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Published Sep.tember 19
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 3

THERE WERE TWO revolutions in Russia in 1917. The first occurred in

February. It must have been very like the overthrow ofthe Shah of
Iran in our own times. The Tsar's regime had lost the support of vir-
tually the whole population, and was swept away by a vast uprising
of workers, peasants and soldiers. Even many from the privileged
classes wanted the Tsar to go.
Tired of war and corruption, the Russian people demanded a
new society. But what kind of society? There was no way the women
textile workers who had sparked the February revolution could
indentify with the hopes of their boss. There was no way the
peasant could share the aims of the landlord who had bled his
family dry these many years. It seemed the whole world was being
turned upside down, yet the workers still toiled for the boss, the
peasant for the landlord. The unity of purpose they may have felt in
dumping an unpopular monarch was to vanish like the morning
mists before the realities of Russia in 1917.
To a new premier, Kerensky, the aim was the kind of society we
have in Britain today. Let the masses vote for whoever they will. Let
them have their toothless parliaments. The real power would still
rest with those who were born to wealth and privilege. Kerensky
wanted to make Russia safe for the employers to make their profits.
But the workers and peasants had other ideas. They hadn't fought
and died to suffer more of the same only under another name.
For months there was this uneasy balance of power in Russia..
First the huge workers' demonstrations and strikes would
paralyse the government. Then that same government would be
prodded by the bosses into putting the workers in their place with
gun and baton. Victory had to fall to one side or the other.
In October, the breaking point came. Kerensky's government
was by now totally discredited. It was incapable of gi ving the vast
majority ofthe population - the workers and peasants - what they

THE ROAD TO OCTOBEH


wanted. Instead of peace, it gave them fine words about fighting on
until the war was won. Instead of bread, it gave them continued
hunger. Instead of land, it gave them the landlords' rack-renting
4 bailiffs.
The government which took power through the revolution of'
October 1917 was of a kind the world had never seen before - a
workers' socialist republic. This second revolution was the product
of two social movements which took place at one and the same time.
In the countryside, home of the vast majority of Russia's
enormous population, the struggle was between two property-
owning .classes, the landowners and the peasants. The despised,
impoverished and oppressed peasants saw the old power shaken.
They had risen in revolt before, but never before had their masters'
grip on the reins of power looked so unsure. The peasants seized the
estates of the landowners and began dividing them into individual
plots. It seemed they could achieve their long-cherished ambitions:
to own their own patch ofland and farm it as they liked - free of the
landlords who demanded extortionate payments in rents, taxes and
produce. They had their own peasant party, the Social Revolu-
tionaries, to represent their interests.
In the towns and cities, the revolution bore a different face.
Here, the struggle was between new classes thrown up by the rapid
development of industry as Russia tried to drag herself into the
twentieth century. There were the employers who made massive
fortunes out of the huge, new manufacturing plants and were
determined to hang on to them at all costs. Ranged against them
was the enemy industrialisation had created, a numerically tiny
but powerful working class marshalled in the enormous factories.
These workers sensed their power and learned a new
philosophy radically different to the centuries-old ideas their
peasant forefathers had accepted in the unchanging villages. They
learned socialism. They wanted to decide how to use what they
made. They wanted to elect their own managements. They wanted
the marvellous new technology which was rising everywhere
around them to be put at the service of every man, woman and child
in Russia, not just the miserable money-grubbing employing class.
In 1905 the workers had challenged the Tsar in a series of mass
strikes, but they faced a peasant army still loyal to the Tsar. They
paid dearly for the failure to defeat the old order during years that
followed of imprisonment, shootings, poverty and police terror. But
the workers learned from their defeat. They discovered from their
own experience of organising strikes that they were able to manage
the day-to-day running of society better than their rulers.
In Petrograd in 1905, they had organised their own workers'
HOW THE REVOLUTION WAS LOST
c?uncil, made up of delegates elected from workplaces all over the
CIt~. Fr.om economic demands, they grew to organise political
.strikes In defence of mutineering sailors at the Kronstadt naval
bas.e who w~re threatened with execution. We know this body better 5
by Its Russian name, the Soviet.
The Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet or workers' council
Leon Trotsky, has explained how it worked: '
'The Soviet is in reality an embryo of a revolutionary government.
It organises street patrols to secure the safety of the citizens It
takes over ... the post office, the telegraph and the railroads It
made an effort to introduce the eight-hour day ... The first wave of
the next revolution will lead to the creation of Soviets all over the
country.'
T~otsky was right. What began as a kind of giant strike
committee was forced, in the dislocation and chaos of revolution to
develop into an alternative government. Twelve years after the first
Soviets appeared, they became the basis for the .national govern-
ment of October 1917, a government infinitely more democratic
than any parliament. You didn't just put a cross on a ballot'and
watch them sell you out for the next five years. The delegates to the
Soviets were subject to recall by the voters and had to explain
themselves regularly at workers' mass meetings. They involved the
mass of working people.
American journalist John Reed wrote this eye-witness accoun t:
'No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will
was ever invented. And this was necessary, for in time of revoluti on,
the popular will changes with great rapidity. For example, during
the first weeks of December 1917, there were mass parades and
demonstrations in favour of the Constituent Assembly - that is to
say, against th~ Soviet Power. One of these parades was fired on by
some irresponsible Red Guards and several people killed.
'The reaction to this stupid violence was immediate. Within twelve
hours the complexion of the Petrograd Soviet changed. More than a
dozen B?lshevik deputies were withdrawn and replaced by
Mensheviks [moderate socialists]. And it was three weeks before
public sentiment subsided - before the Mensheviks were one by one
retired and the Bolsheviks sent back.'
Can you imagine our rulers responding in 12 hours? We're lucky
if they take notice in 12 months!
Working people could exert control over national decision-
making bodies on a day-to-day basis after October 1917 in a way
that has never been possible in capitalist societies. A lot of people
THE ROAD TO OCTOBER
 who don't want to believe that working people can con trol ~their own
lives try to convince us that the revolution in Russia was nothing
like this. They never mention the torrent of debate and argument,
6 the flood of newspapers, the active democracy of the revolution in
ferment. They paint a very different picture, with Lenin, Trotsky
and the Bolshevik Party as dark, conspiratorial villains plottingin
secret to seize power. This is sheer nonsense. The Bolsheviks formed
the new Soviet government because they had proved over twenty
long years of struggle that they were the best fighters against the
rotten Tsarist regime.
Just before the October revolution, the Bolsheviks won a
majority in the Soviets. So it was with the support of virtually the
whole working class that they mounted the insurrection which
toppled the bankrupt Kerensky regime. Little wonder the old
system went down like a pack of cards. So bloodless was the
insurrection that more people died in the making of Eisenstein's
silent film about it than died in the real thing!
A moderate socialist called Martov, who opposed the
insurrection, wrote at the time:
'Understand, please, what we have before us after all is a victorious
uprising of the proletariat - almost the entire proletariat supports
Lenin and expects its social liberation from the uprising.'
The Bolshevik Party in July 1917 had 176,000 members. When
you think that there were just three million workers in the towns
you can imagine the enormous support it had. In Britain, it would
add up to a party of 2 1/ 2 million members! And these weren't the
passive card-holders you get in the Labour Party. They were active
party workers. By the time the Bolsheviks came to form the first
Soviet government, something like one worker in every ten was a
member of the Bolshevik Party.
The October revolution could not have happened without the
coming together of the revolution in the towns and the revolution in
the countryside. Without the industrial power of the workers, the
peasant revolt would have become just one more uncoordinated
failure. Without the support of the millions of peasants in the army,
the workers would have been crushed, as they were in 1905, by sheer
force of numbers and military strength.
Though they did unite, the workers and peasants shared no
long-term identity of interests. What united them was the alliance
of their enemies - the big industrialists and the great land-owners
- against them.
When the workers rose in insurrection in October they had the
sympathy of the peasants and the army, made up as it was mainly
HOW THE REVOLUTION WAS LOST
of peasant recruits. The revolution was initiated, led and completed
by the organised working class, drawing in behind it the peasant
masses. Because the workers' insurrection allowed them to seize
and hold the land, the peasants accepted the new Soviet power. 7
And, by accepting the rule of the Soviets, the peasants accepted the
majority party ofthe Soviets, the Bolsheviks, and its right to bethe
party of government.
In the first months of Soviet Russia, the peasants continued to
accept the leadership of the workers, and the workers' party, the
Bolsheviks. After all, the land was being divided up between them.
Their hopes were being fulfilled. But what would happen if the
interests of the workers and the peasants came into conflict? This
was the question which would haunt the revolution.
SO THE WORKERS held power. The dream of generations of socialists
had come true. The working people had overthrown the old ruling
class and held power through their own workers' governments, the
Soviets.
John Reed has described the feelings of the Russian workers:
'Across the horizon spread the glittering lights of the capital,
immeasurably more splendid by night than by day, like a dyke of
jewels on the barren plain. The old workman who drove held the
wheel in one hand, while with the other he swept the far-gleaming
capital with an exultant gesture.
"Mine!" he cried, his face alight, "All mine now! My Petrograd!".'
Well might they celebrate their new power. From the offices of
the Bolsheviks who formed the first Soviet government poured
decree after decree. They announced workers' control of the
factories, they abolished the death penalty, they announced the
separation of state and education from the church, and they
announced full freedom of religion - ending the anti-semitic terror
which had ruled Russia for hundreds of years. They embarked on a
great experiment in education, ending the dictatorship of the
teacher. They launched a mass campaign to teach reading and
writing to the millions of illiterate people in Russia. They swept
away the degrading legislation which had crushed women for
centuries. Marriages could be dissolved by either partner. Children
DAYS OF HOPE
 born out of wedlock were given equal rights with theichildren of
married parents. They announced the provision of free abortion on
demand.
8 Andto spell out that these weren't just the empty promises ora
self-seeking elite, they announced that government officials would
be paid the average wage of a skilled industrial worker. Hope was'i!{
the air. The freedom they had won almost intoxicat~d- the
Bolsheviks. How else can we explain their naivety in releasing
General Kaledin, later to become the leader of the White Armies
who fought against them, solely on the promise that he would not
fight against them?
But people do not, unfortunately, make history in circum-
stances of their own choosing.
The Russia now ruled by the Soviet government was a grim
place. Shattered by the ravages ofthe First World War, its railways,
communications and industry dislocated, Russia was not the kind
of place in which past socialists had expected the workers to seize
power. Until then, all socialists had expected that workers would
first take over in the wealthy advanced countries of western Europe
and north America. The material basis of socialism would be high
productivity, sophisticated technology and a high level of human
skill.
Tra vel the nine-tenths of Russia still shrouded in
backwardness and ignorance in 1917, and you would have
compared it to Europe in the Middle Ages rather than to an
advanced capitalist nation. As early as the summer of 1918 the
situation in which the Bolsheviks sought to create their new world
was already desperate. There was cholera in the capital city,
Petrograd. Famine stalked the country. Opponents of the workers'
state resorted to assassination, the Bolshevik leader Lenin being
shot and seriously injured.
The Bolsheviks looked beyond the frontiers of their devastated
country for help. The only way a socialist republic could survive in
Russia, where the working class was a minority of just three million
out of 160 millions, would be with the aid of other, more developed
socialist states, they said. Workers' republics in great, industrial
nations like Germany and France could send tractors and
machinery to improve the lot of the peasants, so winning their
loyalty to Soviet Russia. They could help Russia industrialise
rapidly and drag her by the bootstraps into the twentieth century.
The alternative would be even deeper crisis, worse shortages, and
ultimately the end of the peasants' support for the Soviet state. The
Bolsheviks had no doubt that it had to be international socialism-
or destruction.
HOW THE REVOLUTION WAS LOST
Lenin returned to this question time and time again:
'We are living not only in a state, but in a system of states, and it is
inconceivable for the Soviet Republic to exist alongside the
9
imperialist states for any length of time. One or the other must
triumph in the end.'
And:
'We have always staked our play upon an international revolution
and this was unconditionally right. We have always emphasised ...
, the fact that in one country it is impossible to accomplish such a
work as a socialist revolution.'
And again, in March 1919:
'The absolute truth is that without a revolution in Germany we
shall perish.'
Nor was this the dreaming of a few idealists. In those days the
whole world seemed to be in the rapids of revolution. In Germany
and Austria the monarchy collapsed and workers', sailors: and
soldiers' councils were set up. In Hungary and Bavaria, Finland
and Latvia, Soviet governments briefly came to power. In Italy the
factories were occupied. The Turkish Sultan was overthrown. The
British Army was fought to a standstill by the Irish national
liberation movement. Even in Britain itself terror gripped the rul-
ing class and gunboats were anchored on the Mersey and the Clyde.
Millions of workers in every country of the world were inspired
by the courage and vision of the Bolsheviks. They seemed to offer an
alternative to the horrors of war, unemployment and poverty.
Harry Pollitt, later to become a leading member of the British
Communist Party, has written about what it was like to live
through the great days when workers throughout the world rallied
to the cause of socialist Russia:
'In November 1917, when news of the Russian Revolution came
through, it sent a thrill of excitement through every revolutionary
worker. But information other than the distorted news that
appeared in the press was hard to get. I pounced on everything that
dealt with the Russian Revolution, and the knowledge that workers
like me and all those around me had won power, had defeated the
boss class, kept me in a growing state of enthusiasm.'
In the event, the Communist Left were too weak or too poorly
organised to seize their chance. The gap left by the Conservatives
and other ruling class parties was filled by the likes of the Labour
Party and their European counterparts and the sell-out trade union
DAYS OF !lOPE
I:
leaders. Like many Labour leaders today, they talked socialist but
when it came down to it, they preferred what they had to the great
gamble of revolution. In some countries, like Germany, they even
10 went so far as to have their left-wing opponents murdered.
Capitalism gained a breathing space, but it was by no means
out of danger. The new Communist Parties might not be ready to
take power but they were rapidly growing in strength. The new
Communist International, uniting the Communist Parties of the
world, soon commanded the support of hundreds of thousands, even
millions of workers.
The Bolsheviks could not, however, wait for the European
workers to take power. Defence of the revolution at home and its
extension abroad became inseparable. What the Bolsheviks did
next was dictated by the international capitalist powers. Sixteen
foreign armies, including the British and Americans, invaded
Russia and equipped the White Armies of the deposed ruling class.
The capitalist countries, and not the Russian people, began the
bloody civil war which followed. Before the Bolsheviks could even
think of implementing their policies they had first to drive back the
White and foreign armies. Every effort was thrown into the defence
of the Soviet Republic. The economy of the country was geared to
the needs of the armies of the workers' republic. This strict,
militarised system of sacrifice and rationing the Bolsheviks called
'War Communism'.
11
THE BOLSHEVIKS WON the Civil War. Trotsky was the Bolshevik
leader entrusted with the task of creating a new revolutionary
army, the Red Army. When the forces of the workers' republic were
everywhere on the retreat, he and many of the most devoted
Bolsheviks arrived at the front to rally them. The ideal which had
spurred the workers to revolution carried them to victory on the
battlefield. Trotsky travelled the length and breadth of Russia in a
special armoured train, urging the Red Army to ever greater feats of
heroism and courage. Eventually, under his leadership the forces of
the counter-revolution were driven back and defeated.
But the price paid in lives and in material terms was appalling.
The already shattered economy was delivered blow after crushing
blow. By May 1919 Russian industry was reduced to 10 percent of its
normal fuel supply. Production of all manufactured goods had
fallen to 13 per cent of the already miserable 1913 level. In a country
where motor transport was hardly known, 79 per cent ofthe railway
lines were out of action. Such simple things as thread, matches and
paraffin had disappeared from the shops. Trotsky even reported
occurrences of cannibalism in some provinces!
The number of workers in the towns fell from three million to
just 1 % million. Historian E H Carr wrote that there had been a
'mass flight of industrial workers from the towns and reversion to
the status and occupation of peasants.' For to stay was to starve. By
1921, Petrograd, the heart of the revolution, had lost57.5 per cent of
its total population, and Moscow 44.5 per cent. The working class
which led the revolution had made tremendous sacrifices.
Thousands of the best members of the Bolshevik Party perished on
the battlefield.
The working class which made the October Revolution had
been decimated.
It was no longer the living core of Soviet power. Desperate to
stay alive in the famine-ridden cities of the Civil War, workers sold
what they had for food. Some even stole machinery from their
workplaces to barter. The black market ruled their lives. A bitter
individual struggle for existence replaced the collective democracy
of the revolutionary days of 1917.
Every gain of the revolution was imperilled by the sheer
THE RESULTS OF THE CIVIL WAR
 scarcity of resources. When the workshops are half empty and you
don't know where the next supply of iron will come from, workers'
power can be no more than a slogan. The few workers who remained
12 in the cold, deserted factories no longer had the confidence or
optimism of 1917. They couldn't feel their strength; only their.
weakness. The Bolsheviks had to appoint managers to get any
production at all.
When a woman doesn't know where the next meal is coming
from she doesn't dare take advantage of the liberating legislation
and end the marriage she hates so much. At least her husband may
find something for the kids to eat.
When revolutionary workers are being massacred (in Finland
alone, in April 1918, more than ten thousand workers died at the
hands of counter-revolutionaries), you can't afford the luxury of
abolishing the death penalty for their murderers.
The decrees of the first, hopeful days would remain mere pieces
of paper if the revolution didn't spread abroad. Tragically, it didn't.
The 'temporary' measures forced on the Bolsheviks began to look
disturbingly permanent.
The question facing the Bolsheviks was this. If the class which
made the revolution had effectively ceased to exist, how could a
working-class party continue to rule'? They certainly couldn't hand
over power to the White armies. Hadn't revolutionary workers been
tortured and killed when captured'? In some parts of Russia the
Bolsheviks' enemies reverted to feudal barbarism. They would fix a
kind of leather tourniquet round their victims' head and turn it until
the skull burst.
As Trotsky once said, if the Bolsheviks had surrendered control
of Russia, fascism would be a Russian and not an Italian word.
Workers' Russia had survived, but in a drastically altered form. The
Soviets, the democratic workers' councils, could mean nothing in-
dependently of the workers who elected them. If a majority of the
workers were Mensheviks, moderate socialists, the Soviets would be
Menshevik. If the majority were Bolsheviks, the Soviets would be
Bolshevik.
The Bolsheviks did have that majority in: the Soviets. They
exercised control by proving, week in, week out, that they best
represented the interests of Russia's working people. Other parties
('I\ l n peted with the Bolsheviks in the Soviets. The Mensheviks
l<lntinued to operate legally until June 1918. But the terrible
destruction of the Civil War changed all that.
With the best of the workers and peasants fighting the length
a nd breadth ofthe vast country, with the great factories, such as the
Putilov Works, virtually at a standstill, and the remaining workers
!lOW THE IU:VOLUTION WAS LOST
foraging for survival, the Soviets could no longer be the organs of
workers' power they had been. You can't have a workers' govern-
ment without workers. A leading Bolshevik, Kamenev, has
described how the soviets declined: 13
'We know that because ofthe war the best workers were withdrawn
in large numbers from the cities, and that therefore at times it
becomes difficult in one or another provincial or district capital to
form a soviet and make it function ... The Soviet plenary sessions as
political organisations often waste away, the people busy
themselves with purely mechanical chores ... General Soviet
sessions are seldom called, and when the deputies meet, it is only to
accept a report, listen to a speech and the like.'
In other words, the Soviets didn't do anything. They became
ineffectual talking shops. Real power came more and more to rest
with the Bolshevik government alone.
The Bolsheviks came to the conclusion that they would have to
maintain a centralised government of· only those who
wholeheartedly supported the revolution - and that increasingly
meant themselves! Take a brief look at the other parties in the
Soviets and you will see why.
The Right Social Revolutionaries, one of the two peasant
parties, openly sided with the counter-revolution. In many areas
they were indistinguishable from the White Armies.
The Left Social Revolutionaries, the other peasant party,
resorted to terrorism against the Bolsheviks when they disagreed
with government policy.
The Mensheviks were moderate socialists who had opposed the
revolution. Even now, though they did support the Bolsheviks
against the counter-revolution, their support was lukewarm and
cowardly. They called for a Constituent Assembly of all the parties
in Russia, whether they were for the revolution or against it! That
would mean including representatives even of those who had spilt
the blood of workers and peasants on the battlefields of Russia.
~
I Clearly, none of these parties could have any part in the kind of
I
government the Bolsheviks proposed. To include them would have
been suicide.
Events had propelled the Bolsheviks at a dizzy pace. They were
scarcely in control of events. The Soviet state of 1917 had of
necessity been replaced by the single-party state of the years after
1920. The Soviets became little more than a front for the Bolsheviks.
From 1919 there were no elections to the Moscow Soviet for over 18
months.
THE RESULTS OF THE CIVIL WAR
r-
':".
,I
The single-party state was not born out of individu'allust for
power. As we have seen, every retreat, every concession was forced
by the pressure of events and was intended to be purely temporary.,. -
14 The erosion of democracy was the direct result of the holocaust of
war, responsibility for which must belaid at the doorofthe Western.'
capitalist powers. They had been unable to crush the workers' state
from outside, but they had now created the conditions for de'(;ay
from within.
THE END OF THE Civil War gave no respite to the Bolsheviks. The
almost uninterrupted cycle of war, revolution, and again more war
had exhausted a country already so backward that it often
resembled 18th century France rather than advanced twentieth
century society.
Once the immediate threat of counter-revolution had been
beaten back, the potential conflict between the two classes which
made the revolution - the workers and the peasants - erupted. The
peasants had wanted one thing and one thing only from the
revolution - land. Now that the White Armies were driven from
Russia, there was no chance of a restoration of the landowners. The
peasants were confident that their land was safe. The alliance with
the workers was over. Their interests now stretched no further than
their own little piece of property. Many peasants saw a new enemy:
the Bolshevik regime, with its demands for the grain and the taxes
it needed to ensure the survival of the cities. When the Bolsheviks
changed their name to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
many peasants summed up their feelings like this:
'The Bolsheviks were OK. They gave us land. But these Commu- '
nists ... they take everything from the countryside and give it to the
towns.'
This new opposition to the Bolsheviks came to a head with the
Kroristadt mutiny of 1921. The Kronstadt fortress guarded the
approaches to Petrograd. In October 1917 the Kronstadt sailors had
been at the very storm centre of the revolution. Many Bolsheviks
were horrified when they heard the news that the sailors had now
risen in revolt. If Kronstadt is not ours then we are surely doomed!
HOWTIIE REVOLUTION WAS LOST
I But Kronstadt in 1921 was not the Kronstadt of the revolution.
Many of its best fighters had gone to fight in the army in the front
line. Many had died in the defence of the revolution. In their place
had come peasant recruits, their loyalty only ensured by fear of a 15
return to the landlords. The Kronstadt uprising was a reflection of
the peasants' break with the socialist aims of the Bolsheviks.
Consider their demands: Soviets without Bolsheviks and a free
market in agriculture. To accept the demands ofKronstadt would be
to surrender the socialist revolution.
Victor Serge, an anarchist who had come over to the Bolsheviks
after the October Revolution, had great sympathy with the
Kronstadt sailors and was very critical of the ruthlessness with
which they were put down. But, in the end, he knew that the
Bolsheviks were right. Socialist Russia was in peril. There were at
the time no fewer than fifty outbreaks of peasant insurrection. He
wrote:
'After many hesitations, and with unutterable anguish, my
Communist friends and I finally d~clared ourselves on the side of
the Party ... The country was absolutely exhausted, and production
practically at a standstill: there were no reserves of any kind, not
even reserves of stamina in the hearts of the masses. The working
class elite that had been moulded in the struggle against the old
regimes was literally decimated.
'The Party, swollen by the influx of power-seekers, inspired little
confidence. Of the other parties, only minute nuclei existed, whose
character was highly questionable. It seemed clear that these
groupings could come back to life in a matter of weeks, but only by
incorporating embittered, malcontented and inflammatory
elements in their thousands, no longer, as in 1917, enthusiasts for
the young revolution. Soviet democracy lacked leadership,
institutions and inspiration; at its back there were only masses of
starving and desperate men.
'The popular counter-revolution translated the demand for freely-
elected Soviets into one for "Soviets without Communists". If the
Bolshevik dictatorship fell, it was only a short step to chaos, and
through chaos to a peasant uprising, the massacre of the Commu-
nists, the return of the emigres, and in the end, through the sheer
force of events, another dictatorship, this time anti-proletarian.'
The Bolsheviks could not relinquish state power. To do so
would, as Serge says, open the way to full-blooded counter-
revolution. Nor could they continue the austerity policies of 'W Hr
Communism', whose harshness had driven the peasants to revolt.
It was time to change course. As Lenin said: 'The Kronstadt events
WORKERS AND PEASANTS

16
were like a flash of lightning which threw more of a ~lare upon
reality than anything else.'
The Bolsheviks decided to call a temporary retreat in order to
save workers' Russia from certain death. This retreat they called
the New Economic Policy, or NEP, which aimed to reconcile the
peasants by making concessions, while at the same time maintain-
ing a strong, centralised socialist state apparatus. The New
Economic Policy can be summed up as follows:
Reintroduction of private trade.
A tax on grain in place of the hated requisitioning.
Small scale capitalist manufacture.
Acceptance of the principle of profitability in the state sector.
Strict financial orthodoxy.
The NEP was a desperate gamble indeed. Every Bolshevik
leader knew it meant reviving parts of the old capitalist economy,
and in turn remnants of the old classes. A nagging doubt occurred
to many devoted party members; what is left of our socialist Russia?
The workers did not exercise power in any meaningful sense. How
could they, when most of them were out of work? The economy was
not planned. How could it be when there was anarchy everywhere?
Victor Serge explains what Russia was like then in his book,
'Memoirs of a Revolutionary':
'And now the cities we ruled over assumed a foreign aspect: we felt
ourselves sinking into the mire - paralysed, corrupted ... Money
lubricated the entire machine as under capitalism. A million and a
half unemployed received relief - inadequate relief - in the big
towns ... Classes were reborn under our very eyes; at the bottom of
the scale, the unemployed receiving 24 roubles a month; at the top,
the engineer [the expert, not the shopfloor worker] receiving 800,
and between the two, the party functionary with 222, but obtaining
a good many things free of charge. There was a growing chasm
between the prosperity of the few and the misery of the many.'
The dreams of October, of equality, workers' control, a classless
society, were drowning in a sea of poverty and isolation imposed by
a hostile, capitalist world. Only the state, staffed by Communists,
seemed to ensure the socialist aims of the besieged revolution.
Yet even that is a hopelessly optimistic account of events. By
the end of1920, there were a staggering 5,880,000 state officials; five
times as many as the number of industrial workers! And as ifthat
was not gloomy enough, of those millions only a minority were
Bolsheviks. Of the rest, few could be relied upon to remain faithful
to the revolution. The party had been forced to employ thousands of
HOW THE REVOLUTION WAS LOST
(
,
J
members of the old Tsarist bureaucracy in order to maintain a fun-
ctioning government administration. Lenin saw the dangers ofthis
when he spoke at the 1922 Party Congress:
'What we lack is clear enough. The ruling stratum of the
Communists is lacking in culture. Let us look at Moscow. This mass
of bureaucrats - who is leading whom? The 4,700 responsible
17
communists in the mass of bureaucrats, or the other way round? I
do not believe you can honestly say the communists are leading the
mass. To put it honestly, they are not the leaders, but the led.'
The state apparatus was 'borrowed from Tsarism and hardly
touched by the Soviet world ... a bourgeois and Tsarist mechanism'.
The state was 'a workers' state with bureaucratic distortions.'
And if the Bolsheviks were being led by the remnants of the old
society, there can be no doubt in which direction. We have heard
how the whole dirty mess of class society had begun to revive. The
representatives of the rich peasants, the small capitalists, the
bureaucrats, all began to influence the communists.
The revolutionary socialist party could not remain .immune
from such immense social pressures. The party itself was deteriora-
ting. If Russia had disintegrated 'from the Commune state of 1917
to the party dictatorship of late 1918' (a slide which accelerated
dramatically after 1918) then the party too was changing from a
democratic workers' organisation to a bureaucratic monster. Now
that they were in power, the Communists attracted all sorts of
people who would have gladly seen them dead before the revolution.
The report of the Eighth Party Congress of March 1919 said:
'Elements which are not sufficiently communist, or even directly
parasitic, are flowing into the party in a broad stream. The Russian
Communist Party is in power and this inevitably attracts to it,
together with the better elements, careerist elements as well.'
In 1922 Lenin admitted that: 'We have a bureaucracy not only
in the Soviet institutions but in the institutions of the party.' The
Party Congress demanded: 'a serious purge ... in Soviet and Party
institutions.' The word 'purge' had none of the sinister overtones it
1 was later to acquire. It meant parting company with the careerists
} and freeloaders whose expulsion Lenin repeatedly demanded. But
still they flooded into the party. Membership grew from 200,000 in
early 1918 to 650,000 in October 1921. Nine-tenths of party members
had not held party cards in October 1917.
The Bolshevik Party was born, developed, grew strong and
came to power as a party of workers, steeled in workers' struggles,
fired by the workers' hopes. But now that the best members of the
WORKERS AND PEASANTS
 working class had died on the battlefield or been drawn into the
state apparatus, now that the workers in the factories were
demoralised and weak, the party was gradually transformed into a
18 bureaucratic organisation.
When the party's ranks were filled by workers who had fought i.-
for Bolshevik policies in the two revolutions of 1917, it was hardto:
imagine the party departing from its socialist aims. In 1919, these
party stalwarts made up onein ten of the party's members. By 1922,
they were only one in forty. Now, Communist workers with a total
devotion to the cause of socialist revolution rubbed shoulders with
people of very dubious political origin.
The party was bloated. It was left to the leading Bolsheviks,
with their unshakeable revolutionary commitment, to hold it on
course. As Lenin wrote:
'It must be recognised that the party's proletarian policy is
determined at present not by its rank and file, but by the immense
and undivided authority ofthe tiny sections that might be called the
party's "Old Guard".'
The old Bolsheviks had to protect the party against people who
more and more came to regard it as part and parcel of their careers.
They couldn't appeal to the dispirited working class. The only way
was by exerting an iron discipline over party members. This most
democratic of parties now 'temporarily' banned internal factions.
No minority voices of opposition could be expressed in case they
played into the hands of anti-socialist forces. The Bolshevik
leadership alone guaranteed socialist policy.
A minority of a minority now ruled Russia. The Bolsheviks
maintained a dictatorship over the people. The Bolshevik leader-
ship maintained a dictatorship over the party rank and file. How
different from the democratic traditions of the party. Lenin had
himself been in a minority in the party many times. In April 1917
for example, he had had to organise a platform in opposition to most
of the Bolshevik Central Committee to argue for immediate
socialist revolution. Later that year, two party leaders Kamenev
and Zinoviev, had publicly argued against the decision to stage the
insurrection. They were still allowed to hold party office.
As late as 1921, at the conclusion of the Civil War, the party
printed 250,000 copies ofthe Programme oftheWorkers' Opposition
and two members of the opposition were elected to the Central
Committee. No capitalist government has ever allowed such
freedom of discussion in wartime.
By 1922, these traditions were dead or dying. Not, as many of
the 'experts' would have us believe, because of something fun-
HOW THE REVOLUTION WAS LOST
damentally wrong with socialism, or the 'totalitarian' nature of the
Bolsheviks, but because the isolation of the revolution had
destroyed them.
How deep the rot had gone was not fully realised until the 19
economy began to recover after the Civil War. It was to be expected
that wages would slowly begin to rise and that the workers' move-
ment would recover its pre-war strength and confidence. Far from
it. Because of the measures of the New Economic Policy, the new
money made available went mainly to the peasantry. Everyone but
the workers seemed to benefit. In trying to buy off the peasants'
discontent, the Bolsheviks failed to improve the lot of the only class
on whom they could depend to support their socialist aims, the
workers.
And the workers didn't just lose out in comparison with the
peasantry. In 1922 workers had made up 65 per cent of the
management staff of industry, so ensuring some element of
workers' control survived. By 1923 the figure had fallen to 36 per
cent. A new privileged group emerged: the 'red industrialists'. They
benefitted from high salaries, they could hire and fire at will.
LITTLE WONDER that when divisions developed in the party over the
direction the revolution was taking, the workers took little interest.
The Bolshevik Party had held Russian society together
through the chaos of Ci vil War, counter-revolution and famine, but
in victory it found itself trying to keep peace between the con-
tending social forces which emerged during the New Economic
Policy. It tried to balance between the workers and the peasants,
between the peasants and the new private capitalists or'NEPmen'.
It could not do this without responding to the pressures of these
different classes.
The danger was that the small trader, the rich peasant, the fac-
tory manager would all arrive at the office of the Communist
official to press their case. But what of the shopfloor workers? They
could exert little pressure. The Communists found themselves
trying to defend the interests of workers they rarely met, and whose
conditions they no longer shared, against people who were ever-
present with their demands, their persuasion. The situation of the
THE RISE OFTHE BUREAUCRACY
Communist official in fact resembled that of today's full-time trade
union official. Without constant rank and file control, they began
more and more to adapt to the representatives of alien social forces.
The class struggle which was taking place in Russian society 21
increasingly reflected itself within the party. Until the death of
Lenin in 1924, the conflict remained beneath the surface. After his
death open warfare was to break out within the party. In the last
years of his life, Lenin continually warned of the threat of bureau-
cracy, 'that same Russian apparatus which we took over from
Tsarism and slightly annointed with Soviet oil.' His last desperate
battle in the party was over the Workers' and Peasants'
Inspectorate, a body set up to combat just that terrible evil of
bureaucratism. The urgency with which Lenin conducted his
campaign against the bureaucrats confirms the seriousness of the
threat they posed.
The job ofthe Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate was to 'fight
encroaching bureaucratism, careerism, the abuse of their party and
soviet positions by party members, the violation of comradely
relations within the party, the spread of unfounded and unv.erified
rumours and insinuations, which discredit the party or its in-
dividual members, and other such reports that damage the party's
unity and authority.'
In the light of what we have said, this was a vital organisation.
But the Inspectorate itself was already a tool of the growing party
bureaucracy. Its head was a leader of second rank in the revolution,
Stalin. As Isaac Duetscher later put it, Stalin transformed the
Inspectorate into 'his private police within the government.'
In his final days, Lenin attacked the Inspectorate for its
'ridiculous swank ... which plays entirely into the hands of our
soviet and party bureaucracy.' In the end, in one last desperate
attempt to reverse the trend towards bureaucracy, Lenin called for
the removal of Stalin as Secretary-General of the party. It was too
late. Stalin was too deeply entrenched. He was the party machine's
man, the real beneficiary of the inner party struggle which took
place after Lenin's death.
Three major trends developed in the contest for control of the
Communist Party.

The Left Opposition, grouped around Trotsky, the organiser of

the October insurrection and leader of the Red Army, embodied the
tradition of revolutionary socialism. The starting point of its
argument was that you can't have socialism without workers'
democracy. The Left Opposition sought to democratise the party,
curb the growing bureaucracy and implement a programme of

THE RISE OF THE BUREAUCRACY

 industrialisation.
Their aim was to revive the working class as the central social
and political force and recreate the basis of real Soviet democracy.
They had no illusions that it was possible to do this purely by an
22 effort of will. Soviet Russia just didn't have the resources to achieve-
more rapid industrialisation without demanding massive sacrifiGe~
from the peasantry. The extension of the revolution abroad
remained, for the Left Opposition, an absolute priority.
But if the Left Opposition had the advantage that they
possessed a clear, forceful policy rooted in the Bolshevik tradition, it
also possessed-one great disadvantage. Its supporters were arguing
on behalf of a working class so weakened that it could itself take no
part in the political debate. _ take the field without an army.
The other factions with which they had to compete, the 'Right'
and the 'Centre', were more deeply entrenched in the party bureau-
cracy. To functionaries more accustomed to rubbing shoulders with
other functionaries, the conservative policies of the Right and the
Centre seemed both more realistic and more attractive.
The Right was made up of those who not only favoured the present
concessions to the peasantry at the expense of the workers, but
wanted even more. They had come to reflect the interests of the
wealthy peasants, known as Kulaks. So far had they moved from
their revolutionary socialist beginnings that their leader,
Bukharin, called on the peasants to 'enrich yourselves'.
The Centre, though few thought so at the time, was the most
important of all. This was the party bureaucracy, grouped around
Stalin, spokesman for that influential state apparatus Lenin had
feared so much.
It was clear to most people what the Left and Right stood for.
On the one hand, rebuilding the workers' movement; on the other,
protecting the interests of the peasantry. But what of the Centre?
For a time it allied itself with the Right against Trotsky's
supporters. Some thought that the Right and Centre together were
moving towards a restoration of the old capitalists. But the Centre
was increasingly developing distinctive ideas and interests of its
own. The inner party battles of the twenties signalled more than
just the factional struggle of different wings of the Bolshevik Party;
they saw the development of the bureaucracy as a class.
Perhaps the most telling milestone in the march of the bureau-
cracy was the announcement of the doctrine of 'Socialism in One
Country', a notion which would have been rejected as absurd at
HOW THE REVOLUTION WAS LOST
earlier Congresses of the Party. Against the internationalism of
Trotsky and the Left Opposition, once held by the whole party,
Stalin's group now united around a philosophy of unashamed
nationalism.
The Stalinist bureaucracy - the centre - at first played off 23
right against left. But it quickly developed the strength and in-
dependent will to challenge both. Even when Zinoviev, Kamenev
and Lenin's widow Krupskaya joined Trotsky in united opposition
to Stalin, they were unable to stop him. Whereas they represented
the dying embers of workers' power, Stalin embodied a real and
living force, a force which was growing stronger all the time.
Against Stalin's machine, the opposition were like generals who
The bureaucracy laid its claim to power when it launched a
withering propaganda war on its opponents immediately after
Lenin's death.
Lenin's funeral was turned into an almost religious occasion,
with Stalin intoning a kind of hymn to the dead man. Against
everything Lenin had said in his lifetime, and against the wishes of
his widow, Krupskaya, the ruling faction launched the cult of
'Leninism'. They interred Lenin's mummified body in a huge
mausoleum, elevating him to almost godlike status. His writings
were no longer a guide to action, tested day-to-day by their
relevance to real struggles; they became a Holy Writ, to be read out
in order to exorcise some heretic or other in the party.
The first target was Trotsky and the Left Opposition, who were
subjected to a torrent of lies, abuse and intimidation. They were
howled down at meetings, their protest demonstrations broken up.
In the demonology invented by Stalin's supporters, the good of
'Leninism' faced the evil of 'Trotskyism' in a life or death struggle.
The years of cooperation between the two leading figures of the
revolution were forgotten. Lenin's last statement referring to
Trotsky as 'the most able member of the Central Committee' and
recommending the removal of Stalin was jgnored. The propaganda
machine worked full-time discovering long-forgotten disagree-
ments between the two men, and justifying the expulsion and
deportation of the 'Trotskyists'. The way was open to the nightmare
witch-hunts of the thirties, with their absurd talk of 'Trotsky-
fascism' and the rest.
Ayear later the followers of Zinoviev and Kamenev suffered the
same fate. Zinoviev, the recognised leader of the party, was forced
out of his post as he~d of the party in Leningrad. Stalin's opponents
were expelled and deported, just as the Tsar had expelled his
opponents in the past. Anyone who resisted was imprisoned. A new
THE RISE OF THE BUREAUCRACY
 "
atmosphere could be felt in the party. Gone was the free dis~ussion
of past years. Now the chairperson would ask: 'Anyone disagree?'
Nobody did.
24 The leaders of the October Revolution were driven out and
replaced with people who had come later, functionaries whose
loyalty was to the bureaucracy. Between 1923 and 1929 the bureau-
cracy became aware that its interests differed from those of the
workers. In ousting the Old Guard of the revolution, the bureau-
cracy was crushing the last of the people who were keeping alive the
tradition of workers' democracy. Stalin's 'theory' of 'Socialism in
One Country' was not just a different, more cautious road to the goal
of international socialism; it set itself a different goal.
1929 WAS THE year of reckoning. In response to grain strikes by rich
peasants, the Stalinist bureaucracy now made a sharp turn in
policy. Everything was to be sacrificed to the aim of competition
with the west. As Stalin himself said:
'To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind and those who lag
behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. No, we don't want
to. The history of old Russia ... she was ceaselessly beaten for her
backwardness ... by the Monghol Khans ... by the Turkish Beys by
Polish-Lithuanian Panz ... by Angle-French capitalists by
Japanese barons, she was beaten by all- for her backwardness, for
military backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for
agricultural backwardness ... We are fifty or a hundred years
behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten
years.'
In the countryside the bureaucracy set out to break the
economic power of the peasantry. They set about the 'liquidation of
the Kulaks [rich peasants] as a class.'Armed detachments were
sent into the villages to seize grain to feed the growing towns. They
enforced state control, or 'collectivisation', of agriculture, breaking
up the peasants' holdings. The peasants inevitably resisted and
were suppressed with unprecedented savagery. Literally millions of
peasants died, and they were by no means all members of the
wealthy Kulak class.
HOW THE REVOLUTION WAS LOST
In the towns, the bureaucracy was determined to force down the
standard of living of the workers. U nti11929, the workers had hung
on to some of the gains of October. Through a body known as the
'troika', the trade unions and Communist workers influenced 25
i r-
management policy. Workers still had the right to strike and won a
third of strikes. The wage of a party official was still the same as
that of a skilled worker. The state might have slipped from the
hands of the workers, but traces of workers' power lingered still.
At the end of 1928 the powers of the troika were reduced. Strikes
were no longer permitted or even reported in the press. From the end
of 1930, workers couldn't even change jobs without permission.
In the programme of the Left Opposition, industrialisation had
meant reviving workers' power and the Soviets. Trotsky had
spoken of a 20 per cent rate of growth. Now Stalin drove it up to 40
per cent. And nowhere was there any mention of greater democracy
or of internationalism. In the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy,
the policy of industrialisation meant subordinating everything to
the national interests of the Russian state.
What Stalin and the bureaucracy had achieved was no palace
coup, no minor change at the top. The virtual destruction of the
working class by a decade of war, counter-revolution, siege and
starvation had left them in control of the state. They successfully
crushed all opposition, whether from the peasants or from the
people in the party still faithful to the ideals of October. The burea-
cracy was the new ruling class. From 1929 onwards, the bureau-
cracy turned every gain of the revolution on its head. As Isaac
Deutscher has put it:
'In 1929, five years after Lenin's death, Soviet Russia embarked
upon her second revolution, which was directed solely and ex-
clusively by Stalin.'
Stalin's supporters were in control of industry, the civil service,
the police and the army. They faced no significant opposition. They
controlled the state. They didn't have to seize political power. It was
already theirs. They had purged their opponents within the party,
they had destroyed the last vestiges of workers' democracy, they
had broken the power of the peasantry. They were the only power in
Russia.
It was full-blooded counter-revolution. Wages between the
years 1930 and 1937 were cut by half. Wage differentials were in-
creased. Abortion and divorce reforms were withdrawn. Education
was forced back into its authoritarian straitjacket. Revolutionaries
abroad were forced to follow suicidal strategies decided by the
Russian state, culminating tragically in the victory of Nazism in
THE NEW RULING CLASS
 Germany. The Communist International was no longer a weapon ages', 'radiant as the sun'. Society again resolved itself into the
in the struggle for international socialist revolution; it was a tool of ages-old tyranny of classes, with the 'Great Man' at the top, then the
Russian foreign policy. Generals, Ministers, and Civil Servants, and, at the very bottom,
26 Most tragic of all, Stalin converted Russia into one huge labour the working people who create the wealth such parasites live off so 27
camp. He had turned the revolution inside out. In 1928, even after a well.
t,'"
decade of wars, there were only 30,000 political prisoners in Russia Equality became a dirty word. This was what one Russian
and the number was falling. They were not ill-treated and could not' foreign minister, Molotov, had to say of it:
be used for forced labour. By 1931, two million people were in the
camps. By 1933, the figure was five million. By 1942 a staggering 15 'Bolshevik policy demands a resolute struggle against egalitarians
million. And these were in no way counter-revolutionaries. They as accomplices of the class enemy, as elements hostile to socialism.'
were workers, peasants, teachers, people who had believed in the One of the ideals which had fired the October Revolution was
revolution. now a counter-revolutionary crime!
In 1935-7 a mass slaughter through a series of grotesque show The very word socialism was tainted and corrupted by the new
trials destroyed what was left of the Bolshevik 'Old Guard' which Tsar Stalin and his murderous system.
led the revolution. The Moscow Trials were the victory of the
bureaucracy in their Civil War against the masses. They witnessed
the final freeing of the bureaucracy from any form of popular
control. Krushchev later described what happened to the delegates
to the 17th Party Congress of 1934:
'Of the 1,966 delegates, 1,108 were arrested ... of the 139 members
and candidates of the party's Central Committee at the Congress,
98, that is 70 per cent, were arrested and shot.'
Anyone who had joined the party in the great years - 80 per
cent of the delegates to the 17th Congress had been members in 1921
- was liquidated and replaced by new personnel who had not the
slightest links with the workers' movement. Stalinist Russia was
the absolute opposite of the Soviet Republic. Lenin had spoken of
the withering away of the state:
'We shall see the progressive withering away of the state, and the
Soviet state will not be like the others but a vast workers' commune.'
Now listen to Stalin's grotesque distortion of these words:
'We advance towards the abolition of the state by l:vay of
strengthening the state.'
And strengthen it he did, making it entirely independent of any
democratic pressure. The Soviets didn't meet at all during the years
1931-5, the period of the greatest transformation of Russia. The
First Five Year Plan, the years which saw the achievement of the
counter-revolution, took place without even consulting the 'highest
authority' in the country, the Supreme Soviet!
A 'cult of the personality' was invented around the figure of
Stalin. He became the 'beloved leader', the 'wisest and greatest of all

HOW THE REVOLUTION WAS LOST THE NEW RULING CLASS


28
/ ....
BETWEEN THE SOCIAUSTstate of Russia in 1917 and the bureaucratic
monolith of today there exists a vast chasm. A monstrous tran-
sformation has taken place. From in ternational socialist revolution
to nationalism. From the workers' democracy of the Soviets to the
dictatorship of the party apparatus. From full debate and the free
acceptance of discipline in the party to unthinking, passive
obedience before faceless bureaucrats. From an inspiration to a
cruel mockery of our hopes.
Competition with the West replaced internationalism. If the
West had tanks then Russia must have tanks, ifit had bombs, then
so must Russia. If the United States had to crush Vietnam, and
Britain Ireland, then Russia would trample on 'its own' satellites,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. These days, Russia is
eagerly constructing its nuclear power stations, and having its own
little-publicised Three Mile Island disasters.
And if the West pays for these signs of 'progress' by forcing
down the living standards of the workers, so must Russia. From the
thirties onwards Russia began to act like any other capitalist
power, except that a state bureaucracy, not private capitalists, rode
on the backs of the workers. Few have expressed the logic of the
Russian system better than Stalin himself:
'The environment in which we are placed ... at home and abroad
compels us to adopt a rapid rate of growth in our industry.'
The role of the bureaucracy in history has been to establish the
Russian state as a major world power. There is nothing socialist
about such a transformation. A very similar expansion occurred in
Japan.
The reason why socialism, workers' power, failed in Russia in
1917 is not because dictatorship is the inevitable result of socialist
revolution - as propagandists for the present system would have
us think. The Russian Revolution was lost because the foundations
on which socialism could have been built were destroyed by a World
War, by the invasion of Russia by foreign armies, by a long Civil
War.
There can be no workers' power without workers - and the
HOW THE REVOLUTION WAS LOST
working class had been destroyed. There can be no socialism
without resources - and Russia was in economic ruin and on the
verge of total starvation.
The reason the Russian Bolshevik P arty became first a bureau- 29
cracy, then a new ruling elite under Stalin, is not becausethi~isthe
inevitable development of any revolutionary party - as, agam, the
propagandists would have us believe. The workers' party draws li!e
from the working class - with that class destroyed, the party m
Russia became isolated and ultimately a bureaucratic elite. The fact
that tens of thousands of socialists died in Stalin's camps and
before firing squads in their struggle to prevent this is a testimony
to the strength and socialist dedication of the party that made the
revolution.
Once the bureaucracy was in power, it acted like any other rul-
ing class in the world. 1929 saw the abolition of independent trade
unions, the abolition of the right to strike, the forcing down of
wages. That these are the policies of Tory governments today shows
that Russia had become but one capitalist power among others -
the only difference being that in Russia the state itself was the rul-
ing class, that it was state capitalism.
Russia has ceased to be a beacon of a future socialist society to
the workers of the capitalist nations. It has become one more
competitor in the murderous game of theft, intrigue and war, an im-
perialist power, a symbol of oppression and inj ustice. The victory of
the new state capitalist class had horrifying consequences which
for generations led working people to withdraw in disgust from
socialism. It turned the-dream of human liberation into a dark
nightmare. As Trotsky said in the year before his death:
'Stalinism had first to exterminate politically, then physically, the
leading cadres of Bolshevism in order to become that which it now
is, an apparatus ofthe privileged, a brake upon historical progress,
an agency of world imperialism.'
Today we socialists have to explain what happened in Russia.
'Wasn't Stalinism just a continuation of the revolution? Won't any
revolution go the same way?' people ask. No, we answer. What we
see in Russia today is not 'socialism gone wrong'. It is the absolute
opposite of socialism, and only a new workers' revolution will
change it.
The world today has harnessed far greater resources of
technology than the world of 50 years ago. We have at our disposal
immense reserves of wealth and creativity. A world free of drudgery
and toil is no longer a dream. It is a real possibility as never before
in history, even in 1917. Only a corrupt, profit-thirsty ruling class
THE MESSAGE FOR TODAY
stands in the way, East and West. Socialism remains the only alter-
native to the barbaric priorities of capitalism.
In the Bolsheviks' struggle for socialism, there is a wealth of
experience on which we can draw. In the refusal of many revolu- 31
tionaries to succumb to despair and anti-communism, there is a
determination and idealism we can emulate.
Victor Serge lived through the great years of the revolution,
through its decline and defeat. Yet still he would not surrender his
faith in the capacity of working people to change the world. He
replied to those who try to tar the October Revolution with the
dismal spectre of Stalin in these terms:
'It is often said that "the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at
its beginning". Well, I have no objection., Only, Bolshevism also
contained many other germs - a mass of other germs s - and those
who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first
victorious revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man
by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in a corpse - and
which he may have carried in him since his birth - is this very
sensible?.'
The 'mass of other germs' of which Serge speaks are workers'
power, women's liberation, an end to poverty and oppression, a new
comradeship and generosity between people, the relationship of
men and women freed from concerns of ownership and domination,
the withering away of racism and prejudice. In short, the birth of
human freedom.
The Bolsheviks struggled. They lost.
Their defeat spawned the twin barbarisms offascism and war.
Their struggle for human liberation was crushed and there followed
a second dark age in which a bloody road stretched from
Buchenwald to My Lai, Guernica to Cambodia, and so many in the
workers' movement accepted all the grim mythology of Stalinism.
But the achievements of the Bolsheviks were not eradicated.
Just as they learned from the achievements and errors of the
generation of socialists who preceded them, so we, revolutionary
socialists today, learn from their achievements and errors. And
today, as the world capitalist system faces yet another period of
crisis, with ruling classes both East and West again seeking to solve
their problems at the expense of the workers, our socialist ideas are
of day-to-day practical relevance. Increasingly, the ideas of the
Russian Revolution, of the Bolshevik tradition, of revolutionary
socialism, connect with the everyday struggles of workers against
repression, unemployment, increased exploitation and all the other
resorts of a world in crisis.

THE MESSAGE FOR TODAY

 iF I

International
Socialists
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