“Second Congress of the Communist International” (1924) by Isaak Brodsky. (c) Wolfgang Kumm/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

In the Soviet period, the October Revolution played the role of foundation myth, but the Russian authorities today prefer to talk about it less: the commemoration of these century-old events is a reminder that no empire lasts forever.

oDR spoke to Maria Lipman, a political analyst and editor-in-chief of the Washington-based journal Counterpoint, about whether Russia can achieve unity without confronting the truth about 1917.

What kind of truth about 1917 are the Russian authorities trying to pass over today? What is it and why do we need it now, in 2017?
Maria Lipman: This isn’t an easy question: how is national memory created, and in particular, a memory of the Bolshevik or as it was called in the Soviet period, the Great October Revolution? Several conflicting discourses around this landmark event co-exist in Russia today.

The Communist Party of The Russian Federation, for example, hasn’t moved an inch from its traditional position, continuing to glorify the revolution, Lenin and Stalin. It still sees the Soviet era as a time of magnificent achievements, the liberation of work and people, the transformation of an agrarian country into an industrial one, and so on. Its main emphasis continues to be on achievements in all spheres.

“This anniversary and its commemoration will also pass, and with them the need to say something about the Revolution”

Then there is the very different perspective of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), which is a very important institution: in terms of public trust it comes in at fourth place, after the president, the FSB and the army. The ROC regards the October Revolution as an unmitigated tragedy: for it, 1917 was the starting date for its persecution, the repression of believers and murder of Russia’s first “new martyrs”, Orthodox priests who were executed. The ROC has also canonised Russia’s last Tsar, Nicolas II, and his family as “new martyrs”.

Icon depicting the Martyrdom of Metropolitan St Kirill Smirnov of Kazan the New Martyr (1863-1937).

At the same time, today’s Federal Security Service (FSB) sees itself as the proud successor of the Soviet security police bodies known successively as the Cheka, NKVD and KGB. Its officers even call themselves Chekists [from Cheka], proud of their predecessors who executed the Tsar. These various visions of the past are so contradictory, it feels as if they can’t exist side-by-side. So it’s impossible to give a single, definitive answer to the question of what the February and October Revolutions mean to Russia today. Opacity, uncertainty, prevarication — this is the approach to history, the controversial moments of history, that the Russian government, presidential administration, the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin have chosen. We don’t speak about to avoid exacerbating the contradictions, we tolerate a very broad spectrum of views among those who are loyal to the authorities and prepared to support them on important issues.

But then 2017, the 100th anniversary, came around. You need to talk about it somehow. Putin is not a big fan of the early Bolsheviks. He has admitted this two or three times in passing, as something of slight importance. The Bolsheviks came to power because of the weakness of the Tsarist state; they were instrumental in its downfall, a fact that flies in the face of Putin’s perception of the crucial importance of strong state in Russia. But politically, Putin needs the support of both the communists and the ROC.

On the eve of the centenary, it was essential to come up with some statement about the Revolution. The political experts expected Putin to say something at his annual Address to the Federal Assembly at the end of 2016, but he again expressed himself very equivocally, talking about the importance of national reconciliation and unity, although he did remark that the Russian people needed an honest and profound analysis of the Revolution. He has spoken of “reconciliation” on numerous occasions, going back to an article published under his name at the end of 1999, entitled “Russia at the turn of the Millennium”. But at the very end of this October Dmitry Peskov, the president’s press secretary, announced that the Kremlin was not planning any events connected with the anniversary and added that he didn’t even know “what we actually have to celebrate”.

I am not going to respond to the question of why Russia needs to remember the October Revolution. I don’t feel entitled to give Russians any advice on anything.

But the actual question we asked was a little different: what truth about the revolution has still not been revealed? What truths are being silenced, avoided?
ML: We’re lacking truth of any kind. It’s not a question of a definitive truth, Truth with a capital letter. It just seems odd and wrong that neither the Russian government, nor society, has any common narrative, whatever that might be, about this supreme event of the 20th century. An event that turned not only Russia, but in some senses the entire world, upside down. In the Soviet period, the “truth” consisted of the fact that the revolution was the central event of Russia’s national history and the beginning of Soviet statehood. We had our foundation myth — the October Revolution, our founding father in Lenin, our pantheon of historical heroes and a date, 7 November, for our main national holiday.

“The government is solving a purely political problem — to avoid further public conflicts and therefore minimise the risk to itself”

Of course, we can’t remain at Soviet positions. The Soviet period is inseparably linked to the Revolution that spawned it. It was a period of totalitarianism, when the people had one unalterable truth dictated to them from “above”. For Putin, revolution is unacceptable. He is an anti-revolutionary leader: the idea that a popular uprising might overthrow the government is an absolutely unthinkable historical construct, exacerbated by the recent “colour” revolutions which he believes were inspired by the west. To contend, however, that the revolution was a manifestation of evil, a catastrophe, as the ROC sees it, is also impossible, because you then have to decide how to view the rest of the Soviet period, the “good”, acceptable USSR. If you start to formulate all this clearly, you leave yourself very little room for manoeuvre. This is why Putin, the current regime, has one option — not to articulate anything.

Then there’s another question that hasn’t been answered: what do you so with the pre-Soviet period? You can’t, after all, claim that pre-revolutionary Russia was a great place and should have stayed the way it was. You can’t pretend that the Revolution happened out of the blue: Russia had an archaic regime that didn’t want to reform itself. The Revolution came to a head because the system didn’t align with society’s needs for development. And in any case, today’s Russians are the descendents of Soviet Russia, not pre-revolutionary Russia. They were annihilated, and any who survived had to flee abroad.

The chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Gennady Zyuganov, hands out orders during a meeting of the jubilee committee on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution in Moscow, Russia. (c) Emile Alain Ducke/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

So I don’t know what kind of truth is needed here. Objectively, it’s a problem that cannot be solved. We could probably, however, talk about how these questions need to be addressed as part of a nationwide discussion. That way we could come to a relative consensus on how to talk about this subject. But we only have two known points of view on this — the communist and the Orthodox. There are probably a whole range of other viewpoints between these two, but they don’t fit together. Meanwhile, the government is solving a purely political problem — to avoid further public conflicts and therefore minimise the risk to itself.

This anniversary and its commemoration will also pass, and with them the need to say something about the Revolution. In the future, we won’t have to talk about it again. But the problem is that the future development of the country will depend on it having stable foundations. We’re developing, but into who? Like a country that has overcome communism? No, that’s not working for some reason. There was an attempt in the early 1990s, but nothing came of it. Or are we a country that has re-united with its Soviet past? That isn’t happening either. There is still a certain lack of definition in our very nation building project: are we an empire or a civic nation? This is not the only reason why Russia has developmental problems, but it is an important one.

Of course, as an individual, a person with my own ideas about the Russia in which I live and the Soviet Union in which I used to live, I would like society to come to at least some kind of consensus on condemning Communist terror. Today, it seems that the authorities are talking about this: this year has seen the opening of a monument to victims of the Great Terror at Butovo, outside Moscow, where mass shootings took place in 1937-8. Another monument, created on the order of Putin himself, was unveiled on Moscow’s Andrei Sakharov Avenue on 30 October, the memorial day for victims of political repression. The president was present at the unveiling and spoke again of overcoming the national split, reconciliation and mutual forgiveness. But this memorial, this immortalisation is much more modest in scope.

“What ‘mutual forgiveness’ are we talking about, when nothing is being said about executioners and the reasons for this mass national self-destruction”

But what “mutual forgiveness” are we talking about, when nothing is being said about executioners and the reasons for this mass national self-destruction, and when FSB officers call themselves Chekists and occupy the same building on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, where the cellars were used for shooting innocent people. The government tells the public that they may mourn the victims of the Terror, but shouldn’t discuss what happened and why the Soviet people spent decades in self-destruction. Instead, we are invited to “draw a line” under it all.

The case of Yury Dmitryev, the Gulag historian arrested on spurious pornographic charges, is interesting in this context: it shows that whenever someone tries to initiate a discussion on this subject — not even reopen one but start from scratch — they are immediately stopped. We open a monument to the repressed with one hand, and imprison Dmitriyev with the other.
ML: With one hand and the other — this is exactly what I think is important to recognise. I don’t know how we can get round it in today’s Russia, with today’s government and the history of Putin’s presidency, not to mention his own past as a KGB operative and his perception of what a state should be. But what you just said seems to sum it up. One hand does one thing. The other does another. At the same time. And both hands belong, of course, to the administration, the ruling circle or government loyalists. And given that both Vladimir Zyuganov, the head of the Russian Communist Party and the ROC hierarchy are loyalists in their own way, it means that totally incompatible views can co-exist under the umbrella of loyalty.

We should perhaps think about why Yury Dmitriyev became a victim: the government, after all, is sanctioning the preservation and immortalisation of the memory of victims of repression, at least up to a certain point. And especially now, with the erection of the monument on Sakharov Avenue, it’s as though the authorities themselves are preserving it.

“Wondering, reflecting on why it all happened — that’s not a question the Orthodox Church will ask. The Kremlin can rely on it not to. Here the task is to have victims without executioners”

This is the tendency now: the government “authorises” the ROC to be responsible for preserving the memory of victims of repression. This is very convenient: in the first place, because the Church is loyal to the government and in the second, because weeping for and mourning the dead is a basic function of the church. But wondering, reflecting on why it all happened — that’s not a question the church will ask. The Kremlin can rely on it not to. Here the task is to have victims without executioners.

Talking about the people who carried out the executions — who they were, why it happened, why the country plunged into the nightmare and horror of self-destruction — is a question that is practically never asked. The Putin administration has made it clear that no one can cast any doubt on government of any kind, whether Imperial, Soviet, Bolshevik or any later form — whatever government is in power, is sacrosanct and mustn’t be undermined in any way.

For many years, local historian Yuri Dmitriyev researched mass executions and Soviet crimes in the northern region of Karelia. Photo courtesy of Natalia Shkurenok. All rights reserved.

The Dmitryev case is horrendous, and I really hope that he will somehow be freed. But what happened to him, doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone engaged in similar activities will inevitably be arrested and end up behind bars. And it’s important to recognise this as well. The Moscow-based International Memory Society is still functioning, although in difficult circumstances, and another public initiative, The Last Address, is also continuing to preserve the memory of those shot by Stalin’s gunmen.

But why do we, a century after the Revolution, still need a universal, coherent historical narrative? In the Soviet Union it was, of course, very universal and very coherent, but that didn’t stop it falling apart in an instant. As sociologist Alexei Yurchak puts it: “Everything was forever, until it was no more”. It turns out that a coherent narrative doesn’t guarantee effective government and stability. Perhaps it isn’t necessary after all?
As for the Soviet Union, it was indeed a rigid ideological system, especially at the beginning. One step to the left or the right of the “only true theory” and you were a renegade. There was one only true theory, and this was not just a figure of speech or a joke: that was its name and it was the essential basis for everything, be it scientific research, the evaluation of artistic works or discussion of international politics. Every student of every university in the Soviet Union, whether they studied the Humanities or anything else, attended classes in Marxism-Leninism, Historical Materialism, Dialectical Materialism and so on. Marxism-Leninism was seen as the only real philosophy — everything else was mere bourgeois sophistry.

This system was incredibly rigid and could only last as long as the state was based on mass terror. As soon as they “loosened the strings” a little, this ideological discipline broke down. Out of the inertia of fear and subordination to a horrendous regime, people continued to use the right words — and not just when criticising someone at a meeting. Anyone writing a dissertation had to include references to the Marxist-Leninist classics, but this gradually turned into an absolutely empty husk — everyone knew that it was pure dross, a repetition of hackneyed phrases totally devoid of content. The entire, vast country regurgitated these clichés as often as was necessary, without believing them or even thinking about them. Yurchak writes perceptively that many people didn’t even think of this as hypocrisy or double standards: it was just what they had always done without thinking.

A trailer for a new Russian TV serial on the life of Leon Trotsky.
So when the Soviet system began to creak as a result of Gorbachev’s Perestroika (don’t forget that change began from the top), when the husk finally collapsed, people barely noticed the disappearance of the ideology. The vast majority of the population didn’t see any point in it anyway. So when a new Russian Constitution was introduced in 1993, two years after the collapse of the USSR, it went without saying that that it wouldn’t contain any obligatory national ideology. This was easily accepted, as people were fed up to the teeth with all the meaningless drivel they had been repeating for so long without believing in it or giving a damn about it.

Today, the era of big ideologies is past. North Korea, I think, is the last country to embody a single idea that is for everyone, explains everything, permits no doubts and is based on governmental violence, so that anyone who wavers from the true faith faces severe punishment.
National unity is nonetheless a very important goal for the state. What does it mean when someone says, “I am the citizen of this country”? There has to be something to unite people, whether they live in Germany, France, Russia, China or wherever. We can say that language unites them, or a constitution — but there has to be some idea of living in a particular country. This is a loose concept today, but in the absence of a “big idea” it’s crucial to have something that unites people — some perception of our country, its history and what we want as a nation — do we want to be part of Europe, for example?

Going back to the idea of truth: perhaps this would not be a question of creating some kind of coherent narrative, but of admitting that we don’t have one: recognising the existence of different points of view, agreeing about what we disagree on and bringing the idea that there is an enormous range of issues on which we have no consensus out into the public arena. Perhaps this realisation might even lead to a common sense of the truth.
ML: We still do need some kind of consensus if we are to develop as a country. It’s important to recognise the existence of conflict within our society, both because of our history and where we are and what we are now: if we can resolve some of our discord through the concept of a “loyalty umbrella” we can then achieve “reconciliation” and “stability” and lower the risks for our government.

Putin has often returned to the theme of “reconciliation”. In 2012, at the start of his third presidential term, he talked about a civil war in people’s heads; in other words, he is well aware of the serious divisions in our society, and he has chosen his own way of dealing with them. From the start, when he first became president, he adopted a policy of ambiguity and equivocation, drawing a veil over the issues that divide Russians. Does someone want to discuss difficult questions and issues that might potentially divide the Russian public? Let them discuss them, but at a local level: don’t let them arouse or stir up the people. This proviso is essential, if existing divisions are not to get in the way of Putin’s ruling the country as he wishes.

“Putin adopted a policy of ambiguity and equivocation, drawing a veil over the issues that divide”

Putin’s top priority is control — everything else, however crucial, is of secondary importance. He has had frequent opportunities to confirm that this is the case. For him, control is more important than development. This applies to both the ideological sphere and political decision-making: the decision to appoint regional governors rather than have them locally elected, for example. Why is he doing that? The idea is to increase his control. So control is increasing, but whether this is leading to better and more effective government is another question.

In some ways he’s reviving Nicholas II’s approach to governance…
ML: But Nicholas II, unlike Putin, was a weak ruler who couldn’t control anything. And it’s a completely different country now.

Of course. But the question is whether the current government can learn anything from the events of a century ago.
ML: I think the most important lesson learned by Putin was about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gorbachev years, and this lesson was more immediate because by that time he was a mature and serious adult, with his own opinions, who had long since decided on his chosen career. What did Gorbachev do when he came to power and realised that his country’s economy was in dire straits? He loosened the strings; he couldn’t give people a higher standard of living but he gave them some freedom, and they pretty quickly grabbed a bit more. And he lost the country as a result, not to mention his presidential post, although he was fortunate and didn’t lose his life. So the lesson is: if your country is in trouble, don’t loosen the strings: on the contrary, clench your fist even tighter.

It is a principle with Putin — and one formulated very succinctly, deftly and conceptually in his 1999 article “Russia at the turn of the Millennium” — that in Russia the most important organising principle is state power. This doesn’t apply in all countries: not everyone has a need for such a powerful centralised system of government, but for Russia, there is no alternative. And that power, strength and might must never be allowed to weaken. This is the criticism Putin throws at the Bolsheviks. He hasn’t made a big deal of it but he has talked about it and in particular about Russia withdrawing from the First World War in 1917. It was, he contends, unforgivable to admit defeat. Russia had a chance to be among the victors: but the Brest-Litovsk peace represented a surrender of positions and a voluntary admittance of defeat in a world war.

December 2016: Vladimir Putin delivers the Annual Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly. Source: Kremlin.ru.

For Putin, any weakening of the state is unthinkable, and its head must do his utmost to strengthen it. I think that for Putin, this is the lesson of both the Revolution and the collapse of the USSR. And if we accept that his principle requires the state to be strong, no matter what (and here, strength doesn’t mean the same as effective government, but control over every other institution, individual and so on), then we must concur that he is successful in his attempts. This is his top priority, allowing him to maintain internal stability and a respected role in the global arena. There is a remark by Putin quoted in the “Russia, my History” permanent exhibition at the VDNKh exhibition centre in Moscow. 

“Too often in our national history we have encountered opposition to Russia itself, rather than opposition to its government… And we know how that ends — with the dismantling of the state itself.”

For Putin, this is evidently an important truth: it is out of the question that someone should emerge “from below” with their own idea about how badly the current authorities govern, and how they could do better. Whoever “they” might be — a peasant uprising, the Decembrists, the “People’s Will” or the Bolsheviks — it will inevitably end in disaster. Also, this kind of movement is almost always inspired by events in other countries: our enemies, who wish to weaken us.

This is evidently how Putin views the revolution. This is why Putin avoids even talking about it and cannot admit in any way that those who rose up in 1917, who led a 300-year old empire to its end, were right.

Maria Lipman is a Russian political analyst and commentator. She is editor of Counterpoint, an online journal published by Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (George Washington University), and is currently a visiting fellow and lecturer at the Russian and East European Institute, Global and International Studies, Indiana University (Bloomington).

Courtesy: Open Democracy
 

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Red carnations are laid on the Berlin tomb of German communist leader Rosa Luxemburg during a ceremony to commemorate her death. Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

On 15 January 1919, at around nine in the evening, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested by the army in Berlin. They were taken to the Eden Hotel where they were interrogated and tortured.

A German postal stamp from 1974 commemorating Rosa Luxemburg. Shutterstock

Luxemburg was then taken outside the hotel where she was beaten to death with a rifle butt. Her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal. Liebknecht was shot dead.

In death Luxemburg and Liebknecht became martyrs to the communist cause. Even the Soviet Union’s first head, Vladimir Lenin, with whom Luxemburg had a conflicted relationship, wrote that,
 

she was — and remains for us — an eagle. And not only will communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete work… will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world.
 

Lenin’s comments were prescient.

Here in 2017, Luxemburg is still widely regarded as a major theorist of imperialism, capitalism, democracy and political action.

Electrifying intelligence

Luxemburg was born in Zamość, Poland, on 5 March 1871 to a lower middle-class Jewish family. At the age of five she became very ill and suffered damage to her hip that left her with a permanent limp and lifelong pain. But even as a child she had what’s been described by memoirist, Vivian Gornick, as an “electrifying intelligence”.

At the age of 15 she joined the Polish Proletariat Party, in which she developed a lifelong political connection to radical unions and workers. It was during this period that she began engaging in a range of political activities, including organising a general strike. These actions brought Luxemburg to the attention of the authorities. In 1887, when she had completed her secondary education, she fled to Switzerland to escape arrest.

She enrolled at the University of Zurich. She wanted, as one writer put it, everything – “books and music, sex and art, evening walks and the revolution”. Ten years later she graduated with a doctorate in law, making her one of very few women with a PhD at the time.
Luxemburg then returned to serious political work. Her anti-capitalist and internationalist stance immediately put her at odds with the Polish Socialist Party. For Luxemburg, true independence did not just mean the independence of Poland, but a truly internationalist, anti-capitalist revolution. She would hold to radical internationalism till the end of her life.

In 1898 Luxemburg moved to Berlin to be, she believed, at the heart of the communist struggle. Unsurprisingly Germany didn’t allow the young revolutionary into the country. She remedied this via an unconsummated marriage of convenience.

She immediately positioned herself on the radical left of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. She came to loathe the reformist parliamentary route taken by German socialists, leading her, years later, to describe the party as “nothing but a stinking corpse”.

During this period of her life Luxemburg worked at a frantic pace, writing, teaching and speaking to build the international movement of the workers across Europe. From the outset, she was radically anti-imperialist. In 1899 she wrote with foresight that,
 

the dismemberment of Asia and Africa is the final limit beyond which European politics no longer has room to unfold.

Intellect and passion

Luxemburg first met Lenin in 1901 and was immediately drawn to his intellect and passion. They got to know each other well during the proletarian upsurges across Russian and Eastern Europe in 1905 and 1906. But Luxemburg and Lenin were often critical of each other.

She argued for a form of revolutionary democracy rooted in struggle, and theory as something constantly open to debate and change. In “The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions” (1906) she argued that spontaneity and organisation are both vital to any struggle.

In 1907, while teaching at a political school in Berlin, she began to undertake serious theoretical work on imperialism. This included a study of southern Africa. Luxemburg argued that the development of capitalism depended on the destruction of non-capitalist societies, beginning with the appropriation of land.

Her first major theoretical intervention, “The Accumulation of Capital” (1913) argued that capitalism could not function within a single society and that imperialism, “a system of exploitation practised by European capital in the African colonies and in America”, was inherent to capitalism. Capital, she wrote
 

ransacks the whole world.

Bourgeois interests

As the First World War ravaged Europe, Luxemburg, like her Russian comrades, was firm that the working classes were being used to fight the war but that it would be resolved in the interest of the bourgeois and the elite. Luxemburg together with Liebknecht, and others started the Spartacus League to oppose the war and advocate for a more radical agenda in Germany.

In 1915, she was arrested but continued to agitate, write and communicate with the world outside. In a letter from prison she wrote that,
 

To be a human being is the main thing above all else … To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life in the giant scales of fate if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud.

“The Russian Revolution”, an essay written in prison contains what is perhaps her most widely repeated remark:
 

Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

When released from prison in 1918, she and Liebkneckt, immediately began the Die Rote Fahne (the Red Flag) newspaper. Luxemburg also worked tirelessly to foster the revolutionary spirit that led to the second revolutionary wave that hit Germany in January 1919. If she and her comrades had been successful with their revolution, history would most probably have taken a very different course, avoiding the rise of fascism in Europe.

But alas, it was not to be. As German poet Bertolt Brecht wrote in Epitaph (1909):
 

Red Rosa now has vanished too. (…)
She told the poor what life is about,
And so the rich have rubbed her out.
May she rest in peace.

This year marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution. This article is part of a series taking a look at a number of women who played decisive and revolutionary roles before, during and after the Revolution.

Vashna Jagarnath, Senior Lecturer, History Department, Rhodes University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The Petrograd Soviet in the heady days leading up to October. Photo credit: Time

The Russian Revolution is a startling paradox. It was a revolution largely based on the working class, the first workers’ revolution in history, creating a state that was not a workers’ state. This searing paradox would clinch the fate of the radical left for the rest of the twentieth century, since the chief outcome of the revolution (the regime known as ‘Stalinism’) would exert a preponderant influence on radical sectors of the left in countries like India no less than in Europe, and crucially affect the course of major political events internationally, most notably, Hitler’s unimpeded rise to power at the end of the twenties and the tragic fate of the Spanish Revolution a few years later.
 
As Don Filtzer showed in his seminal book Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization, by the 1930s the working class in the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a collective force, and the sole basis on which a strong opposition might have emerged was therefore preempted. Even more tragically, ‘with Stalin socialism came to mean something altogether different from [its] revolutionary vision, as socialism became identified with top-heavy, centralized bureaucracy, government attempts to control every aspect of social and individual life, a repressive and brutal police apparatus, scarcity, and general economic mismanagement’. The key issue thrown up by the revolution, then, is how this came about or how this was allowed to happen.
 
The Bolsheviks had seized power in October 1917 by garnering the support of Russian workers because they were seen as endorsing the slogan of workers’ control of production and because of the support they extended to the Factory Committees that mushroomed from the middle of 1917. As the most detailed study of those committees suggests, ‘There is no doubt that the notion of workers’ control of production was very popular at the grass roots, and it was the willingness of the Bolsheviks to support this demand which was a crucial reason for their growing appeal’ (S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd, p. 165). Already by June, factory committees were widespread throughout the bigger establishments, where they were dominated by ‘skilled, experienced, relatively well-paid workers’.  
 
Yet within a few weeks of the Revolution the Bolsheviks were demanding the subordination of the factory committees. The first Congress of Trade Unions held in January 1918 ‘voted to transform the Factory Committees into union organs’ (Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, p. 32). By March that year, Lenin ‘made the first of a series of appeals to return to one-man management’ (Smith, Red Petrograd, p. 241). A year later, when the eighth party congress declared portentously, ‘the trade unions must achieve a de facto concentration in their hands of the whole administration of the whole national economy considered as a single economic unit’, the factory committees had ceased to matter entirely. With a brutal civil war dominating most of 1919 and 1920 and massive supply shortages throughout the country, Trotsky was arguing for the ‘militarisation of labour’, that is, for the unabashed exercise of compulsion in industry and other economic sectors, and for the subordination of the unions to the state. Although this was never officially endorsed, by 1920 industrial workers in post-revolutionary Russia were again subject to what one historian called ‘the familiar forms of capitalist industrial organisation’, as if the clock had moved full circle.
 
The only significant challenge to all of this, the group known as the Workers’ Opposition, which emerged at the end of 1920 to espouse a vision of an economy run jointly by the unions and factory committees in a sort of articulated system of management, came closest (among the Bolsheviks) to the revolutionary aspirations of 1917 but was met with sharp reprisals by the party leadership, causing widespread disillusionment among more class-conscious workers (many of them part of the Metalworkers’ Union) and effectively ending an earlier tradition of inner-party democracy. When ‘factions’ were banned at the tenth party congress in March 1921, the Workers’ Opposition was almost alone in opposing the ban publicly.
Suspended in a social void for lack of any organised expression of the autonomous power of the workers such as the factory committees, the Party ‘now exercised absolute power and was outside the control of any social force whatsoever’. This was the situation Kollontai would presciently denounce early in 1921. What it entailed increasingly over the 1920s was a ‘dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat’. 

Alexandra Kollontai

At the very  congress at which the Workers’ Opposition presented its programme for workers’ management of the economy and opposed the ban on factions, Alexandra Kollontai, one of its leading spokespersons and the Revolution’s best known feminist, described the rapid bureaucratisation of the state as ‘breeding an atmosphere altogether repugnant to the working class’. She denounced a nascent party bureaucracy as the source of the cleavage between the government and the masses (Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography, pp. 367ff.). Although he derided Kollontai at the congress itself, even resorting to personal attacks, Lenin was perfectly aware of the justness of her charges. By the early 1920s there had grown up an ‘enormous body of functionaries who, according to Lenin, were former Tsarist bureaucrats’ (Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 8). Suspended in a social void for lack of any organised expression of the autonomous power of the workers such as the factory committees, the Party ‘now exercised absolute power and was outside the control of any social force whatsoever’ (Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 10). This was the situation Kollontai would presciently denounce early in 1921. What it entailed increasingly over the 1920s was a ‘dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat’, as Lewin describes it (Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 17). For the regime known as Stalinism to emerge all it now needed was the domination of the party itself by a clique or, as happened, by one man.     
  
Lenin, who had suffered a stroke in May 1922, never fully regained his health. Further strokes followed in December that year, and in the last week he began to dictate a series of ‘notes’ on what he saw as the impending crisis in the party’s leadership. One of these said, in terms that can only be described as prophetic, ‘Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution’ (Lenin cited Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 80). On 4 January 1923 a further note added, ‘Stalin is too rude, and this defect, though quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. This is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post’ (Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 84; my italics).

This never happened, of course. Lenin himself died in January 1924 and, as Victor Serge tells us, ‘In the meantime Stalin completes the job of packing all the party secretariats…with his creatures. In 1926 his work is done, he is the master of the party, of a party in whose ranks utter silence reigns; a party in which majorities, docile because they profit by being docile, do nothing but vote the resolutions prescribed by the Central Committee…’ (Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, p. 43–44). Stalin’s consolidation of power in the party in a regime where the party was the state, or the state a massive extension of the party, not only clinched the fate of the revolution but came to embody a form of state-power unique in history. Trotsky struggled with its characterization, never abandoning the delusion that somewhere at the heart of this new web of power lay a workers’ state. He continued to believe that a proletarian nucleus would reassert its control over the party (T. M. Twiss, Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy, p. 187), when the reality was that ‘the main thrust of regime policy was to break down the working class, to undermine its cohesion and solidarity… and destroy its ability to act collectively as a self-conscious historical force’ (Filtzer, Soviet Workers, p. 255). Without a cohesive working class and autonomous organs of struggle, the Left Opposition was doomed, its heroism matched only by its total isolation, Serge estimating that ‘there must be less than a thousand of us’.

The terrible repression of the 1930s extended well beyond this handful of revolutionaries to include entire groups –  technicians, ‘kulaks’, ethnic minorities, military leaders (the whole Soviet General Staff!), large sectors of a brilliant intelligentsia, so-called ‘harmful elements’ (vagrants, prostitutes, the homeless, etc.), and of course tens of thousands of workers, peasants and other ordinary Soviet citizens. On the NKVD’s own figures, between the early 1930s and 1953 some 1.1–1.2 million Soviet citizens were executed, three-quarters of them in the years 1937–38. This was, as Serge called it, ‘the incessant massacre of an entire revolutionary generation’ (Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 396), but it was also genocide in a stricter legal meaning if only because national communities were being systematically liquidated (for this argument see Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides; on the terror itself there is a magnificent recent account in Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937).
Stalin’s consolidation of power in the party in a regime where the party was the state, or the state a massive extension of the party, not only clinched the fate of the revolution but came to embody a form of state-power unique in history. Trotsky struggled with its characterization, never abandoning the delusion that somewhere at the heart of this new web of power lay a workers’ state. He continued to believe that a proletarian nucleus would reassert its control over the party.

Leon Trotsky

The purges and the Moscow show trials ‘served one purpose only – to manipulate public opinion at home and abroad’ (Serge, Memoirs, p. 290). Today the mass media are a simple and effective way for the authorities and ruling groups to achieve the sort of integration that the Stalinist elite sought to achieve by altogether more primitive means. Stalinism produced a ferocious culture of conformity, in part through the intimidation produced by terror but even more importantly through the figure of Stalin himself. Stalin had to be worshipped, wrote Victor Serge, ‘because to the world he was the incarnation of the party…[The Opposition’s] capital error was that their attachment to the past prevented them from seeing that this party is dead’ (Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, p. 82). In the later Marxist tradition the only serious attempt to give a dialectical sense to what Serge might have meant by this ‘incarnation’ is Sartre’s unfinished masterpiece Critique of Dialectical Reason, whose second volume, among the most difficult written by any Marxist intellectual, is essentially an attempt to construct a theory of the Stalinist regime that would make its structure and dynamics intelligible.
 
Sartre argues that Stalin’s personality cult ‘was the first known attempt to change an entire society into a pledged group’, as if the whole of the USSR had voluntarily joined the party and pledged to work for it and for Stalin. Since Stalin’s power was a ‘condensation of the sovereign powers of the group [the party]’, he was ‘incarnated in the pyramid of ruling bodies’ (that is, the bureaucracy) as they were in him. But beyond this ‘reciprocity of incarnation’, Stalin was everywhere, ‘his millions of portraits were just one portrait’, and he was in everyone, as a structure of ‘interiorized inertia’ and as the ‘living (and deceptive) image of pledged passivity’.
 
Forced capital accumulation, the dispossession of millions of expropriated peasants, the silencing of the opposition, the banning of abortion and cult of the family, and then the paroxysm of violence known as the Great Terror – if this was socialism, then Stalin’s Russia was discrediting and destroying it for decades to come, and that effectively is what it did.
 
So the Revolution was tragically betrayed, destroyed or deviated, however one describes its overall trajectory. But behind this lies an important lesson, at least for the Left. In 1917, before October, the soviets and the factory committees had been the only real organised expressions of the power of the masses, veritable organs of mass democracy. Yet, when the Bolsheviks took control of the Petrograd Soviet in September, a more complex dialectic came into play. ‘The party was launched on the road of armed insurrection through the soviets and in the name of the soviets’, wrote Trotsky in his fine History of the Russian Revolution. Here in a nutshell was the dilemma. Where would the locus of real power reside? With the party or with the masses and their own mass organisations such as the soviets and factory committees, or factory councils as they were known elsewhere?

(This article was first published in Hardnews).

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