Thus the proclamation of a ‘socialist revolution’ in October meant above all that socialists were taking power and that they believed the international situation to be revolutionary. In the case of Russia, it was a statement of intent, referring to a distant future in a different international environment. Although utopian, the declaration possessed genuine political force: presenting the seizure of power as a socialist revolution (even if fraught with difficulties for the future) played a decisive role. It foregrounded the Leninist notion that backward Russia could serve as a trigger or catalyst on a very troubled international stage. The prognosis was not confirmed, but at the time there was nothing absurd about it.
The second crucial advantage of this utopian vision stemmed from the fact that ‘socialism’ signified a commitment to social justice and equal rights for the various nationalities: an essential ingredient in the credo, with a strong resonance among the latter. The absence of a Russian nationalist orientation proved a powerful weapon against the Whites, who espoused a traditional Great Russian domination – a fatal weakness in a multinational country.
The socialist vision also allowed for an appeal to the peasantry; class terms were familiar to them. Moreover, the slogan ‘Seize the land from the landowners and the rich’ was not an incitement to do it, but retrospective acceptance of the fact that peasants were already in the process of doing precisely that and that no one could stop them. The peasants thereby eliminated the landowners, who constituted a class, and the richer peasants – the kulaks – who were also regarded as a class (though this was not unproblematic in a more rigorous class analysis). The Bolshevik approach thus expressed a reality that was familiar to the peasants and contained demands for social justice that were very close to their basic interests. The term ‘socialist’ made sense to them, without having to read Marx. This was another considerable advantage over the Whites: in the territories they conquered, they restored the land to the nobility and landowners – a fatal but far from accidental blunder. However powerful militarily, the Whites were doomed to failure politically, as was Russian monarchism in general.
At any rate, a few months after October and the Bolshevik seizure of power, the alternative facing Russia was crystal-clear. On one side were the Reds, a radical camp with considerable appeal and the ability to fashion a state; on the other were the Whites, who knew how to fight but who were incapable of (re) constructing a state – precisely as Lenin had predicted.
Because it was oriented to the poor peasantry, soldiers and workers, this revolution that could not be socialist could be a distant relative of the same: a ‘plebeian’ revolution. And that was the key to its victory: it allowed the Bolsheviks to mobilize vast armies hailing from the popular classes. The composition of the Red Army is very revealing. The soldiers were mainly peasants and the NCOs workers who had served in the Tsarist army; others, like Khrushchev, had undergone rapid training courses for young commanders. Many members of the intelligentsia were in military or political-military positions. The picture was complicated by the presence of tens of thousands of former Tsarist officers, some of them issuing from the nobility. While some of the latter deserted to the Whites, a majority remained loyal to the soviets. It was a winning combination!
The revolutionary phase in the strict sense (late 1917–early 1918) saw little bloodshed. But the situation became ever more tense and when full-blown civil war broke out in July 1918, it was a savage, bloody confrontation for very high stakes. It would determine who was to hold power in a country that had been plunged into indescribable chaos. No compromise was possible between the two camps: it was a struggle to the death.
These events drastically changed the Bolshevik Party’s modus operandi, which no longer had anything in common with the pre-October situation. Not only was the organization completely remoulded, but membership was renewed by successive waves of adhesion – each of them bringing different ways of thinking and acting. With the approach of peace, there was a further influx of new members who wanted to contribute to a wholly novel task: constructing a state, administering a country, fashioning a strategy for the conduct of international relations. For a time, the principal cadres were recruited from among those who had joined the party during the Civil War, which had formed them politically. This explains why many of them were supporters of an authoritarian line even in peacetime. From 1924 onwards, a new recruitment would alter the membership once again, filling its ranks with what some of the old guard regarded as completely ‘raw’ elements – that is to say, people with no political experience who, unlike the Civil War veterans, had not demonstrated their commitment to the regime. For the old Bolsheviks, whose surviving number generally held high positions, the party was no longer recognizable: it was no longer a party of revolutionaries totally devoted to the cause of socialism. The newcomers shared neither their values nor their past. They would all now be moulded into an organization that was altogether different from the earlier one, even if was still called ‘the’ party.
Let us note that the broadly plebeian orientation of this recruitment remained a source of strength throughout the 1920s. The policy of comprehensive industrialization in the 1930s brought the party additional popular strata who had a stake in the regime and were also instrumental in the victory of 1945.
A clarification is in order here: there is all the difference in the world between a privileged person who acquires an additional privilege and someone at the bottom of the social ladder who suddenly has access to what was previously beyond her, however modest it might be. Although power did not belong to the ‘plebeians’ as a popular class, they and their children (many of them) now had the chance of attaining positions that had previously been out of their reach. For the regime, this influx of popular elements into the lower and middle levels of the bureaucracy and technical professions remained a constant source of strength and popular support. But because ‘plebeian’ meant low educational levels and a propensity for authoritarianism, an old Bolshevik, who was often highly educated and who had studied Das Kapital (frequently in a Tsarist prison), could feel swamped by a milieu where (to borrow a witticism from industrial Birmingham) they would not know the difference between Marx and Engels and Marks & Spencer.
In fact, this predominance of plebeian origins and attitudes, combined with the pride of place given ‘technicians’ (often trained on the job or crash courses), had a darker potentiaclass="underline" it could serve as the social background for the politics and ideology of Stalinism, during the NEP to start off with and then massively during the subsequent decade. For those who had experienced such upward social mobility (and who had such attitudes), the power of the state and its head were not only acceptable but necessary. Even so, the social base of Stalinism, which accounts for the apparent mass support it enjoyed in the 1930s and thereafter, was not the only source of the phenomenon. As I argued in Part One, the seeds of Stalinism lay in the peculiar brand of ‘statist’ ideology that emerged in the ranks of Civil War combatants who gravitated towards Stalin as the NEP was unfolding.