The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today (Pt. 8)

69. After April, onwards to the great struggle

The reader who has understood the significance of our treatise knows that our intention is not to compile a generic historiography or give a complete account of the facts, which would require greater uniformity in the ‘density of the writing’. The facts, even in the news columns, are well known, yet are quite controversial at a detailed level, and rendered obscure: which is where we pause to consider the documentation and make a more in-depth analysis.

What we aim to do, however, is to make a continual comparison between the doctrinal elaboration carried out in advance by the party – or even by other parties – those which engage with the historical process, and what actually then happens.

It is for that reason that we gave a lot of space to the April phase; during which the party drew up its theoretical balance-sheet of two battles, of differing content, about which it has sufficed for us, and will continue to suffice, to sketch out the key stages and important struggles.

The Bolshevik party had developed on a grand scale an impressive edifice of historical perspectives in the period leading up to 1905, grafting its conclusions and forecasts relative to Russia onto the great perspective of Marxist communism regarding proletarian battles in the countries of the white race.

A second balance sheet had to be made during the new pause determined by the reaction which followed 1905 and utilizing the lessons learnt in that great struggle, until one arrived at the next major crisis to hit international socialism with the outbreak of war in 1914. A new doctrinal battle was conducted, not so much at first within Russian socialism, which appeared to Lenin, too, to be entirely against a war proclaimed by the hated Tsar (we saw that here Lenin was for the most part mistaken, unable to believe that after so much theoretical preparation there would be any hesitation on that point), as within the parties in the West, most of which had shamefully caved in and gone along with the chauvinist betrayal.

When in February 1917 the crisis engulfed the Russian Tsarist State, all doctrinal forecasts are once again put to the test of facts, but the devastating effects of the European and world war would overlap with those of the class struggle in Russia, and of the anti-feudal revolution in which the working class must take up a fighting position that is difficult to define, but certainly in the front ranks.

The party within which there had been such abundant preparation following February, would acquit itself well in terms of action, but find itself on shaky ground in the latter phase as regards three problems which we have adequately outlined. First: response to the war. Second: the task of the proletarian party in the anti-feudal revolution. Third: the struggle against international social-democratic and social-patriotic opportunism.

In April the historical balance sheet is completed in an extremely thorough way, profiting from the transitory legality then in force in Russia. The program of action is constructed with great resolution. It is just a matter of applying it.

70. Legal Preparation or Preparation for Battle?

The question can be seen under two aspects: of method and principle, and tactics. Two extreme ‘wings’, to use a rather inexact term, see it in very clear cut terms. Lenin’s dialectical viewpoint identifies the two types of activity and strives to apply them at the most appropriate times, when they are most likely to meet with success.

A position that is clearly Menshevik and opportunist is to say: tsarism has collapsed, and power is held by a coalition, sometimes open, sometimes hidden, of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opportunists. It is established that we cannot support any part of the domestic or foreign program of such a government: we need to call for power to be passed to the workers’ and peasants’ councils. But now that we are free to agitate and distribute our propaganda, following the victory of the democratic revolution, it is just a matter of winning, openly and by legal means, the majority in the workers’ organizations and the soviets. Even worse it would be to say: such peaceful agitation must be extended, even if we did win a majority in the Soviets, until the constituent assembly is convoked, in order to successfully place in a minority the solution of a coalition government with the bourgeoisie.

For a start, such a solution should be rejected as it is non-revolutionary, insofar as it is not proposed in reference to a transient phase, but in the sense of an acknowledgement that, after the democratic liberation, the party programmatically and on principle excludes armed struggle, the civil war, though having on the other hand excluded a parliamentary and government bloc with the bourgeois parties. Lenin’s response is instead completely dialectical: now, at the end of April, it doesn’t suit us to provoke, in the short term, a civil war to take power. Nevertheless, the civil war will happen, and there are two hypotheses: a tsarist counter-revolution which aims to overthrow the provisional government, in which case we will provide armed support (which happened), and in a second hypothesis: that, with the proletarian struggle having developed to the point that it both has the capacity and the need to take all power with the Soviets, the provisional government is resistant to ceding it (which also happened).

Lenin therefore responds ‘no’ to this right-wing which wants to renounce armed struggle once and for all, but at the same time he agrees with them that it is not yet the moment to spark off a rebellion and that it is necessary to undertake legal work.

Another opposition wing, also oblivious of the dialectical link between theory and strategic method, wants immediate, spontaneous struggle to be provoked without delay, to be instigated on every occasion with preliminary actions. Now that the liberal revolution has happened, these comrades say, any support for bourgeois governments, even if ratified by a parliament, is ruled out, and the way to overthrow them is not by means of the peaceful conquest of the majority but by insurrection alone. Even this position is flawed if it becomes dogmatic, restrictive for the party, if it is not just content to say that armed struggle is plausible and is bound to happen in the future, but goes on to assert that armed struggle alone should be considered at all times, and not peaceful preparation.

Against these comrades Lenin expended a great deal of effort to stop a premature attack being launched, while at the same time fully admitting that in all spontaneous movements of the working masses the party should be present not only with political agitation but with material force as well.

Given the extreme difficulties involved in identifying the propitious moment in such difficult conversions for the activity of the party, at such moments, caught between war at the borders and economic and social crisis, almost all comrades would later bitterly reproach themselves, both those who hadn’t wanted the struggle, and those who had opted to compromise it by launching it prematurely.

What is indisputable is that without the robust preparation of the April debate, the party, either due either to exhaustion or exasperation, would have gone down the road to ruin and certain defeat.

71. The post-April Phase

We know that even before the conference opened, on the 17th April, 14 days after Lenin arrived, the masses reacted to a provocation by the government. The date coincided not only with the 1st of May new style, the first post-tsarist one, but also with a declaration by Milyukov, the Kadet Foreign Minister, in which he promised, at the request of the Allies, to continue the war. Notwithstanding the related level of infatuation with defencism noticed by Lenin among the Russian people and soldiers, in contrast with the tendencies supporting the war’s immediate liquidation, there began in Petrograd and Moscow a series of days in which the workers called for Milyukov’s head with armed demonstrations, calling for peace, and for him to resign, which he did a few days later. But the masses didn’t go beyond demonstrations, and the party was still intent on settling its doubts.

It was on 17th May, or 4th of May old style, after the conference had closed on 12 May (29 April), that Trotsky arrived in Petrograd (greeted with enthusiasm not least as its old president in 1905) and made a speech to the Soviet in which he declared (he didn’t yet belong to the Bolshevik Party) that he fully concurred with Lenin’s political directive.

During the April Days some Bolsheviks had proposed to launch the watchword of overthrowing the government, but the party rebuked them by opposing it. Trotsky mentions here that Stalin and two conciliators signed the telegram that asked the Kronstadt sailors to suspend the anti-Milyukov action. In early May, meanwhile, with Milyukov and Guchkov having resigned their ministries, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) entered the coalition.

From the ending of the conference on 12 May, up to the convocation of the 1st Congress of Soviets from 3/16 June 1917, the Bolsheviks carried out the work of propaganda, organization and penetration which had been set out at the conference.

Meanwhile the opportunists were moving in the direction Lenin had predicted. Before April, the Soviet’s executive committee, which they controlled, was split about fifty-fifty between those for entering the government, and those against it. After the initial crisis involving the street protests, the delegates voted 34 to 19 in favor of reaching a settlement with the bourgeoisie. In Lenin’s opinion, it was the petty bourgeoisie, faced with the threat of a new revolutionary phase, which was caving in, conceding to the capitalists on all positions. On 6/19 May, the members of the new government were announced, a government presided over by the bourgeois Lvov with Kerensky and the others mentioned above: the bourgeoisie and the opportunists had clinched their pact of steel.

As predicted, the government would be powerless even in a reformist sense and the timid steps taken by the “socialists” were soon blocked, thus among the masses of the city and countryside disappointment in the government and the leaders of the Soviet would increase at this time

72. The Struggle in the Countryside

The struggle of the peasants to seize in one way or another the land of the big landowners was boiling over, and one of the aims of the coalition was to divert this simmering threat into achievements attained by peaceful means. The Minister of Agriculture Chernov made attempts to implement the convoluted theoretical program of the Social Revolutionaries, involveing repartition of the land. He welcomed the call from the rural zones which denounced the attempts of the landowners to save themselves from spoliation by means of partial sales to nominees, or to rich or well-to-do peasants: and he adopted the measure of suspending, with a legal order to the notaries, all contracts involving the sale of land.

This strange measure, which contrasted on the theoretical level with the program of a great bourgeois revolution, which in France in 1789 would make “of the land an article of commerce”, aroused the indignation of the big landowners, who claimed that Chernov should withdraw this provision. Despicably this man first rendered it ineffective in practice by specifying that the transmission of mortgage rights was not prohibited, and then, more cowardly still, he authorized the resumption of all contracts which conformed “to the law”, under the pretext that only the future Constituent Assembly would be able to legislate otherwise. A miserable end for the man who had been dubbed the “minister of the mujiks”.

This gave further confirmation of the correctness of the Bolshevik view, who proposed that without waiting for the Constituent assembly the land should, without further delay, be declared the property of the State, by handing it over into the immediate material possession of the local peasant councils to be collectively managed by them or to make transitory distributions of land allotments to farming families.

73. The Demands of the Urban Workers

At the same time in the cities the scarcity of resources and staple goods was agitating the workers who were clamoring for pay increases. For months on end the government avoided this thorny issue, they had no minister of labor, whereas the progressive Konovalov was minister of trade and industry. Finally the Menshevik Skobelev would take it on, but with the sole means of getting the so-called unofficial Duma Conference to appoint a commission, divided into sub-commissions and sections, which were deprived of any authority, and which hid behind the assertions made by the employers that any major expenditure would cause the productive machinery to grind to halt, or cause an enormous rise in prices. Around a million industrial workers would take action in the factories, not satisfied with the vague works committees which the new regime had grudgingly recognized.

Until early June it would only be in commissions and theoretical declarations that the government would tackle the question of the State’s political economy, its control of the factories and the prospect of direct State control of the largest ones, which the government viewed very unfavorably because… due to the severe lack of resources it wasn’t possible to pass to socialism! Conditions as regards obtaining supplies were worsening, workers’ wives found themselves queueing for days on end, and in the large and medium sized centers the wave of discontent was steadily rising.

As for the army, whereas the government was plotting a revival of the military struggle with support from the powers of the Entente, though fearing the consequences – which then came – of the mad launching of the offensives at the front, there was meanwhile a growing aversion among the soldiers to proceeding with the war. In the regiments agitation was rising and they were organizing Councils, always oriented more and more towards the Bolshevik tendency.

Against this hazy social backdrop there was the opening, for another great political struggle, still a bloodless one, of the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

With the reinvigorated Bolshevik fraction Lenin, just as he had brought the force of revolutionary requirements into the party meeting, got ready to bring it to the assizes of the entire working class. It was a memorable clash.