The Red Flag: A History of Communism (14 page)

Syndicalists had a good deal of support in France, Italy and Spain. They even flourished in the United States, under the banner of the Industrial Workers of the World – the ‘Wobblies’. In Germany they had very little influence, though their views were not too far from a group of radical Marxists in the SPD surrounding Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg, like the old Radical Marx, had faith in the revolutionary capabilities of the proletariat, and accused Kautsky and the SPD leadership of neglecting them in favour of reforms that merely buttressed the capitalist system. Eager for revolutionary politics, she travelled illegally to Warsaw (then part of the Russian empire) at the end of 1905 to take part in the revolution, and was arrested and imprisoned for several months. On her return to Germany, she urged that the SPD follow the Russian example and use mass strikes to mobilize the working class. Predictably, her ideas were opposed by Kautsky, who feared that mass action would threaten his sacrosanct party organization.

However, it was foreign, not internal affairs that would ultimately destroy the unity of Marxism, as Marxists found that they had to respond to the increasing power of imperialism and nationalism. Marxists prided themselves on their internationalism, and their leaders were part of a transnational community. Wars abroad, empires and mass armies were anathema. They therefore tried to stress the overriding importance of domestic inequality between classes. Some also tried to adapt Marxism to explain a new international inequality: between Europe and the colonized world. Marxist theorists like Rudolf Hilferding and Rosa Luxemburg developed a new view of an ‘imperialist’ capitalism. If in the 1840s the main forces of history had been capital and labour, half a century later the nation state and empire had joined them. Aggressive monopoly capitalists, they argued, had forged an alliance with states, and together they waged wars to dominate the colonized world.

Internationalists had some support from industrial workers who did not identify with the nation state. The international community of workers, united under the slogan ‘Workers of All Lands Unite’, seemed much more comfortable a home for many workers than an ‘imagined community’, as they saw it, created by aristocrats, liberal middle classes and generals.

The International’s Stuttgart Congress of 1907 therefore denounced imperialism and nationalism. But orthodox internationalism came under pressure from revisionists – people like Bernstein and the British Labour Party’s Ramsay MacDonald. They saw the advantages of empire for jobs, and believed that support for imperialist foreign policies was a price that had to be paid if workers were to be integrated into the nation state; some also sympathized with imperialist claims that they were bringing civilization to the colonial world.

But even orthodox Marxists found it difficult to resist the pressure to support the war effort as peace broke down in 1914, partly because many had implicitly nationalistic attitudes, and partly because they were afraid of the alternative.
⁹⁸
If they opposed the war, there was always the risk that trade unions and Marxist parties would be banned in the name of national security. Also, the French feared a German regime that might be repressive towards workers, whilst the Germans and Austrians feared the even more reactionary Russians; and whilst the French socialist party largely saw the war as a defensive one against German aggression, the German party saw it as resistance to Russian barbarism and autocracy. As the SPD leader Hugo Haase told a French socialist, ‘what the Prussian boot means to you the Russian knout means to us’.
⁹⁹

When war came in August 1914 Marxist leaders were wholly unprepared. But it was no surprise that all socialist parties bar two decided to vote for war credits. Some leaders, including Kautsky, tried to stand against the nationalistic tide, but they soon sacrificed principle to pragmatism and the desire for unity. Victor Adler, the head of the Austrian party, summed up the dilemma of international Social Democracy:

It looked as if the International, and Marx’s dream, was dead. Most Marxists in Europe had signed up to what they had previously denounced as ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and ‘imperialism’. They were now part of a war effort in alliance with national elites.

Having emerged from an amalgam of Romantic socialisms, Marxism became a movement of revolutionary radicalism, before evolving into a Modernist Marxism, which then increasingly yielded to a more Pragmatic, reformist socialism. But a new cycle was soon to begin, as the revolutionaries once again seized the initiative in the international Communist movement. Although it appeared that elites and capitalists were in the ascendant in 1914, they were to be virtually destroyed by war, their nationalism discredited. Only three years later it looked as if the majority of Marxist parties had made the wrong call and lost the moral high ground.

The beneficiaries of this error were the parties within the International that had stood firm against the nationalist current: the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (both the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions), their allies, the small Serbian party, and the Italian socialists (PSI). Bernstein might have been right to insist, contra Marx, that the German working classes did have a fatherland, but the situation in Russia was very different. There many ordinary people felt deeply alienated from the national project, and war was to strain relations between them and the state to breaking point. Marx had been mistaken to think that he could transfer the banner of revolution from Paris to Berlin. Berlin was merely a transit point on its journey eastwards: to St Petersburg.

In November 1927, Soviet citizens were treated to a number of films made for the tenth anniversary of the October revolution. This was a golden era of film-making, and the Bolsheviks could call on several talented directors to tell the story of the revolution and explain its meaning, including the already famous Sergei Eisenstein. But it was Vsevolod Pudovkin’s
End of St Petersburg
that elicited the greatest acclaim among the party elite. Pudovkin’s film presented revolution as a resolutely modernizing force. It tells the story of 1917 through the life of a peasant – ‘the Lad’ – who is forced by poverty to move from the countryside to St Petersburg. In a classic Soviet ‘socialist realist’ plot-line, the Lad makes a journey from ignorance to political ‘consciousness’. He finds work by joining a group of strike-breakers. But he soon learns to despise the tsarist secret police, and sees how cruel the bosses are towards their workers. He turns against the regime, is briefly imprisoned, and is then released to fight the Germans; whilst in the army he becomes a Bolshevik, and ultimately joins the assault on the Winter Palace.
¹

Pudovkin, then, insists that the peasant masses had become both modern and revolutionary. He also shows how the revolution took up the baton of modernization, dropped by the
ancien régime
, using the motif of the famous St Petersburg equestrian statue, the ‘Bronze Horseman’. Ever since Alexander Pushkin wrote his famous poem on the subject in 1833, this monument to Peter the Great – the ruler who founded St Petersburg as a European-style city in 1703 – had become a symbol of the tsars’ occasional harsh efforts to modernize Russia. Pudovkin followed Pushkin in presenting the Bronze Horseman as a symbol of the state’s brutality, as well as of its modernizing ambitions.
During his scenes of the storming of the Winter Palace, he intercuts images of the Bronze Horseman with frames of the classical statues surmounting the Palace, as they are destroyed by the guns of the invading Bolsheviks. Pudovkin is suggesting that the Bolsheviks will end tsarist arrogance. But he makes it clear that they will not destroy the modernity brought by Peter. Soaring cranes replace the elegant classical statues, and an anonymous worker holds up his hand commandingly, evoking the Bronze Horseman’s masterful gesture. Pudovkin tells his audience that the revolution will continue the work of Peter. But the new bronze horsemen bringing modernity will be the workers, not their erstwhile lords.

Pudovkin’s drama showed how far the image of revolution had altered since the days of Delacroix, and how influential Modernist Marxism had become. His was a violent revolution, but it was also much more modern and scientific even than Delacroix’s. Machines and metal had taken the place of billowing robes and blood-stained flags. Yet in many ways Pudovkin’s story departed from the conventional Modernist Marxism of Kautsky and the German Social Democrats. The hero was not a solid worker, but a peasant who had only recently entered proletarian ranks. Also, Pudovkin’s revolution was not only going to bring social justice; it would inherit a state-building project from a failing regime, and bring modernity to a poor, peasant country.

Pudovkin’s film was well received by the members of the Bolshevik elite who watched it at its first showing in Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, largely because he had captured the essence of Lenin’s revolution.
²
Lenin was trying to forge a new combination of Radical and Modernist Marxism, suitable for a society that orthodox Marxists thought much too backward to experience a revolution. As the French Jacobins had found, it was precisely weak and failing states, with their repressive regimes, angry intelligentsias, urban workers and peasantries, which provided the most fertile ground for revolutions. Lenin was yoking a popular desire for equality with a plan to overcome backwardness, but by the 1920s he and the Bolsheviks had also added a crucial ingredient to the Marxist tradition. A specifically Russian organization, the militant, vanguard ‘party of a new type’ was to become the bearer of revolution and modernity.

In retrospect, though, Pudovkin’s story was unconvincing. The idea that peasants and workers would move rapidly from a populist socialism,
angry at injustices perpetrated by an elite, to become loyal Bolsheviks and dutiful citizens in a modern, planned economy, was a fanciful one. Soon after Lenin had seized power, he understood how much wishful thinking there had been in 1917. As the Jacobins discovered, it was impossible to marry ordinary people’s demands for equality with a project to create a powerful state. The chaos of revolution led many of the Bolsheviks to abandon their temporary flirtation with Radical Marxism. They now embraced a more Modernist Marxism: workers and peasants would have to be subjected to strict discipline. But soon they even realized that this order was unsustainable, and they retreated further, from a revolutionary Radicalism, to Modernist faith in science, to a Pragmatism that appealed to larger groups of the population.

In May 1896 the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II was celebrated in Moscow with extraordinary pomp – ‘Versailles relived’, according to one contemporary. The Tsar entered the city on a ‘pure white horse’, followed by representatives of subject peoples, each in national costume. The procession also included delegates of the social estates and the local governments (
zemstva
), as well as foreigners.
³
Despite the profusion of social and ethnic groups, though, the procession was designed to stress the empire’s unity. The newspaper
Moskovskie Vedomosti
declared:

The correspondent was mistaking propaganda for reality. As part of the government’s paternalistic attempts to involve the ordinary people in the coronation events, it had become customary to hold a ‘people’s feast’ on Khodynka Field, featuring plays and games for the entertainment of all. This year, however, more numbers than expected came and too few Cossack troops were deployed to control the crowds. As the festival began, there was panic, and between 1,350 and 2,000 were killed in the
crush. The public, domestic and international, were horrified by reports in the press. It was clear that for all his claims to be the head of the invincible Rus’, the Tsar’s government was a poorly managed shambles. Nor was the much-vaunted unity of Tsar and people in evidence. Though Nicholas expressed his regret at the events, the festivities were not cancelled, and that same evening he attended a lavish ball given by the French Ambassador. An English observer wrote, ‘Nero fiddled while Rome was burning, and Nicholas II danced at the French ball on the night of the Khodynskoe massacre.’
⁵
The future Bolshevik worker Semén Kanatchikov, arriving at the festival shortly after the disaster, similarly railed at the ‘irresponsibility’ and ‘impunity’ of the authorities.
⁶
The Khodynka affair was a bad omen for the Tsar – his grandiose pretensions at the coronation had been humiliatingly exposed, and he had responded with insouciant arrogance. There could be no clearer display of despotic decadence.

As the coronation rituals made clear, the Russian empire at the end of the nineteenth century was proud to be an
ancien régime
. Indeed, it consciously overtook pre-1789 France as the embodiment of reactionary principles. Paradoxically, its
ancien régime
was of relatively recent vintage. Just as Enlightenment
philosophes
were condemning hierarchy and difference, the tsars were entrenching them, and after its defeat of revolutionary France in the Napoleonic wars, the regime self-consciously styled itself the bastion of tradition and autocracy against enlightenment and revolution. Russia continued to be made up of a series of unequal estates, status groups and nationalities, each with their own specific legal privileges and obligations.
⁷
The peasants were notoriously disadvantaged, and before 1861 they were unfree – the last serfs in Europe.