He made only a brief summary as time was lacking, he said, and asked us to support the resolution about re-organizing the Peasants’ Unions into Soviets. This re-organization was, subsequently, approved by the Congress. This was the only question on the agenda at the Congress which had not been considered at the meeting in Gulyai-Pole.
On our return from the Congress, and after a series of reports, the Peasants’ Union of Gulyai-Pole was transformed into a Soviet of peasants; its principles were not modified nor were its methods of struggle which it was intensively preparing the peasants to use in its upcoming struggles. It appealed to the workers to drive out the owners of the factories and plants and to liquidate their right of private ownership of social enterprises.
During this time, while we were busy with the formal transformation of Union into Soviet, in Moscow on August 14 opened the All-Russian Democratic Conference and on its tribune appeared our esteemed, dear elder — Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin.
Our Anarchist Communist Group of Gulyai-Pole was dumbfounded by this news, although we appreciated very well that it was difficult for our old friend, after so many years of work and being shunted about foreign lands, preoccupied in his old age with humanitarian ideas, to return to Russia and refuse his assistance to this Democratic Conference. But all such considerations had to take a back seat to the tragic crisis in the Revolution which immediately followed this Conference.
We condemned our old friend for taking part in the Conference. We naively imagined that the former apostle of anarchism had transformed himself into a sentimental old man searching for peace and quiet and the strength for applying his knowledge to life one last time. But this blame we kept inside our group, and our enemies were not aware of it, because deep down Kropotkin remained for us the greatest and strongest theoretician of the anarchist movement. We knew that if he were not so advanced in years, he would have put himself at the head of the Russian Revolution and would have been the uncontested chief of anarchism.
Whether we were right or not, we never discussed with our political enemies the question of the participation of Kropotkin in the All-Russian Democratic Conference of Moscow…
Thus with a sinking feeling we listened to what Petr Alekseevich said. We didn’t lose faith that he remained always dear and close to us, but the revolutionary moment called us in a different direction. For a number of reasons of purely artificial character, the Revolution showed signs of reaching an impasse. On it was fitted a noose by all the political parties participating in the Provisional Government. And all these parties were gradually becoming more entrenched in power and becoming in themselves a threatening counter-revolutionary force.
Chapter 12
Kornilov’s March on Petrograd
Around August 20 1917 our group reviewed the distribution and utilization of our forces. This meeting was the most serious one we had held. I have already mentioned that our group did not have in its ranks a single theoretically-trained anarchist. We were all peasants and workers. Our schools turned out half-educated people. Schools of anarchism did not exist. Our fund of knowledge of revolutionary anarchism was obtained reading anarchist literature for many years and exchanging views with each other and with the peasants, with whom we shared all that we had read and understood in the works of Kropotkin and Bakunin. We owe thanks to Comrade Vladimir Antoni (known as Zarathustra) for supplying us with literature.
In the course of this very important meeting we discussed a number of burning questions and came to the conclusion that the Revolution was having the life choked out of it by the garrotte of the State. It was turning pale, weakening, but could still emerge victorious in the supreme struggle. Help would come to it principally from the revolutionary peasant masses who would remove the garrotte and get rid of this plague — the Provisional Government and its satellite parties. Drawing some conclusions from our analysis for practical activity we formulated a series of positions, namely:
The Russian Revolution has, from the beginning, posed a clear choice to the Russian and Ukrainian anarchist groups, a choice which imperiously demands a decision on our part. Either we go to the masses and dissolve ourselves in them, creating from them revolutionary cadres, and make the Revolution; or we renounce our slogan about the necessity of social transformation, the necessity of carrying through to the end the workers’ struggle with the powers of Capital and the State.
To remain as before, restricted to isolated group activities, limited to publishing pamphlets, journals, and newspapers and holding meetings — was impossible. At this time of decisive events, the anarchists risked finding themselves completely isolated from the masses, or dragging along behind them.
Anarchism, by its very essence, cannot accept such a role. Only a lack of understanding and enthusiasm on the part of its adherents — the anarchist groups and federations — created the possibility of dragging it down the wrong path.
Every militant group, the revolutionary anarchists in particular, must try to draw the labour masses to its side at the moment of insurrection or revolution. At the moment when they begin to show confidence in the group, it must, without being carried away, follow the broken path of unfolding events (a path which may be revolutionary but not anarchist) and seize the right moment to draw the labouring masses in the right direction.
This is an old method, but one not experienced by our movement in practice, and one which will not be experienced until such time as we master certain organizational principles and create our own organization. A serious movement requires strategic planning. A movement without a definite organization of forces is a bunch of uncoordinated groups, frequently ignorant of each other and even taking conflicting actions in relation to their political enemies. Such a movement could, certainly, be created at the revolutionary moment, but it would be impossible to infuse it with a lasting existence, to give it a credo which could guide the revolting masses towards genuine liberation from their economic, political, and moral chains. There would just be a useless loss of human lives, sacrificed in a struggle both necessary and just in its goals, but unequal.
After having observed for seven months the anarchist movement in the cities, our group could no longer ignore the very numerous militants who failed to recognize their role and were stifling the movement, preventing it from liberating itself from the traditional forms of disorganization and transforming itself from grouplets into a mass movement. That is why our Group threw itself with renewed energy into the study of problems not yet solved by the anarchist movement, for example: the problem of coordinating the activities of different groups as events unfolded. None of the federations which sprang up after the February Revolution had formulated an answer although they all published their resolutions and indicated their view of the way forward.
That’s why, after having feverishly searched for a guiding rule in the works of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta, we arrived at the conclusion that our group of anarchist-communist peasants of Gulyai-Pole could neither imitate the anarchist movement of the cities, nor could we listen to its voice. We could count on no one but ourselves at this critical moment in the Revolution. It was up to us to help the downtrodden peasants realize that they must create the Revolution themselves in the villages, that it is up to them to determine the character and the course of the Revolution. We must not let their faith in themselves be shaken by the political parties and the government which have done nothing to create the revolutionary movement in the villages.