However, Lenin did not waver in his conviction that actual international revolution was a necessary basis for rapid steps toward socialism in Russia itself. In one of his final articles of 1923 Lenin took heart that ‘Russia, India, China, etc.’ made up the vast majority of mankind and ‘this majority has been drawn into the struggle for liberation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.’ All socialist Russia had to do was hold out (proderzhat’sia) until the final victory. In this article of five printed pages Lenin not only uses ‘hold out’ twice, but also employs words with related meanings and based on the same root (derzhat’) for a total of six more times.27
Lenin’s ‘hold-out scenario’ displays something of his old confidence, although in a more subdued tone. Yet the enforced dependence on international capitalism injected a new anxiety into his outlook. Old Bolshevism had fought for political freedom in Russia as a central goal because the Bolsheviks had been confident that the Social Democratic message could win the loyalty of the workers in an open fight. But now the fear of international capitalism made political freedom in Soviet Russia seem equivalent to suicide. As he wrote in 1921 to a party comrade who advocated full freedom of speech:
Freedom of the press in the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic], surrounded by bourgeois enemies of the entire world, means providing freedom of political organization to the bourgeoisie and their most loyal servants, the Mensheviks and the SRS.
This is an incontrovertible fact.
The bourgeoisie (on a global scale) are still stronger than us by many orders of magnitude. To give it another such weapon as freedom of political organization (= freedom of the press, for the press is the core and basis of political organization) means making the enemy’s job easier and helping the class enemy.
We do not wish to do away with ourselves by suicide and therefore we will not do this.28
Lenin’s remarks show his old respect for ‘freedom of the press’ as the essence of ‘freedom of political organization’, but combined now with a new sense of vulnerability.
Kto-Kovo (Who-Whom)
Lenin’s second justification for ‘steps toward socialism’ in Russia was the class war within the peasantry. From his very first writings in 1894 Lenin had seen the peasantry splitting apart into two poles, a majority of exploited proto-proletarians at one pole and a minority of exploiter proto-bourgeois at the other. The democratic revolution against the tsar would be fought alongside the entire peasantry, since the tsar’s oppressive rule violated the interests of rich and poor peasant alike. The political freedom made possible by the tsar’s overthrow would give the socialists access to the exploited rural majority. Support for a socialist revolution against capitalism would be forthcoming only from the exploited majority, not from the ‘petty bourgeoisie’.
Lenin was still operating with this scenario when he announced in late 1918 that class conflict in the Russian village was leading to a rural October that was even more significant than the 1917 October revolution carried out by the urban workers. The socialist credentials of the Bolshevik revolution were vulnerable as long as the Bolsheviks were supported by the whole peasantry and not just the exploited majority.
Alas, the mismatch between scenario and reality could not long be ignored and Lenin was again forced to adjust. Before 1919 Lenin focused on the polar extremes within the peasantry: the rural poor (bednota) versus the kulak. In 1919 the official focus moved toward the centre of the spectrum: the mass of the peasantry that had not yet been polarized. More and more, steps toward socialism depended on enticing the middle peasant – the peasant as peasant – to follow the lead of the proletariat. Accordingly, Lenin’s adjustments can be followed in a series of parallel processes: disillusion with the leadership qualities of the rural poor, soft-pedalling the conflict with the kulak and searching for ways to convince the middle peasant of the virtues of socialism.
In Lenin’s original scenario the rural poor were assigned a specific mission: to spearhead the transition from small-scale individual production to large-scale collective production. Impelled by the economic breakdown caused by the war, the poorest peasants would realize the impossibility of farming in the old ways. They would pool together their land to form communes (kommuny) or take over landowner estates and run them as ‘state farms’ (sovkhozy). These collective enterprises would reveal the advantages of socialism to the rest of the peasantry, and voilà! slow but steady and perceptible progress down the path to socialist transformation of the countryside. Such was Lenin’s vision.
The only problem – as Lenin realized with growing dismay – was that the actual communes and state farms were negative examples that pushed the peasantry away from socialism. From early 1919 on we have a ceaseless litany of complaints that only increase in volume and bitterness. Lenin’s vitriol on this issue stemmed from his enormous emotional investment in his original scenario.
April 1919: ‘The peasants say: long live the Soviet vlast, long live the Bolsheviks, but down with kommuniia! They curse the kommuniia when it is organized in a stupid way and forced upon them. They are suspicious of everything that is imposed upon them, and quite rightly so. We must go to the middle peasants, we must help them, teach them, but only in the field of science and socialism. In the area of farm management we must learn from them.’29
December 1919: ‘the communes have only succeeded in provoking a negative attitude among the peasantry, and the word “commune” has even at times become a slogan in the fight against communism’.30
December 1920: Lenin states derisively that collectively organized farms were in such pathetic condition that they were justifiably termed almshouses.31
March 1921: ‘The experience of this collective farming shows us only an example of how not to farm: the surrounding peasants laugh or are filled with indignation.’32
Parallel to Lenin’s progressive disillusionment with the rural poor as class leaders is a definite soft-pedalling of the frenetic anti-kulak rhetoric of 1918. In 1919 he emphasized the distinction between the kulak and the bourgeoisie in generaclass="underline" kulak resistance would be crushed but kulaks would not be expropriated like urban capitalists.33 Later in the year he noted with some wonderment that the pitiless logic of ‘ili-ili’ – either the dictatorship of the workers or the dictatorship of the landowners – meant that kulaks in Siberia supported soviet power against Admiral Kolchak (the ‘supreme leader’ of the anti-Bolshevik White movement). In December 1920 an irritated Lenin told Bolshevik questioners that the Central Committee had unanimously agreed that ‘we got carried away with the struggle against the kulak and lost all sense of measure’. By this time, in fact, the Bolsheviks were openly relying on the economic exertions of the kulak, although he had been rechristened for this purpose as ‘the industrious owner’.34