bolshevik1917
25th October 2002, 17:17
Sorry if this has been posted before but its a great article to silence all the menshevik lenin hater types.
Taken from Ted Grants 'Russia, from revolution to counter revolution'
Was the October Revolution a coup?
In an attempt to discredit the Bolsheviks, no effort has been spared to falsify the historical record. The usual trick is to describe the October Revolution as a coup d'état, that is, a movement carried out by a small minority using conspiratorial methods behind the backs of the majority. The Bolsheviks, so the argument goes, seized power from the Provisional Government which issued from the February Revolution and which, supposedly, represented the democratic will of the people. If only Lenin's "conspiracy" had not prospered, the story goes, Russia would have entered on the road of Western parliamentary democracy and lived happily ever after. This fairy story has been repeated so many times that it has been uncritically accepted by many. Like any other fairy story its purpose is to lull the wits to sleep. And also like any other fairy story, it is convincing only to very small children.
The first thing which springs to mind is: if the Provisional Government really represented the overwhelming majority, and the Bolsheviks only an insignificant group of conspirators, how did the latter succeed in overthrowing the former? After all, the government possessed (at least on paper) all the might of the state apparatus, the army, the police and the Cossacks, whereas the Bolsheviks were a small party which, at the beginning of the revolution in February had only about 8,000 members in all Russia. How was it possible for such a tiny minority to overthrow a mighty state? If we accept the argument of a coup, then we must assume that Lenin and Trotsky possessed magical powers. This is the very stuff of fairy tales! Sadly, it has no place in real life, or in history.
In reality, the conspiracy theory of history explains nothing. It merely assumes what has to be proved. Such a superficial mode of reasoning, which assumes that every strike is caused by "agitators" and not by the accumulated discontent in a factory, is typical of the police mentality. But when it is seriously advanced by self-styled academics as an explanation for great historical events, one can only scratch one's head in bewilderment - or else assume that an ulterior motive is present. The motive of the policeman who seeks to attribute a strike to the activities of unseen agitators is quite clear. And this mode of argument is really no different. The essential idea is that the working class is incapable of understanding its own interests (which are, naturally, identical to those of the bosses). Therefore, if they move to take their destiny into their own hands, the only explanation is that they have been misled by unscrupulous demagogues.
This argument, which incidentally can be used against democracy in general, also misses the point. How could Lenin and Trotsky "mislead" the decisive majority of society in such a way that in the short space of nine months, the Bolshevik Party passed from an insignificant minority to win the majority in the soviets, the only really representative organs of society, and take power? Only because the bourgeois Provisional Government had revealed its complete bankruptcy. Only because it had failed to carry out a single one of the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. And this can be demonstrated very easily by one fact alone: the Bolshevik Party took power in October on the basis of the programme of "Peace, Bread and Land". This is the most graphic illustration of the fact that the Provisional Government had failed to achieve any of the most burning needs of the Russian people. This, and this alone, explains the success of the Bolsheviks in October.
The most striking thing about 1917 is precisely the active involvement of the masses at each stage. This, in fact, constitutes the essence of a revolution. In normal periods the majority of men and women are prepared to accept that the most important decisions affecting their lives are taken by others, by the "people that know" - politicians, civil servants, judges, "experts" - but at critical moments, the "ordinary" people begin to question everything. They are no longer content to allow others to decide for them. They want to think and act for themselves. That is what a revolution is. And you can see elements of this in every strike. The workers begin to participate actively, speak, judge, criticise - in a word, decide their own destiny. To the bureaucrat and the policeman (and some historians whose mental processes function on the same wavelength) this seems like a strange and threatening madness. In fact, it is precisely the opposite. In such situations, men and women cease to act like automatons and begin to behave like real human beings with a mind and a will. Their stature is raised in their own eyes. They rapidly become conscious of their own condition and their own aspirations. Under such conditions, they consciously seek out that party and programme that reflects their aspirations, and reject others. A revolution is always characterised by the rapid rise and fall of parties, individuals and programmes, in which the more radical wing tends to gain.
In all Lenin's speeches and writings of this period, we see a burning faith in the ability of the masses to change society. Far from adopting "conspiratorial" methods, he based himself on appeals to the revolutionary initiatives of the workers, poor peasants and soldiers. In the April Theses he explained that: "We don't want the masses to take our word for it. We are not charlatans. We want the masses to overcome their mistakes through experience." (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 36, p. 439, henceforth referred to as LCW.) Later on he said: "Insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced classÉ Insurrection must rely upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people." (LCW, Vol. 26. p. 22.)
The fact that Lenin here counterposes the masses to the Party was no accident. Although the Bolshevik Party played a fundamental role in the Revolution, this was not a simple one-way process, but a dialectical one. Lenin pointed out many times that the masses are a hundred times more revolutionary than the most revolutionary party. It is a law that in a revolution, the revolutionary party and its leadership come under the pressure of alien classes. We have seen this many times in history. A section of the leadership at such moments begins to doubt and hesitate. An internal struggle is necessary to overcome these vacillations. This occurred in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin's return to Russia, when the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd (mainly Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin) adopted a conciliatory attitude to the Provisional Government and even considered fusing with the Mensheviks. The line of the Party was only changed after a sharp internal struggle in which Lenin and Trotsky joined forces to fight for a second revolution in which the working class would take power into its hands.
In this struggle, Lenin appealed directly to the advanced workers over the heads of the Central Committee. He said that "the 'country' of the workers and the poor peasants É is a thousand times more leftward than the Chernovs and the Tseretelis, and a hundred times more leftward than we are". (LCW, Vol. 24, p. 364.) The motor force of the revolution at each stage was the movement of the masses. The task of the Bolsheviks was to give a clear political and organisational expression to this movement, to ensure that it was concentrated at the right moment for the seizure of power, and to avoid premature uprisings which would lead to defeat. For a time this meant actually holding the masses back. The key Vyborg Committee in Petrograd stated in June: "We have to play the part of the fire-hose." (Quoted in M. Liebman, Leninism under Lenin, p. 200.) Podvoisky admitted at the Sixth Party Congress in August: "We were forced to spend half our time calming the masses." (Ibid., p. 200.)
Permanent mobilisation
Numerous witnesses from all parties testify to the extraordinary degree of participation by the masses. In the words of Marc Ferro: "The citizens of the new Russia, having overthrown Tsardom, were in a state of permanent mobilisation." (Ibid., p. 201.) The prominent Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov recalls that "all Russia É was constantly demonstrating in those days. The provinces had all become accustomed to street demonstrations". (Ibid., p. 201.) Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, recalls:
"The streets in those days presented a curious spectacle: everywhere people stood about in knots, arguing heatedly and discussing the latest events. Discussion that nothing could interrupt!É The house in which we lived overlooked a courtyard, and even here, if you opened the window at night, you could hear a heated dispute. A soldier would be sitting there, and he always had an audience - usually some of the cooks or housemaids from next door, or some young people. An hour after midnight you could catch snatches of talk - 'Bolsheviks, MensheviksÉ' At three in the morning: 'Milyukov, BolsheviksÉ' At five - still the same street-corner-meeting talk, politics, etc. Petrograd's white nights are always associated in my mind now with those all-night political disputes." (N. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin, pp. 351-2.)
The same picture is presented by John Reed: "At the Front the soldiers fought out their fight with the officers, and learned self-government through their committees. In the factories those unique Russian organisations, the Factory-Shop Committees, gained experience and strength and a realisation of their historical mission by combat with the old order. All Russia was learning to read, and reading - politics, economics, history - because the people wanted to knowÉ In every city, in most towns, along the Front, each political faction had its newspaper - sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organisations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts - but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, and GorkyÉ
"Lectures, debates, speeches - in theatres, circuses, school-houses, clubs, Soviet meeting-rooms, Union headquarters, barracksÉ Meetings in the trenches at the Front, in village squares, factoriesÉ What a marvellous sight to see Putilovsky Zavod (the Putilov factory) pour out its forty thousand to listen to Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever they had to say, as long as they would talk! For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In railway-trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere." (John Reed, op. cit. p. 14-5) The thirst for ideas was reflected in an enormous interest in the printed word. John Reed describes the situation with the soldiers in the front line: "We came down to the front of the Twelfth Army, back of Riga, where gaunt and bootless men sickened in the mud of desperate trenches; and when they saw us they started up, with their pinched faces and the flesh showing blue through their torn clothing, demanding eagerly, 'Did you bring anything to read'?" (Ibid., p. 16, emphasis in original.)
The Bolshevik Party gained because it stood for the only programme that showed a way out. Lenin's celebrated slogan was - "Patiently explain!" The masses were able to experience the programmes of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries in practice, and discarded them. The votes for the Bolshevik candidates in the soviets steadily increased to the point where, by September they had won the majority in Petrograd, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and all the major cities. At this point, the question of a transfer of power from the discredited Provisional Government, which represented only itself, to the soviets, the democratic organs of the mass of workers and soldiers (overwhelmingly peasants) was an imperative necessity. The growth of the Bolshevik Party in this period is something without precedent in the history of political parties. From only around 8,000 members in February, it grew to 177,000 by the Sixth Congress in July. Moreover, we must remember that this was achieved despite an extremely weak apparatus, and in conditions of severe persecution. Krupskaya writes: "The growth of Bolshevik influence, especially among the troops, was obvious. The Sixth Congress welded the forces of the Bolsheviks still closer. The appeal issued in the name of the Sixth Party Congress spoke about the counter-revolutionary position taken by the Provisional Government, and about the impending world revolution and the battle of classes." (N. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin, pp. 369-70.) The numerical growth of the Party only partly expressed the rapid growth in its mass influence, above all in the workers' and soldiers' soviets. Marcel Liebman describes the Party's progress thus:
"Lenin's Party recorded, all through the year 1917, remarkable and almost constant election successes. Whereas at the beginning of the revolution it had only small representation in the Petrograd Soviet, by May the Bolshevik group in the workers' section of that institution possessed almost an absolute majority. One month later, during the first conference of the factory committees of Petrograd, three-quarters of the 568 delegates expressed support for the Bolshevik theses. Yet it was only at the end of the summer that the Leninists reaped the full harvest of their policy of opposition to the Provisional Government. In the Petrograd municipal elections in June the Bolsheviks received between 20 and 21 per cent of the votes; in August, when the Party was still suffering from the consequences of the July days, it received 33 per cent. In Moscow in June the Bolsheviks had received a little over 12 per cent of the votes. In September they won an absolute majority, with 51 per cent of the votes. That their grip was especially strong among the working class is clear from the advance of their representation at the factory-committee conferences. In Petrograd, by September, there were no more Mensheviks or Social Revolutionaries present at the regional meetings of these bodies, their places having been taken by Bolsheviks." (Liebman, op. cit. p. 206.)
We will give the last word on this subject to a prominent opponent of Bolshevism, who was also an eye witness and historian of the Russian Revolution, the Menshevik Sukhanov. Describing the situation in the last days of September, he writes: "The Bolsheviks were working stubbornly and without let-up. They were among the masses, at the factory-benches, every day without a pause. Tens of speakers, big and little, were speaking in Petersburg, at the factories and in the barracks, every blessed day. For the masses they had become their own people, because they were always there, taking the lead in details as well as in the most important affairs of the factory or barracks. They had become the sole hopeÉ The mass lived and breathed together with the Bolsheviks." (Ibid., p. 207.)
Party and class
The Russian Revolution took place over nine months. During that period, the Bolshevik Party, using the most democratic means, won over the decisive majority of the workers and poor peasants. The fact that they succeeded so easily in overcoming the resistance of the Kerensky forces can only be explained by this fact. Moreover, as we shall see, there is no way that the Bolsheviks could have held onto power, without the support of the overwhelming majority of society. At every stage, the decisive role was played by the active intervention of the masses. This is what set its stamp on the whole process. The ruling class and its political and military representatives could only grind their teeth, but were powerless to prevent power from slipping from their hands. True, they were involved in constant conspiracies against the Revolution, including the armed uprising of General Kornilov, which aimed at overthrowing Kerensky and instituting a military dictatorship, but all of this foundered on the movement of the masses.
The fact that the masses supported the Bolsheviks was accepted by everyone at the time, including the staunchest enemies of the Revolution. Naturally, they put this down to all kinds of malign influences, "demagogy", the immaturity of the workers and peasants, their supposed ignorance, and all the rest of the arguments which are essentially directed against democracy itself. How it came about that the masses only became ignorant and immature when they ceased to support the Provisional Government must be one of the greatest mysteries since Saint Paul saw the light on the road to Damascus. But if we leave aside the obvious motivation of spitefulness, malice and impotent rage, we can see that the following passage from a rightwing paper constitutes a valuable admission that the Bolsheviks indeed enjoyed the support of the masses. On the 28th October, Russkaya Volya wrote the following:
"What are the chances of Bolshevik success? It is difficult to answer that question, for their principal support is the É ignorance of the popular masses. They speculate on it, they work upon it by a demagogy which nothing can stop." (Quoted in J. Reed, op. cit., p. 298, my emphasis.)
It is impossible to understand what happened in 1917 without seeing the fundamental role of the masses. The same is true of the French Revolution of 1789-94, a fact which historians frequently fail to grasp (there are exceptions, notably the anarchist Kropotkin, and, in our own times, George Rudé). But here for the first time in history, if we exclude the brief but glorious episode of the Paris Commune, the working class actually succeeded in taking power and at least beginning the socialist transformation of society. That is precisely why the enemies of socialism are compelled to lie about the October Revolution and slander it. They cannot forgive Lenin and the Bolsheviks for having succeeded in leading the first successful socialist revolution, for proving that such a thing is possible, and therefore pointing the way for future generations. Such a precedent is dangerous! It is therefore necessary to "prove" (with the assistance of the usual crew of "objective" academics) that this was all a very bad business, and must not be repeated.
The claim that the October Revolution was only a coup is often justified by pointing to the relatively small numbers actually involved in the insurrection itself. This apparently profound argument does not resist the slightest scrutiny. In the first place, it confuses the armed insurrection with the revolution, that is to say, it confuses the part with the whole. In reality, the insurrection is only a part of the revolution - a very important part, it is true. Trotsky likens it to the crest of a wave. As a matter of fact, the amount of fighting that took place in Petrograd was very small. One can say that it was bloodless. The reason for this was that nine-tenths of the tasks were already accomplished beforehand, by winning over the decisive majority of the workers and soldiers. It was still necessary to use armed force to overcome the resistance of the old order. No ruling class has ever surrendered power without a fight. But resistance was minimal. The government collapsed like a house of cards, because nobody was prepared to defend it.
In Moscow, mainly because of the mistakes of the local Bolsheviks, who did not act with sufficient energy, the counter-revolutionary Junkers initially went onto the offensive and carried out a massacre. Despite this, incredibly, they were allowed to go free on giving their word that they would not participate in any further violent acts against the Soviet power. This kind of thing was quite typical of the early days of the Revolution, characterised by a certain naivety on the part of the masses who had yet to understand of what terrible violence the defenders of the old order were capable. Far from being a bloodthirsty regime of terror, the Revolution was an extraordinarily benign affair - until the counter-revolution showed its real nature. The White General P. Krasnov was one of the first to lead an uprising against the Bolsheviks at the head of the Cossacks. He was defeated by the Red Guards and handed over by his own Cossacks, but again was released on parole. Of this Victor Serge writes correctly:
"The revolution made the mistake of showing magnanimity to the leader of the Cossack attack. He should have been shot on the spot. At the end of a few days he recovered his liberty, after giving his word of honour never to take up arms again against the revolution. But what value can promises of honour have towards enemies of fatherland and property? He was to go off to put the Don region to fire and the sword." (Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, p. 87.)
Do the relatively small numbers involved in the actual fighting mean that the October overturn was a coup? There are many similarities between the class war and war between nations. In the latter too, only a very small proportion of the population are in the armed forces. And only a small minority of the army is at the front. Of the latter, even in the course of a major battle, only a minority of the soldiers are normally engaged in fighting at any given time. Experienced soldiers know that a lot of time is spent waiting in idleness, even during a battle. Very often the reserves are never called into action. But without the reserves, no responsible general would order an advance. Moreover, it is not possible to wage war successfully without the wholehearted support of the population at home, even though they do not directly participate in the fighting. This lesson was carved on the nose of the Pentagon in the latter stages of the Vietnam war.
The argument that the Bolsheviks were able to take power without the masses (a coup) is usually linked to the idea that power was seized, not by the working class, but by a party. Again, this argument is entirely false. Without organisation - the trade unions and the party - the working class is only raw material for exploitation. This was already pointed out by Marx long ago. True, the proletariat possesses enormous power. Not a wheel turns, not a light bulb shines, without its permission. But without organisation, this power remains as just potential. In the same way, steam is a colossal force, but without a piston box, it will be harmlessly dissipated in the air. In order that the strength of the working class should cease to be a mere potential and become a reality, it must be organised and concentrated in a single point. This can only be done through a political party with a courageous and far-sighted leadership and a correct programme. The Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky was such a party. Basing themselves on the movement of the masses - a magnificent movement that represented all that was alive, progressive and vibrant in Russian society, they gave it form, purpose and a voice. That is its cardinal sin from the standpoint of the ruling class and its echoes in the labour movement. That is what lies behind their hatred and loathing of Bolshevism, their vitriol and spiteful attitude towards it, which completely conditions their attitude even three generations later.
Without the Bolshevik Party, without the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, the Russian workers would never have taken power in 1917, despite all their heroism. The revolutionary party cannot be improvised on the spur of the moment, any more than a general staff can be improvised on the outbreak of war. It has to be systematically prepared over years and decades. This lesson has been demonstrated by the whole of history, especially the history of the twentieth century. Rosa Luxemburg, that great revolutionary and martyr of the working class, always emphasised the revolutionary initiative of the masses as the motor force of revolution. In this, she was absolutely right. In the course of a revolution the masses learn rapidly. But a revolutionary situation, by its very nature, cannot last for long. Society cannot be kept in a permanent state of ferment, nor the working class in a state of white-hot activism. Either a way out is shown in time, or the moment will be lost. There is not enough time to experiment or for the workers to learn by trial and error. In a life and death situation, errors are paid for very dearly! Therefore, it is necessary to combine the "spontaneous", movement of the masses with organisation, programme, perspectives, strategy and tactics - in a word, with a revolutionary party led by experienced cadres. There is no other way.
It is necessary to add that at every stage the Bolsheviks always had before them the perspective of the international revolution. They never believed that they could hold power in Russia alone. It is a striking testimony to the vitality of the October Revolution that, in spite of all the vicissitudes, all the crimes of Stalinism and the terrible destruction of the second world war, the basic conquests were maintained for so long, even when the revolution, deprived of aid from the rest of the world, was thrown upon its own resources. Even in the last period, the collapse of Stalinism was not the result of any inherent defect of the nationalised planned economy, but flowed from treachery and betrayal of the bureaucracy which, as Trotsky brilliantly predicted, sought to reinforce its privileges by selling out to capitalism.
'All power to the soviets!'
As a corollary of the slanders against October, we have the attempt to paint the February Revolution in glowing colours. The "democratic" regime of Kerensky, it is alleged, would have led Russia into a glorious future of prosperity, if only the Bolsheviks had not spoilt it all. Alas! The idealisation of the February Revolution does not stand up to the least scrutiny. The February 1917 Revolution - which had overthrown the old Tsarist regime - had not solved one of the tasks of the national-democratic revolution: land reform, a democratic republic, the national question. It was not even capable of bringing about the most elementary demand of the masses - for an end to the imperialist slaughter and the conclusion of a democratic peace. In short, the Kerensky regime in the course of nine months gave ample proof of its total inability to meet the most basic needs of the Russian people. It was this fact, and this alone, which enabled the Bolsheviks to come to power with the support of the decisive majority of society.
Emerging from the ravages of the first world war, Tsarist Russia was a semi-colony particularly of France, Germany, and Britain. Russia produced less than 3 per cent of world industrial output. It could not compete on a world scale. For every hundred square kilometres of land, there were only 0.4 kilometres of rail track. Around 80 per cent of the population eked out a bare existence on the land, which was fragmented into millions of smallholdings. The Russian bourgeoisie had entered onto the stage of history too late. It had failed to carry out any of the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, that had been solved in Britain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the contrary, the Russian capitalists leaned on imperialism on the one hand and the Tsarist autocracy for support on the other. They were linked by a thousand threads to the old landlords and aristocrats. Horrified by the 1905 Revolution, the bourgeoisie had become more conservative and suspicious of the workers. They had no revolutionary role to play. "Whereas in the dawn of its history it was too unripe to accomplish a Reformation," states Trotsky, "when the time came for leading a revolution it was overripe." (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, p. 28.)
The only revolutionary class in Russia was the young, small, but highly concentrated proletariat. Arising from the law of uneven and combined development, a backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries. It does not slavishly reproduce all the stages of the past, but skips over a whole series of intermediate stages. This gives rise to a contradictory development, where the most advanced features are superimposed upon extremely backward conditions. Foreign investment had meant the creation of highly advanced concentrated factories and industries in Russia. The peasants were uprooted, thrown into industry, and proletarianised over night. It fell to this youthful proletariat - which had none of the conservative traditions of its counterpart in the West - to take Russian society out of the impasse it faced. The attempt to counterpose the February regime to October has no foundation whatever. Had the Bolsheviks not taken power, the future that faced Russia was not one of prosperous capitalist democracy, but fascist barbarism under the jackboot of Kornilov or one of the other White generals. Such a development would have signified, not advance, but a terrible regression.
In the October Revolution, the victorious proletariat first had to tackle the basic problems of the national-democratic revolution, then went on, uninterruptedly, to carry out the socialist tasks. This was the very essence of the permanent revolution. Capitalism had broken at its weakest point, as Lenin explained. The October Revolution represented the beginning of the world socialist revolution. The revolution of February had spontaneously thrown up committees of workers and soldiers, as had the revolution of 1905. The committees, or soviets, became transformed from extended strike committees into political instruments of the working class in the struggle for power, and later into administrative organs of the new workers' state. They were far more democratic and flexible than the territorially elected bodies of bourgeois democracy. To paraphrase Marx, capitalist democracy allows the workers every five years to elect parties to misrepresent their interests. In Russia, with the establishment of peasants' soviets, they embraced the overwhelming majority of the population.
Throughout the nine months between February and October, the soviets represented a rival power to the capitalist state. It was a period of "dual power". One of the key demands of the Bolsheviks throughout this time was: "All power to the soviets!" Months of patient explanation and the harsh experience of events won over the overwhelming majority of the workers and poor peasants to Bolshevism. The October Revolution brought to power a new revolutionary government, which took its authority from the Congress of Soviets. Contrary to common belief, it was not a one-party regime but originally a coalition government of Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries. The urgent task facing the government was to spread the authority of Soviet power - the rule of the working class - throughout all Russia. On the 5th January 1918, the government issued a directive which declared that the local soviets were from then on invested with all the powers held by the former administration, and added: "The entire country must be covered with a network of new soviets."
The system of soviets was not, as the reformists claim, an exclusively Russian phenomenon. The November 1918 Revolution in Germany spontaneously threw up similar bodies. They were the embodiment of workers' self organisation. In every German port, town and barracks, workers', soldiers' and sailors' councils were established and held effective political power. Soviets were established in Bavaria and during the Hungarian Revolution of 1919. In Britain also, Councils of Action were established in 1920, which were described by Lenin as "soviets in all but name", as well as during the 1926 General Strike (committees of action and trades councils). Although the Stalinists and reformists tried to prevent the reappearance of soviets, they re-emerged in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, with the creation of the Budapest Workers' Council.
In its origins, the soviet - the most democratic and flexible form of popular representation yet devised - was simply an extended strike committee. Born in mass struggle, the soviets (or workers' councils) assumed an extremely broad sweep, and ultimately became transformed into organs of revolutionary direct government. Beside the local soviets, elected in every city, town and village, in every large city there were also ward (raionny) soviets as well as district or provincial (oblastny or gubiernsky) soviets, and finally delegates were elected to the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets in Petrograd. The delegates were elected at every unit of labour to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, and subject to immediate recall. There was no bureaucratic elite. No deputy or official received more than the wage of a skilled worker.
The Soviet government issued a whole series of economic, political, administrative and cultural decrees in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. At a grassroots level, there was a mushrooming of soviet organisation. Everywhere attempts were made to do away with the distinction between legislative and executive functions, to allow individuals to participate directly in the application of decisions they had made. As a consequence, the masses began to take their destiny into their own hands. In November 1917 Lenin wrote an appeal in Pravda: "Comrades, working people! Remember that now you yourselves are at the helm of state. No one will help you if you yourselves do not unite and take into your hands all affairs of stateÉ Get on with the job yourselves; begin right at the bottom, do not wait for anyone." (LCW, Vol. 26, p. 297.) He was anxious for the masses to involve themselves in the running of industry and the state.
In December 1917 Lenin wrote: "One of the most important tasks of today, if not the most important, is to develop [the] independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working and exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in creative organisational work. At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the so-called upper classes, only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organisational development of socialist society." (LCW, Vol. 26, p. 409.)
The myth of the Constituent Assembly
Among all the numerous legends put in circulation in order to portray the October Revolution in an unfavourable light, that of the Constituent Assembly is perhaps the most persistent. According to this, the Bolsheviks before the revolution had advocated a democratically elected parliament (Constituent Assembly), yet after the revolution they disbanded it. Since they were in a minority, the argument goes, they decided to dissolve the democratically elected parliament and resort to dictatorship. This argument overlooks a number of fundamental questions. In the first place, the demand for a Constituent Assembly - which undoubtedly played a progressive role in mobilising the masses, especially the peasantry, against the Tsarist autocracy - was only one of a series of revolutionary-democratic demands, and not necessarily the most important one. The masses were won over to the revolution on other demands, notably "Peace, Bread and Land". These, in turn, became a reality only because they were linked to another demand - all power to the soviets.
The February Revolution failed precisely because it was not capable of satisfying these most pressing needs of the population. The complete impotence of the Kerensky regime was not accidental. It reflected the reactionary character of the Russian bourgeoisie. The capitalist class of Russia was a very weak class, tied hand and foot to the landlords, and subordinate to world imperialism. Only the revolutionary transfer of power into the hands of the most resolutely revolutionary part of society, the working class, made possible the ending of the war and the distribution of land to the peasants. This was the function of the October Revolution.
The calling of elections to the Constituent Assembly the following year was almost in the nature of an afterthought. The Bolsheviks intended to use this to try to mobilise the majority of the peasantry and rouse them to political life. But above all from the standpoint of the peasantry, formal parliamentary democracy is worse than useless if it does not carry out policies that solve their most pressing needs. Under certain circumstances, the Constituent Assembly could have played a progressive role. But in practice, it became clear that this Constituent Assembly could only be an obstacle and a rallying point for the counter-revolution. Here, the slow moving mechanism of parliamentary elections lagged far behind the swift current of revolution. The real attitude of the peasantry was revealed in the civil war, when the right Social Revolutionaries (SRs) and most of the Mensheviks collaborated with the Whites.
At the time of the October Revolution, the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies represented all that was alive and dynamic in Russian society. The working class voted for the Bolsheviks in the soviets, which were much more democratic that any parliament. At the same time, the soldiers, of whom a big majority were peasants also voted overwhelmingly for the Bolsheviks:
Votes
Percentages
Party
June
September
June
September
Social Revolutionaries
974,885
54,374
58
14
Mensheviks
76,407
15,887
12
4
Kadets
168,781
101,106
17
26
Bolsheviks
75,409
198,230
12
51
(Source, Anweiler, p. 188.)
These figures show, on the one hand, a growing polarisation between the classes, to the right (note the vote of the bourgeois Kadet party) and the left, and a collapse of the parties of the "centre", the Mensheviks and SRs. But the most striking feature is the sweeping victory of the Bolsheviks, who, from a mere 12 per cent in June were now an absolute majority. What this shows is that the Bolsheviks had the support of the overwhelming majority of the workers, and a sizeable section of the peasants also. In November 1917 the Menshevik leader Y.O. Martov himself had to admit that "almost the entire proletariat supports Lenin". (Quoted in Liebman, op. cit., p. 218.) Precisely on this basis, the Bolsheviks were able to overthrow the discredited Provisional Government and take power with a minimum of resistance. These facts alone give the lie to the myth of the October Revolution as a coup.
Thus, the democratic legitimacy of the October Revolution was clearly established. But this was not reflected in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, when the Bolsheviks only got 23.9 per cent of the votes (to which must be added the votes of the Left SRs):
Constituent Assembly (in votes):
Russian SRs
15,848,004
Ukrainian SRs
1,286,157
Peasant Parties
Ukrainian socialist coalition
3,556,581
Total SRs and allies
20,690,742
Bolsheviks
9,844,637
Mensheviks
1,364,826
Workers Parties
Other socialists
601,707
Kadets
1,986,601
Conservative Russian groups
1,262,418
Bourgeois and rightwing parties
Nationalist groups
2,620,967
Constituent Assembly (in seats)
Russian SRs
299
Ukrainian SRs
81
Left SRs
39
Bolsheviks
168
Mensheviks
18
Other socialists
4
Kadets
15
Conservatives
2
Nationalist groups
77
(Source, Anweiler, p. 220.)
Despite this, the Bolsheviks remained firmly in power. Why? The right SRs had traditionally led the peasants, going back to the time of the Narodniks at the turn of the century. These middle class elements were the traditional village aristocracy - teachers, lawyers, and the "gentlemen who spoke well". During the first world war, many of them became army officers. At the time of the February Revolution, these democratic revolutionaries exercised a considerable influence among the peasant soldiers. Their vague and amorphous "revolutionism" corresponded to the first stirring of consciousness among the peasantry. But the tide of revolution flows fast. Soon after the February Revolution, the right SRs betrayed the peasantry by abandoning the programme of peace, and the revolutionary struggle for land.
Where could the peasants in uniform turn for support? Once awakened to political life, the peasant masses, specially the most active layer in the army whose experience of the war raised them to a higher level of understanding than their brothers in the villages, soon came to understand the need for a revolutionary overturn in order to conquer peace, bread and land. This could only be achieved by a revolutionary alliance with the proletariat. The realisation of this fact was registered in the Soviet elections by a sharp swing to the left. By the autumn of 1917, the old right SR leaders had lost their base among the soldiers, who went over in droves to the left SRs and their Bolshevik allies.
The elections to the Constituent Assembly were organised in a hurry after the revolution on the basis of electoral lists drawn up before October. The peasantry had not yet had time to understand the processes that were taking place. The split between the left and right SRs had not yet taken place. There was not time for the peasantry as a whole to grasp the meaning of the October Revolution and Soviet power, particularly in the vital fields of land reform and peace. The dynamics of a revolution cannot be easily translated into the cumbersome mechanism of parliamentarism. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the inert masses of the backward countryside was thrown into the balance. Weighed down by the ballast of a thousand years of slavery, the villages lagged behind the towns.
These right SRs were not the political representatives but the political exploiters of the peasantry. Implacably hostile to the October Revolution, they would have handed back power to the landlords and capitalists in the kind of democratic counter-revolution which robbed the German working class of power in November 1918. There were two mutually exclusive centres of power. The reactionaries rallied around the slogan: "All Power to the Constituent Assembly." Faced with this situation, the Bolsheviks, with the support of the Left SRs, did not hesitate to place the interests of the revolution before constitutional niceties. Basing themselves on the soviets, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly. There was no resistance. This incident now causes an indignant reaction in some quarters. And yet, we are left with a self-evident contradiction. If the Constituent Assembly really represented the will of the masses, why did nobody defend it? Not a hand was raised in its defence, precisely because it was an unrepresentative anachronism. The reason for this was very well explained by the celebrated English historian of the Russian Revolution, E.H. Carr:
"The SRs had gone to the polls as a single party presenting one list of candidates. Its election manifesto had been full of lofty principles and aims but, though published on the day after the October Revolution, had been drafted before that event and failed to define the party attitude towards it. Now three days after the election the larger section of the party had made a coalition with the Bolsheviks, and formally split away from the other section which maintained its bitter feud against the Bolsheviks. The proportion between Right and Left SRs in the Constituent Assembly - 370 to 40 - was fortuitous. It was entirely different from the corresponding proportion in the membership of the peasants' congress, and did not necessarily represent the views of the electors on a vital point which had not been before them. 'The people,' said Lenin, 'voted for a party which no longer existed.' Reviewing the whole issue two years later Lenin found another argument which was more cogent than it appeared at first sight. He noted that in the large industrial cities the Bolsheviks had almost everywhere been ahead of the other parties. They secured an absolute majority in the two capitals taken together, the Kadets here being second and the SRs a poor third. But in matters of revolution the well-known principle applied: 'the town inevitably leads the country after it; the country inevitable follows the town.' The elections to the Constituent Assembly, if they did not register the victory of the Bolsheviks, had clearly pointed the way to it for those who had eyes to see." (E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Vol. 1, pp. 121-2.)
This was admitted in so many words by Kerensky himself, who wrote the following in his memoirs: "The opening of the Constituent Assembly ended as a tragic farce. Nothing happened to give it the quality of a memorable final stand in defence of freedom." (Alexander Kerensky, The Kerensky Memoirs - Russia and History's Turning-Point, p. 470.)
Taken from Ted Grants 'Russia, from revolution to counter revolution'
Was the October Revolution a coup?
In an attempt to discredit the Bolsheviks, no effort has been spared to falsify the historical record. The usual trick is to describe the October Revolution as a coup d'état, that is, a movement carried out by a small minority using conspiratorial methods behind the backs of the majority. The Bolsheviks, so the argument goes, seized power from the Provisional Government which issued from the February Revolution and which, supposedly, represented the democratic will of the people. If only Lenin's "conspiracy" had not prospered, the story goes, Russia would have entered on the road of Western parliamentary democracy and lived happily ever after. This fairy story has been repeated so many times that it has been uncritically accepted by many. Like any other fairy story its purpose is to lull the wits to sleep. And also like any other fairy story, it is convincing only to very small children.
The first thing which springs to mind is: if the Provisional Government really represented the overwhelming majority, and the Bolsheviks only an insignificant group of conspirators, how did the latter succeed in overthrowing the former? After all, the government possessed (at least on paper) all the might of the state apparatus, the army, the police and the Cossacks, whereas the Bolsheviks were a small party which, at the beginning of the revolution in February had only about 8,000 members in all Russia. How was it possible for such a tiny minority to overthrow a mighty state? If we accept the argument of a coup, then we must assume that Lenin and Trotsky possessed magical powers. This is the very stuff of fairy tales! Sadly, it has no place in real life, or in history.
In reality, the conspiracy theory of history explains nothing. It merely assumes what has to be proved. Such a superficial mode of reasoning, which assumes that every strike is caused by "agitators" and not by the accumulated discontent in a factory, is typical of the police mentality. But when it is seriously advanced by self-styled academics as an explanation for great historical events, one can only scratch one's head in bewilderment - or else assume that an ulterior motive is present. The motive of the policeman who seeks to attribute a strike to the activities of unseen agitators is quite clear. And this mode of argument is really no different. The essential idea is that the working class is incapable of understanding its own interests (which are, naturally, identical to those of the bosses). Therefore, if they move to take their destiny into their own hands, the only explanation is that they have been misled by unscrupulous demagogues.
This argument, which incidentally can be used against democracy in general, also misses the point. How could Lenin and Trotsky "mislead" the decisive majority of society in such a way that in the short space of nine months, the Bolshevik Party passed from an insignificant minority to win the majority in the soviets, the only really representative organs of society, and take power? Only because the bourgeois Provisional Government had revealed its complete bankruptcy. Only because it had failed to carry out a single one of the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. And this can be demonstrated very easily by one fact alone: the Bolshevik Party took power in October on the basis of the programme of "Peace, Bread and Land". This is the most graphic illustration of the fact that the Provisional Government had failed to achieve any of the most burning needs of the Russian people. This, and this alone, explains the success of the Bolsheviks in October.
The most striking thing about 1917 is precisely the active involvement of the masses at each stage. This, in fact, constitutes the essence of a revolution. In normal periods the majority of men and women are prepared to accept that the most important decisions affecting their lives are taken by others, by the "people that know" - politicians, civil servants, judges, "experts" - but at critical moments, the "ordinary" people begin to question everything. They are no longer content to allow others to decide for them. They want to think and act for themselves. That is what a revolution is. And you can see elements of this in every strike. The workers begin to participate actively, speak, judge, criticise - in a word, decide their own destiny. To the bureaucrat and the policeman (and some historians whose mental processes function on the same wavelength) this seems like a strange and threatening madness. In fact, it is precisely the opposite. In such situations, men and women cease to act like automatons and begin to behave like real human beings with a mind and a will. Their stature is raised in their own eyes. They rapidly become conscious of their own condition and their own aspirations. Under such conditions, they consciously seek out that party and programme that reflects their aspirations, and reject others. A revolution is always characterised by the rapid rise and fall of parties, individuals and programmes, in which the more radical wing tends to gain.
In all Lenin's speeches and writings of this period, we see a burning faith in the ability of the masses to change society. Far from adopting "conspiratorial" methods, he based himself on appeals to the revolutionary initiatives of the workers, poor peasants and soldiers. In the April Theses he explained that: "We don't want the masses to take our word for it. We are not charlatans. We want the masses to overcome their mistakes through experience." (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 36, p. 439, henceforth referred to as LCW.) Later on he said: "Insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced classÉ Insurrection must rely upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people." (LCW, Vol. 26. p. 22.)
The fact that Lenin here counterposes the masses to the Party was no accident. Although the Bolshevik Party played a fundamental role in the Revolution, this was not a simple one-way process, but a dialectical one. Lenin pointed out many times that the masses are a hundred times more revolutionary than the most revolutionary party. It is a law that in a revolution, the revolutionary party and its leadership come under the pressure of alien classes. We have seen this many times in history. A section of the leadership at such moments begins to doubt and hesitate. An internal struggle is necessary to overcome these vacillations. This occurred in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin's return to Russia, when the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd (mainly Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin) adopted a conciliatory attitude to the Provisional Government and even considered fusing with the Mensheviks. The line of the Party was only changed after a sharp internal struggle in which Lenin and Trotsky joined forces to fight for a second revolution in which the working class would take power into its hands.
In this struggle, Lenin appealed directly to the advanced workers over the heads of the Central Committee. He said that "the 'country' of the workers and the poor peasants É is a thousand times more leftward than the Chernovs and the Tseretelis, and a hundred times more leftward than we are". (LCW, Vol. 24, p. 364.) The motor force of the revolution at each stage was the movement of the masses. The task of the Bolsheviks was to give a clear political and organisational expression to this movement, to ensure that it was concentrated at the right moment for the seizure of power, and to avoid premature uprisings which would lead to defeat. For a time this meant actually holding the masses back. The key Vyborg Committee in Petrograd stated in June: "We have to play the part of the fire-hose." (Quoted in M. Liebman, Leninism under Lenin, p. 200.) Podvoisky admitted at the Sixth Party Congress in August: "We were forced to spend half our time calming the masses." (Ibid., p. 200.)
Permanent mobilisation
Numerous witnesses from all parties testify to the extraordinary degree of participation by the masses. In the words of Marc Ferro: "The citizens of the new Russia, having overthrown Tsardom, were in a state of permanent mobilisation." (Ibid., p. 201.) The prominent Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov recalls that "all Russia É was constantly demonstrating in those days. The provinces had all become accustomed to street demonstrations". (Ibid., p. 201.) Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, recalls:
"The streets in those days presented a curious spectacle: everywhere people stood about in knots, arguing heatedly and discussing the latest events. Discussion that nothing could interrupt!É The house in which we lived overlooked a courtyard, and even here, if you opened the window at night, you could hear a heated dispute. A soldier would be sitting there, and he always had an audience - usually some of the cooks or housemaids from next door, or some young people. An hour after midnight you could catch snatches of talk - 'Bolsheviks, MensheviksÉ' At three in the morning: 'Milyukov, BolsheviksÉ' At five - still the same street-corner-meeting talk, politics, etc. Petrograd's white nights are always associated in my mind now with those all-night political disputes." (N. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin, pp. 351-2.)
The same picture is presented by John Reed: "At the Front the soldiers fought out their fight with the officers, and learned self-government through their committees. In the factories those unique Russian organisations, the Factory-Shop Committees, gained experience and strength and a realisation of their historical mission by combat with the old order. All Russia was learning to read, and reading - politics, economics, history - because the people wanted to knowÉ In every city, in most towns, along the Front, each political faction had its newspaper - sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organisations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts - but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, and GorkyÉ
"Lectures, debates, speeches - in theatres, circuses, school-houses, clubs, Soviet meeting-rooms, Union headquarters, barracksÉ Meetings in the trenches at the Front, in village squares, factoriesÉ What a marvellous sight to see Putilovsky Zavod (the Putilov factory) pour out its forty thousand to listen to Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever they had to say, as long as they would talk! For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In railway-trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere." (John Reed, op. cit. p. 14-5) The thirst for ideas was reflected in an enormous interest in the printed word. John Reed describes the situation with the soldiers in the front line: "We came down to the front of the Twelfth Army, back of Riga, where gaunt and bootless men sickened in the mud of desperate trenches; and when they saw us they started up, with their pinched faces and the flesh showing blue through their torn clothing, demanding eagerly, 'Did you bring anything to read'?" (Ibid., p. 16, emphasis in original.)
The Bolshevik Party gained because it stood for the only programme that showed a way out. Lenin's celebrated slogan was - "Patiently explain!" The masses were able to experience the programmes of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries in practice, and discarded them. The votes for the Bolshevik candidates in the soviets steadily increased to the point where, by September they had won the majority in Petrograd, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and all the major cities. At this point, the question of a transfer of power from the discredited Provisional Government, which represented only itself, to the soviets, the democratic organs of the mass of workers and soldiers (overwhelmingly peasants) was an imperative necessity. The growth of the Bolshevik Party in this period is something without precedent in the history of political parties. From only around 8,000 members in February, it grew to 177,000 by the Sixth Congress in July. Moreover, we must remember that this was achieved despite an extremely weak apparatus, and in conditions of severe persecution. Krupskaya writes: "The growth of Bolshevik influence, especially among the troops, was obvious. The Sixth Congress welded the forces of the Bolsheviks still closer. The appeal issued in the name of the Sixth Party Congress spoke about the counter-revolutionary position taken by the Provisional Government, and about the impending world revolution and the battle of classes." (N. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin, pp. 369-70.) The numerical growth of the Party only partly expressed the rapid growth in its mass influence, above all in the workers' and soldiers' soviets. Marcel Liebman describes the Party's progress thus:
"Lenin's Party recorded, all through the year 1917, remarkable and almost constant election successes. Whereas at the beginning of the revolution it had only small representation in the Petrograd Soviet, by May the Bolshevik group in the workers' section of that institution possessed almost an absolute majority. One month later, during the first conference of the factory committees of Petrograd, three-quarters of the 568 delegates expressed support for the Bolshevik theses. Yet it was only at the end of the summer that the Leninists reaped the full harvest of their policy of opposition to the Provisional Government. In the Petrograd municipal elections in June the Bolsheviks received between 20 and 21 per cent of the votes; in August, when the Party was still suffering from the consequences of the July days, it received 33 per cent. In Moscow in June the Bolsheviks had received a little over 12 per cent of the votes. In September they won an absolute majority, with 51 per cent of the votes. That their grip was especially strong among the working class is clear from the advance of their representation at the factory-committee conferences. In Petrograd, by September, there were no more Mensheviks or Social Revolutionaries present at the regional meetings of these bodies, their places having been taken by Bolsheviks." (Liebman, op. cit. p. 206.)
We will give the last word on this subject to a prominent opponent of Bolshevism, who was also an eye witness and historian of the Russian Revolution, the Menshevik Sukhanov. Describing the situation in the last days of September, he writes: "The Bolsheviks were working stubbornly and without let-up. They were among the masses, at the factory-benches, every day without a pause. Tens of speakers, big and little, were speaking in Petersburg, at the factories and in the barracks, every blessed day. For the masses they had become their own people, because they were always there, taking the lead in details as well as in the most important affairs of the factory or barracks. They had become the sole hopeÉ The mass lived and breathed together with the Bolsheviks." (Ibid., p. 207.)
Party and class
The Russian Revolution took place over nine months. During that period, the Bolshevik Party, using the most democratic means, won over the decisive majority of the workers and poor peasants. The fact that they succeeded so easily in overcoming the resistance of the Kerensky forces can only be explained by this fact. Moreover, as we shall see, there is no way that the Bolsheviks could have held onto power, without the support of the overwhelming majority of society. At every stage, the decisive role was played by the active intervention of the masses. This is what set its stamp on the whole process. The ruling class and its political and military representatives could only grind their teeth, but were powerless to prevent power from slipping from their hands. True, they were involved in constant conspiracies against the Revolution, including the armed uprising of General Kornilov, which aimed at overthrowing Kerensky and instituting a military dictatorship, but all of this foundered on the movement of the masses.
The fact that the masses supported the Bolsheviks was accepted by everyone at the time, including the staunchest enemies of the Revolution. Naturally, they put this down to all kinds of malign influences, "demagogy", the immaturity of the workers and peasants, their supposed ignorance, and all the rest of the arguments which are essentially directed against democracy itself. How it came about that the masses only became ignorant and immature when they ceased to support the Provisional Government must be one of the greatest mysteries since Saint Paul saw the light on the road to Damascus. But if we leave aside the obvious motivation of spitefulness, malice and impotent rage, we can see that the following passage from a rightwing paper constitutes a valuable admission that the Bolsheviks indeed enjoyed the support of the masses. On the 28th October, Russkaya Volya wrote the following:
"What are the chances of Bolshevik success? It is difficult to answer that question, for their principal support is the É ignorance of the popular masses. They speculate on it, they work upon it by a demagogy which nothing can stop." (Quoted in J. Reed, op. cit., p. 298, my emphasis.)
It is impossible to understand what happened in 1917 without seeing the fundamental role of the masses. The same is true of the French Revolution of 1789-94, a fact which historians frequently fail to grasp (there are exceptions, notably the anarchist Kropotkin, and, in our own times, George Rudé). But here for the first time in history, if we exclude the brief but glorious episode of the Paris Commune, the working class actually succeeded in taking power and at least beginning the socialist transformation of society. That is precisely why the enemies of socialism are compelled to lie about the October Revolution and slander it. They cannot forgive Lenin and the Bolsheviks for having succeeded in leading the first successful socialist revolution, for proving that such a thing is possible, and therefore pointing the way for future generations. Such a precedent is dangerous! It is therefore necessary to "prove" (with the assistance of the usual crew of "objective" academics) that this was all a very bad business, and must not be repeated.
The claim that the October Revolution was only a coup is often justified by pointing to the relatively small numbers actually involved in the insurrection itself. This apparently profound argument does not resist the slightest scrutiny. In the first place, it confuses the armed insurrection with the revolution, that is to say, it confuses the part with the whole. In reality, the insurrection is only a part of the revolution - a very important part, it is true. Trotsky likens it to the crest of a wave. As a matter of fact, the amount of fighting that took place in Petrograd was very small. One can say that it was bloodless. The reason for this was that nine-tenths of the tasks were already accomplished beforehand, by winning over the decisive majority of the workers and soldiers. It was still necessary to use armed force to overcome the resistance of the old order. No ruling class has ever surrendered power without a fight. But resistance was minimal. The government collapsed like a house of cards, because nobody was prepared to defend it.
In Moscow, mainly because of the mistakes of the local Bolsheviks, who did not act with sufficient energy, the counter-revolutionary Junkers initially went onto the offensive and carried out a massacre. Despite this, incredibly, they were allowed to go free on giving their word that they would not participate in any further violent acts against the Soviet power. This kind of thing was quite typical of the early days of the Revolution, characterised by a certain naivety on the part of the masses who had yet to understand of what terrible violence the defenders of the old order were capable. Far from being a bloodthirsty regime of terror, the Revolution was an extraordinarily benign affair - until the counter-revolution showed its real nature. The White General P. Krasnov was one of the first to lead an uprising against the Bolsheviks at the head of the Cossacks. He was defeated by the Red Guards and handed over by his own Cossacks, but again was released on parole. Of this Victor Serge writes correctly:
"The revolution made the mistake of showing magnanimity to the leader of the Cossack attack. He should have been shot on the spot. At the end of a few days he recovered his liberty, after giving his word of honour never to take up arms again against the revolution. But what value can promises of honour have towards enemies of fatherland and property? He was to go off to put the Don region to fire and the sword." (Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, p. 87.)
Do the relatively small numbers involved in the actual fighting mean that the October overturn was a coup? There are many similarities between the class war and war between nations. In the latter too, only a very small proportion of the population are in the armed forces. And only a small minority of the army is at the front. Of the latter, even in the course of a major battle, only a minority of the soldiers are normally engaged in fighting at any given time. Experienced soldiers know that a lot of time is spent waiting in idleness, even during a battle. Very often the reserves are never called into action. But without the reserves, no responsible general would order an advance. Moreover, it is not possible to wage war successfully without the wholehearted support of the population at home, even though they do not directly participate in the fighting. This lesson was carved on the nose of the Pentagon in the latter stages of the Vietnam war.
The argument that the Bolsheviks were able to take power without the masses (a coup) is usually linked to the idea that power was seized, not by the working class, but by a party. Again, this argument is entirely false. Without organisation - the trade unions and the party - the working class is only raw material for exploitation. This was already pointed out by Marx long ago. True, the proletariat possesses enormous power. Not a wheel turns, not a light bulb shines, without its permission. But without organisation, this power remains as just potential. In the same way, steam is a colossal force, but without a piston box, it will be harmlessly dissipated in the air. In order that the strength of the working class should cease to be a mere potential and become a reality, it must be organised and concentrated in a single point. This can only be done through a political party with a courageous and far-sighted leadership and a correct programme. The Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky was such a party. Basing themselves on the movement of the masses - a magnificent movement that represented all that was alive, progressive and vibrant in Russian society, they gave it form, purpose and a voice. That is its cardinal sin from the standpoint of the ruling class and its echoes in the labour movement. That is what lies behind their hatred and loathing of Bolshevism, their vitriol and spiteful attitude towards it, which completely conditions their attitude even three generations later.
Without the Bolshevik Party, without the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, the Russian workers would never have taken power in 1917, despite all their heroism. The revolutionary party cannot be improvised on the spur of the moment, any more than a general staff can be improvised on the outbreak of war. It has to be systematically prepared over years and decades. This lesson has been demonstrated by the whole of history, especially the history of the twentieth century. Rosa Luxemburg, that great revolutionary and martyr of the working class, always emphasised the revolutionary initiative of the masses as the motor force of revolution. In this, she was absolutely right. In the course of a revolution the masses learn rapidly. But a revolutionary situation, by its very nature, cannot last for long. Society cannot be kept in a permanent state of ferment, nor the working class in a state of white-hot activism. Either a way out is shown in time, or the moment will be lost. There is not enough time to experiment or for the workers to learn by trial and error. In a life and death situation, errors are paid for very dearly! Therefore, it is necessary to combine the "spontaneous", movement of the masses with organisation, programme, perspectives, strategy and tactics - in a word, with a revolutionary party led by experienced cadres. There is no other way.
It is necessary to add that at every stage the Bolsheviks always had before them the perspective of the international revolution. They never believed that they could hold power in Russia alone. It is a striking testimony to the vitality of the October Revolution that, in spite of all the vicissitudes, all the crimes of Stalinism and the terrible destruction of the second world war, the basic conquests were maintained for so long, even when the revolution, deprived of aid from the rest of the world, was thrown upon its own resources. Even in the last period, the collapse of Stalinism was not the result of any inherent defect of the nationalised planned economy, but flowed from treachery and betrayal of the bureaucracy which, as Trotsky brilliantly predicted, sought to reinforce its privileges by selling out to capitalism.
'All power to the soviets!'
As a corollary of the slanders against October, we have the attempt to paint the February Revolution in glowing colours. The "democratic" regime of Kerensky, it is alleged, would have led Russia into a glorious future of prosperity, if only the Bolsheviks had not spoilt it all. Alas! The idealisation of the February Revolution does not stand up to the least scrutiny. The February 1917 Revolution - which had overthrown the old Tsarist regime - had not solved one of the tasks of the national-democratic revolution: land reform, a democratic republic, the national question. It was not even capable of bringing about the most elementary demand of the masses - for an end to the imperialist slaughter and the conclusion of a democratic peace. In short, the Kerensky regime in the course of nine months gave ample proof of its total inability to meet the most basic needs of the Russian people. It was this fact, and this alone, which enabled the Bolsheviks to come to power with the support of the decisive majority of society.
Emerging from the ravages of the first world war, Tsarist Russia was a semi-colony particularly of France, Germany, and Britain. Russia produced less than 3 per cent of world industrial output. It could not compete on a world scale. For every hundred square kilometres of land, there were only 0.4 kilometres of rail track. Around 80 per cent of the population eked out a bare existence on the land, which was fragmented into millions of smallholdings. The Russian bourgeoisie had entered onto the stage of history too late. It had failed to carry out any of the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, that had been solved in Britain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the contrary, the Russian capitalists leaned on imperialism on the one hand and the Tsarist autocracy for support on the other. They were linked by a thousand threads to the old landlords and aristocrats. Horrified by the 1905 Revolution, the bourgeoisie had become more conservative and suspicious of the workers. They had no revolutionary role to play. "Whereas in the dawn of its history it was too unripe to accomplish a Reformation," states Trotsky, "when the time came for leading a revolution it was overripe." (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, p. 28.)
The only revolutionary class in Russia was the young, small, but highly concentrated proletariat. Arising from the law of uneven and combined development, a backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries. It does not slavishly reproduce all the stages of the past, but skips over a whole series of intermediate stages. This gives rise to a contradictory development, where the most advanced features are superimposed upon extremely backward conditions. Foreign investment had meant the creation of highly advanced concentrated factories and industries in Russia. The peasants were uprooted, thrown into industry, and proletarianised over night. It fell to this youthful proletariat - which had none of the conservative traditions of its counterpart in the West - to take Russian society out of the impasse it faced. The attempt to counterpose the February regime to October has no foundation whatever. Had the Bolsheviks not taken power, the future that faced Russia was not one of prosperous capitalist democracy, but fascist barbarism under the jackboot of Kornilov or one of the other White generals. Such a development would have signified, not advance, but a terrible regression.
In the October Revolution, the victorious proletariat first had to tackle the basic problems of the national-democratic revolution, then went on, uninterruptedly, to carry out the socialist tasks. This was the very essence of the permanent revolution. Capitalism had broken at its weakest point, as Lenin explained. The October Revolution represented the beginning of the world socialist revolution. The revolution of February had spontaneously thrown up committees of workers and soldiers, as had the revolution of 1905. The committees, or soviets, became transformed from extended strike committees into political instruments of the working class in the struggle for power, and later into administrative organs of the new workers' state. They were far more democratic and flexible than the territorially elected bodies of bourgeois democracy. To paraphrase Marx, capitalist democracy allows the workers every five years to elect parties to misrepresent their interests. In Russia, with the establishment of peasants' soviets, they embraced the overwhelming majority of the population.
Throughout the nine months between February and October, the soviets represented a rival power to the capitalist state. It was a period of "dual power". One of the key demands of the Bolsheviks throughout this time was: "All power to the soviets!" Months of patient explanation and the harsh experience of events won over the overwhelming majority of the workers and poor peasants to Bolshevism. The October Revolution brought to power a new revolutionary government, which took its authority from the Congress of Soviets. Contrary to common belief, it was not a one-party regime but originally a coalition government of Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries. The urgent task facing the government was to spread the authority of Soviet power - the rule of the working class - throughout all Russia. On the 5th January 1918, the government issued a directive which declared that the local soviets were from then on invested with all the powers held by the former administration, and added: "The entire country must be covered with a network of new soviets."
The system of soviets was not, as the reformists claim, an exclusively Russian phenomenon. The November 1918 Revolution in Germany spontaneously threw up similar bodies. They were the embodiment of workers' self organisation. In every German port, town and barracks, workers', soldiers' and sailors' councils were established and held effective political power. Soviets were established in Bavaria and during the Hungarian Revolution of 1919. In Britain also, Councils of Action were established in 1920, which were described by Lenin as "soviets in all but name", as well as during the 1926 General Strike (committees of action and trades councils). Although the Stalinists and reformists tried to prevent the reappearance of soviets, they re-emerged in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, with the creation of the Budapest Workers' Council.
In its origins, the soviet - the most democratic and flexible form of popular representation yet devised - was simply an extended strike committee. Born in mass struggle, the soviets (or workers' councils) assumed an extremely broad sweep, and ultimately became transformed into organs of revolutionary direct government. Beside the local soviets, elected in every city, town and village, in every large city there were also ward (raionny) soviets as well as district or provincial (oblastny or gubiernsky) soviets, and finally delegates were elected to the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets in Petrograd. The delegates were elected at every unit of labour to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, and subject to immediate recall. There was no bureaucratic elite. No deputy or official received more than the wage of a skilled worker.
The Soviet government issued a whole series of economic, political, administrative and cultural decrees in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. At a grassroots level, there was a mushrooming of soviet organisation. Everywhere attempts were made to do away with the distinction between legislative and executive functions, to allow individuals to participate directly in the application of decisions they had made. As a consequence, the masses began to take their destiny into their own hands. In November 1917 Lenin wrote an appeal in Pravda: "Comrades, working people! Remember that now you yourselves are at the helm of state. No one will help you if you yourselves do not unite and take into your hands all affairs of stateÉ Get on with the job yourselves; begin right at the bottom, do not wait for anyone." (LCW, Vol. 26, p. 297.) He was anxious for the masses to involve themselves in the running of industry and the state.
In December 1917 Lenin wrote: "One of the most important tasks of today, if not the most important, is to develop [the] independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working and exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in creative organisational work. At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the so-called upper classes, only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organisational development of socialist society." (LCW, Vol. 26, p. 409.)
The myth of the Constituent Assembly
Among all the numerous legends put in circulation in order to portray the October Revolution in an unfavourable light, that of the Constituent Assembly is perhaps the most persistent. According to this, the Bolsheviks before the revolution had advocated a democratically elected parliament (Constituent Assembly), yet after the revolution they disbanded it. Since they were in a minority, the argument goes, they decided to dissolve the democratically elected parliament and resort to dictatorship. This argument overlooks a number of fundamental questions. In the first place, the demand for a Constituent Assembly - which undoubtedly played a progressive role in mobilising the masses, especially the peasantry, against the Tsarist autocracy - was only one of a series of revolutionary-democratic demands, and not necessarily the most important one. The masses were won over to the revolution on other demands, notably "Peace, Bread and Land". These, in turn, became a reality only because they were linked to another demand - all power to the soviets.
The February Revolution failed precisely because it was not capable of satisfying these most pressing needs of the population. The complete impotence of the Kerensky regime was not accidental. It reflected the reactionary character of the Russian bourgeoisie. The capitalist class of Russia was a very weak class, tied hand and foot to the landlords, and subordinate to world imperialism. Only the revolutionary transfer of power into the hands of the most resolutely revolutionary part of society, the working class, made possible the ending of the war and the distribution of land to the peasants. This was the function of the October Revolution.
The calling of elections to the Constituent Assembly the following year was almost in the nature of an afterthought. The Bolsheviks intended to use this to try to mobilise the majority of the peasantry and rouse them to political life. But above all from the standpoint of the peasantry, formal parliamentary democracy is worse than useless if it does not carry out policies that solve their most pressing needs. Under certain circumstances, the Constituent Assembly could have played a progressive role. But in practice, it became clear that this Constituent Assembly could only be an obstacle and a rallying point for the counter-revolution. Here, the slow moving mechanism of parliamentary elections lagged far behind the swift current of revolution. The real attitude of the peasantry was revealed in the civil war, when the right Social Revolutionaries (SRs) and most of the Mensheviks collaborated with the Whites.
At the time of the October Revolution, the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies represented all that was alive and dynamic in Russian society. The working class voted for the Bolsheviks in the soviets, which were much more democratic that any parliament. At the same time, the soldiers, of whom a big majority were peasants also voted overwhelmingly for the Bolsheviks:
Votes
Percentages
Party
June
September
June
September
Social Revolutionaries
974,885
54,374
58
14
Mensheviks
76,407
15,887
12
4
Kadets
168,781
101,106
17
26
Bolsheviks
75,409
198,230
12
51
(Source, Anweiler, p. 188.)
These figures show, on the one hand, a growing polarisation between the classes, to the right (note the vote of the bourgeois Kadet party) and the left, and a collapse of the parties of the "centre", the Mensheviks and SRs. But the most striking feature is the sweeping victory of the Bolsheviks, who, from a mere 12 per cent in June were now an absolute majority. What this shows is that the Bolsheviks had the support of the overwhelming majority of the workers, and a sizeable section of the peasants also. In November 1917 the Menshevik leader Y.O. Martov himself had to admit that "almost the entire proletariat supports Lenin". (Quoted in Liebman, op. cit., p. 218.) Precisely on this basis, the Bolsheviks were able to overthrow the discredited Provisional Government and take power with a minimum of resistance. These facts alone give the lie to the myth of the October Revolution as a coup.
Thus, the democratic legitimacy of the October Revolution was clearly established. But this was not reflected in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, when the Bolsheviks only got 23.9 per cent of the votes (to which must be added the votes of the Left SRs):
Constituent Assembly (in votes):
Russian SRs
15,848,004
Ukrainian SRs
1,286,157
Peasant Parties
Ukrainian socialist coalition
3,556,581
Total SRs and allies
20,690,742
Bolsheviks
9,844,637
Mensheviks
1,364,826
Workers Parties
Other socialists
601,707
Kadets
1,986,601
Conservative Russian groups
1,262,418
Bourgeois and rightwing parties
Nationalist groups
2,620,967
Constituent Assembly (in seats)
Russian SRs
299
Ukrainian SRs
81
Left SRs
39
Bolsheviks
168
Mensheviks
18
Other socialists
4
Kadets
15
Conservatives
2
Nationalist groups
77
(Source, Anweiler, p. 220.)
Despite this, the Bolsheviks remained firmly in power. Why? The right SRs had traditionally led the peasants, going back to the time of the Narodniks at the turn of the century. These middle class elements were the traditional village aristocracy - teachers, lawyers, and the "gentlemen who spoke well". During the first world war, many of them became army officers. At the time of the February Revolution, these democratic revolutionaries exercised a considerable influence among the peasant soldiers. Their vague and amorphous "revolutionism" corresponded to the first stirring of consciousness among the peasantry. But the tide of revolution flows fast. Soon after the February Revolution, the right SRs betrayed the peasantry by abandoning the programme of peace, and the revolutionary struggle for land.
Where could the peasants in uniform turn for support? Once awakened to political life, the peasant masses, specially the most active layer in the army whose experience of the war raised them to a higher level of understanding than their brothers in the villages, soon came to understand the need for a revolutionary overturn in order to conquer peace, bread and land. This could only be achieved by a revolutionary alliance with the proletariat. The realisation of this fact was registered in the Soviet elections by a sharp swing to the left. By the autumn of 1917, the old right SR leaders had lost their base among the soldiers, who went over in droves to the left SRs and their Bolshevik allies.
The elections to the Constituent Assembly were organised in a hurry after the revolution on the basis of electoral lists drawn up before October. The peasantry had not yet had time to understand the processes that were taking place. The split between the left and right SRs had not yet taken place. There was not time for the peasantry as a whole to grasp the meaning of the October Revolution and Soviet power, particularly in the vital fields of land reform and peace. The dynamics of a revolution cannot be easily translated into the cumbersome mechanism of parliamentarism. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the inert masses of the backward countryside was thrown into the balance. Weighed down by the ballast of a thousand years of slavery, the villages lagged behind the towns.
These right SRs were not the political representatives but the political exploiters of the peasantry. Implacably hostile to the October Revolution, they would have handed back power to the landlords and capitalists in the kind of democratic counter-revolution which robbed the German working class of power in November 1918. There were two mutually exclusive centres of power. The reactionaries rallied around the slogan: "All Power to the Constituent Assembly." Faced with this situation, the Bolsheviks, with the support of the Left SRs, did not hesitate to place the interests of the revolution before constitutional niceties. Basing themselves on the soviets, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly. There was no resistance. This incident now causes an indignant reaction in some quarters. And yet, we are left with a self-evident contradiction. If the Constituent Assembly really represented the will of the masses, why did nobody defend it? Not a hand was raised in its defence, precisely because it was an unrepresentative anachronism. The reason for this was very well explained by the celebrated English historian of the Russian Revolution, E.H. Carr:
"The SRs had gone to the polls as a single party presenting one list of candidates. Its election manifesto had been full of lofty principles and aims but, though published on the day after the October Revolution, had been drafted before that event and failed to define the party attitude towards it. Now three days after the election the larger section of the party had made a coalition with the Bolsheviks, and formally split away from the other section which maintained its bitter feud against the Bolsheviks. The proportion between Right and Left SRs in the Constituent Assembly - 370 to 40 - was fortuitous. It was entirely different from the corresponding proportion in the membership of the peasants' congress, and did not necessarily represent the views of the electors on a vital point which had not been before them. 'The people,' said Lenin, 'voted for a party which no longer existed.' Reviewing the whole issue two years later Lenin found another argument which was more cogent than it appeared at first sight. He noted that in the large industrial cities the Bolsheviks had almost everywhere been ahead of the other parties. They secured an absolute majority in the two capitals taken together, the Kadets here being second and the SRs a poor third. But in matters of revolution the well-known principle applied: 'the town inevitably leads the country after it; the country inevitable follows the town.' The elections to the Constituent Assembly, if they did not register the victory of the Bolsheviks, had clearly pointed the way to it for those who had eyes to see." (E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Vol. 1, pp. 121-2.)
This was admitted in so many words by Kerensky himself, who wrote the following in his memoirs: "The opening of the Constituent Assembly ended as a tragic farce. Nothing happened to give it the quality of a memorable final stand in defence of freedom." (Alexander Kerensky, The Kerensky Memoirs - Russia and History's Turning-Point, p. 470.)