Soviet democracy in USSR

[RedWorker]

To what extent did soviet democracy exist in USSR before Stalin's rise to power?

How was Lenin himself elected?

[Blake's Baby]

It didn't. The soviets were essentially dead by 1921 in my view.

How was Lenin elected to what?

[RedWorker]

So how was it immediately after 1917?

How did Lenin become the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars? Technically he was elected by the congress of soviets, the delegates to which were elected by the soviets, right? Was this democratically done?

[RedWorker]

How many months did actual democracy last? Was press freedom and other such things restricted during that time?

How did the process of democracy being progressively reduced happen? Can anyone explain a simple timeline, a rundown of events?

To what degree can Trotsky and Lenin themselves be blamed?

Is "Ten days that shook the world" by John Reed an accurate account? How about Trotsky's various accounts?

Why is there so less information about this stuff? The history seems to be a little unclear, but maybe I'm just not looking at the right places. What are some sources to look at?

I realize that this requires speculation, but is it likely the democracy would have remained had the soviet government not been attacked from everywhere?

[Blake's Baby]

I think there are two contradictory dynamics going on. On, which is essentially revolutionary, involves the working class taking over production and distribution, and creating councils that basically are going to administer society.

Then there is the dynamic by which the Bolsheviks fuse themselves with the state in order to preserve something until the German revolution which they believe is about to break out. This is essentially a conservative dynamic, as it seeks in some ways to preserve the state as a bastion against reaction.

Both of these dynamics happen at the same time. The positive, revolutionary dynamic dominated for the early period. As more workers are shipped to the fronts to fight in the civil war (most of the most class-conscious workers apparently volunteered to fight the counter-revolution in the early days of the civil war) and as the hostile capitalist powers re-asserted control over their own revolutionary or at least 'bolshie' working class, the conservative dynamic came to dominate the situation.

Were Lenin and Trotsky to blame? Of course. If not them then it would have been Stalin and Kamenev or Bukharin and Zinoviev to blame. Lenin and Trotsky made decisions that we can see with hindsight were wrong.

But were they to blame for the historical circumstances in which they made those decisions (WWI, disunity of socialists, failure of revolution in Germany, division of working class into those contained by defeated and victor states)? No. Whatever Lenin and Trotsky did, or didn't do, whatever policies they may have taken, if they'd resigned, if they'd instituted a constituent assembly, if they'd guaranteed that the soviets continued to function, if they'd never tried to introduce one-man-management or the militarisation of labour, the revolution would still have failed.

Because it didn't fail in Russia, it failed in Germany. Lenin and Trotsky didn't have a lot to do with that.

[Hatshepsut]

To what extent did soviet democracy exist in USSR before Stalin's rise to power? How was Lenin himself elected?

Most of the answer to these questions is settled by posts above. The USSR did have a period in the 1920s when its policies were relatively liberal, and although hardly ideal, most Soviet citizens of the 1980s were better off than after the USSR collapsed. Live expectancy stats for Russia show it, and Ukraine and Belarus have had little but repressive governments since independence.


Because it didn't fail in Russia, it failed in Germany. Lenin and Trotsky didn't have a lot to do with that.
If it had succeeded in Germany in 1848, it would have spread to France, probably. But would it have ever reached England or the USA? Interesting exercise in "what if..." :)

[Hit The North]

If it had succeeded in Germany in 1848, it would have spread to France, probably. But would it have ever reached England or the USA? Interesting exercise in "what if..." :)

1848 was a failed bourgeois revolution, so France would not have required it, nor Britain or USA which were already bourgeois societies.

If the Russian (1917) revolution had spread successfully to the principal powers in Europe, socialism would have had a much better chance of developing and so the appeal to the workers in Britain and the UK would have been that much stronger when both working classes were going through militant strife with their capitalist masters immediately after WW1 and during the twenties and thirties.

Probably ;)

[Blake's Baby]

Yeah, if you change the 'Britain and the UK' to 'Britain and the US' in Hit the North's post (which is what I assume is meant) then that's pretty much my view. The revolution went as far as it could in Russia; it spread to Germany and Austria-Hungary, but was defeated; the echoes spread around the globe to Seattle and Shanghai and Argentina and Canada and Britain and Italy, but the capitalist class defeated these smaller revolts.

Rosa Luxemburg - quite rightly in my opinion - said that the questions had been posed in Russia, but couldn't be answered there. The answer came with bullets and bayonets, not in Petrograd but in Berlin.

A couple of days ago I was reminded of the phrase 'with if you can put Paris in a bottle'. But, if the working class in Germany had managed to overthrow the state and establish a lasting 'council republic' - what then?