The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  It had become clear by early 1918, as it had in France at the end of 1793, that the goals of the popular and elite revolutions were diverging; Lenin’s Marxist synthesis was disintegrating. But Lenin did not adopt Robespierre’s course and launch a moral reformation or reign of virtue. Rather, he reverted to technocratic type, abandoning his short-lived Radical Marxism for a severe Modernist version. In March–April 1918 he announced his retreat from the ‘commune-state’ and the citizens’ militia model of socialism. Lenin now declared that his earlier optimism about the working class had been misplaced. The Russian worker was a ‘bad worker compared with people in advanced countries’ and could not be trusted with workers’ democracy. Lenin’s solution was the creation of a ‘harmonious’, economic machine, run by experts – bourgeois if necessary – and based on the principles of the latest technology. If workers were ‘mature’ enough, this would only amount to the ‘mild leadership of a conductor of an orchestra’; until then individual bosses and experts must exercise ‘dictatorial power’.86

  Lenin had learnt the lesson of Brest-Litovsk. As he wrote at the time: ‘The war taught us much… that those who have the best technology, organization, discipline and the best machines emerge on top… It is necessary to master the highest technology or be crushed.’87 He now turned from the example of the Paris Commune to the system of the American ‘scientific management’ theorist Frederick W. Taylor, used in Henry Ford’s car plants in the United States. Taylor deployed experts with stop-watches, dividing workers’ tasks up into precise movements, timing them to the second and paying them according to how much they had produced. Previously Lenin had condemned this system as typical of a brutalizing capitalism. But now there was no longer room for such radical notions; workers’ enthusiasm and creativity would not revive the economy. They had to be encouraged by the carrot – money – and the stick – labour discipline.88 The old hated bourgeois experts would have to be given back their power and higher wages; in the army that meant restoring the old imperial officers and disbanding soldiers’ committees. The ‘red guard’ assault on the bourgeoisie, Lenin now declared, was over.

  Lenin justified his ‘retreat’ from the promises of 1917 by recourse to Marxist theory. The Bolsheviks, he asserted, had been overambitious to talk about workers’ democracy, especially in the absence of world revolution; the time was not yet ripe for the withering of the state, which would only arrive with full Communism.89 Lenin’s new vision, of a modern state with powers over the economy, was closer to Marx’s lower stage of ‘socialism’ than to his higher stage of ‘Communism’.90 But Lenin had transformed Marx’s vision in a crucial way: modernity would be brought by the elite vanguard party, which now had to transfer its attention from revolution to state-building.91 Over the next few years, the party was to centralize power in its own hands, emasculating or destroying the elected soviets and committees that had made the revolution.

  The Bolsheviks’ vision of modernity was not only one of heavy industry and hard work. It included a commitment to mass education, welfare, the end of religion and the emancipation of women – though little progress was made on much of this programme, especially that relating to women’s equality.92 But Bolshevism’s technocratic culture was unmistakeable, and some took it to extremes. Aleksei Gastev, a metal-worker before 1917 and a poet, the ‘Ovid of engineers, miners and metal-workers’, was one of the most committed propagandists of the Taylorist system. In his most popular poem published in 1914, ‘We Grow out of Iron’, he described a worker growing into a giant, merging with the factory with ‘new iron blood’ flowing into his veins, but after the revolution he sought to combine man and machine in more practical ways.93 As a board member, alongside Lenin and Trotsky, of the ‘League for the Scientific Organization of Labour’ founded in 1921 – a vigilante body which sought to expose time-wasting and laziness in factories and offices94 – Gastev embraced a new world in which workers would become anonymous cogs, ‘permitting the classification of an individual proletarian unit as A, B, C, or 325, 0.075, 0, and so on’; ‘Machines from being managed will become managers’ and the movement of workers would become

  similar to the movement of things, in which there is no longer any individual face but only regular, uniform steps and faces devoid of expression, of a soul, of lyricism, of emotion, measured not by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speed gauge.95

  This horrifying utopia was satirized by the writer Evgenii Zamiatin in his science fiction novel We, written in 1920–1 (and first published outside the USSR in 1924), an important influence on Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.96 And yet it was not this vision that prevailed, much as Lenin may have wanted it to. The system that emerged after 1918 was less the factory-style socialism of Modernist Marxism than a union of Marx and Mars. This was the system that the Bolsheviks’ detractors described as ‘barracks communism’, and they themselves came to describe as ‘war communism’ – a form of Communism that was to have an influence on the Soviet model well into the future. The pure, white horse of Nicholas II had been replaced by Babel’s Red Cavalry, not by Lenin’s bronze horsemen.

  After a brief respite following the Brest-Litovsk peace of March 1918, a combination of SR rebels and former tsarist army officers (the ‘Whites’), bolstered by British and other allied help, challenged the Reds. The Bolsheviks were faced with a full-scale civil war that erupted across the former Russian empire. They responded by embracing wartime methods with gusto, but they also moved away from the decentralized civilian militia style of military organization towards a new, more conventional military one, as had the Jacobins. Trotsky founded the ‘Red Army’; he dissolved the soldiers’ committees, banned the election of officers, and appointed ‘military experts’ – a euphemism for the former tsarist officers. By the end of the civil war, three quarters of officers were from the old officer corps. Meanwhile the harsh discipline, so unpopular in the hands of the old regime, returned.97

  Many of the other practices of wartime also returned, reinforced by Marxist ideology. Spying and surveillance of popular opinion was one. During and after World War I many European powers, including the Russian Provisional Government and later the Whites, became anxious about the mood of the population. They both produced propaganda and employed officials to check up on its effectiveness. The Bolsheviks did the same, though unlike Western powers they maintained this spying even after war started to wind down – for they had broader ambitions to transform society and create ‘new socialist people’. The Cheka – the new secret police – soon took over from the military in this role, and by 1920 the Bolsheviks employed 10,000 people to open letters and write reports on popular opinion.98

  The Bolsheviks also used wartime methods to control the economy, though as Marxists they were even more hostile to the market than their predecessors. They imposed high grain quotas on the countryside and tried to ban private trade. The Cheka arrested ‘baggers’, who illegally sought to bring food to sell in the towns, and the authorities rationed much of the food in urban areas. Inflation and shortages had rendered money worthless. However, some hailed these developments as the achievement of a Marxist goal: the end of the market and money, and the state’s control over the whole economy. Trotsky tried to show how this extreme manifestation of state power was compatible with the ultimate withering away of the state:

  Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. the most ruthless form of the state, which embraces the life of the citizen authoritatively in every direction.99

  However, ‘war communism’ did not merely consist of brute discipline. When it came to their supporters, the Bolsheviks could be more populist. Trotsky’s Red Army was not a mere copy of conventional Western armies but tried to combine discipline with at least some remnants of the populist spirit of the early revolutionary era. By 1919 the Bolsheviks had begun to solve the problem of military recruitment, which had bedevill
ed their tsarist and liberal predecessors, by giving a range of incentives to peasants, from guaranteed rations for their families, to education and land for themselves and their children. The Bolsheviks’ continuing message of class struggle also appealed to many soldiers, and an elaborate propaganda and educational department was established to bring the Marxist worldview to the men.100 Abstract language was translated into terms comprehensible to peasants. So, a cartoon in the peasant journal Bednota (Poverty) showed a peasant boy covered with spiders and leeches labelled ‘landowner’, ‘priest’ and ‘interventionist’.101 Soldiers were taught a Manichaean worldview with struggle and conflict at its centre. Even their biology lessons included a discussion of ‘animals that are friends and animals that are enemies of humans’.102

  By 1921, the Red Army numbered a massive 5 million men. It became a bulwark of the new regime, the germ of a new society within the old. The urban Bolsheviks, having come to power with a deep suspicion of the countryside, had created a new power-base amongst peasant army recruits, many of them young men at the bottom of the patriarchal village hierarchy.103 After the civil war, many of these veterans went on to staff the party and state bureaucracies. The experience of war, and the militarized culture it produced, was to shape Soviet Communism, and the politics it projected around the world, for decades to come.

  It was Trotsky (and, as will be seen, Stalin), rather than Lenin, who really revelled in this military culture. Lenin hoped to move from class revenge to a society of dutiful workers who had internalized ‘real bourgeois culture’, instilled by a modern and educated Communist party.104 But this was unlikely to happen at a time of fratricidal conflict, and the Bolsheviks’ own rhetoric was still full of revolutionary violence. From the summer of 1918 Lenin, like Robespierre towards the end of 1793, tried to control the terror, channelling it against the Bolsheviks’ political opponents and discouraging its use as an attack on the whole bourgeoisie ‘as a class’. However, local authorities continued to persecute indiscriminately.105 During the civil war hundreds of thousands of people were executed by the Cheka and internal security troops, many of them described as ‘rebellious’ peasants.106

  Whilst many Red Army soldiers may have been enthused by the Bolshevik message, other groups were deeply alienated. Peasants, whose main concern was local autonomy, were especially hostile to Bolshevik exactions.107 Yet however brutal the Bolsheviks were, they could plausibly claim that they were merely fighting fire with fire. For the Whites also pursued campaigns of violent revenge against Jews, Communist sympathizers and peasants who refused to enrol in their armies. The Whites were distinctly ambiguous on the land question, and peasants were convinced that they would reverse what for them was the main gain of the revolution – the redistribution of the gentry’s estates. So whilst many certainly believed that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the ideals of 1917, many also saw them as the main bulwark against a return of the aristocracy and the tsar.108 As the famous Red Army marching song warned:

  White army, black baron,

  Again prepare for us the tsarist throne.

  But from the taiga to the British seas,

  The Red Army is strongest of all.109

  As long as the Whites were a threat, the Reds seemed like a lesser evil. The Menshevik Martov certainly found this ambivalence when he tried to convert workers to Menshevism in early 1920: ‘So long as we denounced Bolshevism, we were applauded; as soon as we went on to say that a changed regime was needed to fight Denikin successfully our audience turned cold or even hostile.’110

  The real crisis for the Bolsheviks came when the Whites were finally defeated in the spring of 1920; military methods no longer seemed justified. Yet Trotsky, far from giving up his vision, argued that military methods had to be extended to society as a whole, in peacetime. He set demobilized soldiers to work on economic projects, and took over the railways, seeking to apply top-down military organization and discipline. The ‘labour front’ was to become yet another military campaign, the whole population mobilized into labour brigades. Men and women would work ‘to the sound of socialist hymns and songs’.111 At the same time, he called for the economy to be subjected to a single rational ‘plan’.

  Trotsky came under attack from the Radical Marxist wing of the Bolshevik party on the left, who disliked his use of tsarist officers and favoured a more egalitarian model of society. A number of groups on the left – the ‘Left Communists’, the ‘Workers’ Opposition’ – condemned the party leadership for betraying its promises of ‘workers’ democracy’ and anti-bourgeois struggle. Meanwhile Bogdanov and his allies – more interested in Romantic, utopian ideas of workers’ cooperation and creativity than the conquest of political power – set up ‘proletarian culture’ organizations (Proletkults), which they believed would foster workers’ naturally collectivist psychology.112 Lenin banned Proletkults, seeing them as a rival to the party, and the political left was easily outvoted, but it remained a constant thorn in Lenin’s side.

  However, even Lenin resisted Trotsky’s more ambitious projects. He was right to be sceptical. The Russian state was no more able to organize an efficient economic machine than it had been before the October revolution. Indeed, it was probably less able to. As it took over all areas of economic and social activity, it became a Hydra of proliferating, overlapping and competing organizations. At the same time, officials used their increased power for private gain, with corruption blackening the reputation of the regime. Everybody bemoaned the problem of careerist, amoral and uncontrollable bureaucrats. The Saratov Cheka described one party organization as a ‘mob of drunks and card sharks’, and Timofei Sapronov, a leftist Bolshevik, complained that ‘in many places the word “communist” is a term of abuse’ because officials lived in ‘bourgeois’ luxury.113

  The hypocrisy of socialist officials living the high life only intensified popular dissatisfaction with the intrusive Bolshevik state. The harvest of 1920 was a poor one, and by the spring of 1921 much of rural Russia was starving. As in 1905 and 1917, shortages of food fuelled a potentially revolutionary insurgency. Peasants rebelled against state grain procurement throughout the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia. The most serious uprising was in Tambov, where the rebels called for a soviet power free of Bolshevik repression. They united behind a series of rather confused slogans: ‘Long live Lenin, down with Trotsky!’ and ‘Long live the Bolsheviks, death to the Communists!’114

  Unrest soon spread to the towns and, most dangerously for the Bolsheviks, to the Kronstadt naval base, on an island near Petrograd. The Kronstadters had for long been on the more radical wing of the revolution. They had been ruled until the summer of 1918 by a coalition of radical leftist parties, and now demanded a return to rule by a freely elected soviet. They did not call for the overthrow of the Bolsheviks, but for an end to ‘war communism’, the destruction of Taylorism, and a return to the old ideals of October 1917.115 At the beginning of March 1921, the rebels organized new elections and for over two weeks created a mini commune-state. It looked as if a populist socialist revolution was brewing – a ‘third revolution’ – but this time the Bolsheviks would be its victims, not its beneficiaries.116 At precisely this time the tenth party congress was meeting, and Lenin faced a challenge within the party, from the Bolshevik left.

  Lenin was faced with a stark choice. It was clear that the divisive ‘war communism’ model, with its heavy reliance on state power and coercion, had failed. The idea that the Russian people would work as cogs in an efficient machine was a fantasy, as was Trotsky’s dream of universal soldierly enthusiasm. Marx’s ‘socialist’ lower stage of Communism – centralized state control without the market – which war communism most closely resembled, was clearly not suited to Russia in 1921. This left a dilemma for the Bolsheviks. They could either return to the ‘commune-state’ of 1917 – an ‘advance’ towards Communism in Marxist terms – and rely yet again on working-class mobilization. Or they could ‘retreat’ towards capitalism. Lenin’s choice was never in dou
bt. The commune-state would only hasten disintegration and chaos, and was incompatible with the Bolsheviks’ modernizing ambitions. It also would not solve the main economic crisis, the shortage of food. It had become clear that the market alone would give peasants the incentives to grow grain. Lenin, unwillingly, was forced to allow peasant demands to sell grain on the open market. Shortly after he announced the ‘New Economic Policy’ (NEP), Bolshevik troops brutally put down the Kronstadt rebellion; at the same time a ‘ban on factions’ suppressed the leftist groups within the party, and the leadership ordered the first party ‘purge’ (chistka – or ‘cleansing’) of the politically unreliable and the class ‘impure’. In 1918 the Bolsheviks had responded to the regime’s near-collapse by centralizing power in the hands of the party; in 1921 they reacted to a second crisis by disciplining the party itself.

  Lenin conceded that he had ‘retreated’ from the economic ambitions of 1919–20. ‘We made a mistake,’ he admitted, in thinking that the regime could eliminate the market, and moved too rapidly towards Communism. The Bolsheviks, he argued, had to adopt ‘state capitalism’.117 Lenin was worried about the reaction within the party, and insisted that full-blown capitalism was not on the cards; the heavy industry at the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy would still be nationalized. But the free market in grain had a cascade of effects throughout the economy:118 private traders – ‘nepmen’ – had to be permitted to operate, to supply grain to the towns; factories producing consumer goods, like textiles, had to be denationalized to produce goods peasants might want to buy in exchange for their grain. Subsidies to nationalized industries had to be cut, to control inflation – vital if peasants were to trust the currency. As a result, wages had to be cut, labour discipline tightened, and the power of managers and bourgeois specialists strengthened. The position of workers further deteriorated, and unemployment increased. For many workers and some Bolsheviks, this looked just like the old capitalist order. NEP had become the ‘New Exploitation of the Proletariat’. What had happened to socialism?