Simon Pirani: The Russian Revolution in Retreat 1920-24: Review

A new account of the Russian Revolution as it recovered from the civil war lambasts Lenin and his comrades, says Bill Jefferies

The Russian Revolution in Retreat 1920-24: Soviet workers and the new communist elite

Ninety years ago the Soviet Union was in the grip of civil war. The loss of life and economic dislocation put severe stress on the ties that bound the Bolshevik Party which led the 1917 revolution and the working class who made it.

A thriving democracy requires enough work to ensure a reasonably full stomach, but not so much that there is no time for reflective thought and education; without this informed decisions cannot be made and political accountability becomes a hollow phrase. How a revolutionary party oversees the iron discipline needed to fight off counter-revolution while not suffocating genuine debate, involves negotiating real, social, contradictions. What range of policies is possible in any given set of material circumstances? Where is the line to be drawn between realism and utopia? Where do justifiable if regrettable backwards steps end and inexcusable errors begin?

Simon Pirani’s book enters this debate. He provides an interesting account of the early degeneration of the Russian Revolution. The book focuses on Moscow. It looks at the relationship between the Bolshevik Party, the state and the workers’ movement from 1920, at the end of the civil war, and continues until 1924.

It examines the impact of the end of war communism, the Kronstadt uprising, the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the growing bureaucratisation of the Bolshevik Party and state. It assesses the importance of the revival of the economy under NEP and the consolidation of power in this period by the “party elite”, with Stalin at its head.

From the outset Pirani states his case: “This book argues that the working class was politically expropriated by the Bolshevik Party, as democratic bodies such as Soviets and factory committees were deprived of decision making power; it examines how the new Soviet ruling class began to take shape.” He goes on to say that: “. . . within months of the [1917] October uprising the revolution was in retreat from the aims of social liberation it had proclaimed. It was confounded by circumstances and pushed back by the state.” (p2)

His emphasis on the state and the Bolsheviks’ subjective “choices” as the reason the revolution was pushed back is the book’s central paradox. On the one hand he says: “These arguments are made from a standpoint that views the working class in the sense used by Marx and E P Thompson: as a class formed in a process of struggle and self-definition against the ruling class . . .” (p4) But on the other hand Pirani considers the Bolshevik Party to be something separate from the working class; not as an integral part of it, part of its own “self-definition”. You would not think that this party was made up of tens of thousands of factory workers or that it had the support of hundreds of thousands of such workers across Russia.

The Bolsheviks, according to Pirani, were not formed in struggle against the ruling class. They are treated as an extraneous organisation that went on to politically expropriate the workers because of their inherent flaws, their “vanguardism” and “statism”. He claims: “This book argues that one of the most important choices the Bolsheviks made at this point was to turn their backs on forms of collective, participatory democracy that workers briefly attempted to revive . . . The party’s vanguardism, i.e. its conviction that it had the right and duty, to make political decisions on the workers’ behalf, was not reinforced by its control of the state apparatus.” (p4) While he shows how objective circumstances frequently determined the Bolsheviks’ “choices”, these choices were essentially, for him, erroneous in the given circumstances. But in this he fails to make a convincing case.

A country in ruins

In the aftermath of the civil war society was in a state of breakdown. In Moscow one million people had migrated to the countryside, one third of its houses had been destroyed. In late 1919, 91% of enterprises with less than ten employees had closed. Pirani points out that the number of industrial workers had fallen by around 50%, to 200,000, but the number of “sluzhashchie”, service sector workers, had fallen only slightly to 220,000. The number of metal workers fell to 30,000 while the textile workforce had collapsed from 250,000 to 120,000. Only 65% of enterprises with more than 500 employees were open.

At first glance the collapse of the industrial proletariat and the rapid decline in the urban population and growth of the army (a result of the continuing threat of the White Armies, the defeat of the first German revolution and the Polish invasion in 1920) would all seem to confirm the Bolsheviks’ argument that it was the hollowing out of the working class that resulted in a decline of the Soviets. Pirani concedes this point but gets round the problem by redefining the working class.

He challenges what he refers to as the Bolshevik “discourse”, that “the dispersal of urbanised workers to the Red Army or the countryside, and their substitution in the factories by women, younger workers, and new migrants, had ‘deproletarianised’ the working class.” (p21) Pointing out that the differences between industrial and service sector workers were not “absolute” he argues that the relatively high proportion of service sector workers still present in Moscow refutes the Bolsheviks argument about “deproletarianisation”.

In the grand scheme of things differences between sections of the working class are not absolute, but real differences do exist and in given historical conditions those differences can be crucial to the fate of the class struggle. Russia in 1920 is a case in point.

Metal workers, concentrated in giant plants and steeled by years of struggle, were crucial for the victory of the Russian revolution in a way that the university lecturer, school teacher, domestic servant and office administrator of the Tsarist Empire were not. The decline in the number of metal workers was always likely to be more decisive to the course of events, the health of the Soviets and so on than the relative stability of the numbers of white collar and service workers, many of whom were hostile to the Bolsheviks and Soviet power.

The Bolsheviks were acutely aware of the difference between the leading layers of the factory-based working class who had made the revolution and the wide layers of workers who followed their lead. Pirani claims that such a distinction represents a lack of faith in the working class by the Bolsheviks. It represents the opposite.

This is important as the Bolsheviks were aware of the threat posed to the health of the revolution and its state by the growth of the bureaucracy, manifested in the increase in numbers of service sector workers, administrators and bureaucrats. They sought to address it by placing industrial workers in responsible positions within the state.

The need to staff the state with working class militants was itself a product of the backwardness of Russia. The urban population was a very small part of the total population. The working class was an even smaller part of the urban population. Sizeable layers of white collar workers adapted to administrative tasks, typical of advanced capitalist nations like Germany, the UK and US, did not exist in Russia. 

But the transformation of communist workers into working commissars did weaken the Bolsheviks’ links with the working class and they underestimated how the material change in circumstances, from bench to desk, impacted on the workers who made that transition. By September 1920 only 9,777 party members in the Moscow region, a little more than a quarter of the total, worked in industry or transport, while the proportion in administration continued to rise.

Food supply

Just as the problem of state administration was a product of backwardness and civil war, so was the issue of food supply. Pirani explains: “During the civil war and through 1920, relations between workers and “their” state were determined, more than anything, by the food shortage in the cities, which made inequality in distribution inevitable. The food shortage resulted from the constant decline in the proportion of land sown for food production, itself caused by civil war, peasant hostility to state requisitioning of grain, and contraction of trade.” (p26)

Various rationing mechanisms which prioritised soldiers at the front, those doing heavy physical work, and industrial workers were introduced to give priority rations over the “sluzhashchie” and other groups. A bewildering array of special ration categories developed as industrial managers and trade unions competed with each other, undermining the principle of equality even when supplies of food improved in late 1920.

These tensions led to an outbreak of strike action in the summer of 1920. According to Pirani, “the party responded to the strike in such a way as to undermine workers’ organisation and consciousness.” (p33) He cites Isaak Minkov the secretary of the Moscow Committee who wrote a circular that if strikes could not be avoided by negotiation then party members in workplaces should “without the mass noticing, isolate it from the influence of actively counter-revolutionary persons.” (p33)

The Moscow Committee’s actions, which went on to include arrests of “malicious persons”, are compared by Pirani with repression “reminiscent of Tsarism”. (p33) And in one sense they were. All states are characterised by repression. A workers’ state can be obliged to use repression in defence of revolution. The question is, can such actions be justified? Given that there was real counter- revolutionary activity in Moscow at the time it seems reasonable to argue that they were. Rationing is by definition discriminatory but not necessarily undemocratic. And the Bolshevik party “while thus throttling ­independent action” nonetheless, campaigned for equalisation of rations, in conjunction with the non-party workers of the Moscow Automobile Company.

Pirani’s problem is that he sees the repression in defence of a revolution as essentially the same as any other repression.

Red terror

The use of Red Terror was an important element in the revolution. It was stepped up after the Left SR coup attempt on 6 July 1918. The Left SRs had been in government with the Bolsheviks but disagreed strongly with the government’s decision to make peace with Germany at Brest Litovsk. Their rising was aimed at provoking a German offensive in a misguided attempt to reignite a revolutionary war. The coup attempt lasted two days and included the assassination of the German ambassador, Von Mirbach, the bombardment of the Kremlin and capture of the Moscow Telegraph Exchange. 

The following month on 30 August 1918 there was an unconnected assassination, by a disgruntled army officer, of the Petrograd Left communist Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd Cheka. On the same day in Moscow Lenin was shot, nearly fatally, receiving bullets to both chest and neck. The Red Terror that followed led to a wave of arrests and some executions targeted at the opponents of Soviet power amongst the aristocracy, bourgeoisie and officer corps and of the anti-Soviet parties, mainly the right SRs and Cadets and their supporters. But repression was also directed at the pro-Soviet parties, the Left SRs and anarchists who had supported the July coup attempt.

None of this is mentioned in Pirani’s book. He will claim that this is because he deals with a later period. But he refers to various other events that occurred before 1920, such as the Petrograd strike wave of 1918, which he describes as the peak of “organised independent workers’ action”, (p6) evidently exceeding in his opinion even the insurrection of November 1917 just six months before.

His decision to exclude the circumstances under which the Red Terror was launched seriously distorts his entire subsequent narrative. Without any explanation of the context, the Bolsheviks’ repressive actions appear unjustified. In reality they were justified in terms of the defence of the revolution and they were agonised over by those wary of the consequences of taking such extreme measures.

The Red Terror was an emergency measure. It conflicted with the goal of the revolution – the emancipation of humanity. It was the antecedent of the later perverted Stalinist opposition to democracy and freedom of expression. This should serve as a key lesson for today’s ­revolutionaries. But this does not mean this short-term measure, however brutal and unpleasant, was unnecessary, wrong or meant that the revolution was doomed from there on in. The alternative was the likely defeat in civil war and the drowning of the revolution in blood. The Bolsheviks made the right choice in 1918.

Without this important contextual evidence the Bolshevik’s repression of the Left SRs and anarchists makes no sense. This absence of context suits Pirani’s thesis that it was Bolshevism’s inherent qualities that led to the rise of Stalin. Introducing this context blows his thesis out of the water.

Pirani says: “No trace remained in Bolshevik practice of the ideas, widely discussed in 1917-18, that repression of the revolution’s enemies, like other aspects of policy, was an issue subject to decision by the masses of the revolution’s participants. The arbitrary exercise of power by party bodies and the Cheka, often justified during the civil war on military grounds, continued in 1920.”

He attempts to prove this by citing two examples where Cheka decisions were subject to just such a mass intervention. When a rumour broke out about the threatened execution of four workers from the Menshevik dominated printers’ union, a strike was called which lasted four days, the works were occupied for two days and as a result the four workers were released. This is a curious example of the unaccountability of the Cheka as it appears to demonstrate the opposite. Again in October 1920, following the arrest of two SR members at an engineering factory, a “general meeting was called, a Cheka representative explained the grounds on which the arrests had been made, and three delegates were elected to testify to the workers’ good character to the Cheka and secure their release.” (p38)

Yet according to Pirani these examples of mass accountability, demonstrate that no mass accountability existed. He continues: “The scale and direction of repression of non-Bolshevik parties – including those who had supported the Soviet side during the civil war, such as left Mensheviks, left SRs and anarchists – were decided on by the Cheka, which reported to party committees. Workers’ organisations had no say.” (p38)

Pirani’s prejudiced views prevent him from expressing an objective, in the sense of historically accurate, reading of the facts. He complains that the Cheka directed repression against the anarchists but then says: “In early 1920, Cheka action in Moscow was concentrated on the anarchist underground organisation that had organised the bombing of a Moscow party meeting in September 1919.” (p38) Presumably the Cheka should have just winked at people going around blowing up the offices of a working class organisation.

Kronstadt

The Kronstadt uprising of spring 1921 is the iconic moment of betrayal universally cited by opponents of the Bolshevik revolution. Pirani provides good contextual evidence to demonstrate why it arose, the limits of the uprising and argues that it was not a widespread protest against the Bolsheviks. The suppression of the uprising did not fundamentally alter the course of the revolution. Other larger social factors did that and Kronstadt shone a spotlight on those factors.

Kronstadt was preceded by a temporary improvement in supplies to the cities, something that the Bolsheviks over-optimistically took as evidence of a general and sustainable trend, and which encouraged them to maintain war communism. The alternative to war communism, allowing peasants to keep a proportion of their produce, was the only real way of reviving agriculture in a largely rural country like Russia. But this alternative meant the creation of a market in agricultural produce and was resisted by the Bolsheviks because of the dangers of capitalist restoration that it involved.

The eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920, encouraged by the revival of food supplies, rejected a Menshevik resolution permitting peasants to retain a proportion of their surpluses, a policy which, when adopted just months later, was to become the core of the NEP. Instead it agreed a motion from a Democratic Centralist supporter that envisaged a centrally directed sowing campaign, carried out by sowing committees.

Pirani points out that the improvement in supplies was only temporary and “it took another two months – during which the peasant revolts intensified, the supply crisis threatened the Moscow and Petrograd workers with hunger and unrest climaxed in the Kronstadt revolt – before the Bolshevik leaders were forced into a fundamental change of strategy, the adoption of the initial NEP-type measures at the tenth party congress in March 1921.” (p43)

According to Pirani: “The early spring of 1921 was a turning point for the Soviet state. The grain requisitioning system used during the civil war had aggravated the crisis in the countryside . . . the transport breakdown disrupted the supply of food to Moscow, Petrograd and other urban centres . . . the crisis culminated in early March in the uprising at the Kronstadt naval base, which the Bolshevik leadership perceived as a threat to its survival.” (p72) He continues: “Opposition to the Bolshevik monopolisation of political power was widespread and the demand for renewal of the Soviets was popular. On the other hand advocates of a “third revolution”, or any challenge to the Soviet system as such, were in a tiny minority.” (p72)

The strike movement was not linked to the uprising, but motivated by a variety of issues related to food supply, support for the equalisation of rations as well as opposition to rations in general. The near split of the party and the impact of the Kronstadt uprising led to the rapid adoption of the NEP. Enabling peasants to retain a proportion of their surplus NEP encouraged private accumulation as a means of restoring agriculture. It also had another very significant consequence:

“The tenth congress, held in the first week of March while the Kronstadt revolt was being put down, decided to replace grain requisitioning with a tax in kind. It also banned factions in the party and approved the further centralisation of the apparatus; this together with the suppression of Kronstadt and the invasion of Georgia, confirmed the authoritarian, apparatus-centred direction that the Soviet state was to take.” (p72)

It marked a defeat for the Democratic Centralists and their support for a more federal system of decision-making. The decision to ban factions was taken after a brief discussion at the end of the meeting after most delegates had left. It was not regarded as significant at the time, as it was part of a general mood in favour of unity and fear of splits. Bukharin’s resolution expressed this mood well. The Bolsheviks needed to close ranks to form a “single party, with a single psychology and a single ideology.” (p88)

This disastrous decision was taken as the Bolshevik party sought to pull together, to unite against external enemies and the dangers it knew would come internally from NEP. It was taken because, as Lenin put it, the party was retreating and a retreat required sterner discipline than an advance. But it fatally weakened the party’s ability to fight internal enemies, notably the growth of the bureaucracy and the impact of the revival of the market under NEP.

The NEP and the social contract

The economy improved with the launch of the NEP: “The end of the civil war, the retreat from grain requisitioning and the revival of legal trade with the countryside paved the way for economic revival. Straight after the tenth congress, closed factories began to reopen and industrial output began to recover.” (p90) According to Pirani this revival of production led to the party redefining its relationship with the working class: “A social contract evolved, under which workers would maintain discipline and improve labour productivity, and cede real decisions making power to the party – which in turn would ensure a consistent improvement in living standards.” (p90)

Dissident Bolsheviks, anarchists and opposition socialists were silenced by repression, and labour discipline was restored in the factories to raise productivity. In other words the isolation of the revolution, its poverty, and the creation of bureaucracy and the fatigue of the working class after years of war, revolution and civil war, opened the way to the degeneration of the revolution.

By the end of 1921 most factories had reopened, albeit with production at very low levels. Workers began to return from the countryside, but wages had reached only half their 1913 level.

Party bureaucratisation

Pirani points out that the NEP accelerated the bureaucratisation of the party: “workers turned administrators, together with soldiers turned administrators and ­administrators turned Bolsheviks, formed the majority of the party.” (p115) As a result the Bolsheviks’ base in the working class weakened and “the new party elite began to build support in this milieu.” (p115)

As disillusionment and disorientation grew among former war communists party membership began to fall. The Moscow region’s membership fell from 52,354 in July 1920 to 34,436 by February 1922 after the national re-registration (p116). Inside the party the ban on factions impeded free discussions about these issues. The Democratic Centralist supporters retreated into semi-secrecy and the Workers’ Opposition baulked at the prospect of a split.

To counter the dangers inherent in NEP Lenin viewed the promotion of working class cadres, by which he meant longstanding industrial militants, into the state apparatus as a key means of countering the influence of the middle class apparatchiks who had flooded into the Soviet bureaucracy. But this measure inadvertently weakened the links of the party to the working class: “As the party further consolidated its role in the state, its base among workers weakened. Its factory based membership dwindled to a minority, and those who worked ‘at the bench’, rather than in management, to a minority of this minority.” (p115) Even so, Lenin’s proposals failed as there were simply not enough workers to staff the state. The workers’ inspectorate was watered down to allow white collar administrators back in.

By late 1921 the economy was rapidly recovering, with output and living standards on the up. As the economy revived under the impact of market relations, so the bureaucracy and party elite swelled. While Pirani takes a swipe at Trotsky’s account of the degeneration of the revolution, in the Revolution Betrayed, his own account leans heavily on it. The material privileges of the bureaucrats were, in the context of a very poor society, extremely important. A centralised system of party functionaries appointed by the Central Committee began to develop under Stalin’s direct control. Regional party secretaries had to be confirmed at a national level.

The party elite began to legitimise its material privileges. Molotov headed a Central Committee commission which agreed higher salaries for officials. A survey by M Vovsi in 1924 found that in Soviet, industrial, trade banking and co-operative institutions more than 80,000 people were earning more than eight times the minimum wage; of these 15,400 were earning between 15 and 30 times and about 1,500 more than 30 times. (p174)

The party’s monopoly on power had become institutionalised under NEP and attempts to protect the party from the dangers such monopoly carried with it failed. While opposition voices in the party were drowned out after 1921 the shrill cries of the functionaries grew louder. Alongside them a layer of managers developed in industry.

Crisis and counter-revolution

In 1923 the contradictions inherent in NEP created a crisis. Peasants held back supplies to push prices up, plunging the economy into turmoil. The crisis also exposed the scale of bureaucratic growth in the party and state. And, despite the 1921 ban on factions, the Platform of the 46 was issued as an answer to this crisis.

The new opposition was led by Trotsky, Preobrazhenskii and Sapronov. It included Democratic Centralists, rank and filers, economic decision makers and some industrial managers. It was ranged against the triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, whose victory Pirani attributes to “stronger social forces . . . the rising ruling class and its allies, stood behind the party elite.” (p211)

The 1923 Platform of the 46 united the opposition to the Stalinist elite. Its publication led to a huge outpouring of debate and discussion within the party. But the opposition was outmanoeuvred and finally broken by the opening up of the party to a mass recruitment campaign, the so-called “Lenin Levy”. The new recruits were enrolled into a party now controlled by Stalin and his allies – and the last thing they wanted to hear about was a debate over revolutionary strategy. They were the shock troops of the new bureaucracy, the base used by Stalin to launch his counter-revolution.

Pirani’s book contains information that is valuable to those who want to critically re-examine the legacy of Bolshevism. We can be grateful for the work he has carried out. His argument about the way in which the Bolshevik Party operated a social contract with the Russian working class between 1921 and 1923 in a bid to preserve its rule is a useful insight. It is his failure to present a real balance sheet of Bolshevism’s victories and defeats, mistakes and successes that disappoints. This is because Pirani has a predetermined view that Bolshevism equals bureaucratic elitism. He does not prove this even once. He merely throws in references to vanguardism and statism as though the words themselves lend validity to his case.

They don’t. They simply explain his personal break from the Bolshevik tradition. Pirani used to be a leading cadre in Gerry Healy’s bureaucratic cult, the Workers Revolutionary Party. Like other leaders of this organisation, who themselves practised the most outrageous bureaucratic and bullying standards, Pirani seeks to salve his conscience and excuse his actions by blaming it all on “the Bolshevik tradition”. By deciding that the Bolsheviks quickly evolved into a ruling class – but without once bothering to prove this on a theoretical or factual level – he has found his historical scapegoat.

But a tradition that delivered the world’s only authentic working class socialist revolution of the past one hundred years has vital lessons to teach us. Those who stand by this tradition need to carry out a thorough balance sheet, and not leave it to the Pirani’s of this world. In so doing we will re-elaborate Bolshevism by learning from its real mistakes, not imagined ones.

Thu 18, June 2009 @ 17:18