The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today (Pt. 4)

23 – Back to 1914

We repeat that it was not a digression, but an introduction to our main theme, when [between chapters 4 to 22 in this Part One] we examined the central falsification of that History of the Bolshevik Party which, as Trotski recalls, appeared first anonymously, then as the work of a group of authors, and then finally in Joseph Stalin’s Collected Works.

In order to demonstrate, as we propose to do, that the only framework that exists in Russia is capitalist, not socialist, it was important to show from when it was the attempt was made to switch the thesis (certainly not new theory) of Lenin on the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war, for the false one, for which Stalin alone was responsible, of building of socialism only in Russia.

In that exposition we recalled that Lenin had heard that the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and even the socialist revolutionaries, had protested in the Russian Duma against the war and voted against credits. Lenin believed this is in September, and maybe even in August when he wrote the Seven Theses; but it was not so.

The Mensheviks, including Chkheidze and former maestro of the Bolsheviks, Plekhanov, are the leaders, in the Duma and in the emigration, of the “defensists”, whose ranks however also include some non “liquidators”. The Bolshevik workers’ deputies’ group is opposed to the war, and soon its adherents are arrested and deported; but various Mensheviks, including Martov, are also against the war. In the Bolshevik’s own organizations and in the groups abroad there were serious oscillations, and consequently among the deportees in Siberia: Stalin’s stance is much discussed, let’s say it was quite demure, until news reached them much later of Lenin’s stance. Spandarian was the energetic head of the defeatists, before any links were established abroad.

The social revolutionaries split in their turn: against the war, Chernov at the head of a small group, in favour of it, Avksentyev, Bunakov and many others who formed a group “Beyond the border”. All of the latter, namely Plekhanov, Peter Kropotkin, Chkheidze and so on, declared that the war on the Germans was just, defensive and holy, and they called for all actions against the government and the Tsarist dynasty to be suspended. Not even Chkheidze and Kerensky had the effrontery to vote in favour of war credits, however.

24 – Subversion of the “Tendencies”?

Even the objective Wolfe, not that orthodox as far as his theoretical line goes, is pleased to insist on the fact – for us not that significant – that the division between defeatists and defensists in 1914 did not coincide with that between revisionist-reformists and radical orthodox Marxists. To the famous example of Kautsky he counters Karl Liebknecht, who was a “left Bernsteinian”, while later Bernstein himself was among the first to deplore the abandonment of the “old Marxist tactic” (here well said) of the vote against war credits. But a series of other well-known orthodox Germans were chauvinist: Parvus, Lensch, Cunow, Haenisch. In England the extremely right-wing labourites Snowden and MacDonald voted against credits; in favour was Hyndman, leader (according to Wolfe) of the orthodox Social Democratic Federation. The British Socialist Party, which had none of its members in parliament, was decidedly against the imperialist war.

We will close the inexhaustible subject of the pre-war socialists with Wolfe’s cutting remark: “the soft-minded humanitarians inclined to pacifism while many a tough-minded ‘historical materialist’ [the quotes are Wolfe’s, a clearly idealist historian] flung himself heart and soul into the war” (B. Wolfe, op cit., p.698, Three Men who Made a Revolution, 1966).

Quite right! Wolfe didn’t put Mussolini on the list. We could have told him that Mussolini was an idealist who was conned, or who conned himself, into following revolutionary materialism. An idealist is neither a radical Marxist nor a reformist Marxist. He is just somebody not following the same path as us. Historically Gramsci helped us by providing a thousand good reasons to expel Turati. Theoretically however, and it is always a bad thing to keep quiet about this, Gramsci was less orthodox than Turati.

It is the general tendencies that interest us: persons and names are only helpful as a didactic mnemonic; maybe we’ll be partly to blame if it all becomes a bit indigestible. We have wanted to give an account of the struggle between defensism and defeatism. That was indispensible before we could pass on to the other antithesis between “uni-constructionism” and… communism. Social chauvinism and cominformism are not interpretations of communist theory; they are just some of the many ways of abandoning it. A very bad journey, gentlemen!

Anyway, what is neither right nor left is the Kremlin’s historical method: self-promoting historicism. The whole of the Bolshevik Party was solidly against the war. Whereas in fact the trial of the Duma deputies, arrested with Kamenev went badly, and equivocal statements were made, arousing the ire of valiant comrades Spandarian and Sverdlov (dead both of them without a stain on their names) the History brands Kamenev alone. Kamenev did indeed lead the Duma group, and didn’t prevent it on 25 July from issuing a very equivocal joint declaration with the Mensheviks, which talked of defending the people against every oppression, whether domestic or foreign. Lenin didn’t know about it: but what was clear was the gravity, immensely greater, of any act of solidarity, however vague, with the defensive war in autocratic Russia with respect to the western countries.

The historic fact, nevertheless, that all of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties gave respite to the Tsar as soon as he set off to war is just one more proof of Lenin’s historic construction: it is only the proletariat that can overthrow tsarism and feudalism, to make that revolution that is not its own. In February 1915 the Duma greeted the ukase [decree] of its long-term dissolution with a loud cheer for the victory of the imperial armies!

25 – The early part of the War

The capitalist leaders of the democratic nations were certain that the Muscovite steamroller, so often drawn up under the walls of the western cities to crush revolutions, would be set inexorably in motion to loosen the grip of the German armies descending on Paris. But the last time the Russian military machine had been tested on western battlefields was many decades before. Since then war, and the means to fight them, had been transformed by modern technology; their huge reserves of manpower, their mass of mounted soldiers no longer counted for much, and the loans from the French bankers and of other nations were happily gobbled up without much to show for them in terms of modern armaments.

The Germans detached a few corps from the western front, taking advantage as usual of their internal lines, and pulled them back to eastern Prussia, but before they reached the Russian front Samsonov’s army had already been crushed with colossal losses by Hindenburg’s brilliant manoeuvre at the Masurian Lakes, and by the superior martial organization of the Germans. The Bourgeois in France and Russia nevertheless exchanged compliments for this lightening of the pressure on Paris, analogous incidentally to that obtained by the Russians in Stalingrad after the huge massacres in the Second World War.

Old comrades may recall a cartoon by Scalarini in Avanti!: Nicholas’s claws tighten around Berlin, Wilhelm’s around Paris. The Masurian lakes and the Marne transformed everything.

Meanwhile in the Russian cities there was a waning of that wave of enthusiasm which had seen students, and some plebeian elements from the revolutionary strata of 1905, singing the war’s praises and kneeling to sing tsarist hymns. The generals attempted to redeem themselves in the Caucasus, by driving back the Turks, and in Galicia by smashing through the Austro-Hungarian front in August as far as Leopolis [Lviv], and in Spring they arrived at the fortress of Przemysl, the key to the Carpathians. But in the Summer of 1915, an overwhelming counteroffensive along the whole of the Austro-German front reached as far as Riga and Warsaw.

The military, civil, administrative and economic disorganization that spread throughout Russia was frightening: highly priced provisions in the countryside, an industrial crisis, a transport system threatening to seize up, and extreme dislocation of the State’s finances. Soon their western allies began to get worried about it as well.

Over the course of 1916 what remains of Russia’s potential is, at the request of the allies who assist with money and supplies, employed in a series of offensives which are either useless or of short duration, and whose aim is to reduce the pressure being exerted by the Austro-Germans on the Western Front. Moscow no longer dictates its will by throwing its massive military might into the balance but serves as a buffer whenever it pleases the modern despotism of big capital.

26 – War suits Democracy

The lessons of the first great universal war start to make an impact, and yet an entire cycle will go by and another great war will arrive and overwhelm the continents, without the swindles engendered by opportunist superstitions being avoided. The binomial so dear to bourgeois rhetoric, which associates despotism with military strength, autocracy with invincibility, and which portrays capitalism’s modern liberal States as pacific and defenceless and ill-adapted to all-out war, is resoundingly refuted as the first global conflict unfolds. France, England, Italy itself, and then America involved, countries all laying a claim to freedom and parliamentary government, emerge from the war virtually intact, and with advantages and conquests to boot. First to surrender is Russia, followed by “feudal” Germany, Austria, and Turkey, even though they had adopted modern industrial technology for military purposes to a far greater extent than Russia. Napoleon was invincible not because he was a despot, but because he acted under the impetus of the democratic revolution which first created the citizen soldier; because he was in control of the army of the Convention of 1793, which first instituted military conscription, fully relevant at the time, to defend the revolution and the country.

A lie was therefore crushed, which unfortunately later regained an immense amount of lost ground later on, namely that in order to put a stop to militarism you have to worship democracy. The two things actually go hand in hand as Athens and Rome had already shown (they were slave societies, but the slave was forbidden to bear arms).

Even if drawn from a propaganda publication, it is interesting to see how the effects of the 1914-18 war were mirrored in the “national wealth” of the countries involved. Russia down to 40% compared to the 1913 figure, Austria down to 55%, Germany 67%, France 69%, England 85%: the national wealth of Japan and America increased! Exchange rates against the dollar in 1918 were: Japan up 1%, England down 2%, France down 12%, Italy down 20%, Germany down 23%, Austria down 33%, Russia down 40%!

We shouldn’t therefore be saying that democracy is not militarist, but rather the opposite: the more democracy there is, the more militarism there is and the greater the potential for war.

So the inevitable conclusion presented itself of its own accord: Russia is no longer the decisive military factor in Europe. What is to be done to make it more effective in war? Democratise it!

Did we maybe diminish Lenin when we commented that he worked for an entire historical period to plant “democracy” in Russia? Those quick to condemn him pose this dilemma: if the capitalists in the West and in Russia are fighting for democracy in order to strengthen Russia’s military capacity in the war, and to win it – and Lenin and the communists are fighting for this historical transition [to democracy] to be completed, but their goal is defeat. Which side did history prove to be correct?

27 – Cracks Appear in the Empire

Following the series of setbacks suffered by the Russian army there arose an entire movement dedicated to plotting within the ruling spheres on the domestic front and within the diplomatic corps: discontent about the serious errors and general administrative chaos won over ever new strata; these circles predict above all that the extreme corruption of the tsarist regime and the deep economic depression will inevitably arouse the masses who had started to manifest their intolerance, not only about the way the war was being conducted, but against the war itself, and for it to end.

The industrial bourgeoisie, who had become more important because of the war, called for a new government which wasn’t dominated by the court cliques and landed nobility. The liberal parliamentary parties and the Kadets [popular name for the Constitutional Democrats, or K.Ds] who had flaunted their solidarity with the government begin to get restless. Their leader Miliukov delivers a pompous address on the subject: stupidity or betrayal?

Whereas corruption in the imperial court was demonstrated by the famous episodes of fanatical enthusiasm for the monk Rasputin and the well-known influence of the Tsarina over the faint-hearted Tsar, Russian capitalists and foreign diplomats had caught wind of a tendency among the reactionary forces which wished to make a separate peace with the Germans. On each side it was decided to act without delay, while for their part the masses and even the soldiers at the front were rebelling ever more frequently.

Even those opposed on most matters now agreed that previous initiatives and international meetings had proved ineffective, and that the ambassadors of France and England were secretly pulling strings to bring about a bourgeois democratic government and the deposition, if not of the dynasty, of Tsar Nicholas.

The replacement of Sazonov, minister of foreign affairs with strong connections to the west, with extreme right-wing elements would ratchet up the tension even further.

On 15 December 1916 Rasputin is assassinated by aristocrats in a palace plot which aims to ward off the regime’s collapse.

At the beginning of 1917 there increasingly take shape preparations for a coup d’etat by the nobility and big bourgeoisie, the aim being to depose Nicholas and to nominate his ailing son Alexis as Tsar; and as concerns power they consider appointing prince Lvov. It seems the English ambassador Buchanan was behind these moves. But popular action took the plunge and the various parties of the parliamentary left were forced to speed things up; which they did, in truth, with complete success, constituting a power entirely controlled by the bourgeoisie, while the petty-bourgeois parties and social-defensists did a magnificent job of keeping the proletarian forces at bay.

28 – A Warmongering Revolution

If it is true that the Bolsheviks were the only ones to engage in intense work among the masses to bring down the government, by stirring up workers, soldiers, sailors and even the women in the food queues, by leading the general strikes and by placing themselves at the front of the crowd in several bloody clashes with the police, just as true, as regards Lenin’s revolutionary ‘scheme’, is that they were tricked and didn’t know how to apply it consistently.

The instructions were supposed to be, as we recall from the lengthy analysis of Lenin’s writings in 1905 (at our Bologna meeting): mass action on the streets, not agreements between parliamentary parties – overthrow of the dynasty, not constitutional government; republic – democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants, i.e., not agreements with parties on the left which would also make agreements with the bourgeoisie.

In Lenin’s view this historical phase was still a bourgeois revolution in the hands of the proletariat and the peasants.

February 1917 was not that; it was instead an earlier, extremely volatile phase, rendered possible only by the war and the foreign powers. Suffice to recall that the proletarians (Bolsheviks) and the poor peasants (Left S.R.s) remained in opposition, and at a certain point were outlawed.

October 1917, which we will examine later, was, in an immediate sense (and more than that as well as we will see) the Leninite phase, that is, the democratic revolution in the hands of the proletariat.

February can be defined straightaway: democratic and bourgeois revolution in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The dateline of events is well known (with dates given in the calendar we use which is 13 days ahead, so not in February).

• 10 March. General strike in Petrograd; street battles.
• 11 March. The Tsar dissolves the Duma. The deputies remain in the capital to reject the order and to form the provisional government.
• 12 March. Formation of the Provisional Committee of the Duma and the Soviet of Petrograd Workers’ Deputies (which, in the classic Marxist scheme, should take total national power).
• 13 March. Arrest of the tsar’s ministers.
• 14 March. Soviet in Moscow. Soldiers’ delegates in the Petrograd Soviet. The army sent in against the workers opens fire on the police.
• 15 March. One up to the bourgeoisie: the Provisional Government is formed by the Provisional Committee of the Duma. Lvov, constitutional [Kadet], prime minister – Miliukov, head of the Kadets, foreign affairs – Kerensky, populist social-revolutionary, Justice, etcetera.
  Nicholas II abdicates in favour of his brother Mikhail.
• 16 March. Mikhail abdicates and defers to the future constituent assembly.
• 18 March. The Petrograd Soviet, like the one in Moscow, is mostly in the hands of the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries. It effectively consigns power to the provisional government formed by the bourgeois parties, in which the verbose and traitorous Kerensky plays the part of representative of the left and the socialist workers. The Bolsheviks react with a manifesto (and this time we can agree neither with the Stalinists, nor even with Trotski) which does not disown the bourgeois provisional government, but sets out demands for the latter to enact: albeit by opposing a peaceful conclusion to the war rather than stoking it up.

Mensheviks and social revolutionaries would subsequently enter the government: the Bolsheviks took an unclear position, and Pravda published articles by Kamenev that would later arouse Lenin’s indignation: in essence they not only failed to define the Lvov government as counter-revolutionary but offered it support, albeit conditional.

The bourgeoisie, having got the proletariat to overthrow the tsarist forces, were now one hundred per cent successful in clinching the contest for power.

This was due solely to the action and the historical role of the opportunist and petty-bourgeois parties, as “Lenin’s plan”, sketched out over a long period, had perfectly summed up.

29 – A Loss of Direction

It was very clear that the whole of the right wing or, more precisely, almost the whole of the provisional government, was composed of supporters of the war and friends of the western allies. They had been persuaded to overthrow the tsar’s government, to which in 1914 they had offered full national solidarity, for the sole reason it was suspected of pro-German defeatism which would sabotage the country’s full potential, and now it was logical for them to direct every effort towards the resumption of hostilities at the front.

No less logical was it that that part of the proletarian parties, who in 1915 had proved to be shamelessly “defensist”, should support the same policy and approve of the war, which by now had acquired a democratic virginity.

The members of those parties which, even when not defeatist, had at least opposed the war, but who now embraced the policy of the continuation of the war and defence of liberated Russia, showed that they had nothing in common with the condemnation of the imperialist war “on all sides”, and that it was bourgeois reasons, not Marxist ones, which had kept them from marching off to war, for as long as the tsar was directing it.

But was perhaps the position the Bolsheviks took as regards this historical alternative perfectly clear? What had changed? Should defeatism continue, or should they move to another phase because one had a “democratic fatherland” now? Unfortunately they were far from making a sound choice.

And yet even before the war question arose, the period of euphoria, in which for example there the veterans of the Siberian deportation, such as the taciturn Stalin, and the highly eloquent Sverdlov and many others met up, and there was rhetorical fraternisation between populists, trudoviks, social revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, shows that the theoretical evolution of the movement fell far short of the powerful roadmaps which were sketched out in Lenin’s work and in the battles fought at the congresses.

At the time of the “Two Tactics”, and of many other sharp polemics, Lenin had rightly branded not only every type of populist, but also the Mensheviks, with the inevitability of their counter-revolutionary fate.

The Mensheviks had posed as intransigents, maintaining that the proletariat couldn’t insist on taking power in Russia as it was the bourgeoisie who must do that; we will not govern, at most we can ‘monitor’ (a word which infuriated Lenin) the democratic power.

They made out that Lenin was an opportunist for bluntly stating: it is we who must take power as a provisional government in the democratic bourgeois revolution on condition we concede not an iota of power to the bourgeois parties. And what is more, let there be no more talk of monarchy.

The dispute, despite the lies spread via Stalinist channels, was never about us taking power in order to build a socialist Russia. Heavy hitting adversaries like Plekhanov would of course immediately responded: but if we are talking about that historical objective, then we are for taking power as well.

Lenin – and it is as well to constantly emphasise this – said that it was necessary to take power because history offered no other way of avoiding a counter-revolutionary victory. Evidently in a potential sense taking power derives from the necessity to advance historically towards socialism, towards the Russian and the world revolution, but it is always suggested in a potential sense and not as the immediate and present content of the historical struggle.

At this point even Trotski had not yet found his bearings. When Lenin pointed out the rightism of the Mensheviks, he agreed. However, when the Mensheviks, with staggering hypocrisy, attacked a Lenin who was making the proletariat fight for too little, Trotski, who as an ardent militant dreamed only of struggle, was perplexed; although later on he would understand the powerful dialectics of Lenin’s construction, and understand it in earnest. In any case we will use him as an impeccable witness to the fact that what Lenin wanted was this: the bourgeois democratic revolution, as long as it was not an abortion and parody of a bourgeois democratic revolution. As a steely determinist, the accusation of having wished for too little made him laugh. In reality he had given a terrible example, as the anglo-saxons would put it, of how to write the history that is yet to come.

So, the minute the Mensheviks reveal their true colours, and though declaring that they were only negotiating about liberty, democracy, and democratic war, never about immediate socialism, ENTER the bourgeois government, every red-blooded Bolshevik should have grabbed them by the throat and declared war without quarter on them. But neither Kamenev, Sverdlov, Stalin or anyone else did so. Apart from the war question – which they knew had been resolved by Lenin and by uncorrupted Marxism over two years earlier – they also failed in their duty towards a party that had taken such trouble to define what its tasks should be during those hours which had struck so gloriously on the clockface of history.

This group, despite the great merit they had accrued in the insurrectional struggles, fell short as regards the problem of the relations between the social classes and the political parties in Russia. That the party which had explained the historical doctrine so brilliantly should fall down when it came to action was indeed a serious matter.

30 – A homeland at last?

This was also due to the war situation. Indisputably so. But to the error regarding Russia’s internal dynamics there corresponded a similar error regarding the dynamics of the international forces, of the global imperialist conflict.

For the late-lamented Karl Marx, if he follows things from the next world (for us materialists, he surely is following them, but from the place-time when he was alive, and there is Vladimir – oh go ahead, laugh – to shout what he would have shouted) the most horrible moments must surely be, having explained so often that dialectics is the key to history, when he sees “Marxists” who are apparently totally oblivious of it, and their adversaries seemingly knowing it inside out.

The group of bourgeois parties in the pre-war period (whose movements were closely tracked by Lenin) were very definite that they would never launch an attack on the feudal government and that they would avoid the awkward stage of the “illegal” transitional government, and they only set aside this judicious assessment because losing the war would have spelled ruin for powerful Russian and international capitalistic interests, and would certainly have provoked violent movements at the expense of the propertied classes, resulting in an intense civil war. They therefore followed the road that could avoid complications of this kind, the road to German defeat in the world war.

Apart from everything else, this was consistent with the purely bourgeois requirement of exalting national values at home, as in all the other bourgeois revolutions in the nineteenth century. If, therefore, they followed the path of Germandefeat, that is, of the victory of western imperialists bound together by important business interests, it is clear that from the anti-tsarist revolution was bound to emerge not an end to the war, but its revival in an extra-virulent form fuelled by “national enthusiasm”, and a surmounting of the defeatism being plotted by hysterical Tsarinas and dishevelled Rasputins.

The provisional government didn’t hesitate to take this road. Who could have stopped them? The Soviet, with its dualist power. But what dualism of powers! Power is not to be shared, just as the bourgeoisies in the west hadn’t shared it with the deputies from the workers’ parties who voted for war credits or who joined the ministries: to these reprobates was given status and honours, but no more than that. And so it was with the Cheidzes and Tseretellis, the Martovs and the Chernovs.

To get back on the right road was reading Lenin’s text really too much to ask, or to hear echoing in one’s head the tough, unvarnished speeches he made over the course of ten congresses and conferences; or even without reading the theses, to have read the articles and the pamphlets dictated after the 2nd International’s shameful 1914?

And if the Belgian and French socialists had been pilloried, what doubt was there that by the same token the Russians who had given national solidarity to a post-tsarist republic should be as well?

To hesitate on this meant to be subject to purely bourgeois and nationalist ideology, to draw a parallel between the defence of the country by the Convention and the epic of France’s Thermopylae, to not have understood a damn thing about anything Marx wrote, or Lenin’s Imperialism, or about the Marxist-Leninist distinction between wars of revolutionary defence and the contemporary, abhorrent and shameful war of the imperialist powers, that certainly stunk no less after the Romanovs had gone, nor by acquiring the cachectic face of Woodrow Wilson.

These in fact are precisely the arguments which the Italian reformists wanted to utilise after the collapse at Caporetto to give their support to the war effort; and often we have recalled the blood, sweat and tears involved in holding on to them.

Were these then rock-hard Bolsheviks, firmly loyal to the party, with bloody red revolution running through their veins? Not a bit of it!

31 – Vladimir Gets Ready to Move Off

Need we recount again the story of Lenin’s journey from Switzerland to Russia and his triumphant arrival? Perhaps not, and yet we will, because the events are very instructive, and so great is the danger that easy sentimentalism, or its condescending ally, a sly and despicable scepticism, will conclude: there is nothing to be said; it all depends on one man, on one man’s brain, and History’s great movements only break out when the dice have been thrown, and from the many idiots discharged from the uteruses of the world, one guy is selected “who is always right”.

The news Lenin has received when he sets out is only partial, but during the journey, and especially after crossing the border, or rather the front, he gets to know more. In his hands are copies of Pravda edited by Stalin and Kamenev, which he angrily shows to his travel companions, perhaps terrified he’d tear them up.

Trotski recounts that Kamenev, one of Lenin’s most devoted disciples, to the point he even mimicked his gestures and handwriting – not a man to mimic for sure – went to meet him, and felt he was badly treated. Raskolnikov, another sound head, recounts that Lenin came in and sat down on the couch: “What have you people been writing in Pravda? [he must surely have used the term equivalent to “what the f…?”]. We are very angry with you!” From then on whoever came into range got a similar greeting, up to the famous speech to the crowd, from the armoured car.

We will emphasize the gulf that had opened up between the mentality of the comrades who had remained in Russia and Lenin’s interpretation of things. In the first place, in order to dismantle one aspect of the theory of his Hypnotization of the masses, we will point out what a great advantage it is to be able to look at these important matters from a distance (both spatially and timewise). Lenin gets off the train in Petrograd. He doesn’t even look round, no-one is stupid enough or has the nerve to say: get yourself settled in first. The representatives of the government, false and obsequious, come to greet him in the great station’s imperial lounge. He can’t stand Cheidze, who delivers a welcoming address, offering him unity with the Mensheviks in the “revolutionary democracy”. In the party meeting, a few days before, Stalin had showed that he was prepared – as we will see – to welcome a similar initiative from Tseretelli.

Lenin didn’t even respond with a no, but resolutely turned his back on the official delegation (merely shrugging his shoulders would have been too respectful), walked to the station entrance, entered the square to much applause, and hoisted himself up onto an armoured car. Maybe no text of the speech exists. Everyone refers to excerpts from it: … I greet you as the advance guard of the proletarian army… this war of imperialist plunder is the start of the civil war throughout Europe… The world socialist revolution has already dawned… any day, maybe tomorrow, capitalist imperialism may collapse once and for all… The revolution achieved by you was a start, it opened a new epoch: Long Live the Worldwide Socialist Revolution!

That speech, and Lenin’s later appearances at the party headquarters and at the conference of the following day, as amply documented in the April Theses, not only left the so-called “leaders of the revolution” lost for words, but, if all the testimonies are correct, “turned the heads” of the best workers and leading Bolshevik intellectuals. Following his overwhelming critique, nothing was left of the tactics followed up until that point. The new proposals descended like a crash of lightning on his astounded and disorientated audience. Those who heard Lenin speak, without oratorical emphasis, and many of those who didn’t hesitate to contradict him, can say how whatever he said appeared obvious and relevant to everyone, including those who had never heard him before. Those who were least skilled in Marxist dialectics were always the most astonished of all. What he says is impossible! But it is so clear and evident that not a syllable can be refuted…

32 – The April Fool

The newspaper reports of the speech on the 3rd April were greeted with general astonishment; not only by his opponents, but by the cadres of the Bolshevik party; and this continued during the meeting on the following day when Lenin gave a more in-depth presentation, showing no interest in the topics and resolutions on the agenda, but dashing off there and then the famous theses, on which Stalinism would try to base his gigantic falsification, and which trotskists would misunderstand, claiming that Lenin had revolutionized the “old” Bolshevik tactic of 1905. But in fact, what Lenin brings to Moscow is the underlying argument of the Two Tactics without changing a thing, and it’s just that Trotski only finally grasps its revolutionary significance (having arrived on the scene a little later). The falsification is this, that it is not at all to do with passing from the bourgeois revolution to the “socialist transformation” but rather more exactly of passing from the “Menshevik tactic of the democratic revolution” to the communist and “revolutionary tactic” during the democratic revolution.

This is demonstrated in crystal clear fashion in the text of the Theses of April Fourth and by Lenin’s reports to the conference on the 24th and over the following days, during which Lenin constantly repeats: “it isn’t yet about installing socialism”, but rather of not acting like opportunists in the bourgeois revolution.

For now, however, we will linger over the testimonies to this general astonishment, which, if there had been a real Marxist party functioning as it should, would have been replaced by the simple statement: he is saying what he has been saying for twenty years, and we were idiots to have taken a different path, on the ground of the usual prejudice that new and unexpected situations required it.

Their opponents can hardly have been surprised: their statements merely expressed fierce disappointment that their clever snare, laid at the heart of the soviets to entrap the Bolshevik fraction, had been severed with one blow.

Plekhanov, who as a theoretician must have recognized the Lenin as he was when he himself was with him, makes out, good renegade that he was, that he heard those things first time round. He is like the Italian supporters of Togliatti who to some indignant old comrade reply: can you still be coming out with that old stuff from 1921! His expressions are very similar: This speech is a farcical dream, it is the ravings of a madman. The Mensheviks, having made the sign of the cross, discover that Lenin “is inciting a civil war”! Cheidze is a more formidable opponent: Lenin will stay out of the revolution, while we will follow in its path. Great prophets! Tseretelli states that if they had taken power they would have ruined everything and destroyed – wait for it – the proletarian International!

These people had already drooled over the way out provided by the Germans, before dashing off to see if Lenin, after so many years, would offer them his hand on which to throw themselves weeping with emotion; spurned, they came back spitting venom. All this is classic, we well know, and there is no need to go into it further. But what is important is the disorientation of even the comrades in the front line, totally ignored in the official History, which as usual only slings mud at Kamenev, Rykov, Bukharin and others from the gallows platform of twenty years later. Let us listen to the testimonies gathered by Trotski. “There was no discussion – he said – All were too stunned for that. No one wanted to expose himself to the blows of this desperate leader” (here he veers on the side of fiction a bit: a leader not desperate, but angry, to not use a slightly stronger term, and yet on a resolute doctrinal march from the past to a clear-cut future, at that particularly fecund turning point; one of the very few in which the catalysing action of that mere corpuscle that is the leader acts on an entire collectivity). Trotski continues: “they whispered among themselves that Ilyich had been too long abroad, that he had lost touch with Russia, that he did not understand the situation, and worse than that, that he had gone over to the position of ‘trotskism’”. Here the great Leon is guilty not of vanity, which one wouldn’t expect from him, but of bounteous naivety: it was Trotski who finally discovered Lenin, not the other way round. Trotski with his eagle eyes did not witness that scene, but he knew that the blue, ultra-penetrating, eyes of Lenin, at that moment, blazing, seemed to be quietly saying: not only is it such and such, but you should recognize that every faithful sucker knows it already. Nobody’s head is set spinning just by being told things they didn’t know before, but only when they have the sensation of ‘how come this wasn’t said right at the start: how could we ever have thought otherwise? We used to know this off by heart!’

33 – Thrills After the Dressing Down

There are other references to this sensational brain-washing operation; an operation entrusted not to ruthless cops or Freudian sorcerers, but to material forces during certain historical crises as they come to a head, which myth, the maker neither of dreams nor farces, but laborious interpreter of palpable facts, used to express with the sacred words: He is the Word: he has spoken, and the light has entered into us! (oh, materialist Plekhanov, how deep have you fallen!). And the references are as follows.

When Lenin said: I propose to change the name of the party to the Communist Party, not even Zinoviev, who had just arrived with him, supported the proposal! The Bolshevik Angarsky wrote: ‘It must be openly acknowledged that a great many of the Old Bolsheviks maintained the Old Bolshevik opinions on the question of the character of the revolution of 1917 and that the repudiation of these views was not easily accomplished’. And Trotski writes: ‘As a matter of fact it was not a question of ‘a great many of the Old Bolsheviks’ but of all of them without exception’. Well, no Angarsky, no, Trotski. Maybe it was all of them (but despite a lack of alternative sources from which to make a reconstruction, it is difficult to believe that Krupskaya, let’s say, and who knows who else, did not accept it without flinching) but actually it was the matter of laying claim to the “old theses of 1905” as they stood, point by point. It is these coincidences, not the power of one human brain, however much light emanates from it, which when linked to the forces of the historical subsoil have the power to shake an entire epoch.

But it was Markov, a worker from the Urals, “whom the revolution had found at his lathe”, who spontaneously gave the assessment that was theoretically correct: “our leaders were groping until the arrival of Vladimir Ilyich. Our party’s position began to clarify with the appearance of his famous Theses”.

Bukharin, too prone to flaring up, recalled after Lenin’s death that a part of the party considered the theses as a betrayal of Marxist ideology! Ludmilla Stahl wrote: ‘Our comrades were content with mere preparations for the Constituent Assembly using parliamentary methods and did not even consider the possibility of going further. By accepting Lenin’s word we shall be doing that which life itself is urging us to do’. Very well. But we will show that that word, which condemned the universal suffrage Constituent Assembly in the bourgeois Russian revolution, was printed back in 1905.

34 – Monosyllabic Droof: Da

Since a certain elephantine global co-ordinating body did such a great job of creating the myth that only Stalin accepted the April line straightaway, (whereas Pravda, when edited by him and Kamenev, stated that the ‘pravdas’ [truths] of Lenin (poor little fellow!) were merely personal opinions) let us quote a last non-trotskist witness.

This is not the first time we have referred to it, but it is useful and pertinent to the subject under discussion. At the enlarged executive of the Comintern in February-March 1926, during a meeting on the Russian question (the Trotski-Zinoviev-Kamenev opposition was forming), the debate on which was prevented from being brought to the plenary session on the grounds that the opposition itself had requested as much for fear of being even more severely chastised, a delegate from the left of the Italian party asked Stalin whether it were true that at the 1917 meeting, when discussing the stance to be taken on the war, Lenin had included him, Stalin, among those against whom he directed epithets of the type “Russian chauvinist”, “Cossack nationalist” and such like. As the embarrassed young interpreter remained silent, Stalin ordered him to translate the question for him, raised his head, and clearly said: da – yes, it is true.

On one occasion (in fact at that same executive meeting) during an attack on the lefts, Stalin made a triple distinction: when it is comrade X speaking, it is always a lie – when it is comrade Y, it is sometimes true, sometimes a lie – when it is comrade Z (the Italian delegate) it is always true, even if the conclusions he draws are wrong.

The witness we have quoted is Stalin himself, via he who according to him (see the report printed in Moscow) never bore false witness. And to him be given due credit for not wishing, even if monosyllabically, to lie either.

That would not be enough to condemn anybody, if even Jesus Christ had to tell his first lieutenant, Peter, that before the cock crowed, he would deny him thrice.

To us materialists it cannot be said: you will be with me in Paradise! History, and its theory, towers above us all, big and small, famous and unknown. It is its path alone that we follow.