The October Revolution turned out to be a number of revolutions, all rolled into one. There was the mass social revolution, in which peasants sought land, soldiers (peasants in another guise) struggled for peace, and workers struggled for greater recognition in the labour process. At the same time, there was a democratic revolution, expressing aspirations for the development of political accountability and popular representation, although not necessarily in classic liberal democratic forms. Above all, the democratic revolution sought a constitution, which would both define and constrain political power. This was reinforced by the liberal revolution, in which the nascent bourgeoisie repudiated the absolutist claims of divine rule by the monarchy and fought to apply what they considered to be more enlightened forms of constitutional government and secure property rights. This was accompanied by the national revolution, which confirmed the independence of Poland and Finland, and saw the rapid fragmentation of the Russian Empire. For Marxists, there was also the revolution of internationalism, which suggested that the old-style nation-state was redundant. As capitalism became a global system, so social classes would gradually lose their national characteristics and become part of a single social revolution. Then there was the revolution within the revolution. As the most extreme wing of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks usurped the agenda of the moderate socialists, and mobilised workers and revolutionary idealists (such as the anarchists) to establish their own political dictatorship. The Bolsheviks were the most ruthless and effective advocates of the radical emancipation of the people in the name of a new set of social ideals.9
Such disparate sources of the revolution were reflected in the Bolshevik struggle to take Moscow.10 The initial seizure of power in Petrograd was relatively easy, but in Moscow there was both social and political resistance. It took ten days for the Bolsheviks to break the resistance, including heavy fighting in and around the Kremlin, accompanied by significant loss of life. Victory was only achieved when Lenin drafted in the Latvian Riflemen and the Kronstadt sailors. In other words, Moscow entered the Communist era as a defeated city, with revolutionary socialism of the Petrograd type imposed on the city. This was an occupation regime, with all of the consequences that follow from the attempt to impose a political system on a reluctant population.11 Strong resistance among the print workers and some other sections of the working class continued until spring 1918, and indeed a deep current of resistance lasted into the 1920s.12 The Men- sheviks were particularly deeply rooted in Moscow, and maintained a persistent critique of Bolshevik policy from their footholds in the trade unions and local soviets until they were finally extirpated in the 1920s.13 This was rooted in the hostility of the traditional intelligentsia to the coercive radicalism of the Bolshevik administration.
OPPOSITION WITHIN THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION
Not surprisingly, the struggle for pluralism within the revolution was reflected in the Bolshevik party itself. The Bolshevik party had grown from a small group of about 25,000 in February 1917 to something around 300,000 in October, and once in power the ranks continued to swell. The problem of managing this mass was achieved through various purges and discipline campaigns. Within the leadership the first major debate was over the organisation of Soviet power. The creation of an exclusively Bolshevik government in the form of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) headed by Lenin on 25 October disappointed those who believed that power would be transferred to the soviets. The creation of Sovnarkom took power away from the Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) of the soviets, in whose name the revolution had been made, and was consolidated in a body responsible to no one but the Bolshevik party itself. In other words, the fateful step towards the 'substitution' of the popular power, as represented by the soviets, to unaccountable party committees was taken, as Leon Trotsky had warned earlier. Trotsky by now had joined the radicals, in keeping with his theory of the 'permanent' (uninterrupted) revolution, but this was countered by the moderates within the Bolshevik party, who in effect endorsed the logic that allowed the new government created after the February Revolution to be called 'provisional'.
They objected to Lenin's coup, arguing that the manner of seizing power meant that the only way the Bolsheviks could remain pre-eminent was through violence and civil war. For them, the revolution was indeed to be 'interrupted', if not impermanent. The coalitionists called for the broadening of the government to include all parties represented in the soviets. A group including Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev and Alexei Rykov insisted on the formation of a coalition government encompassing anti-war moderate socialists and envisaged a role for some organisations in addition to the soviets in the new system. They felt so strongly over the issue that they resigned from the new government, warning that Lenin's policies would lead to civil war.14 Lenin in
November agreed to share power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (LSRs), which constituted itself as a separate party at that time, an arrangement that lasted to March 1918, but following an alleged attempt at an uprising on 6 July the LSRs were severely persecuted. After a bitter struggle the coalitionists were defeated. This was the first instance of a major debate in a revolutionary party in power. The warnings of the coalitionists turned out to be entirely prescient, with the coercive power of the regime confirmed by the creation of the Cheka (secret police) in December 1917, and the institution of the Red Terror from August 1918. Lev Kamenev at the head of the Moscow Soviet would go on to become the most consistent critic of secret police power.
Lenin refused to accept that Bolshevik authority was in any way 'provisional', and instead established the tradition that once a revolutionary socialist group came to power, the change of system was irreversible. From the teleological perspective that underlay Marx's view of history, why allow a reversion to a retrograde form of social organisation once a more advanced model had been established? Obviously, the Bolshevik moderates were not ready to give up power either, but they did defend a more inclusive version of that power. This meant that when it came to the long-awaited Constituent Assembly, they agreed with Lenin that this was a remnant of the 'bourgeois' phase of the revolution, and put up no resistance to its dissolution after only one day on 5 January 1918. Nikolai Bukharin announced that the Bolsheviks 'declare war without mercy against the bourgeois parliamentary republic'. Russia's experiment with accountable constitutional governance ended before it had begun. Lenin claimed that soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat was a far higher form of democracy, but the shooting of workers demonstrating in favour of the Assembly, in Petrograd and elsewhere, revealed the fate of those who disagreed.
THE LENINIST CONSOLIDATION
The imposition of a particularly narrow and intolerant version of revolutionary socialism elicited a hostile reaction from some of the leading lights of the movement abroad. Rosa Luxemburg, on the internationalist wing of German social democracy, initially welcomed the Bolshevik revolution as having 'put socialism on the agenda', but she soon condemned the methods of Leninist rule, above all its suppression of democracy. She insisted that socialism should mean the deepening and not the limitation of democracy, although she understood the need for temporary restrictions. In a famous formulation in 1918 she stressed that 'Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for members of one party - however numerous they may be - is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.'15 Karl Kautsky, one of the leading figures of the German socialist movement, reaffirmed the commitment of social democracy to parliamentary forms of revolutionary transformation. He insisted that democracy was more than an instrument in the struggle but an inherent component of socialism itself. As he put it, 'For us, therefore, socialism without democracy is unthinkable. We understand by modern socialism not merely social organisation of production, but democratic organisation of society as well.'16 Echoing Gramsci's view of Russia, Kautsky considered the Bolshevik revolution as something alien to the international revolutionary struggle. For him, it was the outcome of specific Russian conditions, notably the strains of war and relative social underdevelopment, a view that provoked Lenin's fury.