The Red Flag: A History of Communism (21 page)

Trotsky came under attack from the Radical Marxist wing of the Bolshevik party on the left, who disliked his use of tsarist officers and favoured a more egalitarian model of society. A number of groups on the left – the ‘Left Communists’, the ‘Workers’ Opposition’ – condemned the party leadership for betraying its promises of ‘workers’ democracy’ and anti-bourgeois struggle. Meanwhile Bogdanov and his allies – more interested in Romantic, utopian ideas of workers’ cooperation and creativity than the conquest of political power – set up ‘proletarian culture’ organizations (Proletkults), which they believed would foster workers’ naturally collectivist psychology.
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Lenin banned Proletkults, seeing them as a rival to the party, and the political left was easily outvoted, but it remained a constant thorn in Lenin’s side.

However, even Lenin resisted Trotsky’s more ambitious projects. He was right to be sceptical. The Russian state was no more able to organize an efficient economic machine than it had been before the October revolution. Indeed, it was probably less able to. As it took over all areas of economic and social activity, it became a Hydra of proliferating, overlapping and competing organizations. At the same time, officials used their increased power for private gain, with corruption blackening the reputation of the regime. Everybody bemoaned the problem of careerist, amoral and uncontrollable bureaucrats. The Saratov Cheka described one party organization as a ‘mob of drunks and card sharks’, and Timofei Sapronov, a leftist Bolshevik, complained that ‘in many places the word “communist” is a term of abuse’ because officials lived in ‘bourgeois’ luxury.
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The hypocrisy of socialist officials living the high life only intensified popular dissatisfaction with the intrusive Bolshevik state. The harvest of
1920 was a poor one, and by the spring of 1921 much of rural Russia was starving. As in 1905 and 1917, shortages of food fuelled a potentially revolutionary insurgency. Peasants rebelled against state grain procurement throughout the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia. The most serious uprising was in Tambov, where the rebels called for a soviet power free of Bolshevik repression. They united behind a series of rather confused slogans: ‘Long live Lenin, down with Trotsky!’ and ‘Long live the Bolsheviks, death to the Communists!’
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Unrest soon spread to the towns and, most dangerously for the Bolsheviks, to the Kronstadt naval base, on an island near Petrograd. The Kronstadters had for long been on the more radical wing of the revolution. They had been ruled until the summer of 1918 by a coalition of radical leftist parties, and now demanded a return to rule by a freely elected soviet. They did not call for the overthrow of the Bolsheviks, but for an end to ‘war communism’, the destruction of Taylorism, and a return to the old ideals of October 1917.
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At the beginning of March 1921, the rebels organized new elections and for over two weeks created a mini commune-state. It looked as if a populist socialist revolution was brewing – a ‘third revolution’ – but this time the Bolsheviks would be its victims, not its beneficiaries.
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At precisely this time the tenth party congress was meeting, and Lenin faced a challenge within the party, from the Bolshevik left.

Lenin was faced with a stark choice. It was clear that the divisive ‘war communism’ model, with its heavy reliance on state power and coercion, had failed. The idea that the Russian people would work as cogs in an efficient machine was a fantasy, as was Trotsky’s dream of universal soldierly enthusiasm. Marx’s ‘socialist’ lower stage of Communism – centralized state control without the market – which war communism most closely resembled, was clearly not suited to Russia in 1921. This left a dilemma for the Bolsheviks. They could either return to the ‘commune-state’ of 1917 – an ‘advance’ towards Communism in Marxist terms – and rely yet again on working-class mobilization. Or they could ‘retreat’ towards capitalism. Lenin’s choice was never in doubt. The commune-state would only hasten disintegration and chaos, and was incompatible with the Bolsheviks’ modernizing ambitions. It also would not solve the main economic crisis, the shortage of food. It had become clear that the market alone would give peasants the incentives to grow grain. Lenin, unwillingly, was forced to allow peasant demands to sell grain on the open market. Shortly after he announced the ‘New Economic Policy’ (NEP), Bolshevik troops brutally put down the Kronstadt rebellion; at the same time a ‘ban on factions’ suppressed the leftist groups within the party, and the leadership ordered the first party ‘purge’ (
chistka
– or ‘cleansing’) of the politically unreliable and the class ‘impure’. In 1918 the Bolsheviks had responded to the regime’s near-collapse by centralizing power in the hands of the party; in 1921 they reacted to a second crisis by disciplining the party itself.

Lenin conceded that he had ‘retreated’ from the economic ambitions of 1919–20. ‘We made a mistake,’ he admitted, in thinking that the regime could eliminate the market, and moved too rapidly towards Communism. The Bolsheviks, he argued, had to adopt ‘state capitalism’.
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Lenin was worried about the reaction within the party, and insisted that full-blown capitalism was not on the cards; the heavy industry at the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy would still be nationalized. But the free market in grain had a cascade of effects throughout the economy:
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private traders – ‘nepmen’ – had to be permitted to operate, to supply grain to the towns; factories producing consumer goods, like textiles, had to be denationalized to produce goods peasants might want to buy in exchange for their grain. Subsidies to nationalized industries had to be cut, to control inflation – vital if peasants were to trust the currency. As a result, wages had to be cut, labour discipline tightened, and the power of managers and bourgeois specialists strengthened. The position of workers further deteriorated, and unemployment increased. For many workers and some Bolsheviks, this looked just like the old capitalist order. NEP had become the ‘New Exploitation of the Proletariat’. What had happened to socialism?

NEP rescued the Communists by appeasing the peasantry. The Bolsheviks, a tiny sect within the revolutionary intelligentsia, had ridden to power on the back of a popular revolution, but they found the construction of their Marxist state much more challenging. Their early revolutionary methods proved too disruptive, the Modernist vision was impractical, and the martial politics of the civil war created too much opposition. The Bolsheviks did find supporters, not so much within the urban working class, as amongst the young peasants who made up the Red Army. Nevertheless, the regime’s appeal was too narrow; and indeed, their economic system was unsustainable. Recognizing the need for greater support, the Bolsheviks moderated their
old sectarianism and concessions were made to the mass of the rural population.

The Bolsheviks may have avoided becoming victims of a new socialist revolution, but the crisis seems to have taken its toll on Lenin’s health. From 1920 to 1921 his exhaustion was evident. In May 1922 he had his first stroke, and he remained seriously ill until his death in January 1924. It is tempting to link his deteriorating health with the failure of his revolutionary hopes. Lenin’s unique contribution to Marxism in 1917 had lain in his ability to combine a hard-nosed commitment to modernization with a furious revolutionary impatience. In March 1921 this project was in ruins. Lenin was forced to accept that the semi-capitalism of NEP would last for a long time. Socialism would only be feasible once the working class had undergone a ‘cultural revolution’, by which Lenin seems to have meant education and the successful inculcation of the work ethic that he had himself learnt from his parents.
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He never admitted the charge of the Second International and the Mensheviks, that his revolution had been premature. But in practice he had reverted to a Marxism that had distinct echoes of Kautsky’s ‘revolutionary waiting’.

In 1920 the painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin was commissioned to design a building for the Third ‘Communist’ International (‘Comintern’), which Lenin had founded the previous year to rival the Second International of Social Democratic Parties. A ‘productivist’ artist, who sought to combine mathematical and geometrical forms with social usefulness, Tatlin did a good job of representing Modernist Marxism’s hierarchical and technocratic vision of politics. The monument was to be a Communist successor to the Eiffel Tower: it would demonstrate that the capital of the world revolution had moved from Paris to Moscow. It was a cross between a spiral and a pyramid. There were to be three rooms on top of each other, which were designed to rotate at different speeds. The largest, on the bottom, was for legislative assemblies, and was to rotate once a year; the next storey, designed for executive bodies, would turn once a month; the smallest room at the top would rotate daily, and would be ‘reserved for centres of an informative character: an information office, a newspaper, the issuing of proclamations, pamphlets and manifestoes’ by means of radio.
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The model became a classic of modern design, representing Soviet creativity to the avant-garde intelligentsia of the West. At a time of shortages and poverty it was a clearly utopian project. The model had to be made of wood, not the metal and glass planned for the actual building. And in place of the intended machinery, a small boy manipulated the ropes and pulleys that rotated the rooms. The avant-garde poet Maiakovskii welcomed it as an alternative to the pompous busts going up around Moscow – the ‘first monument without a beard’ – but it is unlikely that Lenin approved.
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Even so, Lenin’s mechanical state had much in common with Tatlin’s tower. It was hollow and ramshackle. But it did provide a symbol of a modern, non-capitalist system, controlled by a disciplined ‘vanguard party’ issuing ‘proclamations’ to the workers of the world. It was this party that was to appeal to so many future Communists, eager to find some Promethean force capable of fomenting revolutions and forging modernity. And at a time when the old order was in crisis, many on the left saw Tatlin’s tower as a beacon, showing the way to the future.

In February 1919 one of the most prominent Communist-sympathizing intellectuals of the inter-war era, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, wrote the play
Spartakus
. Later entitled
Drums in the Night
, it was published for the first time in 1922 and told the story of a soldier, Andreas Kragler, who has returned from the war to find a Germany full of venality and corruption. His girlfriend, Anna, encouraged by her grasping parents, is planning to marry a bourgeois war profiteer, Murk. Kragler wins Anna back, but in the meantime he has become a revolutionary, leading the denizens of Glubb’s Gin Mill onto the streets in support of the insurgent Marxist ‘Spartacists’. Anna, seeing him in the demonstrations, rushes out, and urges him to leave the revolution and choose love instead. Kragler gives in. He hands over responsibility for the revolution to the audience and decides on Anna.
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Brecht wrote
Spartakus
during the third, and most radical, revolutionary conflagration to engulf Europe, following those of 1789 and 1848. Much, though, had changed since the previous revolutionary eras. Now, for a vocal minority, government without the bourgeoisie seemed not only possible but necessary; Russia, and the Bolsheviks, had actually created a viable ‘proletarian’ government; and the imperialism and nationalism of Europe’s elites – both aristocratic and bourgeois – had killed millions. Many believed the old order had forfeited its right to rule.

Intellectuals, writers and artists were at the forefront of revolution, and Brecht was one of them, but his attitude was ambivalent. He was sceptical about ideas of heroic self-sacrifice and
Spartakus
suggested that the German masses did not want a revolutionary, workers’ government. Kragler defeats his bourgeois rival Murk, but then retreats to the comforts
of private life. Brecht’s view turned out to be realistic. The Communists did not take power in 1919 in Germany, and by 1921 it was clear that the revolutionary tide in the West had receded. Pro-Soviet Communist parties never captured the affections of the majority of the European working classes or peasants. By the mid-1920s the ruling elites had restored order and the edifice of authority and property.

Yet the hatreds unleashed by war and revolution had not entirely abated, and Communists remained significant minorities in several countries. But Communists were forced to change their style and approach. Lenin’s ‘retreat’ from revolutionary Radicalism to a Marxism of discipline and hierarchy infused the international Communist movement. This gritty realism was much more in tune with Brecht’s own sensibility. His leather-jacketed machismo, hatred of sentimentality, love of the modern, and disdain for romantic dreams all reflected the hard-nosed Communist sectarianism of Western Europe in the 1920s. The contrast with the idealism of 1918–19 could not have been greater.

In 1915, as Europe was consumed by violence, neutral Switzerland hosted two groups of intellectuals profoundly disgusted by the bloodshed. The first was the anti-war Social Democrats, who gathered in the holiday village of Zimmerwald in September 1915, and again in Kiental in April 1916. Attendance was sparse. Most representatives were from Russia and Eastern Europe, and included Lenin and Trotsky, although the Italian Socialists (PSI) and the Swiss Social Democrats were also important members. The large Western Social Democratic parties had supported the war and were therefore absent. Trotsky recalled bitterly that half a century following the founding of the First International Europe’s internationalists could be comfortably accommodated in four charabancs.
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It was in these inauspicious circumstances that the foundations for the international Communist movement were laid.