The Red Flag: A History of Communism (18 page)

The crisis forced the Tsar to give in to the reforming Apollon Apollonoviches of his regime, and to allow elements of ‘society’ – members of educated society committed to modernization – a role in the war effort. In some ways this was successful, and by early 1917 Russia had destroyed the Habsburg army and was producing more munitions than the Germans.
⁵⁸
Yet the Russian monarchy’s partial attempts to transform itself from an
ancien régime
into a mobilized nation state, along the lines of Germany’s, only hastened its end. Its efforts to reform the food supply system were especially disruptive. A peculiar alliance of modernizing ministers and experts, including a future planner under the Bolsheviks, the Menshevik economist V. Groman, tried to replace the market in grain with state-led grain procurement. But the regime could not cope with the organization and transport of supplies, and the peasantry refused to sell grain for the low prices offered.
⁵⁹

Educated society blamed the Tsar for the economic and military disasters, and accusations of inefficiency became intertwined with the
poisonous charge of treason. It was commonly believed that Tsarina Alexandra, English in culture though German by birth, was at the centre of a conspiracy centred in Berlin to sabotage the war effort. Tsardom, a branch of the international European aristocracy, lacked the patriotic charisma to unite Russia against its enemies. And when, on 23 February 1917, protests against bread shortages by St Petersburg women developed into a general strike and soldiers’ mutinies, few were willing to defend the regime.

For a brief time Russians were united in favour of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Russia seemed to have experienced its 1789, and everybody was aware of the parallel. The ‘Marseillaise’ (or ‘
Marsiliuza
’) became the new regime’s national anthem, played at every opportunity, and forms of address based on the old hierarchy were abolished in favour of the terms ‘citizen’ (
grazhdanin
) and ‘citizeness’ (
grazhdanka
).
⁶⁰
Even French revolutionary festivals were imitated, with plans for a ‘grandiose-carnival spectacle’ in the Summer Garden in Petersburg, involving a cardboard city representing eighteenth-century Paris.
⁶¹
Yet, even though socialist party organizations had a minimal role in the February revolution, the new symbolism showed how much more radical the new dispensation was than its French predecessor. The socialist red flag, not a Russian tricolour, was flown over the Winter Palace and effectively became the national flag. It was at this time that the symbols of the urban and rural masses – the hammer and the sickle – first appeared, appended to the Marinskii Palace, the seat of the Provisional Government.
⁶²

Yet despite this apparent unity, signs of division between educated, liberal groups on the one side, and workers and peasants on the other, were soon evident. The word ‘comrade’ (
tovarishch
) – a socialist form of address – could be heard alongside ‘citizen’. And competing with the conventional ‘Marseillaise’, a hymn of praise to nationalist unity translated into a Russian context, was a ‘workers’ Marseillaise’, a socialist version. This exhorted its listeners to ‘kill and destroy’ ‘the parasites’, ‘the dogs’ and ‘the rich’. It also had another competitor, much preferred by all Marxist parties – the anti-nationalist ‘Internationale’, whose words had been written in 1871 by a member of the Paris Commune to the tune of the ‘Marseillaise’, but which had been given new music in 1888.
⁶³
Conflicts over symbols and songs were institutionalized from the very beginning of the February revolution in the existence of ‘dual power’. The Provisional Government, dominated by the propertied and
professional classes, ruled alongside the Petrograd (formerly Petersburg) Soviet, elected by the lower classes.

The Provisional Government was initially made up of liberals. But from March it included Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary (SR) members of the Soviet, and from July was led by the moderate socialist Aleksandr Kerenskii. The government was committed to liberal democracy and the rule of law, and declared itself a provisional body until one-man-one-vote elections could be held to a Constituent Assembly. It also sought to continue the war, though from the spring only a defensive one, against the Germans.

However, the Provisional Government found it no easier to enlist the support of workers and peasants into its vision of Russia than the Tsar’s reformist ministers. The political and cultural gap between the propertied and educated elites and the mass of the population was too great. The government tried to achieve a compromise on the war, continuing to fight but abandoning the Tsar’s old expansionist war aims. Yet following the failure of the offensive in June, it could not maintain discipline within the army, and elected soldiers’ committees believed it was their right to discuss whether to obey officers’ orders.
⁶⁴
In the countryside, the Provisional Government tried to end food shortages by creating an even tighter state grain monopoly, but peasants were no more willing to grow and sell than before. It made a start on addressing the peasants’ demands for land, but it was slow and cautious. It soon lost control of the countryside as peasants seized landlords’ property, with little fear of retribution.

The Provisional Government also granted concessions to workers, on wages and conditions, but again these were not enough. Conflicts between factory-owners and workers became more acrimonious. Managers who laid workers off were accused of ‘sabotage’, and workers’ factory committees demanded the right to supervise management, or ‘workers’ control’ over their factories.
⁶⁵
A massive wave of strikes ensued in September.

By the summer of 1917 the language of class struggle had permeated popular culture. Demands for the rule of the masses, operating through the soviets, and the overthrow of the ‘bourgeois’ Provisional Government – which, it was claimed, could not be a representative ‘people’s government’ – became common.
⁶⁶
As a resolution of the soldiers’ committee of the 92nd Transport Battalion declared in September:

In some cases, this type of language reflected an interest in socialism and Marxism. Anna Litveiko, a Ukrainian factory worker and future Communist Youth (Komsomol) member, remembered her idealism as a young woman:

Much more common among ordinary people, though, was not Marxism but a deep-rooted populist worldview. The socialist word ‘bourgeois’ (
boorzhui
) was a common insult, but underlying the revolutionary mood was less a Marxist economic critique of exploitation than a moral outrage at the remnants of
ancien régime
privilege. An officer, writing from the front, recognized the deep-seated resentment which his men displayed towards the socially privileged:

His observation was a perceptive one. The demand for dignity, so evident among Chernyshevskii’s students and clerks of the 1860s, had been passed on to workers from the 1890s, and many of the complaints of workers in 1917 were preoccupied with rudeness from superiors. The
first act of the Petrograd Soviet, Order No. 1, concerning the army, included the demand that officers address soldiers by the respectful ‘you’ (
vy
) rather than its informal equivalent (
ty
).
⁷⁰

Workers, therefore, increasingly demanded that organizations of the ordinary people, such as the soviets and factory, soldiers’ and village committees take power, whilst excluding the upper classes from politics. This did not mean they were necessarily opposed to the power of the state. In fact they commonly demanded that the state take harsh, dictatorial measures in the interests of the people against ‘enemies’; as the delegates of the sixth army corps declared in October, ‘the country needs a firm and democratic authority founded on and responsible to the popular masses’.
⁷¹
At a time of food shortages, collapsing transport and disorder, it is not surprising that people should have sought a stronger state and berated the Provisional Government for its weakness.

This popular worldview, that the ‘people’ should engage in a struggle against the privileged, and build a powerful, centralized people’s state, may not have been Marxist in origin, but it seemed to coincide with Lenin’s ideas, at least for a short time in mid-1917. He presented his political agenda most clearly in his powerful synthesis,
State and Revolution
, written during his temporary exile in Finland. In this crucial work, he reconciled the Modernist Marxism of planning and centralization with the Radical Marxism of proletarian democracy and class struggle. He first used Hilferding’s ideas to claim that the war had forged the economy into a single, centralized machine.
⁷²
At the same time, though, Lenin went back to the egalitarian Marx of 1848 and 1871. Workers, he claimed, would soon be able to run this simplified economy by themselves; in his famous phrase, any female cook could run the state. Granting special privileges to technical specialists was no longer justified. Marx’s dream – the merging of ‘mental and manual labour’ – would soon become a reality.

Lenin’s vision was therefore one of complete equality, not only economic and legal, but also social and political. Liberal democracy, where citizens elected deputies who in turn controlled officials, was not enough. Officials had to be directly elected by the masses, as had happened in the Paris Commune – the model for Lenin’s new ‘commune-state’. The state would then start to merge with the people, and all hierarchies would start to disappear. The vanguard party was barely mentioned.

Lenin, then, talked a great deal about ‘democracy’ in
State and Revolution
, but this was not a democracy of universal rights. Democracy for the proletariat was perfectly compatible with a violent repression of its enemies. Lenin’s commune-state was rather like a group of vigilante volunteers: it could suppress the ‘exploiters’ ‘as simply and readily as any crowd of civilized people… interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or prevent a woman from being assaulted’.
⁷³
Lenin had no qualms about violence, and described the proletariat as the ‘“Jacobins” of the twentieth century’.
⁷⁴
But he denied extensive repression would be necessary. Only a few demonstrative arrests, he insisted, would be required. Whilst the vigilante volunteers might initially be a minority, they would very soon expand into a ‘militia embracing the whole people’.
⁷⁵
This form of socialism, then, had a martial style, but it harked back to the barricades of 1848 and 1871; it had little in common with the conventional armies of World War I.

Did Lenin, a hard-nosed revolutionary, really take the utopian vision of
State and Revolution
seriously? Did he really believe that it would be so straightforward for workers to run the economy and the state? His language is ambiguous, and he may have planned a less egalitarian outcome. But as a Marxist ideologue, he was convinced that classes had single, coherent interests. If proletarians ran the state, there was no reason why it could not forge a consensus with the working class as a whole.

Of course, it soon became clear after the October Revolution that Lenin was wrong. Inevitably unity disintegrated into conflicts between the regime and society, within society, and amongst workers themselves. But in the radicalized Russia of 1917, the idea that a popular, revolutionary ‘General Will’ existed, and that it could rule through a state both ‘democratic’ and centralized, was not Lenin’s alone. It seemed to make sense, not only to him, but to large sections of the Russian working class.
⁷⁶

Lenin returned to Russia from exile in April 1917 determined to impose his uncompromising vision of class struggle on his party. Against the doubts of many of his fellow Bolsheviks Lenin insisted that power be transferred from the Provisional Government to the soviets. The time was not yet ripe for the end of the market, but the workers and peasants, not the bourgeoisie, had to lead and build the ‘commune-state’; meanwhile the soviets had to supervise the production and distribution of goods.