One thing remains unarguable. For all his political inadequacies and strategic mistakes, since 1903 Martov had stood utterly opposed to Lenin’s concept of socialism–of vanguardism, substitutionism and one-party rule imposed by violence and repression. He did so without reneging on radical socialism, and provided an inspiring example of political principle and personal integrity in the midst of war and social breakdown. If political leaders are to be judged by the intent, outcome and legacy of their work, then it was Lenin who failed, and disastrously. By this criteria Martov also failed–although as Orwell wrote posthumously of Gandhi, compared to his political contemporaries “how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind”.24
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
National Bolshevism
By 1921 the threat of White counter-revolution had been defeated and all foreign expeditionary forces in Soviet Russia had been withdrawn. After six years of war and Civil War the Russian economy was on its knees. Its transport infrastructure barely existed. Taking the last full year of peace, 1913, as the base, industrial production was down 80% by 1920. Production of coal had fallen 73%, textiles 62% and cast iron an incredible 97.5% (this was mainly due to the loss throughout most of 1917-20 of the coal, iron and steel that used to come from southern Russia). As the Civil War ended the Red Army demobilised, which led to two and a half million men with military experience returning to the villages. Rural uprisings were spreading, often led by trained soldier-peasants.
In early 1920 the brutality of the Grain Requisition Squads led to a mass peasant rebellion in the Tambov province. Led by the charismatic Left SR Alexander Antonov, the revolt involved over 50,000 peasants and spread rapidly to Samara, Tsaritsyn, Saratov and parts of Siberia. With the Red Army engaged in the Soviet-Polish War in an attempt to force Soviet power on unwilling Polish workers and peasants, it could not direct enough men to Tambov to force it on unwilling Russian workers and peasants. The rebellion took a year to suppress. Even then the Red Army had to use chemical weapons and a chain of concentration camps to re-impose Sovnarcom’s authority in the region.1
Tambov was the flashpoint of a massive, simmering crisis across all Soviet-held territory. When the crop failed in 1920 there were no surplus stores to fall back on and famine re-emerged for the first time in thirty years. People left the cities to try to find food in the country. The population of Petrograd plummeted from 2,400,000 in 1917 to 574,000 in 1920. Of the winter of 1920-21, Victor Serge recorded:
Winter was a torture for the townspeople: no heating, no lighting, and the ravages of famine. Children and feeble old folk died in their thousands […] Inside Petrograds’ grand apartments, now abandoned, people were crowded in one room, living on top of one another around a little stove of brick or cast iron, its flue belching smoke through an opening in the window. Fuel for it would come from the floorboards of rooms nearby, from the last stick of furniture, or else from books […] People dined on a pittance of oatmeal or half-rotten horsemeat. The local Commune did everything it could to keep the children fed, but what it managed was pitiful.2
From 1917 to 1921 the population of Soviet Russia’s major cities fell by an average of 33%, although Petrograd was a large part of that average. The number of the industrial working class–the ostensible basis of the Soviet regime–also fell. Tens of thousands of workers were killed in the Civil War. Many joined the Communist Party and were promoted into the administration. In 1921 the total number of the industrial working class actually engaged in industry had fallen from 3,024,000 in 1917 to 1,243,000, and these were increasingly resistant to the orders of the Bolshevik government. At the same time as mass peasant revolts broke out in Tambov, Samara, Penza, Belorussia and western Siberia, a wave of strikes erupted in Moscow and Petrograd. Sovnarcom’s greatest fear was that sooner or later working-class and peasant opposition to War Communism would unite.
Sovnarcom also had to grapple, as had the Provisional Government, with the desire of Imperial Russia’s “territories” for independence. In June 1917 Lenin had condemned the Provisional Government for not carrying out its “elementary democratic duty” and providing for “the autonomy and complete freedom of secession of Ukraine”.3 On 2nd November, 1917 Sovnarcom’s “Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia” established its nationalities policy. Its key principle was “The right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination, up to secession and formation of an independent state”. It added, “Concrete decrees stemming herefrom will be worked out immediately after the establishment of the Commission for the Affairs of Nationalities”. It was signed by Lenin and the People’s Commissar for Nationalities Affairs, J.V. Stalin.4
After the Ukrainian People’s Republic declared independence in January 1918, several political factions fought for control. Following the overthrow of Hetman Skoropadsky and the defeat of Deniken’s White Army–victories won in great part by Makhno’s anarchist army–the People’s Republic of Ukraine was re-established, along with the Free Territories of the Mahknovshchina. But the Bolsheviks had no time for either. With Deniken defeated the Red Army invaded Ukraine in full force. On 21st November, 1919 the Politburo discussed “theses” put to it by Lenin which established policy for the occupation of Ukraine. These mandated that Ukrainian ethnic traditions and language should be respected and that new structures should be created in the country to “intensify work on the class differentiation of the village”.
Lenin had learnt from the first attempt to create Poor Peasants Committees. Accepting that the dubious category of “middle peasants” hardly existed, he stressed that food should be redistributed to poorer peasants only at the expense of the very richest Kulaks, and that fewer surpluses than usual be taken. But the relatively lenient approach to the Ukrainian villages was solely to create a base of peasant support for political action in the towns. Thesis 7 stated, “Treat the Jews and urban inhabitants of the Ukraine with an iron rod, transferring them to the front, not letting them into government agencies” (in the margin, next to “Jews”, Lenin noted “Express it politely–Jewish petty bourgeoisie”). Thesis 8 said, “Place the Teachers Union, the cooperatives, and other such petty bourgeois organisations in the Ukraine under special surveillance, with special measures for their disintegration”.5
By this process Ukrainian nationalist organisations, especially in Kiev, were “disintegrated” and replaced with specially bribed poor peasants and trained party cadres. The exclusion of Jews from Ukrainian government organs was partly because they were the most likely to play significant roles in nationalist organisations, partly to appease the notorious anti-Semitism of Ukrainian peasants. Even Makhno’s forces, committed to genuine social liberation, were not immune from anti-Semitism, although Makhno took stern measures to eradicate it from the Makhnovischina, which in comparison to the rest of Ukraine was a relative haven for Jews.
He and his Revolutionary Council issued numerous proclamations and orders against anti-Semitism. If soldiers under his command committed anti-Jewish outrages, Makhno had them swiftly arrested and executed no matter their rank or record. There is no truth in later Soviet propaganda about Makhnovist anti-Semitic pogroms, and overwhelming evidence to refute it. Many of Makhno’s leading advisors and publicists, such as Voline and Baron, were themselves Jewish, reflecting his own lack of native prejudice. Unlike Lenin he did not pander to Ukrainian anti-Semitism but confronted it head on, instructing his Cultural-Educational Commission to conduct teaching seminars with peasant supporters to explain the basic principles of internationalism and anarchist humanism.6