(19) October Revolution: Lenin and the politics of 1917

Viktor Mikhaylovich Chernov (1893-1952) was a founder and a leder of the peasant-based Social Revolutionary Party, who served as Agricultural Minister under Kerensky and who endorsed Kerensy's policy of continuing the war. He was brought into the Kerensky's regime on May 5 as part of the first "coalition" government. He became the President of the Constituent Assembly that the Bolshevik government dissolved after its first day in operation in January 1918. He associated briefly with one of the counterrevolutionary White governments, and in 1920 emigrated to France and later to America.

Rex Wade recounts how during the July Days unrest in 1917, Chernov was taken hostage by a group of the famously militant Kronstadt sailors, angry at him for not taking a more radical position. "The worker who shook his fist in Chernov’s face and yelled 'Take power you son-of-a-bitch when it is offered to you' illustrated the frustration of the crowd. It was only with difficulty that Leon Trotsky, who had already become a popular radical, got him freed."

Lenin speaking with Trotsky standing by the podium to his left

In 1924 after Lenin's death, the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal published a kind of obituary polemic by Chernov against his old enemy, Lenin (2:3; 03/15/1924).

It's a confusing and confused essay, in which he declares in the first part, "Politics to him meant strategy, pure and simple. Victory was the only commandment to observe; the will to rule and to carry through a political program without compromise, that was the only virtue; hesitation, that was the only crime."

Yet he also writes, "Foresight on a large scale, however, was the very thing he lacked. He was a fencing master first of all, and a fencer needs only a little foresight and no complicated ideas." Which would imply that Lenin thought almost purely tactically, the opposite of the previous description. He reinforces this with, "This perfect and immediate tactical sense formed a complete contrast to the absolutely unfounded and fantastic character of any more extensive historical prognosis he ever attempted - of any program that comprised more than today and tomorrow."

Chernov denied that Lenin was a "blind dogmatist." Instead, "he often became a quack, an experimenter, a gambler; this is why he was an opportunist, which is something diametrically opposed to a dogmatist."

It's not unusual for political polemics to be inconsistent. Nor for actual people to have strange contradictions in their behavior.

But regardless what one thinks of his goals or his methods, the notion that for Lenin, "Victory was the only commandment to observe; the will to rule and to carry through a political program without compromise, that was the only virtue; hesitation, that was the only crime," doesn't reflect the reality of Lenin's political career, and particularly not that of 1917.

The cascade of events of that year and the victory of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution can't be recounted without the remarkable story of Lenin's role as the primary Bolshevik leader. The Bolsheviks had relatively little influence on the Provisional Government under Kerensky, which depended in its various changing formations during the year by Liberals, rightwingers, Mensheviks and Right Social Revolutionaries. The Social Revolutionaries were the primary party among the peasants, who constituted the majority of the population.

When Lenin returned to Russia from years of exile after the February Revolution, he initially stood alone among the leadership of the party in demanding that the Bolsheviks oppose the Provisional Government. During the July Days unrest, he opposed calls from some other Bolsheviks to attempt an immediate seizure of power. But after the Kornilov Revolt of August was suppressed, he found himself again initially alone in pressing for military preparations for a forcible seizure of power in the immediate future.

Starting from the moment of the February Revolution, pulling off the subsequent October Revolution required both strategic sense and tactical talent and dexterity on the part of the Bolshevik leaders, Lenin in particular. Do they support the Provisional Government or not? Do they support the election of a Constituent Assembly or not? Should they take a prowar position in defense of the new government or continue to oppose the war? What kind of opportunities did the July Days present? How will the public react after Kerensky's accusations that Lenin was an agent of the German Kaiser? How big of a danger did the Kornilov Revolt present to the Provisional Government and the broader revolutionary movement? Should the Bolsheviks defend the Provisional Government in that particular situation or not? Do the Bolsheviks pursue an alliance with the Left Social Revolutionaries or try to go it alone in seizing power? Do they make the workers' and soldiers' councils (soviets) the basis of their legitimacy or do they continue to support the elections for the Constituent Assembly after October 26?

And in those days before TV and perpetual public opinion polls, the Bolsheviks also had to gauge public opinion on the war, the hunger crisis, and the confusing series of crises foreign and domestic. They had to do the usual things politicians do in normal times: making contacts with other, striking deals, building alliances, rolling out political mobilization programs. In addition, there was a heavy military component to the politics. The Bolsheviks had to organize their own military command under intense time pressure, coordinate with the soldiers' soviets, gauge the capabilities and likely responses to military commanders to changing political situations. And there were the Germans, still taking more Russian territory and attempting to defend the country under the Provisional Government just as they had been doing with the Czar in power.

Another major factor was the "dual power" arrangement. There was a Provisional Government. But there was also a separate and independent revolutionary structure composed of the soviets, the workers' and soldiers' councils. The dual powers each had to coordinate and compete with the other. And it was obvious to all that having two separate governmental structures for the same political entity was not a sustainable situation. And overlaying the two government structures were the partisan conflicts of the various parties jockeying for position in both the Provisional Government and the soviets.

Navigating this political situation was difficult for everyone. And to come out on top as the Bolsheviks did, and to establish and maintain their power and legitimacy as a government during a bitter two-year civil war, they had to know what they were doing on a lot of fronts and many levels. Luck always plays a role in politics, and the same was true in 1917 in Russia.

Lenin mugging for the camera

Lenin and the Bolsheviks didn't drop out of the sky, or emerge from the nether regions of the earth, as their most hostile critics might prefer to say. They had been involved in politics actively, including competing for seats in the (largely toothless) parliament, the Duma. They had experienced leaders and seasoned activists that had worked together for years, often under very adverse conditions. Lenin himself was very active within the Socialist International agitating against the war. His exile in Poland and later in Switzerland weren't long vacations. He was not only intensely involved in Russian politics and partisan journalism from afar. That also gave him experience and insight into the foreign policy approaches of the European powers who would be critical as allies or enemies in the event of a revolution.

He wasn't, say, just some real estate and casino magnate with a side career in show business who took over leadership of the country with little or no actual experience in politics or government.

George Kennan took a very different view of the nature and importance of Lenin's leadership (The Russian Revolution: Its Nature and Consequences Foreign Affairs 46:1; Oct 1967) in the Russian Revolution from 1917 on:

... it is tempting to say that Bolshevism triumphed because no unity existed among its major political opponents, and none of those opponents, in any case, would have been remotely capable of ruling the country. But it would be an oversimplification to attribute the Communist success solely to these negative factors. No less central to it were positive ones as well: the extraordinary discipline, compactness and conspiratorial tightness of the Communist Party; the magnificent political leadership - bold, ruthless, determined and imaginative - given to it at all times by its dominant figure, Vladimir Il'ich Ulyanov-Lenin; and the driving, unrelenting military leadership which the party gave to the Red Army units in the civil war. In the vast fluid confusion that followed the breakdown of the old order, the cutting edge of these qualities was of far greater effectiveness than any of the shifting, undependable winds of popular sympathy. The Bolsheviki came out ahead very largely because they were, in this maelstrom of poorly organized political forces, the only political force that had hardness, sharpness, disciplined drive and clearly defined purpose. [my emphasis]

(13) October Revolution: the Big Three (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin)

Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1870-1924), better know to the world by the last name he adopted, Lenin, was by all accounts the most important leader of the Russian Revolution in the 1917-1922 and in the years leading up to it. Albert Resis in his biographical sketch of Lenin for the reliably staid Britannica Online (accessed 09/23/2017) writes:

If the Bolshevik Revolution is — as some people have called it — the most significant political event of the 20th century, then Lenin must for good or ill be regarded as the century’s most significant political leader. Not only in the scholarly circles of the former Soviet Union but even among many non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in history, as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since Marx.

Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1916)

He fell seriously ill in early 1922, possibly due to the effects of a failed assassination attempt on him in 1918. By the end of that year, he was no longer active in leadership. A stroke in March 1923 left him without speech, and he passed away in January 1924 at the age of 53.

Spiegel TV has a two-minute video of silent clips of Lenin, apparently all from the time of the revolution, although it does not include commentary or captions: Lenin - Führer der Revolution.

Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (1879-1940), better known as Leon Trotsky, was one of the two major contenders for the Communist Party leadership, along with Josef Stalin, after Lenin's death. Trotsky advocated a different development policy and international political strategy than those identified with Stalin's commitment to "socialism in one country." Up until Trosky's death in Mexico at the hands of an assassin wielding a pickax in 1940, Trotskyism was the most important dissenting ideology that identified itself as part of the Communist left.

Leon Trotsky (1918)

In the later ideological disputes, Stalin and Trotsky and their partisans did their utmost to boost the importance of the one during the 1917-1924 period and to denigrate that of the other.

Trotsky had been a visible if erratic figure in the Russian revolutionary movement prior to 1917, sometimes finding himself in agreement with the Bolsheviks, other times not. He was the only one of the three who ever visited the United States, from January to May of 1917, when he returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks in August. As Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played a decisive role in directing troops loyal to the Bolsheviks in the October 25-26 (Old Style) seizure of power. He later became Foreign Minister responsible for negotiating peace with Germany and the leader of the Red Army during the civil war.

When Lenin fell ill in 1922, the Bolshevik leaders elevated a troika composed of Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinovyev in preference to giving the central leadership position to Trotsky. Stalin had a established himself as the main leader by 1923, a status he retained until his death. In 1926, Trotsky would join with Kamenev and Zinovyev in what was called the United Opposition to Stalin. He was exiled from the USSR in 1929, and in exile formed the Fourth International, a collection of rival communist parties to those of the Moscow-led Third International.

Trotskyism has been a persistent strain in left thought ever since. Trotskyists are known for presenting themselves as the most uncompromising of revolutionaries while also at times taking positions that echo those of rightwingers and counter-revolutionaries. I once heard a useful definition which said that the Trotskyists are people who support revolution everywhere except where one is actually taking place.

Ioseb Dzhugashvili Stalin, aka, Josef Stalin (1879-1953) was named General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922, soon becoming the main political leader of the Soviet Union and remaining so until his death in 1953. Though he is widely remembered today as a villain, he was also one of the few most consequential political leaders of the 20th century, leading the USSR in the rapid industrialization of the 1920s and 1930s and during what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. And his role during the Russian Revolution of 1917-1921 has also been contested in great detail, both by his partisans and his enemies.

Ioseb Dzhugashvili Stalin

Stalin was from Georgia, then a part of the Czarist Empire. He studied at a Greek Orthodox seminary, where he became attracted to Marxist revolutionary ideas. Which were definitely not part of the seminary's preferred outlook! He joined the Russian Social Democratic party in 1898 and left the seminary the following year, devoting himself to revolutionary political activity. Among other things, he pulled off robberies to fund party activities, notably including a spectacular robbery of a shipment of money to the State Bank at Tiflis in 1907.

Stalin's role during the Russian Revolution itself was significant, though not as visible as that of Trotsky.

Uwe Klußman writes in "Der letzte freie Leser" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmacht/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016:

Im März 1917, kurz nach dem Sturz des Zaren, schloss sich der aus der sibirischen Verbannung heimgekehrte Stalin in Petrograd seinen bolschewistischen Genossen an. Im April 1917 wählten sie ihn zum Mitglied des Zentralkomitees. In dieser Funktion bereitete er den Aufstand der Bolschewiki vor. So wurde Stalin Teilhaber der Macht, als Mitglied der von Lenin geführten Regierung, des „Rates der Volkskommissare". Dort war er zuständig für Nationalitätenfragen.

[In March 1917, shortly after the overthrow of the Czar, he [Stalin] joined up with his Bolshevik comrades in Petrograd after returning from Siberian exile. In April 1917, they voted him to be a member of the Central Committee. In this function, he prepared the uprising of the Bolsheviks. Thus Stalin became a holder of power, as a member of the government led by Lenin, of the "Council of People's Commissars." There he was responsible for nationality questions.]

In the Russian Empire, the nationality problems were extremely important ones. Russia ruled various non-Russian nationalities and was known as the "prison house of nations." During a stay in Vienna to acquaint himself with European Social Democracy, Stalin prepared his best-known theoretical work at the time of the Revolution, Marxism and the National Question (1913), in which he advocated for the right on national self-determination on the part of the nations of the Empire. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia and various nationalist groupings made cause with the Whites in the civil war, they were forced to take a more, shall we say, nuanced view of those nationalist movements.

During Stalin's stay in Vienna for six weeks in 1913, two other men who would become major antagonists of his later in life: Leon Trotsky and Adolf Hitler. There is no evidence that Stalin's paths crossed with the impoverished young rightwing fanatic Hitler, who was then living in a shelter for homeless men who had been surviving on the margins of society. However, Herbert Lackner ("Stalin unser" Der Erste Welkrieg-Profil History April 2013) recounts that that Stalin did meet Trotsky for the first time in Vienna at Trotsky's apartment at Kolschitzkygasse 30 in the Wieden district. In an account written many years later, in 1939, Trotsky described his first impression of Stalin as not very positive. It was also during his stay in Vienna that he started using the name Stalin, first as a pen name on an article of his that appeared in the newspaper, Der Sozialdemokrat.

Klußman writes further about Stalin's role in the Revolution:

Lenin schätzte Stalin als Multitalent der Machtsicherung. Während des Bürgerkriegs sandte die Partei ihn daher an verschiedene Frontabschnitte zwischen Perm am Ural und Petrograd. In Zarizyn an der Wolga, der Stadt, die später als Stalingrad weltbekannt wurde, zeigte er seinen rigorosen Führungsstil: Stalin ließ Getreide requirieren, Gegner hinrichten und Kritiker unter den aus der Zarenarmee übernommenen Militärberatern einsperren. Für seine militärischen Leistungen verlieh die sowjetische Führung ihm 1919 die höchste Auszeichnung, den Rotbannerorden.

[Lenin valued Stalin as a multi-talent for the securing of power. During the civil war, the Party sent him {Stalin} to different portions of the front between Perm on the Urals and Petrograd. In Tsaritsyn {Volgograd} on the Volga, the city that later would become world famous as Stalingrad, he showed his rigorous leadership style: Stalin had grain requisitioned, enemies executed, and critics among the military advisers taken over from the Czarist army imprisoned. For his military services, the Soviet leadership awarded him the highest recognition, the Order of the Red Banner.

Order of the Red Banner

(11) October Revolution: Lenin, the Bolsheviks and the Constituent Assembly

In the context of thinking about the October Revolution, it's useful to focus on the nature of the state that was initially created after the revolution. Most people know that it was called a "dictatorship of the proletariat" and most of them assume the term was largely some kind of excuse for dictatorship. And no doubt many of its practioners saw it that way.

In one pragmatic way of looking at it, there was a lot of improvising. The Tsarist government fell in February, replaced with a liberal government that immediately squandered much of what credibility it had by dedicating itself to continuing the now very unpopular war. The workers councils ("soviets") formed a kind of parallel government to Kerensky's official one. And when the soviets gave the Bolsheviks a majority, that was the basis of legitimacy on which Lenin relied in taking power in October.

They immediately faced an issue with the Constituent Assembly elections in October.

George Kennan relates the background results of the elections in November in Russia Leaves the War (1956). The February Revolution, which Kennan refers to as March in the following, had set up plans for a Constituent Assembly:

When the first Russian Revolution occurred, in March 1917, one of the basic points in the political program of the first provisional ministry had been the early convening of a constitutional convention, or "constituent assembly" as it was usually called in English usage, to determine the permanent form of national government. The intention to hold a constituent assembly accorded with the wishes of every major political party and faction operating in Russia during the period of the Provisional Government. It was the basis of the very expression "provisional government." The parties of the left, including the Bolsheviki, not only subscribed to the principle of holding such an assembly, but demanded it — repeatedly and insistently.

There was an Election Commission working on scheduling the election for it at the time the October Revolution took place.

Here's where its worth remembering that revolutions are revolutions. When they take place outside the established official order - which is not a requirement for a revolution to be an actual revolution - then they are faced with the task of constructing a new regular order with some new elements and some adaptations of the old government.

Here the example of Venezuela in the summer of 2017 is a useful approach to conceptualizing this. Hugo Chávez styled his government as a revolutionary one, the "Bolivarian Revolution." He was repeatedly re-elected as President and carried forward wide-ranging economic reforms, including exerting full public control over the PDVSA, the national oil company. Even after the 2002 US-backed coup against him fizzled, he maintained an electoral government and the national Constitution. He deferred plans for a new Constitution, judging that there wasn't public backing for it. But his government's policies were shaped by the known hostility of the US against him, which became more pronounced under the Obama Administration, whose Latin American policies were generally sharply conservative. The Cuban anti-Communist groups in the US made Venezuelan regime change a special project, which was eagerly championed by Republicans like Florida Sen Marco Rubio.

When Chavez died in 2013, a new Presidential election brought Nicolás Maduro to power by a narrow but clear margin in a highly competitive election. The opposition became increasingly militant, and the Venezuelan petrostate was hard hit by the worldwide slump in oil prices, causing new economic distresses. The Obama Administration heightened the pressure by declaring Venezuela a threat to US national security, a fairly absurd description on its face, but necessary to invoke the legal sanctions Obama had determined to impose on Venezuelan officials. The rightwing opposition became increasingly militant over time, with violent demonstrations a common occurrence by 2017. By this year, the CIA Director was talking openly about the US providing aid to supposedly democratic opposition groups. The Trump Administration even threatened military intervention.

Maduro's government decided to proceed with the process of creating a new Constitution, presenting it as a way to reconcile the pro- and anti-government factions on a peaceful basis. When the National Assembly authorized a referendum on setting up a Constituent Assembly that would prepare a new Constitution, the opposition boycotted the referendum. They and their American allies demanded that the referendum not be held. Afterward, the fact that the referendum had been carried out was used by the opposition to denounced Maduro's government as illegitimate, including the Trump Administration, which used it as an excuse to push for additional sanctions.

The Russian Constituent Assembly is mentioned in this report on Abby Martin's Empire Files program on the left TeleSUR network, Venezuela's Constituent Assembly: Dictatorship or Democracy? 08/29/2017:

I don't take this as an analogy. But it's another example of a case in which a government in a precarious position had to make practical decisions around a Constituent Assembly that carried some kind of official legitimacy but one which very much subject to being contested among the contending parties.

Kennan relates what happened when the Constituent Assembly election took place on November 25, 1917:

The Electoral Commission itself Electoral Commission "refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Bolshevik seizure of power, and continued to implement preparations for the election in accordance with the instructions of the defunct Provisional Government. This procedure was viewed with sharpest misgiving by the Bolshevik authorities, but they did not seriously interfere.

The Bolsheviks' misgivings proved to be well-founded:

The result was highly unfavorable to the Bolsheviki. Out of a total of 707 deputies elected, 410 were Social-Revolutionaries, only 175 Bolsheviki. Even with the addition of the Left S-R's, who at that time split away from their own party and joined with the Bolsheviki, the Bolshevik faction still had the support of less than a third of the body. The Bolsheviki, as was to be expected, proved to have their strength in the big cities, where the moderate conservative parties ran them a close second. But the peasantry, by far the most numerous segment of the population, voted almost solidly for the S-R's [Socialist Revolutionaries].

Kennan describes the November 25 elections rather grandly. "They represented the first sounding of the popular will ever conducted in Russia under rules comparable to those which prevail under western parliamentary systems. That they were, in general, honestly held and that they constituted a faithful reflection of the feelings of the voters does not appear to have been seriously challenged by historians of the Revolution."

The official Soviet histories did not see the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly as quite the historical tragedy that Kennan portrays. In the official 1939 Stalinist History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) - Short Course, the dismissal is described briefly:

In order to consolidate the Soviet power, the old, bourgeois state machine had to be shattered and destroyed and a new, Soviet state machine set up in its place. Further, it was necessary to destroy the survivals of the division of society into estates and the regime of national oppression, to abolish the privileges of the church, to suppress the counter-revolutionary press and counter-revolutionary organizations of all kinds, legal and illegal, and to dissolve the bourgeois Constituent Assembly. ...

The Ministries were abolished and replaced by Soviet administrative machinery and appropriate People's Commissariats. The Supreme Council of National Economy was set up to administer the industry of the country. The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Vecheka) was created to combat counter-revolution and sabotage, and F. Dzerzhinsky was placed at its head. The formation of a Red Army and Navy was decreed. The Constituent Assembly, the elections to which had largely been held prior to the October Revolution, and which refused to recognize the decrees of the Second Congress of Soviets on peace, land and the transfer of power to the Soviets, was dissolved.

The Bolsheviks controlled Petrograd, where the Constituent Assembly convened in January. Kennan writes that by December "the control of the Assembly was in the main a battle between two strongly leftist parties: the S-R's, who had the majority in the Assembly, and the Bolsheviki, who controlled the city streets."

Pro-Constituent Assembly demonstrators - January 5, 1918

At this stage, it would be difficult to distinguish ideology from expediency in the actions taken. The Bolshevik government tried hard to intimidate the SR's in the leadup to the first meeting of the Assembly. Kennan:

As more of the deputies began to arrive in Petrograd, the Bolsheviki neglected no steps to impress upon them the danger in which they would be placing themselves if they dared to take action not consistent with Bolshevik purposes.8 On December 26, the Pravda published a set of "theses," drafted by Lenin, on the subject of the Constituent Assembly. In this document the shift of Bolshevik policy toward the Assembly was rationalized on grounds convincing only to those who shared a belief in the ultimate righteousness of the Bolshevik cause and held that this justified an unlimited policy of expediency. "The interests of this revolution," Lenin wrote, "stand over the formal rights of the Constituent Assembly." He warned brutally that a complete endorsement by the Assembly of the legitimacy and actions to date of the Soviet regime would be the only "painless solution" of the crisis that had arisen; if this course were not taken, the crisis would have to be resolved

... only in the revolutionary manner, only by the most energetic, swift, firm, and decisive revolutionary measures. ...

In those Theses On The Constituent Assembly, Lenin argued on pragramatic grounds that the process "is taking place under conditions which preclude the possibility of the elections to this Constituent Assembly faithfully expressing the will of the people in general and of the working people in particular." And he argued on the basis of Marxist theory, "the Republic of Soviets (of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies) is not only a higher type of democratic institution (as compared with the usual bourgeois republic crowned by a Constituent Assembly), but is the only form capable of securing the most painless transition to socialism." He also stressed the urgent priority of getting Russia out of the world war:

One of the particularly acute problems of national life is the problem of peace. A really revolutionary struggle for peace began in Russia only after the victory of the October 25 Revolution, and the first fruits of this victory were the publication of the secret treaties, the conclusion of an armistice, and the beginning of open negotiations for a general peace without annexations and indemnities.

Only now are the broad sections of the people actually receiving a chance fully and openly to observe the policy of revolutionary struggle for peace and to study its results.

At the time of the elections to the Constituent Assembly the mass of the people had no such chance.

It is clear that the discrepancy between the composition of the elected Constituent Assembly and the actual will of the people on the question of terminating the war is inevitable from this point of view too.

When the Assembly finally convened, the arguments between the two sides were contentious, to put it mildly. Kennan gives this memorable description of Lenin at the session:

Lenin himself was present, and acted as master of ceremonies for his faction. It was plain to observers that every nerve of his politically impassioned being was aroused by this supreme parliamentary contest. His face deathly pale with tenseness, his burning eyes darting constantly over the scene and absorbing every detail, he directed his cohorts like a commander in battle, whenever there was any chance of their dominating the proceedings. When opposition speakers had the floor, he stretched out at full length on the steps leading to the podium and reinforced the harassing operations of his followers by appearing to go to sleep out of sheer boredom.

The following morning, the Soviet government officially dissolved the Assembly. "Thus ended Russia's one and only constitutional convention," writes Kennan.

In his speech to the Party's Central Executive Committee on January 19 (Jan 6 old calendar), Lenin offered this defense of dissolving the Assembly:

In the course of a revolution called forth by the strength of the Soviets there are certain to be all kinds of errors and blunders. But everybody knows that revolutionary movements are always and inevitably accompanied by temporary chaos, destruction and disorder. Bourgeois society is the same war, the same shambles; and it was this circumstance that gave rise to and accentuated the conflict between the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets. Those who point out that we are now “dissolving“ the Constituent Assembly although at one time we defended it are not displaying a grain of sense, but are merely uttering pompous and meaningless phrases. At one time, we considered the Constituent Assembly to be better than tsarism and the republic of Kerensky with their famous organs of power; but as the Soviets emerged, they, being revolutionary organisations of the whole people, naturally became incomparably superior to any parliament in the world, a fact that I emphasised as far back as last April. By completely smashing bourgeois and landed property and by facilitating the final upheaval which is sweeping away all traces of the bourgeois system, the Soviets impelled us on to the path that has led the people to organise their own lives. We have taken up this great work of organisation, and it is well that we have done so. Of course, the socialist revolution cannot be immediately presented to the people in a clean, neat and impeccable form; it will inevitably be accompanied by civil war, sabotage and resistance. Those who assert the contrary are either liars or cowards. (Stormy applause.) [my emphasis in bold]

When he spoke at that point of "civil war, sabotage and resistance," he was describing the immediate situation. Over the following decades when Lenin's words had taken on canonical status for Communists, statements like this by Lenin would become items in elaborate disputes among left factions and for opponents of socialism.

In this speech, which offers Lenin's overview of the previous year's revolutionary process, he concludes with this explanation of dissolving the Assembly:

To hand over power to the Constituent Assembly would again be compromising with the malignant bourgeoisie. The Russian Soviets place the interests of the working people far above the interests of a treacherous policy of compromise disguised in a new garb. The speeches of those outdated politicians, Chernov and Tsereteli, who continue whining tediously for the cessation of civil war, give off the stale and musty odour of antiquity. But as long as Kaledin exists, and as long as the slogan “All power to the Constituent Assembly“ conceals the slogan “Down with Soviet power“, civil war is inevitable. For nothing in the world will make us give up Soviet power! (Stormy applause.) And when the Constituent Assembly again revealed its readiness to post-pont’ all the painfully urgent problems and tasks that were placed before it by the Soviets, we told the Constituent Assembly that they must not be postponed for one single moment. And by the will of Soviet power the Constituent Assembly, which has refused to recognise the power of the people, is being dissolved. The Byabushinskys have lost their stakes; their attempts at resistance will only accentuate and provoke a new outbreak of civil war.

The Constituent Assembly is dissolved. The Soviet revolutionary republic will triumph, no matter what. the cost. (Stormy applause. Ovation.)

(8) October Revolution: Lenin the ... German agent?

One of the stories that has lingered in various incarnations is the notion that Lenin in returning to Russia and inciting the October Revolution was acting as an agent of the German Emperor (Kaiser). While Lenin as the chief leader of the Bolsheviks plays an outsize role in these accounts, this particular

John Kenneth Galbraith in the documentary episode previously linked discusses Lenin's career in exile and his return to Russia in 1917 via Germany, in what became known as the "sealed train," which in the July Days events of 1917 would become the (very thin) basis of Karensky's Provisional Government charge that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were acting as foreign agents of the Kaiser. In the companion volume, The Age of Uncertainty (1977), he writes:

Following jail and a three-year sentence in Siberia, [Lenin] had been out of Russia (except for short periods during and after 1905) since the beginning of the century. But the Polish police were tole rant, even friendly - Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, speaks of them with appreciation. And access to Russia was easy. Revolutionaries came and went across the border, many coming to visit Lenin whose stah1re as a revolutionary leader was now widely accepted. Though easy, it remained a wonderfully conspiratorial traffic. Once one Muranov, a leading Bolshevik member of the Duma, came to visit Lenin . He had parliamentary immunity so no one could question his right to travel. Nonetheless he made a clandestine crossing. When Lenin rebuked him for doing so, he apologized and explained that it had never occurred to him that one could cross a border legally.

With the outbreak of the war, Lenin wound up in Switzerland, where among other things he spent a great deal of his time and energy organizing antiwar conferences.

Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869-1939)

Galbraith recounts how in January of 1917, Lenin had rather sadly commented to a meeting of fellow socialists in Zurich, "We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution."

But with the February Revolution, the pace of history had quickened for him:

In the next days Lenin was desperate. How could he, and they [his colaborators in Switzerland], get to Russia? An airplane? That was mentioned, though in those days only as an idle dream. Out through France? The French would not think Lenin a helpful influence in Petrograd. They would arrest him forthwith. He could not lead a revolution from a French jail. To go through Germany would be to risk the suspicion, when he arrived in Russia, that he was a German agent. Still, that was the only chance. The German view of Lenin 's contribution to the Russian war effort, which was surprisingly sophisticated, was the same as that of the French but it led to the opposite conclusion. How good to have Lenin in Russia.

With, one must believe, a good deal of initiative and skill, a Swiss socialist, Fritz Platten, made an arrangement: Lenin would go through Germany. But it would be on an extraterritorial or non-German train. The concept of an extraterritorial train passing over the German railroads proved too difficult for the average later historian, and from this came the reference to a sealed train. And eventually it came to be imagined that the Germans had sealed Lenin up because they wanted protection from the Bolshevik infection. They weren't that troubled. It was Lenin who wanted to minimize his exposure to the Germans.

About twenty of Lenin's fellow Bolsheviks were on the train. There was a child or two, and also Inessa Armand, a sharply beautiful, French-born revolutionary and a close friend, brilliant collaborator and possibly - it does not seem important - a mistress of Lenin 's. The journey was not a very festive excursion. Lenin was deeply worried about his reception in Russia. After all, Germany and Russia were still at war. He might not even be allowed in. He was, although Fritz Platten was excluded as a foreigner. On April 3, 1917 (according to the Russian calendar), he arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd. In October he took power. [my emphasis in bold]

Rex Wade (The Russian Revolution, 2017) gives the same picture of Lenin's trip:

The Germans, after all, had an interest in helping the radical antiwar Russian socialists get home where they might help disrupt the government and war effort, just as Britain and France had an interest in hindering them. This led to the famous and much misunderstood “sealed train,” where the Russian radicals, in an effort to defuse the inevitable charges of cooperation with the enemy in wartime, were given a special status whereby no German would enter their car during the trip across Germany and all contact would be via a Swiss intermediary. Feeling that the need to return to Russia and participate in the politics of the revolution outweighed the dangers of being labeled a “German agent,” Lenin made the trip.

During early July, the Provisional Government pulled out the charge that Lenin was working for the Germans:

... the government released documents purporting to show Bolshevik ties with Germany, which brought some previously “neutral” garrison regiments out in support of the Soviet leaders while dampening the enthusiasm of many demonstrators. These charges, printed and distributed on the 5th, produced a sensation and led to a sudden drop in the Bolsheviks’ popularity. Lenin and several leading Bolsheviks fled into hiding in Finland to avoid the arrest warrants issued by the government, while some local leaders found themselves abused or even attacked by their fellow workers and soldiers.

It was bogus propaganda, but it did turn public opinion momentarily against the Bolsheviks. The government had been concentrating much of its political propaganda against the Bolsheviks, "The July Days were not, as the Bolsheviks’ opponents immediately asserted (and later mythology repeated), an abortive planned Bolshevik coup. They represented a genuine outburst of popular discontent."

Ivan Krastev in Analogie zum Jahr 1917? APuZ 34-36:2017 gives a somewhat vague description of this story, focusing primarily on whatever intent the German Kaiser had to actually radicalize the Russian Revolution under way, it didn't work out that way:

Der Plan der deutschen Reichsregierung, die revolutionären Kräfte in Russland zu unterstützen, um letztlich eigene geopolitische Ziele zu erreichen, nahm kein gutes Ende. Die Revolution beendete zwar Russlands Teilnahme am Ersten Weltkrieg, verbreitete jedoch in ganz Europa das Revolutionsfieber – und brachte den Bürgerkrieg sogar nach Deutschland.

[The German government's plan to support the revolutionary forces in Russia, in order to reach its own geopolitical goals in the end, came to a bad end. The revolution did end Russia's participation in the First World War, nevertheless spread revolution fever all through Europe - and even brought civil war to Germany.]

It's not exactly clear what Krastev means by bringing "civil war to Germany."
And his vagueness in discussing it leaves it unclear how much if any of the old trope he wants to keep alive.

Das kaiserliche Deutschland hegte keinerlei Sympathien für Lenins revolutionäre Träume. Wäre der eigenwillige Bolschewik Deutscher gewesen, hätte die Obrigkeit ihn ins Gefängnis geworfen. Lenin war aber Russe und der deutsche Führungsstab der Ansicht, die verschiedenen revolutionären Gruppen seien für Deutschland im Krieg hilfreich. Also wurden sie unterstützt. Berlins Ziel war es, Russland dazu zu bringen, sich aus dem Krieg zurückzuziehen – oder zumindest Chaos in Russland zu stiften. Die Deutschen prägten ein eigenes Wort für diese spezifische Art der Einflussnahme: „Revolutionierungspolitik“.

Wade writes, "The myth of Lenin as a German agent and of the Bolsheviks as surviving only because of 'German gold' is only the most historically enduring of the many conspiracy theories current in 1917."

Wade cites Semion Yandres' study, The Bolsheviks' "German Gold" Revisited Carl Beck Papers #1106 (1995). It's a readable piece of forensic history. German records on the supposed money transactions between the German government and the Bolsheviks had been available earlier. But only after the fall of the Soviet Union were some key original documents made available to researchers. The accusations that the Provisional Government had published during the July Days, aka, the June Uprising, were based on a series of 66 telegrams involving financial transactions of what Yandres calls the Parvus--Kozlowski firm. The Kerensky government brought charges against several Bolsheviks, alleging that the transactions were a front for fund transfers from the German government through Stockholm to the party. Part of the case was based on the argument that the language in the telegrams involved the use of a code to hide messages. The Bolsheviks had seized power and dropped the charges before they were vetted in court.

Yandres on the findings of his analysis of the 66 telegrams: "The present work provides an analysis of each individual telegram as well as of the entire group of 66, and finds no support in them for the July accusations. In fact, the telegrams contain no evidence that there were any funds transferred from Stockholm to Petrograd, let alone funds that wound up in Bolshevik coffers." He also found that "no evidence that the telegraphic correspondence maintained between Petrograd and Stockholm was coded." Not only that, in the transactions in question,"Goods were sent to Petrograd, and payments traveled back to Stockholm - but never in the opposite direction." (emphasis in original)

Yandres even found that the Provisional Government's own internal investigation had found that the telegrams didn't support the charge.

Notwithstanding a persistent search for proof that the Bolsheviks received German funds through the Parvus-Fürstenberg-Kozlowski-Sumenson network (the Provisional Government thoroughly examined not only the records of Sumenson's commercial activities but also all foreign monetary transactions into Russia between late 1914 and July 1917), the investigation concluded that there was no evidence of the "German connection."

(Jakub Furstenberg was a Bolshevik who also used the name Hanecki. Parvus, who Yandres describes as a "Russo-German Social Democrat" whose real name was Alexander Israel.)

It would have been surprising under the circumstances of 1914-17 if there had been no contact at all between German agents and the Bolsheviks. And Yandres speculates that the reason the Soviets never released the telegrams themselves was because "they do reveal the existence of close contacts between prominent party figures from Lenin's immediate circle and German agents in Scandinavia. It is quite certain that these ties were close enough to prevent the Bolsheviks from openly acknowledging them."

Yandres notes that Parvus, one of the principle figures in the Stockholm transfers, may have transmitted funds to the Bolsheviks in other ways, noting that the German government did provide Parvus significant funds "to promote revolution in Russia." And he writes, "In August 1917, Carl Moor, the Swiss socialist and agent of the German (and before that, Austrian) government, approached the members of the Bolshevik Foreign Bureau in Stockholm with an offer of financial support to the party. ... Recently declassified records of the Central Committee reveal that in summer 1917 the Bolshevik Foreign Bureau in fact did receive from Moor a contribution in an amount then valued at 230,000 German marks." He goes on to explain, "it was used by the Foreign Bureau to finance the so-called Third Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists (including German!), which met in Stockholm in September 1917. Thus far, this is the only documented proof that the Bolsheviks received German funds before coming to power."

As we've been often reminded in the United States the last few months, the meaning of contacts between political figures and foreign governments can be unclear from the outside. In the case of the Zimmerwald conference in the summer of 1917, both of the "dual governments" in Russia, the Provisional Government and the Soviets, were cooperating on a peace initiative that included supporting the convening of the conference. So it's not clear that the government would have regarded even taking German funds as a subversive act in itself. They might have taken that as a gesture by the German government as a possible willingness to engage with a peace proposal.

In any case, there is nothing in that record that could remotely carry the weight of a conspiracy theory that the October Revolution was primarily a German "regime change" operation!

Historian Jan Kusber in his brief article "Des Kaisers Bolschewik" 1917 (Zeit Geschichte 2:2017) seems to take it for granted that big bucks from the Kaiser came to the Bolsheviks, citing the funds that the German government transmitted to Parvus obviously went to them, without citing the strong qualifications in Yandres' paper. The 230 thousand German marks cited above going to support organizing the Zimmerwald Conference came from Carl Moor, who, Yandres is careful to explain, "was working independently of Parvus."

Kusber seemingly excessively willing to credit the "German gold" story, he makes a similar comment to Ivan Krastev's, making the story a warning to governments putting too faith in regime-change operations in countries considered hostile:

Doch am Ende sollte es Lenins Plan sein, der aufging: Die Zugeständnisse von Brest-Litowsk waren nur vorübergehend. Und die Bolschewiki hatten aller Welt gezeigt, dass eine sozialistische Revolution moglich war. Revolutionare Stimmung breitete sich auch in Deutschland aus und führte im November 1918 zum Sturz der Monarchie. Die Bolschewiki wiederum eroberten im Bürgerkrieg viele Gebiete des alten Zarenreichs zurück, und die Sowjetunion stieg zur Weltmacht aus. Insofern war der Transfer des Revolutionärs durch seine konservativ-imperialen Kontrahenten ein Lehrstück fur eine Politik, die das Gegenteil dessen erreichte, was sie beabsichtigte. Dieser Befund ist so offensichtlich, dass es erstaunt, wie wenig auch gegenwärtig die nicht intendierten Effekte derartiger Strategien bedacht werden.

[But in the end, it would be Lenin's plan that came to pass: the concessions of Brest-Litowsk were only transient. And the Bolsheviks had shown the world that a socialist revolution was possible. A revolutionary atmosphere spread even in Germany and in November 1918 led to the overthrow of the {German} monarchy. The Bolsheviks in the civil war reconquered many areas of the old Czarist Empire, and the Soviet Union rose to be a world power. In so far, the transfer of the revolutionary {presumably Lenin in the "sealed train" is meant here} by his conservative Imperial foes a lesson about a policy that achieved the opposite of that which it intended. This finding is so obvious that it is suprising how little even today the unintended consequences of that kind of strategy are considered.]

As much as I like the warning that Krastev and Kusber make against reckless thinking on regime change operations, the analogy doesn't work for me in this case. While the Germans may have wanted to stir up trouble, there is just no reason to think that their goal was a Communist/Bolshevik government in Russia. And, as explained above, the amount of support they are actually known to have provided to the Bolsheviks could scarcely have been decisive in the outcome.

Historical analogies are tricky.

I'm intrigued to see that in the New York Times Red Century series piece with he cheesy-but-catchy title How German Condoms Funded the Russian Revolution by British writer Catherine Merridale 07/17/2017 states as a fact that Fürstenberg's firm was laundering money to the Bolsheviks. She doesn't give much detail. But she certainly seems to be talking about the Parvus-Fürstenberg operation that Semion Yandres researched. If she's working with new archival information beyond what Yandres drew upon, she doesn't indicate it.

Another entry in the "Red Century" series by historian Sean Mcmeekin, Was Lenin a German Agent? New York Times 06/19/2017, refers to supposed extensive support by the Germans to the Bolsheviks, including the charges brought by the Provisional Government based on the 66 telegrams, with no indication that research like that of Yandres has been published.

This doesn't give me a lot of confidence in how carefully the Times' "Red Century" series has been edited.

(7) October Revolution and civil war: a sample of the bottomless sea of polemics over the event

It wouldn't be right to do a whole series of posts on the October Revolution and not offer up a sample of Leninist polemics. The October Revolution became not only an object of endless arguments between supporters and opponents of the revolution. They also became the topic of a bottomless pit of polemics among Marxists and pretty much everyone else on the political spectrum to this day. Some actually scholarly, some purely political polemics not worrying excessively about historical accuracy, some just slogans.

I'm starting here from an article by Israel Getzler, Lenin's Conception of Revolution As Civil War Slavonic and East European Review 74:3 1996) And I'm picking out a part where he discusses a 1917 polemic between Lenin and the main Menshevik leader at the moment, L. Martov (Yuly Osipovich Tsederbaum). The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were the two main factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), though by 1917 the two factions were functioning as de facto separate parties.

The polemic in this case involves Lenin's view on civil war. Getzler argues that Lenin saw civil war as a desirable thing from the standpoint of a socialist revolution. Getzler argues:

... what distinguished Lenin from other revolutionaries (for example Martov - his 'repressed alter ego') was not so much his intense revolutionism or his absolute conviction that a European socialist revolution was within reach, but rather his simplistic, narrow and brutal understanding of revolution as civil war tout court [i.e., and nothing else]. It was that understanding, and the corresponding strategy and tactics, mentality and modus operandi, which he injected into his 'belligerent party' of Bolsheviks. With that credo of civil war he marched the Bolsheviks into the October revolution and the construction of the Soviet state. And it was that revolutionary Soviet state power, which he defined as merely 'a tool of the proletariat in its class struggle, a special bludgeon, rien de plus!', that he bequeathed to his Bolshevik heirs. [my emphasis in bold]

This argument reflects on several important historical points, such as Mensheviks vs. Bolsheviks, the relationship of Lenin's "war communism" to later Soviet governance, even worldwide polemics in the 1960s between Maoists and Soviet-line Marxists. This is one reason that processing any aspect of the Soviet experience can quickly come to feel like dashing through field of thorns with a large animal in pursuit.

I've tried in this series of posts to highlight the ways that the October Revolution needs to be understood as part of the experience and outcome of the First World War. The scale and murderous effectiveness of the were was unprecedented in history at that time. The war also meant that a lot of people, most of them men, had weapons and training in how to use them.

There had been a prewar general consensus among the social-democratic parties of the Second International that the monopoly capitalism that had come to dominate the advanced capitalist nations was inherently expansionist. Some, including Lenin, even used "imperialism" as a synonym for monopoly capitalism. Formal resolutions of the International committed the social democrats of each country to oppose their "own" imperialisms and block them from starting a war. The Moroccan crises of 1905-6 and 1911 had already given real-world warnings of how a major war among major capitalist powers could break out.

Infamously, once war came the ruling groups in Europe found it fairly easy to persuade the socialist parties to support their ruling classes. But there were splits in the socialist parties between those who did support "their" wars and those who opposed them. That split is sometimes thought to be the beginning of the later split between Communist and Social Democrats. That's not entirely wrong. But it's also a serious over-implication of the process. In Germany, for instance, Eduard Bernstein, the creator of Marxist "revisionism," sided with the generally more radical opponents of the war.

Lenin was emphatically in the antiwar camp. But he didn't take a pacifist position. On the contrary, he promoted the slogan of turning the "imperialist war" into a "civil war," i.e., socialist revolutions against the capitalist rulers of the belligerent countries.

The more immediate background to the Martov-Lenin polemic we're focusing on here is that after the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia that brought the Karensky government to power, there ensued months of "dual power," in which the formal government of Kerensky was facing a competing quasi-government based in the soviets, i.e., the workers and soldiers councils that had been the driving popular force in the revolution. In July, there were spontaneous attempts by some militant workers to overthrow Kerensky that are remembered as the July Days, sometimes called the July Uprising. "Spontaneous" in this case meaning not centrally organized as a coup attempt. (Unless otherwise specified, the dates here are Old Style.)

Rex Wade describes the July events in The Russian Revolution (2017):

The July Days were not, as the Bolsheviks’ opponents immediately asserted (and later mythology repeated), an abortive planned Bolshevik coup. They represented a genuine outburst of popular discontent. They were a demand for a more radical and effective government – an all-socialist government – which would fulfill popular aspirations for peace, economic reform and solutions to the many problems wracking the country. The Bolsheviks were the major party supporting these demands and their harsh criticism of the government helped focus worker and soldier discontents on the demand for Soviet power as the solution to their problems. This, and the deep involvement of Bolshevik activists, forced the Bolsheviks to attempt a belated leadership role in the demonstrations. Ironically, the latter also concentrated attention on the Bolsheviks’ role in fomenting the demonstrations while ignoring the very important role of the Left SRs [Social Revolution party] and anarchists as well as of popular grievances. This focus on the Bolshevik leaders distorted interpretations of the July Days, both at the time and later. It allowed Provisional Government and Revolutionary Defensist leaders to avoid coming to grips with the genuineness of popular discontent and the implications of growing political support for the notion of Soviet power. As a result they did not move to deal with those discontents, which helps explain the rapid revival of leftist, including Bolshevik, popularity soon thereafter, despite repressive measures against the Bolsheviks. (p. 184) [my emphasis]

"July Days" demonstration in Petrograd, 1917

In addition, the Kornilov Affair of August 27-31 was a rightwing attempt by Gen. Lavr Georgiyevich Kornilov to overthrow the Kerensky regime. Kerensky had appointed Kornilov as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Kerensky's government, with some timely assistance from railway workers, thwarted this attempt and arrested Kornilov. "For the left – moderate and radical – Kornilov became the symbol of counter revolution," writes Rex Wade:

Now, however, Kerensky was rescued by the very Soviet and the workers and soldiers he had intended to move against. The socialist parties, always on the lookout for counterrevolution, responded energetically, calling on the workers and soldiers to rally to defense of the revolution. Arms were distributed to the Red Guards, which now expanded dramatically, and the more revolutionary Petrograd garrison regiments were called out. Even before they had to act, however, railway workers hindered the advance of Krymov’s troops, while agitators from Petrograd and local towns filtered into the soldiers’ ranks to warn them that they were being used for counterrevolution. The soldiers stopped and refused to go further. General Krymov, after a tumultuous meeting with Kerensky, retired to the apartment of a friend where, after declaring that “The last card for saving the homeland has been beaten – living is not worthwhile any longer,” he shot himself.52 By August 31 Kornilov’s effort collapsed and he and several associates were placed under arrest near the front military headquarters (though guarded by Kornilov’s own loyal bodyguard unit). (p. 203)

General Lavr Georgiyevich Kornilov (1870–1918) 

Here is how Getzler frames Lenin's dispute with Martov as showing Lenin's seeming obsession with the need for civil war:

In August and September, preparing for the plunge into the October revolution, Lenin again raised the banner of civil war. Taking advantage of Martov's warning against civil war, he told him that such a self-denying ordinance would be tantamount to

a manifest rejection of any form of class struggle, of any revolution [ ... ] who does not know that the world history of all revolutions shows that class struggle turns inevitably and not just by accident to civil war.

Almost at the same time, he repeated that point in 'The Russian Revolution and Civil War', where he extolled the blessings of civil war:

Gentlemen, do not frighten us with civil war [ ... ] it is inevitable [ ... ] it gives victory over the exploiters, land to the peasants, peace to the nations, it opens up the road that leads to the victorious revolution of the international socialist proletariat.

It was with that credo of civil war and revolutionary dictatorship that Lenin took his Bolsheviks into the October revolution and into a 'homogeneous', that is, a one-party Bolshevik government.

I find this to be a strained interpretation.

The first document he cites is from August 19, a published text by Lenin called "They Do Not See the Wood for the Trees" Collected Works, Vol. 25:

Martov implies that a Marxist or even just a revolutionary democrat had the right to reject a slogan correctly expressing the interests of the people and those of the revolution on the grounds that the slogan could be realised “only in the course of a civil war”. But this is an obvious absurdity, an obvious renunciation of the whole class struggle, the whole revolution. For everyone knows that the history of all revolutions the world over reveals an inevitable rather than an accidental transformation of the class struggle into civil war. Everyone knows that it was after July 4 that we in Russia saw the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie starting civil war, the disarming of regiments, executions at the front, and assassination of Bolsheviks. Civil war is “impermissible” for revolutionary democrats, if you please, just when the course of events has inexorably brought about a situation in which the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie have started civil war. (p. 256) [my emphasis]

That document is a polemic of September 1917, when the political situation was one of intense turmoil. This was after the July Days and after Kornilov was appointed defense minister but before the Kornilov Affair.

The second Lenin article fronm which Getzler quotes is The Russian Revolution And Civil War (Collected Works Vol. 26, p. 28):

This experience, similarly to the experience of all European revolutions, from the end of the eighteenth century on shows that civil war is the sharpest form of the class struggle, it is that point in the class struggle when clashes and battles, economic and political, repeating themselves, growing, broadening, becoming acute, turn into an armed struggle of one class against another. More often than not - one may say almost always - in all more or less free and advanced countries the civil war is between those classes whose antagonistic position towards each other is created and deepened by the entire economic development of capitalism, by the entire history of modern society the world over—civil war is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

During the past half year of our revolution, we have experienced very strong spontaneous outbursts (April 20-21, July 3-4) in which the proletariat came very close to starting a civil war. On the other hand, the Kornilov revolt was a military conspiracy supported by the landowners and capitalists led by the Cadet Party, a conspiracy by which the bourgeoisie has actually begun a civil war.

Such are the facts. Such is the history of our own revolution. More than anything we must learn from this history, we must give a great deal of thought to the course it has taken and to its class significance. [my emphasis] (p. 29)

Lenin at this time was not writing out religious catechisms or formulating a philosophy of history for academic editing and publication. It was in the middle of a revolutionary process in which he was a key player and the stakes were literally life-and-death for him and his closest collaborators. And for many others, as well. Both these polemics with Martov, the Menshevik leader, show Lenin arguing for a seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and their supporters on behalf of a socialist order against the unpopular and failing Kerensky government. Technically, Kerensky provided over four different governments during his short time in power, because of the restructurings necessitated by his regime's precarious hold on power during the entire period.

And Lenin here is plainly arguing that it would be ridiculous to back down from taking power under the threat that it would cause a civil war. As he says there, the real possibility of a civil war was already manifesting itself in real time. As events played out, the Bolshevik takeover on late October itself took place with relatively little violence in the capital of Petrograd (St. Petersberg), although hundreds were killed in street fighting in Moscow.

Here is another point where remembering the wartime context is important. Kerensky refused to sue for peace and was pursuing the already massive violence of the war against Germany. And that continuation of the international warfare was extremely unpopular. As the historian Manfred Hildermeier puts it, "The vital question of the [Kerensky] regime remained the war."

The civil war really got under way a few months into 1918 with a wide variety of players. It would be difficult to argue that it was solely based on the actions of the Bolshevik government, unless one takes the point of view that its very existence was itself the justification for civil war. Maybe that is the perspective that lies behind Getzler's argument. Certainly, in 1918 the Woodrow Wilson Administration and its French and British allies in the war thought the existence of Lenin's government was sufficient cause to encourage the civil war, including with direct military intervention on the side of the Whites (counter-revolutionaries).

Does the real history justify Getzler's contention that Lenin was operating from a "simplistic, narrow and brutal understanding of revolution as civil war tout court"? Whatever criticism that can legitimately be leveled at Vladimir Lenin, arguing that he took a "simplistic" view of politics, revolutionary or otherwise, is one of the most unlikely. Did Lenin want a civil war in order to establish the kind of regime he wanted? The only way to know with reasonable certainty would be in the counterfactual case that his government had a protracted period of a year or more in which civil war and active foreign intervention had not been pursued by their enemies. If Lenin and his Soviet Communist government had really had the opportunity for such a period in which they could rule without military conflict, would they have really rejected the opportunity? Even as pure speculation, that is hard to imagine.

John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty: Lenin and The Great Ungluing"

Today's episode of John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 The Age of Uncertainty is Episode 5 Lenin and The Great Ungluing, which deals with the First World War and its aftermath:

Galbraith in the companion book notes, "No subject known to history, not even the reasons for the long decline of Rome (the more interesting question is how it lasted so long), has been so much debated as the causes of World War I."

But that doesn't stop him from offering his own observations. This is an important one. He takes issue with Marxist theories of imperialism that held capitalism to be especially prone to generating wars, and the First World War more specifically:

The better explanation lies in the traditional territorial attitudes of predominantly rural societies. Their governments, at least in that time, were dangerously belligerent - more so, Marx notwithstanding, than those of the capitalist world.

Ever since the beginning of historical experience, land and men had been the basis of both wealth and military power; the two went together. The wealth of a prince had always been in proportion to the extent and quality of the land be controlled. For varying with the extent and quality of the land were the number, and perhaps also the quality, of the peasantry it supported and therewith of the soldiers he could muster. Thus his military power. Thus the territorial imperative, the belief that nothing should stand in the way of acquisition or defense of territory.

In 1914, the belief in land and men- this territorial imperative - was part of the deepest instinct of the old ruling houses. It was a factor as between France and Germany. Had Germany won, something more of France would have been added to Alsace and Lorraine. Between the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, and in the Balkans, it was mortal. It was for this reason that the rulers eyed each other with suspicion; each believed that his neighbor wanted the territory that was decisive for wealth and power. [my emphasis]

He also spends some time to discuss Lenin's leadership, including the following:

Marx, no one could doubt, was a revolutionary; the free-flowing beard, piercing eye, exceptionally untidy appearance were all in keeping. It may, indeed, be Marx who has given us our mental image of how a revolutionary should look. Far more than Marx, Lenin was a revolutionary. Marx wrote; Lenin led . He remains the revolutionary colossus who stands astride a whole age, the point of reference still for the long, slowly moving lines beside the Kremlin Wall. With his high for ehead greatly accented by the bald dome above, his neat mustache, dark, quiet suit and something very near a VanDyck beard, he looked like the head of a firm of chartered accountants. Leon Trotsky, with his fi erce and glittering eye and much less disciplined beard, was a man of far more satisfactory aspect.

Once quite a few years ago a Soviet historian visited Harvard. He was an old man and had served in Budenny's cavalry during the Revolution. He had known Lenin well and told with amused pride that Lenin had once paid him a high compliment; he was, Lenin had said, the world's only known case of a cavalryman with brains. I asked him the source of Lenin's leadership - a man so tidy, looking so much like a clerk. He replied: "When Lenin spoke, we marched."

Galbraith also relates this anecdote, which he presents as like apocryphal, talking about the time Lenin spent at the library in the British Museum while in exile: "Years later [after the Boshevik Revolution], according to legend, it occurred to someone to ask one of the library attendants if he remembered Lenin. He did, a most diligent little man. The librarian wondered whatever had become of him."

He also discusses the vexatious issue of the adjustments made by capitalist countries in their method of rule after the First World War:

In the West the war ended, Germany was defeated but the glue seemed to hold. In Germany Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat, became President. Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht led a militant minority whose view of revolution was as Lenin's. But the moderate opposition in Germany, the counterpart of the Mensheviks, was far stronger than in Russia. Gustav Noske, a Social Democrat, became Minister of Defense and put down their revolt. Luxembourg and Liebknecht were both killed by anti-Communists. But in the Western countries too, the United States partly excepted , there was a quiet revolution, one that deserves the name.

In all European countries the old coalition of capitalists and traditional rulers [aristocratic landowners, more or less] was at an end. There would still be a ruling coalition; it would be of business interests, large and small, and the trade unions and their parties. Sometimes these joined in power. More often they traded it back and forth, increasingly sharing it with yet other groups. So it was in Britain, France and the British Dominions. And so, with the passage of time, it would be in the United States. It was a prospect that Marx did not foresee.

Tags: age of uncertainty, colonialism, john kenneth galbraith, lenin, world war i

Does the world exist independent of the observer?

New Age/esoteric spiritual groups often teach that "we create our own reality" in the most literal sense. On an ever more widespread basis, Christian fundamentalist views of science and more cynical industry-lobby-created scientific scams on issues like global climate change have gone a long way, especially during the Cheney-Bush administration, toward confusing the distinction between fact and opinion. The philosophical debate between "idealist" and "materialist" views of the world is probably best known from the positions of Plato (idealist) and Aristotle (materialist). Both "idealism" and "materialism" have specific meanings in philosophy that are distinct from the colloquial meanings.

In looking through Brown University's online collection of the New Left journal Radical America, I came across the following reference to a memorable remark by the Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin on the topic. It's from the Sept-Oct 1970 issue of that journal, in an article by Paul Piccone, "Toward and Understanding of Lenin's Philosophy". This issue was largely turned over to the philosophical journal Telos (more on it below), making it effectively an extra issue of Telos.

The comment, quoting Piccone from p. 18 of the linked PDF document, is that:

the independent existence of the [world] cannot be seriously doubted (or else we fall to the level of psychotics or university professors, according to Lenin).

This comes in the middle of Piccone's discussion of Lenin's book Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908). I haven't been able to find the exact quotation in the linked full English text. So maybe that was Paul Piccone's interpretation of the book, which is full of sharp words for various academics and the concept of "idealist" philosophy. In any case, it's a memorable saying.

It still surprises me to think that a guy like Lenin, who made his mark on history through his political activities in leading the Russian Bolshevik revolution and founding the Soviet Union, spent a significant part of his life pouring through philosophical texts to write a polemic like Materialism and Empirio-criticism. His example in that regard had lasting influence on the Soviet leadership. In his book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1992), Alan Bullock described how the leaders in the USSR were expected to show their own mastery of Communist ideological/philosophical concepts.

Telos is a philosophical journal still being published. It was founded by Paul Piccone who was the chief editor until he passed away in 2004. It is still published, and Telos Press has a Web site, although it apparently doesn't make copies of its articles available online. As of this writing, the the alternating slideshow blurbs of "What others are saying about TELOS" includes this one from Jerry Brown, former California Governor, former Mayor of Oakland and current California's environmental-friendly Attorney General: "TELOS remains provocative and independent in a time of intellectual banality."

And, yes, it's entirely believable that Jerry Brown reads Telos. And understands it.

This tribute, The Trek with Telos: A Rememberance [sic] of Paul Piccone (January 19, 1940—July 12, 2004) by Timothy Luke Fast Capitalism 1.2 (2005), gives more biographical details about Piccone. Piccone's focus on the political philosophy of the very conservative Germany theorist Carl Schmitt suggests that he may have developed interests that run in a more conservative direction later in life. Marie Piccone also writes about him and the journal in TELOS: Its Past and Future (2007).

I haven't read many articles from any issue of Telos, so I can't really say much about it's current philosophical or political direction. Browsing the blog posts on the front page of the Telos Press Web site, including one by Irene Lancaster on Islam and another by current Telos editor Russell Berman of Stanford on the recently-release National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, suggests that the blog itself has a distinct neoconservative bent.

Tags: irene lancaster, jerry brown, lenin, paul piccone, russell berman

More daffy history from Bush

Does this man look like a Muslim terrorist to you?

Dear Leader Bush addressed his grateful subjects at the Heritage Foundation on Thursday. There was a lot of the usual: terror, evil people, the "war on terror", the value of torture, the need for indiscriminate domestic spying, etc. You can find the full text with audio and video at the White House Web site. A highlights version is available from TPM.

I was struck by the fact that Our Leader mentioned a couple of antiwar groups by name, MoveOn.org and Code Pink. He positioned them as allies of the Democrats against American national security, soldiers and veterans, starting at about 19:30 in the White House video:

I ask Congress to send me a clean veterans funding bill by Veterans Day; and to pass a clean defense spending bill. Congress needs to put the needs of those who put on the uniform ahead of their desire to spend more money. When it comes to funding our troops, some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the requests of our commanders on the ground, and less time responding to the demands of MoveOn.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters.

This is sleazy as all hell, though the Republicans generally have been slinging such charges for basically the last six years, and they're getting more and more hysterical about it.

But the Heritage Foundation crowd responded with warm enthusiasm.

I'm a little surprised by his singling those two groups out, though. It's obvious that when the President considers them significant enough to mention in a speech, that's likely to raise their profile. So why are they doing that? One reason is obviously that the Republicans have been focusing hard lately on discrediting antiwar activists and critics. But this is Dick Cheney's government, after all. So I can't help but wonder just how much they are intending to escalate against those named groups.

At about 4:50 in the White House video, Bush starts his grand history lesson. I found myself thinking about it a lot after I first heard that passage. For the first half hour or so, I was pretty much in a state of wonderment at the strangeness of it. And I don't pretend to understand it. But the jist of it is that Bin Laden is kind of like Hitler and Lenin and therefore we should pay attention to what they say, which would then make everyone go along with Bush and Cheney's plans for whatever they want to do.

Here are Dear Leader's own words on the topic starting at around 4:40 on the White House video:

We must take the words of the enemy seriously. The terrorists have stated their objectives. They intend to build a totalitarian Islamic empire - encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In pursuit of their imperial aims, these extremists say there can be no compromise or dialog with those they call infidels - a category that includes America, the world's free nation [sic], Jews, and all Muslims who reject their extreme vision of Islam. They reject the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the free world. Again, hear the words of Osama bin Laden last year: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."

History teaches that underestimating the words of evil, ambitious men is a terrible mistake. In the early 1900s, the world ignored the words of Lenin, as he laid out his plans to launch a Communist revolution in Russia - and the world paid a terrible price. The Soviet Empire he established killed tens of millions, and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war.

In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews - and the world paid a terrible price. His Nazi regime killed millions in the gas chambers, and set the world aflame in war, before it was finally defeated at a terrible cost in lives and treasure.

Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. And the question is: Will we listen? (my emphasis)

This is more of the usual threat inflation. But I still marvel at the notion of history here.

Karl Kautsky: forerunner of the Taliban?

Let's pretend for a minute that when Woodrow Wilson entered the Oval Office in 1913, he was less worried about rising European tensions and German Imperial aggressiveness under Kaiser Bill than about the threat of communist revolution. And that he set up a crack team of assassins to go after the leader most likely to lead such a movement. He would most likely have gone after Karl Liebknecht or maybe even Lenin's ideological nemesis Karl Kautsky. They were both high-profile leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). And the SPD was generally considered the strongest of the Social Democratic parties and the most likely to come to power first. (The split into Social Democratic and Communist Parties came in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917.) It's unlikely that he would have gone after Lenin in his exile in Cracow, Poland, hanging out at the Jama Michalikowa Café. Because despite the Russian Revolution of 1905, which saw the first appearance of the workers' committees known as "soviets", Russian Social Democrats appeared even to most Marxists and Social Democrats elsewhere as unlikely leadership for a world revolution. Preventive assassination, like preventive war, is an inherently uncertain business.

John Kenneth Galbraith writes about Lenin in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):

With his high forehead greatly accented by the bald dome above, his neat mustache, dark, quiet suit and something very near a Van Dyck beard, he looked like the head of a firm of chartered accountants. Leon Trosksy, with his fierce and glittering eye and much less disciplined beard, was a man of far more satisfactory aspect [to fit the popular image of a revolutionary]. ...

Previously in London he had been astonished that the library at the British Museum was run for the public and that the librarians actually regarded themselves as the servants of the readers. (Years later, according to legend, it occurred to someone to ask one of the library attendants if he remembered Lenin. He did, a most diligent little man. The librarian wondered whatever had become of him.)

Though he didn't look like The Greatest Threat to Civilization in 1912 or thereabouts, it's not as though Lenin was completely ignored, though. Anyone who had reason or inclination to know about Russian politics or the European socialist movement had probably heard of him and knew something about the Bolshevik political stance. Kaiser Bill in 1917 decided to allow Lenin to travel through Germany from Switzerland on the way back to Russia, where the Kaiser thought Lenin could cause trouble for Germany's Russian enemy in the First World War then still under way.

Karl Liebknecht: Did he want to create a worldwide caliphate?

And after Lenin came to power, Wilson hardly ignored him. In fact, Wilson had a Protestant moralistic streak not completely unlike that associated with Bush. He regarded Lenin as something like the incarnation of evil, to the point of declining to pursue a proposal from Lenin that would have given the Communist government a much smaller area of control than what they wound up with. Wilson even joined with the British in landing troops in Russia. The small clashes that ensued were actually the only time in the existence of the Soviet Union that American and Soviet troops entered directly into hostilities with each other.

So I'm not really sure what the [Cheney] Bush means when he says, "the world ignored the words of Lenin".

Then there's Hitler. The original one, I mean, not Osama Hitler or Ahmadinejad Hitler or Code Pink Hitler. Bush says, "In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews". That's actually a bit vague.

There seems to be a fascination among authoritarian types with the notion that Hitler mapped out his later strategy in Mein Kampf, which he published in 1925. Not really. Written during his brief stint in prison after making a failed coup attempt in Munich in 1923, now known as the Beer Hall Putsch, it is mostly a propagandistic rant derived largely from the extremist pamphlets he had read voraciously in Vienna prior to the First World War.

Here again, anyone paying attention in internal German politics in the 1920s would have had some knowledge of Hitler as the leader of the NSDAP (Nazi Party). Henry Ford even sent money to the NSDAP, so he knew about them. Ford was the only American singled out for praise in Mein Kampf.

But the NSDAP was one of several splinter parties in the German Parliament in the 1920s. According to my trusty multi-color chart from Fragen an die deutsche Geschichte (1991), the NSDAP in 1928 had 12 seats in Parliament, versus 73 for two other overtly anti-Semitic parties, the Christlichsoziale Partei and the Deutsche Reformpartei. Of the two "Weimar parties", as they are sometimes called, the SPD had 153 seats and the Catholic Center Party 62. The Communists had 54 and the liberal Deutsche Staatspartei 25. The two other most significant rightwing parties were the Duetsche Volkspartei with 45 seats and the Deutschnationale Partei with 73 seats.

So, if you were an American looking at German politics in 1928, how worried would you have been about the NSDAP? Even if the Internet had been around then, how much time would you have spent searching out their Web sites? In fact, the NSDAP at that point looked to be a party in decline, its Parliamentary representation having fallen from 32 in 1924 to 14 and then to the 12 of 1928. It was the onset of the Great Depression in Europe in 1929 that gave the NSDAP its fateful boost. In the 1930 elections, the increased their representation to 107 seats. Prior to Hitler becoming Chancellor in January, 1933, the NSDAP's electoral strength peaked at 230 seats in early 1932, which made it then the largest party in Parliament for the first time, and then fell in the elections of late 1932 to 196.

From 1929 onward, anyone who was paying attention to German politics was paying attention to Hitler and the NSDAP. But the real failure of judgment wasn't a failure to listen to Hitler's words. They didn't get votes in those parliamentary elections without practicing the usual political arts of targeting pleasing messages to various segments of the public. Not all of their public positions in 1928-32 turned out to be blueprints for their policies.

The most significant failure on the part of Western nations was failing to recognize the inherently threatening nature of his military buildup, which was at the center of Hitler's domestic economic program from the day he became Chancellor. And a failure to develop foreign policies and military policies consistent with them to be able to contain Germany once they began to revise the Versailles Treaty limits by force with the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March, 1936.

So, the bottom line here is that Bush's little history lesson was as ditsy as most Republican pop history is. The main thing he seems to be trying to do is to inflate the menace of Osama bin Laden running a terrorist network from a cave or village hunt in some godforsaken corner of Wazirstan or wherever he is to the military threats represented by Nazi German and by the Soviet Union at the height of their power.

For that amount of threat inflation, I guess you need to come up with some pretty creative alternative history.

Tags: authoritarianism, bolshevik revolution, bush, germany, german politics, lenin, republican party, soviet union, third reich