Berkman’s The Bolshevik Myth (1925) was a powerful indictment of the Bolshevik regime and its brutal suppression of trade union, socialist and anarchist opposition, soaked in vivid detail and saeva indignatio.7 Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia (1924) did much the same, detailing her travels to Kharkov, Poltava, Kiev and Odessa, her encounters with rigged Soviets, harassed unions, forced labour and relentless persecution of any and all opposition. She freely admitted that “The strongest of us are loath to give up a long cherished dream”8; yet give it up she eventually did, the final severance coming after the mass slaughter at Kronstadt. From then she considered the Bolsheviks “the most pernicious enemies of the revolution”.9 Goldman’s and Berkman’s books were widely available on the left in the 1920s and 1930s and helped form the thought of anti-Leninist socialists like George Orwell.
For many of today’s anti-capitalist campaigners the legacy of non-Leninist, libertarian socialism has found its best expression in the positions taken by Noam Chomsky since the 1960s. Chomsky’s forensic and damning indictments of US foreign policy are rooted in his anti-authoritarian politics. He is also one of the few outstanding left intellectuals to unambiguously reject Leninism and Bolshevism as not just misguided but fundamentally anti-socialist, and “in my view counter-revolutionary”. Speaking of “incipient socialist institutions” such as Soviets, Factory Committees and workers’ cooperatives that emerged in the period after the February Revolution, Chomsky observed that “Lenin and Trotsky pretty much eliminated them as they consolidated power”. He conceded there are arguments about the pressures and justifications for doing so (i.e. the need to win the civil war) but believed that “the incipient socialist structures in Russia were dismantled before the really dire conditions arose”.10 More detailed studies, such as Maurice Brinton’s analysis of Workers’ Control in the period 1917-1921, confirm this.
Chomsky’s general critique derives from “Council Communists” such as Anton Pannekoek and Sylvia Pankhurst, anarcho-syndicalists such as Berkman and Rudolf Rocker, and an underlying and long-established anti-statist radicalism best expressed by Michael Bakunin, the great seer and leader of 19th-century anarchism. Lenin himself added credence to their analyses through his political activities and philosophy–from his clearly stated belief that the working class was “incapable on its own of developing anything more than a trade union consciousness”, and required political leadership “from without”, to his blunt admission shortly after October that “socialism is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people”. Diane P. Koenker, in a study of labour relations in the post-October period, summed up what this meant for ordinary Russian workers: “In the shops where one-man management (Lenin’s own preference) replaced collegial management workers faced the same kinds of authoritarian management they thought existed only under capitalism”.11
Against this critical interpretation one must measure an equally valid argument about the initial attraction and mass base of the Bolshevik Revolution, best expressed in Trotsky’s magnificent History of the Russian Revolution. In the academic sphere this case has been substantiated by Alexander Rabinowitch’s outstanding work on the Bolshevik Party during the crucial period from mid-1917 to mid-1918, specifically his conclusion that
The October Revolution in Petrograd was less a military operation than a gradual process rooted in popular political culture, widespread disenchantment with the results of the February Revolution and, in that context, the magnetic attraction of the Bolsheviks’ promises of immediate peace, bread, land for the peasantry, and grass roots democracy exercised through multiparty soviets.12
Whilst this is true, it must be seen in the context of the Bolsheviks’ rapid backtracking on their main slogans from an early stage after October, a backtracking that raises suspicion that the slogans were short-term tactical necessities rather than firm political principles. This book details the scale and speed of that backtracking, which included the suppression of the Soviets as genuine vehicles of grassroots democracy, the crushing of press and political freedom, the replacement of workers’ control by one-man management, the establishment of a secret police apparatus far more extensive and brutal than the Tsars’, the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly whose defence and convocation had been one of the justifications for October, the militarisation and control of the trade unions by the state and, finally, the mass murder of socialist activists at Kronstadt who had been instrumental in October, for the crime of abiding by its initial ideals.
Despite this there has been, and still is, a strong tradition on the left of exculpation of the Bolsheviks. Outside of a handful of serious works this rarely goes into detail, but broadly asserts that the period from 1917-21 was the original essence of the October Revolution. After that, it concedes, the Revolution began to falter due to a “counter-revolution” fed by the decimation of the Bolsheviks’ best cadres in the civil war and the rise of a bureaucratic structure controlled by Stalin. As Lenin fell ill and died, and Trotsky was marginalised and replaced, the counter-revolution gained power and strength, reversed most of the liberatory social and political initiatives of October (though not the nationalisation of the economy) and clamped down on political freedom. The process culminated in the Great Terror of the 1930s and Stalin’s emergence as Dictator.
This has been the general view of the left since the public discrediting of Stalinism that followed Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech”. Often without acknowledgment, it reflects Trotsky’s analysis of the degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution as expounded in The Revolution Betrayed (1936). It found a particularly loud expression in the works of Tony Cliff, the intellectual guru of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), whose three-volume biography of Lenin is the ne plus ultra of Leninist hagiography.
Cliff’s work had its counterpart in more sophisticated authors such as Isaac Deutscher and Marcel Leibman, who themselves followed a line of intellectual defence of Leninism first expounded by the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács in Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (1924). Lukács’ short book is an ingenious if disreputable justification of Lenin, whom he regarded as “the greatest thinker to have been produced by the revolutionary working class movement since Marx”. Cloaking Lenin’s every strategy and tactical maneuver in the armour of “dialectics”, Lukács asserted that criticism of Leninism as elitist and undemocratic arose from “the undialectical concept of the ‘majority’”, and lamented that “Many workers suffer from the illusion that a purely formal democracy, in which the voice of every citizen is equally valid, is the most suitable instrument for expressing the interests of society as a whole”.13
Lukács ridiculed the “mechanistic rigidity of undialectical thought” that drew attention to the Bolsheviks’ betrayal of many of their pre-October promises. To free critics from their mechanistic rigidity, Lukács explained, “the Russian Communist Party’s policy, Lenin’s policy, is only contradictory in so far as it seeks and finds the dialectically correct solution to the objective contradictions of its own social existence”.14 Lukács’ book was re-released by Verso in 2009 as part of its Radical Thinkers series with the publisher’s recommendation that it “remains indispensable to an understanding of the contemporary significance of Lenin’s life and work”.