The Red Flag: A History of Communism (19 page)

The Bolsheviks, therefore, were the only major party outside the government, and they were calling for rule by the lower classes and an end to the war. The Menshevik high command continued to argue that a proletarian revolution would fail in a backward country like Russia, as did Kautsky and the Second International. In July, when the Provisional Government cracked down on the Bolsheviks and Lenin was again forced into exile, it looked as if he had miscalculated. But conditions were more similar to the France of 1789 than that of 1848 or 1871, and the middle-class forces of order could not rely on a peasant army to resist urban revolution. The Commander-in-Chief of the army, Kornilov, tried to use the army to restore discipline, and believed that he had Kerenskii’s support for the ‘coup’. But many of his soldiers would not obey, Kerenskii denied he was involved, and the episode undermined the Provisional Government as a whole.

The Bolsheviks’ popularity, conversely, increased. Even if most were unaware of the detailed policies of the party, it seemed to many that it was the only force that might save the revolution. It won formal majorities in both the Moscow and Petrograd soviets, and Lenin used this evidence of support to argue for the immediate seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. On 25 October the Petrograd Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee, led by Trotsky and other Bolsheviks, readily took control of the poorly defended Winter Palace. This was, then, a coup of sorts. The famous scene in Eisenstein’s film
October
of thousands swarming over the gates and invading the palace is pure fiction, but the Provisional Government’s failure to rally forces to defend itself, and the ease with which the Bolsheviks took over the major cities, shows how far the Bolshevik approach to politics in 1917 was in tune with the radicalism of many of the urban population. The Bolsheviks never won an all-Russia election. They were an urban party in an overwhelmingly rural country. But in the elections to the Constituent Assembly towards the end of 1917 they gained a majority of workers’ and 42 per cent of soldiers’ votes, and took 10.9 million votes out of 48.4 million. They also shared much of the programme of the victors of the election – the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Left SRs). So this was not, properly speaking, a ‘Bolshevik revolution’. It was a Bolshevik insurrection amidst a radical populist revolution, whose values were partly endorsed, for a very short time, by the Bolsheviks. The liberal alternative – of class compromise and the rule of law – supported by most of propertied and
educated Russia, had little chance of victory, for the mass of the population was simply too wedded to the radical redistribution of property and power. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were soon to retreat from their populism towards a much more authoritarian politics, and ultimately they only secured their power by force of arms in a civil war. The Bolshevik victory was therefore by no means inevitable, but some radical socialist outcome was likely. And once the Bolsheviks had taken power, however unpopular they might become, there was little desire for the return of the old order.

In 1923, the writer Isaak Babel published
Red Cavalry
, a series of stories about his experiences as a Bolshevik political agitator with Budennyi’s Cossack cavalry in the Polish war of 1920. The book received instant acclaim and was widely read. In one story, entitled ‘A Letter’, Babel told of the civil war within one peasant family through a fictional letter from the red cavalryman Vasilii Kordiukov to his mother. It is a peculiar document, poorly written, bland and matter-of-fact, peppered with banal descriptions of the places he has visited. But its subject matter is horrific: the bloody struggle between Vasilii’s father Timofei, a former tsarist policeman fighting with General Denikin’s anti-Bolshevik Whites, and his brothers Fedor and Semen, fellow soldiers with the Bolsheviks. His father, finding Fedor among Red prisoners of war, hacks him to death, only to be pursued by his other sons, intent on revenge. They finally find him. Semen, nicknamed ‘the wild one’, declares: ‘Papa… if I fell into your hands, I would find no mercy. So now, Papa, we will finish you off!’, and proceeds to slaughter him. The story ends with Vasilii showing the narrator a photograph of the whole family. Timofei, ‘a wide-shouldered police constable in a policeman’s cap… was stiff, with wide cheekbones and sparkling, colourless vacant eyes’; beside him sat his wife, a ‘tiny peasant woman… with small, bright, timid features’.

Many of Babel’s stories were about the gruesome violence he witnessed, and participated in, during the civil war, and his attempts to come to terms with it. As a Jewish intellectual among martial Cossack peasants, he was appalled by the casual brutality (and anti-Semitism) of men like the Kordiukov brothers. And yet he admired their bravery, and at times an unattractive Nietzschean power-worship creeps into his writing. The result is disconcerting – a deliberately distanced account of his cruel heroes, a firm refusal to judge.
⁷⁸
He cannot understand them; they are opaque with ‘vacant eyes’, as in a photograph. They are forces of nature, Aeschylean furies, seeking revenge for past wrongs.

This was, of course, not the world Lenin had expected to inherit. Lenin, whilst not a Nietzschean revelling in violence, was perfectly prepared to use it, and from early on he embraced class revenge. But he soon found it difficult to control; he insisted that the ‘masses’ had to be both revolutionary
and
disciplined. It was clear from the beginning that the transition to the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ would not go as smoothly as Lenin hoped.

The first challenge came from moderate socialists who objected to soviet, class power as opposed to liberal parliamentary rule. The delegates to the Constituent Assembly, 85 per cent of whom were socialists, insisted that they represented the Russian people, but Lenin denounced them as an example of ‘bourgeois parliamentarism’. Red Guards shot several supporters demonstrating in favour of the Assembly just before it convened in Petrograd’s Tauride Palace – the first time since February 1917 that troops had fired at unarmed crowds – and the Assembly was later broken up. The Left SRs survived in coalition with the Bolsheviks for four months, but by March 1918 it was clear to everybody that all power was being transferred to the Bolsheviks, not the soviets.

Lenin had claimed that power was to be passed to the soviets as a whole, but he never pretended to be a pluralist democrat, and it was no surprise that he refused to work with rival parties. At the same time, however, he seems to have taken his promises for some kind of ‘democracy’ within the working class seriously, and during the first months of Bolshevik rule, Lenin may have believed that the ambitious plans of
State and
Revolution
were realistic: popular initiative and centralization could coexist; or he may have merely been giving workers what they wanted when the party was weak. He continued to call for ‘workers’ democracy’, knowing how popular it was in the factories, and in November 1917 issued a Decree on Workers’ Control, which gave considerable powers to elected factory committees. The army also continued to be run in a ‘democratic’, or ‘citizens’ militia’ style, with soldiers electing officers. Lenin’s approach towards the peasantry was less Marxist, but it also gave in to the demands of the masses. Rather than creating large-scale, collective farms, as Marxist theory (and earlier Bolshevik policy) dictated, his Decree on Land gave the peasants what they wanted – they could keep their small plots and subsistence agriculture.

As Isaak Babel observed, for many ordinary people, the flip-side of ‘democracy’, or power to the masses, was ‘class struggle’, or revenge against the ‘bourgeoisie’ – as it had been for the
sans-culottes
. And in the first few months of the revolution Lenin was prepared to encourage this ‘popular’ terror. ‘Loot the Looters’ was the slogan of the moment, and in December 1917 Lenin declared a ‘war to the death against the rich, the idlers, the parasites’.
⁷⁹
However, he was happy to delegate the conduct of the struggle to local communities. Each town or village was to decide how to ‘cleanse’ Russia of these ‘vermin’: they might imprison them, put them to work cleaning latrines, give them special documents or ‘yellow tickets’ so that everybody could keep an eye on them (a treatment traditionally meted out to prostitutes), or shoot one in every ten.
⁸⁰

Lenin’s principles were embraced enthusiastically by party activists in Russia’s regions. Bolsheviks seized the goods of the rich, imposed special taxes on them, and took members of ‘bourgeois’ classes – the so-called ‘former people’ – as hostages. Anna Litveiko herself took part in a detachment to seize bourgeois property:

The experience of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie was, of course, traumatic, even for those who were not arrested or physically abused. Princess Sofia Volkonskaia remembered how the authorities forced her to accept lodgers to live in her flat:

In the early months, ‘class struggle’ permeated all aspects of life, including the symbolic world, and the Bolsheviks, like their Jacobin predecessors, were determined to create a new culture that would propagate their values. Petrograd, in particular, was the home to several mass theatrical events, echoing the plays and festivals of the Paris of 1793. One, ‘The Mystery of Liberated Labour’, was staged on May Day 1920. In front of the Petrograd Stock Exchange, a group of debauched kings and capitalists indulged in a drunken orgy, whilst toilers slaved to the sounds of ‘moans, curses, sad songs, the scrape of chains’. Waves of revolutionaries, from Spartacus and his slaves to the
sans-culottes
in their Phrygian caps, mounted attacks on the potentates’ banquet table, but were repulsed, until the star of the Red Army rose in the East. Finally the gates to the Kingdom of Peace, Freedom and Joyful Labour were destroyed, and within was revealed the liberty tree, around which the people danced, in the style of David. Huge numbers participated – 4,000 actors, workers and soldiers, merging at the end with 35,000 spectators.
⁸³

Lenin himself, however, had little interest in the carnivalesque theatre of class struggle. As Bely would have predicted, his view of the new revolutionary culture was much closer to Apollon Apollonovich’s. Moscow, the new capital of the revolution, was to be filled with statues of the revolutionary heroes and plaques bearing the principles of Marxism. Yet the conservative neo-classical taste favoured by Lenin, and much of the Muscovite populace, clashed with the modernism of
some of the sculptors. A cubo-futurist statue of Bakunin had to be hidden by wooden boards for fear of popular disapproval; when the partitions were stolen for firewood and the statue revealed, the authorities, fearing a riot, had to demolish it. The project, moreover, suffered from shortages of materials. In the end several temporary plaster and cement figures were erected, many of which were washed away by the rain.
⁸⁴
One statue of Robespierre suffered a different fate – destruction by a terrorist bomb. Bizarrely, one of the few to have survived to this day was originally built by the
ancien régime
: a marble obelisk constructed outside the Kremlin to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanovs in 1913, its inscription replaced with a remarkably eclectic list of Bolshevik ‘forefathers’, including Thomas More, Gerrard Winstanley, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Chernyshevskii and Marx.
⁸⁵

Given Lenin’s love of order, it was perhaps predictable that he would eventually abandon his brief flirtation with Radical Marxism. But it was the near destruction of the regime at the beginning of 1918 that forced his
volte-face
. The Bolsheviks had expected that revolution in Russia would be accompanied by a world revolution, and Germany’s proletariat would help the backward Russians to achieve socialism. Instead, however, German militarists were still in power, and were imposing humiliating peace terms. Lenin realized how weak his new state was and counselled acceptance, but he was outvoted on the Central Committee. As the Germans marched into Ukraine, the leaders continued to argue. At the last minute Trotsky changed his mind, and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk averted the almost certain fall of the regime. The hope that the revolution would be rescued by the expected revolution in Germany was clearly a dream.