The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today (Pt. 10)

83 – The Situation Changes

In fact we are at a historical turning point, at one of those tipping points that are generally invoked as a pretext not only for a total revision and a complete overturning of the tactical rules of action, but also – and this is a serious and harmful mistake – to call for the elaboration of an entirely new historical perspective and doctrinal evaluation, diffeing from that hitherto followed by the party. And it is at these turning points that the crises of opportunist infection break out.

The strength of the Bolshevik party, in the light of the facts we are demonstrating here, giving the lie to the rotten, false and treacherous usage of these celebrated and immensely important experiences, was instead to shift with magnificent certainty the focus of its deployment and its practical means of combat, but without ever departing from the solidly unbroken line of its theorization of and forecast on the course of the revolution in Russia. To be sure, through all these twists and turns now this guy, now that, now this tendency now another, did not avoid the crisis, and it could hardly have been otherwise, but almost always the party, as a unit over and above individuals, took, and held to, the right course.

Nor is it correct to attribute this exceptionally favorable outcome of the historical struggle, the most memorable one the labor movement has registered so far, to the presence of the Man of Genius who “only comes along once every five hundred years”, as Zinoviev once let slip. Lenin himself proved and showed that the beneficial outcome was due to the steady maintenance of the principles of the party over many years, to the coherent use made of the march of the proletarian movement over a long course and crossing all nations, and to the rigorous relating of current events to the laws of historical development in all its past stages, as elaborated in our revolutionary theory. Willpower, tenacity, courage and self-control in the face of terrible situations was shown by hundreds and thousands of comrades and proletarians.

The Congress of Soviets, after interminable and sometimes vacuous discussions, closed on June 24th/July 7th, 1917: in the twenty days of its sterile labors everything has changed.

After the demonstration on June 18th, the activities of Bolshevism’s enemies take on an increasing sense of urgency: capitalist ministers and Tsarist generals, under pressure from the Western imperialisms connected to them, must unleash war, if only to alleviate the German pressure on the “democratic” countries. The opportunists of “socialism”, even those who had taken a vaguely internationalist and Zimmerwaldist attitude when the autocratic monarchy was at the head of the army, are irresistibly dragged down the path of the social-national betrayal of the European parties: they who insulted Lenin by calling him a German agent when he pointed out to them to the path indicated by Liebknecht, who was in prison at the time for telling German soldiers to shoot their Kaiser. They don’t understand that their coalition with the bourgeoisie facilitates the latter’s link with the counterrevolution, and an autocratic and Tsarist one at that, as shortly afterwards they would come to realise, yet without being able to recover from it – Lenin will predict, and take note during successive phases, that such a coming to ones’ senses is not possible.

The date of the famous July days is between the 4th and the 6th, that is, between the 17th and 19th in the new style calendar. On the 7th/20th a warrant was issued for Lenin’s arrest, and he will go into hiding. Meanwhile the Bolshevik’s Congress, which will allow Trotsky and his tendency to take part, is convened for July 26th/August 8th and will take place entirely underground. On the 22nd Trotsky himself will be arrested, and along with him Kamenev and many other comrades. Stalin, still free, will be in overall charge of organizing Lenin’s flight to safety in Finland as well as of the illegal congress, whose discussions are inevitably, yet again, greatly affected by that tumultuous turn of events.

84 – The July Battles

As we said, it was precisely on June 18th /July 1st, while the masses were demonstrating in Petrograd, that the war offensive began, with around 300,000 men spread along a 70-kilometer front and the employment of considerable artillery: 800 light pieces, and more than 500 medium and heavy pieces. There was military success to begin with. Up to June 25th, the Russians registered successes and advanced, though only by sacrificing 60 thousand men. But the Germans counterattacked, and by July 6th, they had already made a definitive breach in the front, causing the famous Kerensky and Brusilov offensives to fail and resulting in the collapse of the Russian combatant army.

All of these events: the betrayal of the social-opportunists, of the “supporters of compromise”, with the passage to police reaction, the collusion between their leaders and ministers and the Tsarist generals, the catastrophe of the offensive imposed by the imperialist allies, the return of the parties to illegality and the situation of civil war, were wholly anticipated in the perspective followed by Lenin.

All this confirmed the tactics followed by the Soviets which had to get to the point of unmasking the opportunist bourgeois policy before the peasant masses at the front, and the party was thus fully prepared for it.

However, the strategy previously put in place by Lenin and by the majority was still not one which accepted fighting in the streets and overthrowing the government: that as well was a historical turning point predicted in theory and prepared for tactically, but the party hadn’t and wouldn’t have chosen July. It was too early. However after the rearmament in April, July was not at all surprising, and it went to show that the view that had been taken was the correct one, and that we were proceeding nicely along the historical path that the party was prepared to follow right to the end.

The statement that at the 6th Congress (in the same old official History) the party moved towards armed insurrection is therefore false. It had been oriented towards tha for some time, and had never supposed it could successfully take power and achieve victory by any other means. Lenin had nothing new to discover on the subject, much less did he need Stalin to discover it, as per the glaringly insinuated falsification!

Spontaneous demonstrations erupted in the Vyborg district on July 3rd /16th, and merged into one large demonstration of workers, this time armed, and marching under the banner of the transfer of power from the Provisional Government to the Soviets. The party was there to prevent an armed assault taking place, but the government unleashed junkers (officer trainees) on the demonstrators and blood began to flow. Bourgeois and white guards deluded themselves into thinking they had won.

85 – Defeat in the Streets and Repression

It is not our intention here to give a blow-by-blow account of the July Days of 1917. In our already very extensive elaboration we have been concerned, above all, to revisit events so we can highlight the alternating phases, and the evaluations which the party now and then gave of them (or which sections or currents of the party gave of them) in line with its general theoretical principles, and its organic and decennial vision of the Russian revolution.

As we have already noted, the two days of mass action in the streets, mainly in Petrograd, were on July 3rd and 4th (16th – 17th). The workers spontaneously and violently reacted to various factors as we have shown, namely: the ever-closer coalition of the Mensheviks and the SRs with the bourgeois Kadets and the other center parties, and the unleashing of Kerensky’s insane offensive at the front.

The version of events that opportunists and those in cahoots with the bourgeoisie gave was that the Bolsheviks, having witnessed the defeat of their theses (that the Soviets should take power themselves, and break off their coalition with the bourgeoisie in the Provisional Government) in the Soviet executive (which sat from the 3/16 June) and losing mainly because of the major influence the SRs and Mensheviks still had in the provinces and countryside, they then responded to losing the vote with the deliberate use of force; with all of this spiced up with slanderous attacks on them as German agents, or even Tsarist ones! But all historical accounts, on this point, are agreed that this was simply not true, and that not only had the party definitely not prepared this immediate change of tactics in advance, but it did everything in its power, at the time, to avoid a head-on clash.

In reality, masses of Petrograd workers and soldiers and sailors of the fleet, armed and masters of the city for two days, gathered around the Tauride Palace where the Executive Committee of the Soviets was in session, and sent a series of menacing delegations calling for an end to the ruling coalition, for peace, for an end to the offensives at the front, and for all the other measures which tallied with Bolshevik positions. Among the agitators, along with some of the more impatient and extremist Bolshevik workers, there was also no shortage of anarchist workers, and agents provocateurs as well, acting both on behalf of the whites, and of the social- traitors themselves, who were planning their counterattack on the Bolsheviks.

Key events were the machine-gun regiment’s request to attack and arrest the government, the siege of the St. Peter and Paul fortress, and the physical takeover of the red quarter in Vyborg and of the naval base in Kronstadt. But both Trotsky and Stalin concur in saying that the Bolshevik leadership and the Central Committee did their utmost to stop such armed actions and of out and out civil war.

Key incidents during the repression triggered immediately afterwards were: the interventions by the armed forces called in by Kerensky: the junkers, the Volinia regiment (the one that would tip the scales over to the revolutionary side in October) on whose arrival the various Tseretelis, casting aside all fear along with their masks, proclaimed a new government coalition, identical to the first; the trashing of the Bolshevik newspaper editorial offices and printing presses, during which the worker Vojnov was murdered. The proletarian Red Guards were disarmed, and the reddest of the military units sent off to the front. A wave of arrests began, which Lenin managed to evade. A great trial for “high treason” was announced. The party was outlawed, the workers had to fall back.

What did the party make of this new phase, and what strategy did it settle on for the future? We here are intent on proving that the leading thread was the same as it had been since 1900. But there were many alternating phases. From February to April, there was concealed tolerance of the bourgeois-worker coalition and of the war, along with talk of rapprochement with the Mensheviks (stuff given the historical name “Kamenev-Stalin” without the fact of the two names eventually lining up in opposing camps, one as victim the other as executioner, having been able to erase it). From April to June, following the return of Lenin, revival and back onto the “classic” revolutionary line along with clarification of all theses and positions along with the strategy of engaging in legal and peaceful action to conquer the Soviet, and by means of the latter to effect the conquest, to take upon itself, the new power of the state. In July, defeat inside the Soviet, fury of the working masses, offensive by the renegade traitors inside the working class, momentary defeat of the working class, attempt of the bourgeois government to annihilate the party.

86 – Clandestine Congress

It will not be until October, having grabbed the dissenters by the scruffs of their necks, that Lenin roars that there’s not a moment to lose, that it is no time for consultations, that the Soviet congress, the Party congress and the Committee vote can all go and screw themselves, along with the crap opinion of the majorities; that we must this very night (of October 24th – 25th/November 6th-7th O.S.) either finish off the enemy government, or disappear from history.

But during this phase of retreat, it is of the utmost interest to follow the reaction of how the aforementioned 6th party congress (coming ten years after the 5th congress in London, and which was held between July 13th/26th and August 3rd/16th).

This was in fact preceded by a conference of the Bolshevik organizations in Petrograd, which had been interrupted by the demonstrations, and which closed between the 4th and 7th (17th and 20th) of July. Spirits had been aroused: the conference in the first phase had done everything to put a brake on the impatient masses, now they were fiercely debating whether the setback had been decisive and the phase of victorious counterrevolution had begun. The majority followed one of the most valiant Bolsheviks, Volodarsky, who doggedly refused to admit that the counterrevolution had beaten us. His resolution to that effect was accepted by 28 votes to 3, but with about 28 abstaining. The kind of man Volodarsky was, so much more than a specialist presenter of agendas, is stated in these terrible terms by Trotsky, showing how the revolutionary party might in given cases oppose the unleashing of civil war, but after the defeat it is the first to fight back: “The defeatist mood among the masses only lasted a few weeks. Open agitation was resumed in the middle of July, when at small meetings in various parts of the city three courageous revolutionists appeared: Slutsky, who was later killed by the White Guards in Crimea; Volodarsky, killed by the SRs in Petrograd; and Yevdokimov, killed by Stalin in 1936”.

We exalt the memory of Comrade Volodarsky, not just because he met his end at the hands of a proletarian traitor, but for the powerful statement he gave at the July conference, when being hunted down by the dogs (camelotti) of capital. And we don’t share the judgements that Trotsky would later go on to make.

The documents we now have, amongst which articles written in July and published in September at Kronstadt (where they had not dared to suppress the press, the cop Kerensky seemingly not daring to provoke Vyborg by having the congress dissolved immediately after the conference) establish how Lenin had made an impromptu assessment, lacking any uncertainty, of the situation as it stood at the time.

The official History at this point puts Stalin in a very prominent position at the 6 th Congress and attributes to him paternity of the diagnosis of transition from the legal to the civil war phase, and yet again of the statement that the revolution must address the construction of socialism. But Trotsky documents how Stalin – who was the only one, or near enough, who had links with the Lenin in hiding – had in his possession the original July Theses written by Lenin, which no one else had seen, nor had they ever been published. Obviously, the text of these can be deduced from the articles we previously mentioned, and it is obvious that Stalin did not formally articulate these discoveries, but, mindful of past events, merely made himself a slavish spokesman for Lenin.

In addition, if it turns out that at the Petrograd Conference Stalin, though speaker on the politics of the current moment, opposed Volodarsky’s resolution which denied the victory of the counter-revolution, it is difficult to see how he could appear as the one who mapped out the future phase of revolutionary civil war.

87 – Still a Balance Sheet of the Revolution

We are in the presence of three historical presentations which we can say are by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. The latter two say that theirs are Lenin’s, indeed they claim in a certain sense that Lenin pointed to a road they were already on, that of the non-peaceful, insurrectional development of the revolution which began in February.

In truth Trotsky and Stalin shared a common position: namely, that during 1917 Lenin modified and renounced his 1905 thesis on the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry. In this regard Trotsky claims responsibility for an old thesis of his, which indeed he had been advocating since 1905: permanent revolution, that is, an uninterrupted series of class wars ranging, as Marx enunciated for Germany in 1848-50, from a clearly bourgeois revolution, supported by the proletariat, to a clearly proletarian revolution. Stalin then stakes claim to a thesis that he developed much later, at least seven to eight years later, namely, that since the first revolution had exhausted the bourgeois tasks, the second would have as its content the establishment of a fully socialist society in Russia alone.

It should be noted straightaway that Trotsky’s construct does not differ on the political plane from Lenin’s, insofar as along with him he maintains that the closing of the permanent revolution will only occur in parallel with a European socialist revolution.

But Trotsky, along with Stalin, got it wrong when he argued that Lenin broke with the line he had taken in 1905. The revolutions in Lenin’s writings – and in history – are neither two historically and socially autonomous ones, nor one revolution which was developed over a longer period: there are three of them. Anti-feudal revolution led by the bourgeoisie with the help of petty-bourgeois opportunists – democratic revolution but led, against the former, by the revolutionary proletariat – anti-capitalist revolution coinciding with a “pure” proletarian revolution in the West.

Lenin’s second point, politically and regarding power, already contains one aspect of the socialist revolution and constitutes the only path towards socialism. The third point alone leads to the socialist transformation of the European and Russian economies.

Trotsky reports that Volodarsky, after taking the correct position on the question of the July battle “continued to defend in substance the Bolshevik schema for the Revolution of 1905: first, the democratic dictatorship; then the inevitable break with the peasantry; and, in the event of the victory of the proletariat in the West, the struggle for the socialist dictatorship”. Then he says that “Stalin, supported by Molotov and several others, defended Lenin’s new conception: the dictatorship of the proletariat, resting on the poorest peasants, can alone assure that the tasks of the democratic revolution will be solved at the same time as opening the era of socialist transformations”.

Strange that, in a book written to demolish Stalin, he should agree with him when he is fundamentally wrong, that is, in making him the herald of a new conception about which a massive fuss would be made for many decades! We’re not deploring the formula of “opening the era” that appeared in Lenin’s as well as in Marx’s writings (see in “Russia and Marxist Theory” about the ”signal to the workers’ revolution in the West”) but we do contest that 1917 produced a different and new conception of the historical path in Russia, let alone that it was Lenin’s, whose original formulations we shall shortly see.

Nor can Trotsky say: “Stalin was right as against Volodarsky, but he did not know how to prove it”. It would have mattered little. Nor is it fair to add: “On the other hand, in refusing to recognize that the bourgeois counter-revolution had won a decisive victory, Volodarsky was proved right against both Lenin and Stalin”. Volodarsky was right and had the right to appeal to Lenin: it is Stalin who had no right to do so back then (and kept quiet at the time of the vote) and much less did he have it after having recounted that it was he who first dictated the course to be followed: and now we march for the civil war!

88 – Lenin’s Political Line

We derive what is stated above from the same text by Trotsky: when Volodarsky saw that Stalin was the speaker he declared: either Lenin, or Zinoviev should do the report. When the 28 then abstained, they declared that they did so because they had not been able to read Lenin’s theses, and were perplexed by Stalin’s hesitation. If only they had known that Lenin shared Volodarsky’s line, the vote would have been unanimous.

The work of Lenin when in hiding was yet again admirable. Here Trotsky describes it, as befits him: “Although the fact that he was at a distance led him not infrequently into tactical errors, it enabled him all the more surely to define the Party’s strategy”.

A profound truth that shows how directing a revolution bears no resemblance to staging a dramatic display. A truth that is still not understood a century afterwards.

Of Lenin’s texts we have these: “On Slogans” written in July and then appearing as a pamphlet, in Kronstadt we believe; and “Lessons of the Revolution”, written in late July and published in September in the newspaper Rabochiye (Workers) and as a pamphlet. The study of these texts is enough to clarify, many years later, the issues which the party was facing in that situation at the 6th Congress, even if the written theses have been lost.

The first article states formally what is flaunted in the official History as a brilliant, innovative new order from Stalin: that the watchword: “all power to the Soviets”, which we had fought over from April to June, should be liquidated. Lenin had realized by then what would happen. In such cases as these one has the bad habit of saying: we were wrong in April to launch that slogan, which had a bad effect (defeat in July). And by the same token popular opinion will be wrong when in September the same watchword of power to the Soviets is issued again, implying that it was a mistake to have dropped it in July… It is reasoning akin to that of modern hack opinions of the American type: politics is the art of making up and launching appropriate slogans, like those which sell soft drinks or new cars. Whoever gets the right slogan wins the big political game and is successful, as the masses, befuddled, take to dancing the can-can of history to those rhythms…

A very different dialectic is found in the positions Lenin takes, as for example in his critique of Blanquism which, as we recalled, he uses in April against the so-called leftists; and in his defense of Blanquism, that is, of the Marxist conception of the art of insurrection, which he uses in October, against the defeatist-pacifists.

The apparent contradictions, in the minds of idiots, are allowed instead to be magnificently placed on the path of the same doctrinal vision, confirming its powerful unity and continuity, and inviting the peddlers of new conceptions, past or posthumous, generous or tendentious, to spare themselves the trouble.

Lenin’s exposition makes it clear that while in the first stage it was possible to forecast the handover of power to the Soviets peacefully, in the subsequent stage the bourgeois government would not abandon power without a struggle. The watchword of this violent struggle now cannot be the transfer of power from the defeated government to the Soviet, because the present Soviets (July) are “lambs led to the slaughter” inasmuch as they are in the hands of the Mensheviks and SRs, whose actions have only allowed power to be transferred to the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.

Already in this conception is contained the future objective that, when the Soviets pass from the hands of the opportunists into those of the revolutionaries (the Bolsheviks), the demand will be made that State power be handed to them. It’s a case of a negation of the negation. But not in the sense of a new repentance, overriding the previous repentance, but in the dialectical sense of a shift to a higher plane: in October it’ll no longer be a question of a peaceful handover of power to the Soviets, but of a violent, insurrectional shift, conditioned by the overthrow, weapons in hand, of bourgeois power.

Lenin insists on the fact that the formulation of watchwords for immediate action should be made not according to general criteria, but in relation to the concrete situation, not based on the nature of the Soviet in the abstract, but on the nature of the Soviets that are actually present. It could even happen, if things evolved down a certain degenerative course, that in the future the Soviets as a form of working-class power would be meaningless. It is not the form but the content of the Revolution that matters. The content of any demand is judged by its class character: a Soviet in the hands of the bourgeoisie or servants of the bourgeoisie is a Soviet cadaver: “so it means they are nothing, puppets, and that real power is not in their hands”; so, that is, in response to the objection that it is not the Soviet, but peradventure Chernov and Tsereteli as individuals, who had the protesting workers shot at.

It is a grave error of the parties of “Leninism” and “Bolshevization” that they interpret this adherence of the watchwords to the immediate characteristics of situations that involve force, as a rash inclination to change and reconstruct every now and again new ideologies and theories for the party!

89 – History of the Oscillating Power

And in fact Lenin explains the vicissitudes of the power play between the Soviets and the bourgeoisie by referring back to the purest strand of theory. The State, he says, according to Engels, consists, first of all “of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command”.

Immediately after the February Revolution such an apparatus was in the hands of the Tsarist monarchy and the feudal classes. This apparatus was destroyed by the working-class and peasant masses who rapidly organized themselves into spontaneous armed groups and took power everywhere at a local level, opening up a phase of complete freedom, which in concrete terms meant that every anti-feudal political current could organize itself without being inconvenienced by cops and prisons.

The Soviets, well-known since 1905, soon appeared everywhere and began to equip themselves with a network covering the whole of Russia. If they had held central power in their hands, no coercion by means of police and imprisonment could have stopped them. But on the one hand the capitalists and landowners began to form a power of their own, sticking to forms similar to those that had been suppressed: a ministry formed by the non-right wing groups from the former Duma, and pseudo-parliamentary committees; and on the other, the dominant parties among the working class allowed dualism of power to be established, and administered it outside the Soviet in a coalition with the bourgeoisie. In the period up to June 18th, the Soviet could have decided to break with dualism by forming within itself a government of workers’ parties, albeit a non-revolutionary one: in those months the bourgeoisie could not have prevented it by using repressive force. What is more, says Lenin, the struggle between these petty-bourgeois parties and the revolutionary proletarian party could also have proceeded in a non-violent way, if the Soviets, instead of having divested themselves of it, had had State power in their hands and consequent control of all its armed units.

The policy of the opportunists threw away these historical possibilities: the civil and especially the military government placed their command structures outside of the Soviet, and had control of the army, the bureaucracy and the police: in every class effort to oppose it, the Mensheviks and SRs saw to it that the Soviet ratified these acts.

The point had now been reached where such a government could use the armed detachments and prisons in its own way: the phase of freedom of agitation ends, the masses are shot at, newspapers are suppressed, arrests made, etc.

In such a situation there are only two ways out: either the bourgeois counterrevolution (not yet white, Tsarist) holds on to armed power and removes all freedom of action from the proletariat, or the proletariat forcefully overthrows the counterrevolutionary government and its opportunist allies.

Socially speaking, Lenin explains it by the fact that the petty bourgeoisie, who according to Marx are always cowardly and wavering, has allied itself with the bourgeoisie.

With power in the hands of the Soviets, detaching the petty bourgeoisie from the bourgeoisie by peaceful means could have happened, and an understanding been reached between it and the proletariat. But the petty-bourgeois parties and leaders, by becoming servants of the bourgeoisie itself, closed the way to any non-violent resolution of these relations.

Therefore, the watchword today will not be, says Lenin, all power to the Soviets, but rather “decisive [i.e., destructive and armed] struggle against the counter-revolution, that seized power”.

90 – Responding to Tactical Objections

Lenin himself predicts what they will say to him: We think the time is still not right to take up arms in a civil war; if we switch into that mode now, we would be encouraging imprudent actions and provocations. Lenin responds that the Russian workers are already class-conscious enough not to yield to provocation: however, it is certainly not the time to keep quiet about the essential resumption of armed struggle that is required, insofar as only the revolutionary proletariat has the strength to defeat the counterrevolution.

With this he also counters a second objection: When we declared we wouldn’t launch an armed attack on a Soviet-based government of Mensheviks and SRs, if it detached itself from the parliamentary bourgeoisie, we showed the masses that we believed that these petty-bourgeois movements could be accepted as allies. How then can we now denounce them as enemies, and the Soviet itself as an enemy that they control? If bourgeois reaction, or worse still, Tsarist reaction also attacked them, and wanted to dissolve the Soviets, could we remain indifferent? And Lenin’s answer here, too, betrays no sense of uncertainty.

We know, says Lenin, that the leaders of these parties will go the way they inevitably must: but that doesn’t prevent us from defending the masses of the peasantry and the poor against the attacks of both capitalist and feudal reaction. And here the Kornilov phase, that would follow shortly afterwards, is clearly sketched out.

“It would be a profound error to think that the revolutionary proletariat can ‘refuse’ to support the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks against the counter-revolution, by way of ‘revenge’, so to speak, for the support that they gave in smashing the Bolsheviks, in shooting down soldiers at the front and in disarming the workers. First, this would be applying petty-bourgeois conceptions of morality to the proletariat (since, for the good of the cause, the proletariat will always support not only the vacillating petty bourgeoisie but even the big bourgeoisie)” but above all, it would be a mistake to conceal the fact that the counterrevolutionaries, “the Cavaignacs (…), these new holders of state power can be defeated only by the revolutionary masses, who, to be set into motion, must not only be led by the proletariat, but must also turn their backs on the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties, which have betrayed the cause of the revolution”.

Lenin’s response makes an appeal to the classical directives of Marxism. As long as the feudal menace still remains (thus it would be with Kornilov, and for a long time after him) the proletariat will support the petty-bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie (in Marx, even the big bourgeoisie against the petty-bourgeoisie, often allied with the feudatories). But it will remember the lesson of the Cavaignacs, the generals and ministers of the 1848 Republic, who after they won in February, using proletarian forces, viciously massacred the workers of Paris in June; and it will only see its own victory after these temporary allies are destroyed.

Reading through these documents, which were not written dispassionately, as though a historical analysis was being conducted from a distance, but rather in the heat of the battle, one must know how to place them in a dialectical sequence. The Party knows from the outset what the trajectory will be: it will have to ally itself with the bourgeoisie and sometimes save them (as it did from Kornilov), however it knows it must end up dispersing them; it knows that the petty-bourgeois parties will have to be dragged along as allies, although their leaders will betray the party and will have to be beaten back, and even the classes below them will eventually set themselves against the proletariat.

But in external proclamations, these stages of action are signaled when the series of givens contained in the doctrine have become part of the experience of the masses cast into the revolutionary furnace: from February to June, a government that is a democratic dictatorship of proletarians and peasants is declared possible even on the basis of a front of left-wing parties; once the right-wing front is made, the social formula is certainly not thrown out – diverging from Trotsky and from Stalin – but the break with the populist and Menshevik parties is deemed irrevocable: any peaceful competition with them even at the Soviet level is ruled out.

And so, once the inanity of these political forces has brought down on their heads the Tsarist generals who, champing at the bit, want to destroy the Soviets and the parliamentary ministries, it will be the revolutionary workers and the Bolshevik Party who, having taken up arms, will make those armies of reaction bite the dust, and who will save, but only in order to well and truly crush it in due time, the Kerensky regime.

All of this is flawless revolutionary strategy. None of it needs to be justified by theories that have been improvised in the face of alleged sudden unforeseen changes, even if all the forecasts theoretically reached are not placed at the same time at the centre of the agitation.

91 – Lenin’s Conclusions

The second article develops these same concepts more fully, and especially the Marxist one on the instability of the petty-bourgeoisie and the unsurmountable petty-bourgeois character of the peasantry.

What emerges from it all, in full light, is that moving from the watchword of the peaceful period to that of the civil war period wasn’t Stalin’s doing, and that among other things the sudden change consisted essentially of a different view (and anticipated stage) of the Weg zur Macht, of the road to power, and was certainly not a new version of the immediate social program of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party, much less a declaration that, merely by having unmasked the petty-bourgeois parties, one had moved, all of a sudden, to maintaining – almost, as Lenin said, as though doing it out of spite – that there would be implemented in Russia, without European support, full (one-countryist) socialism; a vulgar lie fabricated long afterwards.

Indeed, here is how Lenin brings the article to a close: “The lesson of the Russian revolution is that there can be no escape for the working people from the iron grip of war, famine, and enslavement by the landowners and capitalists unless they completely break with the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties and clearly understand the latter’s treacherous role, unless they renounce all compromises with the bourgeoisie and resolutely side with the revolutionary workers. Only the revolutionary workers, if supported by the peasant poor, are capable of smashing the resistance of the capitalists and leading the people in gaining land without compensation, complete liberty, victory over famine and the war, and a just and lasting peace”.

There can be no longer any doubt that, while in July the condemnation of the opportunists is resounding, public, and openly irrevocable, and the resort to violence is likewise declared inevitable, the demands are politically STILL on the democratic plane, and are socially STILL NOT on the socialist plane: all of them, at each step, are nevertheless self-evident inasmuch as they are placed on the road that leads politically to power being fully in the hands of the proletarian party, and socially to an international socialist society.

It is completely false then when the Official History has us see Stalin, after having cleverly – which is undeniable – put Lenin somewhere safe, taking his place and dictating the rules of the new road!

For that matter, the History itself says that the Congress posited as essential points of the party’s economic platform the following: the confiscation of land from all landowners, the nationalization of banks and big industry, and workers’ control over production and redistribution, i.e., the usual pre-socialist measures. Other writings and documents would show that, still in October, nationalization is demanded in limited and entirely bourgeois forms.

92 – Still on the 6th Congress

Despite it being a difficult moment, 157 delegates convened: membership of the party had gone up to 240 thousand. It had 41 newspapers, and it is curious that the main one (Pravda) only printed 320 thousand copies for the whole of Russia.

Absent, either because in prison or on the run, were Lenin, Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Kamenev, Kollontai and a great many others. Among the better-known of those present were Sverdlov, Bukharin, Stalin, Molotov (what a pity we can’t pluck him from the conferential armchairs and ask him a bit about how it really went!), Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, Yurenev and Manuilsky.

Sverdlov gave the Central Committee’s organizational report. Stalin repeated the reports given at the Petrograd Conference on political activity and the state of the country. He declared that now was the time to fight hard against the social-compromisers. Bukharin dealt with international issues and the war, arguing that only by the overthrow of the Provisional Government could there arise action for peace.

In the debate, one could see that the two speakers did not agree with one another. It is also strange that Trotsky, in formulating the two theses, admits here that Stalin is right. Bukharin was supposedly defending the “old Bolshevik plan”: first revolution shoulder to shoulder with the peasants, second revolution shoulder to shoulder with the European proletariat, the first one in the name of democracy, the second one in the name of socialism. Stalin said Bukharin’s plan was futile, since if the proletariat does fight it can only do so in its own interests. Trotsky finds the rebuttal correct, having argued since 1905 that the proletariat, if it takes power, can only begin a socialist revolution. However, a few years later, he would accuse both Bukharin and Stalin of having revived the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship” in pursuit of the International’s aims as well, and with a catastrophic effect as far as Trotsky was concerned on the revolution in China, and in other countries.

Trotsky, a genuine revolutionary, finds it even more difficult than Lenin to tolerate a proletarian class and Marxist party committing considerable energy to facilitating democratic and bourgeois anti-feudal revolutions, and says that in such a case, and given Lenin was right in saying that it was being done “solely for the objectives of our socialist cause”, one should wash ones hands of such a dirty business as soon as possible, and move on to the socialist revolution.

There is no doubt that taking power even in Russia alone, along with having no few tasks of a democratic and capitalist nature to attend to as well, was nevertheless a step towards socialism, and indeed an act of socialist revolution. Much more sagaciously in 1926 Trotsky would make the magnificent statement that without letting go of your power and without ceasing to declare your own politics and also your own economic policy as socialist, you had to know how to wait, even for decades. When it is recognized that socialist society is not yet ready to burst into life, it is still possible to take measures with socialist content that are not only symbolic and propagandistic, but practical as well: you are growing grapes also when you prune the vine, and you are aiming for wine when you water the vine.

Let us go even further: there is nothing wrong with announcing that socialist society is closer than it actually is as long as its socialist substance is not betrayed. At the time we can see that not only Bukharin and Trotsky, but Stalin as well, were convinced that socialist society would not develop in Russia before a political victory was achieved by the European proletariat.

Stalin in fact concluded with the words: As the forces of the revolution develop, some explosions will occur and the moment will come when the workers will rise up and gather around themselves the strata of the poor peasantry, they will raise the banner of the workers’ revolution, and begin the era of socialist revolution in the West. This, notes Trotsky here, remained the party’s formula in the years to come. We showed in this study’s summary exposition that in 1926 Trotsky and Zinoviev charged Stalin with the fact that he, as well, had thought and spoken thus until 1924.

We attribute the greatest importance – we hope with the readers understanding – to showing how in the various stages and transition phases the party theorizes and perceives these great questions, still of pressing importance today.

When in its turn the Stalinist History quotes Stalin’s confutation, to certain right-wing elements, with the words, “It is not ruled out that Russia will be the country to pave the way to socialism”, it is searching for an alibi that doesn’t hold up. That prediction was first made in 1882, when it appeared in the preface to the Russian translation of the Manifesto; and it has nothing to do with the prediction of a socialist society in Russia within a capitalist world, which back then would have made even Stalin laugh. His confutation was directed at some comrades – certainly not Bukharin – who wanted to postpone until the Western Socialist Revolution the seizure of political power by the Communist Party in Russia, remaining until then a simple opposition to governments of a Kerenskian type.

To this Trotsky was fiercely opposed, as he shows in word and deed. Nevertheless, he is so attached to the tradition of the 1905 polemic that, while unwilling to leave such a hybrid task to the Kerenskians, of whom he was the destroyer, he thinks – and it was certainly a useful thought to have in the final days before the October insurrection – that in any case one should not have any qualms, after power has been taken by force of arms, about rejecting non-socialist tasks. And it is also a revolutionary fact that in 1917 neither Lenin, Trotsky, nor the party, pose the formidable question: What will become of us if the proletariat of Europe doesn’t make its move?

In that phase is socialist work for an entire political generation which we always sum it up as three main tasks: liquidating the war – entirely liquidating opportunism in the various Russian parties, and annihilating them – reorganizing the Proletarian International and taking it back to its revolutionary program.

The conquest of power, preparations for which started to be made by the party from that key moment in July, and with its forces alone – except for the left fraction of the SRs, in which a cycle of crises would soon follow – is seen from that position (as from ours in 1955) as the greatest, and only victorious one, of the socialist revolutions.

But Lenin’s greatest and boldest perspective, cold and passionate at the same time, needing to encompass immense tasks of a capitalist social nature and satisfy the people’s democratic-bourgeois demands, looms ever larger today; after the proletarian revolution didn’t happen in the West, and with capitalism now ruling the world. And yet despite that result, we will never concede that Lenin and Bolshevism were mistaken, and didn’t understand revolutionary history, or did not work in its grandiose furrow.

93 – Where the Line Was Broken

Trotsky’s thesis that the proletariat could not, in a revolution coming after the first bourgeois-popular revolution, take all power without moving towards socialism, is, in a certain sense, undeniable (and also inevitably pondered within the Russian proletariat in the pre-October situation, since although it is true that the proletariat must carry heavy historical burdens that are not its own, in the end it must feel that it is fighting for its own demands), but said thesis only remains solidly in place for as long as questions of “internal” economic policy remain dormant: in essence, during the period when the war was being wound down, which took almost a year; during the period when hundreds of counter-revolutionary forces were being destroyed, which takes another three or so years; and in the simultaneous period of the gigantic effort to support the European revolution, which we may consider extended it for a further three years.

All these tasks are carried out under a socialist government, and as only a proletarian and communist government can.

Little by little as the possibility of an intervention in the social transformation of any of the major advanced countries in the West weakened, the problem for the new Bolshevik power became increasingly daunting.

The crude formula that proletarian power can only have a socialist program would become its reciprocal opposite, that is, if that power is not exerted within a socialist society, one that is no longer capitalist, it is bound to collapse, or worse still, hand in its resignation to History.

In fact, the solution that the victorious enemies and the murderers of Trotsky found was to govern and not to hand in their resignation, declaring not only that socialist society could be generated in Russia even before it had arisen within the environment of European capitalist production, but that it had already been generated: as what was, in that hideous slogan, called “the building of socialism in one country”, cultivated in a hothouse, the surrogation of the revolutionary giving birth with an administrative poultice.

Not out of any necessity to choose between the two opposed directions that Trotsky’s formula took – which in those days Stalin would have the merit (!) of pitting against Volodarsky and Bukharin – but because of the less rigid consequence which Lenin’s richer and loftier vision contained… He will win or lose as a principled revolutionary in theory and practice he who, like Volodarsky, says: I will tear power away from the bourgeois counterrevolution and use it against it, even if I have to call it democratic and popular for a while, and put up with having in Russia alone triggered, after overcoming every obstacle, the bursting forth of the most vigorous of capitalisms from a stagnant, medieval society.

He would consign power by other means to the global enemy he who backed up this arrangement with the statement that this palingenesis of modern capitalist – only partially so in the countryside – forms, is instead the finally achieved advent of that socialist society, which all of us for centuries have demonstrably been heading towards; worse, that this form, for us historically necessary, arose from a will, a will to build, an expression that is in itself disgustingly bourgeois!

If Volodarsky, on the position which, as principled militant, he always held, hadn’t been killed by SR counter-revolutionaries, as they would turn out to be, he would certainly have been killed, like his July friends, by the latter species of counter-revolutionary.

Was it just an error of historico-economic definition then? A small error, but one written on tags tied to the backs of chairs, placed in front of firing squads.

Not bullets in the behinds, but in the backs of former comrades. And yet it is not on sentimentalism that we rely, but on the organic demonstration of how the doctrine came to be betrayed. An error far more monstruous than just pulling a trigger. Revolutions have always passed over a multitude of errors of the second kind.

The former one assassinates the revolution itself.