                    H.6 Why did the Russian Revolution fail?

   The greatest myth of Marxism must surely be the idea that the Russian
   Revolution failed solely due to the impact of objective factors. While
   the date Leninists consider the revolution to have become beyond reform
   varies (over time it has moved backwards towards 1917 as the
   authoritarianism under Lenin and Trotsky has become better known), the
   actual reasons are common. For Leninists, the failure of the revolution
   was the product of such things as civil war, foreign intervention,
   economic collapse and the isolation and backwardness of Russia and not
   Bolshevik ideology. Bolshevik authoritarianism, then, was forced upon
   the party by difficult objective circumstances. It follows that there
   are no fundamental problems with Leninism and so it is a case of simply
   applying it again, hopefully in more fortuitous circumstances.

   Anarchists are not impressed by this argument and we will show why by
   refuting common Leninist explanations for the failure of the
   revolution. For anarchists, Bolshevik ideology played its part,
   creating social structures (a new state and centralised economic
   organisations) which not only disempowered the masses but also made the
   objective circumstances being faced much worse. Moreover, we argue,
   vanguardism could not help turn the rebels of 1917 into the ruling
   elite of 1918. We explore these arguments and the evidence for them in
   this section.

   For those who argue that the civil war provoked Bolshevik policies, the
   awkward fact is that many of the features of war communism, such as the
   imposition of one-man management and centralised state control of the
   economy, were already apparent before war communism. As one historian
   argues, "[f]rom the first days of Bolshevik power there was only a weak
   correlation between the extent of 'peace' and the mildness or severity
   of Bolshevik rule, between the intensity of the war and the intensity
   of proto-war communist measures . . . Considered in ideological terms
   there was little to distinguish the 'breathing space' (April-May 1918)
   from the war communism that followed." Unsurprisingly, then, "the
   breathing space of the first months of 1920 after the victories over
   Kolchak and Denikin . . . saw their intensification and the
   militarisation of labour" and, in fact, "no serious attempt was made to
   review the aptness of war communist policies." Ideology "constantly
   impinged on the choices made at various points of the civil war . . .
   Bolshevik authoritarianism cannot be ascribed simply to the Tsarist
   legacy or to adverse circumstances." [Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists
   in Power, p. 24, p. 27 and p. 30] The inherent tendencies of Bolshevism
   were revealed by the civil war, a war which only accelerated the
   development of what was implicit (and, often, not so implicit) in
   Bolshevik ideology and its vision of socialism, the state and the role
   of the party.

   Thus "the effective conclusion of the Civil War at the beginning of
   1920 was followed by a more determined and comprehensive attempt to
   apply these so-called War Communism policies rather than their
   relaxation" and so the "apogee of the War Communism economy occurred
   after the Civil War was effectively over." With the fighting over Lenin
   "forcefully raised the introduction of one-man management . . . Often
   commissars fresh from the Red Army were drafted into management
   positions in the factories." By the autumn of 1920, one-man management
   was in 82% of surveyed workplaces. This "intensification of War
   Communism labour policies would not have been a significant development
   if they had continued to be applied in the same haphazard manner as in
   1919, but in early 1920 the Communist Party leadership was no longer
   distracted by the Civil War from concentrating its thoughts and efforts
   on the formulation and implementation of its labour policies." While
   the " experience of the Civil War was one factor predisposing
   communists towards applying military methods" to the economy in early
   1920, "ideological considerations were also important." [Jonathan Aves,
   Workers Against Lenin, p. 2, p. 17, p. 15, p. 30, p. 17 and p. 11]

   So it seems incredulous for Leninist John Rees to assert, for example,
   that "[w]ith the civil war came the need for stricter labour discipline
   and for . . . 'one man management'. Both these processes developed lock
   step with the war." ["In Defence of October," pp. 3-82, International
   Socialism, no. 52, p. 43] As we discuss in the [1]next section, Lenin
   was advocating both of these before the outbreak of civil war in May
   1918 and after it was effectively over. Indeed he explicitly, both
   before and after the civil war, stressed that these policies were being
   implemented because the lack of fighting meant that the Bolsheviks
   could turn their full attention to building socialism. How these facts
   can be reconciled with claims of policies being in "lock step" with the
   civil war is hard to fathom.

   Part of the problem is the rampant confusion within Leninist circles as
   to when the practices condemned as Stalinism actually started. For
   example, Chris Harman (of the UK's SWP) in his summary of the rise
   Stalinism asserted that after "Lenin's illness and subsequent death"
   the "principles of October were abandoned one by one." Yet the practice
   of, and ideological commitment to, party dictatorship, one-man
   management in industry, banning opposition groups/parties (as well as
   factions within the Communist Party), censorship, state repression of
   strikes and protests, piece-work, Taylorism, the end of independent
   trade unions and a host of other crimes against socialism were all
   implemented under Lenin and normal practice at the time of his death.
   In other words, the "principles of October" were abandoned under, and
   by, Lenin. Which, incidentally, explains why, Trotsky "continued to his
   death to harbour the illusion that somehow, despite the lack of
   workers' democracy, Russia was a 'workers' state.'" [Bureaucracy and
   Revolution in Eastern Europe, p. 14 and p. 20] Simply put, there had
   been no workers' democracy when Trotsky held state power and he
   considered that regime a "workers' state". The question arises why
   Harman thinks Lenin's Russia was some kind of "workers' state" if
   workers' democracy is the criteria by which such things are to be
   judged.

   From this it follows that, unlike Leninists, anarchists do not judge a
   regime by who happens to be in office. A capitalist state does not
   become less capitalist just because a social democrat happens to be
   prime minister or president. Similarly, a regime does not become state
   capitalist just because Stalin is in power rather than Lenin. While the
   Marxist analysis concentrates on the transfer of state power from one
   regime to another, the anarchist one focuses on the transfer of power
   from the state and bosses to working class people. What makes a regime
   socialist is the social relationships it has, not the personal opinions
   of those in power. Thus if the social relationships under Lenin are
   similar to those under Stalin, then the nature of the regime is
   similar. That Stalin's regime was far more brutal, oppressive and
   exploitative than Lenin's does not change the underlying nature of the
   regime. As such, Chomsky is right to point to "the techniques of use of
   terminology to delude" with respect to the Bolshevik revolution. Under
   Lenin and Trotsky, "a popular revolution was taken over by a managerial
   elite who immediately dismantled all the socialist institutions." They
   used state power to "create a properly managed society, run by smart
   intellectuals, where everybody does his job and does what he's told . .
   . That's Leninism. That's the exact opposite of socialism. If socialism
   means anything, it means workers' control of production and then on
   from there. That's the first thing they destroyed. So why do we call it
   socialism?" [Language and Politics, p. 537]

   To refute in advance one obvious objection to our argument, the
   anarchist criticism of the Bolsheviks is not based on the utopian
   notion that they did not create a fully functioning (libertarian)
   communist society. As we discussed [2]section H.2.5, anarchists have
   never thought a revolution would immediately produce such an outcome.
   As Emma Goldman argued, she had not come to Russia "expecting to find
   Anarchism realised" nor did she "expect Anarchism to follow in the
   immediate footsteps of centuries of despotism and submission." Rather,
   she "hope[d] to find in Russia at least the beginnings of the social
   changes for which the Revolution had been fought" and that "the Russian
   workers and peasants as a whole had derived essential social betterment
   as a result of the Bolshevik regime." Both hopes were dashed. [My
   Disillusionment in Russia, p. xlvii] Equally, anarchists were, and are,
   well aware of the problems facing the revolution, the impact of the
   civil war and economic blockade. Indeed, both Goldman and Berkman used
   these (as Leninists still do) to rationalise their support for the
   Bolsheviks, in spite of their authoritarianism (for Berkman's account
   see The Bolshevik Myth [pp. 328-31]). Their experiences in Russia,
   particularly after the end of the civil war, opened their eyes to the
   impact of Bolshevik ideology on its outcome.

   Nor is it a case that anarchists have no solutions to the problems
   facing the Russian Revolution. As well as the negative critique that
   statist structures are unsuitable for creating socialism, particularly
   in the difficult economic circumstances that affects every revolution,
   anarchists stressed that genuine social construction had to be based on
   the people's own organisations and self-activity. This was because, as
   Goldman concluded, the state is a "menace to the constructive
   development of the new social structure" and "would become a dead
   weight upon the growth of the new forms of life." Therefore, she
   argued, only the "industrial power of the masses, expressed through
   their libertarian associations - Anarchosyndicalism - is alone able to
   organise successfully the economic life and carry on production" If the
   revolution had been made a la Bakunin rather than a la Marx "the result
   would have been different and more satisfactory" as (echoing Kropotkin)
   Bolshevik methods "conclusively demonstrated how a revolution should
   not be made." [Op. Cit., pp. 253-4 and p. liv]

   It should also be mentioned that the standard Leninist justification
   for party dictatorship is that the opposition groups supported the
   counter-revolution or took part in armed rebellions against "soviet
   power" (i.e., the Bolsheviks). Rees, for example, asserts that some
   Mensheviks "joined the Whites. The rest alternated between accepting
   the legitimacy of the government and agitating for its overthrow. The
   Bolsheviks treated them accordingly." [Op. Cit., p. 65] However, this
   is far from the truth. As one historian noted, while the "charge of
   violent opposition would be made again and again" by the Bolsheviks,
   along with being "active supporters of intervention and of
   counter-revolution", in fact this "charge was untrue in relation to the
   Mensheviks, and the Communists, if they ever believed it, never
   succeeded in establishing it." A few individuals did reject the
   Menshevik "official policy of confining opposition to strictly
   constitutional means" and they were "expelled from the party, for they
   had acted without its knowledge." [Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the
   Communist Autocracy, p. 193] Significantly, the Bolsheviks annulled
   their June 14th expulsion of the Mensheviks from the soviets on the
   30th of November of the same year, 1918. [E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik
   Revolution, vol. 1, p. 180]

   By "agitating" for the "overthrow" of the Bolshevik government, Rees is
   referring to the Menshevik tactic of standing for election to soviets
   with the aim of securing a majority and so forming a new government!
   Unsurprisingly, the sole piece of evidence presented by Rees is a quote
   from historian E.H. Carr: "If it was true that the Bolshevik regime was
   not prepared after the first few months to tolerate an organised
   opposition, it was equally true that no opposition party was prepared
   to remain within legal limits. The premise of dictatorship was common
   to both sides of the argument." [Op. Cit., p. 190] Yet this "judgment
   ignores" the Mensheviks whose policy of legal opposition: "The charge
   that the Mensheviks were not prepared to remain within legal limits is
   part of the Bolsheviks case; it does not survive an examination of the
   facts." [Schapiro, Op. Cit., p. 355fn]

   As regards the SRs, this issue is more complicated. The right-SRs
   welcomed and utilised the rebellion of the Czech Legion in May 1918 to
   reconvene the Constituent Assembly (within which they had an
   overwhelming majority and which the Bolsheviks had dissolved). After
   the White General Kolchak overthrew this government in November 1918
   (and so turned the civil war into a Red against White one), most
   right-SRs sided with the Bolsheviks and, in return, the Bolsheviks
   restated them to the soviets in February 1919. [Carr, Op. Cit., p. 356
   and p. 180] It must be stressed that, contra Carr, the SRs aimed for a
   democratically elected government, not a dictatorship (and definitely
   not a White one). With the Left-SRs, it was the Bolsheviks who denied
   them their majority at the Fifth All-Congress of Soviets. Their
   rebellion was not an attempted coup but rather an attempt to force the
   end of the Brest-Litovsk treaty with the Germans by restarting the war
   (as Alexander Rabinowitch proves beyond doubt in his The Bolsheviks in
   Power). It would be fair to say that the anarchists, most SRs, the Left
   SRs and Mensheviks were not opposed to the revolution, they were
   opposed to Bolshevik policy.

   Ultimately, as Emma Goldman came to conclude, "what [the Bolsheviks]
   called 'defence of the Revolution' was really only the defence of
   [their] party in power." [Op. Cit., p. 57]

   At best it could be argued that the Bolsheviks had no alternative but
   to impose their dictatorship, as the other socialist parties would have
   succumbed to the Whites and so, eventually, a White dictatorship would
   have replaced the Red one. This was why, for example, Victor Serge
   claimed he sided with the Communists against the Kronstadt sailors even
   though the latter had right on their side for "the country was
   exhausted, and production practically at a standstill; there was no
   reserves of any kind . . . The working-class elite that had been
   moulded in the struggle against the old regime was literally decimated.
   . . . If the Bolshevik dictatorship fell, it was only a short step to
   chaos . . . and in the end, through the sheer force of events, another
   dictatorship, this time anti-proletarian." [Memoirs of a Revolutionary,
   pp. 128-9]

   This, however, is shear elitism and utterly violates the notion that
   socialism is the self-emancipation of the working class. Moreover, it
   places immense faith on the goodwill of those in power - a utopian
   position. Equally, it should not be forgotten that both the Reds and
   Whites were anti-working class. At best it could be argued that the Red
   repression of working class protests and strikes as well as opposition
   socialists would not have been as terrible as that of the Whites, but
   that is hardly a good rationale for betraying the principles of
   socialism. Yes, libertarians can agree with Serge that embracing
   socialist principles may not work. Every revolution is a gamble and may
   fail. As libertarian socialist Ante Ciliga correctly argued:

     "Let us consider, finally, one last accusation which is commonly
     circulated: that action such as that at Kronstadt could have
     indirectly let loose the forces of the counter-revolution. It is
     possible indeed that even by placing itself on a footing of workers'
     democracy the revolution might have been overthrown; but what is
     certain is that it has perished, and that it has perished on account
     of the policy of its leaders. The repression of Kronstadt, the
     suppression of the democracy of workers and soviets by the Russian
     Communist party, the elimination of the proletariat from the
     management of industry, and the introduction of the NEP, already
     signified the death of the Revolution." ["The Kronstadt Revolt", pp.
     330-7, The Raven, no, 8, p. 333 p. 335]

   So it should be stressed that no anarchist would argue that if an
   anarchist path had been followed then success would have automatically
   followed. It is possible that the revolution would have failed but one
   thing is sure: by following the Bolshevik path it did fail. While the
   Bolsheviks may have remained in power at the end of the civil war, the
   regime was a party dictatorship preceding over a state capitalist
   economy. In such circumstances, there could no further development
   towards socialism and, unsurprisingly, there was none. Ultimately, as
   the rise of Stalin showed, the notion that socialism could be
   constructed without basic working class freedom and self-government was
   a baseless illusion.

   As we will show, the notion that objective circumstances (civil war,
   economic collapse, and so on) cannot fully explain the failure of the
   Russian Revolution. This becomes clear once the awkward fact that
   Bolshevik authoritarianism and state capitalist policies started before
   the outbreak of civil war is recognised (see [3]section H.6.1); that
   their ideology inspired and shaped the policies they implemented and
   these policies themselves made the objective circumstances worse (see
   [4]section H.6.2); and that the Bolsheviks had to repress working class
   protest and strikes against them throughout the civil war, so
   suggesting a social base existed for a genuinely socialist approach
   (see [5]section H.6.3).

   Finally, there is a counter-example which, anarchists argue, show the
   impact of Bolshevik ideology on the fate of the revolution. This is the
   anarchist influenced Makhnovist movement (see Peter Arshinov's The
   History of the Makhnovist Movement or Alexandre Skirda's Nestor Makhno
   Anarchy's Cossack for more details). Defending the revolution in the
   Ukraine against all groups aiming to impose their will on the masses,
   the Makhnovists were operating in the same objective conditions facing
   the Bolsheviks - civil war, economic disruption, isolation and so
   forth. However, the policies the Makhnovists implemented were radically
   different than those of the Bolsheviks. While the Makhnovists called
   soviet congresses, the Bolsheviks disbanded them. The former encouraged
   free speech and organisation, the latter crushed both. While the
   Bolsheviks raised party dictatorship and one-man management to
   ideological truisms, the Makhnovists stood for and implemented
   workplace, army, village and soviet self-management. As one historian
   suggests, far from being necessary or even functional, Bolshevik
   policies "might even have made the war more difficult and more costly.
   If the counter-example of Makhno is anything to go by then [they]
   certainly did." [Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets, p. 265]
   Anarchists argue that it shows the failure of Bolshevism cannot be put
   down to purely objective factors like the civil war: the politics of
   Leninism played their part.

   Needless to say, this section can only be a summary of the arguments
   and evidence. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of the
   revolution or civil war. It concentrates on the key rationales by
   modern day Leninists to justify Bolshevik actions and policies. We do
   so simply because it would be impossible to cover every aspect of the
   revolution and because these rationales are one of the main reasons why
   Leninist ideology has not been placed in the dustbin of history where
   it belongs. For further discussion, see [6]the appendix on the Russian
   Revolution or Voline's The Unknown Revolution, Alexander Berkman's The
   Russian Tragedy and The Bolshevik Myth, Emma Goldman's My
   Disillusionment in Russia or Maurice Brinton's essential The Bolsheviks
   and Workers' Control.

H.6.1 Can objective factors explain the failure of the Russian Revolution?

   Leninist John Rees recounts the standard argument, namely that the
   objective conditions in Russia meant that the "subjective factor" of
   Bolshevik ideology "was reduced to a choice between capitulation to the
   Whites or defending the revolution with whatever means were at hands.
   Within these limits Bolshevik policy was decisive. But it could not
   wish away the limits and start with a clean sheet." From this
   perspective, the key factor was the "vice-like pressure of the civil
   war" which "transformed the state" as well as the "Bolshevik Party
   itself." Industry was "reduced . . . to rubble" and the "bureaucracy of
   the workers' state was left suspended in mid-air, its class based
   eroded and demoralised." ["In Defence of October," pp. 3-82,
   International Socialism, no. 52, p. 30, p. 70, p. 66 and p. 65]

   Due to these factors, argue Leninists, the Bolsheviks became dictators
   over the working class and not due to their political ideas. Anarchists
   are not convinced by this analysis, arguing that is factually and
   logically flawed.

   The first problem is factual. Bolshevik authoritarianism started before
   the start of the civil war and major economic collapse. Whether it is
   soviet democracy, workers' economic self-management, democracy in the
   armed forces or working class power and freedom generally, the fact is
   the Bolsheviks had systematically attacked and undermined it from the
   start. They also, as we indicate in [7]section H.6.3 repressed working
   class protests and strikes along with opposition groups and parties. As
   such, it is difficult to blame something which had not started yet for
   causing Bolshevik policies.

   Although the Bolsheviks had seized power under the slogan "All Power to
   the Soviets," as we noted in [8]section H.3.11 the facts are the
   Bolsheviks aimed for party power and only supported soviets as long as
   they controlled them. To maintain party power, they had to undermine
   the soviets and they did. This onslaught on the soviets started
   quickly, in fact overnight when the first act of the Bolsheviks was to
   create an executive body, the the Council of People's Commissars (or
   Sovnarkon), over and above the soviets. This was in direct
   contradiction to Lenin's The State and Revolution, where he had used
   the example of the Paris Commune to argue for the merging of executive
   and legislative powers. Then, a mere four days after this seizure of
   power by the Bolsheviks, the Sovnarkom unilaterally took for itself
   legislative power simply by issuing a decree to this effect: "This was,
   effectively, a Bolshevik coup dtat that made clear the government's
   (and party's) pre-eminence over the soviets and their executive organ.
   Increasingly, the Bolsheviks relied upon the appointment from above of
   commissars with plenipotentiary powers, and they split up and
   reconstituted fractious Soviets and intimidated political opponents."
   [Neil Harding, Leninism, p. 253]

   The highest organ of soviet power, the Central Executive Committee
   (VTsIK) was turned into little more than a rubber stamp, with its
   Bolshevik dominated presidium using its power to control the body.
   Under the Bolsheviks, the presidium was converted "into the de facto
   centre of power within VTsIK." It "began to award representations to
   groups and factions which supported the government. With the VTsIK
   becoming ever more unwieldy in size by the day, the presidium began to
   expand its activities" and was used "to circumvent general meetings."
   Thus the Bolsheviks were able "to increase the power of the presidium,
   postpone regular sessions, and present VTsIK with policies which had
   already been implemented by the Sovnarkon. Even in the presidium itself
   very few people determined policy." [Charles Duval, "Yakov M. Sverdlov
   and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK)",
   pp. 3-22, Soviet Studies, vol. XXXI, no. 1, p.7, p. 8 and p. 18]

   At the grassroots, a similar process was at work with oligarchic
   tendencies in the soviets increasing post-October and "[e]ffective
   power in the local soviets relentlessly gravitated to the executive
   committees, and especially their presidia. Plenary sessions became
   increasingly symbolic and ineffectual." The party was "successful in
   gaining control of soviet executives in the cities and at uezd and
   guberniya levels. These executive bodies were usually able to control
   soviet congresses, though the party often disbanded congresses that
   opposed major aspects of current policies." Local soviets "had little
   input into the formation of national policy" and "[e]ven at higher
   levels, institutional power shifted away from the soviets." [Carmen
   Sirianni, Workers' Control and Socialist Democracy, p. 204 and p. 203]
   In Moscow, for example, power in the soviet "moved away from the plenum
   to ever smaller groups at the apex." The presidium, created in November
   1917, "rapidly accrued massive powers." [Richard Sakwa, Soviet
   Communists in Power, p. 166]

   The Bolshevik dominated soviet executives used this power to maintain a
   Bolshevik majority, by any means possible, in the face of popular
   disillusionment with their regime. In Saratov, for example, "as early
   as the spring of 1918 . . . workers clashed with the soviet" while in
   the April soviet elections, as elsewhere, the Bolsheviks' "powerful
   majority in the Soviet began to erode" as moderate socialists
   "criticised the nondemocratic turn Bolshevik power has taken and the
   soviet's loss of their independence." [Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing
   Russia's Civil War, p. 366 and p. 368] While the influence of the
   Mensheviks "had sunk to insignificance by October 1917", the
   "unpopularity of government policy" changed that and by the "middle of
   1918 the Mensheviks could claim with some justification that large
   numbers of the industrial working class were now behind them, and that
   but for the systematic dispersal and packing of the soviets, and the
   mass arrests at workers' meeting and congresses, their party could have
   one power by its policy of constitutional opposition." The soviet
   elections in the spring of 1918 across Russia saw "arrests, military
   dispersal, even shootings" whenever Mensheviks "succeeded in winning
   majorities or a substantial representation." [Leonard Schapiro, The
   Origin of the Communist Autocracy, p. 191]

   One such technique to maintain power was to postpone new soviet
   elections, another was to gerrymander the soviets to ensure their
   majority. The Bolsheviks in Petrograd, for example, faced "demands from
   below for the immediate re-election" of the Soviet. However, before the
   election, the Bolshevik Soviet confirmed new regulations "to help
   offset possible weaknesses" in their "electoral strength in factories."
   The "most significant change in the makeup of the new soviet was that
   numerically decisive representation was given to agencies in which the
   Bolsheviks had overwhelming strength, among them the Petrograd Trade
   Union Council, individual trade unions, factory committees in closed
   enterprises, district soviets, and district non-party workers'
   conferences." This ensured that "[o]nly 260 of roughly 700 deputies in
   the new soviet were to be elected in factories, which guaranteed a
   large Bolshevik majority in advance" and so the Bolsheviks "contrived a
   majority" in the new Soviet long before gaining 127 of the 260 factory
   delegates. Then there is "the nagging question of how many Bolshevik
   deputies from factories were elected instead of the opposition because
   of press restrictions, voter intimidation, vote fraud, or the short
   duration of the campaign." The SR and Menshevik press, for example,
   were reopened "only a couple of days before the start of voting."
   Moreover, "Factory Committees from closed factories could and did elect
   soviet deputies (the so-called dead souls), one deputy for each factory
   with more than one thousand workers at the time of shutdown" while the
   electoral assemblies for unemployed workers "were organised through
   Bolshevik-dominated trade union election commissions." Overall, then,
   the Bolshevik election victory "was highly suspect, even on the shop
   floor." [Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, pp. 248-9, p.
   251 and p. 252] This meant that it was "possible for one worker to be
   represented in the soviet five times . . . without voting once." Thus
   the soviet "was no longer a popularly elected assembly: it had been
   turned into an assembly of Bolshevik functionaries." [Vladimir N.
   Brovkin, The Mensheviks After October, p. 240]

   When postponing and gerrymandering failed, the Bolsheviks turned to
   state repression to remain in power. For all the provincial soviet
   elections in the spring and summer of 1918 for which data is available,
   there was an "impressive success of the Menshevik-SR block" followed by
   "the Bolshevik practice of disbanding soviets that came under
   Menshevik-SR control." The "subsequent wave of anti-Bolshevik
   uprisings" were repressed by force. [Brovkin, Op. Cit., p. 159] Another
   historian also notes that by the spring of 1918 "Menshevik newspapers
   and activists in the trade unions, the Soviets, and the factories had
   made a considerable impact on a working class which was becoming
   increasingly disillusioned with the Bolshevik regime, so much so that
   in many places the Bolsheviks felt constrained to dissolve Soviets or
   prevent re-elections where Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries had
   gained majorities." [Israel Getzler, Martov, p. 179]

   When the opposition parties raised such issues at the VTsIK, it had no
   impact. In April 1918, one deputy "protested that non-Bolshevik
   controlled soviets were being dispersed by armed force, and wanted to
   discuss the issue." The chairman "refus[ed] to include it in the agenda
   because of lack of supporting material" and requested such information
   be submitted to the presidium of the soviet. The majority (i.e. the
   Bolsheviks) "supported their chairman" and the facts were "submitted .
   . . to the presidium, where they apparently remained." [Charles Duval,
   Op. Cit., pp. 13-14] Given that the VTsIK was meant to be the highest
   soviet body between congresses, this lack of concern clearly shows the
   Bolshevik contempt for soviet democracy.

   The Bolsheviks also organised rural poor committees, opposed to by all
   other parties (particularly the Left-SRs). The Bolshevik leadership
   "was well aware that the labouring peasantry, largely represented in
   the countryside by the Left Socialist-Revolutionary party, would be
   excluded from participation." These committees were "subordinated to
   central policy and thus willing to implement a policy opposing the
   interests of the mass of the peasants" and were also used for the
   "disbandment of the peasants' soviets in which Bolshevik representation
   was low or nil". It should be noted that between March and August 1918
   "the Bolsheviks were losing power not only in favour of the Left
   Socialist-Revolutionaries" but also "in favour of non-party people."
   [Silvana Malle, The Economic Organisation of War Communism, 1918-1921,
   pp. 366-7]

   Unsurprisingly, the same contempt was expressed at the fifth
   All-Russian Soviet Congress in July 1918 when the Bolshevik
   gerrymandered it to maintain their majority. The Bolsheviks banned the
   Mensheviks in the context of political loses before the Civil War,
   which gave the Bolsheviks an excuse and they "drove them underground,
   just on the eve of the elections to the Fifth Congress of Soviets in
   which the Mensheviks were expected to make significant gains". While
   the Bolsheviks "offered some formidable fictions to justify the
   expulsions" there was "of course no substance in the charge that the
   Mensheviks had been mixed in counter-revolutionary activities on the
   Don, in the Urals, in Siberia, with the Czechoslovaks, or that they had
   joined the worst Black Hundreds." [Getzler, Op. Cit., p. 181]

   With the Mensheviks and Right-SRs banned from the soviets, popular
   disenchantment with Bolshevik rule was expressed by voting Left-SR. The
   Bolsheviks ensured their majority in the congress and, therefore, a
   Bolshevik government by gerrymandering it has they had the Petrograd
   soviet. Thus "electoral fraud gave the Bolsheviks a huge majority of
   congress delegates". In reality, "the number of legitimately elected
   Left SR delegates was roughly equal to that of the Bolsheviks." The
   Left-SRs expected a majority but did not include "roughly 399
   Bolsheviks delegates whose right to be seated was challenged by the
   Left SR minority in the congress's credentials commission." Without
   these dubious delegates, the Left SRs and SR Maximalists would have
   outnumbered the Bolsheviks by around 30 delegates. This ensured "the
   Bolshevik's successful fabrication of a large majority in the Fifth
   All-Russian Congress of Soviets." [Rabinowitch, Op. Cit., p. 396, p.
   288, p. 442 and p. 308] Moreover, the Bolsheviks also "allowed
   so-called committees of poor peasants to be represented at the
   congress. . . This blatant gerrymandering ensured a Bolshevik majority
   . . . Deprived of their democratic majority the Left SRs resorted to
   terror and assassinated the German ambassador Mirbach." [Geoffrey
   Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War, p. 176] The Bolsheviks
   falsely labelled this an uprising against the soviets and the Left-SRs
   joined the Mensheviks and Right-SRs in being made illegal. It is hard
   not to agree with Rabinowitch when he comments that "however
   understandable framed against the fraudulent composition of the Fifth
   All-Russian Congress of Soviets and the ominous developments at the
   congresses's start" this act "offered Lenin a better excuse than he
   could possibly have hoped for to eliminate the Left SRs as a
   significant political rival." [Op. Cit., p. 308]

   So before the start of the civil war all opposition groups, bar the
   Left-SRs, had suffered some form of state repression by the hands of
   the Bolshevik regime (the Bolsheviks had attacked the anarchist
   movement in April, 1918 [Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, pp.
   184-5]). Within six weeks of it starting every opposition group had
   been excluded from the soviets. Significantly, in spite of being,
   effectively, a one-party state Lenin later proclaimed that soviet power
   "is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois
   republic" and pointed to the 6th Congress of Soviets in November with
   its 97% of Bolsheviks! [Collected Works, vol. 28, p. 248 and p. 303]

   A similar authoritarian agenda was aimed at the armed forces and
   industry. Trotsky simply abolished the soldier's committees and elected
   officers, stating that "the principle of election is politically
   purposeless and technically inexpedient, and it has been, in practice,
   abolished by decree." [How the Revolution Armed, vol. 1, p. 47] The
   death penalty for disobedience was restored, along with, more
   gradually, saluting, special forms of address, separate living quarters
   and other privileges for officers. Somewhat ironically, nearly 20 years
   later, Trotsky himself lamented how the "demobilisation of the Red Army
   of five million played no small role in the formation of the
   bureaucracy. The victorious commanders assumed leading posts in the
   local Soviets, in economy, in education, and they persistently
   introduced everywhere that regime which had ensured success in the
   civil war." For some reason he failed to mention who had introduced
   that very regime, although he felt able to state, without shame, that
   the "commanding staff needs democratic control. The organisers of the
   Red Army were aware of this from the beginning, and considered it
   necessary to prepare for such a measure as the election of commanding
   staff." [The Revolution Betrayed, p. 90 and p. 211] So it would be
   churlish to note that "the root of the problem lay in the very
   organisation of the army on traditional lines, for which Trotsky
   himself had been responsible, and against which the Left Communists in
   1918 had warned." [Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists in Power, p. 231]

   In industry, Lenin, as we discussed in [9]section H.3.14, started to
   champion one-man management armed with "dictatorial" powers in April,
   1918. Significantly, he argued that his new policies were not driven by
   the civil war for "[i]n the main . . . the task of suppressing the
   resistance of the exploiters was fulfilled" (since "(approximately)
   February 1918."). The task "now coming to the fore" was that of
   "organising [the] administration of Russia." It "has become the main
   and central task" precisely because of "the peace which has been
   achieved - despite its extremely onerous character and extreme
   instability" and so "the Russian Soviet Republic has gained an
   opportunity to concentrate its efforts for a while on the most
   important and most difficult aspect of the socialist revolution,
   namely, the task of organisation." This would involve imposing one-man
   management, that is "individual executives" with "dictatorial powers
   (or 'unlimited' powers)" as there was "absolutely no contradiction in
   principle between Soviet (that is, socialist) democracy and the
   exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals." [Op. Cit., vol. 27, p.
   242, p. 237, p. 267 and p. 268]

   Trotsky concurred, arguing in the same speech which announced the
   destruction of military democracy that workplace democracy "is not the
   last word in the economic constructive work of the proletariat". The
   "next step must consist in self-limitation of the collegiate principle"
   and its replacement by "[p]olitical collegiate control by the Soviets",
   i.e. the state control Lenin had repeatedly advocated in 1917. However
   "for executive functions we must appoint technical specialists." He
   ironically called this the working class "throwing off the one-man
   management principles of its masters of yesterday" and failed to
   recognise it was imposing the one-man management principles of new
   masters. As with Lenin, the destruction of workers' power at the point
   of production was of little concern for what mattered was that "with
   power in our hands, we, the representatives of the working class" would
   introduce socialism. [How the Revolution Armed, vol. 1, p. 37 and p.
   38]

   In reality, the Bolshevik vision of socialism simply replaced private
   capitalism with state capitalism, taking control of the economy out of
   the hands of the workers and placing it into the hands of the state
   bureaucracy. As one historian correctly summarises the s-called
   workers' state "oversaw the reimposition of alienated labour and
   hierarchical social relations. It carried out this function in the
   absence of a ruling class, and them played a central role in ushering
   that class into existence - a class which subsequently ruled not
   through its ownership of private property but through its 'ownership'
   of the state. That state was antagonistic to the forces that could have
   best resisted the retreat of the revolution, i.e. the working class."
   [Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24, p. 240]

   Whether it is in regards to soviet, workplace or army democracy or the
   rights of the opposition to organise freely and gather support, the
   facts are the Bolsheviks had systematically eliminated them before the
   start of the civil war. So when Trotsky asserted that "[i]n the
   beginning, the party had wished and hoped to preserve freedom of
   political struggle within the framework of the Soviets" but that it was
   civil war which "introduced stern amendments into this calculation," he
   was rewriting history. Rather than being "regarded not as a principle,
   but as an episodic act of self-defence" the opposite is the case. As we
   note in [10]section H.3.8 from roughly October 1918 onwards, the
   Bolsheviks did raise party dictatorship to a "principle" and did not
   care that this was "obviously in conflict with the spirit of Soviet
   democracy." Trotsky was right to state that "on all sides the masses
   were pushed away gradually from actual participation in the leadership
   of the country." [The Revolution Betrayed, p. 96 and p. 90] He was just
   utterly wrong to imply that this process happened after the end of the
   civil war rather than before its start and that the Bolsheviks did not
   play a key role in so doing. Thus, "in the soviets and in economic
   management the embryo of centralised and bureaucratic state forms had
   already emerged by mid-1918." [Sakwa, Op. Cit., pp. 96-7]

   It may be argued in objection to this analysis that the Bolsheviks
   faced resistance from the start and, consequently, civil war existed
   from the moment Lenin seized power and to focus attention on the events
   of late May 1918 gives a misleading picture of the pressures they were
   facing. After all, the Bolsheviks had the threat of German Imperialism
   and there were a few (small) White Armies in existence as well as
   conspiracies to combat. However, this is unconvincing as Lenin himself
   pointed to the ease of Bolshevik success post-October. On March 14th,
   1918, Lenin had proclaimed that "the civil war was one continuous
   triumph for Soviet power" and in June argued that "the Russian
   bourgeoisie was defeated in open conflict . . . in the period from
   October 1917 to February and March 1918". [Collected Works, vol. 27, p.
   174 and p. 428] It can be concluded that the period up until March 1918
   was not considered by the Bolsheviks themselves as being so bad as
   requiring the adjustment of their politics. This explains why, as one
   historian notes, that the "revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion on 25 May
   1918 is often considered to be the beginning of full-scale military
   activity. There followed a succession of campaigns." This is reflected
   in Bolshevik policy as well, with war communism "lasting from about
   mid-1918 to March 1921." [Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 22 and p. 19]

   Significantly, the introduction of one-man management was seen not as
   an emergency measure forced upon the Bolsheviks by dire circumstances
   of civil war but rather as a natural aspect of building socialism
   itself. In March, 1918, for example, Lenin argued that civil war
   "became a fact" on October, 25, 1917 and "[i]n this civil war . . .
   victory was achieved with . . . extraordinary ease . . . The Russia
   revolution was a continuous triumphal march in the first months." [Op.
   Cit., pp. 88-9] Looking back at this time from April 1920, Lenin
   reiterated his position ("Dictatorial powers and one-man management are
   not contradictory to socialist democracy.") while also stressing that
   this was not forced upon the Bolsheviks by civil war. Discussing how,
   again, the civil war was ended and it was time to build socialism he
   argued that the "whole attention of the Communist Party and the Soviet
   government is centred on peaceful economic development, on problems of
   the dictatorship and of one-man management . . . When we tackled them
   for the first time in 1918, there was no civil war and no experience to
   speak of." So it was "not only experience" of civil war, argued Lenin
   "but something more profound . . . that has induced us now, as it did
   two years ago, to concentrate all our attention on labour discipline."
   [Op. Cit., vol. 30, p. 503 and p. 504] Trotsky also argued that
   Bolshevik policy was not conditioned by the civil war (see [11]section
   H.3.14).

   As historian Jonathan Aves notes, "the Communist Party took victory as
   a sign of the correctness of its ideological approach and set about the
   task of economic construction on the basis of an intensification of War
   Communism policies." [Workers Against Lenin, p. 37] In addition, this
   perspective flowed, as we argue in the [12]next section, from the
   Bolshevik ideology, from its vision of socialism, rather than some
   alien system imposed upon an otherwise healthy set of ideas.

   Of course, this can be ignored in favour of the argument that party
   rule was required for the revolution to succeed. That would be a
   defendable, if utterly incorrect, position to take. It would, however,
   also necessitate ripping up Lenin's State and Revolution as it is
   clearly not relevant to a socialist revolution nor can it be considered
   as the definitive guide of what Leninism really stands for, as
   Leninists like to portray it to this day. Given that this is extremely
   unlikely to happen, it is fair to suggest that claims that the
   Bolsheviks faced "civil war" from the start, so justifying their
   authoritarianism, can be dismissed as particularly unconvincing special
   pleading. Much the same can be said for the "objective conditions"
   produced by the May 1918 to October 1920 civil war argument in general.

   Then there is the logical problem. Leninists say that they are
   revolutionaries. As we noted in [13]section H.2.1, they inaccurately
   mock anarchists for not believing that a revolution needs to defend
   itself. Yet, ironically, their whole defence of Bolshevism rests on the
   "exceptional circumstances" produced by the civil war they claim is
   inevitable. If Leninism cannot handle the problems associated with
   actually conducting a revolution then, surely, it should be avoided at
   all costs. This is particularly the case as leading Bolsheviks all
   argued that the specific problems their latter day followers blame for
   their authoritarianism were natural results of any revolution and,
   consequently, unavoidable. Lenin, for example, in 1917 mocked those who
   opposed revolution because "the situation is exceptionally
   complicated." He noted "the development of the revolution itself always
   creates an exceptionally complicated situation" and that it was an
   "incredibly complicated and painful process." In fact, it was "the most
   intense, furious, desperate class war and civil war. Not a single great
   revolution in history has taken place without civil war. And only a
   'man in a muffler' can think that civil war is conceivable without an
   'exceptionally complicated situation.'" "If the situation were not
   exceptionally complicated there would be no revolution." [Op. Cit.,
   vol. 26, pp. 118-9]

   He reiterated this in 1918, arguing that "every great revolution, and a
   socialist revolution in particular, even if there is no external war,
   is inconceivable without internal war, i.e., civil war, which is even
   more devastating than external war, and involves thousands and millions
   of cases of wavering and desertion from one side to another, implies a
   state of extreme indefiniteness, lack of equilibrium and chaos." [Op.
   Cit., vol. 27, p. 264] He even argued that revolution in an advanced
   capitalist nations would be far more devastating and ruinous than in
   Russia. [Op. Cit., vol. 28, p. 298]

   Therefore, Lenin stressed, "it will never be possible to build
   socialism at a time when everything is running smoothly and tranquilly;
   it will never be possible to realise socialism without the landowners
   and capitalists putting up a furious resistance." Those "who believe
   that socialism can be built at a time of peace and tranquillity are
   profoundly mistaken: it will be everywhere built at a time of
   disruption, at a time of famine. That is how it must be." Moreover,
   "not one of the great revolutions of history has taken place" without
   civil war and "without which not a single serious Marxist has conceived
   the transition from capitalism to socialism." Obviously, "there can be
   no civil war - the inevitable condition and concomitant of socialist
   revolution - without disruption." [Op. Cit., vol. 27, p. 520, p. 517,
   p. 496 and p. 497]

   Moreover, anarchists had long argued that a revolution would be
   associated with economic disruption, isolation and civil war and,
   consequently, had developed their ideas to take these into account. For
   example, Kropotkin was "certain that the coming Revolution . . . will
   burst upon us in the middle of a great industrial crisis . . . There
   are millions of unemployed workers in Europe at this moment. It will be
   worse when Revolution has burst upon us . . . The number of the
   out-of-works will be doubled as soon as barricades are erected in
   Europe and the United States . . . we know that in time of Revolution
   exchange and industry suffer most from the general upheaval . . . A
   Revolution in Europe means, then, the unavoidable stoppage of at least
   half the factories and workshops." The "smallest attack upon property
   will bring in its train the complete disorganisation" of the capitalist
   economy. This meant that society "itself will be forced to take
   production in hand . . . and to reorganise it to meet the needs of the
   whole people." [The Conquest of Bread, pp. 69-70] This prediction was a
   common feature of Kropotkin's politics (as can be seen from, say, his
   "The First Work of the Revolution" [Act for Yourselves, pp. 56-60]).

   Revolutionary anarchism, then, is based on a clear understanding of the
   nature of a social revolution, the objective problems it will face and
   the need for mass participation and free initiative to solve them. So
   it must, therefore, be stressed that the very "objective factors"
   supporters of Bolshevism use to justify the actions of Lenin and
   Trotsky were predicted correctly by anarchists decades beforehand and
   integrated into our politics. Moreover, anarchists had developed their
   ideas on social revolution to make sure that these inevitable
   disruptions would be minimised. By stressing the need for
   self-management, mass participation, self-organisation and free
   federation, anarchism showed how a free people could deal with the
   difficult problems they would face (as we discuss in the [14]section
   H.6.2 there is substantial evidence to show that Bolshevik ideology and
   practice made the problems facing the Russian revolution much worse
   than they had to be).

   It should also be noted that every revolution has confirmed the
   anarchist analysis. For example, the German Revolution after 1918 faced
   an economic collapse which was, relatively, just as bad as that facing
   Russia the year before. The near revolution produced extensive
   political conflict, including civil war, which was matched by economic
   turmoil. Taking 1928 as the base year, the index of industrial
   production in Germany was slightly lower in 1913, namely 98 in 1913 to
   100 in 1928. In 1917, the index was 63 and by 1918, it was 61 (i.e.
   industrial production had dropped by nearly 40%). In 1919, it fell
   again to 37, rising to 54 in 1920 and 65 in 1921. Thus, in 1919, the
   "industrial production reached an all-time low" and it "took until the
   late 1920s for [food] production to recover its 1912 level." [V. R.
   Berghahn, Modern Germany, p. 258, pp. 67-8 and p. 71] In Russia, the
   index for large scale industry fell to 77 in 1917 from 100 in 1913,
   falling again to 35 in 1918, 26 in 1919 and 18 in 1920. [Tony Cliff,
   Lenin, vol. 3, p. 86]

   Strangely, Leninists do not doubt that the spread of the Russian
   Revolution to Germany would have allowed the Bolsheviks more leeway to
   avoid authoritarianism and so save the Revolution. Yet this does not
   seem likely given the state of the German economy. Comparing the two
   countries, there is a similar picture of economic collapse. In the year
   the revolution started, production had fallen by 23% in Russia (from
   1913 to 1917) and by 43% in Germany (from 1913 to 1918). Once
   revolution had effectively started, production fell even more. In
   Russia, it fell to 65% of its pre-war level in 1918, in Germany it fell
   to 62% of its pre-war level in 1919. However, no Leninist argues that
   the German Revolution was impossible or doomed to failure. Similarly,
   no Leninist denies that a socialist revolution was possible during the
   depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s or to post-world war two
   Europe, marked as it was by economic collapse. This was the case in
   1917 as well, when economic crisis had been a fact of Russian life
   throughout the year. This did not stop the Bolsheviks calling for
   revolution and seizing power. Nor did this crisis stop the creation of
   democratic working class organisations, such as soviets, trade unions
   and factory committees being formed nor did it stop mass collective
   action. It appears, therefore, that while the economic crisis of 1917
   did not stop the development of socialist tendencies to combat it, the
   seizure of power by a socialist party did.

   To conclude, it seems hypocritical in the extreme for Leninists to
   blame difficult circumstances for the failure of the Russian
   Revolution. As Lenin himself argued, the Bolsheviks "never said that
   the transition from capitalism to socialism would be easy. It will
   invoke a whole period of violent civil war, it will involve painful
   measures." They knew "that the transition from capitalism to socialism
   is a struggle of an extremely difficult kind" and so "[i]f there ever
   existed a revolutionary who hoped that we could pass to the socialist
   system without difficulties, such a revolutionary, such a socialist,
   would not be worth a brass farthing." [Op. Cit., p. 431, p. 433 and pp.
   432-3] He would have been surprised to discover that many of his own
   followers would be "such a socialist"!

   Consequently, it is not hard to conclude that for Leninists difficult
   objective circumstances place socialism off the agenda only when they
   are holding power. So even if we ignore the extensive evidence that
   Bolshevik authoritarianism started before the civil war, the logic of
   the Leninist argument is hardly convincing. Yet it does have
   advantages, for by focusing attention on the civil war, Leninists also
   draw attention away from Bolshevik ideology and tactics. As Peter
   Kropotkin recounted to Emma Goldman this simply cannot be done:

     "the Communists are a political party firmly adhering to the idea of
     a centralised State, and that as such they were bound to misdirect
     the course of the Revolution . . . [Their policies] have paralysed
     the energies of the masses and have terrorised the people. Yet
     without the direct participation of the masses in the reconstruction
     of the country, nothing essential could be accomplished . . . They
     created a bureaucracy and officialdom . . . [which were] parasites
     on the social body . . . It was not the fault of any particular
     individual: rather it was the State they had created, which
     discredits every revolutionary ideal, stifles all initiative, and
     sets a premium on incompetence and waste . . . Intervention and
     blockade were bleeding Russia to death, and were preventing the
     people from understanding the real nature of the Bolshevik regime."
     [My Disillusionment in Russia, p. 99]

   Obviously, if the "objective" factors do not explain Bolshevik
   authoritarianism and the failure of the revolution we are left with the
   question of which aspects of Bolshevik ideology impacted negatively on
   the revolution. As Kropotkin's comments indicate, anarchists have good
   reason to argue that one of the greatest myths of state socialism is
   the idea that Bolshevik ideology played no role in the fate of the
   Russian Revolution. We turn to this in the [15]next section.

H.6.2 Did Bolshevik ideology influence the outcome of the Russian Revolution?

   As we discussed in the [16]last section, anarchists reject the Leninist
   argument that the failure of Bolshevism in the Russian Revolution can
   be blamed purely on the difficult objective circumstances they faced.
   As Noam Chomsky summarises:

     "In the stages leading up to the Bolshevik coup in October 1917,
     there were incipient socialist institutions developing in Russia -
     workers' councils, collectives, things like that. And they survived
     to an extent once the Bolsheviks took over - but not for very long;
     Lenin and Trotsky pretty much eliminated them as they consolidated
     their power. I mean, you can argue about the justification for
     eliminating them, but the fact is that the socialist initiatives
     were pretty quickly eliminated.

     "Now, people who want to justify it say, 'The Bolsheviks had to do
     it' - that's the standard justification: Lenin and Trotsky had to do
     it, because of the contingencies of the civil war, for survival,
     there wouldn't have been food otherwise, this and that. Well,
     obviously the question is, was that true. To answer that, you've got
     to look at the historical facts: I don't think it was true. In fact,
     I think the incipient socialist structures in Russia were dismantled
     before the really dire conditions arose . . . But reading their own
     writings, my feeling is that Lenin and Trotsky knew what they were
     doing, it was conscious and understandable."
     [Understanding Power, p. 226]

   Chomsky is right on both counts. The attack on the basic building
   blocks of genuine socialism started before the civil war. Moreover, it
   did not happen by accident. The attacks were rooted in the Bolshevik
   vision of socialism. As Maurice Brinton concluded:

     "there is a clear-cut and incontrovertible link between what
     happened under Lenin and Trotsky and the later practices of
     Stalinism . . . The more one unearths about this period the more
     difficult it becomes to define - or even to see - the 'gulf'
     allegedly separating what happened in Lenin's time from what
     happened later. Real knowledge of the facts also makes it impossible
     to accept . . . that the whole course of events was 'historically
     inevitable' and 'objectively determined'. Bolshevik ideology and
     practice were themselves important and sometimes decisive factors in
     the equation, at every critical stage of this critical period." [The
     Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, p. 84]

   This is not to suggest that the circumstances played no role in the
   development of the revolution. It is simply to indicate that Bolshevik
   ideology played its part as well by not only shaping the policies
   implemented but also how the results of those policies themselves
   contributed to the circumstances being faced. This is to be expected,
   given that the Bolsheviks were the ruling party and, consequently,
   state power was utilised to implement their policies, policies which,
   in turn, were influenced by their ideological preferences and
   prejudices. Ultimately, to maintain (as Leninists do) that the ideology
   of the ruling party played no (or, at best, a minor) part hardly makes
   sense logically nor, equally importantly, can it be supported once even
   a basic awareness of the development of the Russian Revolution is
   known.

   A key issue is the Bolsheviks support for centralisation. Long before
   the revolution, Lenin had argued that within the party it was a case of
   "the transformation of the power of ideas into the power of authority,
   the subordination of lower Party bodies to higher ones." [Collected
   Works, vol. 7, p. 367] Such visions of centralised organisation were
   the model for the revolutionary state and, once in power, they did not
   disappoint. Thus, "for the leadership, the principle of maximum
   centralisation of authority served more than expedience. It
   consistently resurfaced as the image of a peacetime political system as
   well." [Thomas F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia, p.
   91]

   However, by its very nature centralism places power into a few hands
   and effectively eliminates the popular participation required for any
   successful revolution to develop. The power placed into the hands of
   the Bolshevik government was automatically no longer in the hands of
   the working class. So when Leninists argue that "objective"
   circumstances forced the Bolsheviks to substitute their power for that
   of the masses, anarchists reply that this substitution had occurred the
   moment the Bolsheviks centralised power and placed it into their own
   hands. As a result, popular participation and institutions began to
   wither and die. Moreover, once in power, the Bolsheviks were shaped by
   their new position and the social relationships it created and,
   consequently, implemented policies influenced and constrained by the
   hierarchical and centralised structures they had created.

   This was not the only negative impact of Bolshevik centralism. It also
   spawned a bureaucracy. As we noted in [17]section H.1.7, the rise of a
   state bureaucracy started immediately with the seizure of power. Thus
   "red tape and vast administrative offices typified Soviet reality" as
   the Bolsheviks "rapidly created their own [state] apparatus to wage the
   political and economic offensive against the bourgeoisie and
   capitalism. As the functions of the state expanded, so did the
   bureaucracy" and so "following the revolution the process of
   institutional proliferation reached unprecedented heights . . . a mass
   of economic organisations [were] created or expanded." [Richard Sakwa,
   Soviet Communists in Power, p. 190 and p. 191] This was a striking
   confirmation of the anarchist analysis which argued that a new
   bureaucratic class develops around any centralised body. This body
   would soon become riddled with personal influences and favours, so
   ensuring that members could be sheltered from popular control while, at
   the same time, exploiting its power to feather their own nest.
   Overtime, this permanent collection of bodies would become the real
   power in the state, with the party members nominally in charge really
   under the control of an unelected and uncontrolled officialdom. This
   was recognised by Lenin in 1922:

     "If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible
     positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that
     gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much
     whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing
     that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing, they are being
     directed." [The Lenin Anthology, p. 527]

   By the end of 1920, there were five times more state officials than
   industrial workers (5,880,000 were members of the state bureaucracy).
   However, the bureaucracy had existed since the start. In Moscow, in
   August 1918, state officials represented 30 per cent of the workforce
   there and by 1920 the general number of office workers "still
   represented about a third of those employed in the city" (200,000 in
   November, 1920, rising to 228,000 in July, 1921 and, by October 1922,
   to 243,000). [Sakwa, Op. Cit., pp. 191-3] And with bureaucracy came the
   abuse of it simply because it held real power:

     "The prevalence of bureaucracy, of committees and commissions . . .
     permitted, and indeed encouraged, endless permutations of corrupt
     practices. These raged from the style of living of communist
     functionaries to bribe-taking by officials. With the power of
     allocation of scare resources, such as housing, there was an
     inordinate potential for corruption." [Op. Cit., p. 193]

   The growth in power of the bureaucracy should not, therefore, come as a
   major surprise given that it had existed from the start in sizeable
   numbers. Yet, for the Bolsheviks "the development of a bureaucracy" was
   a puzzle, "whose emergence and properties mystified them." It should be
   noted that, "[f]or the Bolsheviks, bureaucratism signified the escape
   of this bureaucracy from the will of the party as it took on a life of
   its own." [Op. Cit., p. 182 and p. 190] This was the key. They did not
   object the usurpation of power by the party (indeed they placed party
   dictatorship at the core of their politics and universalised it to a
   general principle for all "socialist" revolutions). Nor did they object
   to the centralisation of power and activity (and so the
   bureaucratisation of life). As such, the Bolsheviks failed to
   understand how their own politics helped the rise of this new ruling
   class. They failed to understand the links between centralism and
   bureaucracy. Bolshevik nationalisation and centralism (as well as being
   extremely inefficient) also ensured that the control of society,
   economic activity and its product would be in the hands of the state
   and, so, class society would continue. Unsurprisingly, complaints by
   working class people about the privileges enjoyed by Communist Party
   and state officials were widespread.

   Another problem was the Bolshevik vision of (centralised) democracy.
   Trotsky is typical. In April 1918 he argued that once elected the
   government was to be given total power to make decisions and appoint
   people as required as it is "better able to judge in the matter than"
   the masses. The sovereign people were expected to simply obey their
   public servants until such time as they "dismiss that government and
   appoint another." Trotsky raised the question of whether it was
   possible for the government to act "against the interests of the
   labouring and peasant masses?" And answered no! Yet it is obvious that
   Trotsky's claim that "there can be no antagonism between the government
   and the mass of the workers, just as there is no antagonism between the
   administration of the union and the general assembly of its members" is
   just nonsense. [Leon Trotsky Speaks, p. 113] The history of trade
   unionism is full of examples of committees betraying their membership.
   Needless to say, the subsequent history Lenin's government shows that
   there can be "antagonism" between rulers and ruled and that
   appointments are always a key way to further elite interests.

   This vision of top-down "democracy" can, of course, be traced back to
   Marx and Lenin (see sections [18]H.3.2 and [19]H.3.3). By equating
   centralised, top-down decision making by an elected government with
   "democracy," the Bolsheviks had the ideological justification to
   eliminate the functional democracy associated with the soviets, factory
   committees and soldiers committees. The Bolshevik vision of democracy
   became the means by which real democracy was eliminated in area after
   area of Russian working class life. Needless to say, a state which
   eliminates functional democracy in the grassroots will not stay
   democratic in any meaningful sense for long.

   Nor does it come as too great a surprise to discover that a government
   which considers itself as "better able to judge" things than the people
   finally decides to annul any election results it dislikes. As we
   discussed in [20]section H.5, this perspective is at the heart of
   vanguardism, for in Bolshevik ideology the party, not the class, is in
   the final analysis the repository of class consciousness. This means
   that once in power it has a built-in tendency to override the decisions
   of the masses it claimed to represent and justify this in terms of the
   advanced position of the party (as historian Richard Sakwa notes a
   "lack of identification with the Bolshevik party was treated as the
   absence of political consciousness altogether" [Op. Cit., p. 94]).
   Combine this with a vision of "democracy" which is highly centralised
   and which undermines local participation then we have the necessary
   foundations for the turning of party power into party dictatorship.

   Which brings us to the next issue, namely the Bolshevik idea that the
   party should seize power, not the working class as a whole, equating
   party power with popular power. The question instantly arises of what
   happens if the masses turn against the party? The gerrymandering,
   disbanding and marginalisation of the soviets in the spring and summer
   of 1918 answers that question (see [21]last section). It is not a great
   step to party dictatorship over the proletariat from the premises of
   Bolshevism. In a clash between soviet democracy and party power, the
   Bolsheviks consistently favoured the latter - as would be expected
   given their ideology.

   This can be seen from the Bolsheviks' negative response to the soviets
   of 1905. At one stage the Bolsheviks demanded the St. Petersburg soviet
   accept the Bolshevik political programme and then disband. The
   rationale for these attacks is significant. The St. Petersburg
   Bolsheviks were convinced that "only a strong party along class lines
   can guide the proletarian political movement and preserve the integrity
   of its program, rather than a political mixture of this kind, an
   indeterminate and vacillating political organisation such as the
   workers council represents and cannot help but represent." [quoted by
   Anweiler, The Soviets, p. 77] In other words, the soviets could not
   reflect workers' interests because they were elected by the workers!
   The implications of this perspective became clear in 1918, as are its
   obvious roots in Lenin's arguments in What is to be Done?. As one
   historian argues, the 1905 position on the soviets "is of particular
   significance in understanding the Bolshevik's mentality, political
   ambitions and modus operandi." The Bolshevik campaign "was repeated in
   a number of provincial soviets" and "reveals that from the outset the
   Bolsheviks were distrustful of, if not hostile towards the Soviets, to
   which they had at best an instrumental and always party-minded
   attitude." The Bolsheviks actions showed an "ultimate aim of
   controlling [the soviets] and turning them into one-party
   organisations, or, failing that, of destroying them." [Israel Getzler,
   "The Bolshevik Onslaught on the Non-Party 'Political Profile' of the
   Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies October-November 1905",
   Revolutionary History, pp. 123-146, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 124-5]

   That the mainstream of Bolshevism expressed this perspective once in
   power goes without saying, but even dissident Communists expressed
   identical views. Left-Communist V. Sorin argued in 1918 that the "party
   is in every case and everywhere superior to the soviets . . . The
   soviets represent labouring democracy in general; and its interest, and
   in particular the interests of the petty bourgeois peasantry, do not
   always coincide with the interests of the proletariat." [quoted by
   Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 182] As one historian notes, "[a]ccording to the
   Left Communists . . . the party was the custodian of an interest higher
   than that of the soviets." Unsurprisingly, in the party there was "a
   general consensus over the principles of party dictatorship for the
   greater part of the [civil] war. But the way in which these principles
   were applied roused increasing opposition." [Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 182
   and p. 30] This consensus existed in all the so-called opposition
   (including the Workers' Opposition and Trotsky's Left Opposition in the
   1920s). The ease with which the Bolsheviks embraced party dictatorship
   is suggestive of a fundamental flaw in their political perspective
   which the problems of the revolution, combined with lost of popular
   support, simply exposed.

   Then there is the Bolshevik vision of socialism. As we discussed in
   [22]section H.3.12, the Bolsheviks, like other Marxists at the time,
   saw the socialist economy as being built upon the centralised
   organisations created by capitalism. They confused state capitalism
   with socialism. The former, Lenin wrote in May 1917, "is a complete
   material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism" and so
   socialism "is nothing but the next step forward from state capitalist
   monopoly." It is "merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to
   serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased
   to be capitalist monopoly." [Collected Works, vol. 25, p. 359 and p.
   358] A few months later, he was talking about how the institutions of
   state capitalism could be taken over and used to create socialism.
   Unsurprisingly, when defending the need for state capitalism in the
   spring of 1918 against the "Left Communists," Lenin stressed that he
   gave his "'high' appreciation of state capitalism . . . before the
   Bolsheviks seized power." And, as Lenin noted, his praise for state
   capitalism can be found in his State and Revolution and so it was
   "significant that [his opponents] did not emphasise this" aspect of his
   1917 ideas. [Op. Cit., vol. 27, p. 341 and p. 354] Unsurprisingly,
   modern-day Leninists do not emphasise that element of Lenin's ideas
   either.

   Given this perspective, it is unsurprising that workers' control was
   not given a high priority once the Bolsheviks seized power. While in
   order to gain support the Bolsheviks had paid lip-service to the idea
   of workers' control, as we noted in [23]section H.3.14 the party had
   always given that slogan a radically different interpretation than the
   factory committees had. While the factory committees had seen workers'
   control as being exercised directly by the workers and their class
   organisations, the Bolshevik leadership saw it in terms of state
   control in which the factory committees would play, at best, a minor
   role. Given who held actual power in the new regime, it is unsurprising
   to discover which vision was actually introduced:

     "On three occasions in the first months of Soviet power, the
     [factory] committee leaders sought to bring their model into being.
     At each point the party leadership overruled them. The result was to
     vest both managerial and control powers in organs of the state which
     were subordinate to the central authorities, and formed by them."
     [Thomas F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia, p. 38]

   Given his vision of socialism, Lenin's rejection of the factory
   committee's model comes as no surprise. As Lenin put it in 1920, the
   "domination of the proletariat consists in the fact that the landowners
   and capitalists have been deprived of their property . . . The
   victorious proletariat has abolished property . . . and therein lies
   its domination as a class. The prime thing is the question of
   property." [Op. Cit., vol. 30, p. 456] As we proved in [24]section
   H.3.13, the Bolsheviks had no notion that socialism required workers'
   self-management of production and, unsurprisingly, they, as Lenin had
   promised, built from the top-down their system of unified
   administration based on the Tsarist system of central bodies which
   governed and regulated certain industries during the war. The Supreme
   Economic Council (Vesenka) was set up in December of 1917, and "was
   widely acknowledged by the Bolsheviks as a move towards 'statisation'
   (ogosudarstvleniye) of economic authority." During the early months of
   1918, the Bolsheviks began implementing their vision of "socialism" and
   the Vesenka began "to build, from the top, its 'unified administration'
   of particular industries. The pattern is informative" as it "gradually
   took over" the Tsarist state agencies such as the Glakvi (as Lenin had
   promised) "and converted them . . . into administrative organs subject
   to [its] direction and control." The Bolsheviks "clearly opted" for the
   taking over of "the institutions of bourgeois economic power and use[d]
   them to their own ends." This system "necessarily implies the
   perpetuation of hierarchical relations within production itself, and
   therefore the perpetuation of class society." [Brinton, Op. Cit., p.
   22, p. 36 and p. 22] Thus the Supreme Council of the National Economy
   "was an expression of the principle of centralisation and control from
   above which was peculiar to the Marxist ideology." In fact, it is
   "likely that the arguments for centralisation in economic policy, which
   were prevalent among Marxists, determined the short life of the
   All-Russian Council of Workers' Control." [Silvana Malle, The Economic
   Organisation of War Communism, 1918-1921, p. 95 and p. 94]

   Moreover, the Bolsheviks had systematically stopped the factory
   committee organising together, using their controlled unions to come
   "out firmly against the attempt of the Factory Committees to form a
   national organisation." The unions "prevented the convocation of a
   planned All-Russian Congress of Factory Committees. [I. Deutscher,
   quoted by Brinton, Op. Cit., p. 19] Given that one of the key
   criticisms of the factory committees by leading Bolsheviks was their
   "localism", this blocking of co-ordination is doubly damning.

   At this time Lenin "envisaged a period during which, in a workers'
   state, the bourgeoisie would still retain the formal ownership and
   effective management of most of the productive apparatus" and workers'
   control "was seen as the instrument" by which the "capitalists would be
   coerced into co-operation." [Brinton, Op. Cit., p. 13] The Bolsheviks
   turned to one-management in April, 1918 (it was applied first on the
   railway workers). As the capitalists refused to co-operate, with many
   closing down their workplaces, the Bolsheviks were forced to
   nationalise industry and place it fully under state control in late
   June 1918. This saw state-appointed "dictatorial" managers replacing
   the remaining capitalists (when it was not simply a case of the old
   boss being turned into a state manager). The Bolshevik vision of
   socialism as nationalised property replacing capitalist property was at
   the root of the creation of state capitalism within Russia. This was
   very centralised and very inefficient:

     "it seems apparent that many workers themselves . . . had now come
     to believe . . . that confusion and anarchy [sic!] at the top were
     the major causes of their difficulties, and with some justification.
     The fact was that Bolshevik administration was chaotic . . . Scores
     of competitive and conflicting Bolshevik and Soviet authorities
     issued contradictory orders, often brought to factories by armed
     Chekists. The Supreme Economic Council. . . issu[ed] dozens of
     orders and pass[ed] countless directives with virtually no real
     knowledge of affairs." [William G. Rosenberg, Russian Labour and
     Bolshevik Power, p. 116]

   Faced with the chaos that their own politics, in part, had created,
   like all bosses, the Bolsheviks blamed the workers. Yet abolishing the
   workers' committees resulted in "a terrifying proliferation of
   competitive and contradictory Bolshevik authorities, each with a claim
   of life or death importance . . . Railroad journals argued plaintively
   about the correlation between failing labour productivity and the
   proliferation of competing Bolshevik authorities." Rather than
   improving things, Lenin's one-man management did the opposite, "leading
   in many places . . . to a greater degree of confusion and indecision"
   and "this problem of contradictory authorities clearly intensified,
   rather than lessened." Indeed, the "result of replacing workers'
   committees with one man rule . . . on the railways . . . was not
   directiveness, but distance, and increasing inability to make decisions
   appropriate to local conditions. Despite coercion, orders on the
   railroads were often ignored as unworkable." It got so bad that "a
   number of local Bolshevik officials . . . began in the fall of 1918 to
   call for the restoration of workers' control, not for ideological
   reasons, but because workers themselves knew best how to run the line
   efficiently, and might obey their own central committee's directives if
   they were not being constantly countermanded." [William G. Rosenberg,
   Workers' Control on the Railroads, p. D1208, p. D1207, p. D1213 and pp.
   D1208-9]

   That it was Bolshevik policies and not workers' control which was to
   blame for the state of the economy can be seen from what happened after
   Lenin's one-man management was imposed. The centralised Bolshevik
   economic system quickly demonstrated how to really mismanage an
   economy. The Bolshevik onslaught against workers' control in favour of
   a centralised, top-down economic regime ensured that the economy was
   handicapped by an unresponsive system which wasted the local knowledge
   in the grassroots in favour of orders from above which were issued in
   ignorance of local conditions. Thus the glavki "did not know the true
   number of enterprises in their branch" of industry. To ensure
   centralism, customers had to go via a central orders committee, which
   would then past the details to the appropriate glavki and,
   unsurprisingly, it was "unable to cope with these enormous tasks". As a
   result, workplaces often "endeavoured to find less bureaucratic
   channels" to get resources and, in fact, the "comparative efficiency of
   factories remaining outside the glavki sphere increased." In summary,
   the "shortcomings of the central administrations and glavki increased
   together with the number of enterprises under their control". [Malle,
   Op. Cit., p. 232, p. 233 and p. 250] In summary:

     "The most evident shortcoming . . . was that it did not ensure
     central allocation of resources and central distribution of output,
     in accordance with any priority ranking . . . materials were
     provided to factories in arbitrary proportions: in some places they
     accumulated, whereas in others there was a shortage. Moreover, the
     length of the procedure needed to release the products increased
     scarcity at given moments, since products remained stored until the
     centre issued a purchase order on behalf of a centrally defined
     customer. Unused stock coexisted with acute scarcity. The centre was
     unable to determine the correct proportions among necessary
     materials and eventually to enforce implementation of the orders for
     their total quantity. The gap between theory and practice was
     significant." [Op. Cit., p. 233]

   Thus there was a clear "gulf between the abstraction of the principles
   on centralisation and its reality." This was recognised at the time
   and, unsuccessfully, challenged. Provincial delegates argued that
   "[w]aste of time was . . . the effect of strict compliance of vertical
   administration . . . semi-finished products [were] transferred to other
   provinces for further processing, while local factories operating in
   the field were shut down" (and given the state of the transport
   network, this was a doubly inefficient). The local bodies, knowing the
   grassroots situation, "had proved to be more far-sighted than the
   centre." For example, flax had been substituted for cotton long before
   the centre had issued instructions for this. Arguments reversing the
   logic centralisation were raised: "there was a lot of talk about
   scarcity of raw materials, while small factories and mills were stuffed
   with them in some provinces: what's better, to let work go on, or to
   make plans?" These "expressed feelings . . . about the inefficiency of
   the glavk system and the waste which was visible locally." Indeed, "the
   inefficiency of central financing seriously jeopardised local
   activity." While "the centre had displayed a great deal of conservatism
   and routine thinking," the localities "had already found ways of
   rationing raw materials, a measure which had not yet been decided upon
   at the centre." [Op. Cit., p.269, p. 270 and pp. 272-3]

   This did not result in changes as such demands "challenged . . . the
   central directives of the party" which "approved the principles on
   which the glavk system was based" and "the maximum centralisation of
   production." Even the "admission that some of the largest works had
   been closed down, owning to the scarcity of raw materials and fuel, did
   not induce the economists of the party to question the validity of
   concentration, although in Russia at the time impediments due to lack
   of transport jeopardised the whole idea of convergence of all
   productive activity in a few centres." The party leadership "decided to
   concentrate the tasks of economic reconstruction in the hands of the
   higher organs of the state." Sadly, "the glavk system in Russia did not
   work . . . Confronted with production problems, the central managers
   needed the collaboration of local organs, which they could not obtain
   both because of reciprocal suspicion and because of a lack of an
   efficient system of information, communications and transport. But the
   failure of glavkism did not bring about a reconsideration of the
   problems of economic organisation . . . On the contrary, the ideology
   of centralisation was reinforced." [Op. Cit., p. 271 and p. 275]

   The failings of centralisation can be seen from the fact that in
   September 1918, the Supreme Economic Council (SEC) chairman reported
   that "approximately eight hundred enterprises were known to have been
   nationalised and another two hundred or so were presumed to be
   nationalised but were not registered as such. In fact, well over two
   thousand enterprises had been taken over by this time." The "centre's
   information was sketchy at best" and "efforts by the centre to exert
   its power more effectively would provoke resistance from local
   authorities." [Thomas F. Remington, Op. Cit., pp. 58-9] This kind of
   clashing could not help but occur when the centre had no real knowledge
   nor understanding of local conditions:

     "Organisations with independent claims to power frequently ignored
     it. It was deluged with work of an ad hoc character . . . Demands
     for fuel and supplies piled up. Factories demanded instructions on
     demobilisation and conversion. Its presidium . . . scarcely knew
     what its tasks were, other than to direct the nationalisation of
     industry. Control over nationalisation was hard to obtain, however.
     Although the SEC intended to plan branch-wide nationalisations, it
     was overwhelmed with requests to order the nationalisation of
     individual enterprises. Generally it resorted to the method, for
     want of a better one, of appointing a commissar to carry out each
     act of nationalisation. These commissars, who worked closely with
     the Cheka, had almost unlimited powers over both workers and owners,
     and acted largely on their own discretion." [Op. Cit., p. 61-2]

   Unsurprisingly, "[r]esentment of the glavki was strongest where local
   authorities had attained a high level of competence in co-ordinating
   local production. They were understandably distressed when orders from
   central organs disrupted local production plans." Particularly given
   that the centre "drew up plans for developing or reorganising the
   economy of a region, either in ignorance, or against the will, of the
   local authorities." "Hypercentralisation", ironically, "multiplied the
   lines of command and accountability, which ultimately reduced central
   control." For example, one small condensed milk plan, employing fewer
   than 15 workers, "became the object of a months-long competition among
   six organisations." Moreover, the glavki "were filled with former
   owners." Yet "throughout 1919, as the economic crisis grew worse and
   the war emergency sharper the leadership strengthened the powers of the
   glavki in the interests of centralisation." [Op. Cit., p. 68, p. 69, p.
   70 and p. 69]

   A clearer example of the impact of Bolshevik ideology on the fate of
   the revolution would be hard to find. While the situation was pretty
   chaotic in early 1918, this does not prove that the factory committees'
   socialism was not the most efficient way of running things under the
   (difficult) circumstances. Unless of course, like the Bolsheviks, you
   have a dogmatic belief that centralisation is always more efficient.
   That favouring the factory committees, as anarchists stressed then and
   now, could have been a possible solution to the economic problems being
   faced is not utopian. After all rates of "output and productivity began
   to climb steadily after" January 1918 and "[i]n some factories,
   production doubled or tripled in the early months of 1918 . . . Many of
   the reports explicitly credited the factory committees for these
   increases." [Carmen Sirianni, Workers' Control and Socialist Democracy,
   p. 109] Another expert notes that there is "evidence that until late
   1919, some factory committees performed managerial tasks successfully.
   In some regions factories were still active thanks to their workers'
   initiatives in securing raw materials." [Malle, Op. Cit., p. 101]

   Moreover, given how inefficient the Bolshevik system was, it was only
   the autonomous self-activity at the base which keep it going. Thus the
   Commissariat of Finance was "not only bureaucratically cumbersome, but
   [it] involved mountainous accounting problems" and "with the various
   offices of the Sovnarkhoz and commissariat structure literally swamped
   with 'urgent' delegations and submerged in paperwork, even the most
   committed supporters of the revolution - perhaps one should say
   especially the most committed - felt impelled to act independently to
   get what workers and factories needed, even if this circumvented party
   directives." [William G. Rosenberg, "The Social Background to
   Tsektran," pp. 349-373, Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil
   War, Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg and Ronald Grigor Suny
   (eds.), p. 357] "Requisition and confiscation of resources," as Malle
   notes, "largely undertaken by the glavki, worked against any possible
   territorial network of complementary industries which might have been
   more efficient in reducing delays resulting from central financing,
   central ordering, central supply and delivery." By integrating the
   factory committees into a centralised state structure, this kind of
   activity became harder to do and, moreover, came up against official
   resistance and opposition. Significantly, due to "the run-down of
   large-scale industry and the bureaucratic methods applied to production
   orders" the Red Army turned to small-scale workplaces to supply
   personal equipment. These workplaces "largely escaped the glavk
   administration" and "allowed the Bolsheviks to support a well equipped
   army amidst general distress and disorganisation." [Op. Cit., p. 251,
   p. 477 and p. 502]

   Needless to say, Lenin never wavered in his support for one-man
   management nor in his belief in the efficiency of centralism to solve
   all problems, particularly the problems it itself created in abundance.
   Nor did his explicit call to reproduce capitalist social relations in
   production cause him any concern for, if the primary issue were
   property and not who manages the means of production, then factory
   committees are irrelevant in determining the socialist nature of the
   economy. Equally, if (as with Engels) all forms of organisation are
   inherently authoritarian then it does not fundamentally matter whether
   that authority is exercised by an elected factory committee or an
   appointed dictatorial manager (see [25]section H.4). And it must be
   noted that the politics of the leading members of the factory committee
   movement also played its part. While the committees expressed a
   spontaneous anarchism, almost instinctively moving towards libertarian
   ideas, the actual influence of conscious anarchists was limited. Most
   of the leaders of the movement were, or became, Bolsheviks and, as
   such, shared many of the statist and centralistic assumptions of the
   party leadership as well as accepting party discipline. As such, they
   did not have the theoretical accruement to resist their leadership's
   assault on the factory committees and, as a result, did integrate them
   into the trade unions when demanded.

   As well as advocating one-man management, Lenin's proposals also struck
   at the heart of workers' power in other ways. For example, he argued
   that "we must raise the question of piece-work and apply it and test in
   practice; we must raise the question of applying much of what is
   scientific and progressive in the Taylor system". [Op. Cit., vol. 27,
   p. 258] As Leninist Tony Cliff noted, "the employers have at their
   disposal a number of effective methods of disrupting th[e] unity [of
   workers as a class]. One of the most important of these is the
   fostering of competition between workers by means of piece-work
   systems." He added that these were used by the Nazis and the Stalinists
   "for the same purpose." [State Capitalism in Russia, pp. 18-9]
   Obviously piece-work is different when Lenin introduces it!

   Other policies undermined working class collectivity. Banning trade
   helped undermine a collective response to the problems of exchange
   between city and country. For example, a delegation of workers from the
   Main Workshops of the Nikolaev Railroad to Moscow reported to a
   well-attended meeting that "the government had rejected their request
   [to obtain permission to buy food collectively] arguing that to permit
   the free purchase of food would destroy its efforts to come to grips
   with hunger by establishing a 'food dictatorship.'" [David Mandel, The
   Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power, p. 392] Bolshevik
   ideology replaced collective working class action with an abstract
   "collective" response via the state, which turned the workers into
   isolated and atomised individuals. As such, the Bolsheviks provided a
   good example to support Malatesta's argument that "if . . . one means
   government action when one talks of social action, then this is still
   the resultant of individual forces, but only of those individuals who
   form the government . . . it follows. . . that far from resulting in an
   increase in the productive, organising and protective forces in
   society, it would greatly reduce them, limiting initiative to a few,
   and giving them the right to do everything without, of course, being
   able to provide them with the gift of being all-knowing." [Anarchy, pp.
   38-9] Can it be surprising, then, that Bolshevik policies aided the
   atomisation of the working class by replacing collective organisation
   and action by state bureaucracy?

   The negative impact of Bolshevik ideology showed up in other areas of
   the economy as well. For example, the Leninist fetish that bigger was
   better resulted in the "waste of scare resources" as the "general
   shortage of fuel and materials in the city took its greatest toll on
   the largest enterprises, whose overhead expenditures for heating the
   plant and firing the furnaces were proportionately greater than those
   for smaller enterprises. This point . . . was recognised later. Not
   until 1919 were the regime's leaders prepared to acknowledge that small
   enterprises, under the conditions of the time, might be more efficient
   in using resources; and not until 1921 did a few Bolsheviks theorists
   grasp the economic reasons for this apparent violation of their
   standing assumption that larger units were inherently more productive."
   [Remington, Op. Cit., p. 106] Given how disrupted transport was and how
   scare supplies were, this kind of ideologically generated mistake could
   not fail to have substantial impact.

   Post-October Bolshevik policy is a striking confirmation of the
   anarchist argument that a centralised structure would stifle the
   initiative of the masses and their own organs of self-management. Not
   only was it disastrous from a revolutionary perspective, it was
   hopelessly inefficient. The constructive self-activity of the people
   was replaced by the bureaucratic machinery of the state. The Bolshevik
   onslaught on workers' control, like their attacks on soviet democracy
   and workers' protest, undoubtedly engendered apathy and cynicism in the
   workforce, alienating even more the positive participation required for
   building socialism which the Bolshevik mania for centralisation had
   already marginalised. The negative results of Bolshevik economic policy
   confirmed Kropotkin's prediction that a revolution which "establish[ed]
   a strongly centralised Government", leaving it to "draw up a statement
   of all the produce" in a country and "then command that a prescribed
   quantity" of some good "be sent to such a place on such a day" and
   "stored in particular warehouses" would "not merely" be "undesirable,
   but it never could by any possibility be put into practice." "In any
   case," Kropotkin stressed, "a system which springs up spontaneously,
   under stress of immediate need, will be infinitely preferable to
   anything invented between four-walls by hide-bound theorists sitting on
   any number of committees." [The Conquest of Bread, pp. 82-3 and p. 75]

   Some Bolsheviks were aware of the problems. One left-wing Communist,
   Osinskii, concluded that "his six weeks in the provinces had taught him
   that the centre must rely on strong regional and provincial councils,
   since they were more capable than was the centre of managing the
   nationalised sector." [Remington, Op. Cit., p. 71] However, Marxist
   ideology seemed to preclude even finding the words to describe a
   possible solution to the problems faced by the regime: "I stand not for
   a local point of view and not for bureaucratic centralism, but for
   organised centralism, - I cannot seem to find the actual word just now,
   - a more balanced centralism." [Osinskii, quoted by Remington, Op.
   Cit., p. 71] Any anarchist would know that the word he was struggling
   to find was federalism! Little wonder Goldman concluded that
   anarcho-syndicalism, not nationalisation, could solve the problems
   facing Russia:

     "Only free initiative and popular participation in the affairs of
     the revolution can prevent the terrible blunders committed in
     Russia. For instance, with fuel only a hundred versts [about
     sixty-six miles] from Petrograd there would have been no necessity
     for that city to suffer from cold had the workers' economic
     organisations of Petrograd been free to exercise their initiative
     for the common good. The peasants of the Ukraina would not have been
     hampered in the cultivation of their land had they had access to the
     farm implements stacked up in the warehouses of Kharkov and other
     industrial centres awaiting orders from Moscow for their
     distribution. These are characteristic examples of Bolshevik
     governmentalism and centralisation, which should serve as a warning
     to the workers of Europe and America of the destructive effects of
     Statism." [My Disillusionment in Russia, p. 253]

   If Bolshevik industrial policy reflected a basic ignorance of local
   conditions and the nature of industry, their agricultural policies were
   even worse. Part of the problem was that the Bolsheviks were simply
   ignorant of peasant life (as one historian put it, "the deeply held
   views of the party on class struggle had overcome the need for
   evidence." [Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviet, p. 225]). Lenin, for
   example, thought that inequality in the villages was much, much higher
   than it actually was, a mistaken assumption which drove the unpopular
   and counter-productive "Committees of Poor Peasants" (kombedy) policy
   of 1918. Rather than a countryside dominated by a few rich kulaks
   (peasants who employed wage labour), Russian villages were
   predominantly pre-capitalist and based on actual peasant farming (i.e.,
   people who worked their land themselves). While the Bolsheviks attacked
   kulaks, they, at best, numbered only 5 to 7 per cent of the peasantry
   and even this is high as only 1 per cent of the total of peasant
   households employed more than one labourer. The revolution itself had
   an equalising effect on peasant life, and during 1917 "average size of
   landholding fell, the extremes of riches and poverty diminished." [Alec
   Nove, An economic history of the USSR: 1917-1991, p. 103 and p. 102]

   By 1919, even Lenin had to admit that the policies pursued in 1918,
   against the advice and protest of the Left-SRs, were failures and had
   alienated the peasantry. While admitting to errors, it remains the case
   that it was Lenin himself, more than anyone, who was responsible for
   them. Still, there was no fundamental change in policy for another two
   years. Defenders of the Bolsheviks argue that the Bolshevik had no
   alternative but to use violence to seize food from the peasants to feed
   the starving cities. However, this fails to acknowledge two key facts.
   Firstly, Bolshevik industrial policy made the collapse of industry
   worse and so the lack of goods to trade for grain was, in part, a
   result of the government. It is likely that if the factory committees
   had been fully supported then the lack of goods to trade may been
   reduced. Secondly, it cannot be said that the peasants did not wish to
   trade with the cities. They were, but at a fair price as can be seen
   from the fact that throughout Russia peasants with bags of grains on
   their backs went to the city to exchange them for goods. In fact, in
   the Volga region official state sources indicate "that grain-hoarding
   and the black market did not become a major problem until the beginning
   of 1919, and that during the autumn the peasants, in general, were
   'wildly enthusiastic to sell as much grain as possible' to the
   government." This changed when the state reduced its fixed prices by
   25% and "it became apparent that the new government would be unable to
   pay for grain procurements in industrial goods." [Orlando Figes,
   Peasant Russia, Civil War, p. 253 and p. 254] Thus, in that region at
   least, it was after the introduction of central state food requisition
   in January 1919 that peasants started to hoard food. Thus Bolshevik
   policy made the situation worse. And as Alec Nove noted "at certain
   moments even the government itself was compelled to 'legalise' illegal
   trade. For example, in September 1918 the wicked speculators and
   meshochniki [bag-men] were authorised to take sacks weighing up to 1.5
   poods (54 lbs.) to Petrograd and Moscow, and in this month . . . they
   supplied four times more than did the official supply organisation."
   [Op. Cit., p. 55]

   Yet rather than encourage this kind of self-activity, the Bolsheviks
   denounced it as speculation and did all in their power to suppress it
   (this included armed pickets around the towns and cities). This, of
   course, drove the prices on the black market higher due to the risk of
   arrest and imprisonment this entailed and so the regime made the
   situation worse: "it was in fact quite impossible to live on the
   official rations, and the majority of the supplies even of bread come
   through the black market. The government was never able to prevent this
   market from functioning, but did sufficiently disrupt it to make food
   shortages worse." By January 1919, only 19% of all food came through
   official channels and rose to around 30% subsequently. Official
   sources, however, announced an increase in grain, with total
   procurements amounting to 30 million poods in the agricultural year
   1917-18 to 110 million poods in 1918-19. [Nove, Op. Cit., p. 55 and p.
   54] Needless to say, the average worker in the towns saw nothing of
   this improvement in official statistics (and this in spite of dropping
   urban populations!).

   In the face of repression (up to and including torture and the
   destruction of whole villages), the peasantry responded by both cutting
   back on the amount of grain planted (something compounded by the state
   often taking peasant reserves for next season) and rising in
   insurrection. Unsurprisingly, opposition groups called for free trade
   in an attempt to both feed the cities and stop the alienation of the
   peasantry from the revolution. The Bolsheviks denounced the call,
   before being forced to accept it in 1921 due to mass pressure from
   below. Three years of bad policies had made a bad situation worse.
   Moreover, if the Bolsheviks had not ignored and alienated the Left-SRs,
   gerrymandered the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets and pushed them
   into revolt then their links with the countryside would not have been
   so weak and sensible policies which reflected the reality of village
   life may have been implemented.

   Nor did it help that the Bolsheviks undermined Russia's extensive
   network of consumer co-operatives because they were associated with the
   moderate socialists. It should also be noted that the peasants (or
   "kulaks") were blamed for food shortages when problems on the transport
   network or general bureaucratic mismanagement was the real reason. That
   there is "is little evidence to support the Leninist view" that kulaks
   were behind the peasant resistance and revolts resulting from the
   Bolshevik food requisition policies should go without saying. [Figes,
   Op. Cit., p. 155]

   Given all this, it is not hard to conclude that alternatives existed to
   Bolshevik policies - particularly as even the Bolsheviks had to admit
   in 1919 their decisions of the previous year were wrong! The New
   Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced in 1921 (under immense popular
   pressure) in conditions even worse than those in 1918, for example.
   Since NEP allowed wage labour, it was a step backwards from the ideas
   of the peasantry itself, peasant based parties like the SRs and
   Left-SRs as well as such rebels as the Kronstadt sailors. A more
   socialistic policy, recognising that peasants exchanging the product of
   their labour was not capitalism, could have been implemented much
   earlier but Bolshevik ignorance and disdain for the peasantry combined
   with a false belief that centralised state control was more efficient
   and more socialist ensured that this option was unlikely to be pursued,
   particularly given the collapse of industrial production Bolshevik
   state capitalist policies helped deepen.

   The pre-revolution Bolshevik vision of a socialist system was
   fundamentally centralised and, consequently, top-down. This was what
   was implemented post-October, with disastrous results. At each turning
   point, the Bolsheviks tended to implement policies which reflected
   their prejudices in favour of centralism, nationalisation and party
   power. Unsurprisingly, this also undermined the genuine socialist
   tendencies which existed at the time and so the Bolshevik vision of
   socialism and democracy played a key role in the failure of the
   revolution. Therefore, the Leninist idea that politics of the
   Bolsheviks had no influence on the outcome of the revolution, that
   their policies during the revolution were a product purely of objective
   forces, is unconvincing. This is enforced by the awkward fact that the
   Bolshevik leaders "justified what they were doing in theoretical terms,
   e.g. in whole books by Bukharin and Trotsky." [Pirani, The Russian
   Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24, p. 9]

   Remember, we are talking about the ideology of a ruling party and so it
   is more than just ideas for after the seizure of power, they became a
   part of the real social situation within Russia. Individually, party
   members assumed leadership posts in all spheres of social life and
   started to make decisions influenced by that ideology and its
   prejudices in favour of centralisation, the privileged role of the
   party, the top-down nature of decision making, the notion that
   socialism built upon state capitalism, amongst others. Then there is
   the hierarchical position which the party leaders found themselves. "If
   it is true that people's real social existence determines their
   consciousness," argued Cornelius Castoriadis, "it is from that moment
   illusory to expect the Bolshevik party to act in any other fashion than
   according to its real social position. The real social situation of the
   Party is that of a directorial organ, and its point of view toward this
   society henceforth is not necessarily the same as the one this society
   has toward itself." [Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, p. 97]

   Ultimately, the Bolshevik's acted as if they were trying to prove
   Bakunin's critique of Marxism was right (see [26]section H.1.1).
   Implementing a dictatorship of the proletariat in a country where the
   majority were not proletarians failed while, for the proletariat, it
   quickly became a dictatorship over the proletariat by the party (and in
   practice, a few party leaders and justified by the privileged access
   they had to socialist ideology). Moreover, centralisation proved to be
   as disempowering and inefficient as Bakunin argued.

   Sadly, far too many Marxists seem keen on repeating rather than
   learning from history while, at the same time, ignoring the awkward
   fact that anarchism's predictions were confirmed by the Bolshevik
   experience. It is not hard to conclude that another form of socialism
   was essential for the Russian revolution to have any chance of success.
   A decentralised socialism based on workers running their workplaces and
   the peasants controlling the land was not only possible but was being
   implemented by the people themselves. For the Bolsheviks, only a
   centralised planned economy was true socialism and, as a result, fought
   this alternative socialism and replaced it with a system reflecting
   that perspective. Yet socialism needs the mass participation of all in
   order to be created. Centralisation, by its very nature, limits that
   participation (which is precisely why ruling classes have always
   centralised power into states). As Russian Anarchist Voline argued,
   state power "seeks more or less to take in its hands the reins of
   social life. It predisposes the masses to passivity, and all spirit of
   initiative is stifled by the very existence of power" and so under
   state socialism the "tremendous new creative forces which are latent in
   the masses thus remain unused." [The Unknown Revolution, p. 250] This
   cannot help have a negative impact on the development of the revolution
   and, as anarchists had long feared and predicted, it did.

H.6.3 Were the Russian workers "declassed" and "atomised"?

   A standard Leninist explanation for the dictatorship of the Bolshevik
   party (and subsequent rise of Stalinism) is based on the "atomisation"
   or "declassing" of the proletariat. Leninist John Rees summarised this
   argument:

     "The civil war had reduced industry to rubble. The working class
     base of the workers' state, mobilised time and again to defeat the
     Whites, the rock on which Bolshevik power stood, had disintegrated.
     The Bolsheviks survived three years of civil war and wars in
     intervention, but only at the cost of reducing the working class to
     an atomised, individualised mass, a fraction of its former size, and
     no longer able to exercise the collective power that it had done in
     1917 . . . The bureaucracy of the workers' state was left suspended
     in mid-air, its class base eroded and demoralised. Such conditions
     could not help but have an effect on the machinery of the state and
     organisation of the Bolshevik Party." ["In Defence of October," pp.
     3-82, International Socialism, no. 52, p. 65]

   It should be noted that this perspective originated in Lenin's
   arguments that the Russian proletariat had become "declassed." In 1921
   it was the case that the proletariat, "owning to the war and to the
   desperate poverty and ruin, has become declassed, i.e. dislodged from
   its class groove, and had ceased to exist as proletariat . . . the
   proletariat has disappeared." [Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 66]
   However, unlike his later-day followers, Lenin was sure that while it
   "would be absurd and ridiculous to deny that the fact that the
   proletariat is declassed is a handicap" it could still "fulfil its task
   of winning and holding state power." [Op. Cit., vol. 32, p. 412] Since
   Lenin, this argument has been utilised repeatedly by Leninists to
   justify his regime as well as explaining both its authoritarianism and
   the rise of Stalinism.

   It does, of course, contain an element of truth. The numbers of
   industrial workers did decrease dramatically between 1918 and 1921,
   particularly in Petrograd and Moscow (although the drop in both cities
   was exceptional, with most towns seeing much smaller reductions). As
   one historian summarises, the "social turmoil at this time undeniably
   reduced the size of Russia's working class . . . . Yet a substantial
   core of urban workers remained in the factories, and their attitudes
   towards the Bolsheviks were indeed transformed." [Donald J. Raleigh,
   Experiencing Russia's Civil War, p. 348] This core was those with the
   least ties with the countryside - the genuine industrial worker.

   Nor can it be maintained that the Russian working class was incapable
   of collective action during the civil war. Throughout that period, as
   well as before and after, the Russian workers proved themselves quite
   capable of taking collective action - against the Bolshevik state.
   Simply put, an "atomised, individualised mass" does not need extensive
   state repression to control it. So while the working class was "a
   fraction of its former size" it was able "to exercise the collective
   power it had done in 1917." Significantly, rather than decrease over
   the civil war period, the mass protests grew in militancy. By 1921
   these protests and strikes were threatening the very existence of the
   Bolshevik dictatorship, forcing it to abandon key aspects of its
   economic policies.

   Which shows a key flaw in the standard Leninist account - the Russian
   working class, while undoubtedly reduced in size and subject to extreme
   economic problems, was still able to organise, strike and protest. This
   awkward fact has been systematically downplayed, when not ignored, in
   Leninist accounts of this period. As in any class society, the history
   of the oppressed is ignored in favour of the resolutions and decisions
   of the enlightened few at the top of the social pyramid. Given the
   relative lack of awareness of working class protest against the
   Bolsheviks, it will be necessary to present substantial evidence of it.

   This process of collective action by workers and Bolshevik repression
   started before the Civil War began, continued throughout and after it.
   For example, "[t]hroughout the civil war there was an undercurrent of
   labour militancy in Moscow . . . both the introduction and the phasing
   out of war communism were marked by particularly active periods of
   labour unrest." In the Moscow area, while it is "impossible to say what
   proportion of workers were involved in the various disturbances,"
   following the lull after the defeat of the protest movement in mid-1918
   "each wave of unrest was more powerful than the last, culminating in
   the mass movement from late 1920." [Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists in
   Power, p. 94 and p. 93] This was the case across Russia, with "periodic
   swings in the workers' political temper. When Soviet rule stood in
   peril . . . [this] spared the regime the defection of its proletarian
   base. During lulls in the fighting, strikes and demonstrations broke
   out." [Thomas F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia, p.
   101] Workers' resistance and protests against the Bolsheviks shows that
   not only that a "workers' state" is a contradiction in terms but also
   that there was a social base for possible alternatives to Leninism.

   The early months of Bolshevik rule were marked by "worker protests,
   which then precipitated violent repressions against hostile workers.
   Such treatment further intensified the disenchantment of significant
   segments of Petrograd labour with Bolshevik-dominated Soviet rule."
   [Alexander Rabinowitch, Early Disenchantment with Bolshevik Rule, p.
   37] The first major act of state repression was an attack on a march in
   Petrograd in support of the Constituent Assembly when it opened in
   January 1918. Early May saw "the shooting of protesting housewives and
   workers in the suburb of Kolpino", the "arbitrary arrest and abuse of
   workers" in Sestroretsk, the "closure of newspapers and arrests of
   individuals who protested the Kolpino and Sestroretsk events" and "the
   resumption of labour unrest and conflict with authorities in other
   Petrograd factories." This was no isolated event, as "violent incidents
   against hungry workers and their family demanding bread occurred with
   increasing regularity." [Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in
   Power, pp. 229-30] The shooting at Kolpino "triggered a massive wave of
   indignation . . . Work temporarily stopped at a number of plants." In
   Moscow, Tula, Kolomna, Nizhnii-Novoprod, Rybinsk, Orel, Tver' and
   elsewhere "workers gathered to issue new protests." In Petrograd,
   "textile workers went on strike for increased food rations and a wave
   of demonstrations spread in response to still more Bolshevik arrests."
   This movement was the "first major wave of labour protest" against the
   regime, with "protests against some form of Bolshevik repression" being
   common. [William Rosenberg, Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power, pp.
   123-4]

   This general workers' opposition generated the Menshevik inspired, but
   independent, Extraordinary Assembly of Delegates (EAD). "The emergence
   of the EAD", Rabinowitch notes, "was also stimulated by the widespread
   view that trade unions, factory committees, and soviets . . . were no
   longer representative, democratically run working-class institutions;
   instead they had been transformed into arbitrary, bureaucratic
   government agencies. There was ample reason for this concern." To
   counter the EAD, the Bolsheviks organised non-party conferences which,
   in itself, shows that the soviets had become as distant from the masses
   as the opposition argued. District soviets "were deeply concerned about
   their increasing isolation . . . At the end of March . . . they
   resolved to convene successive nonparty workers' conferences . . . in
   part to undercut the EAD by strengthening ties between district soviets
   and workers." This was done amidst "unmistakable signs of the widening
   rift between Bolshevik-dominated political institutions and ordinary
   factory workers." The EAD, argues Rabinowitch, was an expression of the
   "growing disenchantment of Petrograd workers with economic conditions
   and the evolving structure and operation of Soviet political
   institutions". [Op. Cit., p. 224, p. 232 and p. 231]

   Anarchists should be not too surprised that the turning of popular
   organisations into parts of a state soon resulted in their growing
   isolation from the masses. The state, with its centralised structures,
   is simply not designed for mass participation - and this does doubly
   for the highly centralised Leninist state.

   These protests and repression continued after the start of the civil
   war. "At the end of May and beginning of June, a wave of strikes to
   protest the lack of bread swept Nivskii district factories" and
   "strikes followed by bloody clashes between workers and Soviet
   authorities had erupted in scattered parts of central Russia." On June
   21, a general meeting of Obukhov workers "seized control of the plant"
   and the next day the assembled workers "resolved to demand that the EAD
   should declare political strikes . . . to protest the political
   repression of workers." Orders were issued by the authorities "to shut
   down Obukhov plant" and "the neighbourhood surrounding the plant was
   placed under martial law." [Rabinowitch, Op. Cit., p. 231 and pp.
   246-7] However "workers were not so readily pacified. In scores of
   additional factories and shops protests mounted and rapidly spread
   along the railways." [Rosenberg, Op. Cit., pp. 126-7]

   Faced with this mounting pressure of spontaneous strikes, the EAD
   declared a general for the 2nd of July. The Bolshevik authorities acted
   quickly: "Any sign of sympathy for the strike was declared a criminal
   act. More arrests were made. In Moscow, Bolsheviks raided the
   Aleksandrovsk railroad shops, not without bloodshed. Dissidence
   spread." On July 1st, "machine guns were set up at main points
   throughout the Petrograd and Moscow railroad junctions, and elsewhere
   in both cities as well. Controls were tightened in factories. Meetings
   were forcefully dispersed." [Rosenberg, Op. Cit., p. 127] Factories
   were warned "that if they participated in the general strike they would
   face immediate shutdown, and individual strikes were threatened with
   fines or loss of work. Agitators and members of strike committees were
   subject to immediate arrest." Opposition printing presses "were sealed,
   the offices of hostile trade unions were raided, martial law on lines
   in the Petrograd rail hub was declared, and armed patrols with
   authority to prevent work stoppages were formed and put on twenty-four
   hour duty at key points around the city." Perhaps unsurprisingly, given
   "the brutal suppression of the EAD's general strike", it was not
   successful. [Rabinowitch, Op. Cit., p. 254 and p. 259]

   Thus "[b]y the early summer of 1918" there were "widespread
   anti-Bolshevik protests. Armed clashes occurred in the factory
   districts of Petrograd and other industrial centres." [William
   Rosenberg, Op. Cit., p. 107] It should also be noted that at the end of
   September of that year, there was a revolt by Baltic Fleet sailors
   demanding (as they did again in 1921) a "return to government by
   liberated, democratic soviets - that is, 1917-type soviets." As after
   the more famous 1921 revolt, the Left-SR controlled Kronstadt soviet
   had been disbanded and replaced by a Bolshevik revolutionary committee
   in July 1918, during the repression after the Left-SR assassination of
   the German ambassador. [Rabinowitch, Op. Cit., p. 352 and p. 302]

   As well as state repression, the politics of the opposition played a
   role in its defeat. Before October 1918, both the Mensheviks and SRs
   were in favour of the Constituent Assembly and Dumas as the main organs
   of power, with the soviets playing a minor role. This allowed the
   Bolsheviks to portray themselves as defenders of "soviet power" (a
   position which still held popular support). Understandably, many
   workers were unhappy to support an opposition which aimed to replace
   the soviets with typically bourgeois institutions. Many also considered
   the Bolshevik government as a "soviet power" and so, to some degree,
   their own regime. With the civil war starting, many working class
   people would also have been uneasy in protesting against a regime which
   proclaimed its soviet and socialist credentials. After October 1918,
   the Mensheviks supported the idea of (a democratically elected) soviet
   power, joining the Left-SRs (who were now effectively illegal after
   their revolt of July - see [27]section H.6.1). However, by then it was
   far too late as Bolshevik ideology had adjusted to Bolshevik practice
   and the party was now advocating party dictatorship. Thus, we find
   Victor Serge in the 1930s noting that "the degeneration of Bolshevism"
   was apparent by that time, "since at the start of 1919 I was horrified
   to read an article by Zinoviev . . . on the monopoly of the party in
   power." [The Serge-Trotsky Papers, p. 188] It should be noted, though,
   that Serge kept his horror well hidden throughout this period - and
   well into the 1930s (see [28]section H.1.2 for his public support for
   this monopoly).

   As noted above, this cycle of resistance and repression was not limited
   to Petrograd. In July 1918, a leading Bolshevik insisted "that server
   measures were needed to deal with strikes" in Petrograd while in other
   cities "harsher forms of repression" were used. For example, in Tula,
   in June 1918, the regime declared "martial law and arrested the
   protestors. Strikes followed and were suppressed by violence". In
   Sormovo, 5,000 workers went on strike after a Menshevik-SR paper was
   closed. Violence was "used to break the strike." [Remington, Op. Cit.,
   p. 105]

   Similar waves of protests and strikes as those in 1918 took place the
   following year with 1919 seeing a "new outbreak of strikes in March",
   with the "pattern of repression . . . repeated." One strike saw
   "closing of the factory, the firing of a number of workers, and the
   supervised re-election of its factory committee." In Astrakhan, a mass
   meeting of 10,000 workers was fired on by Red Army troops, killing
   2,000 (another 2,000 were taken prisoner and subsequently executed).
   [Remington, Op. Cit., p. 109] Moscow, at the end of June, saw a
   "committee of defence (KOM) [being] formed to deal with the rising tide
   of disturbances." The KOM "concentrated emergency power in its hands,
   overriding the Moscow Soviet, and demanding obedience from the
   population. The disturbances died down under the pressure of
   repression." [Sakwa, Op. Cit., pp. 94-5] In the Volga region, delegates
   to a conference of railroad workers "protested the Cheka's arrest of
   union members, which the delegates insisted further disrupted
   transport. It certainly curbed the number of strikes." [Raleigh, Op.
   Cit., p. 371] In Tula "after strikes in the spring of 1919" local
   Menshevik party activists had been arrested while Petrograd saw
   "violent strikes" at around the same time. [Jonathan Aves, Workers
   Against Lenin, p. 19 and p. 23] As Vladimir Brovkin argues in his
   account of the strikes and protests of 1919:

     "Data on one strike in one city may be dismissed as incidental.
     When, however, evidence is available from various sources on
     simultaneous independent strikes in different cities an overall
     picture begins to emerge. All strikes developed along a similar
     timetable: February, brewing discontent; March and April, peak of
     strikes: May, slackening in strikes; and June and July, a new wave
     of strikes . . .

     "Workers' unrest took place in Russia's biggest and most important
     industrial centres . . . Strikes affected the largest industries,
     primarily those involving metal: metallurgical, locomotive, and
     armaments plants . . . In some cities . . . textile and other
     workers were active protesters as well. In at least five cities . .
     . the protests resembled general strikes."
     ["Workers' Unrest and the Bolsheviks' Response in 1919", pp.
     350-373, Slavic Review, Vol. 49, No. 3, p. 370]

   These strikes raised both economic and political demands, such as "free
   and fair elections to the soviets." Unsurprisingly, in all known cases
   the Bolsheviks' "initial response to strikes was to ban public meetings
   and rallies" as well as "occup[ying] the striking plant and
   dismiss[ing] the strikers en masse." They also "arrested strikers" and
   executed some. [Op. Cit., p. 371 and p. 372]

   1920 saw similar waves of strikes and protests. In fact, strike action
   "remained endemic in the first nine months of 1920." Soviet figures
   report a total of 146 strikes, involving 135,442 workers for the 26
   provinces covered. In Petrograd province, there were 73 strikes with
   85,642 participants. "This is a high figure indeed, since at this time
   . . . there were 109,100 workers" in the province. Overall, "the
   geographical extent of the February-March strike wave is impressive"
   and the "harsh discipline that went with labour militarisation led to
   an increase in industrial unrest in 1920." [Aves, Op. Cit., p. 69, p.
   70 and p. 80]

   Saratov, for example, saw a wave of factory occupations break out in
   June and mill workers went out in July while in August, strikes and
   walkouts occurred in its mills and other factories and these "prompted
   a spate of arrests and repression." In September railroad workers went
   out on strike, with arrests making "the situation worse, forcing the
   administration to accept the workers' demands." [Raleigh, Op. Cit., p.
   375] In January 1920, a strike followed a mass meeting at a railway
   repair shop in Moscow. Attempts to spread were foiled by arrests. The
   workshop was closed, depriving workers of their rations and 103 workers
   of the 1,600 employed were imprisoned. "In late March 1920 there were
   strikes in some factories" in Moscow and "[a]t the height of the Polish
   war the protests and strikes, usually provoked by economic issues but
   not restricted to them, became particularly frequent . . . The assault
   on non-Bolshevik trade unionism launched at this time was probably
   associated with the wave of unrest since there was a clear danger that
   they would provide a focus for opposition." [Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 95]
   The "largest strike in Moscow in the summer of 1920" was by tram
   workers over the equalisation of rations. It began on August 12th, when
   one tram depot went on strike, quickly followed by others while workers
   "in other industries joined in to." The tram workers "stayed out a
   further two days before being driven back by arrests and threats of
   mass sackings." In the textile manufacturing towns around Moscow "there
   were large-scale strikes" in November 1920, with 1000 workers striking
   for four days in one district and a strike of 500 mill workers saw
   3,000 workers from another mill joining in. [Simon Pirani, The Russian
   Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24, p. 32 and p. 43]

   In Petrograd the Aleksandrovskii locomotive building works "had seen
   strikes in 1918 and 1919" and in August 1920 it again stopped work. The
   Bolsheviks locked the workers out and placed guards outside it. The
   Cheka then arrested the SRs elected to the soviet from that workplace
   as well as about 30 workers. After the arrests, the workers refused to
   co-operate with elections for new soviet delegates. The "opportunity
   was taken to carry out a general round-up, and arrests were made" at
   three other works. The enormous Briansk works "experienced two major
   strikes in 1920", and second one saw the introduction of martial law on
   both the works and the settlement it was situated in. A strike in Tula
   saw the Bolsheviks declare a "state of siege", although the repression
   "did not prevent further unrest and the workers put forward new
   demands" while, in Moscow, a strike in May by printers resulted in
   their works "closed and the strikers sent to concentration camps."
   [Aves, Op. Cit., p. 41, p. 45, p. 47, pp. 48-9, pp. 53-4 and p. 59]

   These expressions of mass protest and collective action continued in
   1921, unsurprisingly as the civil war was effectively over in the
   previous autumn. Even John Rees had to acknowledge the general strike
   in Russia at the time, stating that the Kronstadt revolt was "preceded
   by a wave of serious but quickly resolved strikes." [Op. Cit., p. 61]
   Significantly, he failed to note that the Kronstadt sailors rebelled in
   solidarity with those strikes and how it was state repression which
   "resolved" the strikes. Moreover, he seriously downplays the scale and
   importance of these strikes, perhaps unsurprisingly as "[b]y the
   beginning of 1921 a revolutionary situation with workers in the
   vanguard had emerged in Soviet Russia" with "the simultaneous outbreak
   of strikes in Petrograd and Moscow and in other industrial regions." In
   February and March 1921, "industrial unrest broke out in a nation-wide
   wave of discontent or volynka. General strikes, or very widespread
   unrest" hit all but one of the country's major industrial regions and
   "workers protest consisted not just of strikes but also of factory
   occupations, 'Italian strikes', demonstrations, mass meetings, the
   beating up of communists and so on." Faced with this massive strike
   wave, the Bolsheviks did what many ruling elites do: they called it
   something else. Rather than admit it was a strike, they "usually
   employed the word volynka, which means only a 'go-slow'". [Aves, Op.
   Cit., p. 3, p. 109, p. 112, pp. 111-2]

   Mid-February 1921 saw workers in Moscow striking and "massive city-wide
   protest spread through Petrograd . . . Strikes and demonstrations
   spread. The regime responded as it had done in the past, with
   lock-outs, mass arrests, heavy show of force - and concessions."
   [Remington, Op. Cit., p. 111] As Paul Avrich recounts, in Petrograd
   these "street demonstrations were heralded by a rash of protest
   meetings" workplaces On the 24th of February, the day after a workplace
   meeting, the Trubochny factory workforce downed tools and walked out
   the factory. Additional workers from nearby factories joined in. The
   crowd of 2,000 was dispersed by armed military cadets. The next day,
   the Trubochny workers again took to the streets and visited other
   workplaces, bringing them out on strike too. In the face of a near
   general strike, three-man Defence Committee was formed. Zinoviev
   "proclaimed martial law" and "[o]vernight Petrograd became an armed
   camp." Strikers were locked out and the "application of military force
   and the widespread arrests, not to speak of the tireless propaganda
   waged by the authorities" was "indispensable in restoring order" (as
   were economic concessions). [Kronstadt 1921, pp. 37-8, p. 39, pp. 46-7
   and p. 50]

   In Moscow, "industrial unrest . . . turned into open confrontation and
   protest spilled on to the streets", starting with a "wave of strikes
   that had its centre in the heart of industrial Moscow." Strikes were
   "also spreading outside Moscow city itself into the surrounding
   provinces" and so "Moscow and Moscow province were put under martial
   law". [Aves, Op. Cit., p. 130, p. 138, p. 143 and p. 144] This strike
   wave started when "[m]eetings in factories and plants gathered and
   criticised government policies, beginning with supply and developing
   into general political criticism." As was typical, the "first response
   of the civil authorities to the disturbances was increased repression"
   although as "the number of striking factories increased some
   concessions were introduced." Military units called in against striking
   workers "refused to open fire, and they were replaced by the armed
   communist detachments" which did. "That evening mass protest meetings
   were held . . . The following day several factories went on strike" and
   troops were "disarmed and locked in as a precaution" by the government
   against possible fraternising. February 23rd saw a 10,000 strong street
   demonstration and "Moscow was placed under martial law with a 24-hour
   watch on factories by the communist detachments and trustworthy army
   units." The disturbances were accompanied by factory occupations and on
   the 1st of March the soviet called on workers "not to go on strike."
   However, "wide-scale arrests deprived the movement of its leadership."
   March 5th saw disturbances at the Bromlei works, "resulting in the now
   customary arrest of workers. A general meeting at the plant on 25 March
   called for new elections to the Moscow Soviet. The management dispersed
   the meeting but the workers called on other plants to support the calls
   for new elections. As usual, the ringleaders were arrested." [Sakwa,
   Op. Cit., pp. 242-3, p. 245 and p. 246]

   The events at the Bromlei works were significant in that the march 25th
   mass meeting passed an anarchist and Left-SR initiated resolution
   supporting the Kronstadt rebels. The party "responded by having them
   sacked en masse". The workers "demonstrated through" their district
   "and inspired some brief solidarity strikes." Over 3000 workers joined
   the strikes and about 1000 of these joined the flying picket (managers
   at one print shop locked their workers in to stop them joining the
   protest). While the party was willing to negotiate economic issues, "it
   had no wish to discuss politics with workers" and so arrested those who
   initiated the resolution, sacked the rest of the workforce and
   selectively re-employed them. Two more strikes were conducted "to
   defend the political activists in their midst" and two mass meetings
   demanded the release of arrested ones. Workers also struck on supply
   issues in May, July and August. [Pirani, Op. Cit., pp. 83-4]

   While the Kronstadt revolt took place too late to help the Petrograd
   strikes, it did inspire a strike wave in Ekaterinoslavl (in the
   Ukraine) in May, 1921. It started in the railway workshops and became
   "quickly politicised," with the strike committee raising a "series of
   political ultimatums that were very similar in content to the demands
   of the Kronstadt rebels" (many of the resolutions put to the meeting
   almost completely coincided with them). The strike "spread to the other
   workshops" and on June 1st the main large Ekaterinoslavl factories
   joined the strike. The strike was spread via the use of trains and
   telegraph and soon an area up to fifty miles around the town was
   affected. The strike was finally ended by the use of the Cheka, using
   mass arrests and shootings. Unsurprisingly, the local communists called
   the revolt a "little Kronstadt." [Aves, Op. Cit., pp. 171-3]

   Saratov also saw a mass revolt in March 1921, when a strike by railroad
   workers over a reduction in food rations spread to the metallurgical
   plants and other large factories "as workers and non-workers sent
   representatives to the railroad shops." They forced the Communists to
   allow the setting up of a commission to re-examine the activities of
   all economic organs and the Cheka. During the next two days, "the
   assemblies held at factories to elect delegates to the commission
   bitterly denounced the Communists." The "unrest spilled over into
   Pokrovsk." The commission of 270 had less than ten Communists and
   "demanded the freeing of political prisoners, new elections to the
   soviets and to all labour organisations, independent unions, and
   freedom of speech, the press, and assembly." The Communists "resolved
   to shut down the commission before it could issue a public statement"
   and set up a Provincial Revolutionary Committee which "introduced
   martial law both in the city and the garrison" as well as arresting
   "the ringleaders of the workers' movement." The near general strike was
   broken by a "wave of repression" but "railroad workers and dockworkers
   and some printers refused to resume work." [Raleigh, Op. Cit., pp.
   388-9]

   Post-volynka, workplaces "that had been prominent in unrest were
   particularly hit by . . . purges . . . The effect on the willingness of
   workers to support opposition parties was predictable." However, "the
   ability to organise strikes did not disappear" and they continued to
   take place throughout 1921. The spring of 1922 saw "a new strike wave."
   [Aves, Op. Cit., p. 182 and p. 183] For example, in early March, "long
   strikes" hit the textile towns around Moscow. At the Glukhovskaia mills
   5000 workers struck for 5 days, 1000 at a nearby factory for 2 days and
   4000 at the Voskresenskaia mills for 6 days. In May, 1921, workers in
   the city of Moscow reacted to supply problems "with a wave of strikes.
   Party officials reckoned that in a 24-day period in May there were
   stoppages at 66 large enterprises." These included a sit-down strike at
   one of Moscow's largest plants, while "workers at engineering factories
   in Krasnopresnia followed suit, and Cheka agents reported 'dissent,
   culminating in strikes and occupation' in Bauman." August 1922 saw
   19,000 workers strike in textile mills in Moscow region for several
   days. Tram workers also struck that year, while teachers "organised
   strikes and mass meetings". Workers usually elected delegates to
   negotiate with their trade unions as well as their bosses as both were
   Communist Party members. Strike organisers, needless to say, were
   sacked. [Pirani, Op. Cit., p. 82, pp. 111-2 and p. 157]

   While the strike wave of early 1921 is the most famous, due to the
   Kronstadt sailors rebelling in solidarity with it, the fact is that
   this was just one of many strike waves during the 1918 and 1921 period.
   In response to protests, "the government had combined concessions with
   severe repression to restore order" as well as "commonly resort[ing] to
   the lock out as a means of punishing and purging the work force." Yet,
   "as the strike waves show, the regime's sanctions were not sufficient
   to prevent all anti-Bolshevik political action." [Remington, Op. Cit.,
   p. 111, p. 107, and p. 109] In fact, repression "did not prevent
   strikes and other forms of protest by workers becoming endemic in 1919
   and 1920" while in early 1921 the Communist Party "faced what amounted
   to a revolutionary situation. Industrial unrest was only one aspect of
   a more general crisis that encompassed the Kronstadt revolt and the
   peasant rising in Tambov and Western Siberia." This "industrial unrest
   represented a serious political threat to the Soviet regime . . . From
   Ekaterinburg to Moscow, from Petrograd to Ekaterinoslavl, workers took
   to the streets, often in support of political slogans that called for
   the end of Communist Party rule . . . soldiers in many of the strike
   areas showed themselves to be unreliable [but] the regime was able to
   muster enough forces to master the situation. Soldiers could be
   replaced by Chekists, officer cadets and other special units where
   Party members predominated." [Aves, Op. Cit., p. 187, p. 155 and p.
   186]

   Yet, an "atomised" and powerless working class does not need martial
   law, lockouts, mass arrests and the purging of the workforce to control
   it. As Russian anarchist Ida Mett succinctly put it: "And if the
   proletariat was that exhausted how come it was still capable of waging
   virtually total general strikes in the largest and most heavily
   industrialised cities?" [The Kronstadt Rebellion, p. 81] The end of the
   civil war also saw the Bolsheviks finally destroy what was left of
   non-Bolshevik trade unionism. In Moscow, this took place against fierce
   resistance of the union members. As one historian concludes:

     "Reflecting on the determined struggle mounted by printers, bakers
     and chemical workers in Moscow during 1920-1, in spite of appalling
     economic conditions, being represented by organisations weakened by
     constant repression . . . to retain their independent labour
     organisations it is difficult not to feel that the social basis for
     a political alternative existed." [Jonathan Aves, "The Demise of
     Non-Bolshevik Trade Unionism in Moscow: 1920-21", pp. 101- 33,
     Revolutionary Russia, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 130]

   Elsewhere, Aves argues that an "examination of industrial unrest after
   the Bolshevik seizure of power . . . shows that the Revolution had
   brought to the surface resilient traditions of organisation in society
   and had released tremendous forces in favour of greater popular
   participation . . . The survival of the popular movement through the
   political repression and economic devastation of the Civil War
   testifies to its strength." [Workers Against Lenin, p. 186] The idea
   that the Russian working class was incapable of collective struggle is
   hard to defend given this series of struggles (and state repression).
   The class struggle in Bolshevik Russia did not stop, it continued
   except the ruling class had changed. All the popular energy and
   organisation this expressed, which could have been used to combat the
   problems facing the revolution and create the foundations of a genuine
   socialist society, were wasted in fighting the Bolshevik regime.
   Ultimately, though, the "sustained, though ultimately futile, attempts
   to revive an autonomous workers' movement, especially in mid-1918 and
   from late 1920, failed owing to repression." [Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 269]
   Another historian notes that "immediately after the civil war" there
   was "a revival of working class collective action that culminated in
   February-March 1921 in a widespread strike movement and the revolt at
   the Kronstadt naval base." As such, the position expounded by Rees and
   other Leninists "is so one-sided as to be misleading." [Pirani, Op.
   Cit., p. 7 and p. 23]

   Nor is this commonplace Leninist rationale for Bolshevik rule
   particularly original, as it dates back to Lenin and was first
   formulated "to justify a political clamp-down." Indeed, this argument
   was developed in response to rising working class protest rather than
   its lack: "As discontent amongst workers became more and more difficult
   to ignore, Lenin . . . began to argue that the consciousness of the
   working class had deteriorated . . . workers had become 'declassed.'"
   However, there "is little evidence to suggest that the demands that
   workers made at the end of 1920 . . . represented a fundamental change
   in aspirations since 1917." [Aves, Op. Cit., p. 18, p. 90 and p. 91] So
   while the "working class had decreased in size and changed in
   composition,. . . the protest movement from late 1920 made clear that
   it was not a negligible force and that in an inchoate way it retained a
   vision of socialism which was not identified entirely with Bolshevik
   power . . . Lenin's arguments on the declassing of the proletariat was
   more a way of avoiding this unpleasant truth than a real reflection of
   what remained, in Moscow at least, a substantial physical and
   ideological force." [Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 261]

   Nor can it be suggested, as the Bolsheviks did at the time, that these
   strikes were conducted by newly arrived workers, semi-peasants without
   an awareness of proletarian socialism or traditions. Links between the
   events in 1917 and those during the civil war are clear. Jonathan Aves
   writes that there were "distinct elements of continuity between the
   industrial unrest in 1920 and 1917 . . . As might be anticipated, the
   leaders of unrest were often to be found amongst the skilled male
   workers who enjoyed positions of authority in the informal shop-floor
   hierarchies." Looking at the strike wave of early 1921 in Petrograd,
   the "strongest reason for accepting the idea that it was established
   workers who were behind the volynka is the form and course of protest.
   Traditions of protest reaching back through the spring of 1918 to 1917
   and beyond were an important factor in the organisation of the
   volynka". In fact, "an analysis of the industrial unrest of early 1921
   shows that long-standing workers were prominent in protest." [Aves, Op.
   Cit., p. 39, p. 126 and p. 91] As another example, "although the
   ferment touched all strata of Saratov workers, it must be emphasised
   that the skilled metalworkers, railroad workers, and printers - the
   most 'conscious' workers - demonstrated the most determined
   resistance." They "contested repression and the Communists' violation
   of fair play and workplace democracy." [Raleigh, Op. Cit., p. 376] As
   Ida Mett argued in relation to the strikes in early 1921:

     "The population was drifting away from the capital. All who had
     relatives in the country had rejoined them. The authentic
     proletariat remained till the end, having the most slender
     connections with the countryside.

     "This fact must be emphasised, in order to nail the official lies
     seeking to attribute the Petrograd strikes . . . to peasant
     elements, 'insufficiently steeled in proletarian ideas.' The real
     situation was the very opposite . . . There was certainly no exodus
     of peasants into the starving towns! . . . It was the famous
     Petrograd proletariat, the proletariat which had played such a
     leading role in both previous revolutions, that was finally to
     resort to the classical weapon of the class struggle: the strike."
     [The Kronstadt Uprising, p. 36]

   As one expert on this issue argues, while the number of workers did
   drop "a sizeable core of veteran urban proletarians remained in the
   city; they did not all disappear." In fact, "it was the loss of young
   activists rather than of all skilled and class-conscious urban workers
   that caused the level of Bolshevik support to decline during the Civil
   War. Older workers had tended to support the Menshevik Party in 1917".
   Given this, "it appears that the Bolshevik Party made deurbanisation
   and declassing the scapegoats for its political difficulties when the
   party's own policies and its unwillingness to accept changing
   proletarian attitudes were also to blame." It should also be noted that
   the notion of declassing to rationalise the party's misfortunes was
   used before long before the civil war: "This was the same argument used
   to explain the Bolsheviks' lack of success among workers in the early
   months of 1917 - that the cadres of conscious proletarians were diluted
   by nonproletarian elements." [Diane P. Koenker, "Urbanisation and
   Deurbanisation in the Russian Revolution and Civil War", pp. 81-104,
   Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War, Diane P. Koenker,
   William G. Rosenberg and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds.), p. 96, p. 95, p.
   100 and p. 84]

   While there is still much research required, what facts that are
   available suggest that throughout the time of Lenin's regime the
   Russian workers took collective action in defence of their interests.
   This is not to say that workers did not also respond to the problems
   they faced in an individualistic manner, often they did. However, such
   responses were, in part (as we noted in the [29]last section), because
   Bolshevik policy itself gave them little choice as it limited their
   ability to respond collectively. Yet in the face of difficult economic
   circumstances, workers turned to mass meetings and strikes. In
   response, the Bolshevik's used state repression to break resistance and
   protest against their regime. In such circumstances it is easy to see
   how the Bolshevik party became isolated from the masses they claimed to
   be leading but were, in fact, ruling. This transformation of rebels
   into a ruling elite comes as no great surprise given that Bolshevik's
   aimed to seize power themselves in a centralised and hierarchical
   institution, a state, which has always been the method by which ruling
   classes secured their position (as we argued in [30]section H.3.7, this
   perspective flowed from the flawed Marxist theory of the state). Just
   as they had to, first, gerrymander and disband soviets to regime in
   power in the spring and summer of 1918, so the Bolsheviks had to clamp
   down on any form of collective action by the masses. As such, it is
   incredulous that latter day Leninists justify Bolshevik
   authoritarianism on a lack of collective action by workers when that
   authoritarianism was often driven precisely to break it!

   So the claim by John Rees that the "dialectical relationship between
   the Bolsheviks and the working class was broken, shattered because the
   working class itself was broke-backed after the civil war" leaves a lot
   to be desired. [Op. Cit., p. 22] The Bolsheviks did more than their
   fair share of breaking the back of the working class. This is
   unsurprising for a government which grants to the working class the
   greatest freedom undermines its own power by so doing. Even a limited
   relaxation of its authority will allow people to organise themselves,
   listen to alternative points of view and to act on them. That could not
   but undermine the rule of the party and so could not be supported - nor
   was it.

   For example, in his 1920 diatribe against Left-wing Communism, Lenin
   pointed to "non-Party workers' and peasants' conferences" and Soviet
   Congresses as means by which the party secured its rule. Yet, if the
   congresses of soviets were "democratic institutions, the like of which
   even the best democratic republics of the bourgeois have never know",
   the Bolsheviks would have no need to "support, develop and extend"
   non-Party conferences "to be able to observe the temper of the masses,
   come closer to them, meet their requirements, promote the best among
   them to state posts". [The Lenin Anthology, p. 573] How the Bolsheviks
   met "their requirements" is extremely significant - they disbanded
   them, just as they had with soviets with non-Bolshevik majorities in
   1918. This was because "[d]uring the disturbances" of late 1920, "they
   provided an effective platform for criticism of Bolshevik policies."
   Their frequency was decreased and they "were discontinued soon
   afterward." [Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 203]

   In the soviets themselves, workers turned to non-partyism, with
   non-party groups winning majorities in soviet delegates from industrial
   workers' constituencies in many places. This was the case in Moscow,
   where Bolshevik support among "industrial workers collapsed" in favour
   of non-party people. Due to support among the state bureaucracy and the
   usual packing of the soviet with representatives from Bolshevik
   controlled organisations, the party had, in spite of this, a massive
   majority. Thus the Moscow soviet elections of April-May 1921 "provided
   an opportunity to revive working-class participation. The Bolsheviks
   turned it down." [Pirani, Op. Cit., pp. 97-100 and p. 23] Indeed, one
   Moscow Communist leader stated that these soviet elections had seen "a
   high level of activity by the masses and a striving to be in power
   themselves." [quoted by Pirani, Op. Cit., p. 101]

   1921 also saw the Bolshevik disperse provincial trade unions
   conferences in Vologda and Vitebsk "because they had anti-communist
   majorities." [Aves, Op. Cit., p. 176] At the All-Russian Congress of
   Metalworkers' Union in May, the delegates voted down the party-list of
   recommended candidates for union leadership. The Central Committee of
   the Party "disregarded every one of the votes and appointed a
   Metalworkers' Committee of its own. So much for 'elected and revocable
   delegates'. Elected by the union rank and file and revocable by the
   Party leadership!" [Brinton, Op. Cit., p. 83]

   Another telling example is provided in August 1920 by Moscow's striking
   tram workers who, in addition to economic demands, called for a general
   meeting of all depots. As one historian notes, this was "significant:
   here the workers' movement was trying to get on the first rung of the
   ladder of organisation, and being knocked off by the Bolsheviks." The
   party "responded to the strike in such a way as to undermine workers'
   organisation and consciousness" and "throttl[ed] independent action" by
   "repression of the strike by means reminiscent of tsarism." The
   Bolshevik's "dismissive rejection" of the demand for a city-wide
   meeting "spoke volumes about their hostility to the development of the
   workers' movement, and landed a blow at the type of collective
   democracy that might have better able to confront supply problems."
   This, along with the other strikes that took place, showed that "the
   workers' movement in Moscow was, despite its numerical weakness and the
   burdens of civil war, engaged with political as well as industrial
   issues . . . the working class was far from non-existent, and when, in
   1921, it began to resuscitate soviet democracy, the party's decision to
   make the Moscow soviet its 'creature' was not effect but cause."
   [Pirani, Op. Cit., p. 32, p. 33, p. 37 and p. 8]

   When such things happen, we can conclude that Bolshevik desire to
   remain in power had a significant impact on whether workers were able
   to exercise collective power or not. As Pirani concludes:

     "one of the most important choices the Bolsheviks made . . . was to
     turn their backs on forms of collective, participatory democracy
     that workers briefly attempted to revive [post civil war].
     [Available evidence] challenges the notion . . . that political
     power was forced on the Bolsheviks because the working class was so
     weakened by the civil war that it was incapable of wielding it. In
     reality, non-party workers were willing and able to participate in
     political processes, but in the Moscow soviet and elsewhere, were
     pushed out of them by the Bolsheviks. The party's vanguardism, i.e.
     its conviction that it had the right, and the duty, to make
     political decisions on the workers' behalf, was now reinforced by
     its control of the state apparatus. The working class was
     politically expropriated: power was progressively concentrated in
     the party, specifically in the party elite." [Op. Cit., p. 4]

   It should also be stressed that fear of arrest limited participation. A
   sadly typical example of this occurred in April 1920, which saw the
   first conference of railway workers on the Perm-Ekaterinburg line. The
   meeting of 160 delegates elected a non-Party chairman who "demanded
   that delegates be guaranteed freedom of debate and immunity from
   arrest." [Aves, Op. Cit., p. 44] A Moscow Metalworkers' Union
   conference in early February 1921 saw the first speakers calling "for
   the personal safety of the delegates to be guaranteed" before
   criticisms would be aired. [Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 244] Later that year
   dissidents in the Moscow soviet demanded "that delegates be given
   immunity from arrest unless sanctioned by plenary session of the
   soviet." Immediately afterwards two of them, including an
   anarcho-syndicalist, were detained. It was also proposed that
   delegates' freedom of speech "included immunity from administrative or
   judicial punishment" along with the right of any number of delegates
   "to meet and discuss their work as they chose." [Pirani, Op. Cit. p.
   104] Worse, "[b]y the end of 1920 workers not only had to deal with the
   imposition of harsh forms of labour discipline, they also had to face
   the Cheka in their workplace." This could not help hinder working class
   collective action, as did the use of the Cheka and other troops to
   repress strikes. While it is impossible to accurately measure how many
   workers were shot by the Cheka for participation in labour protest,
   looking at individual cases "suggests that shootings were employed to
   inspire terror and were not simply used in the occasional extreme
   case." [Aves, Op. Cit., p. 35] Which means, ironically, those who had
   seized power in 1917 in the name of the politically conscious
   proletariat were in fact ensuring their silence by fear of the Cheka or
   weeding them out, by means of workplace purges and shooting.

   Perhaps unsurprisingly, but definitely significantly, of the 17,000
   camp detainees on whom statistical information was available on 1
   November 1920, peasants and workers constituted the largest groups, at
   39% and 34% respectively. Similarly, of the 40,913 prisoners held in
   December 1921 (of whom 44% had been committed by the Cheka) nearly 84%
   were illiterate or minimally educated, clearly, therefore, either
   peasants of workers. [George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political
   Police, p. 178] Needless to say, Lenin failed to mention this aspect of
   his system in The State and Revolution (a failure shared by later
   Leninists). Ultimately, the contradictions between Bolshevik rhetoric
   and the realities of working class life under their rule was closed by
   coercion.

   Such forms of repression could not help ensure both economic chaos and
   push the revolution away from socialism. As such, it is hard to think
   of a more incorrect assertion than Lenin's 1921 one that "[i]ndustry is
   indispensable, democracy is not. Industrial democracy breeds some
   utterly false ideas." [Collected Works, vol. 32, p. 27] Yet without
   industrial democracy, any development towards socialism is aborted and
   the problems of a revolution cannot be solved in the interests of the
   working masses.

   This account of workers' protest being crushed by the so-called
   workers' state raises an important theoretical question. Following Marx
   and Engels, Lenin asserted that the "state is nothing but a machine for
   the suppression of one class by another" [Collected Works, vol. 28, p.
   259] Yet here is the working class being suppressed by "its" state. If
   the state is breaking strikes, including general strikes, by what
   stretch of the imagination can it be considered a "workers' state"?
   Particularly as the workers, like the Kronstadt sailors, demanded free
   soviet elections, not, as the Leninists then and now claim, "soviets
   without Communists" (although one soviet historian noted with regards
   the 1921 revolt that "taking account of the mood of the workers, the
   demand for free elections to the soviets meant the implementation in
   practice of the infamous slogan of soviets without communists." [quoted
   by Aves, Op. Cit., p. 123]). If the workers are being repressed and
   denied any real say in the state, how can they be considered the ruling
   class? And what class is doing the "suppression"? As we discussed in
   [31]section H.3.8, Bolshevik ideology adjusted to this reality by
   integrating the need for party dictatorship to combat the "wavering"
   within the working class into its theory of the state. Yet it is the
   party (i.e., the state) which determines what is and is not wavering.
   This suggests that the state apparatus has to be separate from the
   working class in order to repress it (as always, in its own interests).

   So anarchists argue that the actual experience of the Bolshevik state
   shows that the state is no mere "machine" of class rule but has
   interests of its own. Which confirms the anarchist theory of the state
   rather than the Marxist (see [32]section H.3.7). It should be stressed
   that it was after the regular breaking of working class protest and
   strikes that the notion of the dictatorship of the party became
   Bolshevik orthodoxy. This makes sense, as protests and strikes express
   "wavering" within the working class which needs to be solved by state
   repression. This, however, necessitates a normal state power, one which
   is isolated from the working class and which, in order to enforce its
   will, must (like any state) atomise the working class people and render
   them unable, or unwilling, to take collective action in defence of
   their interests. For the defenders of Bolshevism to turn round and
   blame Bolshevik authoritarianism on the atomisation required for the
   party to remain in power and enforce its will is staggering.

   Finally, it should be noted that Zinoviev, a leading Bolshevik, tried
   to justify the hierarchical position of the Bolshevik party arguing
   that "[i]n time of strike every worker knows that there must be a
   Strike Committee - a centralised organ to conduct the strike, whose
   orders must be obeyed - although this Committee is elected and
   controlled by the rank and file. Soviet Russia is on strike against the
   whole capitalist world. The social Revolution is a general strike
   against the whole capitalist system. The dictatorship of the
   proletariat is the strike committee of the social Revolution."
   [Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress 1920, vol. 2, p. 929]

   In strikes, however, the decisions which are to be obeyed are those of
   the strikers. They should make the decisions and the strike committees
   should carry them out. The actual decisions of the Strike Committee
   should be accountable to the assembled strikers who have the real power
   (and so power is decentralised in the hands of the strikers and not in
   the hands of the committee). A far better analogy for what happened in
   Russia was provided by Emma Goldman:

     "There is another objection to my criticism on the part of the
     Communists. Russia is on strike, they say, and it is unethical for a
     revolutionist to side against the workers when they are striking
     against their masters. That is pure demagoguery practised by the
     Bolsheviki to silence criticism.

     "It is not true that the Russian people are on strike. On the
     contrary, the truth of the matter is that the Russian people have
     been locked out and that the Bolshevik State - even as the bourgeois
     industrial master - uses the sword and the gun to keep the people
     out. In the case of the Bolsheviki this tyranny is masked by a
     world-stirring slogan: thus they have succeeded in blinding the
     masses. Just because I am a revolutionist I refuse to side with the
     master class, which in Russia is called the Communist Party."
     [My Disillusionment in Russia, p. xlix]

   The isolation of the Bolsheviks from the working class was, in large
   part, required to ensure their power and, moreover, a natural result of
   utilising state structures. "The struggle against oppression -
   political, economic, and social, against the exploitation of man by
   man" argued Alexander Berkman, "is always simultaneously a struggle
   against government as such. The political State, whatever its form, and
   constructive revolutionary effort are irreconcilable. They are mutually
   exclusive." Every revolution "faces this alternative: to build freely,
   independently and despite of the government, or to choose government
   with all the limitation and stagnation it involves . . . Not by the
   order of some central authority, but organically from life itself, must
   grow up the closely knit federation of the industrial, agrarian, and
   other associations; by the workers themselves must they be organised
   and managed." The "very essence and nature" of the socialist state
   "excludes such an evolution. Its economic and political centralisation,
   its governmentalism and bureaucratisation of every sphere of activity
   and effort, its inevitable militarisation and degradation of the human
   spirit mechanically destroy every germ of new life and extinguish the
   stimuli of creative, constructive work." [The Bolshevik Myth, pp.
   340-1] By creating a new state, the Bolsheviks ensured that the mass
   participation required to create a genuine socialist society could not
   be expressed and, moreover, came into conflict with the Bolshevik
   authorities and their attempts to impose their (essentially state
   capitalist) vision of "socialism".

   It need not have been that way. As can be seen from our discussion of
   labour protest under the Bolsheviks, even in extremely hard
   circumstances the Russian people were able to organise themselves to
   conduct protest meetings, demonstrations and strikes. The social base
   for an alternative to Bolshevik power and policies existed. Sadly
   Bolshevik politics, policies and the repression they required ensured
   that it could not be used constructively during the revolution to
   create a genuine socialist revolution.

References

   1. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secH6.html#sech61
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  32. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secH3.html#sech37
