The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm concluded in his history of the “Short Twentieth Century” that in 1920 “the Bolsheviks committed themselves to what in retrospect seems a major error, the permanent division of the international labour movement”.2 This is a valid criticism of the drive to subsume existing socialist parties to the Comintern or, where not successful, to split them by creating new communist parties beholden to the Leninist model and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. But it overlooks that the division was achieved in 1917-18 with the Bolshevik insurrection and the undemocratic state subsequently set up; and that many socialists saw clearly in 1920, not in retrospect, that dividing the international labour movement was a backward step.
Socialism never recovered. What before 1917 had been an inspiring and golden vision of the Socialist Commonwealth hymned by William Morris, Robert Tressell and Joe Hill was now tainted by association with a one-party state and political repression. From the 1920s socialists who did not support Leninism or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat had to explain that their political philosophy was “democratic socialism” to differentiate it from the undemocratic version. The result was a massive perversion and delegitimation of the socialist ideal. Why, then, did so many decent and honest socialists across the globe support what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had done?
Mainly misperception based on limited information, but also an overwhelming desire to believe that a revolution against capital had finally arrived–not in theory and in dream, but in fact. For socialists and trade unionists beaten down by a cruel, unequal, war-mongering capitalist system, the Bolshevik Revolution hit all the right buttons. Inconvenient details, such as the persecution of other socialists, state control of trade unions and suppression of strikes and Soviets, were brushed aside. All critical faculties were suspended in the inspirational light of what many socialists perceived as an authentic working-class revolution. For example, the adulation of militant Minnesota miners for Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1918 was intense, with one activist admitting, “In mystic silence, almost in religious ecstasy, did we admire everything that came from Russia”.3
The widespread support across the left for Lenin and the Bolsheviks was a classic instance of what Maurice Brinton called “the irrational in politics”, specifically that “those aspiring to a non-alienated and creative society based on equality and freedom should ‘break’ with bourgeois conceptions only to espouse the hierarchical, dogmatic, manipulatory and puritanical ideas of Leninism”.4 Some Marxists did of course support Lenin’s version of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat with full understanding of what it meant, because they believed that it promised the best route to socialism and because social, civil and democratic rights were not a priority for them. They were commissars and proud of it. But most socialists did not think like this. They did not support Bolshevism because of ruthless pragmatism, nor from an objective analysis of class forces, nor because “the dialectic” revealed that a higher synthesis would emerge from the contradictions of the present crisis. They believed because they wished to believe.
Many still do. Even now it is a standard argument of those defending Lenin and the Bolsheviks that by 1921 the Russian working class that achieved the October Revolution was “atomised”, “declassed”, had in effect disappeared. This is not so. The Russian working class of the 1920s had political consciousness, it was collectively organised and it fought the Bolshevik state apparatus. In July 1923 alone more than one hundred enterprises employing a total of 50,000 workers were on strike. In August this nearly doubled. Brovkin records the pattern of worker action and government reaction. “The Bolsheviks acted with the explicit purpose of routing out the possibility of further progress. They tried to condition workers that labour protest was futile”.5 Despite this, John B. Hatch’s study of labour conflict in Moscow in the 1920s records that between 1921 and 1926 all branches of industry and transport experienced wildcat strikes, run by spontaneously organised strike committees and “parallel factory committees”.6
Aside from pure numbers–and Petrograd excepted, the exodus of workers from town to country has been exaggerated, with the bulk of women workers, for example, staying put–there is little evidence to support the “deproletarianisation” thesis. Daniel R. Brower records that “average decline in the north (167 towns in all, excluding the capital cities) amounted to 24% between 1917 and 1920”.7 Diane P. Koenker found that military mobilisation of young male workers and the flight to the countryside of unskilled recent migrants, servants etc., actually left “an older, more female and more urbanised working class population”.8 In these circumstances working-class survival and adaptation was demonstrated by “a strong sense of neighbourhood and district loyalty” and an increase in freely available civil marriages, something that in itself indicates a secular, urban working class, not backward peasants drifting to the city.
Examining two examples of strong and cohesive Russian working-class occupational groups, Moscow’s printers and the miners of the Don Basin, Lewis Seigelbaum and Ronald Suny point out that although their professional and social milieu were poles apart–one urban, literate, disciplined; the other living in tight-knit mining settlements, mostly illiterate and politically volatile–they both fell back on traditions of community self-reliance and workers’ self-management during the Civil War, and in its aftermath stood up for their interests against the new regime. As a result, they both “failed to conform to the party’s productivist, self-sacrificing vision”.9
The Mensheviks’ émigré journal was kept well informed of industrial relations matters by its remaining underground activists. In 1924 it published a detailed report on the Moscow printers: its leaders were in exile or prison; Factory Committees had become junior partners of the GPU; workers who spoke up were sacked; those who complied were given special privileges. A once-vibrant working atmosphere, full of political debate, was now mostly silent and defeated.10 In the end, due to the unrelenting criticisms of shopfloor printers, “the union opted for better stage management rather than more genuine democracy”.11 One method of ensuring difficult issues were not discussed openly was to fill meetings with ideological lectures, from which workers took refuge in absenteeism, sarcasm and satire. In 1924 the “Union Organisers’ Dictionary” of the Print Union defined “activism” as “…the ability to sit through a report on the international situation to the end”.12
The anger and incomprehension with which Bolshevik leaders greeted the Workers’ Opposition, Menshevik trade unionists and non-party workers derived from their heroic-simplistic conception of an “advanced” or “conscious” worker. As Sheila Fitzpatrick astutely observed, “a ‘conscious’ worker was a worker who fitted the intellectuals’ idea of what a worker ought to be”,13 and Bolshevism, for all its rhetoric, was led by intellectuals. For Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin the disappearance by 1921 of conscious or advanced workers–all, apparently, either killed or promoted–meant there was no longer a Russian working class worth speaking of. But as Koenker’s investigations suggest, its class consciousness “did not so much disappear as migrate from the workplace to the home, the neighborhood, and such proliferating cultural facilities as libraries, schools, and the theatre”.14