2
Revolution and Bureaucracy
The events of 1917 in which the old Russia perished proved to be a turning point in the history of the intelligentsia, of culture, of the freedom movement and of the state system. In circumstances of general breakdown and collapse, when the country was threatened with complete disintegration and reversion to barbarism, the Bolshevik Party and the organized working class were together the only force capable of establishing some sort of order in Russia and saving it as a civilized state.
The Bolsheviks were at one and the same time ‘the party of revolution’ and ‘the party of order’. Because they constituted the sole militarily disciplined and centralized organization amid the general ruin and chaos, when even the army was without the slightest discipline, it was inevitable that they should come to power. On the day of the October Revolution the independent Social-Democratic newspaper Novaya Zhizn' acknowledged that the Bolsheviks were probably the only force that could bring back order in Russia. Unlike the ‘good wishes’ of the intelligentsia, the decisions of the Bolshevik workers’ organizations ‘do not remain on paper’. The paper wrote that ‘the Bolshevik working-class intelligentsia, who played the leading role in the trade unions, the factory and works committees and the other practical organizations of the proletariat, have carried out an immense amount of cultural work during recent months.’1 The Bolsheviks alone managed to maintain labour discipline in the factories.
The actual seizure of power on 7 November was received fairly calmly by the intelligentsia. The Provisional Government which the Bolsheviks drove out had been elected by no one and possessed no authority. ‘The Provisional Government’, observed Novaya Zhizn', ‘did not perish, did not fall in battle, it dissolved.’2 A shock for the intelligentsia, however, was the series of measures taken by the new rulers which restricted democracy, such as the suppression of a number of right-wing newspapers, which Novaya Zhizn' called an ‘anti-socialist and stupid measure’.3
The cause of the October 1917 revolution is not to be sought in the ‘evil will’ of the Bolsheviks but in the objective situation, which left no room for any other solution. The Russian bourgeoisie, weak and involved with the old regime, had from the very beginning of the revolution, in February 1917, taken up extremely reactionary positions. Even if the proletariat which carried out the revolution had not put forward socialist slogans, large-scale industry would have had to be nationalized, for purely political reasons, as a measure of struggle against bourgeois reaction. In this case socialist ideology provided justification for what was a matter of political necessity. Despite the view generally accepted later, the Bolsheviks were not free ‘creators’ of history but rather the slaves of objective necessity which, as a rule, left them no choice. They could have repeated the words of Saint-Just: ‘La force des choses nous conduit peut-être à des résultats auxquels nous n’avons point pensé.’4
Indeed, Lenin, Trotsky and other ‘wise heads’ in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party5 had no intention of introducing socialism forthwith. Their general policy was aimed not at establishing socialism but at defending — by revolutionary-socialist methods — industry, transport, civilization and the Russian state itself in conditions of collapse and anarchy. The prospect of socialism was bound up with the victory of the proletariat in Germany. ‘The job of construction’, wrote Lenin, ‘is completely dependent on how soon the revolution will succeed in the more important European countries. Only after it succeeds there can we seriously get down to the job of construction.’6 This way of presenting the problem did not seem at all utopian at that time. Although Rosa Luxemburg, observing from Germany the struggle in Petrograd, was highly critical of Lenin and Trotsky she saw ‘proof of their farsightedness’ precisely in the fact that ‘the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution.’7
It was clear that the class foundation for socialism did not exist in Russia; the working class was too small and industry undeveloped. This gave N. Sukhanov grounds for saying:
the Bolshevik regime is doomed to perish not through armed force but through the inner defect which has corroded it from the first moments of the Bolsheviks’ ‘state’ activity. This defect is the absence of objective conditions for their rule.8
In an agrarian country a regime which tried to base itself on the working-class minority, ignoring the will of the other groups in the population, was bound to degenerate and give place to something different. However, Sukhanov could not know in advance the form that this process would take. Another Russian Marxist, B. Avilov, declared that a socialist revolution was possible only on the basis of a highly developed industrial capitalism, ‘and not as an amateurish creation based upon small-scale economy and ruined capitalist industry’, and he considered a transition to socialism unrealizable in practice.9 In his paper Novaya Zhizn', which in 1917-18 became the mouthpiece of the left-wing intelligentsia, Gorky described — perhaps more realistically than did many socialists in the West — the attempt to accelerate the world revolution by using the Russian Revolution to urge it on, as ‘a cruel experiment which is doomed to failure beforehand’,10 and warned that the working class itself would suffer as a result: ‘And if the working class is crushed and destroyed, that means the best forces and hopes of the country will be destroyed.’11
Lenin and his comrades were aware that there was no majority in favour of socialism in Russia, that they lacked sufficient support in this peasant country, that the conditions for socialism had not matured. They realized, too, that ‘the only stable power is the one that has the backing of the majority of the population.’12 Nevertheless, they regarded it as their duty to take power. ‘It does not occur to any of them,’ Lenin wrote in reply to Sukhanov and his comrades,
to ask: but what about a people that found itself in a revolutionary situation such as that created by the first imperialist war? Might it not, influenced by the hopelessness of its situation, fling itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilisation that were somewhat unusual? [emphasis added]13
And later, on the same page of his notes (written not long before his death) on Our Revolution, he asks again:
What if the complete hopelessness of the situation by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West-European countries? [emphasis added]14
Lenin understood no less than Sukhanov or Gorky that Russia was not ready for the transition to socialism. Trotsky solved this problem very simply, by supposing that proletarian revolution in the West would help the Bolsheviks to overcome the backwardness of Russia. Lenin also hoped for revolution in the West (not realizing that the Bolsheviks’ dictatorial methods scared off the Western proletariat from the revolution, thus postponing socialism rather than bringing it nearer). On the whole, though, Lenin’s thinking was incomparably more profound than Trotsky’s for, while appreciating Russia’s backwardness, he saw the task before Bolshevism in the years immediately ahead as precisely to correct that situation and thereby create the possibility of socialism. Anyone who reads the statements made by Lenin after 1917 with an unprejudiced mind will easily perceive that what the Bolsheviks saw as their immediate task was not ‘the construction of socialist society’ but, on the contrary, the strengthening in Russia of civilization and state capitalism in the German manner, because this state capitalism was ‘a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism’.15