Workers and commissars

Simon Pirani's "The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24" is a super-scholarly book in which every sentence seem to contain at least a dozen facts. Unless you are a near-scholarly expert on the course of the Bolshevik revolution, you will find this a difficult read! Even I, who fancy myself to be some kind of lay expert on these matters, was frequently bewildered...

While Pirani's book is nominally about all-Russian developments, he concentrates mostly on the relationship between workers and Bolsheviks in Moscow. I admit that he is very thorough, and almost breaks down the events on a plant-by-plant basis. One of his main sources are reports from the secret police (the Cheka or the GPU), which apparently had informers pretty much everywhere! Pirani details the situation in the Soviet capital from the end of the Civil War (1920) to the so-called Lenin enrolment (1924), when the future Stalinist apparatus was more or less in place.

The author is a revolutionary democratic socialist who believes that the degeneration and bureaucratization of the Soviet state started already under Lenin and Trotsky. This is (of course) a contentious position among those Marxists who regard Lenin's and Trotsky's tenure as substantially better than the later reign of Stalin. Pirani's book is therefore to a large extent an "in house" polemic with competing Marxists or fellow travellers. As a slightly jaded Menshevik, I admit that I tend to sympathize with the author's agenda, as far as it goes...

Thus, Pirani rejects the (absurd) claim that the working class had more or less disappeared during the Civil War. In reality, it was alive and kicking, and often took strike action against the Bolshevik regime. Nor is it true that the resistance was purely economic in character. Strikes and other protests with clearly political objectives also took place, including a march in Moscow in solidarity with the Kronstadt rebellion. In elections to the soviets, factory committees and labour union committees, Bolshevik candidates were often defeated by non-Bolsheviks of various stripes. There were several "workerist" opposition groups within the Moscow Bolshevik Party itself.

Opposition to the Bolshevik regime came from many different quarters, and the dissidents often had widely divergent objectives. Should food rations be equalized, or should some workers receive more than others? Should workers enjoy privileges at the expense of the peasants? What was the solution to the bureaucratization of the Party and its increasing monopoly on power: more soviet democracy, a constituent assembly, or what? Pirani is particularly interested in the "workerist" currents, who often demanded more economic equality and/or more working-class privileges at the expense of both peasants and white collars, while simultaneously also calling for extensive soviet democracy. This could be seen as an attempt to turn the clock back to the initial, more idealist phase of the Russian revolution. Within the Bolshevik party, the Democratic Centralists, the Workers Opposition and various local groups voiced this "workerist" criticism. Outside the party, there was a "non-party" current expressing the same doubts about the course of the revolution. I think it's obvious that the author's sympathies lay with these groups. Of course, the usual opposition parties (Mensheviks, SRs and anarchists) were also active - frankly, I was surprised to learn that some of these managed to hold on until 1923.

Trotsky's opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy left a lot to be desired. After all, Trotsky had initially supported the ban on factions decided upon at the tenth party congress in 1921. He did make his move in 1923, but this first version of the Left Opposition soon made its peace with the ruling Triumvirate of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin. Trotsky even demanded a GPU clamp down on dissident Bolsheviks who had left the party (the Workers Group and Workers Truth)!

Pirani argues that the Bolsheviks eventually managed to create a kind of "social contract" with the working class: in return for a higher standard of living, the working class was expected to become quiescent, and simply carry out orders from above. Instead of participatory democracy, the Communist Party carried out compulsory "mass mobilizations", during which workers were supposed to rubber stamp model resolutions at mass meetings. One such mass mobilization took place during the trial of the SRs in 1922, when 200,000 workers marched through the streets of Moscow, demanding the death penalty for the defendants (!). Another aspect of the social contract was the Lenin enrolment (or Lenin levy), a mass recruitment campaign to the Bolshevik party in 1924. Anti-Stalinist Marxists usually claim that the levy swamped the party with "petty bourgeois" or middle class elements, but according to Pirani, most who joined during the levy were workers. Of course, these stout sons of the proletariat were quickly promoted to the party bureaucracy, and were expected to carry out the increasingly "Stalinist" line. It seems most did.

Since Pirani is still some kind of Marxist, and still supports the October revolution as such, he doesn't want to put all the blame for the retreat of the revolution on Lenin, Trotsky or the Bolshevik party. In fact, he attacks Richard Pipes and other "Cold War" historians for their claim that the Bolshevik dictatorship was an inevitable product of Lenin's ideology, an ideology delineated long before the revolution. Rather, Pirani believes that the Bolsheviks changed their ideological colours at several points, and that the degeneration was a consequence of the adverse situation the revolution found itself in. Pirani regards Lenin's most "democratic" work, "State and revolution", as a genuine expression of Bolshevik politics at the time. (I don't. I think it's obvious that Vladimir Illich was lying through his teeth!) Interestingly, Pirani doesn't seem to think that the degeneration could have been stopped. However, he never draws any political conclusions from this. If the Russian revolution was doomed to degenerate from, say, 1920, what's the point of opposing the Triumvirate, the Lenin enrolment or Stalin? Why not join in and make the best of a bad job? The only other alternative would be to emigrate, as some opposition leaders indeed did, or perhaps hibernate...

As already indicated, "The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24" is a rather specialized scholarly work, which demands a lot of prior knowledge from the reader. I don't recommend it to causal or general readers. However, the few remaining intellectual Trotskyists who still extol the virtues of the Bolshevik leadership until 1924, should perhaps read this work.

And yes, I'm familiar with the colourful background of the author... ;-)