iv Hamlets of Democratic Socialism
On s'engage et puis on voit.' Lenin was fond of citing Napoleon's maxim. It perfectly expressed his own revolutionary philosophy: that revolutions did not make themselves, they had to be made by their leaders. History has long ceased to be the record of the achievements of extraordinary men: we are all social
* The 'Directors', apart from Kerensky, were: Tereshchenko (Foreign Affairs); General Verkhov-sky (War); Admiral Verderevsky (Marine); and A. M. Nikirin (Posts and Telegraphs).
historians now. Yet the course of history is full of unexpected turns that can only be explained by the actions of great leaders. This is particularly so in the case of revolutions, when the tide of events can be so easily turned. The October seizure of power is a good example: few historical events in the modern era better illustrate the decisive effect of an individual on the course of history. Without Lenin's intervention it would probably never have happened at all — and the history of the twentieth century would have been very different.
Kerensky's role stands out in stark contrast; he was quite unable to control events. Those who were close to him during these final weeks testify to his growing isolation, his weakness of will, his paralytic fear of the Left, and his fatal indecision in taking suitable measures against it. The constant tension and the sleepless nights of 1917 had taken a heavy toll on him — and he now lived with the help of morphine and cocaine. Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya, the veteran SR and 'grandmother of the revolution', had moved in with Kerensky in the Winter Palace (gossipers called her his 'nanny'). At the end of July the Bolshevik leaders convened in Petrograd for their Sixth Party Conference. She begged Kerensky to arrest them; but he refused, giving the frail excuse that he did not even know where they were meeting. According to David Soskice, Kerensky's private secretary, the grey-haired woman then:
bowed to the ground before Kerensky and repeated several times in solemn imploring tones: 'I beg thee, Alexander Fedorovich, suppress the Conference, suppress the Bolsheviks. I beg thee to do this, or else they will bring ruin on our country and the revolution.' It was a dramatic scene. To see the grandmother of the Russian Revolution who had passed thirty-eight years of her life in prison and in Siberia in her struggle for liberty, to see that highly cultured and noble woman bowing to the ground in the ancient orthodox manner before the young Kerensky. . . was a thing I shall never forget. I looked at Kerensky. His pale face grew still whiter. His eyes reflected the terrible struggle that was proceeding within him. He was silent for long, and at last he said in a low voice: 'How can I do it?' 'Do it, A.F., I beseech thee', and again Babushka bowed to the ground. Kerensky could stand it no longer. He sprang to his feet and seized the telephone. 'I must learn first where the Conference meets and consult Avksentiev', and rang up the Ministry of the Interior. But Avksentiev was not in his office and the matter had to be adjourned for the time. I fancy to Kerensky's great relief.86
The conference went ahead without arrests — and three months later the Bolsheviks came to power.
One of the many remarkable facts about the Bolshevik seizure of
power was that it had been expected for so long without anyone taking the measures needed to prevent it: such was the paralysis of the Provisional Government. During the evening of 25 October, as the ministers of the Provisional Government sat in the Winter Palace waiting for the end, many of them were tempted to curse Kerensky for having failed to destroy the Bolshevik Party after the July Days. The legal suppressions against them had certainly failed to reverse their growing influence. But the truth was that the government had neither the means nor the authority to make repressions work against a movement that was starting to grow deep roots in the mass-based organizations.
The social polarization of the summer gave the Bolsheviks their first real mass following as a party which based its main appeal on the plebeian rejection of all superordinate authority. The Kornilov crisis was the critical turning point, for it seemed to confirm their message that neither peace nor radical social change could be obtained through the politics of compromise with the bourgeoisie. The larger factories in the major cities, where the workers' sense of class solidarity was most developed, were the first to go over in large numbers to the Bolsheviks. By the end of May, the party had already gained control of the Central Bureau of the Factory Committees and, although the Menshevik trade unionists remained in the ascendancy until 1918, it also began to get its resolutions passed at important trade union assemblies. Bolshevik activists in the factories tended to be younger, more working class and much more militant than their Menshevik or SR rivals. This made them attractive to those groups of workers — both among the skilled and the unskilled — who were becoming increasingly prepared to engage in violent strikes, not just for better pay and working conditions but also for the control of the factory environment itself. As their network of party cells at the factory level grew, the Bolsheviks began to build up their membership among the working class, and as a result their finances grew through the new members' contributions. By the Sixth Party Conference at the end of July there were probably 200,000 Bolshevik members, rising to perhaps 350,000 on the eve of October, and the vast majority of these were blue-collar workers.87
The Bolsheviks made dramatic gains in the city Duma elections of August and September. In Petrograd they increased their share of the popular vote from 20 per cent in May to 33 per cent on 20 August. In Moscow, where the Bolsheviks had polled a mere II per cent in June, they swept to victory on 24 September with 51 per cent of the vote, while the SR vote collapsed from 56 per cent to 14 per cent, and the Mensheviks from 12 per cent to 4 per cent. The Kadets, on the other hand, as the only party representing the interests of the bourgeoisie, increased their share of the vote from 17 per cent to 31 per cent. These elections highlighted the political polarization of the country at large — Dan called them the 'civil war returns' — as voters swung to the two
extremes parties with an overt class appeal. The apathy of the uncommitted — particularly those such as petty clerks, traders and shop assistants, who had no obvious class allegiance or party to vote for — had much to do with the Bolshevik success. Six months of fruitless politics and incessant cabinet crises had not encouraged them to place much faith in the ballot box. The democratic parties ran low-key campaigns and huge numbers of voters stayed away from the polling stations. In the Petrograd elections the turn-out was down by a third since May, while in the Moscow elections it was down by nearly half.88 This of course played into the hands of the Bolsheviks, who were far more hungry — and much better organized — to win power than any other party. How many Communist take-overs have been based on the apathy of the voters in a democracy?
A similar swing to the Bolsheviks took place in the Soviets. Here too grass-roots apathy deprived the Mensheviks and the SRs of their early ascendancy. They had only themselves to blame. To begin with, the Soviets had been open and democratic organs, where important decisions were made by the elected assembly. This made their proceedings somewhat chaotic, but it also gave them a sense of excitement and popular creativity. As the Soviet leaders became involved in the responsibilities of government they began to organize the work of the Soviets along bureaucratic lines, and this alienated the mass of the workers from them. The assemblies began to decline in frequency and attendance as the initiative switched to the executives and their quasi-governmental commissions, whose members were increasingly nominated by the party caucuses. From popular organs of direct self-rule, the Soviets were thus already beginning to be transformed into complex bureaucratic structures, although this process is more commonly associated with the period after 1917. At the time, it seemed a natural development: the workers themselves were deemed to lack the political experience required to take on the responsibilities of government, while the Soviet parties, because of their old camaraderie within the revolutionary movement, were automatically assumed to be exempt from the factional abuse of power which such centralization made po
ssible. This of course was naive — and merely played into the hands of the Bolsheviks, the undisputed masters of factional politics, who increasingly employed such tactics to secure control of the Soviet executives. In dozens of provincial Soviets the Bolsheviks managed to gain a majority on the executive, although they were only a minority in the assembly. This was especially common where a Bolshevik-controlled workers' section was merged with a section of soldiers or peasants and, because of its 'leading role' in the revolutionary movement, given more seats on the executive: in the Samara provincial Soviet, for example, the Bolsheviks made up 75 per cent of the executive but only 26 per cent of the assembly.89
But the Bolsheviks' growing domination of the Soviets was not solely
due to their factional scheming: they worked not just from above but also from below. The Soviets' bureaucratization had set them apart from the lives of the ordinary workers, who began to reduce their involvement in the Soviets and either lost all interest in politics or else looked instead to their own ad hoc bodies such as the factory committees to take the initiative. This added strength to the Bolshevik campaign, which was largely channelled through these grass-roots organizations, for the recall of the Menshevik and SR leaders from the Soviets as part of Lenin's drive towards Soviet power. The revitalization of the Soviets in the wake of the Kornilov crisis thus coincided with their radicalization from below, as factories and garrisons recalled the pro-coalition Mensheviks and SRs in favour of those Maximalists (Bolsheviks, Anarchists and Left SRs) calling for the assumption of Soviet power.
As early as August, the Bolsheviks had won control of the Soviets in Ivanovo-Voznesentsk (the 'Russian Manchester'), Kronstadt, Ekaterinburg, Samara and Tsaritsyn. But after the Kornilov crisis many other Soviets followed suit: Riga, Saratov and Moscow itself. Even the Petrograd Soviet fell to the Bolsheviks. On 31 August it passed a Bolshevik motion condemning the coalition politics of the Soviet leaders and calling for the establishment of a Soviet government. Half the delegates eligible to vote had not been present at this historic meeting, though some of the Menshevik and SR delegates had voted against their party leaders. The leaders threatened to resign if the vote was not reversed at a second meeting on 9 September. But once again the Bolshevik motion was carried. Trotsky, appearing for the first time after his release from prison, dealt the decisive rhetorical blow by forcing the Soviet leaders to admit that Kerensky, by this stage widely regarded as a 'counter-revolutionary', was still a member of their executive. On 25 September the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet was completely revamped, with the Bolsheviks occupying four of the seven seats on its executive and Trotsky replacing Chkheidze as its Chairman. This was the beginning of the end. In the words of Sukhanov, the Petrograd Soviet was now Trotsky's guard, ready at a sign from him to storm the coalition'.90
The Bolshevik cause had been greatly strengthened by Trotsky's entry into the party. No one else in the leadership came anywhere near him as a public speaker, and for much of the revolutionary period it was this that made Trotsky, perhaps even more so than Lenin, the best-known Bolshevik leader in the country at large.* Whereas Lenin remained the master strategist of the party, working mainly behind the scenes, Trotsky became its principal source of public
* It had largely been personal rivalry that prevented Trotsky from joining the Bolshevik Party earlier, despite the absence of any real ideological differences between himself and Lenin during 1917. He could not bring himself to surrender to 'Lenin's party' — a party which he had been so critical of in the past. As Lenin once replied when asked what still kept him and Trotsky apart: 'Now don't you know? Ambition, ambition, ambition.' (Balabanoff, My Life, 175—6.)
inspiration. During the weeks leading up to the seizure of power he spoke almost every night before a packed house at the Cirque Moderne. With his sharp ringing voice, his piercing logic and brilliant wit, he held his listeners spellbound with his denunciations of the Provisional Government. There was a literary, almost Homeric, quality to his oratory (some of his speeches were recorded). It stemmed from the expressive skill of his phrasing, the richness of his imagery, the powerful rhythm and pathos of his speech, and, perhaps above all, the simple style of narration which he used to involve his listeners in the moral drama from which he then drew his political conclusions. He was always careful to use examples and comparisons from the real life of his audience. This gave his speeches a familiarity and earned Trotsky the popular reputation of being 'one of us'.91 It was this that gave him his extraordinary power to master the crowd, even sometimes when it was extremely hostile. The incident with Chernov during the July Days was a good example, as were the occasions in the civil war, when Trotsky persuaded dangerous bands of deserters from the Red Army to return to the Front against the Whites.
Trotsky brought the Mezhraionka with him into the party. The Mezh-raionka, or Inter-District group, was a faction of SD Internationalists with good contacts in the Petrograd garrison. Its importance stemmed less from the size of its following (which was certainly fewer than 4,000 members) than from the stature of its leaders. It was really no more than a collection of brilliant generals without an army. Yet in them the Bolsheviks were to gain some of their most talented organizers, theoreticians, polemicists and agitators: Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Antonov-Ovseenko, Ryazanov, Uritsky, Manuilsky, Pokrovsky, Yoffe and Volodarsky. Many of them were set to play a prominent part in the seizure of power and the later development of the Soviet regime.
The rising fortunes of the Bolsheviks during the summer and autumn were essentially due to die fact that they were the only major political party which stood uncompromisingly for Soviet power.* This point bears emphasizing, for one of the most basic misconceptions of the Russian Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were swept to power on a tide of mass support for the party itself. The October insurrection was a coup d'etat, actively supported by a small minority of the population (and indeed opposed by several of the Bolshevik leaders themselves). But it took place amidst a social revolution, which was centred on the popular realization of Soviet power as the negation of the state and the direct self-rule of the people, much as in the ancient peasant ideal of volia. The political vacuum brought about by this social revolution enabled the Bolsheviks to seize power in the cities and consolidate their dictatorship during the
* The Mensheviks and SRs only had minority left-wing factions in favour of a Soviet government, of which more on pages 464—5.
autumn and winter. The slogan All Power to the Soviets!' was a useful tool, a banner of popular legitimation covering the nakedness of Lenin's ambition (which was better expressed as All Power to the Party). Later, as the nature of the Bolshevik dictatorship became apparent, the party faced the growing opposition of precisely those groups in society which in 1917 had rallied behind the Soviet slogan.
The popular demand for Soviet power had never expressed itself in a preference for the dictatorship of any particular party. The torrent of resolutions, petitions and declarations from the factories, the army units and the villages in support of a Soviet government after the Kornilov crisis invariably called on all the socialist parties to take part in its establishment, and often displayed a marked impatience with the factional disputes between them. Their political language had basically remained unchanged since 1905: the dominant image within them was that of 'the people', the narod, in a struggle for freedom against an oppressive regime, the Kerenshchina. The latter, it is true, was now described as 'bourgeois', which no doubt reflected the increased influence of the Marxist agitators and the Bolsheviks in particular. But the basic concept of these resolutions, which these agitators merely articulated in the language of class, remained in essence a popular struggle between 'us' and 'them', the nizy and the verkhi, or the common people and the privileged elite at the head of the government. Their dominant sentiment was one of anger and frustration that nothing concrete had been gained, neither peace, nor bread, nor land, six months after the February Revolution, and that unless a decisive break was ma
de with the bourgeoisie in the coalition there would only be another winter of stagnation.92
What the workers saw in Soviet power, above all, was the chance to control their own factory environment. They wanted to regulate their own shop-floor relations, to set their own wages and working conditions, and combat the 'sabotage', the conspiratorial running-down of production by profit-conscious employers, which many workers blamed for the industrial crisis. In this heightened atmosphere of class war, impatience was growing with the Mensheviks' leadership of the labour movement: their policies of mediating labour disputes and conciliating the employers had failed to stop the rising tide of unemployment. Many workers, especially those under the influence of the Bolsheviks, saw the solution in the sequestration (or nationalization) of their factory by a Workers' State, called 'Soviet Power', which would then set up a management board of workers, technicians and Soviet officials to keep the factory running.* It was part of the growing political consciousness of the workers, the realization that their demands could only be achieved by changing the nature of the state itself.
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 Page 71
