal of the Bolsheviks’ main justification for the October Revolution, Kautsky bluntly responded that they now governed “by virtue of the superiority of a centralised organisation over the unorganised popular masses and by virtue of the superiority of its armed forces”. This had come about because the Bolsheviks had replaced the Constituent Assembly, a representative body elected on an equal, direct and secret universal suffrage with an assembly–the Soviet Congress and local Soviets–based on “unequal, indirect, public, and limited suffrage, elected by privileged categories of workers, soldiers and peasants”. Kautsky predicted that this partial democracy run by one political party would inevitably mutate into a despotism, and would concentrate power so much that the revolution “necessarily leads to a Cromwell or a Napoleon”.27
Lenin could not contain his anger that a prominent European socialist, with great influence on the left in Germany and elsewhere, should criticise the Bolshevik regime in this manner. He had nothing but contempt for “this windbag” and for the “irrelevant twaddle” with which he sought to “befog and confuse the issue, for he poses it in the manner of liberals, speaks of democracy in general and not of bourgeois democracy”. Lenin considered that Kautsky substituted “eclecticism and sophistry for dialectics”, and thus no longer correctly interpreted Marxism. His own interpretation was that “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws”.28
There was a far more attractive variant of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat–the “Commune State”–that inspired idealistic and libertarian communists both at home and abroad, most prominently Makhno, who had actually created one in southern Ukraine. In 1918 Lenin wrote that the Soviet state would represent
a higher form of democratic state, a state which in some respects, as Engels said, ceases to be a state, is no more a state in the proper sense of the word. This is a state of the type of the Paris Commune, which replaces an army and police force set apart from the people with an armed people.