by Will Podmore
WILL PODMORE
Copyright © 2015 by Will Podmore.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2015905304
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-5035-3109-3
Softcover
978-1-5035-3111-6
eBook
978-1-5035-3110-9
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Contents
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Russia, to 1927
Chapter 2 The Soviet Union from 1927 to 1933
Chapter 3 Towards world war
Chapter 4 World War Two
Chapter 5 Stalingrad and victory
Chapter 6 The Soviet Union from 1945 to 1986
Chapter 7 Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989
Chapter 8 China
Chapter 9 Korea
Chapter 10 Vietnam and South-East Asia
Chapter 11 Cuba, to 1990
Chapter 12 The Soviet Union - counter-revolution and catastroika
Chapter 13 Eastern Europe – counter-revolution and war
Chapter 14 Cuba, the Special Period – workers in control
Notes
Bibliography
Introduction
Is history any use? Why should we look back into the past? In particular, why read a book on the history of the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries? Surely all we need to know is that they tried and failed to create an alternative to the free market economy? This book will present evidence that the attempts achieved real progress.
Human beings have created successively freer, more democratic and more prosperous societies. Archaeological evidence has shown that there was never a time of ‘primitive communism’. Even hunter-gatherer societies competed for scarce resources. Societies developed from slavery, to feudalism, then to capitalism. In the 20th century, workers attempted the biggest change of all, creating socialism, the first form of classless society, in which the majority ruled, not the minority.
Reg Birch, the first chairman of the Communist Party of Britain Marxist-Leninist, said, “The Bolshevik Revolution upon which the Soviet Union is established owes its place in history to being the only change in class power from bourgeois to proletariat, the only change of relation of production from capitalist to socialist in the world. This revolutionary development has dictated the role of the Soviet Union in the world irrespective of individual leaders, for it is the relations of production that determines the political superstructure – hence the domestic and international line. … The Bolshevik Revolution still is the most truly historic change in class forces. It represents the power to do by a working class. It is the example and hope for all other workers’ aspiration. It did because of that great historic change accelerate the course of history in the world. Because of it, the Bolshevik Revolution, others were strengthened, invigorated and inspired. As in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Albania and so on.”1
That is why the rulers feared and smeared the Soviet Union. Their hatred of socialism led to more than a century of wars and to grotesque outcomes. From 1947 to 1987, the US Department of Defense spent $7.62 trillion (in 1982 dollars). In 1985, the US Department of Commerce valued US plant, equipment and infrastructure at just over $7.29 trillion. So the USA spent more on destroying things than on making things.
Workers achieved the 20th-century’s revolutions in the most backward pre-industrial societies, largely feudal, and suffering foreign rule and exploitation. Wherever a working class seized power, the capitalist states at once attacked it with every weapon, including war, terrorism and blockade. The ruling classes did all they could to add to the costs of revolution.
So workers had to build their new states when under attack, amid the ruin of war and under constant threat of new war. In so doing, they achieved much, but also, as was bound to happen, they got many things wrong. These first attempts to build socialist societies mostly failed in the end. To create is always harder than not to create. But we can learn from them. The answer to bad decisions is not ‘no decisions’ but better decisions. The answer to bad planning is not ‘no planning’ but better planning.
Societies which had revolutions - Britain in the 1640s, the USA in 1776, France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959 - were very different from societies which had not. For example, China’s wealth, power and independence vastly surpassed its pre-revolutionary past and outstripped other countries in similar circumstances. Revolutions had costs, but the costs of not having a revolution were greater. And some pioneers, like Cuba, still survived against huge odds and remained true to the highest ideals that humanity had created.
These working classes built independent economies and societies. They created wealth through their own labour, without plundering other countries. They played major roles in ending wars, defeating fascism, freeing the colonies and keeping the peace in Europe from 1945 to 1990. By presenting a practical alternative to unrestrained capital, they aided the working classes of other countries to make gains, especially after 1945.
We can learn from the efforts and the errors of the pioneers, even though as pre-industrial colonised societies they were very different from Britain today. The hope is that this book will provoke thought about what the working class needs to do, not to copy but to create.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the staffs at John Harvard Library, Borough High Street, Southwark, especially to Luke, at Park Road Library, Aldersbrook, especially to Matt, at University College London Library, and at the Library of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Thanks to Nick Bateson and Gill Wrobel for their invaluable advice.
Chapter 1
Russia, to 1927
Tsarist Russia
Russia had worse farmland and a worse climate than the USA or Western Europe, so its agricultural productivity was lower than theirs under any system of farming. Only 1.4 per cent of land suitable for cereal cultivation was in an area with the best combination of temperature and moisture, compared to 56 per cent in the USA. 80 per cent of Russia’s cropland lay in a zone of risky agriculture, compared to 20 per cent in the USA. Russia’s growing season was nowhere more than 200 days a year, far less than Western Europe’s 260 to 300 days.1
There were famines throughout Russia’s history, usually every other year. Between 1800 and 1854, crops failed 35 times. Between 1891 and 1910, there were 13 poor harvests, three famine years and only four good harvests.
Before the revolution, 80 per cent of Russia’s people were peasants, at the mercy of landlords and kulaks. A contemporary observer wrote, “this type of man was commonly termed a Koolak, or fist, to symbolize his utter callousness to pity or ruth. And of all the human monsters I have ever met in my travels, I cannot recall any so malignant and odious as the Russian Koolak.”2
&n
bsp; Tsarist Russia was the most backward, least industrialised and poorest of all the European powers. Tsar Nicholas II, a feudal autocrat, ruled. He supported the anti-Semitic Black Hundred terrorist gangs; he wore their badge on state occasions and called them a ‘shining example of justice and order to all men’. The Russian Orthodox Church’s “cathedrals and churches dominated the built landscape, its holy days shaped the calendar, its teaching was embedded in education, and its priests controlled the registration of births, deaths and marriages. Its ethos permeated family law, custom and a patriarchal order in which the status of women depended on that of their menfolk, and in which women were subordinate to men in terms of power, property, employment, pay and access to education.”3
Labour productivity was 20-25 per cent of the USA’s. In 1913, industrial production per head was 7 per cent of the USA’s. Wages were between a third and a quarter of Western Europe’s average. Russia relied on imports for all its iron and steel, for all complex electrical and optical equipment, for many types of machine tools and textile machinery, and for half its agricultural machinery.
But the Russian working class started to organise in the industries that they were building. They created their trade unions at first locally, then regionally and then, in September 1905, held the first all-Russian conference of trade unions. Workers had a growing sense of class unity and a growing belief that they could solve their problems.
World War One
In 1914, the ruling classes of the great powers wanted war. A British officer wrote, “A good big war just now might do a lot of good in killing Socialist nonsense and would probably put a stop to all this labour unrest.”4 The Daily Telegraph enthused, “This war provides our businessmen with such an opportunity as has never come their way before … There is no reason why we should not permanently seize for this country a large proportion of Germany’s export trade.”5
In 1914, in Imperial Russia, only 15 per cent could vote, in France, 29 per cent, in Britain, 18 per cent. Only 22 per cent of Germany’s people could vote, in Austria-Hungary, 21 per cent. None of them was a democracy. There was no democracy in their empires either. The British Empire had 350 million people in its colonies: none could vote. The French Empire numbered 54 million: none could vote. In Germany’s colonies, none could vote. So the war was not a war for democracy.
In July 1914, Russia intervened unnecessarily in a Balkan conflict. France decided to back Russia. Britain followed France’s lead. None of these three allies was attacked or even threatened.6 So the war was not a war of national defence.
All the socialist parties of the Second International had pledged in 1910 to vote against war credits in the event of war. But on 4 August 1914, the German Social-Democrats in the Reichstag voted for the credits. So did the vast majority of Social-Democrats in all Europe’s countries. Workers chose to reject the democratic ideas of 1789 – liberty, equality and fraternity.
Only the Bolshevik party in Russia kept its word and voted against war credits. It opposed this war between rival empires, this war against the peoples of the world, and called on the Russian working class and peasantry to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, to overthrow tsarism and end the war.
The leader of the Bolshevik party, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, launched the idea that the working class of every country could make its own revolution, overthrow the government, stop the war and then build socialism in its country. He stated in 1915, “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organised its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world.”7 He confirmed in 1916, “The development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in the various countries. It cannot be otherwise under the commodity production system. From this it follows irrefutably that Socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will remain bourgeois or prebourgeois for some time.”8
As he said after the revolution, “I know that there are, of course, sages who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries. They do not suspect that by speaking in this way they are deserting the revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense.”9
In April 1917, the Russian state organised pogroms against the Bolsheviks. The new head of the army, General Lavr Kornilov, said, “It is time to put an end to all this. It is time to hang the German agents and spies, with Lenin at their head …”10 In July 1917, the British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan “contacted the Foreign Minister to ask that the government should take advantage of the situation to crush the Bolsheviks once and for all.” He told the Foreign Office, “normal conditions cannot be restored without bloodshed and the sooner we get it over the better.”11
The British and French governments and the ‘socialist’ Alexander Kerensky all backed Kornilov’s attempted coup in August, which aimed to set up a military dictatorship. Buchanan wrote later, “All my sympathies were with Kornilov.”12 British officers, tanks and armoured cars took part in the coup. US Colonel Raymond Robins told a Senate Committee, “English officers had been put in Russian uniforms in some of the English tanks to follow up the Kornilov advance.”13 But the Russian working class defeated Kornilov and his allies.
A popular revolution
The Bolsheviks had massive popular support. As the British government’s Committee to Collect Information on Russia acknowledged, “Alone among this babel of dissentient voices the cries of the Bolsheviks ‘Down with the War’, ‘Peace and the Land’ and ‘The Victory of the Exploited over the Exploiters’ sounded a clear and certain note which went straight to the heart of the people.”14
At the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets in October 1917, the Bolsheviks had 65-70 per cent of the votes. They won 90 per cent majorities in the elections to the workers’ Soviets, 60-70 per cent majorities in the Soldiers’ Soviets, majorities in the Peasants’ Soviets and majorities in the Soviets of Moscow, Petrograd and many other cities. They had the majority of delegates to the First All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees.
Recent historians have confirmed how much support the Bolsheviks had won. Donald Raleigh noted, “In Saratov, as in Petrograd, Moscow, and Baku, the Bolshevik platform of land, peace, and bread and the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ appealed increasingly to common people …”15 The Bolsheviks in Saratov won more than half the votes in elections to city soviets in September 1917. Evan Mawdsley affirmed, “Without doubt the Bolsheviks’ early promises were a basic reason why they were able to seize and consolidate power in 1917-18: their program of Soviet power, peace, land reform, and workers’ control was widely popular.”16 Alexander Statiev agreed, “The Decree on Land ordered the nationalization of all arable land, its confiscation from landlords and the church, and its distribution among peasants in equal parcels per person as a free lease. This agrarian reform proffered immediate and substantial benefits to many at the expense of few. It secured the consent of most peasants and generated vigorous support among the poorest ones.”17
Ronald Suny agreed, “the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 with considerable popular support in the largest cities of the empire – a case, as Terence Emmons puts it, that is ‘incontrovertible’.”18 Suny also wrote, “The Bolsheviks came to power not because they were superior manipulators or cynical opportunists but because their policies as formulated by Lenin in April and shaped by the events of the following months placed them at the head of a genuinely popular movement.”19 Hugh Phillips noted, “in Tve
r, the party gained power peacefully and with the support of the majority of both the citizens and the local garrison.”20 He concluded, “the once-common notion that the Bolsheviks came to power because they duped a politically unsophisticated populace through a Machiavellian conspiracy simply does not wash when one looks at Tver.”21 John Wheeler-Bennett wrote that in March 1917, “There can be little doubt that the Petrograd Soviet represented the feelings of the great masses of the organized wage-earners far more than did the Provisional Government, or that it was trusted in a far greater degree by workers and peasants alike.”22 Robert Service agreed, “There could be no lasting possession of power unless the party had secured widespread popular support.”23 Raleigh summed up, “By the fall of 1917 the wide strata of workers, soldiers, and peasants had concluded that only an all-soviet government could solve the country’s problems.”24
As Rex Wade noted, “Workers moved quickly to create institutions to advance their interests. The Petrograd and other city soviets were especially important as institutions through which the workers could and did pursue their aspirations. The soviets had enormous popular support because they were class-based organs that pursued unabashedly class objectives. The soviets also were the primary institutions where working-class activism interacted with the socialist political parties. Here, parties put forth their respective programs for approval and competed for worker support, while workers influenced the political process by supporting this or that party. The allegiance of the workers (and soldiers) to the soviets, in turn, made the latter the most powerful political institutions in Russia.”25 The soviets won support because, as American historian Karel Berkhoff observed, they respected ‘the self-esteem, independence, and trustworthiness of ordinary people’.26
