Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  The Pullman strike was far from being the last major labour dispute of the era but it signalled that ultimate victory in the battle between organised labour and corporate power would belong to the corporations, which were coming to dominate American economic life. The picture was very different in Russia where industrialisation and its concomitant industrial relations issues were far behind America. Although there had been industrial unrest in the mid-1880s, most famously at the Morozov cotton mills, the first real industrial strike in Russia was the year after the Pullman boycott. The textile workers of St Petersburg were incited to strike when a three day unpaid holiday was imposed upon them. The strike rapidly assumed a political nature, with one of the main organisers being Lenin, who the previous year had returned from a gathering of Russian revolutionaries in Switzerland to set up the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class (not for him such quaint names as the Knights of Labor or the Molly Maguires). The St Petersburg strike was quickly crushed, with hundreds of arrests (including Lenin), but it was the germ from which the Russian Revolution would grow.

  The St Petersburg strike showed the tsarist regime hitting out in its old-established ways – Lenin, for example, was dispatched into temporary exile – but faced with a new breed of opponent that it simply did not understand. The gulf between tsar and industrial worker was more than unbridgeable; they lived almost literally in two different worlds. By contrast, in America oligarchs and workers lived if not side by side at least in close proximity, and the Pullman strike demonstrated that the American establishment had a much clearer idea of what it was facing and how to overcome dissent. The strike illustrated the increasing tendency of the US government to offer employers moral support and military force, and the willingness of the judiciary to issue injunctions – which became a prime weapon against American unions. Because the ideology of democracy was so widely accepted, the injunctions were usually obeyed even when not enforced by police or military power.

  The key difference between the left in Russia and America was that the left in Russia was fighting against the prevailing ideology, while the left in America thought it was fighting for it. The Russian left was determined to overthrow the existing system and introduce something totally new: the apparatus of the state – tsar, governors, judiciary, oligarchs – was rotten and had to be totally destroyed. The idea that the workers’ struggle might be restrained by a judicial injunction would have been laughable. The American left, on the other hand, was fighting to cleanse the existing system and restore what it believed had been there before. Corporate power was recognised as something new, and the left believed that fighting against it was to follow in the footsteps of those who had fought to establish America as the bastion of freedom and democracy.

  A left-wing commentator wrote a revealing description of the socialists who made Milwaukee for a time one of the most efficiently run cities in America: ‘They lived and believed the great American ideals, enriching them with work, labor, and sacrifice, and practical accomplishment. They aren’t in the history books we give our children, but it is barely possible that they are a nobler monument to democracy as well as socialism than all the plutocrats we have found it so fatally easy to admire.’

  If the institutions of democracy made it easier for the left to organise in America than in Russia, it also made it easier for their opponents to control them. There was no need for an Okhrana secret police to uncover the names of dissidents. In 1909 an American soldier named William Buwalda was court-martialled and sentenced to five years in Alcatraz (later commuted to ten months). His offence was to have attended, along with 5,000 members of the general public, a public meeting in San Francisco addressed by the anarchist Emma Goldman, and to have been seen to applaud her speech. Crimes such as this did not require myriads of secret policemen to uncover.

  That is not to say that there was no secret police in America but, characteristically, the American Okhrana was a private corporation. Where the Okhrana owed its loyalty to the Russian autocracy, the Pinkertons owed theirs to the emerging corporate plutocracy. Allan Pinkerton arrived in the United States as a political refugee, having hurriedly left Scotland the day after his marriage to escape arrest for his activities in the populist Chartist movement. Settling in Chicago, he set up the US Secret Service during the civil war and after the war put his expertise at the service of the new oligarchs. An early success for Pinkerton was to infiltrate the Irish trade union movement, the Molly Maguires. Working for the Philadelphia and Reading railroad, Pinkerton’s detectives produced evidence that apparently proved that leaders of the movement had been responsible for murdering the owners of a number of small mining companies, coincidentally competitors of Pinkerton’s employer. In a somewhat dubious trial the Molly Maguires’ leader John Kehoe was one of those found guilty and sentenced to death (although receiving a posthumous pardon from the governor of Pennsylvania more than a century later). When Allan Pinkerton died in 1884 his two sons carried on the company. The presence of Pinkerton undercover agents and armed militia became a feature of industrial unrest well into the next century.

  Labour unrest continued on a significant scale, but the response of the political establishment was far more subtle that that of the tsars. As the robber barons and their corporate successors became more firmly embedded into mainstream American society, their worst excesses caused increasing embarrassment. In 1902 a massive strike by anthracite miners was ended when President Roosevelt turned on the mine-owners and threatened to send in troops to take over their mines. Roosevelt’s actions illustrate why socialist revolution was never likely in America. Although the robber barons controlled great swathes of the economy and pulled the strings of many political puppets, they never had a monopoly of power. Four-yearly presidential elections and the fragmented nature of power in the federal system ensured that there were always areas they could not control, and there always existed the possibility that the oligarchs’ candidates would not achieve the highest office. Vast sections of the American population had no sympathy with striking industrial workers, but equally had little sympathy for their bosses.

  Communism Arrives

  The same was true in Russia, where the mass of the population may have been fed up with the Romanovs but there was no widespread yearning for a Marxist revolution. The Bolsheviks emerged victorious from the scrum of political factions and sects that were left to scramble for power after the abdication of the tsar thanks to two factors above all: luck and Lenin. Most of the other groups believed that someone else would carry them to power. Anarchists and socialists thought that if they created the right conditions a peasant revolution would erupt more or less spontaneously and reshape society. Many on the far right thought that the soldiers and sailors of the imperial army and navy would allow themselves to be used to impose the will of their nominal commanders. The liberals had an awesome faith in the electorate – however limited in size – and the magical power of the ballot box. What Lenin almost uniquely grasped was that power belonged to whichever group could seize it and hold it while remaining beholden to no one else. What was needed for the Bolsheviks to come out on top was iron discipline within the party and a total disregard for everyone outside.

  In 1903 Lenin had split his party by insisting that the only way to achieve their objectives was to create a core of professional revolutionaries inside Russia. The distinctive feature of what came to be called Leninism was the belief that the workers would never mount a revolution on their own; they needed a ‘vanguard’ to show them the way. And once the revolutionary situation arrived the vanguard would need to assume political control in order to ensure that the workers achieved true socialist awareness.

  Although the Bolsheviks described themselves as the vanguard of the proletariat, other groups were often first to the barricades. The Kronstadt sailors were led by an anarchist, Yarchuck, and anarchists were often in the thick of the fighting. What the Bolsheviks had (and what the anarchists lacked almost by definition) was discip
line. Lenin was single-mindedly obsessed with gaining and keeping power. Anyone in his way had to be destroyed, whether tsarist reactionary or anarchist revolutionary. Emma Goldman, the American anarchist leader, who met Lenin after he had established himself in power, was appalled at his persecution of the anarchists who had spearheaded the original revolution. She travelled to Russia in 1919 after being deported from the United States, expecting to find a hero. After meeting him she wrote, ‘Free speech, free Press, the spiritual achievements of centuries, what were they to this man? A Puritan, he was sure his scheme alone could redeem Russia. Those who served his plans were right, the others could not be tolerated.’ Goldman was right to describe Lenin as a ‘Puritan’: he had the same certainty of purpose and disdain for human weakness as the American Puritans who had been equally determined to create a promised land. She found a man whose morality had more in common with the Machiavellian princes of Muscovy than she had expected. The difference between Lenin and his tsarist predecessors was not what he did but why he thought he was doing it: his ideology.

  Lenin represented an ideology as different from his predecessors as the ideology of the early Puritans was from modern corporate America, but America’s ideology changed by evolution not revolution. America had been able to collapse into civil war with both sides claiming to be fighting for their democratic rights. The ideology of democracy was so widely accepted that ideology itself played an almost insignificant part in political debate; in Russia ideology was fundamentally important. The difference between the two societies is vividly illustrated in the books that drove them to action.

  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, four years before Marx became a foreign correspondent of the New York Tribune and Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book Abraham Lincoln claimed had ‘made’ the American Civil War. It would be hard to find two works more different. Stowe’s graphic depiction of the horrors of slavery struck an instant chord around the world, and within ten years 2 million copies had been sold. Largely devoid of analysis, the novel left its readers rocked with tears and anger, determined to abolish a vile stain on the surface of their society, but content once the aberration of slavery had been swept away to leave the underlying economic and racial structures untouched. The impact of the Communist Manifesto was far less immediate but, its partisans would argue, far more profound. Where Harriet Beecher Stowe gave the world tears, Karl Marx gave it theories.

  The core of Marxist theory was the view that history was a sequence of economic stages – slavery, feudalism, capitalism, communism – each leading inevitably on to the next. Capitalism, with its concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few and increasing exploitation of the many, was destined to be destroyed by a revolution of the industrial proletariat, which in turn would lead to a dictatorship of the working class ushering in a socialist society of genuine equality and dignity for all. Once the workers had developed a state of true ‘socialist awareness’ the state would wither away, and society would need to evolve no more.

  Marx outlines his theory in his most important work, Das Kapital, published in 1867. Again its initial impact was far from dramatic. It was two years before a Russian translation appeared, and Marxist ideology seemed so ludicrous that the tsarist regime did not bother censoring it. Twenty years later Marx was being widely read by students and the new intelligentsia but by hardly anyone else, and the Okhrana still regarded the various Marxist groups as light relief compared with the bomb-hurling anarchists. Not until 1896 was there any real indication of what the future might hold; in that year textile workers in St Petersburg went on strike, and among the strike’s organisers was the twenty-six-year-old Marxist Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov: Lenin.

  Lenin was one of several pseudonyms used by one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable men. It derived from the mighty Lena river, which had captured Lenin’s imagination in one of his exiles. He was the son of a schoolteacher father and social worker mother. The family member who most influenced the young Lenin was his brother, who tried to assassinate the tsar in 1887; he failed and was executed. Lenin was soon following in his brother’s footsteps with far greater success – a professional revolutionary travelling throughout Europe to spread the message of Marx. In 1890 at the age of just twenty he translated the Communist Manifesto into Russian.

  Following the publication of works like the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, Social Democratic parties imbued with the ideology of Marxism sprang up across Europe and North America. Over time most of these parties gradually changed their objectives, and by 1914 when the First World War started they were more concerned with the reform of capitalism than its overthrow. There were exceptions to this trend, the most important being the Russian Social Democratic and Labour party dominated by Lenin. To emphasise its difference from the reformist parties elsewhere it adopted a new name – the Communist party.

  Russia now had two competing ideologies: autocracy and communism. After the revolution these two ideologies merged to create a form of society radically different from anything that had gone before, and yet one that on closer inspection had characteristics that had been there for centuries: a single all-powerful autocrat, a disdain for private property and an imperialism that was to be uncannily similar to its predecessor’s. America after the civil war had also witnessed the fusion of two ideologies – its century-old democracy and the new corporate capitalism – but the process was much less dramatic. The society of the robber barons was as different (and as similar) to the society of the Pilgrim Fathers as Stalin’s Russia was to Ivan the Terrible’s but the changes went almost unremarked. The Bolsheviks claimed to have changed everything and yet much stayed the same; the new American oligarchs claimed to have changed nothing and yet a new way of life had emerged. The souls of both nations continued ever changing and ever constant.

  The Bolsheviks set out to destroy not just the Romanov regime but also the whole apparatus of autocracy: they believed that the working class, with the Communist party in the vanguard, would transform every aspect of Russian society, eventually creating the world’s first genuine democracy. But Lenin recognised that the socialist nirvana could not be created overnight and that to gain and keep control the Bolsheviks would need many of the same tools as their predecessors: a strong army, an all-seeing secret police and an absence of free elections. He also grasped the importance of the tools of the future: one of the key events of the Russian Revolution was Lenin’s radio broadcast to the nation on 12 November 1917, which set the stage for the mass propaganda campaigns that would follow under Stalin.

  Lenin realised that even if he crushed all internal opposition his regime would be under constant attack from outside, so he needed to spread his message of revolution. By its very nature Marxism was global. Whereas the Romanovs believed God had entrusted them with a mission to forever expand their empire, Lenin believed that history itself had ordained that the society he was creating would expand to cover the whole world; all societies would pass through feudalism and capitalism to arrive at his doors. Right from the beginning the Bolsheviks were committed to spreading their authority far beyond the borders of Russia, a commitment fulfilled by Stalin’s Red Army at the end of the Second World War. It is open to debate whether the train of history set in motion by Lenin, Trotsky and the other Bolshevik founding fathers was bound to follow the track that ended in Stalinism or whether it might, with different drivers, have turned off, but the fact is that Stalinism is where it ended up. The ideologies of communism and autocracy merged to become a new force, and a new force that was inherently imperialist.

  Exactly the same sort of merging of ideologies – in this case democracy and corporate capitalism – happened in the United States, but with one massive difference. Unlike communism the new ideology across the Atlantic had never proclaimed its intention to destroy the old; indeed it had never proclaimed itself at all. In the half-century or so after the American Civil War an ideology arose t
hat was to shape the world, and yet did so in such an apparently organic way that few recognised what was happening. Even today the ideology has no commonly recognised name.

  The evolution of the ideology of democracy was the most important philosophical development in American history. The evolution of the concept of the corporation was almost as fundamental. The emergence of the corporation as a legal entity with unlimited scope and limited liability made possible a form of imperialism that would change the face of the world.

  Corporatism:A Digression

  It is possible to understand the history of Russian imperialism without understanding the ideology of communism in any depth. Although communist imperialism was not the same as tsarist imperialism, the fundamentals were not dissimilar: they both relied primarily on crude military force, they both served to magnify the authority of the autocrat, they were both opportunistic in scope but particularly fixated on Poland and the west, they both appropriated territory and property in the name of the state. In the end communist imperialism proved to be a transitory phenomenon with little lasting impact, just one more vagary in the history of the Russian empire. By contrast American imperialism in the century between the Spanish-American War and the invasions of Iraq changed almost beyond recognition, and it is impossible to understand this evolution without understanding the ideology of what might be called, for want of a better term, corporatism.