Before Stalin, was the USSR free?

[RedMarxist]

Before Stalin's rise to power, back when Lenin was still in charge, were the people of the Soviet Union free? How democratic was the country? Should we use it as a model when creating a future socialist society?

[jake williams]

To a certain extent, and I'm not an expert on Soviet history so I can't give too much in the way of deep sources, working class power was actually expanded significantly under Stalin, both in terms of democratizing the Soviet state, and extending Soviet power. (There were also important retreats under Stalin, and later, something I think everyone recognizes).

The workers of the Soviet Union were not at all totally free while Lenin was alive, because it takes some time even to generalize socialist relations at a basic level in any country, on top of subjective mistakes by leadership.

There isn't some "Leninist model" distinct from the objective conditions faced by the revolutionaries - Lenin as a leader did specific things, got some right and some wrong. It's not like Lenin had some vision of Soviet society which was in place while he was alive, and then Stalin had some different vision which was in place while he was alive. Lenin had particular perspectives on the challenges and tasks faced by the revolution, and did what he could to carry them out. Stalin did too, but I think it's worth pointing out that as the Soviet state was actually broader and bigger while Stalin was in power, the problems (subjective and objective) of the Soviet Union were a lot more complex than anyone making a bit point of blaming Stalin personally would suggest.

[Die Rote Fahne]

To not place blame on Stalin for his role in the murder of millions of people, paranoid policies of secret policing, political arrests, corruption, the establishment of a new bourgeoisie--the party, and his idea of socialism in one country that were the incidents that failed the USSR, is absurd. Was Stalin the demonic beast that he is portrayed as in Western propaganda? No. Was he a paranoid dictator? Yes. Did he further the USSR toward Socialism? No. The powers being described by jammoe need to be described, not just say "workers got more power". What powers exactly?

To be quite clear: The nation was not socialist. It wasn't even a DOTP. Therefore, it was not democratic. The people were far from free. I am not saying free as in "bourgeois freedom". They were literally not free to engage in homosexual acts, not free to dissent, not free to have different political opinions than the party, government use of torture and executions for disobeying, extreme censorship, etc.

Was the USSR the worst place in the world? No.

Was it much better off than Tsarist or modern capitalist Russia? I'll say yes.

Was Uncle Joe a true socialist who did everything he could to establish a DOTP? No. It was a Dictatorship in the name of the proletariat, for the party.

[RedMarxist]

well, under Lenin, was it more free then the USA?

[Tommy4ever]

It was still pretty chaotic before Stalin, especially under Lenin.

You have to understand that the Bolsheviks first came to power in the midst of a World War which Russia was already failing at terribly, an economic crisis which had set the country back by decades, an uncontrolled social revolution in town and country and were very soon beset by a terrible civil war.

At first Lenin made several libertarian decrees - workers were given control over factories, peasants were given the right to seize the land form the landowners, the constituent assembly was called, a decentralised democratic structure based on the Soviets was proclaimed.

Within a year all this (with the exception of the land reform) was swept away in the face of the Civil War. Worker control in industry accellerated the collapse of Russian industry (poor management being the main culprit), the Soviets started to turn against the Bolsheviks, the workers started to rumble and some went to industrial action, the peasants were not giving grain to the armies and cities, the war was going badly, there were shortages of everything, the currency had quite litterally become worthless.

So the Bolsheviks brought in something called War Communsim - this was equally, perhaps more, oppressive than anything seen under Stalin. Industry was nationalised (whilst consumer indsutries continued to die the important war industries stayed alive and helped win the war), terrible repressive measures became worse (the Red Terror, whilst not as bad as Stalin's was comparable), private trade was banned (spawning what must have been one of the world's biggest ever black markets) and the Reds basically declared war on the peasantry by sending in armed squads to requisition grain. It was all very chaotic, all very authoritarian. But all this was for the purpose of saving the Revolution from defeat in war. In that it succeeded.

By this time, 1921, Lenin was already starting to fade from weakening health but he pushed through a policy, virtually by his own prestige alone (it was extremely unpopular with the Party) called NEP. This introduced capitalist elements like limited private enterprize and freedom to trade back into the economy. Grain requisitioning was ended and the state would buy the grain from the peasants rather than take it. The repression was also largely ended (although by this stage there was little opposition to repress).

So unless you want endless war and economic collapse then I don't think the Russia of Lenin is a good model for society. :p

Really, in the early days the Soviet Union's policies were entirely made to deal with the circumstances of the time - War Communism was needed to win the Civil War, NEP was needed to restore peace, rebuild society and the economy in an exhausted country and Stalin's rapid industrialisation was needed to counter the threat of a seemingly inevitable war whilst finally ending the Bolshevik desire for an industrialised nation (collectivisation might be another question though).

I'm not sure what your measure of freedom is. The was no freedom of dissent in Lenin's day and the 1920s, but in many other respects the Soviet people enjoyed freedoms that the people in the West did not.

[RedMarxist]

well, if that is the case, then do you think Marxist-Leninism is dead, like I've been repeatedly told? I find myself very into this particular ideology as it seems to be the most successful revolutionary ideology in existence as of now.

is it dead, or are people just *****ing?

[Tommy4ever]

well, if that is the case, then do you think Marxist-Leninism is dead, like I've been repeatedly told? I find myself very into this particular ideology as it seems to be the most successful revolutionary ideology in existence as of now.

is it dead, or are people just *****ing?

I've heard you ask this question before, I even think I've posted a response before. :rolleyes:

But I shall do so again. Now, if you want to find out about Lenin's ideology I suggest you read some of the stuff he wrote - the State and Revolution being a brilliant place to start. But the words ''Marxist-Leninism'' do not necessarily mean the ideology of Lenin, they actually mean the ideology of Lenin as interpreted by Stalin and the Soviet leadership of the mid 20th century. I hope you can see that those two things are not necessarily the same thing.

M-L movements are still alive in many parts of the world but in most cases they are pretty small nowadays. Just as the entire socialist movement is weak and discredited (wrongly so).

But many the actual ideas resonate today just as they did in 1917. So, even whilst the movment fades the ideas remain. And as a clever man once said ''you can't kill an idea''.

Next in our tour of answers is why have the ideologies of Leninsm dominated the revolutionary Left since October 1917? A simple answer is that all other movements failed to achieve the revolution they desired, whilst these Bolsheviks took over almighty Russia and defeated so many enemies. Bolshevism was regarded as the practical ideology of revolution in the 1920s and started to draw supporters from other previous movements. By the end of WWII there was essentially no other revolutionary Leftist ideology. If you were a revolutionary socialist, you were a Leninist. That's the end of the story. With the only other Leninist ideology at the time being Trotskyism (which beyond a few areas was extremely insignificant), Marxist-Leninism (and the 'Maoist variant') basically monopolised all revolutionary movements. So of course it has been the most influencial! As prior to the Third World Revolutions from the 60s on the only 'socialist' revolutions had been in Russia and China.

Hope that gives a basic explanation Comrade.

[RedMarxist]

I have read state and revolution. Now I'm reading what is to be done? which I believe explains the purpose of a vanguard party/democratic centralism.

I do not believe that Lenin was a dictator. He was just trying to hold the USSR together/defend the fruits of the revolution, at all costs.

One thing that I don't like about ML however is when the party(and I'm looking at you Nepal) betrays the wishes of the people, simply because it can. I hope one day there is a "quick fix" for that.

[Jose Gracchus]

Before Stalin's rise to power, back when Lenin was still in charge, were the people of the Soviet Union free? How democratic was the country? Should we use it as a model when creating a future socialist society?

No, Lenin led a party dictatorship after mid-1918. However, things got even worse after 1928, and internal party political participation (note: not working-class political participation) was even basically expunged by 1924.

The soviets ceased to function as democratic instruments of the working class over state politics by the end of 1918, and they were never successfully revived. The party elite formed the nucleus of a new ruling class that took shape throughout the 1920s via the NEP and other policies. They ruled over the working-class on the basis of a "social contract", as Simon Pirani puts it, where the party, and successively, the party elite, politically expropriated the working class in exchange for the living standards of the working class progressively rising through this era.

This came to an end in 1928, as the 'revolution from above' under Stalin and his clique aimed as a massive forced industrialization and collectivization, where the working class was subject to mass political terror, huge criminal restraints on activity, forced mobilizations, and a persistent depression in living standards. This, combined with the theft from the peasantry, was the basis for accumulating the surplus which financed the forced industrialization.


To a certain extent, and I'm not an expert on Soviet history so I can't give too much in the way of deep sources, working class power was actually expanded significantly under Stalin, both in terms of democratizing the Soviet state, and extending Soviet power. (There were also important retreats under Stalin, and later, something I think everyone recognizes).

This is completely absurd and totally wrong as a matter of fact. Life outside the party was characterized by various bourgeois means of squeezing the working class (like Stakhnovism) and a persistent quashing of living standards, as well as political terror and mass imprisonment. Life inside the party was extremely degenerated relative to their position of comparable privilege, even relative to the 1924-1928 period, where the party had been converted from a political party driving policy that at least in part emerged through the mass membership and its institutions, into an administrative apparatus designed to transmit the orders conceived of at the top.


The workers of the Soviet Union were not at all totally free while Lenin was alive, because it takes some time even to generalize socialist relations at a basic level in any country, on top of subjective mistakes by leadership.

I'm unaware that such a thing as "socialist relations" in a Marxian sense were established in the USSR at any time, and especially in this period.


There isn't some "Leninist model" distinct from the objective conditions faced by the revolutionaries - Lenin as a leader did specific things, got some right and some wrong. It's not like Lenin had some vision of Soviet society which was in place while he was alive, and then Stalin had some different vision which was in place while he was alive. Lenin had particular perspectives on the challenges and tasks faced by the revolution, and did what he could to carry them out. Stalin did too, but I think it's worth pointing out that as the Soviet state was actually broader and bigger while Stalin was in power, the problems (subjective and objective) of the Soviet Union were a lot more complex than anyone making a bit point of blaming Stalin personally would suggest.

This doesn't answer the OP at all. He was not assigning blame to Great Men, but asking a question of comparative conditions under different regimes.

[Tim Cornelis]

well, under Lenin, was it more free then the USA?

No, not even more free than the USA.

"All industry was nationalized and strict centralized management was introduced.
State monopoly on foreign trade was introduced.
Discipline for workers was strict, and strikers could be shot.
Obligatory labour duty was imposed onto "non-working classes."
Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surpluses from peasants in excess of absolute minimum for centralized distribution among the remaining population.
Food and most commodities were rationed and distributed in urban centers in a centralized way.
Private enterprise became illegal.
The state introduced military-style control of railroads."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism

Almost one million Don Cossacks were eliminated by Lenin.
5,000,000 died in the famine of 1920-21, apparently orchestrated by Lenin as

"Lenin reversed his agricultural policies once starvation appeared to threaten the survival of the Soviet regime" and "Substantial stockpiles of grain held by the Whites were captured in 1920, and Seed grain as well as food for family consumption was requisitioned from peasants as a punitive measure."

source: http://www.bcaplan.com/cgi-bin/museum1.cgi

Lenin organized Red Tyranny, no more no less.

[RedMarxist]

I do believe, if what I read from The Red Flag is true, then that the Civil War destroyed whatever democracy and liberalism left in the USSR.

If the Civil War had never happened, then the Soviets would have still existed, war communism would never have happened, etc.

I think that if a revolution happened in America, there could still be a vanguard party and democracy at the same time.

[Jose Gracchus]

I think we should remain realistic and materialistic in our analysis and sources, and not opportunistically cite Koch hacks who theorize that "socialism" arises from the desire of "jocks" to steal the cash and women from clever "nerds" who've earned it, like Bryan Caplan, and collect a tenured professor's salary while issuing forth this idiotic bilge. He's a Koch propagandist, and his wide-eyed idealist crap is just as polemical and absurd on the CNT and the Spanish Civil War (which he calls the "anarcho-statists", since they crossed the magical line of "natural rights" to property).

[Tim Cornelis]

I do not believe that Lenin was a dictator. He was just trying to hold the USSR together/defend the fruits of the revolution, at all costs.

How is that mutually exclusive?

When someone is trying to defend the "fruits of the revolution" at all costs, and apparently meant killing millions of people and punishing all dissent, how was that guy not a dictator? Even if his intentions were well meaning it doesn't take away the fact he was a dictator.

[Jose Gracchus]

How did Lenin kill "millions"?

[Tim Cornelis]

I think we should remain realistic and materialistic in our analysis and sources, and not opportunistically cite Koch hacks who theorize that "socialism" arises from the desire of "jocks" to steal the cash and women from clever "nerds" who've earned it, like Bryan Caplan, and collect a tenured professor's salary while issuing forth this idiotic bilge. He's a Koch propagandist, and his wide-eyed idealist crap is just as polemical and absurd on the CNT and the Spanish Civil War (which he calls the "anarcho-statists", since they crossed the magical line of "natural rights" to property).

What a fallacious argument, just because Bryan Caplan is an idiot does not mean the statistics he cites are not facts!

[Tim Cornelis]

I think we should remain realistic and materialistic in our analysis and sources, and not opportunistically cite Koch hacks who theorize that "socialism" arises from the desire of "jocks" to steal the cash and women from clever "nerds" who've earned it, like Bryan Caplan, and collect a tenured professor's salary while issuing forth this idiotic bilge. He's a Koch propagandist, and his wide-eyed idealist crap is just as polemical and absurd on the CNT and the Spanish Civil War (which he calls the "anarcho-statists", since they crossed the magical line of "natural rights" to property).

The famine of 1920-21 + elimination of Don Cossacks + execution of political prisoners and gulags (survival rate 10%)

[Tommy4ever]

How did Lenin kill "millions"?

Don't you know that Lenin traveled by night through Moscow's worker's districts smothering babies? :rolleyes:

Seriously though, don't listen to the neo-liberal bs about Lenin orchestrating the famine of 1921 etc.

If you are going to criticise Lenin (which is something you certainly should do) you should probably approach the job with facts rather than Cold War propoganda.

[RedMarxist]

Well, OK Lenin was a dictator I guess.[sarcasm]

Does this mean that every revolution spearheaded by a vanguard party will automatically = dictatorship?

I think a vanguard party is a good thing, as it guides a revolution to where it has to go.

Opinions?

[Jose Gracchus]

What a fallacious argument, just because Bryan Caplan is an idiot does not mean the statistics he cites are not facts!

He's not a reliable source or authority, nor are his chosen cherry-picks of the far-right's Favorite History Compendium.


The famine of 1920-21 + elimination of Don Cossacks + execution of political prisoners and gulags (survival rate 10%)

The GULag was the central administration of corrective labor camps, and not set up until under Stalin, so that's factually impossible.

We the Don Cossacks executed by the millions on order from the Sovnarkom?

And how is Lenin responsible for the famine of 1920-1921? All of Europe was gripped by a famine in this period, and the Bolsheviks were certainly not responsible in the sense you imply for the breakdown in the economy and transportation, which began under the Tsar in 1917.

Lenin was not an individual dictator in the sense of Stalin. He led the party due to his personal prestige and respect among the party leadership, but there was a distribution of power in this period of the evolution of the Soviet party-state. It had not consolidated into the autocracy of the Great Terror, yet.

[S.Artesian]

No, not even more free than the USA.

"All industry was nationalized and strict centralized management was introduced.
State monopoly on foreign trade was introduced.
Discipline for workers was strict, and strikers could be shot.
Obligatory labour duty was imposed onto "non-working classes."
Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surpluses from peasants in excess of absolute minimum for centralized distribution among the remaining population.
Food and most commodities were rationed and distributed in urban centers in a centralized way.
Private enterprise became illegal.
The state introduced military-style control of railroads."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism

Almost one million Don Cossacks were eliminated by Lenin.
5,000,000 died in the famine of 1920-21, apparently orchestrated by Lenin as

"Lenin reversed his agricultural policies once starvation appeared to threaten the survival of the Soviet regime" and "Substantial stockpiles of grain held by the Whites were captured in 1920, and Seed grain as well as food for family consumption was requisitioned from peasants as a punitive measure."

source: http://www.bcaplan.com/cgi-bin/museum1.cgi

Lenin organized Red Tyranny, no more no less.


Hmmh.... let's see before Stalin... 1919-- civil war in Russia, war communism; 1919-- USA, Red Scare, shootings of workers, arrests of those trying to organize unions. Imprisonments on phony charges. Jim Crow. Lynching of blacks [and the occasional Jew] in the South. Continued confinement and immiseration of indigenous peoples. Discrimination against Mexican-Americans; occupation of the Philippines; quasi-occupation of Cuba.

Oh yeah, my country 'tis of thee, you sure be free. Free as a motherfucker.

[Tommy4ever]

Well, OK Lenin was a dictator I guess.[sarcasm]

Does this mean that every revolution spearheaded by a vanguard party will automatically = dictatorship?

I think a vanguard party is a good thing, as it guides a revolution to where it has to go.

Opinions?

Does a revolution with a vanguard lead directly to dictatorship? Depends what you mean.

Was Lenin a dictator? Not really.

At no stage did Lenin have complete control over policy as you might think a dictator would. He had to argue his position and was often defeated. But he was obviously the most influencial and revered figure in the party, so his opinion carried huge wieght.

But was Lenin's Russia a dictatorship? Yes.

Increasingly during the Civil War power became more and more centralised and eventually ended up with something called a ''collective dictatorship''. The Politburo (around 10 people) were elected by the party. This tiny clique decided basically all policy in the manner a single dictator might. But within the Politburo there were lively debates and splits in opinion. This situation existed from perhaps 1918 until the early 30s when Stalin finally assured his total dominance and came back again, to a large extent, after Stalin's death.

Back to the question of the vanguard. The idea of the vanguard is that a smaller group of revolutionares should look to guide the proletariat towards the revolution rather than just move with the class as more libertarian revolutionary theories suggest. This idea will always carry authoritarian implications as you are trying to exert your will upon the proletarian class. However, it does provide much needed direction in a revolutionary situation. But once again, this vanguard party or trade union (look up syndacalism) can itself be a highly democratic organisation or it can be a disciplined but more authoritarian organisation like the Bolshevik Party.

[Tim Cornelis]

Well, OK Lenin was a dictator I guess.[sarcasm]

Does this mean that every revolution spearheaded by a vanguard party will automatically = dictatorship?

I think a vanguard party is a good thing, as it guides a revolution to where it has to go.

Opinions?

Lenin was a dictator, the power was in his hands and a small clique (central committee).

"Does this mean that every revolution spearheaded by a vanguard party will automatically = dictatorship?"

Never argued this, though chances are high seeing how all Vanguardist experiments lead to such a situation (100% failure rate).

"I think a vanguard party is a good thing, as it guides a revolution to where it has to go."

Who decides where the revolution is going? Workers, people or an elite? Though a vanguard doesn't need to be an elite, it can indeed inspire the masses but it will not seize power in name of the people.

[The Man]

Stalin tried to make the Soviet Union much more free, believe it or not. In fact, before he died he make secret ballots in elections in the 1936 Soviet Constitution, and he also tried to abolish the post of General Secretary, and make himself part of the Central Committee. He also created Freedom of Religion in the USSR.

[Tim Cornelis]

Hmmh.... let's see before Stalin... 1919-- civil war in Russia, war communism; 1919-- USA, Red Scare, shootings of workers, arrests of those trying to organize unions. Imprisonments on phony charges. Jim Crow. Lynching of blacks [and the occasional Jew] in the South. Continued confinement and immiseration of indigenous peoples. Discrimination against Mexican-Americans; occupation of the Philippines; quasi-occupation of Cuba.

Oh yeah, my country 'tis of thee, you sure be free. Free as a motherfucker.

Because I argued the USA was free? Nope.

[Aspiring Humanist]

Ask Makhno if he felt free

[RedMarxist]

When I meant that the USSR was free, I meant pre-civil War Russia. I'm well aware of War Communism and the dictatorial clique developed post-civil war

I'm not into Stalin or post civil war debates right now.

Compared to the US, UK, or any similar "democracy" in the late 1910's, how free and innovative culturally(on racism, schooling, etc) was the USSR?

on a scale of 1 to 10

and who the heck is Makhno?

[Ilyich]

Before Stalin's rise to power, back when Lenin was still in charge, were the people of the Soviet Union free? How democratic was the country? Should we use it as a model when creating a future socialist society?

Pre-Stalin USSR was far more free (for a lack of better terms) than Stalin's USSR. Unfortunately, Lenin's USSR was not completely democratic either (unless you consider the Petrograd Soviet and other revolutionary governments). Also, Stalin's dictatorship came as an undesired result of the bureaucracy that was the result of Lenin's concept of "democratic" centralism.

[Tommy4ever]

When I meant that the USSR was free, I meant pre-civil War Russia. I'm well aware of War Communism and the dictatorial clique developed post-civil war

I'm not into Stalin or post civil war debates right now.

Compared to the US, UK, or any similar "democracy" in the late 1910's, how free and innovative culturally(on racism, schooling, etc) was the USSR?

on a scale of 1 to 10

and who the heck is Makhno?

The Civil War basically started right away after the Bolshevik resumption of power. After they took over Petrograd there was a brief little campaign before Kerensky fled Russia, then the Bolsheviks had to expand their authority into hostile areas whislt national movements and Germans fought against them, then the White Generals organised and the war began. So the Civil War basically began just after the Revolution.

In cultural terms the Bolsheviks deserve huge respect. They tried to introduce some incredibly progressive ideas into one of Europe's most backward societies (imagine trying to bring all of revleft's little cultural faux pas into somewhere like Iran or Uganda today).

They promoted equality for women, made divorce more open and gave access to it to women, abortions were made legal and encouraged (there are a few cheeky propoganda posters involving the Virgin Mary longing for an abortion :p), atheism was encouraged and these ideas were brought to disbelieving peasants (they had 'miracle plays' where a priest and a party man would debate and then the priest would renounce god, they also did some really rather cool things like taking peasants up into the sky to show them there was no god in the clouds), during the civil war and revolutions pogroms against Jews (something very common at the time in Russian culture in all revolts) were punished harshly and denounced, the nationalities were given some limited autonomy at this time, the Communist Party denounced the West's imperial domination of other peoples and the CPUSA stood against racism in America, there is was even a Zion created for the Jews as they searched for a homeland (it was admitedly in Siberia and not quite as popular as Palestine :p), schooling was improved, millions were brought electricity for the first time etc etc. Lots of good points. (but no workers control!)

Makhno was the leader of an Anarchist Army in the Ukraine. The Bolsheviks twiced allied with him during the Civil War to defeat the White Generals and twice betrayed him. The Anarchist project in Ukraine was destroyed by the Bolsheviks.

[RedMarxist]

well, if there was worker control, then could a vanguard ideally exist in a democratic society in a future revolution?

[bietan jarrai]

they actually mean the ideology of Lenin as interpreted by Stalin and the Soviet leadership of the mid 20th century

Actually, no. I am a Marxist-Leninist, my party is marxist-leninist and it is not Stalinist neither is it revisionist. Another good example would be the KKE in Greece. Marxism-Leninism means following the writings and teachings of Lenin. If a "Stalinist" calls himself a Marxist-Leninist, it's really not my problem.

[Tim Cornelis]

When I meant that the USSR was free, I meant pre-civil War Russia. I'm well aware of War Communism and the dictatorial clique developed post-civil war

I'm not into Stalin or post civil war debates right now.

Compared to the US, UK, or any similar "democracy" in the late 1910's, how free and innovative culturally(on racism, schooling, etc) was the USSR?

on a scale of 1 to 10

and who the heck is Makhno?

War Communism was intrdouced in 1918, one year after the Russian Revolution of 1917. So in that one year was Russia more free than under War Communism? I guess.

Makhno was the de facto leader of the Ukranian anarchists and militias (platformists?) who controlled the largely anarchist Free Territory from 1918 till the Red Army of Trotsky barged in in 1921 and executed nearly all anarchists and sympathizers of Makhno. Makhno himself was forced into exile.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Territory

[RedMarxist]

this may be entirely hypothetical but do you think a revolution in America would be much more 'free', as not all of the things that occurred in Russia(Backwardness, civil war, foreign intervention) would happen here(well not necessarily)?

[bietan jarrai]

this may be entirely hypothetical but do you think a revolution in America would be much more 'free', as not all of the things that occurred in Russia(Backwardness, civil war, foreign intervention) would happen here(well not necessarily)?
That depends on the revolution and where the workers want to take it, and if someone uses the revolution for their own profit.

[Tim Cornelis]

this may be entirely hypothetical but do you think a revolution in America would be much more 'free', as not all of the things that occurred in Russia(Backwardness, civil war, foreign intervention) would happen here(well not necessarily)?

You mean a revolution lead by a Leninist vanguard?

In Europe the USA may intervene, in the USA a civil war between the "libertarian" militia movement and Military and private forces protecting privilege may break out.

I think we learned a great deal from history and that the mistakes of the past will not be repeated. If the workers in 'cooperation' with Vanguard were to seize power and the Vanguard appears to become a new ruling class the Red Flags would, quite literally, be going off and the workers would overthrow it and seize power for itself. It depends really on what a "vanguard party" is, some considered the IWW and CNT to be vanguardist as well.

Didn't Amadeo Bordiga have a more libertarian Marxist version of the Vanguard?

[Misanthrope]

As long as capitalism is in existence, no one is free. Enough said, end of discussion. Don't go around blaming Stalin for halting socialism's advances or praising Lenin for advancing socialism. You'll get the same cliche, cult like responses from respective groups. Was capitalism in existence? Yes. So were people free? No.

[S.Artesian]

Because I argued the USA was free? Nope.


No because you argued "not as free as the USA."

[Comrade Crow]

Before Stalin's rise to power, back when Lenin was still in charge, were the people of the Soviet Union free? How democratic was the country? Should we use it as a model when creating a future socialist society?

Not commenting else other than the use of the word "free."

"Free peoples," and free[dom](s) seems like a vague, abstract concept, that is totally subjective to me in terms of politics.

[RedMarxist]

In my opinion the US was less free at this time period. I mean, blacks had no rights. Women also had little to no rights. White supremacy was rampant. And I guess you could argue our 2 political party system is unfair as smaller parties have almost ZERO a chance to win the presidency, even in modern times.

So in away, what with all the reforms the Bolsheviks made(free schooling for peasants, woman and racial rights, worker control(at first), and the Soviet bodies.),one could argue that Russia was more free in 1917 then any other "democratic" nation on Earth

and as for capitalism ending, I could very much see the Greek people adopting true socialism in Greece(in away they[the Greek people] already have), and future protests Europe wide could spell doom for the EU and capitalism in Europe.

You know what I think? The USA will become the last stronghold for capitalism in the world within this coming year.

[Rafiq]

well, under Lenin, was it more free then the USA?

Yes. The years around his death are debatable, though.

[Rafiq]

He also created Freedom of Religion in the USSR.

Freedom of religion has always existed in the USSR. What he did, was allow the Orthodox Church, a tool of the bourgeoisie, to operate freely.

[Rafiq]

Ask Makhno if he felt free

Ask me if I give two fucks what Makhno thinks

[El Oso Rojo]

To not place blame on Stalin for his role in the murder of millions of people, paranoid policies of secret policing, political arrests, corruption, the establishment of a new bourgeoisie--the party, and his idea of socialism in one country that were the incidents that failed the USSR, is absurd. Was Stalin the demonic beast that he is portrayed as in Western propaganda? No. Was he a paranoid dictator? Yes. Did he further the USSR toward Socialism? No. The powers being described by jammoe need to be described, not just say "workers got more power". What powers exactly?

To be quite clear: The nation was not socialist. It wasn't even a DOTP. Therefore, it was not democratic. The people were far from free. I am not saying free as in "bourgeois freedom". They were literally not free to engage in homosexual acts, not free to dissent, not free to have different political opinions than the party, government use of torture and executions for disobeying, extreme censorship, etc.

Was the USSR the worst place in the world? No.

Was it much better off than Tsarist or modern capitalist Russia? I'll say yes.

Was Uncle Joe a true socialist who did everything he could to establish a DOTP? No. It was a Dictatorship in the name of the proletariat, for the party.

He meant well.

[El Oso Rojo]

No, Lenin led a party dictatorship after mid-1918. However, things got even worse after 1928, and internal party political participation (note: not working-class political participation) was even basically expunged by 1924.

The soviets ceased to function as democratic instruments of the working class over state politics by the end of 1918, and they were never successfully revived. The party elite formed the nucleus of a new ruling class that took shape throughout the 1920s via the NEP and other policies. They ruled over the working-class on the basis of a "social contract", as Simon Pirani puts it, where the party, and successively, the party elite, politically expropriated the working class in exchange for the living standards of the working class progressively rising through this era.

This came to an end in 1928, as the 'revolution from above' under Stalin and his clique aimed as a massive forced industrialization and collectivization, where the working class was subject to mass political terror, huge criminal restraints on activity, forced mobilizations, and a persistent depression in living standards. This, combined with the theft from the peasantry, was the basis for accumulating the surplus which financed the forced industrialization.



This is completely absurd and totally wrong as a matter of fact. Life outside the party was characterized by various bourgeois means of squeezing the working class (like Stakhnovism) and a persistent quashing of living standards, as well as political terror and mass imprisonment. Life inside the party was extremely degenerated relative to their position of comparable privilege, even relative to the 1924-1928 period, where the party had been converted from a political party driving policy that at least in part emerged through the mass membership and its institutions, into an administrative apparatus designed to transmit the orders conceived of at the top.



I'm unaware that such a thing as "socialist relations" in a Marxian sense were established in the USSR at any time, and especially in this period.



This doesn't answer the OP at all. He was not assigning blame to Great Men, but asking a question of comparative conditions under different regimes.

It was better than the United States of Settlers.

[Jose Gracchus]

Objectively speaking, I'm pretty sure American workers had a higher standard of living. In what sense do you mean the U.S. was worse? Was the U.S. a more reactionary construct, ideologically? Sure.

There's no doubt workers were subjectively better off during the "great turn" under Stalin -- however you want to justify it in historical or ideological terms -- by the late 30s Stalin's regime (leaving aside the red herring of his personal agency) had 800,000 people executed in a year.

[Tim Cornelis]

No because you argued "not as free as the USA."

Right, if someone asks "Yeah, but North Korea is as free as China right?"

And I respond: "No, it's not as free as China", does this mean I think China is the embodiment of freedom? No, it means I think that North Korea is less free than the unfree China.

[S.Artesian]

Right, if someone asks "Yeah, but North Korea is as free as China right?"

And I respond: "No, it's not as free as China", does this mean I think China is the embodiment of freedom? No, it means I think that North Korea is less free than the unfree China.

Right, and I think your comparison to the US is specious, incorrect, and class-biased. Tell black sharecroppers in Mississippi, Mexican-American agricultural workers in California, coal miners in West Virginia how much freer they were in the US 1919 than in the fSU in 1919.

[RedMarxist]

exactly. To a black sharecropper in 1917-19, I'm sure they would feel more free if that is what your asking in the FSU then in the USA, for obvious reasons.

Right now I'm reading The History of the Russian Revolution, by Trotsky. It is a very good book. long as heck though-1300+ pages

[Jose Gracchus]

Right, and I think your comparison to the US is specious, incorrect, and class-biased. Tell black sharecroppers in Mississippi, Mexican-American agricultural workers in California, coal miners in West Virginia how much freer they were in the US 1919 than in the fSU in 1919.

Query: do you think among the white industrial working class in the U.S., that repression and penetration by state security forces was as intense as the Cheka/GPU assaults on free attempts by the working-class to organize in the 1920s? Whose living standards were higher? The SPUSA, SLP, CPUSA/CLP/WPA, IWW was able to exist, if under enormous pressure and significant repressions. By the 1921, as public organizations alternative workers' organization to the RCP(b)/AUCP(b) had been largely crushed, in the next subsequent few years was totally annihilated.

And given the black sharecropper and Mexican-American agricultural workers are more comparable to the Soviet peasantry than the industrial proletariat, I don't know if I'd consider the 1918-1921 conditions worse for them. They were not subject to forced requisitions and mass famine (though the "Hanging Order" may be less severe than the de facto standing hanging order that was lynch culture enforced by the white racial caste authorities in the Southern rural economy). I am saying we may recontextualize this in historical and ideological terms, but on the mere question of subjective conditions for immediate producers in this-or-that situation, I think it may be difficult to argue things were actually better across the board in the RSFSR/USSR in the 20s, and I think there's no question whatsoever post-28 that American workers were better off.

[S.Artesian]

Query: do you think among the white industrial working class in the U.S., that repression and penetration by state security forces was as intense as the Cheka/GPU assaults on free attempts by the working-class to organize in the 1920s? Whose living standards were higher? The SPUSA, SLP, CPUSA/CLP/WPA, IWW was able to exist, if under enormous pressure and significant repressions. By the 1921, as public organizations alternative workers' organization to the RCP(b)/AUCP(b) had been largely crushed, in the next subsequent few years was totally annihilated.

Actually, I think the whole discussion is pretty much absurd... and is based on some quantitative comparison that is wholly inappropriate given the qualitative differences surrounding the emergence of the fSU.

For example, whose living standards were higher? That's the argument that was used, has been used, after every revolution to condemn the revolution. What were the living standards like for the sans-culottes before the revolution? What were those standards like before the left-wing of the Jacobins took over?

What's involved in this discussion of "freedom" and "living standards" is, IMO, a real voluntarism that says-- oh the living standards might have been better; oh the working class might have been freer if only x......y..........z..... Ignoring that x.......y..........z are historical factors that exist, or not, based on the material history giving birth to the struggle, and continuing to shape the struggle.



And given the black sharecropper and Mexican-American agricultural workers are more comparable to the Soviet peasantry than the industrial proletariat,

Disagree-- the sharecropper relationship was essentially a "mask," a beard covering what was in fact a wage-relationship. The black share-croppers were first and foremost a supply of super-exploited black labor, a rural proletariat for agricultural production.

Likewise agricultural laborers throughout the US West, Southwest and Northwest.



I don't know if I'd consider the 1918-1921 conditions worse for them. They were not subject to forced requisitions and mass famine (though the "Hanging Order" may be less severe than the de facto standing hanging order that was lynch culture enforced by the white racial caste authorities in the Southern rural economy). I am saying we may recontextualize this in historical and ideological terms, but on the mere question of subjective conditions for immediate producers in this-or-that situation, I think it may be difficult to argue things were actually better across the board in the RSFSR/USSR in the 20s, and I think there's no question whatsoever post-28 that American workers were better off.

And then would we say that post-1929, workers if the fSU were better off? That post 1932, workers in the fSU were better off? Post 1937? It's absurd, don't you think. Because 1928 doesn't exist separate and apart from 1929, 32, 37, 39, or 41.

The truth is the whole, and not more or less. That's why I think such comparisons are like reading gossip magazines-- something you do between root canals.

[Jose Gracchus]

No, I basically agree it is pure fallacy and bean counting to isolate conditions from historical context and treat them as ahistorical absolutes, which of course is just part of usual bourgeois apologetics which vuglarly suggest that "that's what happens when you get rowdy" and "things are better when you 'choose' liberalism [sit down and shut the fuck up]".

I was just discussing the factual assertions, but I agree with you entirely about the big picture.

[Dogs On Acid]

RedMarxist, first you were a proud Marxist-Leninist, then a proud Council-Communist, then you have no idea what you are and don't consider Lenin a dictator because he had good intentions.

Either become a Pan-Leftist or Non-Doctrine Communist, or read some more books like State and Revolution, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, or Statism and Anarchy. THEN make your mind up.

[RedMarxist]

For petes sake do I have to decide now? I'm in HS. I lean very far towards Leninism, and furthermore I kind went thorough this Leninism is evil because its always authoritarian phase. I was never attracted to Anarchy(If i was who knows what my parents would have thought).. BUT, It seems the only successful revolutions have been Leninist(well not all but still), combined with the unity and strength of ML parties, I lean towards that(strong organization breeds a strong revolution!)

I mean could the New People's Army(or the Naxals) exist within council communist lines? most likely not. A strong party must guide a strong army to forge a strong nation. I'm beginning to sound quasi fascist. :lol:

[Dogs On Acid]

For petes sake do I have to decide now?
No. Decide when you are ready. Become pan-leftist or non-doctrine while you make up your mind.

I'm in HS.
So am I.

I lean very far towards Leninism, and furthermore I kind went thorough this Leninism is evil because its always authoritarian phase.
There is nothing evil about Leninism. This just shows your lack of understanding. Before calling yourself a Leninist read Lenin's works.

I was never attracted to Anarchy(If i was who knows what my parents would have thought)..
So you're not an Anarchist because your parent's wouldn't like it? What kind of revolutionary are you? Grow up man...

BUT, It seems the only successful revolutions have been Leninist
LOL

combined with the unity and strength of ML parties
Paries aren't strong, the people are strong.

I lean towards that(strong organization breeds a strong revolution!)
So the masses can't organize without a Lenin guiding them? Patronising as fuck.

I mean could the New People's Army(or the Naxals) exist within council communist lines? most likely not.
I honestly don't care.

A strong party must guide a strong army to forge a strong nation. I'm beginning to sound quasi fascist. :lol:
Look up the Black Army, or the Zapatistas.

[RedMarxist]

as you can see I have much to learn. Right now, and I know this has nothing to do with Leninism, I'm reading Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution. I hope it will better my understanding of the Russian Revolution:)

[Dogs On Acid]

as you can see I have much to learn. Right now, and
I know this has nothing to do with Leninism, I'm reading Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution. I hope it will better my understanding of the Russian Revolution:)

It doesn't have to. Read books by many different authors! Don't focus on 1 ideology or you will become dogmatic and hostile toward other tendencies.

Trotsky has some great stuff, keep reading.

I hope you've read the Manifesto by now...

[S.Artesian]

For petes sake do I have to decide now? I'm in HS. I lean very far towards Leninism, and furthermore I kind went thorough this Leninism is evil because its always authoritarian phase. I was never attracted to Anarchy(If i was who knows what my parents would have thought).. BUT, It seems the only successful revolutions have been Leninist(well not all but still), combined with the unity and strength of ML parties, I lean towards that(strong organization breeds a strong revolution!)

I mean could the New People's Army(or the Naxals) exist within council communist lines? most likely not. A strong party must guide a strong army to forge a strong nation. I'm beginning to sound quasi fascist. :lol:


You don't have to do anything except continue asking questions. Don't worry about what anybody else tells you you should do.

[A Marxist Historian]

It was still pretty chaotic before Stalin, especially under Lenin.

You have to understand that the Bolsheviks first came to power in the midst of a World War which Russia was already failing at terribly, an economic crisis which had set the country back by decades, an uncontrolled social revolution in town and country and were very soon beset by a terrible civil war.

At first Lenin made several libertarian decrees - workers were given control over factories, peasants were given the right to seize the land form the landowners, the constituent assembly was called, a decentralised democratic structure based on the Soviets was proclaimed.

Within a year all this (with the exception of the land reform) was swept away in the face of the Civil War. Worker control in industry accellerated the collapse of Russian industry (poor management being the main culprit), the Soviets started to turn against the Bolsheviks, the workers started to rumble and some went to industrial action, the peasants were not giving grain to the armies and cities, the war was going badly, there were shortages of everything, the currency had quite litterally become worthless.

All too true, though the wavering by many Soviets was actually pretty brief. When fullscale civil war broke out, the workers knew immediately which side they were on, and the peasants figured that out too, though a lot more slowly.

QUOTE=Tommy4ever;2171625]So the Bolsheviks brought in something called War Communsim - this was equally, perhaps more, oppressive than anything seen under Stalin. Industry was nationalised (whilst consumer indsutries continued to die the important war industries stayed alive and helped win the war), terrible repressive measures became worse (the Red Terror, whilst not as bad as Stalin's was comparable), private trade was banned (spawning what must have been one of the world's biggest ever black markets) and the Reds basically declared war on the peasantry by sending in armed squads to requisition grain. It was all very chaotic, all very authoritarian. But all this was for the purpose of saving the Revolution from defeat in war. In that it succeeded.[/QUOTE]

Here Tommy goes off the track. Nationalization was enthusiastically supported, indeed often done by the workers themselves before the Bolsheviks thought it was a good idea.

The Red Terror was nothing like Stalin's terror. Here we now have exact figures, from the ex-KGB files.

During the entire Civil War, the Cheka executed a grand total of some 30,000 people. That may sound like a lot, but it was *vastly* fewer than the number of people murdered by the myriad Bolshevik enemies. The total number of Jews who died in pogroms alone was close to 200,000, and Jews were far, far from the only victims of reactionary terror.

During the Great Terror of 1937-38, approximately 800,000 people were killed, and an approximately equal number were sent to gulags, and probably another hundred thousand or so of them died there, perhaps even more. Now, that's more than an order of magnitude less than the insanely large claims you see in the popular media. But it is *vastly* more than died in the Red Terror under Lenin.

Banning private trade in retrospect was a mistake, it had to be re-established under NEP. An understandable mistake, as there were lots of speculators hoarding grain while the cities were starving. But a mistake.

The Bolsheviks did not declare war on the peasantry. Instead, they tried to divide the peasantry, organizing committees of poor peasants to counterbalance the richer ones who were refusing to sell their grain to the cities except at extortionate prices. The committees would seize grain from the more prosperous peasants, turn it over to the workers but get to keep some for themselves.

As there wasn't a lot of Bolshevik presence in the villages, and the Left SR's disapproved, the committees were mostly made up of Red Army soldiers home from the front who hadn't got in on the redistribution of land after the landlords were evicted because they were in the army at the time.

Some places this worked well, many places it worked badly, with all sorts of opportunists claiming to be dirt-poor to get in on the take. It did however prevent total starvation in the cities.


By this time, 1921, Lenin was already starting to fade from weakening health but he pushed through a policy, virtually by his own prestige alone (it was extremely unpopular with the Party) called NEP. This introduced capitalist elements like limited private enterprize and freedom to trade back into the economy. Grain requisitioning was ended and the state would buy the grain from the peasants rather than take it. The repression was also largely ended (although by this stage there was little opposition to repress).

Nobody in the party was too thrilled about the NEP, but the economy was collapsing, people were starving, workers were striking, peasants were revolting and sailors mutinying, and clearly the Soviet people had had it with War Communism. So everybody in the party went along with it, except for Kollontai's "Workers Opposition" who called it the "New Exploitation of the Proletariat."


So unless you want endless war and economic collapse then I don't think the Russia of Lenin is a good model for society. :p

Lenin sure didn't think it was a good model. The *whole idea* of the Russian Revolution was as a spark for world revolution. Which it absolutely was. The Kaiser in German and the emperor of Austria-Hungary was overthrown, and a century of revolutionary movements were touched off all over the world, in Europe before WWII and in the Third World after WWII. The last gasp of that was the Sandinistas and the FMLN in Central America in the '80s.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the entire world has been headed to hell in a handbasket.

But the initial revolutionary wave was defeated, and things took a lot longer than expected. By the time revolution was on the march again, the Soviet Union had gone Stalinist, and became a bad example rather than a good one to other countries.

QUOTE=Tommy4ever;2171625]Really, in the early days the Soviet Union's policies were entirely made to deal with the circumstances of the time - War Communism was needed to win the Civil War, NEP was needed to restore peace, rebuild society and the economy in an exhausted country and Stalin's rapid industrialisation was needed to counter the threat of a seemingly inevitable war whilst finally ending the Bolshevik desire for an industrialised nation (collectivisation might be another question though).

I'm not sure what your measure of freedom is. The was no freedom of dissent in Lenin's day and the 1920s, but in many other respects the Soviet people enjoyed freedoms that the people in the West did not.[/QUOTE]

Therre was plenty of freedom of dissent in Lenin's day *for revolutionaries,* especially within the Bolshevik Party, which was, it soon became very clear, the *only* revolutionary party in Russia unfortunately.

No freedom for counterrevolutionaries or the old ruling classes, however.

Stalin of course put an end to that!

Was rapid industrialization needed for Soviet survival? Well, Bukharin's idea of "socialism at a snail's pace" (his actual words!) did not cut it. A fairly fast pace of industrialization, as the Trotskyists advocated, but not the self-destructive insanity of Stalin's five year plans that brought Soviet industry at one point nearly to collapse, was *not* what was called for.

Especially given that it resulted in the great collectivization famine that killed millions of people, which didn't *exactly* benefit Soviet industrial growth!

But anyway, you can't really build socialism in one country anyway, so there would have had to be a lot of hard choices and cutting of corners till the Revolution spread, no matter who was in charge.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

He's not a reliable source or authority, nor are his chosen cherry-picks of the far-right's Favorite History Compendium.



The GULag was the central administration of corrective labor camps, and not set up until under Stalin, so that's factually impossible.

We the Don Cossacks executed by the millions on order from the Sovnarkom?

And how is Lenin responsible for the famine of 1920-1921? All of Europe was gripped by a famine in this period, and the Bolsheviks were certainly not responsible in the sense you imply for the breakdown in the economy and transportation, which began under the Tsar in 1917.

Lenin was not an individual dictator in the sense of Stalin. He led the party due to his personal prestige and respect among the party leadership, but there was a distribution of power in this period of the evolution of the Soviet party-state. It had not consolidated into the autocracy of the Great Terror, yet.

The Inform Candidate is very informative here.

I just want to add one thing. The business of Lenin killing all the Cossacks is total nonsense. Would have been tricky, being as Gorbachev is Cossack by descent.

The Cossacks were the police of the Tsars, had privileges, and were widely hated, especially by Jews, as they were heavily involved in pogroms.

But they were also peasants, albeit more prosperous than most. So, like all the other peasants, they divided, and there were White Cossacks and Red Cossacks. Lots of Red Cossacks in fact.

Those who want to know something about what really went on in the Cossack lands should read Mikhail Sholokhov's Don novels, "All Quiet Flows the Don" and "The Don Flows Home to the Sea." Won Nobel prizes and thoroughly deserved them. Now nobody outside of Russia and Ukraine ever reads them, as Sholokhov is considered "politically incorrect," being as he was a Stalin fan.

But he was also one of the century's greatest novelists, and these books never mention Stalin once, but do, believe it or not, mention Trotsky (or rather "the commander of the Red Army"), and not negatively.

They are IMHO the very best guide to understanding the Russian Civil War, despite a Bolshevik or two being described as heroic marble statues rather than real revolutionaries. As there are few Bolshevik characters in the novels, this is a minor flaw.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Ask Makhno if he felt free

Well, his troops felt free to kill every Jew they could get their hands on. As Makhno himself actually rather liked Jews, he objected sometimes. But it was an anarchist peasant republic, where the Ukrainian peasants could do what they wanted, and a lot of them really liked to kill Jews.

-M.H.-

[Jose Gracchus]

I hear about this all the time, where's the proof that the Makhnovshchina was marked by persistent and unchecked pogroms?

[Seresan]

To not place blame on Stalin for his role in the murder of millions of people, paranoid policies of secret policing, political arrests, corruption, the establishment of a new bourgeoisie--the party, and his idea of socialism in one country that were the incidents that failed the USSR, is absurd. Was Stalin the demonic beast that he is portrayed as in Western propaganda? No. Was he a paranoid dictator? Yes. Did he further the USSR toward Socialism? No. The powers being described by jammoe need to be described, not just say "workers got more power". What powers exactly?

To be quite clear: The nation was not socialist. It wasn't even a DOTP. Therefore, it was not democratic. The people were far from free. I am not saying free as in "bourgeois freedom". They were literally not free to engage in homosexual acts, not free to dissent, not free to have different political opinions than the party, government use of torture and executions for disobeying, extreme censorship, etc.

Was the USSR the worst place in the world? No.

Was it much better off than Tsarist or modern capitalist Russia? I'll say yes.

Was Uncle Joe a true socialist who did everything he could to establish a DOTP? No. It was a Dictatorship in the name of the proletariat, for the party.

I'm with Trotsky on this: I'd say Stalin betrayed the working class. He made the USSR a mockery of it's intentions.

[RedMarxist]

well not shit he betrayed the working class. removing whatever democracy they had left, gulags, five year plans...

I wish Lenin had lived longer.:crying:

[A Marxist Historian]

I hear about this all the time, where's the proof that the Makhnovshchina was marked by persistent and unchecked pogroms?

There has been research done on this at YIVO, the main repository of Jewish records, in New York City. There is a Makhno file there, which has abundant evidence of persistent and unchecked Jewish pogroms conducted by the Makhnovites. I've seen it myself.

This is part of the Tcherikover archive, the great archive of the Ukrainian pogroms during the Civil War. The issue has been confused by the fact that Tcherikover himself was persuaded to issue a statement in the 1930s clearing Makhno of pogrom guilt.

In the '90s, the archivist in charge of the archive, Marek Webb, was asked about this. He expressed the opinion that perhaps Tcherikover, who stayed in Kiev during the pogroms and didn't go out into the boondocks, wasn't aware of what was going on in Gulyai-Pol'e. An explanation that seems inadequate. There are political reasons why Tcherikover, then a supporter of the anti-Stalinist and anti-Trotskyist Norman Thomas wing of the American Socialist Party, might have wanted to make such a statement.

But in any case, according to Webb, there can be no doubt as to the validity of the damning material in Tcherikover's Makhno file, as since the opening of the Soviet archives huge amounts of confirming material about Makhno pogroms has surfaced.

This was all written up in what I suspect is not your favorite source, the Workers Vanguard newspaper of the Spartacists, quite a while back. But anybody can check for themselves at YIVO in New York just by speaking to the archivists. Webb may even still be there. That is the kind of thing that they know forwards and backwards at YIVO.

-M.H.-

[Dogs On Acid]

well not shit he betrayed the working class. removing whatever democracy they had left, gulags, five year plans...

I wish Lenin had lived longer.:crying:

Labour camps were around since the Czar, and the five year plans were quite successful in industrializing the country.

Don't forget Stalin worked well within your beloved Leninist ideology. Any possible small deviations were due to material conditions.

[RedMarxist]

so what. The guy was a freaking dictator. What ideology to you pertain to?

Leninism does not automatically == EVIL Totalitarian Stalinist Dictatorship

oh they worked well? as in Lenin would have done the same. Most likely he would continue the NEP. The 5 year plans were barbaric. and I know the Tzar had labor camps, don't remind me.

[Kiev Communard]

Well, his troops felt free to kill every Jew they could get their hands on. As Makhno himself actually rather liked Jews, he objected sometimes. But it was an anarchist peasant republic, where the Ukrainian peasants could do what they wanted, and a lot of them really liked to kill Jews.

-M.H.-

Em-m-m-m... No.

Read this (http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/append46.html#app9), please, and next time avoid such groundless accusations against the political figures you do not like.

Especially this part is pertinent, as it cites the work written by Jewish anarchist revolutionary - who was supporting Makhno:


However, by far the best source to refute claims of anti-Semitism the work of the Jewish anarchist Voline. He summarises the extensive evidence against such claims:

"We could cover dozens of pages with extensive and irrefutable proofs of the falseness of these assertions. We could mention articles and proclamations by Makhno and the Council of Revolutionary Insurgents denouncing anti-Semitism. We could tell of spontaneous acts by Makhno himself and other insurgents against the slightest manifestation of the anti-Semitic spirit on the part of a few isolated and misguided unfortunates in the army and the population. . . One of the reasons for the execution of Grigoriev by the Makhnovists was his anti-Semitism and the immense pogrom he organised at Elizabethgrad . . .

"We could cite a whole series of similar facts, but we do not find it necessary . . . and will content ourselves with mentioning briefly the following essential facts:

"1. A fairly important part in the Makhnovist movement was played by revolutionists of Jewish origin.

"2. Several members of the Education and Propaganda Commission were Jewish.

"3. Besides many Jewish combatants in various units of the army, there was a battery composed entirely of Jewish artillery men and a Jewish infantry unit.

"4. Jewish colonies in the Ukraine furnished many volunteers to the Insurrectionary Army.

"5. In general the Jewish population, which was very numerous in the Ukraine, took an active part in all the activities of the movement. The Jewish agricultural colonies which were scattered throughout the districts of Mariupol, Berdiansk, Alexandrovsk, etc., participated in the regional assemblies of workers, peasants and partisans; they sent their delegates to the regional Revolutionary Military Council.

"6. Rich and reactionary Jews certainly had to suffer from the Makhnovist army, not as Jews, but just in the same way as non-Jewish counter-revolutionaries." [The Unknown Revolution, pp. 967-8]

[Dogs On Acid]

so what. The guy was a freaking dictator. What ideology to you pertain to?

Leninism does not automatically == EVIL Totalitarian Stalinist Dictatorship

oh they worked well? as in Lenin would have done the same. Most likely he would continue the NEP. The 5 year plans were barbaric. and I know the Tzar had labor camps, don't remind me.

Calm down.

Lenin was a "freaking dictator" too.

My ideology is irrelevant to working class struggle hence I don't show it.

Leninism, until the present day, has lead to a restoration of Capitalism, Corruption, Authoritarianism and Censorship. Blame it on Material conditions or not, that's what history has shown us.
Don't adder to Leninism just because you like Lenin. Hey I like him too, he accomplished some amazing things but he wasn't as perfect as you might think he is.

The cheka was also "barbaric" and that was during Lenin's rule.

And if you knew the Czar had labour camps, you probably also knew Lenin's Russia had them, Stalin didn't bring anything new in that aspect.

[RedMarxist]

look IMHO material conditions are the main reason for restoration of capitalism. I won't necessarily blame it on the ideology(it isn't the ideology, its what happened to the nations who used it) or the leaders, but they are partly to blame

and damn the internet for making me seem more angry then I was when writing the above post!

[Dogs On Acid]

look IMHO material conditions are the main reason for restoration of capitalism. I won't necessarily blame it on the ideology(it isn't the ideology, its what happened to the nations who used it) or the leaders, but they are partly to blame

and damn the internet for making me seem more angry then I was when writing the above post!

Well the practice of the ideology itself has proven to be very prone and affected by these material conditions. Maybe we should think of another way of reaching Communism (or at least transitional Socialism for that matter), than Marxism-Leninism.

Otherwise it's just playing a broken record over, and over, and over, and over again.

[RedMarxist]

I struggle with this OK. there is alike a billion different tendencies. Its confusing on which one to choose. Can I just call myself a Marxist, as to avoid choosing?

What did you do to make a decision? should I read Lenin first or Marx/Engels first?

[Conscript]

look IMHO material conditions are the main reason for restoration of capitalism. I won't necessarily blame it on the ideology(it isn't the ideology, its what happened to the nations who used it) or the leaders, but they are partly to blame

and damn the internet for making me seem more angry then I was when writing the above post!

It certainly wasn't material conditions that purged bolsheviks and opposing party factions, along with reforming comintern strategies to include anti-revolutionary practices that gave us missed opportunities in places like China and Germany. IMO, the isolation and maiming of the revolution in a backwards country gave us capitalism in the USSR.


Communists have become bureaucrats. If anything will destroy us, it is this.

[Dogs On Acid]

I struggle with this OK.
It's ok bro don't sweat it.


there is alike a billion different tendencies. Its confusing on which one to choose.
Each tendency has it's own ideas. I know it can be excruciatingly hard to choose. My advice is for you to choose a group of tendencies that you identify yourself with the most. Start by looking at the differences between Authoritarian and Libertarian.

Can I just call myself a Marxist, as to avoid choosing?
Yes, or Anarchist... But before you choose, read Bakunin and Marx/Engels.

What did you do to make a decision?
I'm more of a Pan-Leftist, Anti-sectarian. Hence why albeit not being a Marxist-Leninist, I joined the Portuguese Communist party.

Should I read Lenin first or Marx/Engels first?
Is that a serious question? Leninism is a development of Marxism. Starting with Leninism is like trying to run when you haven't crawled yet.

My advice: Read the Manifesto.

[RedMarxist]

sadly, it WAS a serious question. I read the manifesto and am rereading it, as when I read it I had NIL understanding of Communism, so did not get anything in it.

I've read a bit of Lenin, some Marx and Engels, and some Trotsky and Pannokeok. So i know a bit of everything.

[Conscript]

You should check out stuff like Wage Labor & Capital, Critique of the Gotha Programme, state and revolution (if you haven't already), and this (http://www.marxists.org/archive/burns-emile/1939/what-is-marxism/index.htm)

[Dogs On Acid]

You should check out stuff like Wage Labor & Capital, Critique of the Gotha Programme, state and revolution (if you haven't already), and this (http://www.marxists.org/archive/burns-emile/1939/what-is-marxism/index.htm)

+1

Don't forget Anarchist literature like Bakunin or Kropotkin. Read in chronological order too, it's important.

[Rooster]

sadly, it WAS a serious question. I read the manifesto and am rereading it, as when I read it I had NIL understanding of Communism, so did not get anything in it.

I've read a bit of Lenin, some Marx and Engels, and some Trotsky and Pannokeok. So i know a bit of everything.

Read this (http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/) too.

[Tommy4ever]

sadly, it WAS a serious question. I read the manifesto and am rereading it, as when I read it I had NIL understanding of Communism, so did not get anything in it.

I've read a bit of Lenin, some Marx and Engels, and some Trotsky and Pannokeok. So i know a bit of everything.

I've said this to other people before. You seem to have decided you agree with the general ideas of socialism and then jumped at the first ideology that came your way and are attempting to identify with it, feeling the need to ''choose a tendency''. Can I just suggest that you don't. There is no need to attatch yourself to a tendency at all, and certainly not when you are first learning. I would suggest that you for now just identify as a non-doctrinaire communist, just call yourself a socialist. Read widely and look at as many tendencies as you like, perhaps you will one day decide on one particular tendency, perhaps you won't, just don't be so hasty to throw yourself wholeheartedly into Lenin's arms and beg him to love you.

[Dogs On Acid]

I've said this to other people before. You seem to have decided you agree with the general ideas of socialism and then jumped at the first ideology that came your way and are attempting to identify with it, feeling the need to ''choose a tendency''. Can I just suggest that you don't. There is no need to attatch yourself to a tendency at all, and certainly not when you are first learning. I would suggest that you for now just identify as a non-doctrinaire communist, just call yourself a socialist. Read widely and look at as many tendencies as you like, perhaps you will one day decide on one particular tendency, perhaps you won't, just don't be so hasty to throw yourself wholeheartedly into Lenin's arms and beg him to love you.

+1

[A Marxist Historian]

so what. The guy was a freaking dictator. What ideology to you pertain to?

Leninism does not automatically == EVIL Totalitarian Stalinist Dictatorship

oh they worked well? as in Lenin would have done the same. Most likely he would continue the NEP. The 5 year plans were barbaric. and I know the Tzar had labor camps, don't remind me.

Labor camps in the Stalin style were brought in in the early '30s under Yagoda, Stalin's police chief at the time. Under Lenin, you didn't really have labor camps. You had prisons, and political prisoners, and political prisoners had rights ordinary prisoners didn't have. Conditions usually better, though there were some scandals.

The first labor camps were in the mid-'20s, and at first that's all they were. Prisons where prisoners would be rehabilitated thru labor, learning job skills and so forth. For ordinary prisoners not political, of whom there were fairly few under NEP, some claim fewer than in America, where you had thousands of political prisoners after the Palmer Raids in the '20s.

Yagoda turned them into something else.

Meanwhile you had labor camps in the US South all through this period, they called 'em chain gangs. And guess what, they are coming back.

The chain gangs in the South in the '30s probably killed a higher percentage of their prisoners than Stalin's gulags. The really bad stuff done by the NKVD wasn't even in the camps, some of which were incredibly awful and some of which weren't. (As I've been told by a guy I met a long time ago who was once an inmate of one of the better ones in the late '40s). Of course the ones in Siberia people froze to death sometimes.

The worst was during the Great Terror itself, with some 800,000 people killed in two years who never *made it* to the gulags.

The image of the gulags as death camps comes from how secretive it all was. When somebody was killed, the family would be told he had received "ten years without right of correspondence." Somewhere about year six, the relatives would be told that the prisoner had died.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Em-m-m-m... No.

Read this (http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/append46.html#app9), please, and next time avoid such groundless accusations against the political figures you do not like.

Especially this part is pertinent, as it cites the work written by Jewish anarchist revolutionary - who was supporting Makhno:

Yup, I've read it before. It is total crap. Much of it the guy must have managed to persuade himself was true, otherwise he'd have gone nuts no doubt.

Stalin was pretty anti-Semitic in his last years, with the Doctor's Plot and all, and there were *plenty* of Jewish Stalinists around Stalin, all swearing up and down that of course Stalin was a friend of the Jewish people, and it was only the Jewish agents of American and Israel being persecuted. No doubt some of them believed that too.

Makhno was not personally anti-Semitic, and protected the Jews on his staff, like Voline. They looked the other way at what the troops in the field were doing.

Facts are facts. That Makhno's troops committed pogroms is thoroughly well documented historical fact. If you doubt it, go to YIVO and ask the archivists there yourself.

Makhno did indeed shoot Grigoriev. He shot Grigoriev at a big meeting of his band and Grigoriev's band. As a result of shooting Grigoriev, he doubled his forces, as all of Grigoriev's people joined him on the spot. And, of course, continued what they had previously been doing to Ukrainian Jews.

-M.H.-

[bietan jarrai]

I don't see why people seem to be so put off by Leninism. First, revisionist crap like post-Leninist Trotskyism is bullshit. Reformism is worse than any kind of "dictatorship" you guys are talking about.

I don't believe in most of the things you write about Lenin. And even if he did make some mistakes, don't tell me it's easy to run a country. And it's a workers' state, something unseen at the time and something the capitalists would do anything to stop.

I also don't believe in some lies told about Stalin. No, I don't think everyone was happy, but still, the USSR under his rule was the major potency in Europe and Asia. I just think that if you're going to mention all the bad things, mention the good things too. (The Red Army also defeated fascism while under his rule)

I think that, especially when compared to other leftist ideologies, Marxism-Leninism proves itself to be the only one capable of striving towards socialism and communism.

[Rooster]

I don't see why people seem to be so put off by Leninism. First, revisionist crap like post-Leninist Trotskyism is bullshit. Reformism is worse than any kind of "dictatorship" you guys are talking about.

Post-leninist trotskyism?

[bietan jarrai]

Post-leninist trotskyism?
Non-leninist trotskyism, whatever.

[Tommy4ever]

Non-leninist trotskyism, whatever.

Is this something you made up or something people who don't know who Trotsky is made up?

[RedMarxist]

I don't see why people seem to be so put off by Leninism. First, revisionist crap like post-Leninist Trotskyism is bullshit. Reformism is worse than any kind of "dictatorship" you guys are talking about.

I don't believe in most of the things you write about Lenin. And even if he did make some mistakes, don't tell me it's easy to run a country. And it's a workers' state, something unseen at the time and something the capitalists would do anything to stop.

I also don't believe in some lies told about Stalin. No, I don't think everyone was happy, but still, the USSR under his rule was the major potency in Europe and Asia. I just think that if you're going to mention all the bad things, mention the good things too. (The Red Army also defeated fascism while under his rule)

I think that, especially when compared to other leftist ideologies, Marxism-Leninism proves itself to be the only one capable of striving towards socialism and communism.

Agreed. Under Stalin the economy tripled in size(although his methods were questionable) and the USSR became powerful enough to challenge the United States.

As for Leninism, yes it seems the only ideology capable of, or so far, to lead a revolution to conclusion.

[Dogs On Acid]

Agreed. Under Stalin the economy tripled in size(although his methods were questionable) and the USSR became powerful enough to challenge the United States.
Under Hitler's Fascism the German economy boomed as well, powerful enough to challenge the world, it that a good reason to become a Fascist?


As for Leninism, yes it seems the only ideology capable of, or so far, to lead a revolution to conclusion.
Example of a single revolution led to conclusion by Leninism? Or did you pull that right out your butt?

[A Marxist Historian]

Agreed. Under Stalin the economy tripled in size(although his methods were questionable) and the USSR became powerful enough to challenge the United States.

As for Leninism, yes it seems the only ideology capable of, or so far, to lead a revolution to conclusion.

Marxism, Leninism, and Trotskyism are all exactly the same thing. And Stalinism, misdubbed by many people "Marxism-Leninism," is something else together. It is a form of revisionism of Marxism, the idea that Marx's "workers of the world unite" is old hat, and you can build socialism in a single country. An idea you will find *no* trace in in anything he wrote, ever.

And has been tested in practice and doesn't work.

It's true that under Stalin's regime the Soviet Union beat Hitler and became another superpower. That testifies to the fact that the Soviet Union was *not* a capitalist country.

But it was quite far from a socialist country, and that's why you had all those evils under Stalin. The victory over Hitler is to the credit of the Soviet people, not to Stalin, who signed a pact with Hitler and was *surprised* when Hitler violated it! Because of his incompetency and dictatorial bureaucratism Hitler made it all the way to Moscow before he was stopped.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Under Hitler's Fascism the German economy boomed as well, powerful enough to challenge the world, it that a good reason to become a Fascist?

Hitler pulled Germany out of the Great Depression exactly the same way FDR did the same thing in the USA, the USA being a capitalist country too after all.

War production. Militarizing the economy. The trouble with that is that you go into huge debt, so you have to *use* all that military stuff and go conquer somebody and pay the debts with the spoils.

Worked real good at first for Hitler, till he made the mistake of invading the USSR. Worked out real bad for him in the end.

Worked out great for Roosevelt, as he won World War II and the USA ruled the Western world for the next half century. So the US economy boomed again, no more Great Depressions. Until now, as US rule is finally falling apart.

Not a good idea nowadays, with nuclear weapons. If the US nuked China to benefit the US economy, big problems with that, biggest one being that China has nukes too.


Example of a single revolution led to conclusion by Leninism? Or did you pull that right out your butt?

Let's not play word games with "led to conclusion." What he meant is that the Revolution won, and changed the whole world, vastly for the better.

After Lenin died you had a political counterrevolution by Stalin, that destroyed a lot of things Lenin and Leninists had worked for, but not everything. The world was a much better place with the Soviet Union as a superpower and Hitler fascism smashed and tossed in the dustbin of history than the other way around.

And now that the Soviet Union is gone, everything is going to hell in a handbasket. With people saying "communism is dead," so is socialism, so are all social welfare measures, labor unions are shriveling, and wages are dropping like a rock. It's all connected.

Any other revolutions that got that far before going bad? Anywhere? Anytime? Can't think of any.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Em-m-m-m... No.

Read this (http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/append46.html#app9), please, and next time avoid such groundless accusations against the political figures you do not like.

Especially this part is pertinent, as it cites the work written by Jewish anarchist revolutionary - who was supporting Makhno:

Well, I made some serious accusations vs. Makhno, which I need to back up.

Done!

Please, everybody read this article (http://www.revleft.com/vb/makhno-file-t158083/index.html?t=158083), comment, and vote in the poll.

-M.H.-

[Pretty Flaco]

Before Stalin, all of Russia was happy and smiling. The sun always shined, clouds never appeared, and the wind smelled of sweet roses. It was all heaven on earth and not a single person went hungry.

If you ask me you're giving Lenin too much credit OP.

[Kiev Communard]

Well, I made some serious accusations vs. Makhno, which I need to back up.

Done!

Please, everybody read this article (http://www.revleft.com/vb/makhno-file-t158083/index.html?t=158083), comment, and vote in the poll.

-M.H.-

Once again, this article does not prove anything much beyond that some undisciplined elements in Revolutionary Insurgent Army looted Jewish bourgeoisie's shops and sometimes killed their owners. From what I gathered from the other sources, they did the same to Russian and Ukrainian bourgeoisie, without discriminating on the ground of the nationality. As to anti-Semites that were present in Makhno's ranks, they were clearly former soldiers of Hryhoriev, and the majority of them were disarmed by Makhno's specific order in autumn 1919, so that once again you cannot claim that Makhno condoned their actions. Significantly, even I. Klinov you quoted at the end of the article, who is clearly hostile to Makhno, admits that Makhno tried to prevent all acts of anti-Semitism in the troops he commanded. Finally, your assertion that Makhno acted against anti-Semites only as long as and because he was "a commander of Trotsky's Red Army" is baseless, as it is known that there were instances of pogroms by Red Army troops stationed in Ukraine.

[A Marxist Historian]

Once again, this article does not prove anything much beyond that some undisciplined elements in Revolutionary Insurgent Army looted Jewish bourgeoisie's shops and sometimes killed their owners. From what I gathered from the other sources, they did the same to Russian and Ukrainian bourgeoisie, without discriminating on the ground of the nationality. As to anti-Semites that were present in Makhno's ranks, they were clearly former soldiers of Hryhoriev, and the majority of them were disarmed by Makhno's specific order in autumn 1919, so that once again you cannot claim that Makhno condoned their actions. Significantly, even I. Klinov you quoted at the end of the article, who is clearly hostile to Makhno, admits that Makhno tried to prevent all acts of anti-Semitism in the troops he commanded. Finally, your assertion that Makhno acted against anti-Semites only as long as and because he was "a commander of Trotsky's Red Army" is baseless, as it is known that there were instances of pogroms by Red Army troops stationed in Ukraine.

I think the article proves a hell of a lot more than that there were a few occasional instances of looting, but Revleft readers can read it and judge for themselves. No doubt many of the former Hryhoriev bandits had their guns taken away from them for a week or two, until Makhno was certain of their loyalty to him.

Makhno did make occasional efforts to discourage pogroms, but they were highly ineffective and barely noticed by the Jews, to whom Makhno's forces were just another of the many pogrom bands.

Your last sentence is a total nonsequitur. The fact that, with the exception of shooting Hryhoriev, just about every documented example of Makhno preventing a pogrom or taking an anti-pogrom action happened while he was a Red Army commander is extremely significant. Hryhoriev cracked down on pogroms when he was a Red Army commander too. When he took Odessa from the Whites, he issued a proclamation threatening to kill on the spot anybody caught carrying out a pogrom, and carried it out on occasion too.

Were there instances of Ukrainian peasants and cossacks in the Red Army committing pogroms? Of course. Pogroms against Jews were a mass movement in the Ukrainian countryside, and the Red Army was a mass movement too. But the Bolsheviks cracked down on that with a fist of iron, shooting hundreds of Red Army pogromists.

Whereas Jews feared and ran away from the Makhnovites when they could, they welcomed the Red Army and streamed into its ranks, despite occasional unfortunate incidents.

A few years ago, I attended a lecture on Jewish pogroms during the Civil War by a Russian professor who is one of the great experts on the subject. According to him, absolutely everybody among the myriad different factions warring in Ukraine during the Civil War was issuing public statements denouncing pogroms. The trouble was, as he put it, there was a direct correlation between the number of proclamations issued and the number of pogroms the factions committed.

The Ukrainian nationalists (Petliura etc.) issued the most proclamations against pogroms and -- committed the most pogroms. The Bolsheviks issued the fewest proclamations and were the great anti-pogrom force. The Makhnovites were about in the middle on this spectrum.

Klinov, by the way, was hostile to Makhno for one reason and one reason only, because of the pogroms. He was one of the major scholars documenting pogroms in Ukraine.

-M.H.-

[Joe Payne]

Yeah that article is dripping with ridiculous bias. They even openly call them Mahknovites. There were entire all jewish regiments in the RIA. The RIA regularly supplied Jewish communities with arms to defend themselves from the Whites and the Reds. Several leading members were jewish as well, and there were plenty of jews among the ranks outside of the all jewish sections. In fact, the RIA was a mix of many ethnicities and nationalities of the Russian empire.

And I wouldn't trust a pseudo-clever yet completely fecetious comment from some dime-a-dozen professor. It's really just nonsense. The Bolshevik Press and official Bolshevik documents regularly declared the pogroms were lies and fabrications (much made up by them when it suited their needs). And quite frankly if it wasn't for the RIA the Whites would have rolled over the Red forces.

Also it's well documented that anti-semitism and rape were severely punished in the RIA. Mahkno's wife herself, and several other wimmin, were commanders in the RIA and obviously wouldn't have tolerated that. In fact its a regular criticism amongst anarchists of the pretty harsh and extra-judicial punishment for those accused of anti-semitism and rape. And also the shooting of Cheka's and commissars, which was popularly supported by the workers and peasants who had to suffer under them.

Red army soldiers also pretty regularly joined the RIA ranks when they could.

Read Alexandre Skirda on the matter, good stuff. Very informative.


And even though I'm no fan of Lenin and Trotsk. Stalin was certainly worse, although the former led to the latter. If you want a good Marxist perspective, CLR James Facing Reality is really good on the failures of vanguardism. He was an ex-Trotskyist, btw.

[Kiev Communard]

I think the article proves a hell of a lot more than that there were a few occasional instances of looting, but Revleft readers can read it and judge for themselves. No doubt many of the former Hryhoriev bandits had their guns taken away from them for a week or two, until Makhno was certain of their loyalty to him.

Actually the majority of them were disarmed and dismissed in August 1919, when it became clear that their nationalism and pogromism were incompatible with the ideology of the RIA. There is no doubt that some of these dismissed Hryhorievites later used the Makhnovist label to mislead their victims and place the blame for their action on their opponents.


Makhno did make occasional efforts to discourage pogroms, but they were highly ineffective and barely noticed by the Jews, to whom Makhno's forces were just another of the many pogrom bands.

There is numerous evidence that Makhno's commanders dealt harshly with pogromists in their ranks, and the example of Jewish communities in the RIA-controlled territory shows that they were hardly considered "ineffective" by local Jews.


Your last sentence is a total nonsequitur. The fact that, with the exception of shooting Hryhoriev, just about every documented example of Makhno preventing a pogrom or taking an anti-pogrom action happened while he was a Red Army commander is extremely significant. Hryhoriev cracked down on pogroms when he was a Red Army commander too. When he took Odessa from the Whites, he issued a proclamation threatening to kill on the spot anybody caught carrying out a pogrom, and carried it out on occasion too.

Show me the evidence that Makhno did not prevent pogrom activities when he took Yekaterinoslav in October 1919.

[A Marxist Historian]

Yeah that article is dripping with ridiculous bias. They even openly call them Mahknovites. There were entire all jewish regiments in the RIA. The RIA regularly supplied Jewish communities with arms to defend themselves from the Whites and the Reds. Several leading members were jewish as well, and there were plenty of jews among the ranks outside of the all jewish sections. In fact, the RIA was a mix of many ethnicities and nationalities of the Russian empire.

And I wouldn't trust a pseudo-clever yet completely fecetious comment from some dime-a-dozen professor. It's really just nonsense. The Bolshevik Press and official Bolshevik documents regularly declared the pogroms were lies and fabrications (much made up by them when it suited their needs). And quite frankly if it wasn't for the RIA the Whites would have rolled over the Red forces.

Also it's well documented that anti-semitism and rape were severely punished in the RIA. Mahkno's wife herself, and several other wimmin, were commanders in the RIA and obviously wouldn't have tolerated that. In fact its a regular criticism amongst anarchists of the pretty harsh and extra-judicial punishment for those accused of anti-semitism and rape. And also the shooting of Cheka's and commissars, which was popularly supported by the workers and peasants who had to suffer under them.

Red army soldiers also pretty regularly joined the RIA ranks when they could.

Read Alexandre Skirda on the matter, good stuff. Very informative.


And even though I'm no fan of Lenin and Trotsk. Stalin was certainly worse, although the former led to the latter. If you want a good Marxist perspective, CLR James Facing Reality is really good on the failures of vanguardism. He was an ex-Trotskyist, btw.

Sure the article is "dripping with bias," but nothing ridiculous about it. Why shouldn't anybody be biased against people who commit rape and murder against innocent Jews?

Here we have anarchists defending the crimes of their anarchist hero Makhno in exactly the same fashion as Stalinists defending Stalin.

Brothers under the skin here on Revleft.

-M.H.-

[Kiev Communard]

Here we have anarchists defending the crimes of their anarchist hero Makhno in exactly the same fashion as Stalinists defending Stalin.

Brothers under the skin here on Revleft.

-M.H.-

I would rather avoid such flaming that you resort to... otherwise I would say that "here we have a Trotskyist making baseless and generalized allegations against his opponents on the left just in the same manner as Stalinists do against Trotskyists".

[Jose Gracchus]

Here we have anarchists defending the crimes of their anarchist hero Makhno in exactly the same fashion as Stalinists defending Stalin.

Brothers under the skin here on Revleft.

-M.H.-

Yeah, like Trots don't repeat their tiny god's nonsense about Kronstadt being about peasant scum overwhelming manly workers' revolutionary mojo, so he doesn't look like a total asshole.

[A Marxist Historian]

Actually the majority of them were disarmed and dismissed in August 1919, when it became clear that their nationalism and pogromism were incompatible with the ideology of the RIA. There is no doubt that some of these dismissed Hryhorievites later used the Makhnovist label to mislead their victims and place the blame for their action on their opponents.



There is numerous evidence that Makhno's commanders dealt harshly with pogromists in their ranks, and the example of Jewish communities in the RIA-controlled territory shows that they were hardly considered "ineffective" by local Jews.



Show me the evidence that Makhno did not prevent pogrom activities when he took Yekaterinoslav in October 1919.

The material I posted was taken from the Makhno file in the Ukrainian Jewish pogrom archives at YIVO. A huge amount of effort by many Jewish scholars, none of whom had any particular biases against Makhno, and many of whom strongly disliked communism. Sponsored by Jewish community organizations in Ukraine. What you see in there is far, far more authoritative than polemical statements by Makhno defense attorneys like Voline.

It is true that Makhno wasn't *as much* of a Jewish pogromist as other Ukrainian bandit leaders in this period. But that is hardly much of a recommendation.

Here's a link for a discussion of Makhno and pogroms from the *thoroughly* anti-Communist "shtetlinks" Jewish website, with innumerable contributions from old people whose parents and relatives were victims of pogroms in Ukraine. It's a very popular memorial website for nostalgia about the "Fiddler on the Roof" old Jewish world in Eastern Europe. Zillions of memorial subwebsites for zillions of different shtetls.

http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Colonies_of_Ukraine/pogroms/ukrainianpogroms.htm

The conclusion by Chaim Freedman at the end I'll quote.

"The defenders of Makhno claim that he could not have been anti-Semitic because there were a number of Jews in his organization. This line of reasoning is not logically tenable. Unfortunately, throughout Jewish history, there have been Jews who have acted against the best interests of their people. There were Jews in various parties that took part in the Revolution and Civil War in Russia. The worst example of anti-Jewish activity in the Soviet Union was the Yevseksia, comprised of Jews whose aim was to wipe out Jewish culture and religion. They were instrumental in closing synagogues, schools and Jewish institution and sending Jews to imprisonment and execution.

So the presence of Makhno’s Jewish collaborators do not help to exonerate him from the overwhelming Jewish opinion that his army and bandit groups carried out pogroms against the Jews, whether or not Makhno was personally present or approved of the actions of some of his forces.

Other groups also were guilt of this activity, Denikin, Skoropadslk, Petlura. Together with Makhno, the Ukrainians were responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Jews and the plight of thousands of orphans."


The "Yevsektsia" or Jewish section of the Soviet Communist party advocated secular Jewish culture, especially Yiddish culture, against Jewish religion, Hebrew and Zionism. It continued the traditions of the famous socialist "Jewish Bund," most of which in Russia and Ukraine joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1921, and which also was very hostile to right wing Jewish traditions.

As for Yekaterinoslav, that is discussed in the Makhno file article.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Yeah, like Trots don't repeat their tiny god's nonsense about Kronstadt being about peasant scum overwhelming manly workers' revolutionary mojo, so he doesn't look like a total asshole.

Eh. Now that the Soviet archives are open, the word is out and the truth is known. The leaders of the Kronstadt sailors were hand in glove with White reactionary conspirators. This was pretty clear even from anarchist Paul Avrich's account, and now it's all documented and published in Russia.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/59/kronstadt.html

A quote:

"Yeltsin unwittingly helped drive a nail in the coffin of the Kronstadt myth when, in blessing the mutineers, he also opened the archives for study of the mutiny. This led to the 1999 publication of a huge collection of Russian historical materials by ROSSPEN, the main publishing house associated with the Federal Archival Agency of Russia. The documents in Kronshtadtskaia tragediia 1921 goda, dokumenty v dvukh knigakh (The 1921 Kronstadt Tragedy, Documents in Two Volumes) (Moscow: Russian Political Encyclopedia, 1999) confirm beyond doubt the counterrevolutionary nature of the Kronstadt rising."

It's simply fact that, as Trotsky explained, Kronstadt being a totally peaceful front in the Russian Civil War, all the revolutionaries were transferred elsewhere, including the anarchist revolutionaries that wanted to fight the reaction and not simply sit around on the ships playing poker.

And the ranks refilled up mostly by Ukrainian peasants, many of whom were non-revolutionary and anti-Semitic. Avrich described anti-Semitic statements at Kronstadt. And now the Kronstadt rebellion is thoroughly documented, and everything in the documentation confirmed everything Trotsky had to say.

For some reason, no anarchists have been interested in finding out the facts and reading the record. Instead they prefer telling and retelling the same old myths about Kronstadt, that now have been blown out of the water by documented truth.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I would rather avoid such flaming that you resort to... otherwise I would say that "here we have a Trotskyist making baseless and generalized allegations against his opponents on the left just in the same manner as Stalinists do against Trotskyists".

OK, I'll try to cool it a bit, but I'm not exactly the only one engaging in flaming in this thread.

I am puzzled by the use of the word "baseless" however. The whole point here is that I'm providing base for my allegations re: Makhno.

-M.H.-

[Kiev Communard]

And the ranks refilled up mostly by Ukrainian peasants, many of whom were non-revolutionary and anti-Semitic. Avrich described anti-Semitic statements at Kronstadt. And now the Kronstadt rebellion is thoroughly documented, and everything in the documentation confirmed everything Trotsky had to say.

You know, not all Ukrainian peasants were anti-Semites, as you seemingly try to "prove", and the fact that not all of the Kronstadters were angels in human flesh does not mean that Lenin and Trotsky did not institute a dictatorship over the working class and peasantry. In addition, there were some anti-Semitic elements and incidents in the Red Army in Ukraine as well, and the Bolsheviks tolerated Hryhoriev in their army until he broke with them. Finally, the programme of the rebels did not contain any anti-Semitic statements, so I do not think the fact that some of the Kronstadt rebels were personally bigots does not mean all of them were such.

Anyway, Trotsky was rather contemptuous of Jewish traditional culture and religion himself, so I think the right-wing historians you have quoted would claim him to be "an anti-Semite" together with Makhno or "a self-hating Jew" together with Volin.

EDIT: And, by the way, while we are it, neither you, nor your sources managed to prove that anti-Semitic sentiment in Makhno's ranks was systemic, nor that Makhno himself tolerated and condoned it. At best, you have managed to prove that there were some anti-Semitic incidents involving the Insurgents, but they were few and far between in comparison with the deeds of Petlyura - or the Red Army commander-turned proto-fascist warlord Hryhoriev.

Trotsky, on the other hand, is responsible for totally unnecessary and cruel decossackization policy that turned even toiling Don Cossacks against the Soviet government. This policy centered on mass deportations that were conducted basically on quasi-national grounds (as Don Cossacks constituted a practical sub-ethnic group). I would be very glad to hear you defending this.

And please, do not tell me that this is "right-wing lies". After all, the sources you quoted against Makhno are hardly socialist either.

[Jose Gracchus]

Eh. Now that the Soviet archives are open, the word is out and the truth is known. The leaders of the Kronstadt sailors were hand in glove with White reactionary conspirators. This was pretty clear even from anarchist Paul Avrich's account, and now it's all documented and published in Russia.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/59/kronstadt.html

A quote:

"Yeltsin unwittingly helped drive a nail in the coffin of the Kronstadt myth when, in blessing the mutineers, he also opened the archives for study of the mutiny. This led to the 1999 publication of a huge collection of Russian historical materials by ROSSPEN, the main publishing house associated with the Federal Archival Agency of Russia. The documents in Kronshtadtskaia tragediia 1921 goda, dokumenty v dvukh knigakh (The 1921 Kronstadt Tragedy, Documents in Two Volumes) (Moscow: Russian Political Encyclopedia, 1999) confirm beyond doubt the counterrevolutionary nature of the Kronstadt rising."

It's simply fact that, as Trotsky explained, Kronstadt being a totally peaceful front in the Russian Civil War, all the revolutionaries were transferred elsewhere, including the anarchist revolutionaries that wanted to fight the reaction and not simply sit around on the ships playing poker.

And the ranks refilled up mostly by Ukrainian peasants, many of whom were non-revolutionary and anti-Semitic. Avrich described anti-Semitic statements at Kronstadt. And now the Kronstadt rebellion is thoroughly documented, and everything in the documentation confirmed everything Trotsky had to say.

For some reason, no anarchists have been interested in finding out the facts and reading the record. Instead they prefer telling and retelling the same old myths about Kronstadt, that now have been blown out of the water by documented truth.

-M.H.-


"Yasinky's impression that the veteran politicized Red sailor still predominated in Kronstadt at the end of 1920 is borne out by the hard statistical data available regarding the crews of the two major battleships, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol, both renowned since 1917 for their revolutionary zeal and Bolshevik allegiance. Of 2,028 sailors whose years of enlistment are known, no less than 1,904 or 93.9% were recruited into the navy before and during the 1917 revolution, the largest group, 1,195 having joined in the years 1914-16. Only 137 sailors or 6.8% were recruited in the years 1918-21, including three who were conscripted in 1921, and they were the only ones who had not been there during the 1917 revolution. As for the sailors of the Baltic Fleet in general (and that included the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol), of those serving on 1 January 1921 at least 75.5% are likely to have been drafted into the fleet before 1918. Over 80% were drawn from Great Russian areas (mainly central Russia and the Volga area), some 10% from the Ukraine, and 9% from Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Poland.

One reason for the remarkable survival in Kronstadt of these veteran sailors, albeit in great diminished numbers, was precisely the difficulty in trainin, in war-time conditions, a new generation competent in the sophisticated technical skills required on Russia's ultra-modern battleships, and indeed, in the fleet generally.

Nor, as has so often been claimed, did new recruits, some 400 of whom Yasinky had interviewed, arrive in numbers large enough to dilute of even 'demoralize' Kronstadt's Red sailors. As Evan Mawdsley has found, 'only 1,313 of a planned total of 10,384 recruits had arrived' by 1 December 1920 and even they seem to have stationed in the barracks of the Second Baltic Crew in Petrograd.

Israel Getzler, Kronstadt 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 207-208.

Unsurprisingly, you cannot simply extract the highly-skilled and -drilled sailors and specialized workers (employed in torpedo and machinery manufacture) out of a cutting-edge technology modern battle fleet, and throw them into a forlorn hope on the infantry front. Worse yet, if anyone knew this, it was the Commissar of War, Comrade Lev Davidovich.

In a word, more Spart quote-mining and horseshit out of you.

[Forward Union]

No. Lenin erradicated the democratic decission making bodies and placed power in the hands of international capitalist advisors, mainly from Germany and the US. The Cheka was used to eliminate political opponants within the Communist party, and closley allied revolutions such as the Libertarian-Communist Revolution in Ukraine (Which had helped the Red Army during the civil war, sent food and coal to the Petrograd Soviet) was turned on and crushed.

Syndicalists who argued for the Soviets to have control of industry were killed and imprisoned under Lenin. The Sailors in Kronstadt, previously called 'the vanguard' by Trotsky, were slaughtered after demanding workers democracy.

[Red_Struggle]

by the late 30s Stalin's regime (leaving aside the red herring of his personal agency) had 800,000 people executed in a year.

Yezhov didn't exist. It was all intentional.

[Dogs On Acid]

No. Lenin erradicated the democratic decission making bodies and placed power in the hands of international capitalist advisors

What do you mean? Can you enlighten me?

[Jose Gracchus]

Yezhov didn't exist. It was all intentional.

We have the piece of paper where Stalin personally signed off on tortures and executions, and I couldn't really careless if Stalin was personally responsible. He was either personally responsible or criminally incompetent. What kind of a leader cannot get or does not try to get a second opinion or take the pulse on the street of approving hundreds of thousands of executions in a single year?

[A Marxist Historian]

You know, not all Ukrainian peasants were anti-Semites, as you seemingly try to "prove", and the fact that not all of the Kronstadters were angels in human flesh does not mean that Lenin and Trotsky did not institute a dictatorship over the working class and peasantry. In addition, there were some anti-Semitic elements and incidents in the Red Army in Ukraine as well, and the Bolsheviks tolerated Hryhoriev in their army until he broke with them. Finally, the programme of the rebels did not contain any anti-Semitic statements, so I do not think the fact that some of the Kronstadt rebels were personally bigots does not mean all of them were such.

Of course all Ukrainian peasants were not anti-Semites and not all were pogromists. But a lot were. As you I'm sure know better than I, if your sig is accurate, Ukrainian anti-Semitism is historic, going back to the great peasant-Cossack Ukrainian revolt of the seventeenth century, accompanied by large scale Jewish massacres.

Class divisions were sharper in the prosperous Ukrainian countryside, the bread basket, than elsewhere in the Tsarist Empire, and it was precisely the kulak elements, stronger than elsewhere, that were most strongly associated with anti-Semitism.

And since you had to own your own horse to be a cavalryman, and Makhno's forces were mostly cavalry, Makhno's forces inevitably had a certain kulak character.

As for Hryhoriev, until he broke with the Bolsheviks he too was punishing pogromists in his forces. When he took Odessa, his circular threatened if I recall right to skin all pogromists and make drums out of their skins.

Nor were all the Kronstadt sailors anti-Semites, nor was there anti-Semitism in their program. But why would there be? Even Hryhoriev claimed not to be an anti-Semite! His official program called for "Soviets without Communists with a maximum of 10% Jewish officials."

And of course Petliura claimed to be a great friend of the Jews, as Ukrainian history textbooks explain in detail. The problem is that all these programs were worth no more than the paper required to print them.

The anarchist historian Paul Avrich himself describes, and understates, the "down with Communists and Jews" mood at Kronstadt. It did not require official registration in official programs to work its evil.


Anyway, Trotsky was rather contemptuous of Jewish traditional culture and religion himself, so I think the right-wing historians you have quoted would claim him to be "an anti-Semite" together with Makhno or "a self-hating Jew" together with Volin.

No, they don't like Trotsky one bit. I am quoting them because they of all people cannot be accused of pro-communist prejudice, so on a matter like this, they can be assumed to be neutral and objective, if anything preferring not to blame a notorious Bolshevik enemy like Makhno for pogroms if at all possible. As can be seen with some of the contributions on the link I posted. With their main prejudice being the very useful one of being prejudiced *for the victims,* namely the Jews.


EDIT: And, by the way, while we are it, neither you, nor your sources managed to prove that anti-Semitic sentiment in Makhno's ranks was systemic, nor that Makhno himself tolerated and condoned it. At best, you have managed to prove that there were some anti-Semitic incidents involving the Insurgents, but they were few and far between in comparison with the deeds of Petlyura - or the Red Army commander-turned proto-fascist warlord Hryhoriev.

And what is Makhno if not a Red Army commander turned anarchist warlord?

Granted, he was not as bad as Petlyura or Hryhoriev. That has not however prevented him from becoming an icon and hero for the right wing pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists polluting the western half of Ukraine, as I am sure you well know.

Were there just the occasional unfortunate incidents, or was it systematic? Well, who are the best witnesses to decide that? The Ukrainian Jews themselves, and the chroniclers of their victimization of the official Jewish pogrom archive overseen by Tcherikover.

Indeed, Voline himself saw Tcherikov as the ultimate judge, which is why he got Tcherikover to make a statement clearing Makhno and featured it prominently in his book.

Unfortunately, the facts in the Tcherikover's actual files contradict this statement, for reasons I discussed earlier.


Trotsky, on the other hand, is responsible for totally unnecessary and cruel decossackization policy that turned even toiling Don Cossacks against the Soviet government. This policy centered on mass deportations that were conducted basically on quasi-national grounds (as Don Cossacks constituted a practical sub-ethnic group). I would be very glad to hear you defending this.

And please, do not tell me that this is "right-wing lies". After all, the sources you quoted against Makhno are hardly socialist either.

Was Trotsky? During the Civil War, it was Trotsky who opposed direct assault on the Don Cossack strongholds, and Stalin who pushed this policy through over Trotsky's opposition in 1919.

I read Roy Medvedev's book on Red Cossack Mironov, and found much in it questionable. Notably, Medvedev's allegations that Sholokhov's famous Don novels were fraudulent has since been proven to be incorrect.

The best account of what went on in the Cossack lands is Sholokhov's, and I stand by it. Ultra-left errors were made, and Sholokhov depicts them in the second novel, but there was no "ethnic cleansing."

The fact that the Cossacks had been the policemen of the Tsars and built up much hatred against them among workers, Jews and poorer peasants had at times unfortunate results. Blaming Trotsky personally for ultraleft policies with respect to the Cossacks is indeed in my opinion simply one of the anti-Semitic slanders so popular in Ukraine and the old Cossack country.

What is your source, may I ask?

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Yezhov didn't exist. It was all intentional.

That's a good one. Maybe Stalin didn't exist either, and we all imagined the whole thing.

In fact, maybe you don't exist either. Can you prove that you do?

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Israel Getzler, Kronstadt 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 207-208.

Unsurprisingly, you cannot simply extract the highly-skilled and -drilled sailors and specialized workers (employed in torpedo and machinery manufacture) out of a cutting-edge technology modern battle fleet, and throw them into a forlorn hope on the infantry front. Worse yet, if anyone knew this, it was the Commissar of War, Comrade Lev Davidovich.

In a word, more Spart quote-mining and horseshit out of you.

Israel Getzler's book, quite inferior to Paul Avrich's, is now outdated, as it was written in 1983, before the archives opened. (His bio of Martov, by the way, is quite good, I've referenced it here on other threads.)

And as for that cutting edge technology modern battle fleet, it saw *no* combat during the Civil War, and was left at anchor, doing absolutely nothing, except serving as a reason for the British Navy not to intervene.

So yes, all the revolutionaries went off to the front in large numbers and never went back, whether Bolshevik, anarchist or whatever. Those sailors and gunners strongly interested in avoiding combat where they might get themselves killed stayed behind and trained the new recruits from the countryside. Unsurprisingly, they were not of the best.

-M.H.-

[Kiev Communard]

What is your source, may I ask?

-M.H.-


This one (it is in Russian):



Директива Реввоенсовета Южфронта от 16 марта 1919 года:


… Предлагаю к неуклонному исполнению следующее: напрячь все усилия к быстрейшей ликвидации возникших беспорядков путём сосредоточения максимума сил для подавления восстания и путём применения самых суровых мер по отношению к зачинщикам-хуторам:
а) сожжение восставших хуторов;
б) беспощадные расстрелы всех без исключения лиц, принимавших прямое или косвенное участие в восстании;
в) расстрелы через 5 или 10 человек взрослого мужского населения восставших хуторов;
г) массовое взятие заложников из соседних к восставшим хуторам;
д) широкое оповещение населения хуторов станиц и т. д. о том, что все станицы и хутора замеченные в оказании помощи восставшим, будут подвергаться беспощадному истреблению всего взрослого мужского населения и предаваться сожжению при первом случае обнаружения помощи; примерное проведение карательных мер с широким о том оповещением населения.

Директива Реввоенсовета 8-й армии № 1522 от 17 марта 1919 года:


Реввоенсовет 8-й армии приказывает в наикратчайший срок подавить восстание предателей, воспользовавшихся доверием красных войск и поднявших мятеж в тылу. Предатели донцы еще раз обнаружили в себе вековых врагов трудового народа. Все казаки, поднявшие оружие в тылу красных войск, должны быть поголовно уничтожены, уничтожены должны быть и все те, кто имеет какое либо отношение к восстанию и к противосоветской агитации, не останавливаясь перед процентным уничтожением населения станиц, сжечь хутора и станицы, поднявшие оружие против нас в тылу. Нет жалости к предателям. Всем частям, действующим против восставших, приказывается пройти огнем и мечом местность, объятую мятежом, дабы у других станиц не было бы и помысла о том, что путём предательского восстания можно вернуть красновский генеральско-царский режим.


The Revolutionary Military Councils of individual armies and fronts were ultimately subordinated to Trotsky, so just as you conclude that Makhno was somehow personally responsible for some of his fighters' anti-Semitic acts, I might just as well claim that Trotsky was personally responsible for his subordinates' direct discriminatory orders against the Cossack population (including the non-combatants).

[Kiev Communard]

Granted, he was not as bad as Petlyura or Hryhoriev. That has not however prevented him from becoming an icon and hero for the right wing pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists polluting the western half of Ukraine, as I am sure you well know.

No, the West Ukrainian Neo-Nazis generally hate Makhno for his communist-anarchist views and refusal to co-operate with Petlyura and the Whites. The ones that sometimes try to uphold him as an icon (i.e. some Third Positionists) do the same with regard to such left-wing figures as Mao Zedong, Che Guevara and James Connolly - who were hardly anti-Semites in any case.


Was Trotsky? During the Civil War, it was Trotsky who opposed direct assault on the Don Cossack strongholds, and Stalin who pushed this policy through over Trotsky's opposition in 1919.

The Russian historian Pavel Golub, the author of the book «Правда и ложь о «расказачивании» казаков» (Truth and Falsehood on De-Cossackization) claims that neither Stalin nor Sverdlov was involved in drafting anti-Cossack measures, and that it was actually Trotsky-led Military Revolutionary Council that was responsible for it.


The fact that the Cossacks had been the policemen of the Tsars and built up much hatred against them among workers, Jews and poorer peasants had at times unfortunate results. Blaming Trotsky personally for ultraleft policies with respect to the Cossacks is indeed in my opinion simply one of the anti-Semitic slanders so popular in Ukraine and the old Cossack country.

I would say that anti-Semitic sentiment in some parts of Ukraine (that was notably absent in the Left Bank regions where Makhno operated) was caused by the fact that local peasants and artisans felt resentful towards moneylenders who were often Jewish. This, of course, does not mean that all Jews were moneylenders - nor all Cossacks were "Tsar's policemen".

[Kiev Communard]

By the way, as respects the instance of pogrom in Gorkaya colony, it should be noted that the Insurgents who were involved therein were tried by special military tribunal of Makhno's forces and all shot for their crime. If you have the access to Russian archives, here is the reference - ЦДАГОУ. Ф.5, Оп.1, Д.351, Л.36.

EDIT: With regard to Kronstadt, despite anti-Semitic sentiments among some sailors, there was only one time when a group of them wanted to publish an anti-Semitic piece targeting Trotsky and in that case they were sharply rebuked by the rebels' main newspaper editor Labanov, a SR-Maximalist leader. So this is hardly an evidence of all-encompassing anti-Semitism in Kronstadt you allege.

[Kiev Communard]

Class divisions were sharper in the prosperous Ukrainian countryside, the bread basket, than elsewhere in the Tsarist Empire, and it was precisely the kulak elements, stronger than elsewhere, that were most strongly associated with anti-Semitism.

Yes, that is why the majority of real kulaks (i.e. agrarian entrepreneurs of non-noble heritage who owned large swathes of land and routinely exploited wage labour) were against Makhno and helped the Denikinites hunt down his forces (just as they did against the Red Army).


And since you had to own your own horse to be a cavalryman, and Makhno's forces were mostly cavalry, Makhno's forces inevitably had a certain kulak character.

Wrong. The majority of Makhno's cavalrymen were middle and small peasants and agricultural workers who got their horses from the pomieschiki (landlords)' staples after the Makhnovists destroyed their estates in the region in the late 1918. Later their horse stock was supplemented by the horses of several Austro-German and Hetmanite units they overwhelmed. It is well-known from the reports (including ones of the Denikinite intelligence) that the majority of the Makhnovist "victims" were perfectly Great Russian priests, landlords and, yes, kulaks, whom they slaughtered en masse once the White Guardists were thrown out of the region.

[Comrade1]

Do tell how people werent free under Stalin...

[ComradePonov]

Do tell how people werent free under Stalin...


Is this a joke?

[LordAcheron]

they were after the revolution and before lenin's counter-revolution

[Dogs On Acid]

they were after the revolution and before lenin's counter-revolution

Before Lenin there was no USSR.

[Commissar Rykov]

Before Lenin there was no USSR.

Well there you go ruining the surprise.

[Dogs On Acid]

Well there you go ruining the surprise.

:cool:

[Red_Struggle]

We have the piece of paper where Stalin personally signed off on tortures and executions, and I couldn't really careless if Stalin was personally responsible. He was either personally responsible or criminally incompetent. What kind of a leader cannot get or does not try to get a second opinion or take the pulse on the street of approving hundreds of thousands of executions in a single year?

You're leaving out a large portion of political intrigue and conflict that took place before, during, and after the purge. Even during Yagoda's time, Stalin urged stronger supervision on the security appatarus. As David M. Cole noted, he actually hesitated for months before advancing towards a wide-scale purge.

"When Stalin sought to impose certain restrictions on their right to pronounce death sentences, they simply secured that the new courts which were to hear certain cases with the public excluded, should be formed from their own members, that is to say members of the police caste. Stalin's continual pressure for more rigid supervision by organs of the party was just what drove Yagoda and his colleagues into opposition and later into conspiracy." - Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 236

or, as another author puts it:

"...the fact that the police action of 1937 continued for so long, in company with equally self-contradictory political acts, makes it unlikely that we are dealing here with a victorious punitive expedition being carried through by the praetorian guard of an all-powerful dictator. - Rittersporn, Gabor. Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications, 1933-1953. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, c1991, p. 113

Another good source for examining the origins and initial goals of the 1937 purge can be read here: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/110.5/goldman.html It performs a very detailed and well-researched insight into the anti-bureaucratic (although in an inadequate way) overtones that the purge was coupled with.

And for good measure, here's something on Yezhov:
http://red-channel.de/books/ezhov.htm

[ComradePonov]

Another good source for examining the origins and initial goals of the 1937 purge can be read here: It performs a very detailed and well-researched insight into the anti-bureaucratic (although in an inadequate way) overtones that the purge was coupled with.





Stalin... Anti-bureaucratic?


Are you kidding me? How can the cold murder of dozens of old bolsheviks and senior revolutionaries be justified as "anti-bureaucratic"?

Stalin created a class which was worse than the bourgeois. Stalin was a disease to the socialist cause. he is possibly the single reason that individuals like Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Mussolini are such significant figures of history.

Had the power struggle in the 1920's played out differently, we could have possibly avoided the Second World War, and quiete possibly, be living in a socialist world today. One thing I fail to understand is Stalin's reluctance to support socialist movements abroad.

[A Marxist Historian]

This one (it is in Russian):



Директива Реввоенсовета Южфронта от 16 марта 1919 года:



Директива Реввоенсовета 8-й армии № 1522 от 17 марта 1919 года:




The Revolutionary Military Councils of individual armies and fronts were ultimately subordinated to Trotsky, so just as you conclude that Makhno was somehow personally responsible for some of his fighters' anti-Semitic acts, I might just as well claim that Trotsky was personally responsible for his subordinates' direct discriminatory orders against the Cossack population (including the non-combatants).

Firstly, it didn't call for these extreme measures against all Cossacks, but as I read it, again all Cossacks who had risen up in arms against Soviet authority (yes, including their families). Not at all the same thing!

That does indeed sound highly excessive. Exactly the sort of thing Sholokhov criticized in the Don novels. Ultraleft, despite all the crimes committed by Cossacks in the past, and being committed at that very moment, as the Don Cossacks were the heart of Denikin's forces. But not at all in the same category as pogroms against innocent Jews.

Was the 8th Army, the basis of Stalin's intrigues against Trotsky from the town later renamed Stalingrad where he was trying to grab control over the Southern front, truly subordinate to Trotsky in the spring of 1919? That is questionable.

Indeed, in the summer of 1919 there was a big internal dispute in the party over how to advance to the South to get rid of Denikin. Trotsky said that the Don Cossack lands should be avoided, should be gone 'round. Stalin and various others said no, the Don Cossacks were the heart of the problem, the Red Army should go directly through and smash them.

Trotsky lost that argument.

This is all well described in Trotsky's autobiography as well as many other sources.

So no, in this particular case, if you want to blame Lenin for that I suppose that would make sense, he did not side with Trotsky on this issue. But no, you can't blame Trotsky.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

You're leaving out a large portion of political intrigue and conflict that took place before, during, and after the purge. Even during Yagoda's time, Stalin urged stronger supervision on the security appatarus. As David M. Cole noted, he actually hesitated for months before advancing towards a wide-scale purge.

Yagoda was an important figure, the original architect of the gulags and many other of the most unpleasant features of the Stalinist system. Mikhail Ilyinskii's biography of him, Narkom Yagoda, is very worth reading. Got his start, interestingly enough, as an anarchist.

Stalin never trusted Yagoda for a simple reason. Yagoda's sympathies with Bukharin and Bukharinism were pretty well known, and not just a fantasy of Bukharin's when he was trying to bring Kamenev et.al. into his little backdoor conspiracy in spring 1928. Though Yagoda certainly never had the courage to *do* anything about them.

But the reason Yagoda had to go was that he assumed that the Trotskyists and Zinovievists had been defeated, and that it was not *necessary* to try to frame them up as agents of Hitler, which he objected to primarily on professional grounds, that nobody would believe it. Yagoda saw himself as a brilliant policeman, true master of the trade.

He also though that the gulags, his very own idea, had served their purpose and should be slowly phased out, which was not at all Stalin's opinion.

Stalin did indeed hesitate for a while before deciding to essentially destroy his own party and governmental apparatus and replace it with a new one. That is not surprising I should think.


"When Stalin sought to impose certain restrictions on their right to pronounce death sentences, they simply secured that the new courts which were to hear certain cases with the public excluded, should be formed from their own members, that is to say members of the police caste. Stalin's continual pressure for more rigid supervision by organs of the party was just what drove Yagoda and his colleagues into opposition and later into conspiracy." - Basseches, Nikolaus. Stalin. London, New York: Staples Press, 1952, p. 236

The date itself indicates that this author was engaging in baseless speculation.


or, as another author puts it:

"...the fact that the police action of 1937 continued for so long, in company with equally self-contradictory political acts, makes it unlikely that we are dealing here with a victorious punitive expedition being carried through by the praetorian guard of an all-powerful dictator. - Rittersporn, Gabor. Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications, 1933-1953. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, c1991, p. 113

True enough as far as it goes, which is nowhere at all. Indeed what happened was complex and not totally overseen from the top. The "revisionist" Soviet historian who shed the most new light on this was Sheila Fitzpatrick. The "Brezhnev generation" of workers promoted from the factory floor into the bureaucracy by way of engineering school were beneficiaries of the revolution, not revolutionaries, whose basic idea of the purpose of the revolution was not socialism, but working class upward social mobility, first and foremost their own of course. Brezhnev's Russia was their paradise.

Old revolutionaries, whether oppositionists or loyal to Stalin, were in their way. They were the social support for Stalin's Great Terror within the bureaucracy in this murderous intrabureaucratic struggle, which had absolutely nothing "anti-bureaucratic" about it. The working class and peasantry of the Soviet Union were essentially innocent bystanders, neither protagonists nor, by and large, its victims.

The "mass terror" against former kulaks, petty criminals, members of nationalities whose motherlands were allied with Germany or Japan, etc., which accounted for most of the actual victims, was an accidental consequence of Stalin simply turning the Soviet Union over to the NKVD for a year and unleashing them. They simply rounded up and shot or sent to gulags anybody who happened to be on the police lists as a bad actor. Marginal elements in Soviet society, which is why Stalin could get away with this huge scale mass murder without much popular protest.

Yezhov "rounded up the usual suspects" as in Casablanca--and killed them in huge masses, total number murdered some 700,000, of whom only about a tenth were party members.

And once Stalin decided things had gone too far, he had Yezhov shot before Yezhov decided to have Stalin shot too.

I suspect some of the rumors about how Stalin was allegedly a Tsarist agent originate from Yezhov's rumored putting together of a file on Stalin in his last few months as NKVD head...

Yezhov himself, by the way, was a supporter of Kollontai's Workers Opposition in 1921.

-M.H.-


Another good source for examining the origins and initial goals of the 1937 purge can be read here: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/110.5/goldman.html It performs a very detailed and well-researched insight into the anti-bureaucratic (although in an inadequate way) overtones that the purge was coupled with.

And for good measure, here's something on Yezhov:
http://red-channel.de/books/ezhov.htm

[A Marxist Historian]

No, the West Ukrainian Neo-Nazis generally hate Makhno for his communist-anarchist views and refusal to co-operate with Petlyura and the Whites. The ones that sometimes try to uphold him as an icon (i.e. some Third Positionists) do the same with regard to such left-wing figures as Mao Zedong, Che Guevara and James Connolly - who were hardly anti-Semites in any case.

OK, I've only been to Ukraine a few times and you live there. So I'll backtrack. Yes, the outright Neo-Nazis would logically not like Makhno, who did after all serve in the Red Army and fought together with the Red Army vs. Denikin even after raising his rebellion.

However, the right wing Ukrainian nationalists who really do dominate Western Ukraine, which is after all not a Nazi state, do indeed like Makhno. The "Orange Revolutionaries," who defend Makhno and Petlyura both against all sorts of charges against them from communists, making not very much distinction between these two Ukrainian heroes.


The Russian historian Pavel Golub, the author of the book «Правда и ложь о «расказачивании» казаков» (Truth and Falsehood on De-Cossackization) claims that neither Stalin nor Sverdlov was involved in drafting anti-Cossack measures, and that it was actually Trotsky-led Military Revolutionary Council that was responsible for it.

Is that one of those Cossack historians from Rostov?

In principle, deCossackization was a good idea. Why should Cossacks have privileges other peasants did not? Why should they get more and better land than other peasants? In practice, there were problems, and some genuine ultraleft mistakes.


I would say that anti-Semitic sentiment in some parts of Ukraine (that was notably absent in the Left Bank regions where Makhno operated) was caused by the fact that local peasants and artisans felt resentful towards moneylenders who were often Jewish. This, of course, does not mean that all Jews were moneylenders - nor all Cossacks were "Tsar's policemen".

Economic conflict between Jewish artisans, petty traders and merchants and peasants was an old story in Eastern Europe, and an uglier story in Ukraine than anywhere else in Eastern Europe.

Hundreds of years ago when Ukraine was a Polish colony, yes Jews were part of the ruling classes and closely related to the nobility. By the twentieth century Jews in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the Pale were by and large an oppressed group lower on the Tsarist social pecking order than peasants and in many parts of the Pale poorer, though of course some Jews were rich.

Diverting peasant hostility from the landlords to the Jews was an old Tsarist trick that by 1917 had stopped working. It was revived during the Ukrainian Civil War as the most aggravated form of a generalized hostility between town and country.

Since the countryside was overwhelmingly Ukrainian whereas the cities were overwhelmingly Russian and Jewish, social and economic hostility took an ethnic form. The fact that the Red forces in Ukraine were highly Jewish at all levels enabled all reactionary forces to use anti-Semitism combined with anti-Communism as their rallying cry.

The Ukrainian peasant movement was at first directed against the German occupiers, and large parts of it, including peasant guerilla leaders like Makhno and Hryhoriev, initially welcomed the Red Army and joined its ranks.

But as economic crisis sharpened and hostility between peasants and workers grew up and intensified, peasant rebels broke with the Ukrainian Reds. Ultraleft policies on land questions and Luxemburgist disregard of Ukraininian national rights certainly played a role.

So much of this peasant movement broke with the workers and moved towards counterrevolution.

Makhno was simply the most leftwing leader of the most leftwing peasant band. So he was the least anti-Semitic leader of the least anti-Semitic wing of ... an anti-Semitic peasant movement that committed countless atrocities against Ukrainian Jews.

Many anarchists at the time, aware of how dictatorial his regime was, refused to accept that he was truly an anarchist. Now, so many years later, contemporary anarchists have largely forgotten that.

-M.H.-

[Dogs On Acid]

Stalin was a disease to the socialist cause.
Quite possibly yes. Western media capitalized on his actions and turned the workers of the west against Socialism very easily.


he is possibly the single reason that individuals like Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Mussolini are such significant figures of history.
No that's not true at all. Stalin's image is mostly unrelated to these individuals. Hitler and Mussolini would of been well known with or without the U.S.S.R. Churchill was a product of the war. Roosevelt, meh.


Had the power struggle in the 1920's played out differently, we could have possibly avoided the Second World War, and quiete possibly, be living in a socialist world today.
No, just no. The second World War was not caused by Stalin and the events that led up to it were mostly independent of Stalin. It was local ethnic and political and religious friction.

[Joe Payne]

Paul Avrich's history is actually far more outdated, as it was written before Getzler's. Paul Avrich himself even admitted the following:

"Getzler draws attention to the continuity in institutions, ideology, and personnel linking 1921 with 1917. In doing so he demolishes the allegation of Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders that the majority of veteran Red sailors had, in the course of the Civil War, been replaced by politically retarded peasant recruits from the Ukraine and Western borderlands, thereby diluting the revolutionary character of the Baltic fleet. He shows, on the contrary, that no significant change had taken place in the fleet's political and social composition, that at least three-quarters of the sailors on active duty in 1921 had been drafted before 1918 and were drawn predominantly from Great Russian areas."

I dunno where you get "Red Army Commander turned anarchist warlord." He was in prison for eight and a half years prior to 1917 when he killed a police officer as part of an anarchist-communist group. When he was released he organized with this same anarchist group to help set up Peasants' Unions to expropriate the land and such. The group he was with that began fighting the German occupation was explicitly anarchist communist as well. He was always an anarchist, though not a warlord. Nice straw-man though. If Mahkno's a warlord then I don't know what that makes Lenin and Trotsky? State-Ordained Gods?

I suppose it would make me look more like a "Mahkno-worshipper" if I also mentioned that the Whites and small bandit groups were known to fake being Mahknovists to either shatter the morale of the revolutionary workers and peasants in the Free Territory when they were whites, and for Bandits, well, they just faked to be whoever's troops in whichever terroitory they were in. When these were found out they were generally dealt with pretty harshly.

He also had no governing powers himself. The Free Territory consisted of 7 million freely organized peasants and workers via free councils, committees, and soviets. He had no power over these free institutions. ANd even in the military day-to-day operations were decided by general assemblies of the ranks, field "officers" elected. There were also a bunch of anarchist-communist groups about, as well as the NABAT, a relatively large federation that Voline was a part of in the cities.

On another note it isn't accurate to call Voline a defender of Mahkno. He sympathized with the movement but he personally hated Mahkno, and his overview is not really flattering at all and makes claims that existed nowhere before his History, conveniently published well after Mahkno's death. If anything Arshinov's account could be more considered a defense, I suppose. Though given the level of White and Red slander, that's understandable.

And you can't claim that anti-communist and anti-socialist histories aren't biased against anarchist revolutions. That's ridiculous, as we are also socialists and communists, and they would have every reason to make a viable alternative look as bad as possible, even if it requires out and out lying.

[A Marxist Historian]

Quite possibly yes. Western media capitalized on his actions and turned the workers of the west against Socialism very easily.


No that's not true at all. Stalin's image is mostly unrelated to these individuals. Hitler and Mussolini would of been well known with or without the U.S.S.R. Churchill was a product of the war. Roosevelt, meh.


No, just no. The second World War was not caused by Stalin and the events that led up to it were mostly independent of Stalin. It was local ethnic and political and religious friction.

All of the above true, except re: Hitler.

Until about 1928 or so Hitler was just a fairly obscure German fascist of no great notoriety or import. Were it not for the horrible mistakes of the German Communist Party (and of course the treachery of German Social Democracy, but that goes without saying) that is all he ever would have been, a footnote to history.

The triumph of Nazism in Germany was a disastrous and objectively unlikely historical accident, for which Stalin had profound responsibility.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Paul Avrich's history is actually far more outdated, as it was written before Getzler's. Paul Avrich himself even admitted the following:

"Getzler draws attention to the continuity in institutions, ideology, and personnel linking 1921 with 1917. In doing so he demolishes the allegation of Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders that the majority of veteran Red sailors had, in the course of the Civil War, been replaced by politically retarded peasant recruits from the Ukraine and Western borderlands, thereby diluting the revolutionary character of the Baltic fleet. He shows, on the contrary, that no significant change had taken place in the fleet's political and social composition, that at least three-quarters of the sailors on active duty in 1921 had been drafted before 1918 and were drawn predominantly from Great Russian areas."

OK, I'll check over what he has to say on that at first opportunity. It's possible that Trotsky erred in thinking that most of them were recruited from Ukraine. I've read Trotsky's military writings, and one thing that jumps out of them is his *total* disinterest in naval matters. He was strictly an army man, regarding the fleet as irrelevant, which except for the Kronstadt mutiny indeed it was during the Civil War.

According to Trotsky there was a tradition of recruiting Ukrainians for the Black Sea fleet, which all was lost to the Whites at the very beginning of the Civil War. So it would make sense for Trotsky to assume 15-20 years later that Ukrainian peasants who in the past would have joined the Black Sea fleet were signing up for the only navy the Reds had, floating in the Petrograd harbor.

But that huge numbers of revolutionary sailors went off to fight elsewhere during the Civil War, and that few went back, is extremely well known from many sources. I am suspicious that Getzler was engaged in number juggling here.

In any case, the new documentary materials published in 1999 now make all previous commentary, whether by Avrich, Getzler or Trotsky, obsolete. They have to be the basis for all investigations.

The Spartacists described Getzler's response to the overwhelming mass of revelations proving the connections between Kronstadt and the White Guards as "sophistry not scholarship."

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/59/kronstadt.html

I think they proved their point quite persuasively.


I dunno where you get "Red Army Commander turned anarchist warlord." He was in prison for eight and a half years prior to 1917 when he killed a police officer as part of an anarchist-communist group. When he was released he organized with this same anarchist group to help set up Peasants' Unions to expropriate the land and such. The group he was with that began fighting the German occupation was explicitly anarchist communist as well. He was always an anarchist, though not a warlord. Nice straw-man though. If Mahkno's a warlord then I don't know what that makes Lenin and Trotsky? State-Ordained Gods?

He was a warlord because he acted like one. His rule was highly dictatorial, with not one but two secret police organizations infamous for practicing torture on prisoners. Anybody at Gulyai-Pol'e speaking up for communism was in for a world of hurt. A funny sort of anarchist.

He was when you get round to it a classic dictatorial left wing peasant band leader, not that dissimilar when you get down to it from Mao Tse-Tung. As the peasantry unlike the working class is not a revolutionary class, indeed it is not a class at all but divided into classes, peasant movements either are subordinated to movements of other classes, preferably the working class of course, or have the kind of character of the movements of Mao or Castro or for that matter Makhno. At best.


I suppose it would make me look more like a "Mahkno-worshipper" if I also mentioned that the Whites and small bandit groups were known to fake being Mahknovists to either shatter the morale of the revolutionary workers and peasants in the Free Territory when they were whites, and for Bandits, well, they just faked to be whoever's troops in whichever terroitory they were in. When these were found out they were generally dealt with pretty harshly.

He also had no governing powers himself. The Free Territory consisted of 7 million freely organized peasants and workers via free councils, committees, and soviets. He had no power over these free institutions. ANd even in the military day-to-day operations were decided by general assemblies of the ranks, field "officers" elected. There were also a bunch of anarchist-communist groups about, as well as the NABAT, a relatively large federation that Voline was a part of in the cities.

Well, yes, in his own way Makhno was an anarchist. I have no doubt that if he had been questioned about the doings of his secret police organizations, he would have answered something like "ask them, this is a free anarchist republic and I have no control over them." But if asked in too unfriendly a fashion he would have put a bullet through the questioner.

Indeed that is the real reason why there were so many Jewish pogroms carried out by Makhno's soldiers, even though he himself was not an anti-Semite. Occasionally he would shoot a pogromist when one annoyed him. He was very fond of shooting people who annoyed him. But ultimately, his attitude was, if the free Ukrainian rebels want to kill some Jews, that is their business, the people are always right.

The Bolsheviks, as Marxists, had a very different attitude.


On another note it isn't accurate to call Voline a defender of Mahkno. He sympathized with the movement but he personally hated Mahkno, and his overview is not really flattering at all and makes claims that existed nowhere before his History, conveniently published well after Mahkno's death. If anything Arshinov's account could be more considered a defense, I suppose. Though given the level of White and Red slander, that's understandable.

And you can't claim that anti-communist and anti-socialist histories aren't biased against anarchist revolutions. That's ridiculous, as we are also socialists and communists, and they would have every reason to make a viable alternative look as bad as possible, even if it requires out and out lying.

Voline was very far from the only anarchist at the time who had very serious criticisms of Makhno. In fact, the main Russian anarchist movement at the time, whose name unfortunately I have forgotten, denounced and renounced Makhno.

But on the question of Jewish pogroms he defended Makhno. As he was Jewish himself and had served on Makhno's staff, he pretty much had to to defend his own personal honor.

Are anti-communist historians biased against anarchism? Yes, but much less so than against communism. Every historian has his biases, you have to read everything with a grain of salt, there is no such thing as pure "objectivity."

Nonetheless, Jewish historians are the best sources on Jewish pogroms. And if they are right wing historians who dislike *all* leftists, but communists more so than others, then they will come about as close to objectivity on such a subject as alleged pogroms by anti-Bolshevik anarchists as one could reasonably expect.

But this all comes out of the Tcherikover archives anyway. Tcherikover was an anti-Communist left wing socialist who if anything was biased *in favor* of anarchism, which is why Voline could get him to make his statement "clearing" Makhno, which contradicts the Makhno file in the Tcherikover archive so utterly.

It is also not unimportant that the YIVO archivist in charge of the Tcherikover archivist, surely the best contemporary source on the matter, and one with the least desire to disagree in any way with Tcherikover, stated that Tcherikover was erroneous in that statement.

-M.H.-

[Kiev Communard]

OK, A Marxist Historian, judging from your comments on Makhno after our previous exchange, as well as from your implication that Yezhov was somehow as bad as he was due to the fact that he participated in Workers' Opposition in 1921, it appears that your overall strategy seems to be consisting in slandering every political force that was to the left of your precious (and ultimately failed) "Bolsheviks-Leninists" of the 1920s (of course, led by infallible prophet Trotsky, whose autobiography is seemingly accurate historical source - unlike the vile rumblings of these filthy anti-Semites Volin and Makhno :rolleyes:).

The fact is that the Stalinists might use the same logic against you, as it is known that the Germans created a fake Trotskyist party in the first months of their invasion against the USSR in 1941 for propaganda reasons, and that the majority of American Trotskyist intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century later became neo-conservative think-tankers. Anyway, feel free indulging in your sectarian attacks against anarchists and left-communists, pretending that somehow Trotsky's (and other Bolsheviks') methods and policies did not create the ground for Stalinism. Anyhow, this does not overwrite the overall failure of your historical tendency to come to grips with its own share of guilt.

[RedMarxist]

Bolshevism failed? WTF! look, it "failed" because of material conditions. weak economy of Russia, political instability, etc. As an ideology, Leninism has not "failed".

If it failed, then no one would bother making new parties or believing in it. You can't kill an idea.

I've made up my mind. I'm a Leninist. Leaderless revolutions like the ones in Syria, Egypt, etc. are great, but they have many inherit flaws. Lack of leadership creates chaos. chaos creates an inability to get things done. IE the revolution.

I once was enamored by the idea of council communism. Well you no what has that ever been tried and proven right? its just a theory. Leninsm has actually been tried, despite taking root in poor, weak countries and eventually becoming authoritarian, it created powerful states in Russia and China OUT OF NOTHING, or so it seemed.

their must be a vanguard to help make sure a revolution goes on the correct path. if not, then the revolutionaries, the "less advanced" stray from the path.

NOTE: I dont mean to cause a sectarian shit storm, and due to teh nature of the internet i sound angry. yet I'm just stating my opinion.

[Red_Struggle]

Stalin never trusted Yagoda for a simple reason. Yagoda's sympathies with Bukharin and Bukharinism were pretty well known

I looked up Yagoda's info in wikipedia and that claim was unsourced. Anything on the subject? I know Stalin himself wanted Bukharin expelled, while Yezhov, Budennyi, Manuilskii, Shvernik, Kosarev and Iakir voted to have him shot without trial.

Back to Yagoda, he had been indited for charges of corruption, including filling his apartments with four million rubles worth of decorations, and apprently he had a bunch of pornography. Other than that, I don't have a lot of info on the guy. But like the quote I posted above, a security aparatus is not always guided by ideology or is under the control of the Party at all times, which is why careful examination and strict measures need to be put in place in order to prevent corruption and brutality.


"Strongly worded, lengthy resolution.. (it) Completely renounced the purges. Directed at party, Procuracy and NKVD officials in the republic it was highly critical of the "gross violations of legal norms" that had been committed during arrests and investigations in particular the reliance on confessions extracted from the accused and the failure to keep records. Furthermore the resolutions stated , "The NKVD has gone so far in distorting the norms of the judicial process that very recently questions have arisen about giving it so called limits on the process of mass arrests". According to the resolution, Aenemies of the people" who had penetrated the NKVD and the Procuracy were falsifying documents and arresting innocent people". The resolution forbade these organs from continuing their policy of mass arrests and exile. Henceforth arrests were to be made only with the consent of the court or the Procurator; the noxious NKVD troikas which decided cases of the spot were to be abolished." - Amy Knight: Beria-Stalin's First Lieutenant"; Princeton New Jersey 1993; p. 89.

[A Marxist Historian]

Yes, that is why the majority of real kulaks (i.e. agrarian entrepreneurs of non-noble heritage who owned large swathes of land and routinely exploited wage labour) were against Makhno and helped the Denikinites hunt down his forces (just as they did against the Red Army).



Wrong. The majority of Makhno's cavalrymen were middle and small peasants and agricultural workers who got their horses from the pomieschiki (landlords)' staples after the Makhnovists destroyed their estates in the region in the late 1918. Later their horse stock was supplemented by the horses of several Austro-German and Hetmanite units they overwhelmed. It is well-known from the reports (including ones of the Denikinite intelligence) that the majority of the Makhnovist "victims" were perfectly Great Russian priests, landlords and, yes, kulaks, whom they slaughtered en masse once the White Guardists were thrown out of the region.

Well, being determines consciousness. However they got their horses, what did they do with them when they got them? Were they property of the Anarchist Cavalry Commune? Or were they the property of the individual cavalrymen?

And indeed, just what were the social relations in Gulya-Pol'e? Were the farms farmed communally, as with the Spanish anarchist agricultural communes in the 1930s? Or did you have individual peasant proprietorship?

In fact, of course you did. Had Makhno tried to establish anarchist agricultural communes, he perhas might have had more luck with persuading the peasants to join them voluntarily than the Stalinists did later.

But the fact is that the Ukrainian peasants had just taken the land away from the landlords and wanted no such thing. In Russia, where the mir was a much stronger institution than in Ukraine, there were peasants who were actually interested in the idea of collective farming, and in *some* Russian villages there was even support for collectivization in 1929, despite the hideously Stalinist fashion it was done. Not in Ukraine, except among the poorest peasants, none of whom had horses.

And Makhno, being a practical politician, went with the flow.

So as soon as you had conflict between Makhno and the Soviet state, that automatically took on the character of conflict between peasant capitalism and proletarian socialism, by the nature of the case.

All the things I criticize Makhno for, most certainly including his responsibility for Jewish pogroms, flow from this, not from Makhno's evil nature, any more than Stalin's crimes flew from his evil nature, as so many people think.

Indeed Lenin rather liked Makhno personally, at least until he went into rebellion vs. the Soviet state. There was serious discussion about giving him an area to conduct anarchist experiments in peace.

But when he went into rebellion, leaving a gaping hole in the front, and the Whites advanced hundreds of miles in a few weeks, attitudes changed.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I looked up Yagoda's info in wikipedia and that claim was unsourced. Anything on the subject? I know Stalin himself wanted Bukharin expelled, while Yezhov, Budennyi, Manuilskii, Shvernik, Kosarev and Iakir voted to have him shot without trial.

Back to Yagoda, he had been indited for charges of corruption, including filling his apartments with four million rubles worth of decorations, and apprently he had a bunch of pornography. Other than that, I don't have a lot of info on the guy. But like the quote I posted above, a security aparatus is not always guided by ideology or is under the control of the Party at all times, which is why careful examination and strict measures need to be put in place in order to prevent corruption and brutality.

Most of what I know about Yagoda comes from the book by Il'inskii, which has not been translated out of Russian and is very unlikely ever to be. There is very little written about him in the English language.

Yagoda was indeed extremely corrupt, and he indeed had one of the world's greatest collections of pornography. But that had nothing to do whatsoever with why Stalin got rid of him.

His fondness for Bukharin is a matter of record, in that the transcript of Bukharin's 1928 conversations with Kamenev et.al. have been widely circulated, in which Bukharin claims that Yagoda was his man. The transcript was originally published in Trotsky's Bulletin of the Left Opposition, as Kamenev apparently had sent Trotsky a copy.

Il'inskii based his book primarily on the voluminous Yagoda file in the old NKVD-KGB archives, where he found materials confirming Bukharin's claims, and also making it very clear that Yagoda's fondness for Bukharin's opposition to forced collectivization and so forth was purely platonic.

Yagoda carried out Stalinist repression of peasants resisting collectivization with great vigor, but he didn't like it. Too much trouble if nothing else. His only form of "resistance" was secret reports sent to Stalin about just what a failure it was and how much the peasants hated it. Which Stalin naturally took with a grain of salt, knowing that Yagoda was at heart a Bukharin man.


"Strongly worded, lengthy resolution.. (it) Completely renounced the purges. Directed at party, Procuracy and NKVD officials in the republic it was highly critical of the "gross violations of legal norms" that had been committed during arrests and investigations in particular the reliance on confessions extracted from the accused and the failure to keep records. Furthermore the resolutions stated , "The NKVD has gone so far in distorting the norms of the judicial process that very recently questions have arisen about giving it so called limits on the process of mass arrests". According to the resolution, Aenemies of the people" who had penetrated the NKVD and the Procuracy were falsifying documents and arresting innocent people". The resolution forbade these organs from continuing their policy of mass arrests and exile. Henceforth arrests were to be made only with the consent of the court or the Procurator; the noxious NKVD troikas which decided cases of the spot were to be abolished." - Amy Knight: Beria-Stalin's First Lieutenant"; Princeton New Jersey 1993; p. 89.

Quite so, when Stalin decided to get rid of somebody, he was skilled in how he did it, as with Yezhov. Beria did indeed get an image of a "reformer" as a result. Which was as false as the Khrushchev demonization of Beria as a monster with hoof and claw, and a child molester too.

Amy Knight I consider a well intentioned but overly impressionable historian. Her book on the Kirov affair is dreadful IMHO.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

OK, A Marxist Historian, judging from your comments on Makhno after our previous exchange, as well as from your implication that Yezhov was somehow as bad as he was due to the fact that he participated in Workers' Opposition in 1921, it appears that your overall strategy seems to be consisting in slandering every political force that was to the left of your precious (and ultimately failed) "Bolsheviks-Leninists" of the 1920s (of course, led by infallible prophet Trotsky, whose autobiography is seemingly accurate historical source - unlike the vile rumblings of these filthy anti-Semites Volin and Makhno :rolleyes:).

My *strategy* is to be a historian and tell the truth, and let the implications fall where they may. Why? Because truth is revolutionary in and of itself.

Does Yezhov being a former Workers Oppositionist prove that the WO was evil? No. But it is an interesting fact IMHO. I see no reason to conceal facts. I do think it was not accidental, any more than former Trotskyists Shachtman and Burnham going over to US imperialism was accidental either. But I digress again...

And I'll criticize anybody, certainly including Trotsky and Lenin. Was Lenin going along with appointing Stalin as General Secretary in spring 1922 a good idea? Hell no, probably the biggest mistake Lenin made in his entire life. A mistake he did put a lot of effort into trying to reverse, but too late.

And how good a job did Trotsky do of resisting Stalin's rise to power? Initially, piss poor, wavering back and forth. It wasn't till his old friend Joffe in his 1927 suicide note called Trotsky on the carpet for his waverings that he really became the consistent leader the Left Opposition needed. And by then it was definitely too late.

So yes, Lenin and Trotsky definitely bear some responsibility for the victory of Stalin and Stalinism. Just not the kind of responsibility you think they have.

As for Trotsky's autobio, yes it's an accurate source, and Trotsky's defense there of his course between '22 and '27 is pretty weak, though not inaccurate as far as it goes. Special pleading really.

On military affairs, if you want a non-Trotskyist source, indeed one probably easy for you to find, try Neizvestnyi Trotskii, Krasnyi Bonapart, by Krasnov and Daines. Easy to pick up in a Kiev bookshop for dirt cheap I suspect.

I didn't find the book extremely interesting, as I am not a military historian, but I did read his account of the Stalin-Trotsky dispute over strategy with respect to the Don Cossacks in 1919. Didn't read the whole book, don't recall what he had to say about "deCossackization" as such, if anything.

-M.H.-


The fact is that the Stalinists might use the same logic against you, as it is known that the Germans created a fake Trotskyist party in the first months of their invasion against the USSR in 1941 for propaganda reasons, and that the majority of American Trotskyist intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century later became neo-conservative think-tankers. Anyway, feel free indulging in your sectarian attacks against anarchists and left-communists, pretending that somehow Trotsky's (and other Bolsheviks') methods and policies did not create the ground for Stalinism. Anyhow, this does not overwrite the overall failure of your historical tendency to come to grips with its own share of guilt.

[LegendZ]

One thing I fail to understand is Stalin's reluctance to support socialist movements abroad.It might be because if he knew he supported international movements he might gain the unwanted attention of imperialist military's. A combined imperialist invasion from the East and West might have been a quick end to the USSR and a earlier victory for Hitler.

[Red_Struggle]

It might be because if he knew he supported international movements he might gain the unwanted attention of imperialist military's. A combined imperialist invasion from the East and West might have been a quick end to the USSR and a earlier victory for Hitler.

The USSR was still internationalist under Stalin. Trotskyites love to portray the whole thing as a difference between two policies- We have to do X but Stalin did Y. The truth is not so simple. It would fly in the face of history to claim that the USSR did not engage in spreading revolution abroad, where it was feasible.

The USSR was supposed to be the hopelessly backward country dependent on direct state support advanced capitalist countries, which in turn end up being the very countries where the Soviet Union was supposed to support revolution. How was this backward and allegedly helpless country supposed to do it? By sending tens of millions of poorly armed, poorly trained ex-peasants into war against all the major European countries? Were they supposed to send more tanks, more bombers, etc. from an economy that was supposedly too backward? So the USSR needs the Western nations to support socialist construction, which we should assume would produce what is necessary for defense and spreading revolution, but those western nations need the arms and man-power of the USSR to effect their own revolutions so they can directly assist the USSR in constructing socialism....see the problem here? They don't. Yes, the fortress mentality is a difficult situation, but an outright offensive consumes FAR more resources.

Not to mention that between 1946 to 1949, nominal national independence movements were achieved by Burma, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Laos, Libya, Ceylon, Jordan, and the Philipines. How much Soviet influence do you think caused these national independence movements?

[Kiev Communard]

Bolshevism failed? WTF! look, it "failed" because of material conditions. weak economy of Russia, political instability, etc. As an ideology, Leninism has not "failed".

Nope, it failed due to the fact that its domination in the left-wing political discourse led to conflation between state-capitalist monopoly and socialism, thus undermining workers' good disposal towards radical left ideas that was evident in the period of pre-Leninist libertarian socialist ascendancy (i.e. the rise of 1890s- 1920-s syndicalist/council communist movements, both in advanced and "backward" nations).


If it failed, then no one would bother making new parties or believing in it. You can't kill an idea.

The same could be said of classical capitalist ideologies :D.


I've made up my mind. I'm a Leninist. Leaderless revolutions like the ones in Syria, Egypt, etc. are great, but they have many inherit flaws. Lack of leadership creates chaos. chaos creates an inability to get things done. IE the revolution.

I once was enamored by the idea of council communism. Well you no what has that ever been tried and proven right? its just a theory. Leninsm has actually been tried, despite taking root in poor, weak countries and eventually becoming authoritarian, it created powerful states in Russia and China OUT OF NOTHING, or so it seemed.

their must be a vanguard to help make sure a revolution goes on the correct path. if not, then the revolutionaries, the "less advanced" stray from the path.

I agree that some more anti-organizationalist forms of council communism look bizarre and ineffective; however, there needs not be conflation between post-revolutionary minority rule (as in Leninism) and the idea of revolutionary vanguard as you proposed. For the latter, I advise that you look into ideas of Platformism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platformism), FORA-style "workers' anarchism" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FORA) (which ultimately represents a new development of Bakuninism) and pre-councilist German left communism (i.e. that of KAPD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAPD) as opposed to AAUD-E).

[Kiev Communard]

My *strategy* is to be a historian and tell the truth, and let the implications fall where they may. Why? Because truth is revolutionary in and of itself.

Yet you were seemingly disturbed by the implications of the directives on de-Cossackization I cited. It seems that your quest for objectivity does not apply to your ideological idols.


Does Yezhov being a former Workers Oppositionist prove that the WO was evil? No. But it is an interesting fact IMHO. I see no reason to conceal facts. I do think it was not accidental, any more than former Trotskyists Shachtman and Burnham going over to US imperialism was accidental either. But I digress again...

Dozens of thousands former ideological workers of the USSR governmental apparatus became avid supporters of the U.S.-style neoliberalism/right-"libertarianism" overnight after the 1991 events. Does it mean that following the idea of the USSR as "socialist" one is inevitably bound to become a right-liberal later? I think there is no rigid determination there. The same goes for the supporters of bureaucratic collectivist or state-capitalist theses either, as Melotti, for instance, clearly regarded "state-collectivist" regimes, as he termed them, to be less reactionary than the U.S. There is nothing "holy" in the USSR that makes its denunciation equal to apostasy.


And I'll criticize anybody, certainly including Trotsky and Lenin. Was Lenin going along with appointing Stalin as General Secretary in spring 1922 a good idea? Hell no, probably the biggest mistake Lenin made in his entire life. A mistake he did put a lot of effort into trying to reverse, but too late.

Once again, you resort to purely bourgeois concept of the politics, focusing on "bad personal decisions". I'd say the biggest 'mistake' Lenin made (although it was a practical consequence of his own Kautskyan ideology, not an incident) was his, and other Bolshevik leaders', decision to practically dissolve worker-run fabzavkomy in favour of government-controlled VSNkH, thus depriving workers of real control over the economy and preparing grounds for the formation of a new class of bureaucratic capitalists. The other events, including Stalin's appointment, were mere consequences of that course.


And how good a job did Trotsky do of resisting Stalin's rise to power? Initially, piss poor, wavering back and forth. It wasn't till his old friend Joffe in his 1927 suicide note called Trotsky on the carpet for his waverings that he really became the consistent leader the Left Opposition needed. And by then it was definitely too late.

So yes, Lenin and Trotsky definitely bear some responsibility for the victory of Stalin and Stalinism. Just not the kind of responsibility you think they have.

They would have better not forbidden factions and not repressed Myasnikov's group, Bogdanov's Workers' Truth, the Workers' Opposition and Panyushkin's Workers' and Peasants' Party in 1921. In addition, it would have been better if they had not condoned Cheka's shooting of arrested anarchist leaders in the same year. Without these, and other actions of them, there would have been not possible for Stalin to rationalize his own later terror against the Old Bolsheviks themselves.


As for Trotsky's autobio, yes it's an accurate source, and Trotsky's defense there of his course between '22 and '27 is pretty weak, though not inaccurate as far as it goes. Special pleading really.

Yet he sees nothing wrong about his anti-workers' proposals in 1919-1921 (i.e. the labour armies and trade union militarization). Stalin merely picked up on those "treasures" of him later, so, in Emma Goldman's words, Trotsky protests too much".

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Stalin... Anti-bureaucratic?


Are you kidding me? How can the cold murder of dozens of old bolsheviks and senior revolutionaries be justified as "anti-bureaucratic"?

As opposed to Trotsky, the anti-bureaucratic hero...

"The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship...regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class...The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy..."

"The working class cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers. Compulsion of labour will reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism.Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps."

:rolleyes:

[Kiev Communard]

Well, being determines consciousness. However they got their horses, what did they do with them when they got them? Were they property of the Anarchist Cavalry Commune? Or were they the property of the individual cavalrymen?

As far as I know, the horses of permanent members of Makhno's troops were the property of the army as a collective. The non-permanent voluntaries kept their horses with them.


And indeed, just what were the social relations in Gulya-Pol'e? Were the farms farmed communally, as with the Spanish anarchist agricultural communes in the 1930s? Or did you have individual peasant proprietorship?

In fact, of course you did. Had Makhno tried to establish anarchist agricultural communes, he perhas might have had more luck with persuading the peasants to join them voluntarily than the Stalinists did later.

There were some rather significant agricultural communes' experiments on Makhnovist territory, such as Rosa Luxemburg Commune, which had 285 members, but in general you are right - the peasants were still unready for full-scale collectivization, yet they were clearly in favour of expropriation of kulak and noble landowners and the redistribution of their land among the poor, which was conducted by this same Makhno you have accused of "pro-kulak" policies :rolleyes:.


All the things I criticize Makhno for, most certainly including his responsibility for Jewish pogroms

Except you have failed to demonstrate it, as all files you have referenced clearly refer to the isolated accidents by some individuals who may not have been actual Makhnovists at all, and I have already mentioned the trial of pogromists of Gorkaya colony that was carried out by Makhnovist commission.



Indeed Lenin rather liked Makhno personally, at least until he went into rebellion vs. the Soviet state. There was serious discussion about giving him an area to conduct anarchist experiments in peace.

But when he went into rebellion, leaving a gaping hole in the front, and the Whites advanced hundreds of miles in a few weeks, attitudes changed.


Nope, that was not what happened. That is what Aleksandr Shubin (who is a sort of neo-Proudhonist) writes on the military political situation in Ukraine before the break between Makhno and the RSFSR (the text is, again, in Russian, as I lack the time to properly translate it):




В это время махновцы наступали, заняв Кутейниково в тылу белых. Однако над новой дивизией, которая фактически составляла собой всю 2-ю армию, сгущались тучи. За пределами "Махновии" о ней стали распространяться самые ужасные слухи, которые пришлось опровергать комиссару Петрову в послании наркомвоену Украины: "У вас носятся нелепые слухи. Якобы т. Колосов и все политкомы, находящиеся в войсковых частях т. Махно, расстреляны. Считаю нравственным долгом заявить через посредство вас в печати, что это явная провокация, исходящая, как видно, от контрреволюционеров, пользующихся случаем Григорьевской авантюры столкнуть советские круги с т. Махно и войсковыми частями"[298]. Петров пытался убедить руководство, что новая дивизия и дальше будет служить советской власти: "Настроение очень хорошее, массовые наплывы добровольцев в ряды крестьянской армии... Есть дефекты, но они постепенно сглаживаются и должны постепенно отойти в область предания для будущей истории"[299]. Но отношение к махновцам определялось уже не представлениями об их боеспособности. Махно все более расценивался как потенциальный противник, а противник тем лучше, чем слабее.

22 мая прибывший на Украину Троцкий по согласованию с РВС Южного фронта телеграфировал: "произвести радикальный перелом в строении и поведении войск Махно, истребовав для этого из Козлова (штаб Южного фронта – А.Ш.) необходимое число политработников и командирского состава. Если в двухнедельный срок окажется невозможным произвести этот перелом, то РВС 2-й Армии должен войти с рапортом об открытом сопротивлении Махно. Развертывать непокорную, недисциплинированную бригаду в дивизию под тем же командованием есть либо предательство, либо сумасшествие. Во всяком случае, подготовка новой Григорьевщины"[300].

25 мая на заседании Совета рабоче-крестьянской обороны Украины под председательством Х. Раковского обсуждался вопрос "Махновщина и ее ликвидация". Было решено "ликвидировать Махно" силами полка[301].

Причиной активизации действий против Махно несомненно был страх повторения григорьевщины. Большевикам казалось, что неизбежный мятеж Махно развалит фронт также, как Григорьев по существу взорвал выстраивавшийся фронт против Румынии. Большевистские умы не учитывали то, что фронт уже разваливается по другим причинам, и действия против Махно могут попросту открыть дорогу Деникину на Украину.

26 мая в адрес РВС 2-й армии пришла сердитая телеграмма командующего Южным фронтом Гиттиса, педантичного офицера с дореволюционным стажем: "Утверждение сверху самочинно создавшейся дивизии реввоенсовет признает шагом назад в намеченной линии поведения и потому считает невозможным"[302]. 27 мая заместитель наркома военных сил УССР В. Межлаук, под влиянием конъюнктуры уже поменявший свое мнение, докладывал наркому Н. Подвойскому: "Неприятие своевременных мер обещает повторение Григорьевской авантюры, которая будет опасна ввиду огромной популярности Махно среди крестьянства и красноармейцев"[303]. Теперь популярность союзных движений среди местного населения становилась источником смертельной угрозы для большевистского режима. В ходе наращивания антикрестьянской политики (особенно – после введения продразверстки на Украине в апреле) коммунисты стали воспринимать союзника как большую опасность, чем военный противник.

Узнав о намерениях командования, Махно заявил, что готов сложить с себя полномочия. о штаб махновской дивизии постановил:

"1) настоятельно предложить т. Махно остаться при своих обязанностях и полномочиях, которые т. Махно пытался было сложить с себя; 2) все силы махновцев преобразовать в самостоятельную повстанческую армию, поручив руководство этой армии т. Махно. Армия является в оперативном отношении подчиненной Южному Фронту, поскольку оперативные приказы последнего будут исходить из живых потребностей революционного фронта"[304]. В ответ на этот шаг РВС Южного фронта принял решение об аресте Махно.
* * *


Об этом было объявлено, когда сам Южный фронт начал разваливаться. Чтобы понять ситуацию в войсках, противостоящих Деникину, обратимся к состоянию соседней с махновцами 13-й армии. Вот что докладывал командир одного из ее полков: "Довожу до сведения, красноармейцы категорически заявляют, что мы дольше действовать не можем, потому что мы во-первых голодные, во-вторых босые, раздетые, нас насекомые заели, потому что мы с первого восстания нашей организации до сих пор не получили ничего.

Просим вас принять самые энергичные меры, если не будет смены, то мы самовольно бросаем указанные нам позиции и следуем в тыл"[305]. Угрозами дело не заканчивалось: "Дезорганизованные части дезертировали с фронта, шайками бродили в прифронтовой полосе, грабя и убивая друг друга, устраивали охоты и облавы на комсостав и комиссаров"[306].

24 мая белые совершили прорыв в центре Южного фронта на участке 9-й армии и ринулись навстречу казаческому восстанию с центром в станице Вешенской. Тыл красных, разъедаемый восстаниями, дезертирством, холодной враждебностью уставших от продразверстки крестьян, не выдержал. Голодные, босые, плохо вооруженные армии начали бросать позиции.

Один из первых ударов был нанесен по стыку махновцев и 13-й Красной Армии. 19 мая, в разгар конфликтов между союзниками, кавалерия Шкуро прорвала фронт. Соседняя 9-я дивизия РККА оказать сопротивления не смогла. Махновцы противопоставили конной массе белых атаку со штыками наперевес – патронов не было. Легко отбив наскок этих "копьеносцев", Шкуро не решился все же углубляться в махновский район и развернулся во фланг и тыл 13-й армии, которая стала разваливаться. 21 мая Махно еще был в Волновахе[307]. В это время под его командой сражались 1 ударный полк, 3 резервный полк, 5, 7, 8, 9 полки, два мариупольских полка, 1 донской кавалерийский полк, три отдельных батальона, автоотряд, артиллерийский дивизион, отдельный эскадрон[308]. Еще два полка Махно отдал в Крым Дыбенко.

Прекращение распрей в этот трагический момент еще могло спасти положение хотя бы на этом участке фронта. Штаб махновцев призывал к восстановлению единства: "Необходима сплоченность, единение. Только при общем усилии и сознании, при общем понимании нашей борьбы и наших общих интересов, за которые мы боремся, мы спасем революцию... Бросьте, товарищи, всякие партийные разногласия, они вас погубят"[309].

31 мая ВРС объявил о созыве IV съезда советов района. Предлагалось выбрать на собраниях трудящихся по одному делегату от 3 тысяч населения, причем с равной долей представительства от рабочих и крестьян. Военные части и партии могли послать по одному представителю от подразделения (полк, дивизион, штаб, уездный комитет). ВРС постановлял: "посылаемых делегатов на съезд снабжать наказами для более точного выражения подлинной воли крестьян и рабочих..."[310] Повестка дня съезда была заурядной и практически повторяла вопросы, которые рассматривали предыдущие съезды[311].

http://flibusta.net/b/219750/read#t31



The whole book is devoted to the history of anarchist movement during the Civil War in Russia. You may read it through the link I have posted and then express your opinion on it. But the one thing is clear: Makhno did not want to "rebel" against the Red Army until the last moment, when he was actually faced with dilemma of either being arrested for (alleged) "insubordination" or continue an independent struggle against the Whites in the situation when the Red Army's Southern Front was rapidly disintegrating. He chose the latter variant, and, as his successful action against the Whites proved, this was the correct one.

[A Marxist Historian]

Yet you were seemingly disturbed by the implications of the directives on de-Cossackization I cited. It seems that your quest for objectivity does not apply to your ideological idols.

Yes I found it disturbing, disturbing enough to want to check a non-Trotskyist source on this. Found my copy of Krasny Bonapart and have been paging through it. To my pleasure and relief, the auhors do indeed address the deCossackization issue.

According to them, Trotsky was the great advocate of winning over the Cossacks, not just bashing them over the head for old crimes. In fact, this went closely together with his policy of recruiting Tsarist officers as Red Army officers, which the Military Opposition opposed.

When the deCossackization policy was instituted in February 1919, this was indeed at the initiative of Sverdlov. And the commanders on the Southern front went along with it so enthusiastically exactly for the reason I thought, that the Southern front was where Stalin's intrigues were operative, a subject they discuss at considerable length.

Trotsky never directly opposed this policy, as it was, briefly, official party policy. But it cut against the grain of everything he was trying to do, and when it was ended two months later, he immediately went back to issuing appeals to the Cossacks, promising them and Tsarist officers too that there would be no retributions whatsoever if they came over to the Soviet side, and so forth.

But by then it was already too late, the policy had already set off a massive Cossack uprising. So he did the best thing he could do, and argued all summer for avoiding the Cossack lands as much as possible in the summer offensive vs. Denikin. An argument he lost, the only major military argument he lost and was overruled over while he was commanding the Red Army.


Dozens of thousands former ideological workers of the USSR governmental apparatus became avid supporters of the U.S.-style neoliberalism/right-"libertarianism" overnight after the 1991 events. Does it mean that following the idea of the USSR as "socialist" one is inevitably bound to become a right-liberal later? I think there is no rigid determination there. The same goes for the supporters of bureaucratic collectivist or state-capitalist theses either, as Melotti, for instance, clearly regarded "state-collectivist" regimes, as he termed them, to be less reactionary than the U.S. There is nothing "holy" in the USSR that makes its denunciation equal to apostasy.

Yes of course, life is much more complicated than that. The leader and founder of the political tendency I support, the Spartacists, had himself been a Shachtmanite for a decade beforehand, and began his political life as a supporter of the Stalinist American Communist Party. And no, I do not think that these biographical facts are irrelevant for understanding Spartacism.


Once again, you resort to purely bourgeois concept of the politics, focusing on "bad personal decisions". I'd say the biggest 'mistake' Lenin made (although it was a practical consequence of his own Kautskyan ideology, not an incident) was his, and other Bolshevik leaders', decision to practically dissolve worker-run fabzavkomy in favour of government-controlled VSNkH, thus depriving workers of real control over the economy and preparing grounds for the formation of a new class of bureaucratic capitalists. The other events, including Stalin's appointment, were mere consequences of that course.

The strongest advocates of this were the leaders of the fabzavkomy themselves, who then played central roles in the VSNkH, which was very much a manifestation of their vision. I have referenced Chris Goodey's article in Critique on this subject in another thread.


They would have better not forbidden factions and not repressed Myasnikov's group, Bogdanov's Workers' Truth, the Workers' Opposition and Panyushkin's Workers' and Peasants' Party in 1921. In addition, it would have been better if they had not condoned Cheka's shooting of arrested anarchist leaders in the same year. Without these, and other actions of them, there would have been not possible for Stalin to rationalize his own later terror against the Old Bolsheviks themselves.

As for the ban on factions etc., there too I have just written on this, in response to The Inform Candidate, I assume you have seen this posting.

Indeed the very first beginning of the Left Opposition was Trotsky's opposition to excesses in the campaign against the strike movement in 1923 in which the Workers Truth etc. played a role. I do not defend and support everything done by Lenin and Trotsky in 1922 and 1923, errors were made. But overall they were following the right course, Myasnikov etc. were following the wrong course.


Yet he sees nothing wrong about his anti-workers' proposals in 1919-1921 (i.e. the labour armies and trade union militarization). Stalin merely picked up on those "treasures" of him later, so, in Emma Goldman's words, Trotsky protests too much".

These were desperate responses to a desperate situation, especially on the railroads, where the collapse of the rail system was causing collapse of the whole economy and starvation. His error was to generalize these necessary temporary expedients into a "theory."

The entire discussion of the relationship of the unions to the state which ravaged the Bolshevik Party and tied it in knots while the country was on the verge of collapse was fiddling while Rome was burning. Once NEP was instituted it became entirely irrelevant. Ending the factional paralysis with a *temporary* ban on factions was necessary. For it to become permanent was disastrous.

As I wrote elsewhere, I think it was a good thing that Lenin and Trotsky were overruled by the Central Committee when they attempted to get the Workers Opposition leaders removed from the Central Committee in the fall of 1921.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

As far as I know, the horses of permanent members of Makhno's troops were the property of the army as a collective. The non-permanent voluntaries kept their horses with them.

Which of course raises the question. Who had true control and ownership of horses that were property of the army? A democratic anarchist commune, or the Army's commander, batko Makhno? Answering this controversial question requires some serious historical research that goes outside the boundaries one can settle on Revleft. I have heard there was an excellent historical study of what its opponents referred to as the
Makhnovshchina in the '20s, by Poukhov if I have remembered the name properly, which also made the argument as to the essentially kulak nature of the Makhno movement.


There were some rather significant agricultural communes' experiments on Makhnovist territory, such as Rosa Luxemburg Commune, which had 285 members, but in general you are right - the peasants were still unready for full-scale collectivization, yet they were clearly in favour of expropriation of kulak and noble landowners and the redistribution of their land among the poor, which was conducted by this same Makhno you have accused of "pro-kulak" policies :rolleyes:.

Ditto see above.


Except you have failed to demonstrate it, as all files you have referenced clearly refer to the isolated accidents by some individuals who may not have been actual Makhnovists at all, and I have already mentioned the trial of pogromists of Gorkaya colony that was carried out by Makhnovist commission.

That strikes me as a remarkably feeble tendentious attorney's argument. But anyone can read the article here and judge for themselves.


Nope, that was not what happened. That is what Aleksandr Shubin (who is a sort of neo-Proudhonist) writes on the military political situation in Ukraine before the break between Makhno and the RSFSR (the text is, again, in Russian, as I lack the time to properly translate it):

The whole book is devoted to the history of anarchist movement during the Civil War in Russia. You may read it through the link I have posted and then express your opinion on it. But the one thing is clear: Makhno did not want to "rebel" against the Red Army until the last moment, when he was actually faced with dilemma of either being arrested for (alleged) "insubordination" or continue an independent struggle against the Whites in the situation when the Red Army's Southern Front was rapidly disintegrating. He chose the latter variant, and, as his successful action against the Whites proved, this was the correct one.

This is a very old controversial issue, on which much has been written. My own opinions on the issue were first formed by Arthur Adams's account in Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, an extremely valuable account by a well respected American liberal historian, who unlike many such writes very well. I found Trotsky's arguments in his military writings on the subject persuasive.

I am just now going through Krasny Bonapart, whose authors have a position somewhere in between that of Trotsky and that of Makhno on this question, or at least that is my first casual impression.

They differentiate very little between Makhno and Hryhoriev, treating these two Ukrainian peasant leaders as quite similar and natural allies. They have no interest whatsoever in the questions of Jews and pogroms, it is out of their field of vision altogether.

-M.H.-

[Comrade1]

Is this a joke?
Are you stupid?

[Kiev Communard]

Which of course raises the question. Who had true control and ownership of horses that were property of the army? A democratic anarchist commune, or the Army's commander, batko Makhno?

Makhno did not have an unlimited authority over the army you would like to portray. The Revolutionary Military Council was most certainly a collegiate body.


Answering this controversial question requires some serious historical research that goes outside the boundaries one can settle on Revleft. I have heard there was an excellent historical study of what its opponents referred to as the Makhnovshchina in the '20s, by Poukhov if I have remembered the name properly, which also made the argument as to the essentially kulak nature of the Makhno movement.

If it was published in the USSR in the 1920s, in several years after the end of the Civil War, it is inevitably tendentious. I think the sole fact that kulaks fled from Makhnovist-controlled territories to the areas under Denikin's control speaks for itself with regard to Makhno's attitude to kulaks (he was a leader of a communist-anarchist workers' group on one of Hulyay-Polye mills, so hardly a kulak supporter).


Ditto see above.

And what about Trotsky's descent from the rich peasants who actually exploited wage labour and held their "uncultured" neigbours in contempt? One may assume that it has had some part to play in his suspicious attitude to peasantry in general, and the Ukrainian in particular, may one? :rolleyes:


That strikes me as a remarkably feeble tendentious attorney's argument. But anyone can read the article here and judge for themselves.

Yes, let them judge. I myself have already found out that the pogroms in Kherson Governorate you mentioned were conducted in August 1919 by deserters from Makhno's troops, led by certain Otaman Metla, a Ukrainian Left-SR from Odessa, whom Makhno denounced. Considering the fact that RKP(b) had no qualms about integrating rather nationalist Ukrainian Lef-SR (including Hryhoryiv) in their ranks after 1919, yet repressed anarchists, one has to wonder whether they were really as committed to combatting anti-Semitism as you believe. The report of the Makhnovists' involvement in the pogrom in May 1919 in Kiev Governorate most certainly referred to the deserters from the RIAU, as at that time, as you may know, Makhno's troops were at the South Front fighting against Denikin, hundreds of miles away. The other instances I cited, I will review and tell you my opinion on them later.


They differentiate very little between Makhno and Hryhoriev, treating these two Ukrainian peasant leaders as quite similar and natural allies. They have no interest whatsoever in the questions of Jews and pogroms, it is out of their field of vision altogether.

Yet Makhno destroyed Hryhoryiv after he fell out with "Trotsky's Red Army" (this very term of yours speaks volumes on the alleged "democratism" of Trotskyists!). In addition, Hryhoryiv's propaganda was full of nationalist and cross-class themes, Makhno, on the other hand, persistently avoided appeals to ethnicism or nationalism.

[Kiev Communard]

Yes I found it disturbing, disturbing enough to want to check a non-Trotskyist source on this. Found my copy of Krasny Bonapart and have been paging through it. To my pleasure and relief, the auhors do indeed address the deCossackization issue.

According to them, Trotsky was the great advocate of winning over the Cossacks, not just bashing them over the head for old crimes. In fact, this went closely together with his policy of recruiting Tsarist officers as Red Army officers, which the Military Opposition opposed.

When the deCossackization policy was instituted in February 1919, this was indeed at the initiative of Sverdlov. And the commanders on the Southern front went along with it so enthusiastically exactly for the reason I thought, that the Southern front was where Stalin's intrigues were operative, a subject they discuss at considerable length.

Trotsky never directly opposed this policy, as it was, briefly, official party policy. But it cut against the grain of everything he was trying to do, and when it was ended two months later, he immediately went back to issuing appeals to the Cossacks, promising them and Tsarist officers too that there would be no retributions whatsoever if they came over to the Soviet side, and so forth.

Yet all of this puts him in the same league with Makhno by your own standards, as Trotsky "did not do enough" to prevent decossackization just as Makhno, according to you, "did not do enough" to prevent pogroms in Makhnovist-controlled territory.


Yes of course, life is much more complicated than that. The leader and founder of the political tendency I support, the Spartacists, had himself been a Shachtmanite for a decade beforehand, and began his political life as a supporter of the Stalinist American Communist Party. And no, I do not think that these biographical facts are irrelevant for understanding Spartacism.

Yes, perhaps your tendency's followers' subconscious sense of guilt for having supported Shachtman earlier led them to the other excess by limiting their real activity to uncritically praising each and every Soviet foreign policy up to the USSR's demise.


The strongest advocates of this were the leaders of the fabzavkomy themselves, who then played central roles in the VSNkH, which was very much a manifestation of their vision. I have referenced Chris Goodey's article in Critique on this subject in another thread.

So what? The CNT leaders in the Spanish Revolution followed the same conciliatory course with respect to co-operation with the Republican government. Still, as far as I know, most Trotskyists denounce them for such a decision, and rightly so, as the leading cenetistas became opportunistic trade unionists in the process. The same applies to then-fabzavkomy leadership as well.


As for the ban on factions etc., there too I have just written on this, in response to The Inform Candidate, I assume you have seen this posting.

Your whole take on that problem is rather misleading, as the trade union problem was far from "irrelevant" then. For all its faults, the Workers' Opposition at least proposed a feasible variant of partially overcoming the bureaucratic centralist conundrum the Bolsheviks got themselves into.


Myasnikov etc. were following the wrong course.

Were they? I'd bet that for all possible dangers of allowing the free speech to potentially conservative strata, it would have been less harmful in the long run than the regime of total Party censorship, which was hailed by Lenin and Trotsky as something essential even after the crisis was over, and led directly to Stalinist hypocritical literature and press control policies.


These were desperate responses to a desperate situation, especially on the railroads, where the collapse of the rail system was causing collapse of the whole economy and starvation. His error was to generalize these necessary temporary expedients into a "theory."

And why was it so? Perhaps, the War Communism that Bolsheviks advocated till the bitter end (i.e. until the generalized rebellion atmosphere in 1921) had something to do with this, rather than mere abstract "desperate situation"?


As I wrote elsewhere, I think it was a good thing that Lenin and Trotsky were overruled by the Central Committee when they attempted to get the Workers Opposition leaders removed from the Central Committee in the fall of 1921.

-M.H.-

Well, at least you are able to admit just as much.

[A Marxist Historian]

Makhno did not have an unlimited authority over the army you would like to portray. The Revolutionary Military Council was most certainly a collegiate body.

If it was published in the USSR in the 1920s, in several years after the end of the Civil War, it is inevitably tendentious. I think the sole fact that kulaks fled from Makhnovist-controlled territories to the areas under Denikin's control speaks for itself with regard to Makhno's attitude to kulaks (he was a leader of a communist-anarchist workers' group on one of Hulyay-Polye mills, so hardly a kulak supporter).

Other historical material from the 1920s, before Stalinism fully descended, that I have seen I have much respect for. IMHO anything from an anarchist source on the question is inevitably tendentious. Indeed anything by anybody will be tendentious to one degree or another. I have a piece by the author of the "Makhno file" summary with his overall account of the history of the Makhnovshchina which I will post soon. The proper way to deal with such controversies is to read all sides and judge.


And what about Trotsky's descent from the rich peasants who actually exploited wage labour and held their "uncultured" neigbours in contempt? One may assume that it has had some part to play in his suspicious attitude to peasantry in general, and the Ukrainian in particular, may one? :rolleyes:

Yes, his father was indeed that very rare breed, a prosperous Jewish kulak. Trotsky, as is well known, bent over backwards to break with his family traditions and Jewish tradition and culture in general in fact.

Indeed, the fact that he was from a Ukrainian farm background himself is one reason why he understood the Ukrainian countryside quite well, better than those communists of urban background, the overwhelming majority.


Yes, let them judge. I myself have already found out that the pogroms in Kherson Governorate you mentioned were conducted in August 1919 by deserters from Makhno's troops, led by certain Otaman Metla, a Ukrainian Left-SR from Odessa, whom Makhno denounced. Considering the fact that RKP(b) had no qualms about integrating rather nationalist Ukrainian Lef-SR (including Hryhoryiv) in their ranks after 1919, yet repressed anarchists, one has to wonder whether they were really as committed to combatting anti-Semitism as you believe. The report of the Makhnovists' involvement in the pogrom in May 1919 in Kiev Governorate most certainly referred to the deserters from the RIAU, as at that time, as you may know, Makhno's troops were at the South Front fighting against Denikin, hundreds of miles away. The other instances I cited, I will review and tell you my opinion on them later.

No doubt this is a typo on your part, but it would have been difficult to integrate Hryhoriev into anyone's ranks after 1919!

I look forward to your review of the other incidents described. Due to the chaos of the time, no doubt some of the crimes attributed to the Makhno forces were indeed committed by others. I do not think this will change the overall picture however.

According to the account I will post, the very *worst* Makhno atrocities were in 1920, after the second outbreak of conflict between the Red Army and Makhno's forces.

I think that recruiting leftists of Ukrainian nationalist *or* anarchist leanings into the revolutionary forces was very much what was needed, given that the Ukrainian communists were overwhelmingly Russian and Jewish. Many anarchists joined the Bolsheviks, Bill Shatov, Victor Serge and numerous others.

Lenin of course met with Makhno and tried to win him over, and Trotsky made approaches to Makhno after the execution of Hryhoriev, which Trotsky, by my reading of his proclamation on that occasion, if anything gave *too much* credit to this as a revolutionary act, not simply a power struggle which Makhno won and Hryhoriev lost.

You will probably complain that I am personalizing this and not considering the anarchist movement. Yes I am, as I do think that this was a peasant movement around the person of Makhno much more than a true anarchist movement.


Yet Makhno destroyed Hryhoryiv after he fell out with "Trotsky's Red Army" (this very term of yours speaks volumes on the alleged "democratism" of Trotskyists!). In addition, Hryhoryiv's propaganda was full of nationalist and cross-class themes, Makhno, on the other hand, persistently avoided appeals to ethnicism or nationalism.

I wonder how Hryhoryiv's propaganda read before his mutiny? When he went into rebellion, at first at least he claimed to still be a socialist and a revolutionary, supporting Soviet rule but wanting to cleanse it of Communists and capping the Jewish percentage in its organs at 10%.

Makhno may not have issued ethnic/national propaganda, but on several occasions entered into alliances with Petliura the Ukrainian nationalist pogromist. Probably as frequently as he was allied with the Bolsheviks, if not more so.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Yet all of this puts him in the same league with Makhno by your own standards, as Trotsky "did not do enough" to prevent decossackization just as Makhno, according to you, "did not do enough" to prevent pogroms in Makhnovist-controlled territory.

In Gulyai Pol'e, Makhno was effectively the dictator. Trotsky was not a dictator, he was simply the army commander, and policies were decided by the Soviet state.

Further reading of Krasny Bonapart has been clarifying. Indeed he did fight this policy, and won the fight, albeit too late to prevent the Cossack revolt. Here is my hasty and inexact translation (as best I can) of what Trotsky had to say about "deCossackization," from his proclamation vs. Mironov of Sept. 13 1919, on pages 219-222 of the book:

"During the advance of the Red forces into the Don there were, without a doubt, injustices and even brutality committed by certain soviet representatives and the worst Red Army units in various locations with respect to the local Cossack population. These mistakes were due to this, that the Cossackry for too long supported the goddam (proklyatuyu) dirty White Guard business (byelogvardeyshchinu). Thoughtful and honest people should understand the reasons for the mutual (bitterness?) (ozhestocheniya) and devote all efforts to smooth out conflicts between Red troops and the local Cossackry ... replacing them with mutual understanding and fellow feeling. Particular mistakes, false steps of the representatives of Soviet power (ustranyayutsia) by themselves, and the central authorities sharply punish those local representatives, who do not understand their duties with respect to the working population."


Yes, perhaps your tendency's followers' subconscious sense of guilt for having supported Shachtman earlier led them to the other excess by limiting their real activity to uncritically praising each and every Soviet foreign policy up to the USSR's demise.

The story is far more complicated than that, but that is certainly a subject for another thread. And, by the way, the Spartacists most certainly *did not* praise Soviet foreign policy, quite the contrary.


So what? The CNT leaders in the Spanish Revolution followed the same conciliatory course with respect to co-operation with the Republican government. Still, as far as I know, most Trotskyists denounce them for such a decision, and rightly so, as the leading cenetistas became opportunistic trade unionists in the process. The same applies to then-fabzavkomy leadership as well.

The difference is the obvious one, namely that the fabzakomy leaders wished to construct socialism, whereas the CNT leaders had abandoned their anarchist and/or socialist goals and were reinforcing what everyone knew was a "Republican" bourgeois government.


Your whole take on that problem is rather misleading, as the trade union problem was far from "irrelevant" then. For all its faults, the Workers' Opposition at least proposed a feasible variant of partially overcoming the bureaucratic centralist conundrum the Bolsheviks got themselves into.

Essentially, they wanted to transfer stewardship of the economy from state bureaucrats to ... trade union bureaucrats, who were their basis of support. *And* they opposed the absolutely necessary concessions to the peasantry and the economic situation of the NEP, which they referred to as the "New Exploitation of the Proletariat." It is they, not Lenin or Trotsky, who were the most hostile to the peasantry. Had they won, this would have been disastrous.


Were they? I'd bet that for all possible dangers of allowing the free speech to potentially conservative strata, it would have been less harmful in the long run than the regime of total Party censorship, which was hailed by Lenin and Trotsky as something essential even after the crisis was over, and led directly to Stalinist hypocritical literature and press control policies.

The crisis was not over till the 1921-22 famine lifted, in which a very large number of peasants starved to death. By which time Lenin was ill and Stalin was General Secretary of the party. Lenin and Trotsky did not turn front fast enough towards relaxation of the state of siege, but the turn was made. Interestingly, Felix Dzherzhinsky was the leading force in releasing political prisoners etc. Indeed, as post-Soviet documentary revelations have demonstated, the issue over which Trotsky finally broke with the other party leaders after Lenin's stroke was how to deal with the strike wave in Moscow and Petrograd in 1923, where he opposed measures of repression.[/QUOTE]


And why was it so? Perhaps, the War Communism that Bolsheviks advocated till the bitter end (i.e. until the generalized rebellion atmosphere in 1921) had something to do with this, rather than mere abstract "desperate situation"?

Well, at least you are able to admit just as much.

Yes of course, the ultraleft "War Communism" policy certainly had something to do with the situation. At the height of the Civil War it was unavoidable. It should have been ended not in spring '21, but rather as soon as peace was signed with the Poles at the very latest. It was of course Trotsky who first advocated what became the NEP in spring 1920.

But the reason this policy was persisted in was not creeping bureaucratism and loss of revolutionary enthusiasm, but the very opposite. The communists simply could not bring themselves to making concessions to capitalism, which is exactly what the NEP was. And it was precisely the Workers Opposition who opposed the NEP to the bitter end.

-M.H.-

[PolskiLenin]

YES YES YES YES YES.

Lenin's vanguard party of professional revolutionaries led the proletariat to power.
Workers' councils, soviets, were set up in every factory, every workplace, every school, so that the people could have direct voice in democracy. Representatives were elected, but could be recalled at any time.

the means of production were put under workers' management.

It is absolutely absurd and ignorant to say that people weren't free under Lenin, history speaks for itself. There's a reason why when the Red Army was formed, 5 million immediately VOLUNTEERED to defend their freedom.

[Kiev Communard]

No doubt this is a typo on your part, but it would have been difficult to integrate Hryhoriev into anyone's ranks after 1919!

Oops, you are right :D.


I look forward to your review of the other incidents described. Due to the chaos of the time, no doubt some of the crimes attributed to the Makhno forces were indeed committed by others. I do not think this will change the overall picture however.

I am too busy to research this now, as I lack access to archive funds (which are notoriously well-guarded in the post-Soviet countries). I will PM Aleksandr Shubin, the author who wrote a book on anarchist movement in the Civil War, though, to try and deal with the other incidents you have mentioned.


According to the account I will post, the very *worst* Makhno atrocities were in 1920, after the second outbreak of conflict between the Red Army and Makhno's forces.

Well, by that time Makhnovist forces were rapidly disintegrating due to outside pressure, so I won't take their mode of operation at that time as indicative of the movement in general. Still, I will duly examine the evidence in that article as well.


I think that recruiting leftists of Ukrainian nationalist *or* anarchist leanings into the revolutionary forces was very much what was needed, given that the Ukrainian communists were overwhelmingly Russian and Jewish. Many anarchists joined the Bolsheviks, Bill Shatov, Victor Serge and numerous others.

I would not call their decision a wise one; the fate of Shatov is especially telling. As for Ukrainian Left SRs (Borotbyists), they were of course not all anti-Semites, yet, unlike Russian Left SRs and Maximalist-SRs, there were certain nationalist tendencies among them.


Lenin of course met with Makhno and tried to win him over, and Trotsky made approaches to Makhno after the execution of Hryhoriev, which Trotsky, by my reading of his proclamation on that occasion, if anything gave *too much* credit to this as a revolutionary act, not simply a power struggle which Makhno won and Hryhoriev lost.

There was no mere power struggle there; Makhno's and Hryhoryiv's political and ideological visions were actually incompatible, as Makhno was internationalist anarchist, while Hryhoryiv degenerated into Mussolini-style proto-fascist populist.


You will probably complain that I am personalizing this and not considering the anarchist movement. Yes I am, as I do think that this was a peasant movement around the person of Makhno much more than a true anarchist movement.

The programmes of the Congresses of Soviets convoked at the initiative of the Insurgents prove otherwise, as they are unashamedly anarchist in their contents.


Makhno may not have issued ethnic/national propaganda, but on several occasions entered into alliances with Petliura the Ukrainian nationalist pogromist. Probably as frequently as he was allied with the Bolsheviks, if not more so.

-M.H.-

I am sorry, but this is plainly not true, as Makhno never considered entering into alliance with Petlyura. In fact, he scolded him for his social-chauvinism and class collaborationism with the Ukrainian bourgeoisie. It is well-known fact that Makhno was personally hostile to Petlyura, and that an attempt of Petlyura to enter into agreement with Makhno in September 1919 to combat Denikin together failed, as Makhno was not inclined to subordinate his troops to Petlyurists. It is true that they signed a truce then, but after all, the Bolsheviks were also inclined to enter into truce with the Directory of Ukraine in the early 1919.

Interestingly enough, a well-known anti-Semitic otaman (warlord) of Kyiv region, Hryhir Tyutyunnyk, tried to approach Makhno for alliance in late September 1919, but was rebuked, as Makhno shouted at him and called the Petlyurist state "a class enemy and imperialist vassal". In fact, for the period of December 1918 to August 1919 Makhnovists and Petlyurists waged open armed struggle against each other. Makhno did buy weapons from Petlyurists in September 1919, but strictly for money (i.e. 50,000 golder roubles), not as a gesture of alliance.

[Kiev Communard]

In Gulyai Pol'e, Makhno was effectively the dictator. Trotsky was not a dictator, he was simply the army commander, and policies were decided by the Soviet state.

Considering the atmosphere of official adoration which existed around Trotsky in the early 1920s, I beg to differ. He was effectively unaccountable to any Soviet organ, bar the Party oligarchy itself, the policies whereof were hardly democratic. Makhno, on the other hand, never interfered with the decisions of local soviets on the RIAU-controlled territory, and was generally willing to follow the course of action suggested by the elected members of the Revolutionary Military Council.


Further reading of Krasny Bonapart has been clarifying. Indeed he did fight this policy, and won the fight, albeit too late to prevent the Cossack revolt. Here is my hasty and inexact translation (as best I can) of what Trotsky had to say about "deCossackization," from his proclamation vs. Mironov of Sept. 13 1919

You may be interested in this article (http://zhurnal.lib.ru/i/insarow_m/mironov.shtml) on Mironov by Marlen Insarov, a leading theorist of Alliance of Revolutionary Socialist (http://libcom.org/tags/ars)s, an organization I largely subscribe to (even though they are too soft on Bolsheviks in my opinion).


The difference is the obvious one, namely that the fabzakomy leaders wished to construct socialism, whereas the CNT leaders had abandoned their anarchist and/or socialist goals and were reinforcing what everyone knew was a "Republican" bourgeois government.

As I consider Bolshevik programme to be state-capitalist even before the October Revolution, I can hardly agree with you. The justifications given by fabzavkomy leaders on the current "infeasibility" of real working-class administration of the enterprises and the necessity of the "governing centre" scarcely differ from the respective claims of the CNT leaders regarding the necessity of co-operation with "revolutionary Republic".


Essentially, they wanted to transfer stewardship of the economy from state bureaucrats to ... trade union bureaucrats, who were their basis of support. *And* they opposed the absolutely necessary concessions to the peasantry and the economic situation of the NEP, which they referred to as the "New Exploitation of the Proletariat." It is they, not Lenin or Trotsky, who were the most hostile to the peasantry. Had they won, this would have been disastrous.

They opposed not the concessions to peasantry, but the permission for kulaks and urban capitalists to employ wage labour. In addition, I am aware of the limitation of the Workers' Opposition's critique; still, it was much more radical (and popular) among the (allegedly "inexistent") working-class of Russia than the "scientific" waverings of the "Left Opposition" led by Trotsky two years later.


The crisis was not over till the 1921-22 famine lifted, in which a very large number of peasants starved to death. By which time Lenin was ill and Stalin was General Secretary of the party. Lenin and Trotsky did not turn front fast enough towards relaxation of the state of siege, but the turn was made. Interestingly, Felix Dzherzhinsky was the leading force in releasing political prisoners etc. Indeed, as post-Soviet documentary revelations have demonstated, the issue over which Trotsky finally broke with the other party leaders after Lenin's stroke was how to deal with the strike wave in Moscow and Petrograd in 1923, where he opposed measures of repression.

Oh, how kind of noble comrades Dzherzinsky and Trotsky... It would have been ironic if the self-proclaimed "workers' state" would have shot "its" workers once again after the Civil War was officially over... Perhaps, they were merely scared of the possibility of the "new Kronstadt", as the first one was actually ignited by the strike wave in Petrograd?