Today's Topics:
1. Australia, HAIL THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION! Ablokeimet for MACG.
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. US, black rose fed - RED AND BLACK OCTOBER: AN ANARCHIST
PERSPECTIVE ON THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION FOR ITS
100TH ANNIVERSARY
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
The Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group is pleased to release its statement on the
centenary of the October Revolution: ----
https://melbacg.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/hail-the-october-revolution/ ---- In Solidarity,
---- One hundred years ago today, a workers' revolution triumphed in Russia, with
consequences that would echo for generations. It was 7 November 1917, which Russia then
called 25 October because the Czar was so reactionary he opposed switching from the
inaccurate Julian calendar to the more accurate Gregorian one. That day, workers and
soldiers under the command of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet
(which means "council" in Russian) took control of all important public buildings in
Petrograd, the Russian capital, and dismissed the Provisional Government of Alexander
Kerensky. That night, the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets met and proclaimed its power.
The Road to October
The road to the October Revolution had been long and filled with diversions. Russia was a
large but very backward country, whose participation in the First World War had shown that
the State apparatus was so chaotic as to be useless in prosecuting the war. Pushed to
breaking point, it collapsed in March (February, old style) 1917 and a Provisional
Government was formed to take over from the Czar. Significantly, the Petrograd Soviet of
Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies was also formed.
This makeshift government, however, was unable to solve the crisis. Peasants lived in
desperate poverty in semi-feudal conditions, inflation was driving workers to starvation,
soldiers at the front were short of arms, ammunition and even boots, and industry was
grinding to a halt due to shortages of raw materials. Not a single problem in Russia could
be solved without stopping the war, but none of the parties in the Provisional Government
would contemplate pulling out. As a result, the situation continued to deteriorate.
Parties participating in the Government lost credibility and support. More soviets formed,
growing stronger and more representative as the year progressed.
The Anarchist movement in Russia at the time of the February Revolution was very small. It
grew as the year went on, but its influence in the Soviets was still very limited. The
main parties in the Soviets were the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries and the
Bolsheviks. While the Mensheviks and SRs maintained their majority, the Petrograd Soviet
acted as a pressure group on the Provisional Government, rather than seeking to overthrow it.
Out of all the parties, it was the Bolsheviks that gained most from the growing crisis -
but things could have been different. The long-time Bolshevik position was to support what
it called the "democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants". After the February
Revolution, this meant being a Left pressure group on the Provisional Government and
hoping to become a Left wing opposition party in a capitalist parliament governing Russia.
Lenin had to fight several internal battles in the Bolshevik Party in order to get it to
adopt, and then to keep, a position calling for the overthrow of the Provisional
Government and for the Soviets to take power. Without that position, the Bolsheviks would
have followed the path of the Mensheviks and SRs, whose strength grew and then shrank as
the Provisional Government floundered in the face of the growing crisis. The war effort
was tearing Russia to pieces. The only solution was for Russia to leave the War - and that
required overthrowing the Provisional Government.
The growing crisis in the economy spawned the growth of the Factory Committees, where rank
and file workers tried to deal with the day-to-day problems they faced. The Bolsheviks had
a majority in the Committees from an early date, but the more conservative workers,
concerned to support the war effort, were also often keen to use the Committees to
counter-act the bosses' incompetence. Factory Committees gained control of hiring and
firing, resolved conflicts over wage rates, dealt with personnel matters, took on abusive
managers and, increasingly, addressed supply issues. In some cases, bosses abandoned their
factories in the face of their difficulties, but the workers, through the Factory
Committees, kept them going. In the beginning, the impetus behind their formation and
growth was practical, not ideological, but the experience of these committees in gradually
establishing workers' control was key to the growth of working class support for
overthrowing capitalism and establishing self-management under socialism. Workers were
solving problems the bosses couldn't, and learnt a powerful lesson from this.
By early July (Old Style), the workers of Petrograd were supporting the slogan "All Power
to the Soviets". There was a mass demonstration sparked by opposition to the Provisional
Government's order for a war offensive at the front. But support for Soviet power was at
its infancy across the country as a whole and the Petrograd Soviet still had a moderate
majority. The Government suppressed the peaceful demonstration with great violence,
killing 700, and ordered the arrest of Bolshevik leaders. Lenin fled temporarily to Finland.
At the end of August (Old Style), the Provisional Government invited General Kornilov to
bring an army to Petrograd to restore order and suppress the radicals. Kornilov agreed
wholeheartedly and marched on the capital. When Kerensky, leader of the Provisional
Government, realised Kornilov saw him as one of the radicals that needed repressing, he
panicked and turned to the Soviet for salvation. Co-ordinated by the Soviet, railway
workers refused to provide transport, dissidents encouraged sabotage and soldiers deserted
en masse. The army never made it to Petrograd, except for Kornilov and his aides, who
arrived under arrest. The credibility of both the Provisional Government and the Czarist
Right were shot. The Bolsheviks immediately won majorities in both the Petrograd and
Moscow Soviets and continued acquiring majorities in other cities.
October
As a result of the Kornilov Affair, the Petrograd Soviet gained control of troop
placements in and around the capital. The Soviet formed a Revolutionary Military
Committee, under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, to administer this new power. Trotsky,
who had been in a small faction independent of both the Bolsheviks and mainstream
Mensheviks, had led his group into the Bolsheviks at the start of August (Old Style).
Lenin at last persuaded the Bolshevik Central Committee that an insurrection must be
organised and the Revolutionary Military Committee became the forum where the military
side of the October Revolution was planned.
On 25 October (Old Style), which was 7 November (New Style), delegates to the Second
All-Russia Congress of Soviets gathered in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks, for the first time,
had a majority. Not only was the Revolutionary Military Committee ready for action, but
(unlike in July) the Soviets were ready to accept power.
The actual insurrection was almost an anti-climax. With the Petrograd Soviet in control of
military deployments, the ability of the Provisional Government to resist the take-over
was almost non-existent. Detachments occupied public buildings, troop formations went over
to the revolution, government communications were cut and loyalist troops were overwhelmed
or prevented from being located by Kerensky. The entire event was bloodless, with only one
shot fired (into the ceiling) in the storming of the Winter Palace. At 11 p.m. the
Congress of Soviets opened. The Revolutionary Military Committee announced that the
Provisional Government was overthrown and the Soviets accepted power. One chapter was over
and a new one immediately began.
Aftermath
Kerensky blew his remaining credibility four days after the insurrection when he tried to
enter Petrograd like a Czarist general, complete with a white horse and church bells, and
killed eight people before retreating. Events in Moscow were more bloody. Fighting
continued for a week before the Soviets defeated Kerensky's forces. After that, resistance
to the power of the Soviets gradually subsided - for the time being.
From a tiny beginning, Anarchists were growing in influence in Russia during 1917 and
continued to grow through 1918. Anarchists supported the overthrow of the Provisional
Government and some even participated in the storming of the Winter Palace. Anarchists
also participated in the Soviet's dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.
It was a capitalist parliament and would only have created a capitalist state.
Anarchists and Bolsheviks had been operating roughly in parallel (though rarely in
co-operation) until the October Revolution, but went in different directions after that.
In retrospect, it can be seen that the Soviets made two key errors that foreshadowed all
subsequent ones. Firstly, the All-Russia Congress disregarded Marx's insight which he had
set out in his pamphlet on the Paris Commune:
The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at
the same time.
That is, the Commune held executive power and implemented its own decisions. Instead, the
Congress elected a Council of People's Commissars to act as an executive cabinet over the
Soviets. The Congress of Soviets had turned itself into a legislature and was no longer
the working body that the Commune had been.
Secondly, the All-Russia Congress of Soviets assumed central power over the regional and
local soviets. Because of the unevenness of political developments in Russia, the Congress
did need power in relation to areas where regional soviets were not yet established, and
regional soviets needed power in relation to districts where local soviets were not yet
established. But having the Congress assume central power over other soviets ensured that
the All-Russia Congress was experienced as an external power imposed from above, making
arbitrary and often ill-informed decisions. Its decisions were initially a good deal more
just and popular than those of the Czar or the Provisional Government, but they were not
the freely made decisions of the people who would implement them.
As a result of those two errors, Russia had a new state. The Bolsheviks would proceed to
build its power at the expense of the workers and the peasants.
Subsequent events demonstrated that poor structural decisions made at the beginning were
fateful. Very soon, the new government started reining in the Factory Committees. Before
too long it was insisting on "one man management" - often the former owner employed as a
"specialist" on a high salary. Repression of the Anarchists started in April 1918, a month
before the first clashes with organised counter-revolutionary forces that became the White
armies. The Red Terror, in the process of combating counter-revolutionaries, drove
increasing numbers of workers and peasants into opposition because of its dictatorial
methods. Opposition parties were crushed, one by one. Independent revolutions in the
territory of the old Russian Empire were put down - a Menshevik republic in Georgia and
peasant-based Anarchists, the Makhnovists, in Ukraine. The suppression of the Makhnovists
was especially grievous because they had proven their loyalty to the revolution on the
battlefield. In fact, they had done the bulk of the fighting against the White armies that
had invaded from the south. And finally, the Bolshevik (now Communist) Party crushed the
Kronstadt Rebellion, suppressed all other parties and banned its own factions in 1921 -
all after the Civil War had been won.
By 1921, the Russian Revolution was over. All counter-revolutionary forces had been
defeated, but so had the working class. The so-called "Communist" Party had usurped the
power of the Soviets and established a heavy dictatorship. In time, assisted by the
illness and then death of Lenin, Stalin would rise to power and institute major changes in
policy, including "Socialism in One Country", a concept both intellectually ridiculous and
politically criminal. He stacked the Party with flunkies, purged opposition and turned the
reign of terror systematically onto the Party as well (though Lenin had engaged in
sporadic internal repression himself). The name of communism was dragged through the mud,
with consequences we still suffer today.
Lessons
The most obvious lesson of the October Revolution is that workers can take power. We've
done it before and we can do it again. Fundamentally, the October Revolution was
successful because power was taken by the Soviets, the mass organs of workers' democracy.
It was not a mere Bolshevik coup. We don't know what the mass organs of workers' democracy
may be in future revolutions. They may be workers' councils, workplace committees,
anarcho-syndicalist unions, or something else. The essential thing is that, like the
Soviets in Russia, they have the participation of the mass of the working class and they
operate by direct democracy, with mandated and recallable delegates.
The next lesson is that things went very badly wrong in Russia very soon after the October
Revolution, not in 1924. The "workers' state" built by the Bolsheviks was an oxymoron, a
repressive apparatus that could only impose authority from above. It was the antithesis of
workers' freedom and workers' control.
Things could have been otherwise. If the All-Russia Congress had not set up a Council of
People's Commissars to act as an executive cabinet, and if relations between the Soviets
had been established on the basis of consistent federalism, then the Soviets would have
been working bodies where workers came together to make decisions and implement them
directly, without coercion or hierarchy. The Factory Committees would have been able to
take over inside the workplace, being the basic organs of workers' self-management.
A third lesson is that political parties cannot be trusted. The capitalist parties and the
moderate workers' parties discredited themselves well before October, leading to their
eclipse by the Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik Party played a vital role in the period between
the February and October Revolutions, but after the October Revolution it acted
consistently to draw power from the Soviets unto itself. It considered itself the vanguard
of the proletariat, possessed of a better and more reliable revolutionary consciousness
than the mass of the workers. When it had the opportunity to substitute its judgement for
that of the workers, it did. The Civil War provided a high pressure context in which many
of those decisions were made and could be sold to the Soviets, but the authoritarianism
began before the Civil War and continued afterwards.
The final, and to many the most surprising, lesson is that the Russian Revolution proved
that, on the question of the party, Lenin was wrong and Anarchist communists are right. It
is well known that the February Revolution started because of an International Women's Day
demonstration that took a militant turn. It is occasionally pointed out that Bolshevik
women textile workers organised this demonstration and its militant tactics. It is seldom
remembered, though, that these women were acting on their own initiative. They were
organised revolutionaries who debated and discussed amongst themselves, but they weren't
acting on instructions from the Bolshevik Central Committee. This was to be expected,
since the Bolsheviks were illegal at that point and Central Committee members were either
underground or in exile. Much latitude was necessarily given to local branches and factory
cells.
This process played out on a larger scale through 1917. Before the October Revolution, the
Bolshevik Party acted in a very decentralised way, and party discipline was much weaker.
The social turmoil and the rapid growth of the Party prevented the establishment of
thorough centralism. It was only after October that the Bolsheviks could begin working
consistently in the way that Lenin had fought for since 1903. Before October, Right
Bolsheviks like Kamenev and Zinoviev engaged in open freelancing against the Party line.
They even publicly opposed the Soviets taking power after the Central Committee had
committed to the insurrection. An even more telling example is Lenin's famous speech at
the Finland Station when he returned from exile in April. His call for the overthrow of
the Provisional Government, and for the Soviets to take power, was against Party policy!
Lenin had to fight tooth and nail after this speech in order to get the Bolsheviks to
adopt his position. If he had kept to Party discipline, he may never have won the argument
and the Russian Revolution may have taken a vastly different course. Centralisation has a
conservatising effect on organisations and, in a political party, cuts it off from radical
shifts in public consciousness.
Anarchist communists accept that we need to be better organised than in 1917.
Revolutionary working class activists need to organise themselves in specific
revolutionary bodies, in addition to being members of the mass organisations of the
working class. Where we differ from Leninists is on the role and structure of the specific
revolutionary organisations. We believe the role of revolutionary organisations is to urge
the working class to take power itself and not to take power on behalf of the workers. Our
activists need to be exemplary militants rather than leaders. They need to inspire workers
to act for themselves rather than to follow leaders, however revolutionary. As the old
Wobbly saying goes, whoever can lead you into paradise can just as easily lead you out
again. The role of Anarchist organisations, important at any time, will be irreplaceable
in revolutionary periods, since Anarchists in the mass organs of workers' power will have
a message that all parties, including the Leninists, will oppose - that these mass
workers' organs are the very substance of the revolution and must not surrender power to
anyone, whether it be a parliament, a constituent assembly, or a Council of People's
Commissars.
The structure of Anarchist communist organisations must reflect their function. We believe
workers' power must operate on the basis of consistent federalism, where power rests at
the bottom and the higher bodies exist to co-ordinate without coercion. Anarchist
communist political organisations that are large enough to have more than one constituent
group must also organise in this way. Since we believe the mass workers' organs must
operate with mandated, recallable delegates and limited tenure of office, so must
Anarchist communist political organisations operate.
And since we believe that workers can only exercise real power if they are able to hear
all arguments on a given topic, we believe that Anarchists should not attempt to form a
single organisation to present a monolithic opinion to the working class. The inevitable
differences of opinion within the Anarchist movement (let alone between Anarchists and
state socialists) should not be resolved artificially behind closed doors, but presented
to the working class for judgement. If any one organisation, even an Anarchist one, gains
an enduring majority in the mass workers' organs, the danger of usurpation will arise.
Anarchists need to guard against this by ensuring that Anarchist communist organisations
preserve pluralism. They must reject the artificial unity that comes from papering over
political differences.
Conclusion
The October Revolution in Russia was a momentous event and the Melbourne Anarchist
Communist Group celebrates its centenary. The Soviets and the Factory Committees were
great achievements of the working class and taking power was an even greater achievement.
We are angered by the betrayal of the Revolution by Lenin and its total perversion by
Stalin, but we are not disillusioned. Rather, we have learned lessons and work in the
confident expectation that, if capitalism doesn't destroy us in the meantime, there will
be another revolution, and it will be worldwide. Unlike last time, workers won't get taken
in by the siren song of leaders who tell us fairy tales about a workers' state. We won't
be fooled again.
https://melbacg.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/hail-the-october-revolution/
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Message: 2
A hundred years to the day that the Winter Palace fell in Petrograd-October 25 in the
Julian calendar, November 7 in the Gregorian-we present an anarchist perspective on the
Russian Revolution, which began in February 1917 with a mass-mobilization and mutiny that
deposed Tsar Nicholas II. Though the Revolution contained an awesome amount of liberatory
potential as reflected in workers' self-management and peasant land-seizures, it took a
fatal turn with the seizure of power by the authoritarian Bolshevik Party. ---- This piece
part of our ongoing series of articles and social media postings on the 100 year
anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Organized in a question and answer format we hope
this will be a helpful resource both for those beginning to learn about the Russian
Revolution and those already familiar but looking to explore anarchist perspective. We
recommend checking out the recommend links and resources throughout and at the end.
#RussianRev100Years #1917LIVE
By Javier Sethness
Table of Contents
What precipitated the crisis and revolutionary events of 1917?
What helped propel the Revolution?
What was the anarchist role in the Revolution?
How did the events beginning in 1917 present two opposing conceptions of social revolution?
How did the Revolution go wrong?
What was the role of the Bolshevik Party?
What was the Red Terror?
What was the Russian Civil War?
What about the imperialists?
What happened in Ukraine?
Were Makhno and his followers anti-Semitic?
What happened at Kronstadt in 1921?
How did Lenin contradict his supposed anti-imperialist principles while in power?
How did Red October, the Red Terror, and the Civil War lead to Stalin's rule?
What lessons should we take from the Revolution?
Works Cited
Statements/Memoirs
A map of western Russia and Eastern Europe using current borders indicating important
cities and sites for the Revolution. The black star corresponds to Kronstadt.
What precipitated the crisis and revolutionary events of 1917?
Two factors were decisive in the emergence of the Russian Revolution of 1917: the Tsar's
forcible participation in the ongoing First World War, and widespread economic crisis,
including near-famine conditions for urban workers. The disorganization of economic life
during the war led to critical shortages for both the cities and the Army, thus making the
continuation of the war-effort quite impossible. It was in the cities that the Revolution
began in early 1917, spreading to the war-front by summer, provoking mass-desertions by
conscripted soldiers who had experienced the utter pointlessness of the war firsthand. In
fact, the Russian Revolution can in some ways be considered one of the greatest popular
anti-militarist uprisings in history.
In February 1917 (March by the Gregorian calendar), starving masses rose up in Petrograd
(previously and subsequently again known as St. Petersburg). On the first day of
demonstrations, February 24 (Julian calendar), soldiers-perhaps in part with Bloody Sunday
in mind-refused to fire on the striking workers and starving women, and the Petrograd
garrison increasingly mutinied against the Tsar. Even the Imperial Guards turned on the
tsarist police. The regiments in mutiny soon defeated all remaining tsarist forces in the
capital, and railway workers defended the revolutionary city by refusing to transport
loyalist forces to Petrograd. Finally acknowledging the reality of the situation, Nicholas
II abdicated on March 2, ending three centuries of despotism by the Romanov dynasty. The
Revolution had begun!
As Voline writes, the February Revolution, "the action of the masses[,]was spontaneous,
logically climaxing a long period of concrete experience and moral preparation. This
action was neither organized nor guided by any political party. Supported by the people in
arms-the Army-it was victorious" (emphasis in original). He clarifies that this incredible
historical progression was achieved by the people without leaders, for Yuli Martov
(Menshevik) and Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotsky, and Nikolai Bukharin (Bolsheviks) were all
exiled at this time, only to return after February.
What helped propel the Revolution?
Though the February Revolution gave rise to a bourgeois Provisional Government led by
Alexander Kerensky, a social-democratic member of the Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) Party,
the emancipatory spirit of the Revolution was carried on by the insurgent peasantry and
proletariat. The peasants, who made up 85% of Russia's population at the time, immediately
set about expropriating the land after the fall of the Tsar, and the Petrograd Soviet was
resurrected from the 1905 Revolution, once again becoming a trusted voice of the working
class and ever-greater segments of the Army. Nonetheless, the Provisional Government
perpetuated Russia's participation in the war, a decisive factor impelling the fall of the
Romanov dynasty, and Kerensky even re-established the death penalty at the front. He also
ordered a disastrous offensive on the Austro-German lines in June 1917.
In August, the White General Kornilov attempted to crush the Revolution in the name of the
Provisional Government, but the workers of Petrograd once again mobilized as they had in
February to defend the city with arms and by rerouting forces sent via rail to support
Kornilov's putsch attempt. Subsequently, the Bolsheviks won majorities in the soviets,
factory committees, and soldiers' committees, and in light of the Left-Socialist
Revolutionaries' decision to affiliate with them, the Party gained much sympathy among
workers and peasants alike. Thanks to its heroic past, the SR Party, which represented the
cause of agrarian socialism, had become the strongest party after February 1917, taking
the majority of the seats in the Constituent Assembly, and enjoying the support of the
majority of the population due to its "solid backing in the villages as a result of its
pre-revolutionary activity and its work in promoting peasant cooperatives" (Maximov 50).
This arrangement between the Bolsheviks and Left-SR's would continue until July 1918, when
the latter attempted to overthrow the Red State. Following the Provisional Government's
release of an arrest warrant against Lenin on July 6, 1917, the Red leader went
underground to plan an insurrection against Kerensky.
For further reading:
"Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution" (Rod Jones)
"Soviets and Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution" (Peter Rachleff)
"Factory Committees and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (Maurice Brinton)
"Russian Factory Committees" (Paul Avrich)
What was the anarchist role in the Revolution?
Numerically, self-described anarchists in Russia at the time of the February Revolution
were not particularly strong, as the movement was just beginning, while revolutionary
syndicalism was similarly germinating, and the most radical element of party politics, the
Left-SR's, was relatively weak in comparison to the Bolsheviks. Besides that, the
Left-SR's were actually in coalition with the ruling Bolshevik Party from Red October
until July 1918, when they attempted to overthrow their erstwhile allies. Voline
emphasizes that, had the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists had more time than they were
given before the Bolshevik assault of April 1918, they could likely have influenced the
masses to boldly carry on with the project of free initiative and self-organization made
possible by the Revolution. Yet he remarks with disappointment upon his return to
Petrograd from exile in July 1917 that, "[i]n the fifth month of a great revolution, no
Anarchist newspaper, no Anarchist voice was making itself heard in the capital of the
country. And this in the face of the almost unlimited activity of the Bolsheviki!"
(emphasis in original).
Between May and October 1917, some anarcho-syndicalists voted with the Reds in factory
committees in favor of workers' control, and the resurgent anti-authoritarianism of the
Russian masses after February to some extent led the Bolsheviks to converge
opportunistically with anti-statist and federalist critiques, thus misrepresenting their
own politics (Goodwin 45-6). While the Bolsheviks did want to end Russian participation in
World War I and have the land be returned to the peasantry, it is also true that the
Bolsheviks ultimately crushed soviet-based democracy-thus contradicting their rhetorical
commitment to have "all power" be devolved "to the soviets"-and only retroactively
acknowledged the peasantry's expropriation of private property since February with their
Land Decree, proclaimed on October 26, 1917, the day after the fall of the Winter Palace.
Additionally, as shall be described more below, the Reds had a prejudiced, authoritarian
view of the peasants in line with Marxist ideology which rationalized the commission of
several atrocities against them.
Ironically, then, anarchist sailors from Kronstadt played an important role in the
insurrection to capture the Winter Palace. The Dvintsi (from Dvinsk) regiment, both
comprised of and commanded by anarchists, was similarly critical in the struggle against
Kerensky's forces. Their commander, Gratchov, distributed arms and ammunition to the
workers shortly after the October seizure of power, anticipating the danger this posed to
the Revolution, but was killed under mysterious circumstances soon after having reported
to the Bolshevik authorities. Anatoli Jelezniakov, an anarchist Kronstadter, was the one
who ordered the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, announcing that
the parliamentarians had "prattled long enough!" Anarchists also participated in the
defense against General Kornilov's coup attempt of August 1917 and organized
libertarian-oriented partisan groups, such as the "M. A. Bakunin Partisan Detachment" of
Yekaterinoslav or the Black Guards detachments commanded by Maria Nikiforova in Ukraine.
Anarchists were moreover critical to the defense against Admiral Kolchak's White forces in
eastern Russia and Siberia.
Grimly, the Red authorities used the pretext of the Moscow Black Guards' supposed plans
for an "anarchist counter-revolution" to suppress the movement in April 1918, by which
time the movement in Russia had numbered an estimated 10,000 individuals (Goodwin 48). In
parallel, Nestor Makhno's Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine was organized on anarchist
principles, and the Makhnovists played a crucial role in defending the Revolution from the
reactionary White Armies led by Generals Denikin and Wrangel during 1919-1920-before they,
too, were suppressed by the Bolsheviks. The Greens, a powerful guerrilla movement
spearheaded by deserting ex-conscripts, successfully defended the autonomous peasant
revolution against Whites and Reds alike in the Civil War (1918-20) until their eventual
defeat by the centralizing Bolshevik State.
The Union for Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda began publishing Golos Truda ("The Voice of
Labor") in Petrograd as a weekly in summer 1917, continuing until spring 1918 and then
restarting later in Moscow. The Union also founded an Anarcho-Syndicalist publishing
house, but both the press and the Union were shut down by the Reds in 1919. Meanwhile, the
Federation of Anarchist Groups of Moscow published the daily Anarchy, with an
anarcho-communist perspective, carrying on intensive propaganda work from 1917-18. Though
Federation members participated with the Dvintsi in the struggle against Kerensky, the
Reds repressed the Federation in April 1918, eliminating the last of its militants by
1921. In Ukraine, Nestor Makhno, Peter Arshinov, Voline, and others were involved in the
founding in late 1918 of the Nabat ("Tocsin") Confederation, which sought a unified
anarchist movement, proclaimed the necessity of libertarian social revolution through its
Nabat newspaper, and tried to organize a Pan-Russian Anarchist Confederation-a project
that was directly stifled by Trotsky. Like the Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, all these
anarchist organizations "eventually met with the same fate: brutal suppression by the
�Soviet' authority."
The editors of Golos Truda, who included Voline and Maximov, among others, denounced the
ongoing war and called on Russian conscripts to desert the war-effort, thus providing the
possibility of an example to the rest of the world's soldiers, who in unison could ignite
a world revolution. The editors considered it their "first duty, our most sacred task, to
take up this work immediately in our own land[...by]open[ing]new horizons for the laboring
masses,[and]help[ing]them in their quest." In their initial issues, they emphasized the
importance of continuing and deepening the Revolution:
We say to the Russian workers, peasants, soldiers, revolutionists: Above all, continue the
Revolution. Continue to organize yourselves solidly and to unite your new organizations:
your communes, your unions, your committees, your Soviets. Continue-with firmness and
perseverance, always and everywhere-to participate more and more extensively and more and
more effectively, in the economic activity of the country. Continue to take into your
hands, that is, into the hands of your organizations, all the raw materials and all the
instruments indispensable to your labor. Continue to eliminate private enterprises.
Continue the Revolution! Do not hesitate to face the solution of all the burning questions
of the present. Create everywhere the necessary organizations to achieve those solutions.
Peasants, take the land and put it at the disposal of your committees. Workers, proceed to
put in the hands of and at the disposal of your own social organizations-everywhere on the
spot-the mines and the subsoil, the enterprises and establishments of airports, the works
and factories, the workshops, and the machines.
Golos Truda's editors stress the need for workers and peasants to create autonomous class
organizations in order to press forward with the reconstruction of the economy from below,
and the need for intellectuals to focus their efforts in helping the masses prepare for
the "real Revolution" of socializing production. By means of such class organizations
could the economic system realistically transition into serving popular interests.
Demarcating their position from all statists, the editors observe that political parties
are required for the task of taking power, but,
To take over the economy, a political party is not indispensable. But indispensable to
that action are the organizations of the masses, independent organizations remaining
outside of all political parties. It is upon these organizations that falls, at the moment
of the Revolution, the task of building the new social and economic system.
That is why the Anarchists do not form a political party. They agitate, either directly in
the mass organizations or-as propagandists-in groups and ideological unions.
As an illustration of the same, consider the fate of the Nobel refinery in Petrograd: in
late 1917, the refinery's workers decided to manage the site collectively in the wake of
its abandonment by the owners during the Revolution, yet the Red authorities completely
ignored their will and shuttered it anyway, laying off all the workers. The situation was
generally very similar throughout much of Russia and Ukraine, for the Bolshevik
authorities prohibited the masses from independent action, maligning such initiative as a
"breach of discipline," and actively suppressed autonomous social movements like those of
the anarchists, the Makhnovists, and the Greens, as well as cooperatives, workers on
strike, and peasants in revolt.
Golos Truda's editors summarize it well:
Anarchism is not only an idea, a goal; it is, before anything else, also a method, a means
of struggling for the emancipation of[humanity][...]. One cannot achieve Anarchism in any
way except by going straight to the goal, by the direct Anarchist road. Otherwise one
never will arrive (emphasis in original).
For further reading:
Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (Paul Avrich)
The Russian Revolution (ed. Robert Graham)
Timeline of Russian Anarchism, 1921-1953
How did the events beginning in 1917 present two opposing conceptions of social revolution?
Voline emphasizes that, in spite of the "victory" of Bolshevism in power, anarchism
represented a real alternative that envisaged "a full and integral social revolution"
after February 1917. In 1918, this liberatory alternative posed such a threat to the Red
State that the Bolsheviks felt compelled to utterly crush it by means of terror. It was
thus through force rather than via discussion or debate that the Reds suppressed the
anarchist alternative, initially in April 1918 through outright repression of anarchist
individuals and collectives and the shuttering of libertarian social centers and presses,
and evermore so between 1919-1921, particularly in Ukraine, where the Makhnovists
struggled against White reaction and subsequently against Red betrayal. Voline writes that
the period between Red October and the end of 1918 was "significant and decisive, and that
it "was in the course of those months that the fate of the Revolution was decided." Still,
it was not until they had suppressed the Kronstadt Commune and otherwise eliminated the
libertarian movement by the end of 1921 that the Reds became masters of the political
situation, although even then their authority had in reality been destroyed throughout
vast swathes of rural regions, as peasants set off mass-rebellions against conscription
and the grain-requisition regimes imposed by the Reds.
Whereas the Bolsheviks implemented statist-authoritarian means as their revolutionary
strategy, Russian and Ukrainian anarchists followed Proudhon and Bakunin's vision of
"direct and federative alliance[s]" among the associated workers and peasants with their
unions, communes, and cooperatives organized non-hierarchically along local, regional, and
international lines. In contrast to the Marxist view of centralization first, followed in
theory by an eventual "withering away of the State," the anarchists stressed the
importance of an immediate rather than delayed socialization of the means of production by
the working classes. It is therefore untrue that anarchists had no vision for social
organization after the Revolution. On the contrary, we see two contrasting principles of
organization: namely, the Bolsheviks' centralist-authoritarian principles versus the
anarchists' libertarian and federative ones. In Voline's words, "Naturally, the Anarchists
say, it is necessary that society be organized. But this new organization should be done
freely, socially, and, certainly, from the bottom[up]."
Like Bakunin, Voline sees a role for an "elite" to organize the libertarian social
revolution, but such revolutionary organizers must be "true collaborators" with the
people, who help them, "enlighten them, teach them,[...]impel them to take the
initiative,[...]and support them in their action," not "dictators" who hold power
dominate, subjugate, or oppress them. This is another key difference with Bolshevism,
which prescribes an elite that is to be aided by the masses and armed forces through blind
obedience. In contrast, anarchism envisions that, through
The natural interplay of their economic, technical, and social organizations,[and]with the
help of the "elite" and, in case of need, under the protection of their freely organized
armed forces, the labouring masses should[...]be able to carry the Revolution effectively
forward and progressively arrive at the practical achievement of all of its tasks.
Against the Reds' interest in the "organization of power," anarchists counterposed the
project of "organizing the Revolution." For Voline, there exists "an explicit and
irreconcilable contradiction" between the true libertarian social revolution and "the
theory and practice" of statism and authoritarianism.
How did the Revolution go wrong?
"the forward march of the revolutionary masses toward real emancipation, toward the
creation of new forms of social life, is incompatible with the very principle of State
power" (Voline).
In contrast to Trotsky's well-known hypothesis set forth in The Revolution Betrayed
(1937), that the "degeneration" of the Russian Revolution came about only with the rise of
Stalin in 1924, the Bolshevik seizure of power on October 25-26, 1917, arguably can be
considered the beginning of its corruption. Voline describes the storming of the Winter
Palace as amounting "virtually[to]a palace revolution" that gave the Reds a clear tactical
advantage over the anarchists. That the Russian masses entrusted the fate of the
Revolution to the Bolsheviks reflected both the hegemony of statism in the Russian popular
imagination as well as the "insufficiency of the preliminary destruction" achieved in the
February Revolution. Voline means to say that the people's toleration of the continued
existence of the State after the fall of Tsarism set the stage for the Bolshevik seizure
of power and the subsequent deviation and destruction of the Revolution. Instead of the
left-wing coalition government favored by the Menshevik Yuli Martov or any sense of direct
democracy based on the soviets, the victorious Bolsheviks effectively instituted a
one-party dictatorship which claimed baselessly to represent the interests of the
proletariat. Subsequently adopting a perspective that in a way anticipated the Nazi jurist
Carl Schmitt's distinction between "friends" and "enemies," the Reds forcibly disarmed the
workers and their organizations and suppressed all alternative factions through the use of
terror. As the publisher of Gregori Maximov's The Guillotine at Work explains, during the
Russian Civil War (1918-1920):
all-non Bolshevik elements were dubbed �petty-bourgeois and counter-revolutionary
elements.' Right and Left Social-Revolutionists, Social-Democrat[s]of all Shades,
Maximalists, Anarchists of every tendency-all were placed in the same category of
�counter-revolutionists.' Soon these elements began to crowd not only the Tzar's empty
prisons but the vast number of private buildings converted by the Bolsheviks into prisons.
Newly built �concentration camps,' which were unknown to the Tzar's government, were
quickly filled (5-6).
In this way, the Bolshevik regime effectively instituted state slavery to defend its
hegemony-such was the conclusion reached by Karl Kautsky, "the most prominent leader of
world Social-Democracy," while Lenin still lived (Maximov 20).
It is therefore highly ironic yet also revealing to consider that Lenin's popularity after
the February Revolution followed in large part from the entirely misleading vision he sets
forth in the "April Theses" (1917), which argue that the Bolsheviks seek a "second
revolution" that would overthrow the Provisional Government; abolish the police, military,
and bourgeois State apparatus; and champion soviet power in its place. Acutely aware of
the strong libertarian-humanist element in Russian socialism, the former exile knew that
openly presenting his political project as Marxian centralism would be a non-starter in
the motherland (21-3). Instead, he would attract the masses by appealing to the liberatory
memory of the 1871 Paris Commune (31). In fact, such rhetorical "deviations" led several
more moderate Russian Social Democrats to criticize Lenin's call for immediate revolution
as a reversion from Marxism to "Bakuninism": Georgii Plekhanov especially made this
connection, judging Lenin's advocacy of the overthrow of the Provisional Government as "an
insane and extremely harmful attempt to sow anarchist turmoil on the Russian Earth"
(emphasis in original). In parallel, the Menshevik Martov considered Lenin's advocacy of
bypassing the "objectively necessary" historical stage of bourgeois democracy as a
dangerous reorientation of the struggle from Marx to Bakunin (Goodwin 45-7).
Nevertheless, this feigned affinity with anarchism was purely instrumental and
opportunistic: while in opposition to the Provisional Government, Lenin had militated
greatly against the reinstatement of the death penalty in the Army, immediately upon
taking power in October, he took steps to ensure that the revolutionary announcement
abolishing the death penalty made on October 26, 1917-the day after the Winter Palace had
fallen-was a mere formality. Instead, Lenin greatly impressed the need for the persistence
of capital punishment. The appeal to the Paris Commune, therefore, was mere "bait," a
"weapon clearing the road to power" (Maximov 28-34). As the Red leader himself put it, "Do
you really believe we shall be able to come out triumphant without the most drastic
revolutionary terror?" (29).
Like his lieutenant Trotsky, then, Lenin was a State Terrorist, the "initiator and
ideologist of terror in the Russian Revolution modeled upon the terror of the French
Revolution" (Maximov 30). By suppressing not only the capitalists but also the rest of the
non-Bolshevik left after October, these two figures bear principal responsibility for the
vast suffering and death brought about by the Civil War. In targeting socialist-democratic
forces of the Revolution for destruction, the Reds similarly targeted the masses of
workers and peasants who supported these forces. In contrast, Maximov speculates that, had
the broad Russian left been united rather than dealing with a treacherous war launched on
it by the Bolsheviks, the "resistance" of the landowners and reactionaries who would go on
to comprise the White Armies would have been easily defeated, and the need to resort to
terror quite baseless (32-3). Instead, a myriad of socialist and anarchist groups, trade
unions, and cooperatives became the regime's adversaries (37). In parallel, workers and
peasants who resisted Bolshevik policies-such as in the case of the latter, vast grain
requisitions taken indiscriminately by the Red Army from rich and poor peasants alike to
feed the cities-were depicted as "enemies of the people" (39). For this reason, many were
targeted for arrest or assassination by the CheKa, or the Extraordinary Committee, which
Lenin established in December 1917 (54-6).
For Maximov, then, the Marxist-Leninist centralized State views virtually the entire
population as its enemy, with its only "friend" being the minority of pro-Bolshevik
workers. This political strategy of championing the dictatorship of the proletariat-or
really, the Party over the proletariat and the peasantry-hence inevitably becomes "a
slaveholders democracy, which, as distinguished from the one of the ancient world, has for
its aim freedom, economic equality, freeing the entire population from slavery, and all
this is to be realized... by enslaving the entire population! Could there be a more absurd
theory?" (41). Maximov here echoes Bakunin's prescient warnings about the the risks
associated with a Red bureaucracy: "Take the fiercest revolutionary and put him on the
All-Russian throne or give him dictatorial power,[...]and he will become worse than
Alexander Nikolaevich[Alexander II]himself in a year."
In light of the constellation of forces after Red October, it is quite unsurprising that
freedom and equality came to be associated under Lenin with bourgeois delusions, and the
critical victories over Tsarism represented by the securing of the freedom of the press,
association, and organization in February thus easily rolled back (Maximov 42-3). Voline
observes with reason that this suppression of freedom of speech, press, organization, and
action "is fatal to true revolution." Indeed, the Bolshevik regime revealed its autocratic
character through its mass-violation of the formal abolition of capital punishment that
had been decreed the day of the fall of the Winter Palace in October 1917 (55). The regime
even wantonly executed followers of Tolstoy for observing their religious beliefs
regarding non-cooperation with war in refusing conscription for the Red Army (10, 195).
Ultimately, Lenin's terroristic employment of the CheKa was in no way accountable to the
soviets but rather a consciously elitist effort to "direct" the Revolution toward the
Reds' consolidation of power by means of the suppression of various rivals on left and
right (57-8). In specifically targeting the libertarian movement, the Bolsheviks
suppressed the Revolution itself. As Voline recounts:
Thus, inch by inch, the rulers become the absolute masters of the country. They create
privileged classes on which they base themselves. They organize forces capable of
sustaining them, and defend themselves fiercely against all opposition, all contradiction,
all independent initiative. Monopolizing everything, they take over the whole life and
activity of the country. And having no other way of acting, they oppress, subjugate,
enslave, exploit. They repress all resistance. They persecute and wipe out, in the name of
the Revolution, everyone who will not bend to their will.
To justify themselves, they lie, deceive, slander.
To stifle the truth, they are brutal. They fill the prisons and places of exile; they
torture, kill, execute, assassinate.
That is what happened, exactly and inevitably, to the Russian Revolution.
For further reading:
"The Russian Revolution" (Anarchist FAQ)
"The Bolsheviks and Workers Control" (Maurice Brinton, Solidarity)
"Lenin and Workers Control" (Tom Brown, SWF)
"How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?"
"Organizational Platform for a General Union of Anarchists" (Makhno, Arshinov, et al.)
What was the role of the Bolshevik Party?
The Bolsheviks, the supposed "majority" faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party,
agitated and organized against the Provisional Government and Russia's ongoing
participation in World War I following the February 1917 Revolution. Yet as Voline
observes, the Reds' most popular slogans-Long live the Revolution! Down with the war! The
land to the peasants! The factories to the workers!-were in fact appropriated from the
anarchists. As discussed above, moreover, Lenin's public program, as based on the April
theses, invoked the liberatory model of the Paris Commune, thus gravely deceiving the
Russian masses as to the Reds' actual political project: the imposition of State
capitalism in the name of communism. Consider Lenin's comments from "The Tax in Kind"
(1921), that,
[w]hile the revolution in Germany still tarries, our task should be to learn from the
Germans how to run state capitalism, by all means to copy it from them and not to spare
dictatorial methods in order to accelerate this process of taking over from the Germans,
doing it at an even more rapid pace than the one followed by Peter the First in
Westernizing barbarous Russia[...](emphasis added).
Wrongly considered the "leaders" of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks in fact usurped
power from the soviets and thus from the people through their October 1917 seizure of
power, completely deviating the course of the Revolution. Even in November 1917, the
editors of Golos Truda had anticipated that the soviets could well become merely executive
organs of the nascent Red State; this is unfortunately what happened rather soon after Red
October. Besides this, the Bolsheviks' first major imposition on the masses came with the
new authorities' signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany (negotiations for
which began in November 1917, with its ratification coming in March 1918), an accord that
exchanged control over the Baltic States, Ukraine, and Belarus to the Central Powers for
Russia's withdrawal from the conflict. This deal, the invention of Lenin and Trotsky,
greatly contradicted the wishes of the Russian masses, the Left SR's, the Maximalists, the
anarchists, and even the majority of the members of the Bolshevik Party's Central
Committee, who preferred to continue a revolutionary war against the Austro-Hungarian and
German imperialists. Lenin's self-assertion here presages the ruthless centralism that
would govern the Reds' consolidation of power through the terroristic elimination of
political rivals and enemies, and it would serve as the grounds for the Left-SR's attempt
at their overthrow (July 1918).
The Bolshevik Party carried out one of the most disastrous examples of substitutionism in
history: that is, the substitution of the autonomous, independent action of the people by
the centralized rule of dictatorship. While they claimed to represent the interests of the
workers and peasants, the Reds, "a government[comprised]of intellectuals, of Marxist
doctrinaires," in fact greatly oppressed them by means of their imposition of State
capitalism over them. Through the Red Terror and during the Civil War, the Bolsheviks
practiced self-preservation at the expense of millions of lives of workers and peasants
and the very Revolution itself (Maximov 149, 185). The "bourgeois statist-reformers" Lenin
and Trotsky essentially employed instrumental thinking and oppression in their own
supposed struggle against oppression, which in effect was quite enslaving, and
demonstrated clearly for all "how not to wage a revolution."
The reactionary meaning of Bolshevik rule is illuminated well by the proletarian Communist
Party member Gavril Miasnikov, who was expelled from the Party in 1922, effectively for
thoughtcrime. Reflecting on the meaning of the Russian Revolution to date, Miasnikov
addresses Lenin directly, observing, "To break the jaws of the international bourgeoisie
is all very well, but the trouble is that you lift your hand against the bourgeoisie and
you strike at the worker. Which class now supplies the greatest number of people arrested
on charges of counter-revolution? Peasants and workers, to be sure" (Maximov 271, emphasis
added).
For further reading:
"A Fresh Look at Lenin" (Andy Brown)
"The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party" (Alexander Berkman)
What was the Red Terror?
"Lenin's mind, like the mind of any partisan of dictatorship, of any dictatorship, works
only along a single track-the police" (Maximov 150).
The infamous Red Terror launched by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in April 1918 sought to
resolve the contradiction between the profoundly libertarian progress seen since February
with the Bolsheviks' authoritarian vision for the region. The Terror is outlined in
Lenin's address on April 29, 1918, "The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power," which stresses
the putative necessity of "halting the offensive upon capital" waged by striking workers
and those engaged in self-management and industrial democracy (Maximov 59-62).
Acknowledging the "great deal of elemental Anarchism" evident throughout the former
Empire, Lenin insists in parallel on the need for an "iron power" to keep the anarchic
peasantry under control (63-66). According to Voline, the Bolsheviks saw clearly that
allowing anarchists freedom would be equivalent to political suicide. Soon after
publishing "The Immediate Tasks," Lenin reiterated the necessity of an "iron order" and
announced a "great crusade" to be comprised of urban workers' brigades against "grain
speculators, Kulaks, village usurers, disorganizers, grafters[... and all]those who
violate the strict order established by the State" in the countryside (Maximov 68). The
plundering and murders engaged in by Red grain-requisitioners provoked a vast uprising of
the peasantry throughout much of Russia and Ukraine-yet rather than lament such a turn of
events, Lenin considered it a "merit" that "we[had]brought civil war to the village" (69-71).
The second stage of the Terror, an intensification of the same, began after the Left-SR
and ex-anarchist Dora Kaplan's attempt on Lenin's life in August 1918. By means of these
two stages, by the end of 1918, the Reds had suppressed civil liberties and banned all
non-Communist publications, broken up anarchist collectives and murdered individual
anarchists, outlawed the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, suppressed the
Left-SR's, executed a countless number, and incarcerated tens of thousands (Maximov 84).
In parallel, the peasantry was used as a target for exploitation and regimentation.
Consider this testimony by a Left-SR about the scorched-earth tactics employed by the Reds
against the peasants of Tambov:
I was arrested not in January 1921, but in September 1920. There was no wide
insurrectionary movement in the government of Tambov, although there were detached cases
of armed resistance on the part of the peasants to the requisitioning detachments who were
shamelessly looting the villages. On the day of my arrival in Tambov the Central Executive
Committee of Tambov Soviets hung out the following announcement, declaring that �because
of their attempt to disrupt the campaign of grain collecting, the villages
Verkhne-Spasskoye (ten thousand population), Koziri (six thousand), and four other
villages were burnt, hundreds of peasants were shot, and their property was looted.'
During my six months of confinement in the prisons of the Tambov CheKa I had a chance to
see for myself the nightmarish picture of mass-annihilation and ruination of the toiling
peasants of the government of Tambov which was carried on by the Communist authorities:
hundreds of peasants were shot by the Revolutionary Circuit Courts and the Tambov CheKa;
thousands of unarmed peasants were mowed down by the machine guns of the students of
military schools and Communists, and tens of thousands were exiled to the far away North,
while their property was burned or looted. The same picture, according to the data which
the party of Left-Social-Revolutionaries has at its disposal, can be drawn for a number of
other provinces: the government of Samara, Kazan, Saratov, in Ukraine, Siberia, etc.
(Maximov 87-8).
Official statistics show that there were at least 245 peasant uprisings in 1918, and 99 in
the first half of 1919 (Maximov 91). These were cruelly suppressed by the Reds, and such
suppression in turn catalyzed further rebellions. Indeed, echoing the Left-SR's testimony
cited above, the CheKa gave explicit orders for the utilization of "mass terror" against
villages considered to be supportive of the Green guerrillas, who defended the local
peasant revolution (122-3). Additionally, the Reds in 1919-1920 destroyed the Russian
cooperative movement due to its ties to non-Bolshevik socialists; as Maximov writes, "the
cooperatives furnished an abundant and ever-renewed supply of inmates for the prisons and
concentration camps" (132-3). By thus "ruthlessly persecuting all those who differed with
them in opinion," Lenin and Trotsky are clearly responsible for the vast crimes of the
Terror, as for preparing the conditions for the 1921 famine, which took the lives of over
5 million people, in accordance with official statistics (96, 185). While 1921 did see
drought and a resulting poor harvest, that the peasantry lacked accumulated stock due to
the Reds' grain-requisition regime can explain the breadth and depth of the famine (183-4).
Yet, by this time, Lenin would rationalize such State Terror by saying that the
alternative of equality and democracy advocated by Left-SR's, anarchists, and other
democratic critics would necessarily allow the White reaction victory in the Civil War,
such that, according to this thought process, Left-SR's, anarchists, and democrats
effectively became imperialist stooges and agents for the "restoration of capitalism."
Lenin explicitly says as much, calling those who "continue to struggle for the �equality
of labor democracy'[...]partisans of Kolchak," the leader of the Whites (Maximov 94). In
this way, the emergence of the Civil War and the White reaction was utilized as a new and
retroactive rationalization of the pre-existing Terror, and grounds for its expansion, as
in Petrograd and Astrakhan, where the CheKa in 1919 forcibly suppressed striking workers
(99-103). Maximov estimates that in 1919 alone, the Chekist terror took the lives of
25,000, with some 44,000 imprisoned and subjected to starvation, forced labor, torture,
and rampant disease (111-2). In the provinces ruled by Trotsky, workers were often shot
for "violating labor discipline" (136). This follows from the demand he made at the Third
All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions (1920) for the "militarization of labor," and his
deluded sense that, the Soviet Union supposedly having become a "Workers' State," labor no
longer had any need to organize independently of the State.
In February 1920, the CheKa announced the formal abolition of the death penalty in Russia
with the exception of the war front, yet in May it was re-established by official decree.
Just before the ban came into effect in February, however, CheKa head Felix Dzherzhinsky
ordered the mass-execution of those sentenced to death, with the Left-SR A. Izmaylovich
recalling the shooting of 150 prisoners in Moscow on the eve of the decree's proclamation
(Maximov 119-20). Red authoritarianism only burgeoned more: in "The Party Crisis" (January
1921), Lenin defended labor's militarization, dismissed talk of industrial democracy, and
identified the heresy of "syndicalist deviation" as something to be extirpated (Maximov
144-5). Whereas the policies of forcible grain requisitions in large part had triggered
the 1921-1922 famine, Lenin in no way relieved the peasantry of this yoke but instead
continued to demand further extraction, wielding terror against peasants who resisted and
restricting the movement of starving peasants to other provinces in search of food by
means of military cordons (149-50).
Thus, in contrast to the political opening expected by many leftists, workers, and
peasants following the victory over the Whites in the Civil War-the hopes of getting on
with the project of instituting a new Paris Commune in Russia, as falsely projected by
Lenin in 1917 and 1918-the Reds showed that they were fully prepared to continue using
State Terror to hold on to power. Alongside the fate of the Makhnovists, the suppression
of the Kronstadt Commune is the best evidence for this sad reality, accounting for a
quarter of the estimated 70,000 lives taken by the Red Terror in the year 1921 (Maximov 199).
Altogether, from 1917 to 1924, Maximov estimates that 200,000 lives were taken directly by
the Red Terror, and that the Bolshevik experiment overall cost between 8 and 10 million
lives, if we factor in victims of the Civil War and the 1921 famine, or between 10 and 13
million, if we incorporate the deaths attributable to the White Terror and reaction as
well as the 1924 famine (Maximov 240-1).
For further reading:
"Bolshevism: Promises and Realities" (Gregori Maximov)
What was the Russian Civil War?
The Russian Civil War, launched by the top-heavy White Army against the Revolution in 1918
with the forces of international reaction behind it, centrally pitted Reds against Whites
but also saw important liberatory roles played by the Greens, the Left-SR's, and the
Makhnovists, all of whom opposed Whites and Reds alike. White Armies led variously by
Generals Denikin and Wrangel as well as Admiral Kolchak were defeated by the joint action
of the people in the revolt, the Makhnovists, the Greens, and the Red Army by 1920. Voline
points out that some of this counter-revolutionary militarism was actually supported by
Right-SR's and Mensheviks. Yet by the end of 1919, with "Kolchak and Denikin[...]defeated
and the movements headed by them[...]virtually liquidated," much of Russia and Ukraine had
been "cleared of white guardist bands" (Maximov 113). According to Maximov, irregular
libertarian partisans of Russia's Far East were decisive in the defeat of the Whites in
that region (236).
The Greens, so named thanks to their forest and marshland hideouts, united many "deserter
comrades" with disaffected peasants impelled by hatred of State exploitation into rural
partisan armies that defended the Revolution from Red and White alike in Ukraine, the
Volga and Urals regions, Siberia, and some central Russian provinces (Posadskii 8, 11).
Makhno, himself a peasant, led the Insurgent Army through Ukraine, inflicting devastating
losses on Whites as his liberatory forces went. Influenced by anarchism, Makhno hoped to
create a peasant utopia on the land; unlike many Greens, who opposed both Reds and Whites,
Makhno engaged in tactical alliances with the Reds until 1920, when the latter betrayed
the Makhnovists following their vital services rendered to the defense of the Revolution.
Whereas Makhno and his followers together with the Siberian Greens favored free soviets
and free federations, the Greens met with a similar fate at the hands of the victorious
Bolsheviks: the Red Army engaged in scorched-earth tactics against peasant communities
considered to be supportive of the guerrilla movement, specifically targeting family
members of known Greens for reprisal in Caucasia, Crimea, and the Don basin (Posadskii
4-14; Maximov 176-7, 194-5).
In response to their perception of the Bolsheviks' capitulation to imperialism with the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Left-SR's assassinated the German ambassador and a
high-ranking German officer in July 1918, and they spearheaded a short-lived uprising
against the Bolsheviks in Moscow. Later, from 1920-1921, the Left-SR Alexander Antonov led
a major Green uprising in the Tambov region, one so menacing Lenin would consider it the
single greatest threat to his rule. Yet the Tambov Rebellion, too, was put down using
overwhelming force, as detailed above.
The flag of the Green Armies of the Russian Revolution
What about the imperialists?
There is no doubt that the capitalist powers intervened on the side of the Whites against
the Revolution in the Russian Civil War. The infamous Czech Legion, for example, seized
control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad (completed under Nicholas II) during part of the
Civil War, and imperialist governments supplied the Whites heavily with arms and
ammunition. The "North Russia" campaign by U.S., British, French, and Polish forces
captured the key port city of Arkhangelsk from the Reds in 1918. Nonetheless, such
imperialist intervention cannot explain or rationalize the depravity of Bolshevik rule. As
Lenin and company often blamed the shortcomings of the Revolution on "capitalist
encirclement" and the "inaction" of the global proletariat, they assumed that the success
of the Russian Revolution depended on the spread of social revolution to other countries,
yet did not stop to think that the very opposite might be true: that the "extension of the
Revolution depended upon the results of the revolution in Russia." In this sense, the lack
of an expanding global Bolshevik upheaval perhaps reflected workers' ambiguities about the
meaning of the Russian Revolution after its deviation by the Reds. In July 1918, the
Bolsheviks would see the repercussions of their negotiating a peace with the German and
Austro-Hungarian imperialists, when the Left-SR's attempted an abortive uprising to
overthrow Lenin and his colleagues due to their desire to defend the Revolution by
continuing the war against imperialism.
What happened in Ukraine?
In Ukraine, Makhno, Arshinov, and Voline worked with the syndicalist Nabat ("Alarm")
confederation once the Revolution broke out. The Makhnovists proclaimed "Land and
Liberty," expropriated the land, and promoted soviet-based democracy in the regions they
liberated. In 1919, the Insurrectionary Army led by Makhno hailed the Third Revolution
against the Bolsheviks and called for land to be transferred from the Red State directly
to the peasantry itself.
In 1919, the Reds conspired to crush the Makhnovists, even as the Insurrectionary Army was
holding the line against the White General Denikin's forces invading from the south. The
Bolsheviks' calculus was that Denikin would annihilate Makhno's forces, thus eliminating a
major rival to their rule, and then the Ukrainian peasantry would rebel against the
occupying Whites and so weaken it before a victorious Red Army counter-offensive. Toward
this end, in June Trotsky declared illegal the Fourth Extraordinary Convention being
organized by the Makhnovists and ordered the arrest and execution of a number of
commanders, though Makhno escaped unharmed.
Thereafter, the Insurrectionary Army regrouped and rallied to the defense of the
Revolution, wreaking havoc in the rear of Denikin's forces, which were thereafter easily
defeated en route to Moscow by the Red Army (Maximov 108-111). The Reds then re-entered
into a tactical military alliance with the Makhnovists to rout the White General Wrangel's
forces in Crimea. Importantly, the text of this pact stipulates that those regions in
which the Makhnovists have presence are to be governed by the principles of "autonomy,
federalism, and free agreement" in their relations with the Reds (126). Yet once Wrangel
too had been defeated, Red Army commanders ordered the Insurrectionary Army to incorporate
itself into the Red Army (127-8); when they refused to do so, they were criminalized as
"bandits," and the Reds banned their planned 1920 pan-Russian anarchist congress in
Kharkov, ordering Makhno's arrest as a "counter-revolutionary." The militants were
crushed, and the leadership driven into exile (Avrich 60).
The fate of the Makhnovists followed from the Reds' premeditated policy of physically
destroying popular insurgent movements, both "those that were hostile to them as well as
those that fought together with them against Kolchak and Denikin" (173-4). How ironic that
the anarchists' heroic defense of the Southern line against the Whites only facilitated
the Reds' repression of the libertarian movement throughout Russia!
A similar story is seen in Russia's Far East, where the Reds suppressed anarchists,
Maximalists, and Left-SR's after their critical contributions to the defeat of the White
reaction in the region (Maximov 237-8).
For further reading:
"The Russian Revolution in the Ukraine" (Nestor Makhno)
"History of the Makhnovist Movement" (Peter Arshinov)
"Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil War" (Michael Malet)
Were Makhno and his followers anti-Semitic?
No, though Red apologists such as Trotsky like to claim that the Makhnovists hated Jews.
Against such slanderous charges, Voline cites the example of Grigoriev, an ex-tsarist
officer who led a reactionary peasant movement in Ukraine in 1919 that did engage in
pogroms: "One of the reasons for the execution of Grigoriev by the Makhnovists was his
anti-semitism and the immense pogrom he organised at Elizabethgrad, which cost the lives
of nearly three thousand persons."
He adds several other reasons showing the Makhnovists' opposition to anti-Semitism,
including the facts that a "fairly important part in the Makhnovist Army was played by
revolutionists of Jewish origin," that the Insurrectionary Army counted with several
Jewish combatants and contained entirely Jewish fighting units, that Ukrainian Jewish
communities provided many volunteers to the Army, and that "the Jewish population, which
was very numerous in the Ukraine, took an active part in all the activities of the movement."
Thus we see that the Makhnovist movement, though greatly inspired politically by the
example of Mikhail Bakunin, progressed beyond this anarchist militant's conspiratorial
anti-Semitism to strictly punish chauvinistic acts inspired by such prejudice. For his
part, Bakunin believed in the fantasy of universal Jewish power, and he conflates the
power of finance capital with delusions about Jewish domination. See Statism and Anarchy.
What happened at Kronstadt in 1921?
The Kronstadt Commune of March 1921 was preceded by strike movements among workers in
Petrograd and Moscow who demanded resolution to their starvation conditions as well as a
halt to the terror and free soviet elections. The Reds met these striking workers with
mass-arrests, lockouts, the declaration of martial law in Petrograd, and ultimately the
armed suppression of workers in the city. As Maximov writes, whether ironically or not,
"[t]the Petrograd scene strikingly resembled the last week of the Tzar's absolutist
regime" on the eve of the conflict (160). The sailors of Kronstadt echoed their fellow
workers' demands from across the bay, outlining in the Petropavlovsk resolution of
February 28, 1921, fifteen demands, including the re-establishment of civil liberties,
free elections to the soviets, the release of political prisoners, the review of all cases
of those imprisoned and held in concentration camps, the right to organize labor unions,
the immediate abolition of grain-requisitions, the liberation of the peasantry, and the
abolition of Bolshevik commissars in the military and overseeing workplaces. While the
resolution affirmed its demands within the parameters of the Soviet Constitution, Lenin
and Trotsky found it profoundly threatening. They feared that its spirit could spread
quickly within the armed forces-that the "petty-bourgeois[sic]Anarchist elemental
forces[were]the most dangerous enemy, which might draw many sympathizers and partisans,
which might obtain strong backing in the country and change the sentiments of the great
masses of people" (Maximov 175). As such, they slandered the Kronstadt sailors, insulting
them as being the dupes of Socialist Revolutionaries, a former tsarist general known as
Kozlovsky, and the proto-fascist Black Hundreds.
The Bolsheviks then declared a state of emergency in Petrograd, clarifying that any crowds
"congregating in the streets" were to be immediately shot, with any soldiers resisting
such orders themselves to be summarily executed. The Reds also took several relatives of
the sailors hostage (Maximov 165). In response, the Kronstadters took up arms to defend
themselves and declared the abolition of the death penalty while themselves taking some
280 Reds hostage. Unfortunately, however, the weather was still cold enough to allow for
the bay to be frozen over, thus facilitating a ground invasion of the island-fortress.
Ultimately, after more than 10 days of artillery bombardment, Trotsky's battalions, aided
by ex-tsarist generals and supported by Chinese and Bashkir reinforcements, overwhelmed
the Kronstadters and retook the island on March 17. An estimated 18,000 insurgents were
killed in the fighting and executed shortly after their defeat (Maximov 164-8).
On March 18, the Reds held a public celebration in Petrograd marking fifty years since the
beginning of the Paris Commune-this, as Kronstadt lay visibly in ruins. Emma Goldman and
Alexander Berkman, who had attempted to intercede before the Bolsheviks to avert the
Commune's violent suppression, listened aghastly to Bolshevik military bands playing "The
Internationale" in the streets. Goldman writes that "[i]ts strains, once jubilant to my
ears, now sounded like a funeral dirge for humanity's flaming hope," while Berkman
caustically observes that "Trotsky and Zinoviev denounce Thiers and Gallifet for the
slaughter of the Paris rebels."
How did Lenin contradict his supposed anti-imperialist principles while in power?
Lenin is known for his supposedly innovative characterization of imperialism as "the
highest stage of capitalism," and his view that capitalism will be taken down by the
revolt of peoples oppressed by imperialism. Lenin expressed concern for the persistence of
"Great Russian chauvinism" over the former Russian Empire's numerous minorities and
oppressed nationalities. So what was his relationship to such principles after he seized
power over the Russian Empire?
Ukraine
See above. The Bolsheviks clearly did not favor Ukrainian self-determination.
Georgia
In February 1921, the Red Army invaded and occupied its southern neighbor Georgia from
Armenia, reproducing the Red Terror in the newly conquered country. This imperialistic
venture followed from the general maxim of the Terror: As Georgian Mensheviks had declared
independence in October 1917, this renegade province of the Russian Empire required a
coercive corrective to its course. An appeal from Tiflis (Tbilisi) workers to the workers
of Western Europe from August 1921 speaks to the repression imposed by the foreign Red rulers:
From the very first days Georgia was conquered, we were placed in the position of and
treated as slaves. We were deprived of freedom of speech, of press, assembly, and the
right of free association. A regime of military labor service has been imposed upon all
the workers of Georgia, irrespective of their occupation. Everywhere Extraordinary
Committees (CheKa) have been set up[...]. The advanced workers of Georgia, irrespective of
their party affiliation, are thrown into prison where they are being decimated by hunger
and diseases. Human life has become of no value. Innocent people are shot, even those who
never mixed into politics, who never took part in any political struggle. People were shot
because they served the democratic government, the State; because in open war they
defended their native country from the invasion of foreign troops (Maximov 171-2).
Alongside Mensheviks, then, Georgian national-liberation fighters were targeted for
elimination by the occupying Reds (236).
Central Asia: Kirghiz-Kazakh Steppe and Turkestan
A map of Turkestan/Central Asia using current borders
Larger map situating Turkestan in relation to western Russia (using current borders)
In Central Asia, the Reds' desire to maintain imperial hegemony over the region led it to
support Tsarist-era settler-colonists against the indigenous populations, resulting in a
popular resistance movement known as the Basmachi (Russian for "raiders"), and
subsequently intensify the conflict and ultimately accommodate the resistance movement.
Both armed rebellion in the late Tsarist era and the emergence of the Basmachi movement in
Soviet Turkestan had important bases in the colonization of the Central Asian steppe
during the Tsarist period. This colonization, greatly enhanced by the onset of the
Stolypin reforms (1901-3), which effectively targeted the rural commune for elimination,
expelled the indigenous Kirghiz-Kazakh people from the best grazing lands and disrupted
their traditional way of life, resulting in annual famines from 1910 to 1913 (Pipes 83;
Rywkin 16). Increasingly greater stresses on the Kirghiz-Kazakh caused them to revolt in
1916 after they were targeted for conscription during World War I. One important factor
that contributed to the popular resistance to this measure was that these Muslims would be
conscripted to fight alongside non-Muslims against the Ottoman Caliph (Pipes 83; Olcott
353). Following repression of the revolt, many Kirghiz-Kazakh fled to Turkestan, and this
together with the entirety of the travails experienced by the indigenous peoples during
the late Tsarist period caused Kirghiz-Kazakh political leaders to seek the definitive
termination of Russian settlement of the region (Rywkin 17). To this end, the
Kirghiz-Kazakh had, before the 1917 Revolution, begun to demand territorial autonomy above
all else, in the hope that self-rule would allow them to legislate in favor of indigenous
peoples and reverse the excesses of Russian colonization (Pipes 85).
Following the Revolution and further armed conflict with Kirghiz-Kazakhs returning from
exile, the Russian settler-colonists increasingly came to side with the Bolsheviks, hoping
to use the rhetoric of proletarian dictatorship against the indigenous Muslims:
Bolshevism, in this sense, was to mean the rule of workers, soldiers, and peasants, and
since the Kirghiz-Kazakh supposedly had no such organized classes or groups, they were
"not to rule but be ruled" (Pipes 86). Delegates to the 1917 Congress of Soviets, fearful
of losing control over the empire's many disparate nationalities and Central Asia's
lucrative cotton production, voted against any consideration of autonomy for Turkestan and
the participation of Muslims in the Soviet administration in Central Asia (Pipes 91;
Olcott 359-60).
Following up such rhetoric, the Reds, after their occupation of Turkestan in 1919,
excluded local nationalists from political power. Even when the Kirghiz republic was
allowed autonomy a few years later, Russian settler-colonists in the area refused to
accept its sovereignty and worked to undermine it, and the Kirghiz-Kazakh nationalists,
without an army, political organizations, or connections in Moscow, could do little to
effectively liberate the region. The 1921 and 1922 famines that struck the Kirghiz-Kazakh
steppe affected the indigenous populations significantly, as they had lost much of their
livestock following the 1916 rebellion and disproportionately received less food from
government distributions. The profound effects of this famine can explain the subsequent
lack of indigenous popular resistance to the Soviet regime in the Kirghiz-Kazakh region,
in contrast to the case of Turkestan (Pipes 174).
The Basmachi
Soviet rule in Turkestan met with greater challenges than that over the Kirghiz-Kazakh
region. Though Soviet rule greatly discounted indigenous interests here as it did in the
Kirghiz-Kazakh steppe, it met with opposition from an indigenous Muslim government based
in Kokand and, following the breakdown of the Kokand regime, an emerging popular
resistance movement known as the Basmachi (Russian for "raiders"). As in the
Kirghiz-Kazakh region, Soviet power found support from settler-colonial elements, but here
it met opposition from the autonomy-seeking Kokand government, supported by the
politically-inclined segments of the indigenous populations and anti-Communist elements.
The Tashkent Soviet, in an effort to extend control over rural Turkestan, supported
persecutions, expulsions from the land, and looting of the indigenous Muslims, creating a
situation which one contemporary Soviet official equated with the "feudal exploitation of
the broad masses of the indigenous population by the Russian Red Army man, colonist, and
official" (Pipes 177-8, emphasis added). Though the Tashkent Soviet firmly controlled
urban areas, it had little authority over the countryside, where the populace had been
alienated by Soviet cooperation in what it deemed a continued colonization. Tensions at
this time between the two rival governments came to a head, and the Tashkent Soviet,
fearful of the Kokand government's emphasis on national self-determination, ordered the
city of Kokand destroyed, its government overthrown (Pipes 174-8).
Following this brazen dismissal of indigenous interests, the Tashkent Soviet made little
effort to win back the allegiance of its Muslims subjects and made little effort to
relieve those affected by the winter famine of 1917-18, thus pushing more Muslims into
supporting and joining the Basmachi movement (Rywkin 22-3). To some, the destruction of
the Kokand Islamic government and its replacement with a secular, anti-religious State
constituted blasphemy and can explain emergent cooperation with the developing Basmachi
movement (Olcott 358). The Tashkent Soviet's efforts at confiscating waqf, or clerical
lands, for the benefit of the regime; the closing of religious schools; and the
discontinuation of shari'at courts further contributed to popular opposition to the Soviet
regime (Pipes 259).
The emergence of the popular resistance movement known as the Basmachi constituted a
reaction to perceived Soviet abuses and excesses which, gathering support from the general
populace, struggled violently against foreign occupation and resulted in an escalation and
intensification of counter-insurgency efforts. In contrast to the later occupation of
Afghanistan (1979-1989), the Soviets eventually came to realize that brute force itself
would not succeed in bringing an end to popular insurrection in Turkestan, and so they
successfully co-opted the Basmachi movement from below by responding to the needs and
desires of the populace supporting the movement.
Following the fall of Kokand, many indigenous individuals involved in the government,
along with others suffering under the requisitions and looting attendant with the Soviet
regime, joined the Basmachi, who previously had been feared by the population at large as
bandits and common criminals. The group came to represent the struggle for liberation from
Soviet rule (Pipes 178; Rywkin 33). The Basmachi soon grew to control the Turkestani
countryside, generally enjoying the support of the population and, by violently punishing
collaboration with the Soviet regime, coercing those who would think twice about backing
them (Rywkin 35; Haugen 89). Though targeted at Bolshevik rule, the Basmachi resistance
increasingly came to represent a Muslim struggle against Russians rather than an
anti-communist campaign (Rywkin 38). The movement, plagued by lack of unity among its
leaders, hoped to overcome these difficulties and approach victory with the defection of
Enver Pasha, a former ruler of Turkey whom Lenin had sent to quell the insurgency, yet who
ended up joining it himself. Enver's integration into the Basmachi strengthened the
movement, increasing its numbers to twenty thousand members who now could count a number
of victories under their belts. Nonetheless, Enver failed to unify the resistance, having
antagonized other Basmachi commanders with his vision of a pan-Turkic Muslim empire (Pipes
258; Rywkin 39). With his death in battle against the Reds in 1922, all hopes to
consolidate the resistance movement ended (Pipes 259).
The Soviet regime coupled military escalation in response to Basmachi with political
concessions. The combination of these two factors undermine popular support for the
Basmachi and thus their effectiveness. Moscow saw in the emergence and perpetuation of the
Basmachi movement the persistent refusal of the Tashkent Soviet to grant autonomy to
indigenous peoples, such that, in 1918, Stalin ordered Turkestan autonomous. However, the
non-cooperation of local communists with this directive caused it to be irrelevant until
Lenin later intensified central pressure on the Tashkent communists (Pipes Ibid 179, 183).
The result of heavy pressuring, the 1920 Seventh Congress of Soviets was the first to
allow Muslim participation, but few would-be delegates attended for fear of reprisals from
the then-raging Basmachi movement (Rywkin 26). The Eighth Congress, though, yielded an
indigenous majority in the Tashkent government, thus arousing the hopes of Turkestani
intellectuals for self-determination. Although Lenin, in contrast to the Russian
settler-colonists in Turkestan, may have favored real autonomy for the Muslim peoples of
the region in theory, he was not willing to countenance an autonomy that would threaten
the unity of the Soviet regime and the centralized rule of the Communist Party (Rywkin 32).
Following these political concessions came a burgeoning Soviet military presence in
Turkestan. Eventually, Soviet and local leaders increasingly came to realize that the
coupling of military escalation with political half-measures would not bring order to the
region. To this end, the administration overturned the most unpopular reforms: the waqf
was returned, Koranic schools were legalized, shari'a courts were granted increased
autonomy, taxes were cut by half, and food supplies to indigenous peoples were increased
(Pipes 259; Rywkin 41; Olcott 360). Moreover, the introduction of the New Economic Policy
permitted a return to private trade, and ended the forced requisitions of food and cotton,
the origin of much resentment toward the Soviet regime (Pipes 259; Rywkin 41). Given these
substantial concessions, much of the previous support for the Basmachi dissipated, and
order was restored for the Communist Party in much of the region.
How did Red October, the Red Terror, and the Civil War lead to Stalin's rule?
As we have seen, the Bolshevik seizure of power gave rise to the Red Terror and the Civil
War. According to Maximov, the "entire country was turned into a prison" so that Bolshevik
control of the State would persist (192, emphasis in original). The Reds never once tried
to negotiate peaceful settlement of conflicts during the Civil War or thereafter, but
simply resorted to intimidation as based on the real threat of physical annihilation by
means of the Red Army and the CheKa plus its successor, the GPU (State Political
Administration) (179, 207). In quashing all alternatives to Bolshevik hegemony, including
striking workers and peasants in revolt, the Reds exhausted the sources of resistance that
could have averted Stalin's rise or reversed it shortly after its emergence. By 1922, the
rate of State repression against socialists and anarchists lessened to some degree simply
because most of them had by this time already been suppressed (213-223). In cultural
terms, Lenin's partner, N. K. Krupskaya, circulated a list of forbidden literature that
included Kant, Plato, the Gospels, Schopenhauer, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, and Bakunin in 1923,
demanding that libraries remove these authors and works from circulation immediately
(221-2). Of course, the Nazis would publicly burn books by many of these same authors in
the years to come.
As Paul Mattick argues, there is very little in Stalinism that did not also exist in
Leninism or Trotskyism. Indeed, it is quite telling that a variation on the same boast
Trotsky would make after the April 1918 raids against the anarchists-that "At last the
Soviet government, with an iron broom, has rid Russia of Anarchism"-would be used by
Stalin's hangmen to hail the purges against Trotskyists and Old Bolsheviks fifteen years
later.
For further reading:
"How Lenin Led to Stalin" (WSM)
"Stalin Did Not Fall From the Moon" (WSM)
"From the Russian Revolution of 1917 to Stalinist Totalitarianism" (Agustin Guillamon)
What lessons should we take from the Russian Revolution?
Metaphorically, the Russian Revolution illustrates "the resplendent rays of freedom"
melting away an ossified despotism, thanks to the action of "the common people[who]swept
over the land like spring floods and washed away the debris of the old regime" (Maximov
336). The heroic, libertarian mass-mobilizations of February 1917 opened the horizon of
possibility, astonishing the rest of the world through the suddenness of their overthrow
of the Tsar. In this Revolution, the peasantry retook the land and many workers engaged in
cooperative self-management of production. Yet the historical burdens of Tsarism put the
working classes at a disadvantage, in the sense that they could not self-organize openly
as long as Nicholas II ruled. Following his abdication, the absence of workers'
class-organizations which could serve as "receiving sets" for the implementation of
anarchism in Russia and throughout the former Empire greatly hampered the cause in the
struggle between libertarian and authoritarian socialism that characterized the years
1917-1921. To a considerable extent, this lack can explain the defeat of the anarchists by
the Reds in the Red Terror and Civil War.
The anarchist Revolution, of course, can only begin through the action of the masses in
conjunction with specifically anarchist militants, who must not be allowed to hold
coercive power over the people. The success of this Revolution depends ultimately on
whether its emancipatory nature can win over the "neutral" mass through its positive
results. A final essential element is working toward the ideological destruction of what
Voline terms the "political principle": statism and authoritarianism.
We close with the most hopeful interpretation of the tragedy of the Russian Revolution,
one that is not specific to this event but rather to all other major historical setbacks:
"Let Russia serve as a lesson to all other nations. Let the mountains of corpses and the
oceans of blood shed by its people be a redeeming sacrifice for all nations, for the
toilers of all countries" (Maximov 334).
Works Cited
Avrich, Paul. Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).
Bakunin, Mikhail. Statism and Anarchy, trans. and ed. Marshall Shatz (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counter-Revolution, ed. Friends of Aron Baron
(Chico, California: AK Press, 2017).
Goodwin, James. Confronting Dostoevsky's Devils (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).
Haugen, Arne. The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Maximov, G. P. The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (Chicago: Globus
Printing, 1979[1940]).
Olcott, Martha B. "The Basmachi or Freeman's Revolt in Turkestan 1918-24." Soviet Studies
33.3 (July 1981): 352-69.
Pipes, Richard. The Formation of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997).
Posadskii, A. V. (Saratov: Publikatsiya RFFI, 2016).
Rywkin, Michael. Moscow's Muslim Challenge: Soviet Central Asia (Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe, 1990).
Skirda, Alexandre. Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack, trans. Paul Sharkey (Oakland: AK
Press, 2004).
Voline, The Unknown Revolution (Montr�al: Black Rose Books, 1975[1947]).
Recommended Statements and Memoirs
Mollie Steimer, "On Leaving Russia" (1923)
Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)
Alexander Berkman, The Russian Tragedy (1922)
Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans in Soviet Russia, trans. and ed. William Edgerton
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)
Recommended Films
Battleship Pot�mkin, dir. Sergei Eisenstein (1925)
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, dir. Esfir Shub (1927)
October, dir. Sergei Eisenstein (1928)
From Tsar to Lenin, dir. Herman Axelbank (1937)
Doctor Zhivago, dir. David Lean (1965)
Reds, dir. Warren Beatty (1981)
Red in Blue, dir. Thibout Bertrand (2017)
http://blackrosefed.org/red-black-october-anarchist-perspective-russian-revolution-100th-anniversary/
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