Revolution in Danger

by Victor Serge

  On pain of death, that is, at risk of being immediately put to death by the victory of a reactionary dictatorship, revolutionaries will have to take on the dictatorship without any delay.

  2: Soviets or workers’ councils

  In fact it doesn’t matter much which word is used. The soviets in Russia were formed spontaneously during the first days of the February revolution. Elsewhere they may be formed in a different manner. But it nonetheless remains true that, from the very first hours of the social war, councils freely formed by the representatives of the revolutionary workers will be the only bodies to have the moral and material authority necessary to manage production and take the responsibility for action.

  This is all the more true because the revolution will necessarily be made against the bourgeois parliament, and in practice this can only be replaced by the principle of workers’ councils containing solely the representatives of one class.

  3: Terror

  There has never been a revolution without terror. In the two great experiences that we know, we can see the very causes that make terror necessary being born and growing. In France from 1791 to 1792, it was the endless conspiring by the nobility, the priests, the speculators and the swindlers within the country; it was the Vendée rising, the revolts at Lyons, Toulon, Marseilles, Mende; it was the émigrés organizing foreign intervention from Koblenz and London; it was the armies of the monarchies allied in the counter-revolutionary European coalition crossing the frontiers of the young republic. These causes produced a state of panic among some, a determined, pitiless, furious state of mind among others. A king’s head was thrown in the face of Europe, the guillotine was erected on the Place de la République, suspects were arrested by the thousands, and the terrible September massacres were carried out. Nobody willed this sequence of cause and effect; nobody could have evaded its logic.

  From 1917 to 1919, in Red Russia, the same causes—the similarity is total—could not fail to produce the same effects. Clearly we are observing a general law of the development of revolutions. We have only to recall the circumstances: revolutionary Russia retreated in face of the need to shed blood for as long as it was possible to retreat. But when the ceaseless plotting within found expression in the Yaroslavl rising, in the murder of Uritsky in Petrograd, in the attempt on Lenin’s life in Moscow; when the Ural region, occupied by the Czechoslovaks who were marching on the Volga, became a new Vendée; when the Russian counter-revolutionary émigrés began to organize armed intervention from Paris and London, while their gangs were devastating the Don country; when White Finland had assassinated eleven thousand defeated Communists—then it became necessary to have recourse to Red terror.

  It was necessary, on pain of death. For any sign of weakness could have brought about defeat. And defeat meant White terror, a hundred times more terrible than Red terror. In 1871 in Paris in a fortnight, the Versailles forces killed three times as many people as were victims of the Red terror throughout the whole vast territory of Russia in three years of revolution. In Finland, Bavaria and Hungary, the forces of reaction have just shown that they will stop at nothing.

  4: The inevitability of war of revolutionary defence

  Differences in culture, economic development, financial situation, etc., make it very unlikely that revolution will happen completely simultaneously in several large neighboring countries. The revolution which breaks out and triumphs in one country thus finds itself immediately confronted by an alliance of all the neighboring states in which the old system still survives. Just as the Europe of the nobles and monarchs allied together against the French republic, so now capitalist Europe (to which, a significant development, the United States and Japan have added their forces) has allied against Communist Soviet Russia. Clemenceau has acted with verve the role once played by Pitt.

  It is vital to respond to this necessity for revolutionary defence, as to the necessity for terror and dictatorship, on pain of death. For the grim reality of revolutions is that half-measures and half-defeats are not possible, and that victory means life, defeat means death.

  5: The necessity of powerful revolutionary organizations

  It was thanks to the remarkable organization of the Jacobin clubs that revolutionary France successfully resisted the coalition of the European monarchies. As in the case of the Communist Party in Russia, the necessities of the revolution had led to the springing up, in Paris and in the provinces, of clubs which, with better organization, could undoubtedly have held the military and bourgeois reactions in check. Moreover, to hope to defeat the capitalist state without strong and flexible combat organizations, without a whole combat apparatus—publications, economic action, illegal action, terrorism, etc.—would be worse than naïve. Revolutionary energy, which by its very nature is multiple and diverse, must be organized, concentrated, coherent and conscious in battle.

  The anarchists and the experience of the revolution

  These points, I believe, make up the lessons of the Russian Revolution. These are the problems which anarchists have an obligation to confront in an open-minded fashion. Otherwise, in the events which are unfolding, they will not play—as anarchists—any significant role, and that will be a miserable abdication of responsibility on their part.

  This is an important question. For it does not concern only those who label themselves as “anarchists.” It is one which concerns all revolutionaries who love liberty, and are imbued with the spirit of free criticism and free investigation which is the basic characteristic of the anarchist psychology: all those who are not dogmatic, all those who believe in the necessity of having a personal conviction, of following their conscience in struggle and trusting nothing but their conscience; all those who believe that the ultimate aim of all revolutionary efforts can only be the achievement of a society of free workers where human individuality could at last be fully established. For those who think and feel in this way, however vaguely, are, whatever label they adopt, anarchists without realizing it.

  Now, it seems to me that we anarchists must either accept or reject as a whole the set of conditions necessary for the social revolution: dictatorship of the proletariat, principle of soviets, revolutionary terror, defence of the revolution, strong organizations.

  Nothing can be subtracted from this whole without the edifice collapsing. That is how the revolution is. It is a fact. It is not how we dreamed of it, nor what we wanted it to be. Here it is. Are you against it—or with it? The question is posed in this brutal fashion.

  For those who put their entire trust in the achievements of education, in the evolution of the masses, and who believe that such education, such evolution can take a libertarian direction within the capitalist system, the question is settled. They expect nothing of violence, they are against the revolution. That means that it will sweep them away despite themselves, and without their trying to understand it. I know that arguments can be made for this point of view. But the error on which it is based seems to me too obvious for it to be worth the effort of refuting it, and this abstentionism in face of the greatest events of history will never appeal either to the masses or to energetic individuals.

  So, willy-nilly, most anarchists will be with the revolution. Indeed, everywhere they will be the first to face danger, as they were in Russia. But it is one thing to fight, another to think, to exercise an influence, to enlighten the minds of others. They will be found wanting in this latter task if they do not consciously accept all the necessities of the revolution, though without abandoning their own idealism.

  Having advocated for many years class warfare, direct action, the need to use violence, anarchists have no logical reason to reject the dictatorship of the proletariat, a decisive expression of the class struggle, of direct action, of the use of violence; on the contrary, their job is to breathe life into it by infusing it with their spirit, by preventing people misusing words to the prejudice of things, by insisting, for example, that there can be no proletarian dictatorship without the effective and perm
anent supervision of the masses over institutions and people. Doubtless all Communists know this; but their sense of discipline and their habits of centralization make those of them who are not libertarians less fit to recommend or indeed exercise this supervision.

  I do not see how, even from the most intransigent anarchist standpoint, one can make any serious objection to the principle of soviet power. It effectively achieves the minimum of delegation of powers, since members of the soviet remain among their workmates, being elected only for a very short period and liable to be recalled at any moment. And in short, comrades, the soviets will be what you make them!

  A number of Russian anarchists have severely criticized the terror, which, of course, nobody accepted light-heartedly. It none the less remains true that they have often resorted to individual terrorism. Can one accept individual terrorism in a time of relative (very relative, admittedly) social peace and yet repudiate the terrorism of the masses in times of civil war? However reluctant we may be to resort to it, can we avoid it being organized and systematically applied? Certainly not.

  Now let us pose the question of revolutionary defence. The Russian anarchists, in theory very divided on this question, in practice everywhere resolved it by taking up arms, first of all in the Red Guards, later in the Red Army. By forming bands of partisans, they fought against Denikin; they contributed to the defence of Petrograd against Yudenich; they shed their blood on all the fronts of the Soviet Republic. Yet in theory most of them accept only partisan warfare or a volunteer army. It is an ambiguous position. Anyone who agrees to fight may end up winning. Can we defeat the armies of modern imperialism with bands of armed partisans, bands of volunteers? Logic tells us the answer must be no. And experience is conclusive. The necessities of struggle have successively—and victoriously—transformed the Red Guards into a volunteer army, then into a Red Army, based on the principle of compulsory service. The anarchist bands of Makhno were able to do no more than survive in the Ukraine during all the invasions which they could not prevent, and even that was possible only because they too resorted to compulsion in order to recruit fighters.

  The question of revolutionary organization is probably the one which would offer anarchists the best reasons for differentiating themselves. Centralization or federalism? How is it possible to ensure cohesion in action and method, with everything in the perspective of an aim which is often quite remote, and at the same time stimulate the initiative of groups and individuals, and be on one’s guard against bureaucracy, against those who claim infallibility, against the dictatorial zeal of committees, against careerism? How is it possible to create a discipline which is not based on passivity? These are questions to which no-one as yet has produced satisfactory answers. Moreover, they are linked to important questions of tactics and principle. The Bolshevik formula of “a highly centralized party” is open to many criticisms. But if we see this also as merely the expression of an inevitable and necessary reality in the course of the revolution, then all the objections made to the theory will appear to be wholly futile. And such is the case. I shall return to this point a little later on.

  The attitude of the Russian anarchists

  What was the attitude of the Russian anarchists in face of these facts?

  It varied from one extreme to the other, according to the different tendencies.

  There were in Russia anarchists who were mortal enemies of the Bolshevik party, but who acted honestly towards it (though with a hint of hostility) or allied with it, often to the extent of actually joining the party.

  During the struggle against the collapsing government of Kerensky, anarchists and Bolsheviks pursued parallel actions in a fraternal manner. Likewise the anarchists participated in the July Days and in the decisive battles of October. After October, and for quite a long time, they maintained a formidable autonomy in the large cities: in short, they constituted, inside the great republic that was in process of birth, an armed republic which was badly organized but very turbulent. In Petrograd and in Moscow they had, in palaces which they had occupied, headquarters and actual fortresses bristling with machine-guns. Their general staffs organized searches, arrests, requisitions, without any regulation—and without it being possible to draw a clear line between revolutionary acts and banditry. Likewise the absence of formal organization made it impossible to distinguish genuine anarchists from those fishing in troubled waters who found it convenient to describe themselves as such. At this point the anarchist press was influential. It had daily papers in Petrograd, in Moscow (Burevestnik and Anarkhiya) and elsewhere, for example Kronstadt, where for a time the anarchists controlled the soviet whose publication was in fact their publication. Despite many mistakes, despite the absence of a clear program—a terrible lack at a time when action was necessary and decisions had to be taken every day—they encountered enormous sympathy in the working-class population. They were incapable of taking advantage of this to establish a serious movement, the starting-point for which would have had to be the elaboration of a practical program. And their widespread agitation faded out for want of a clear ideology, for want of organization, and as a result of the abuses which turned a great part of the population against the followers of the black flag. It all ended in armed conflict with the Bolsheviks, who resorted to force in order to disarm the anarchist strongholds.

  For all those who know what a wealth of energy is contained within the anarchist movement, this is a very bitter page of the history of the Russian Revolution. But I can’t help wondering whether in the great cities of a revolution under attack from two imperialisms, the existence of an armed force which was not under any supervision or any discipline, even of a moral kind, which obeyed nothing but its own impulses and which necessarily attracted elements who were dubious in every respect, would not, if it had been allowed to continue, have represented a very great danger for the revolution itself. In such a situation, the anarchists themselves would have had to disarm—if necessary, by force—the other anarchists who were thus threatening their life and their achievements.

  This conflict struck a very serious blow against the movement. It discredited it, cut off its support and created a gulf between the majority of anarchists and the Communist Party. Since then, the movement has merely vegetated, except in the Ukraine, where its experience has been both epic and heart-rending.4

  At the present time the anarchists have neither press nor organization, even though there are anarchist militants in nearly every city and every military unit. The differences of opinion among them and the lack of a practical program for action have excluded them from activity more than any other political reason.

  For either they are against the Communist Party, and thus pushed towards the counter-revolutionaries and reduced to the same impotence; or they are with it, and since they have no solutions of their own to propose, they have to tail behind it—or join it. However, it is possible to distinguish three tendencies among them:

  1.

  The “clandestine” or “underground anarchists,” mortal enemies of the Communist dictatorship, which they denounce for its abuses, for the excessive power of its officials, for its centralization and for the sufferings of the people consequent on the revolution. They have advocated armed struggle against the soviet power and, responding in fact to measures of repression exercised in the Ukraine, they were responsible for the attack on the central committee of the Moscow Communist Party on September 25, 1919, which caused twenty-six injuries and ten deaths, and which provoked unanimous disapproval among the vast majority of anarchists. The organization which committed this outrage seems to have been entirely destroyed in the struggle it subsequently undertook against the Special Commission for the Suppression of Counter-revolution and Sabotage.

  2.

  Those whom I shall call the Center, because they occupy an intermediate position between the anti-Communist anarchists and those who are Communists (in the Bolshevik sense of the term). They are by far the majority. The dictatorship, the lack
of freedom, abuses of every sort often distress and embitter them. In theory, they criticize the Communist Party for its authoritarian conduct, for its principles of absolute centralization, for its stress on state control, for its intolerance. At first sight their criticisms are very powerful; but as soon as they are examined in any depth, they become empty, since they are not backed up by any indication of a solution.

  For example, the statement of principles by the Moscow Union of Anarchists (December 1919) contains, as its entire political program, the few simple lines headed “In Politics”:We fight for the total emancipation of mankind, not in order to replace the rule of one class by that of another, but in order to destroy all authority, all right of coercion, all laws based on constraint; we wish to replace them by the spontaneous order based on agreements freely entered into.

  The present state ruled by a class—the forced association of individuals and groupings—must be replaced by the free association of individual persons.