Daily Times

After the victorious i
nsurrection, Lenin spoke to the All Russia Congress of the Soviets: “We shall now proceed to build, on the space cleared by historical rubbish, the airy, towering edifice of socialist society.” The revolution ushered in a new era of socioeconomic transformation. Landed estates, heavy industry, corporate monopolies and the commanding heights of the economy were expropriated by the nascent workers state. The dictatorship of the financial oligarchy was broken; the state had a monopoly on all foreign trade and commerce. Ministerial perks and privileges were abolished and the leaders of the revolution lived in most modest conditions. Victor Serge in his, Memoirs of a Revolutionary wrote: “In the Kremlin Lenin still occupied a small apartment built for a palace servant. In the recent winter he, like everyone else, had no heating. When he went to the barber’s he took his turn, thinking it unseemly for anyone else to give way to him.” Initially the new government was a coalition of the Bolsheviks, Left Social Revolutionaries and the Menshevik Internationalists. Only the fascist Black Hundreds were banned and even the Kadets, the bourgeois liberal party, was allowed to operate after the revolution. The new government was based on the most democratic system ever seen in history, the soviets, i.e. workers, soldiers and peasants councils at grassroots level that were devised to manage and democratically control the economy, agriculture, industry, army and society. The main guiding principles of this soviet system of governance were the following:

1. Free democratic elections to all positions in the soviet state;

2. Right of recall of all officials;

3. No official to receive a higher wage than a skilled worker, and

4. Gradually, all tasks of running society and the state to be performed by everyone in turn.

What this revolution really meant for the oppressed and exploited working classes of Russia was portrayed in an inspiring anecdote by John Reed: “Across the horizon spread the glittering lights of the Capital, immeasurably more splendid by the night than by the day, like a dike of jewels heaped on a barren plain. The old workman who drove the wheelbarrow held in one hand, while with the other he swept the pavement, looked at the far gleaming capital and exclaimed in an exulted gesture, ‘Mine!’ he cried, his face all alight. ‘All mine now! My Petrograd!”

If the revolutionary victory has to be explained from a scientific analysis, the Marxists also have a historical responsibility to give a scientific explanation of the degeneration and collapse of the Soviet Union. But Marxism is a science of perspective and it is a mediocrity of knowledge to analyse events after they have taken place. The Marxists had predicted the fall of the Soviet Union far in advance, starting with the leader of the revolution Vladimir Lenin, who from a Marxist standpoint had never ever envisaged the accomplishment of socialism in a single country. On March 7, 1918, Lenin weighed upon the situation, “Regarded from a world-historical point of view, there would be no hope of the ultimate victory of our revolution if it were to remain alone, if there were no revolutionary victories in other countries… our salvation from all these difficulties is an all-European revolution. At all events, under all conceivable circumstances, if the German revolution does not come, we are doomed.” Leon Trotsky wrote an epoch making book, The Revolution Betrayed in 1936 in which he scientifically predicted more than fifty years before the events took place that why and how the Soviet Union will collapse if the revolution in the advanced countries is not victorious and a political revolution of workers democracy doesn’t take place in the USSR. Ted Grant in his outstanding 1943 work, Marxist theory of the state, further elaborated and analysed this process. His perspectives, albeit in a negative sense, were vindicated by the events around the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Russian revolution of 1917 was not an isolated national event but had immense international repercussions. It not only overthrew capitalism and landlordism in Russia but also smashed the shackles of the imperialist stranglehold. This triggered revolutionary upheavals far beyond the frontiers of the USSR, particularly in Europe. The imperialist masters were terrified by these mass revolts that threatened capitalism in its citadels. The British Prime Minister Lloyd George wrote in a confidential memorandum to Clemenceau, his French counterpart at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference: “The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent but of anger and revolt amongst the workmen against the present conditions. The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other.” To crush the epicentre of the rising tide of the revolutionary upheavals they launched a massive attack on the nascent Soviet state with twenty one imperialist armies. Although the revolution itself was a relatively peaceful affair as only nine people died during the actual insurrection, the imperialist attack supporting the reactionary white armies brought drastic carnage, bloodshed, mayhem, starvation and destruction to a backward country already devastated by the first world war.

On the basis of extreme deprivation and pulverisation of the masses aggravated by the civil war and the blockade, the “struggle for individual existence”, in the words of Karl Marx, did not disappear or soften, but assumed in the subsequent period a ferocious character. The defeats of the revolutions in Germany (1918-19 and 1923), China (1924-25), Britain (1926) and several other countries were a fatal blow for the Bolshevik Revolution. They intensified its isolation and induced nationalist degeneration. The imperialist aggression was defeated by the combination of the heroic fight by the Red Army and the support of the proletariat and the soldiers of the imperialist countries and armies. Trotsky raised a revolutionary Red Army of five million from a war-torn Russian army of three hundred thousand. Innumerable Bolshevik cadres perished in this imperialist civil war. This created a vacuum in which the opportunist and the careerist elements penetrated the Soviet government. The shortages and dearth of commodities, the collapse of industry and agriculture due to the war brought a generalised misery that played an important role in the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution.

(To be continued)

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com