 |
| Kamenev, the most consistent voice of the Bolshevik Right shown with Lenin and Trotsky after 1917 revolution. |
Lars T. Lih, an independent Montreal-based scholar of Soviet history--the author of Lenin Rediscovered and other works. He does not purport to be a Marxist. Jack Conrad is a leader of the CPGB. Both Lih and Conrad argue that, contrary to the widespread belief of Trotskyists and many historians, there was never any fundamental difference between Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution and Lenin's pre-1917 revolutionary perspectives. From this they conclude that Lenin, in calling for a socialist revolution in 1917, did not, as is also widely believed, adopt a view closer to Trotsky's, and hence had no need to wage a struggle within the Bolshevik party to overthrow the Provisional Government and seize power in the name of the soviets. Conrad and Lih argue, on the contrary, that the Bolsheviks were "fully armed" from the beginning. In the following article, and others in the Weekly Worker, Jim Creegan, a Marxist residing in New York City, disputes all these claims in favor of the view of Trotsky and other historians.
Different Perspectives, Different Objectives
I hope any readers who may have been following the
debate between myself and Lars T Lih/Jack Conrad over the past few years will forgive me if I
briefly summarise it for the benefit of anyone tuning in for the first time. I
have defended in these pages the traditional view of Trotsky and other
historians that there were important differences between the perspectives of
Lenin and Trotsky at the time of the aborted Russian Revolution of 1905 on how
the revolution would unfold—whether it was the revolution occurring then, or
the one that would surely in their view erupt again after temporary defeat.
Lenin, in 1905, put forward the idea of
a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, which he thought
would clear the way for a democratic republic and a period of capitalist
development as a prologue to workers’
revolution. Trotsky, on the other hand, espoused the theory of permanent
revolution, according to which there would be no intermediary stage between the
bourgeois and socialist revolutions; that the working class would be the
revolution’s leading force; that once having seized power, the workers,
supported by the peasants, would be forced by the logic of circumstances to
take irrevocable socialist measures, which could only be consolidated with aid
of victorious revolutions in the more advanced countries of Europe.
This traditional view holds
further that Lenin in 1917, relying on his own independent assessment of
revolutionary possibilities, discarded his earlier perspectives to adopt a
standpoint identical in all essentials to that of Trotsky, causing the latter
to join the Bolsheviks. This change, however, was not at first accepted by much
of Lenin’s own party, which still clung to the earlier theory of stages; that
Lenin therefore had to conduct an internal fight, lasting about a month from
his return to Russia in April, to reorient the Bolsheviks toward the seizure of power in the name of
the working class and socialism.
Lih and Conrad reject this
long-established view. They argue that there was in fact no significant
difference between Lenin’s democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and
peasantry, on the one hand, and Trotsky’s permanent revolution, on the other,
and that Lenin therefore did not have to change his views or wage an internal
struggle to realign Bolshevism toward socialist revolution. Jack Conrad, in
particular, asserts that Lenin’s notion of democratic dictatorship anticipated
from the outset the passsage from bourgeois to socialist revolution without any
change at the level of political regime. Thus, argue Conrad and Lih, the
Bolsheviks were fully prepared for 1917 from 1905 onward.
Lenin’s Major Prognosis
I believe I have demonstrated
(“Democratic dictatorship vs. permanent revolution”, Weekly Worker, 21 May, 2015), through a careful exegesis of Lenin’s
principal 1905 programmatic work —Two
tactics of social-democracy in the democratic revolution-- that he regarded
the democratic dictatorship necessary to vanquish tsarism as no more than a
temporary interlude between tsarism and a bourgeois-democratic republic. I have
since come across a quotation to this effect that is even more categorical than
anything in Two tactics. In April of
1905 Lenin writes in opposition to the Mensheviks, who were trying to introduce
a bogus distinction between a provisional revolutionary government and the
democratic dictatorship: “…the
provisional revolutionary government can be nothing else but the revolutionary
dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry…” He continues:
To speak of the
“provisional revolutionary government” is to stress the constitutional aspect
of the case, the fact that the government originates, not from the law, but
from the revolution, that it is a temporary
government committed to the future Constituent Assembly. (emphasis added).
The constituent assembly would in
turn establish a republic. “A republic necessarily implies a government, and—no
social democrat ever doubted it—a bourgeois government at that.”[1]
In the above article, Lenin pours
scorn upon the formal Menshevik schema which states that the Russian
revolution, being bourgeois, must be led
by the bourgeoisie. He writes that the Russian bourgeoisie are far too pusillanimous
to conduct a resolute fight against tsarism. A bourgeois republic can only be
established by the revolutionary action of the masses. But Lenin never explains
exactly how a constituent assembly will lead to the formation of a
bourgeois-democratic republic. It would stand to reason that he assumes that
the bourgeois parties present would also have the support of a majority of
peasant representatives. Even if this were so, is not Lenin, by assuming that
the antagonisms between the bourgeoisie and the workers thrown into action by
the revolution can be resolved by voting in a peaceful parliamentary manner,
descending into a formalism of his own? Will the working class, having seized
control of factories and the governments
of major cities and towns, meekly stand aside and hand everything back to the
bourgeoisie as the result of a constituent assembly vote? This is the heart of
Trotsky’s criticism of the Lenin of 1905.
Lenin’s Other Scenario
Yet, upon further research, the
matter turns out to be a little more complicated. A comrade here in New York has
drawn my attention to two passages in Lenin’s writings that were unknown to me
at the time I wrote “Democratic dictatorship vs. permanent revolution”.
Polemicising in March-April 1905 from his Swiss exile against the right
Menshevik, Alexander Martynov, who stressed the strictly limited bourgeois
character of the revolutionary upheaval, Lenin wrote:
…[The
revolutionary Social-Democrat ]… will not confine himself on the eve of the
revolution to pointing out what will happen “if the worst comes to the worst”.
Rather, he will also show the possibility of a better outcome. He will
dream—and he is obliged to dream if he is not a hopeless philistine—that, after
the vast experience of Europe, after the unparalleled upsurge of energy among
the working class in Russia, we shall succeed in lighting a revolutionary
beacon that will illumine more brightly than ever the path of the unenlightened
and downtrodden masses; that we shall succeed… in realising all the democratic
transformations, the whole of our minimum programme, with a thoroughness never
equalled before. We shall succeed in ensuring that the Russian revolution is not a movement of a few months, but a
movement of many years… And if we succeed in achieving this, then… the
revolutionary conflagration will spread to Europe; the European worker… will
rise in his turn and show us “how it is done”; then the revolutionary upsurge
in Europe will have a repercussive effect upon Russia and will convert a few
revolutionary years into an era of several revolutionary decades; then—but we
shall have ample time to say what we shall do “then”, not from the cursed
remoteness of Geneva, but at meetings of thousands of workers in the streets of
Moscow and St. Petersburg, at the free village meetings of the Russian
“muzhiks”. [2]
And, writing in September of the
same year, still in exile:
…we shall
certainly be with the rural proletariat, with the entire working class, against the peasant bourgeoisie. In
practice this may mean the transfer of the land to the class of petty peasant proprietors—wherever
big estates based on bondage and feudal servitude still prevail, and there are as
yet no material conditions for large-scale socialist production; it may mean
nationalisation—given complete victory of the democratic revolution—or the big
capitalist estates being transferred to workers’
associations, for from the democratic revolution we shall at once, and
precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the
class-conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist
revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half-way. [3]
(emphases in the original)
It is undeniable that in these two passages—the
first written before, and the second written after, the publication of his most
definitive revolutionary prospectus, Two
Tactics (July, 1905)--Lenin envisages the possibility of the revolution
exceeding the bourgeois-republican bounds he sets for it in the latter work and
many other articles. These quotations lend some support to Jack Conrad’s
argument that Lenin, not unlike Trotsky, saw the transition from the democratic
revolution to proletarian dictatorship as a single, uninterrupted process,
without a change in political regime, and therefore had a perspective similar
to Trotsky’s. Was Lenin simply contradicting himself?
Any student of Lenin’s writings
is puzzled at first by the numerous inconsistencies to be found there. The
inconsistencies become more understandable when we consider that Lenin
approaches various situations not merely from the standpoint of a scholar whose only concern is for theoretical
lucidity, but from that of a revolutionary combatant, using Marxism to
interrogate not only the most likely outcome of unfolding events, but also
straining at the outer limits of
possibility—“dreaming”, as he puts it. Lenin no doubt considered it his
responsibility to set out what he thought to be the most probable scenario, the
one he saw as likely to take place without the immediate assistance of the proletariat
of the more advanced countries, and limited by the petty bourgeois craving of
the peasant for a plot of his own. This is the scenario upon which he bases Two Tactics. But Trotsky wrote that for Lenin, no
theoretical schema stood higher than reality. Hence Lenin regarded this
scenario—a revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ dictatorship, followed by a
constituent assembly, followed by an extended period of capitalist development--
as the most probable future trajectory. He did not, however, see this
projection as graven in stone, and saw the revolution as an open-ended process,
whose outcome depended upon two factors that were not entirely predictable:
first, the extent to which an offensive of Russian workers and peasants would
stimulate the workers of other European countries to revolt, and the degree to which their revolt might rebound
back on Russia, and, second; the extent to which landless peasants—the rural
proletariat—could be brought into alliance with industrial workers to bring
about a collectivist, as opposed to a petty-bourgeois proprietary, solution to
the agrarian question.
We will refrain from commenting
here upon the realism of these two prospects. But it can be safely said that
the fact that the February revolution of 1917, occurring , unlike the 1905
revolution, amidst a world war that plunged
Europe into the abyss, was probably the major factor inclining Lenin to place
his bets on a fully socialist Russian revolution as part of a larger,
more-or-less simultaneous, European conflagration. To this he added that the cards within Russia had
been differently dealt than anticipated in 1905. Instead of bourgeois, peasant
and proletarian parties fighting things out in a single constituent assembly,
there had arisen the phenomenon of dual power: an unelected bourgeois
provisional government (which rightwing socialists soon joined), and democratically elected workers and soldiers’
soviets, which allowed the workers, through the largely peasant army, to exert
a radicalising influence on the peasantry as a whole, independently of the
bourgeoisie . These two circumstances moved Lenin to view as possible, even
inevitable, the devoutly to be wished consummation of uninterrupted revolution that he had only glimpsed
as an outside chance in 1905.
‘Old Bolshevism’
Lenin’s exceptional 1905 probing
of the outer limits of revolution did
not, however, translate into a definite programme, or comprise the expectations
that settled into the mind of the average Bolshevik, or even the party’s other
top leaders. Far more often had Lenin reiterated
that theirs was a bourgeois revolution, not to be confused with the socialist
one; that the revolutionary dictatorship was separate and distinct from the
“commune state”, aka the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin’s churning intellect,
conjuring with various permutations and possibilities, was one of the things
that set him apart as a genius of revolution. Followers of lesser cerebral
fertility, on the other hand, felt the need for a stock formula for the future.
They found it, not without encouragement from Lenin, in the Bolshevik version
of a two-stage revolution.
The events of 1917 demonstrate that theory, far from being a
purely mental exercise, can have profound implications for practice. The
Bolshevik party contained deep reserves of revolutionary experience and ardour
that made many of its rank and file recoil instinctively from the critical
support to the Provisional Government offered by Kamenev, Stalin and Muranov in
their capacity as editors of Pravda in
March of 1917, and made it possible for Lenin to reorient the party in the short
interval of a single month. Yet not until his return could even the most
militant Bolsheviks answer the theory of stages that the recently returned Pravda editors and many other senior Bolsheviks
invoked in support of their advocacy of pressuring the Provisional Government
from the left, as opposed to overthrowing it.
Lars T Lih and Jack Conrad assert
that Lenin’s return changed nothing of fundamental importance, and that the
notion that he rearmed the party originated with Trotsky’s Lessons of October,
published in 1924. My most recent article (“The Bolsheviks and
Democracy”, Weekly Worker, 1Nov.) attempted to recount the major events of the
anti-Trotsky campaign being waged by the ruling triumvirs of that
year—Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin—to which Trotsky’s Lesson’s of October was at least partly a defensive response rather
than the attempt at self-aggranisement of
Conrad’s telling. In what follows, I
will summon the testimony of contemporary
witnesses, some of whom had few warm feelings for Trotsky, to establish that
Lenin’s struggle to reorient the Bolsheviks in April of 1917 was far from a
myth promulgated by Trotsky in 1924. I will also attempt to show that there was indeed a
Bolshevik right clustred around Kamenev, which more or less clung to Lenin’s
more widely known 1905 “Old Bolshevik” perspectives--of a revolution limited to
a bourgeois-democratic ‘minimum programme’, and culminating in a constituent
assembly—as their guiding light.
From the Witness Box
Probably the most widely read
account of Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd in April comes from the memoirs of the left-Menshevik, Nikolai Sukhanov, who
attended several of Lenin’s speeches propounding the April Theses to the Bolsheviks
and wider socialist audiences. Sukhanov recollects:
The Bolsheviks were still in a state of
bafflement and perplexity. And the support Lenin found may underline more
clearly than anything else his complete intellectual isolation, not only among Social-Democrats
in general but also among his own
disciples… Lenin was supported by no one but [Alexandra] Kollontai (a recent Menshevik), who rejected any
alliance with those who could not and
would not accomplish a social revolution! Her support called forth nothing but laughter,
and hubbub. (emphasis added)[4]
Lars T Lih disparages Sukhanov’s
testimony as motivated by his strong Menshevik inclination to make Lenin appear
more extreme that he actually was. One can only wonder what motives Lih would
impute to another member of the audience at the first full-length speech in
which Lenin propounded the April Theses, the veteran sailor-Bolshevik Felix
Raskolnikov, who writes:
The most
responsible party workers were represented here, but even for them what Ilyich
[Lenin] said constituted a veritable revelation. It laid down a Rubicon between
the tactics of yesterday and those of today… It was not without cause that our
party’s tactics did not follow a straight line, but after Lenin’s return took a
sharp turn to the left.[5]
In his History of the Russian Revolution (1932), and his Stalin, published in 1941 from an
unfinished manuscript Trotsky was still working on at the time of his
assassination the previous year, the author cites a number of independent sources to corroborate his account of Lenin’s
re-arming of the party in 1917. Since, however, most of the quotations he
supplies are not referenced in these works, and therefore not available for
verification to readers, I shall refrain from reproducing them here and confine
myself to quoting only carefully
referenced materials. (A special note of appreciation in this regard must go to
the outstanding scholar of Bolshevism and the October Revolution, Paul Le
Blanc, for mining several of these sources.)
One such source is Angelica
Balabanova, the Russian-Italian Marxist who became recording secretary for the
Communist International:
I had been
trained, like most Marxists, to expect the social revolution to be inaugurated
in one of the highly industrialized countries, and at the time Lenin’s analysis
of the Russian events seemed to me almost utopian.[6]
Another is Alexandra Kollontai,
who, as one of Lenin’s closest collaborators at the time, was instrumental in
attempting to route his articles from Geneva to Petrograd from her place of
exile in Stockholm, and who soon returned to Petrograd herself. She
corroborates Sukhanov’s account:
I was in substantial
agreement with Lenin and stood closer to him than many of his older followers
and friends. [In many meetings in April] I was the only one of his party
comrades who took the floor to support his theses.[7]
Moving from leading party strata to a rank-and-file Bolshevik military
organisation, we have the testimony of A. F. Ilvin-Ganevsky, a navy
sub-lieutenant stationed near the Finnish border:
In the
[Bolshevik] Committee there were two points of view on the political situation,
one more moderate, approaching the point of view of Kamenev at that time, and
the other more revolutionary, based on the famous theses of Lenin immediately
on his arrival from abroad…[8]
Then there are the words of
Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya:
Lenin expounded
his views on what had to be done in a number of theses…The comrades [in attendance at a meeting of the Soviet at
the Taurida Palace on April 4] were somewhat taken aback for the moment. Many
of them thought that Ilyich was presenting the case in much too blunt a manner,
and that it was too early yet to speak of a socialist revolution.
…
A struggle
started within the Bolshevik organization. It did not last long. A week later a
general city conference of the Bolsheviks of Petrograd took place at which
Ilyich’s point of view was upheld.[9]
We are also privileged to have
the late-life recollections of that well known purveyor of ‘Trotskyite’ myths,
V. M. Molotov. Molotov was Stalin’s foreign minister, and one who remained
loyal to the vozhd (supreme leader),
even after Stalin had his wife deported to the gulag. Being the highest ranking Bolshevik in Petrograd before the
return of Kamenev, Muranev and Stalin in March of 1917, Molotov was briefly
editor of Pravda, which under his
direction took a line much more hostile to the Provisional Government than the
trio that soon replaced him and corrected his ‘leftist’ deviation:
We Bolsheviks were
suddenly confronted with a different direction. Lenin later spoke to a very
small group, about forty-five persons, no more…
In Petrograd I sat at the presidium of a
party conference while Lenin took the floor and said: The danger to us now
comes from the old Bolsheviks who do not understand that we have entered a new
stage. They think we have a democratic revolution. But we should move to
socialist revolution! What!—to socialist revolution?
I had never opposed Lenin, but neither I nor
any of those who were always with Lenin immediately grasped the sense of his
message. All Bolsheviks spoke about democratic revolution, now behold—socialist
revolution!
Well, after all, Kamenev was a Bolshevik,
Rykov was a Bolshevik—yet they did not understand matters Lenin’s way. They
asserted, as usual, that we were still at the stage of democratic revolution…
[Lenin said] The main danger lies within the party. Not because [the old
Bolsheviks] are bad people but because their minds have not made a U-turn. I
was ready to lay down my life for certain goals, but the goals suddenly
changed: one needed to think things over again, and that was not so simple.
Lenin had opened our eyes.[10]
Finally, we have this retrospective
look at 1917:
The party—its
majority… adopted a policy of pressure by the Soviets on the Provisional
Government in the question of peace, and did not decide at once to take the
step forward from the old slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat and
peasantry to the new slogan of power for the Soviets. This half-and-half policy
was intended to give the Soviets a chance to detect in the concrete questions
of peace the imperialist nature of the Provisional Government and so to detach
them from it. But it was a profoundly mistaken position since it bred pacifist
illusions, added fuel to the flames of defencism and hindered the revolutionary
uprising of the masses. This mistaken position I shared with other party
comrades, and renounced completely only in the middle of April when I adhered
to Lenin’s theses.[11]
The above are the words of Joseph
Stalin in 1924, when memories of the revolution were still too fresh for its
history to be falsified completely. Such a thorough rewriting took place in 1939,
with the publication of the infamous Short
course. This shamelessly doctored history of the Bolshevik party (“paper
will take anything that is written on it”, as the vozhd once remarked) has Stalin siding with Lenin from the very
beginning.
I
rest my case against the claim that Lenin’s rearming of the party was a myth
invented by Trotsky in 1924 .
No Bolshevik Right?
A corollary to the Conrad-Lih
“fully armed” thesis is that there was no coherent right wing of the Bolshevik
Party in 1917, and that there were no
lasting or important differences between Lenin and Lev Kamenev, who is usually thought of as the
most consistent spokesman of the Bolshevik right. Lars T Lih, in fact, performs
prodigies of tortured exegesis to prove that the Pravda editorial, penned by
Kamenev immediately upon his return from exile—seen by many on the
Bolshevik left to take a position of revolutionary defencism in the war and
critical support for the Provisional Government—represented nothing more than a
temporary tactical misunderstanding between Kamenev and Lenin. Lih says the
same thing about a second Pravda editorial,
written by Kamenev after the publication of Lenin’s April theses in that paper,
asserting that the theses represented only Lenin’s personal point of view and
not that of the party, and were “unacceptable”
because the bourgeois stage of the revolution was not completed. Yet I think
Lih would have difficulty explaining why these presumed tactical differences
persisted through the entire month of April, up to the eve of the October
Revolution, and even after the conquest of power.
Lenin won the support of the
Bolshevik majority for his April Theses at two crucial conferences: the
Petrograd City conference in mid-April, and the all-Russian Bolshevik
conference at the end of the same month (or the beginning of May by the Western
calendar). Yet at both these conclaves Kamenev continued to oppose Lenin’s call
for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and power to the soviets on the
basis that the bourgeois revolution was still in progress. E.H. Carr, the most
prominent English-language historian of the Russian Revolution, describes how
Kamenev persisted in opposing Lenin, even against his newly acquired party
majority:
…Now only
Kamenev presented a coherent defence of the policies accepted by all leading
Bolsheviks in Petrograd before the presentation of the April Theses. The main
issue was narrowed down to the question of whether, as Lenin proposed, the
party should work for a transfer of power to the Soviets, or whether, as
Kamenev desired, it should be content with the ‘most watchful control’ of the
Provisional government by the Soviets, Kamenev being particularly severe on
anything that could be construed as incitement to overthrow the government. In
the decisive vote, Kamenev’s amendment was defeated by twenty votes to six.[12]
Nor did Kamenev abandon his
position at the later April conference, even when opposed by other prominent
Bolsheviks, including his fellow Pravda editor
. “At the conference,” writes Carr, “the tide flowed still more strongly in
Lenin’s favour. Stalin briefly, and Zinoviev at greater length, supported him against Kamenev”[13]
(emphasis added)
That Kamenev and Zinoviev were
the only two members of the Bolshevik Central Committee to vote against Lenin’s
plan for an insurrection, and that they both publicly denounced the plan in
Maxim Gorky’s Menshevik paper, Novaya
Zizhn, are well known. Less familiar are the efforts of Kamenev and his
cohorts to cobble together an all-socialist Soviet government after the seizure of power. When the
Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Trotsky, rejected their efforts to negotiate a broad
coalition with the Mensheviks and Right Socialist Revolutionaries, six leading party
members—Kamenev, Rykov, Zinoviev, Nogin and Miliutin—collectively resigned in
protest from the party’s Central Committee. Though they never organised
themselves into a formally declared
faction, these individuals (with the exception of Zinoviev, who did not
consistently adhere to the right) formed a distinct “moderate” current of
opinion within the Bolshevik Party of 1917. To the above names can be added
Lunacharsky, Tomsky and Kalinin.
Why did Lenin and Trotsky so
adamantly reject the notion of an all-socialist Soviet government? The answer
is that the non-Bolshevik socialists, with whom such a coalition Kamenev and
company proposed, had all along rejected the idea of breaking with bourgeois
parties and putting the soviets in power. Inviting them into government would
have been tantamount to undoing the October Revolution. (The one non-Bolshevik
party that did accept the soviet-power framework, the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries, was soon invited by the Bolsheviks to join a coalition
government).
Earlier, in September, in the
wake of a failed coup attempt by a Tsarist officer and aspiring rightwing
strongman, Lavr Kornilov, the question arose of forming an all-socialist coalition
in place of Kerensky’s Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks even at one point
expressed a willingness to abandon their intention to overthrow the Provisional
Government if the then-existing cross class coalition were replaced by a
government comprised exclusively of socialist groups, excluding all bourgeois
parties. Such a proposal gained widespread support among many Mensheviks and Socialist
Revolutionaries (SRs). Alexander
Kerensky, however, vetoed not only any proposal that would exclude bourgeois parties, but even a
far more moderate suggestion to exclude the principal bourgeois party, the Cadets
(Constitutional Democratic Party), which was deeply implicated in the Kornilov
affair. Kerensky, on the contrary, handed the Cadets key cabinet portfolios.
Yet the “moderate” socialists who then held a majority on the Soviet executive
still refused to withhold support from the Provisional Government, Kerensky’s
insistence on including the most reactionary bourgeois elements
notwithstanding.
A few months later, immediately
after the Bolshevik seizure of power, a proposal was put forward by the left
Menshevik, Jules Martov, for the formation of a soviet government that would
include all socialist parties. The Bolshevik delegates to the Soviet at the
time accepted Martov’s proposal. The Right SRs and a majority of Mensheviks,
however, walked out of the Soviet rather than legitimating its newly
established power by joining such a government.
After the soviet power became an
accomplished fact, the same socialists who had recently walked out returned,
now themselves demanding a coalition of all socialist parties. They had one
important condition, however: that any such soviet coalition government exclude
Lenin and Trotsky. It was in answer to this coalition-government demand that
Trotsky, speaking from the rostrum of the Soviet, famously relegated these
‘compromisers’ to the “dustbin of history”. And it was such a coalition—of the Bolsheviks
with socialists who had consistently refused to break with the bourgeoisie and consistently
opposed soviet power—that Kamenev and his confreres proposed to welcome into
the first soviet-power regime. Jack Conrad can dilate all he likes about
Lenin’s ‘close comrades’, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Yet the fact is that, at this
crucial juncture, Lenin’s closest comrade in resisting the vacillations of the
Bolshevik right, and putting the soviet power on a firm basis, was Leon
Trotsky.
There is reason to believe that
the “moderation” of Kamenev and his co-thinkers involved more than a deficit of
revolutionary mettle. If they supported the passage of political power to the
soviets, which many certainly did, it may not have been because they, like
Lenin and Trotsky, saw it as a step to proletarian dictatorship and, with the
aid of the international revolution, to socialism. There is evidence to suggest
that Lenin’s 1905 ‘Old Bolshevik’
perspective still figured as a significant strand of their outlook; they tended to see soviet power as the
fulfilment of Lenin’s aim of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and
peasantry. In this optic, the rule of
the soviets was not an end in itself, but either a complement to the
Constituent Assembly, or, even more in keeping with Lenin’s Two Tactics, a transition point in a process of which an all-class Constituent Assembly was
the culmination. Zinoviev and Kamenev wrote in On the Present Situation, their famous pre-insurrection dissent:
The chances of our party in the elections to
the Constituent Assembly are excellent….l
…
…The Soviets, which have become rooted in
life, can not be destroyed. The Constituent Assembly will be able to find
support for its revolutionary work only in the Soviets. The Constituent
Assembly plus the Soviets—this is that combined type of state institutions
toward which we are going. It is on this political basis that our party is
acquiring enormous chances for a real victory.[14]
Kamenev’s ally, Viktor Nogin, saw
even less of a future for the soviets (if I may be permitted a single
unreferenced citation from Trotsky, the authenticity of which I have no doubt):
In the process
of development the most important functions of the soviets will fall away. A
whole series of administrative functions will be transferred to the municipal,
district and other institutions. If we examine the future development of the
structure of the state, we cannot deny that the Constituent Assembly will be
convoked and after that the Parliament… Thus it follows that the most important
functions of the soviets will gradually wither away. That, however, does not
mean to say that the soviets will end their existence in ignominy. They will
only transfer their functions. Under these same soviets we shall not achieve
the commune-republic in our country.[15]
Thus the weight of evidence
suggests that there were two revolutionary perspectives at work in the mind of
the Bolsheviks in 1917: one that aimed at proletarian revolution and socialism--
formulated most clearly and unequivocally by Trotsky in his 1906 work Results and Prospects, which propounded
the theory of permanent revolution--and adumbrated in certain respects by Lenin
in the two obiter dicta quoted above.
It was to this perspective, arrived at via his own thinking, that Lenin,
through the extraordinary force of his revolutionary imagination and political
will, won the majority of his party in April of that momentous revolutionary year.
Yet a Bolshevik minority of more cautious and conservative temperament still
took refuge in the earlier two-stage scenario promulgated and emphasised by
Lenin in Two tactics in of
social-democracy in the democratic revolution (1905), even after Lenin himself
had relegated this ‘Old Bolshevik’ prognosis to the museum of antiques. It is
true that Trotsky did not possess the political authority to actualise his views.
The critical element in the success of the October Revolution was the existence
of the instinctively revolutionary and battle-tempered party that Lenin and
others had laboured to build over previous years. But without the evolution of
Lenin’s views, the Bolsheviks would never have gained the adherence of the revolution’s
second-greatest leader. And without a determined struggle for that changed
perspective on Lenin’s part, and his and Trotsky’s efforts to resist the counsels of a minority still acting on the basis of the old
two-stage theory, the vast rising of the Russian masses in 1917 may have gone
down in history with the Paris Commune as another valiant but ill-fated episode
in the history of class struggle.
[1] “The
revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”, Collected Works, (Moscow, 1962), Vol.
8, p. 302
[2]
“Social-Democracy and the Provisional Revolutionary Government”, CW,
Vol. 8, Pp. 287-288
[3]
“Social-Democracy’s Attitude Towards the Peasant Movement”, CW, Vol. 9, Pp. 236-237
[4] Boris
Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917,
Oxford, 1984, p. 288
[5] Quoted
in “Paul Le Blanc: Re-Arming the Party: Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolution in
1917” from F. F. Raskolnikov, Kronstadt
and Petrograd in 1917, London, 1972, pp 76-77)
[6] Quoted by Paul Le Blanc, op. cit,
from My Life as a Rebel by Angelica
Balabanoff, Bloomington, pp. 143-144)
[7] Quoted a Sexually Emancipated Communist by Le Blanc, Ibid. from The Autobiography of Woman, (New York,
1975, pp. 27, 31)
[8] Quoted by Le Blanc, op. cit., from A.
F. Ilyin Genevsky, From the February to
the October Revolution 1917, New York, 1970, p. 27)
[9]
N.K. Krupsaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, New
York, 1960, pp. 348-349
[10] Molotov Remembers, Chicago, 1993, pp.
93-94
[11]
Quoted in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution,
Vol. 1, Middlesex, 1984, pp. 87-88), p.87
[12] Ibid. p. 93
[13] Ibid., p. 93
[14]
Zinoviev Internet Archive
[15]
Quoted in The Lessons of October by
Leon Trotsky, which appears as part of a larger volume of Trotsky’s writings, The Challenge of the Left Opposition
(1923-25), New York, 1975, pp. 218-219.
Jim Creegan can be
reached at egyptianarch@gmail.com
Jim Creegan
New York,
17 December, 2018
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