The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Pudovkin’s drama showed how far the image of revolution had altered since the days of Delacroix, and how influential Modernist Marxism had become. His was a violent revolution, but it was also much more modern and scientific even than Delacroix’s. Machines and metal had taken the place of billowing robes and blood-stained flags. Yet in many ways Pudovkin’s story departed from the conventional Modernist Marxism of Kautsky and the German Social Democrats. The hero was not a solid worker, but a peasant who had only recently entered proletarian ranks. Also, Pudovkin’s revolution was not only going to bring social justice; it would inherit a state-building project from a failing regime, and bring modernity to a poor, peasant country.

  Pudovkin’s film was well received by the members of the Bolshevik elite who watched it at its first showing in Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, largely because he had captured the essence of Lenin’s revolution.2 Lenin was trying to forge a new combination of Radical and Modernist Marxism, suitable for a society that orthodox Marxists thought much too backward to experience a revolution. As the French Jacobins had found, it was precisely weak and failing states, with their repressive regimes, angry intelligentsias, urban workers and peasantries, which provided the most fertile ground for revolutions. Lenin was yoking a popular desire for equality with a plan to overcome backwardness, but by the 1920s he and the Bolsheviks had also added a crucial ingredient to the Marxist tradition. A specifically Russian organization, the militant, vanguard ‘party of a new type’ was to become the bearer of revolution and modernity.

  In retrospect, though, Pudovkin’s story was unconvincing. The idea that peasants and workers would move rapidly from a populist socialism, angry at injustices perpetrated by an elite, to become loyal Bolsheviks and dutiful citizens in a modern, planned economy, was a fanciful one. Soon after Lenin had seized power, he understood how much wishful thinking there had been in 1917. As the Jacobins discovered, it was impossible to marry ordinary people’s demands for equality with a project to create a powerful state. The chaos of revolution led many of the Bolsheviks to abandon their temporary flirtation with Radical Marxism. They now embraced a more Modernist Marxism: workers and peasants would have to be subjected to strict discipline. But soon they even realized that this order was unsustainable, and they retreated further, from a revolutionary Radicalism, to Modernist faith in science, to a Pragmatism that appealed to larger groups of the population.

  II

  In May 1896 the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II was celebrated in Moscow with extraordinary pomp – ‘Versailles relived’, according to one contemporary. The Tsar entered the city on a ‘pure white horse’, followed by representatives of subject peoples, each in national costume. The procession also included delegates of the social estates and the local governments (zemstva), as well as foreigners.3 Despite the profusion of social and ethnic groups, though, the procession was designed to stress the empire’s unity. The newspaper Moskovskie Vedomosti declared:

  No one lived his own personal life. Everything fused into one whole, into one soul, pulsing with life, sensing and aware that it was the Russian people. Tsar and people created a great historical deed and, as long as the unity of people and Tsar exists, Rus’ will be great and invincible, unfearing of external and internal enemies.4

  The correspondent was mistaking propaganda for reality. As part of the government’s paternalistic attempts to involve the ordinary people in the coronation events, it had become customary to hold a ‘people’s feast’ on Khodynka Field, featuring plays and games for the entertainment of all. This year, however, more numbers than expected came and too few Cossack troops were deployed to control the crowds. As the festival began, there was panic, and between 1,350 and 2,000 were killed in the crush. The public, domestic and international, were horrified by reports in the press. It was clear that for all his claims to be the head of the invincible Rus’, the Tsar’s government was a poorly managed shambles. Nor was the much-vaunted unity of Tsar and people in evidence. Though Nicholas expressed his regret at the events, the festivities were not cancelled, and that same evening he attended a lavish ball given by the French Ambassador. An English observer wrote, ‘Nero fiddled while Rome was burning, and Nicholas II danced at the French ball on the night of the Khodynskoe massacre.’5 The future Bolshevik worker Semén Kanatchikov, arriving at the festival shortly after the disaster, similarly railed at the ‘irresponsibility’ and ‘impunity’ of the authorities.6 The Khodynka affair was a bad omen for the Tsar – his grandiose pretensions at the coronation had been humiliatingly exposed, and he had responded with insouciant arrogance. There could be no clearer display of despotic decadence.

  As the coronation rituals made clear, the Russian empire at the end of the nineteenth century was proud to be an ancien régime. Indeed, it consciously overtook pre-1789 France as the embodiment of reactionary principles. Paradoxically, its ancien régime was of relatively recent vintage. Just as Enlightenment philosophes were condemning hierarchy and difference, the tsars were entrenching them, and after its defeat of revolutionary France in the Napoleonic wars, the regime self-consciously styled itself the bastion of tradition and autocracy against enlightenment and revolution. Russia continued to be made up of a series of unequal estates, status groups and nationalities, each with their own specific legal privileges and obligations.7 The peasants were notoriously disadvantaged, and before 1861 they were unfree – the last serfs in Europe.

  As the French monarchy discovered in 1789, such a system could persist only so long as the state did not make too many demands of its subjects. But once it sought to compete with rival states – to the West and the East – which could mobilize large, well-trained armies, raise high levels of taxation, and build modern munitions, it had to do the same. Inevitably the peasants, and later the industrial workers and ethnic minorities in the Russian empire, who were expected to make these sacrifices, demanded something in return. If they were to contribute money or their lives to the state, they wanted to be treated with dignity, as valued participants in a common enterprise, not as cannon-fodder or milch-cows.

  A series of military defeats – by the British and Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War (1853–6), by the Japanese (1904–5) and by the Germans in the Great War – forced some of the Tsar’s officials to recognize that the ancien régime was not working; reformers realized that the empire had to become something like a unified nation state, with modern industry and agriculture. The divisions within society had to be overcome and an emotional bond forged between people and the state. Against them, however, were ranged conservatives who feared reform would undermine the monarchy and the hierarchies which were its foundation. The result was a series of unstable compromises, which only partially integrated the population into the political system, and increased popular resentment. Alexander II introduced a series of reforms in the 1850s and 1860s, the most important of which, the emancipation of the serfs, legally freed the peasants. But they still had an inferior legal status, and they did not receive the land they believed was their due. They also continued to be tied to the ancient village ‘commune’ (obshchina) – an ancient institution of local self-regulation – the better to control and tax them. The peasants’ anger at the inequitable settlement, expressed as a populist, almost anarchistic resentment against the state, continued to simmer until the Bolsheviks gave them land in 1917.8

  If the peasantry, a separate estate, remained isolated and discriminated against, the working class was completely excluded from the estate structure, despite its growing size during Russia’s belated industrialization in the 1880s and 1890s. Pudovkin’s ‘Lad’ was typical of the millions who left the increasingly overpopulated countryside for industry in the towns. In the fifty years before 1917 the urban population of Russia quadrupled from 7 to 28 million; and whilst the industrial working class was still a relatively small 3.6 million, it was highly concentrated in the politically important cities. On arriving in the city, workers sometimes joined informal communities, or ‘artels’. The worke
r Kanatchikov remembered his group of fifteen men, who rented an apartment and ate cabbage soup every day together from a common bowl with wooden spoons, celebrating their twice-monthly pay-cheque with ‘wild carousing’.9 But workers were not allowed to organize themselves into trade unions or any larger bodies, at least before 1905, and so the rich culture of the German unions and SPD was completely lacking. However, resentment at poor conditions and treatment remained; indeed the workers’ impotence fuelled it. The worker A. I. Shapovalov recalled in his memoirs his attitude towards his boss:

  At the sight of his fat belly and healthy red face I not only did not take off my hat, but in my eyes, against my will, there flared up a terrible fire of hatred when I saw him. I had the mindless idea of grabbing him by the throat, throwing him to the ground, and stamping on his fat belly with my feet.10

  Eventually, Kanatchikov and Shapovalov, and many other so-called ‘conscious’ workers, decided to act on their anger by joining a larger organization. But it was to the radical intelligentsia that they looked for leadership – another group excluded from the estate system, and determined to overcome Russia’s divisions and accelerate its modernization.

  III

  From the middle of the 1860s, the Russian authorities became worried about a new fashion amongst young educated people: women were escaping their highly restrictive families by contracting fictitious marriages; the newly-weds would then separate after the wedding, or live together without consummating the relationship. The police were also concerned with what they saw as a related phenomenon: the popularity of the ménage à trois. They located the roots of this subversive behaviour in an extraordinarily influential, though poorly written, novel published in 1863, What is to be Done? From Tales of New People, by the Russian socialist intellectual Nikolai Chernyshevskii.11

  The impact of Chernyshevskii’s novel amongst young educated people was comparable to the influence of Rousseau’s novels before the French Revolution; this was not accidental, for Chernyshevskii set out to produce a Russified, socialist version of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse.12 Chernyshevskii told the story of a woman, Vera, whose authoritarian parents, like Julie’s, want her to accept a loveless, arranged marriage. Vera is rescued by Lopukhov, a Saint-Preux-like tutor, who lives with her in a chaste quasi-marriage, but she subsequently marries his friend, Kirsanov. After a short period when they live together as a ménage à trois, Lopukhov leaves, to return later and live, now married to another, with Vera and Kirsanov in a harmonious joint family.

  The novel also presents several Romantic socialist utopias. In one Vera and Lopukhov set up a cooperative workshop and a commune of seam-stresses. In another, Vera dreams of a society of rationally organized, communal labour; men and women live in a huge iron and glass palace full of technological wonders including, prophetically, air-conditioning and light-bulbs, modelled on London’s Crystal Palace which Chernyshevskii had once seen from a distance. His characters work joyously in the fields by day, happy because most of the work is done by machines; and in the evenings they have lavish balls, dressed in Greek robes of ‘the refined Athenian period’.13

  We do not know how seriously Chernyshevskii wanted his readers to take these socialist and revolutionary ideas.14 The novel was written in an obscure style to evade the censors. Yet What is to be Done?, like Rousseau’s writings, had an enormous effect on young men and women because it showed an alternative to their everyday experience of hierarchy, subordination and social division; just as Robespierre thanked Rousseau for revealing his innate dignity to him, so Russian youths praised Chernyshevskii for showing them how to live their lives as ‘new people’ – in equality, standing up to supercilious aristocrats, escaping their controlling families and devoting themselves to the common good. The appeal of the ‘new man’ is shown in the story told of Lopukhov, when he finds himself sharing a St Petersburg pavement with an arrogant dignitary. Rather than giving way to him, he picks him up bodily and, whilst maintaining absolute self-discipline and formal politeness, deposits him in the gutter, cheered on by two passing peasants.

  Chernyshevskii, like most Russian socialists of the time, was deeply hostile to Russian nationalism. But his view that the ancien régime was an affront to ordinary men and women’s dignity resonated deeply at a time when Russia itself was being humiliated by foreign rivals, just as Rousseau’s ideas had appealed to youths desperate to revive French power. Chernyshevskii was convinced that Russia was weak because its hierarchies made men servile. Everybody had to adopt an obsequious, sycophantic manner, and social solidarity was impossible. These ‘Asiatic values’ (aziatchina) had corrupted Russians’ personalities and behaviour.15

  Chernyshevskii, however, departed from Rousseau in insisting that Russia could only escape its humiliation by becoming more modern, and more like the West. He therefore combined a Rousseauian interest in egalitarian utopias with a Marx-like interest in a modern socialism and revolution. For alongside Vera and her fellow ‘new people’, What is to be Done? introduced a ‘special person’, committed to focused, purposeful political action – the ascetic revolutionary Rakhmetov.

  The novel suggests that Chernyshevskii did not entirely approve of Rakhmetov, but his readers found him an exciting figure.16 He hails from an ancient aristocratic family, and significantly he is of mixed Eastern and Western – Tartar and Russian – blood. He also has the dual virtues of both the intellectual and the man of the people. Though well-read in French and German literature, he is also a self-strengthener. At seventeen he resolves to transform his physique, following a diet involving raw beefsteak, and even becomes a boat-hauler on the Volga. He then goes to university, where he meets Kirsanov, but he continues to lead an austere life, eating the diet of the common people – apples rather than apricots (though he does allow himself oranges in St Petersburg). He abstains from drink, and even subjects himself to self-inflicted tortures, lying on a bed of nails so that he can know what he is capable of. His whole life is dedicated to the service of the people. He reads only books that will be useful, spurning frivolous works such as Macaulay’s History of England. His utilitarianism also extends to personal relations. He only speaks to people who have authority with others, bidding a dismissive ‘Excuse me, I have no time’ to anyone less weighty.17

  Rakhmetov deploys these single-minded qualities to foment revolution in Russia, and understandably many readers saw What is to be Done? as an appeal to emulate him. ‘Great is the mass of good and honest men, but Rakhmetovs are rare,’ the novel declares. ‘They are few in number, but they put others in a position to breathe, who without them would have been suffocated.’18 Chernyshevskii seemed to have been calling for an elite organization of modern, rational people, who also had an affinity with the common folk. They alone could overthrow the old weak and unequal order.

  Chernyshevskii’s characters were viciously satirized in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, published in 1864. His ‘Underground Man’ emulates Lopukhov’s assertion of dignity by refusing to give way to an officer in the street. But after days of planning the confrontation, his attempts end in comic failure; when he finally does brush against the baffled officer, it is not clear that the arrogant grandee has even noticed his revolutionary gesture.19

  Dostoyevsky’s cynical response, however, was unusual, at least among the young, and Chernyshevskii’s work became a holy book for generations of radical Russian students. Alexander II’s reforms liberalized and expanded the universities, opening the way for non-nobles to become students. The government hoped that they would make their way up the ranks of the imperial bureaucracy and bring new talent to government. In practice a new radical student culture emerged, intolerant of the tsarist regime’s obscurantism, committed to science, and determined to liberate the people. Radicalism in the 1860s and 1870s became a lifestyle, much as it did in Western universities in the 1960s and 1970s. Students challenged authority by using direct, disrespectful speech, and wearing shabby, ‘poor’ clothes. One remembered that the me
dical students were the most political group, and expressed their opinions openly: ‘Blue glasses, long hair, red shirts not tucked in but belted with sashes – these were surely medical students.’ Radical women students, meanwhile, wore puritanical black dresses and short cropped hair. This counter-uniform helped to forge a moral community, a group of ‘apostles of knowledge’, committed to using their privileged education to help the benighted people.20

  However, sharp disagreements over how best to bring socialism emerged amongst the students. One remembered the two views competing for the students’ loyalty:

  It is a debt of honour before the people we want to serve that we receive a solid, scientific, well-rounded, and serious education; only then can we assume with a clear conscience the spiritual leadership of the revolution.