A Hundred Years After October Revolution, Rethinking the Origins of Stalinism

To learn from October is to learn from and about its defeat, about why a truly workers’ state never emerged and developed in the years when it should have, and what went wrong to preempt that from happening.

A hundred years ago, the Russian revolution changed economic and political configurations across the world. Through a series of articles, The Wire revisits the making of The Soviet Century. 

It should be obvious by now that the regime that came to be known as Stalinism wasn’t born overnight, but emerged in a succession of fatal steps over the greater part of the early 1920s. If this was not sufficiently clear already from E.H. Carr’s magisterial, multi-volume History of Soviet Russia, it is now abundantly evident in the most recent accounts to appear, based on the wealth of new documentation that has been thrown open in the post-Soviet state and party archives, in work like Barbara Allen’s fascinating biography of Alexander Shlyapnikov and Simon Pirani’s methodical analysis of the revolution’s “retreat” which deals with the period from 1920 to 1924. To this new, post-Soviet scholarship one can now add the expanded translation of Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary published in 2012, restoring nearly 200 cuts that Serge’s translator Peter Sedgwick had been forced to make to the original translation.

That the October Revolution ended in the monstrous counter-finality of Stalinism remains the real challenge for the Left, especially those sectors of it that claim some part of the revolution’s legacy. To learn from October is to learn from and about its defeat, about why a truly workers’ state never emerged and developed in the years when it should have, and what went wrong to preempt that from happening.

Given the fact that Bolshevism stemmed from a tradition of revolutionary socialism, the most startling fact about the revolution itself was how rapidly the goal of workers’ control of the economy was given up. “Workers’ control had been abandoned in the winter of 1917–18,” Carr states laconically in The Interregnum 1923–1924. “The factory committees launched the slogan of workers’ control of production quite independently of the Bolshevik party”, but it was the “willingness of the Bolsheviks to support this demand which was a central reason for their growing appeal”, so runs a crucial argument in Steve Smith’s book Red Petrograd. Yet Vladimir Lenin saw the factory committees “as a means of helping the Bolshevik Party to seize power”. They were, for him, simply organs of insurrection, not, as the Turin factory councils would be for Antonio Gramsci in 1919, “embryos of the proletarian state”. If Lenin abandoned the factory committees in the early part of 1918, as Allen tells us, this was doubtless because “the ‘proletarian’ nature of the regime was seen by nearly all the Bolshevik leaders as hinging on the proletarian nature of the Party that had taken state power” (this is the substance of Brinton’s critique in The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control). Embedded in this assimilation between party and class was the ‘ultra-Bolshevik’ idea that the party was by definition a sort of distilled repository of class consciousness, an incarnation of the ‘advanced sectors’ of the working class.

Following this fatal initial regression, the political trajectory of the revolution is best summed up by a two-fold movement – a growing rift between the party and its working- class base; and a growing culture of repression. It is no accident that both of the strongest challenges to the Bolshevik leadership came from ‘worker communists’, workers who had identified with Bolshevism at an early age and remained in the party till they were either expelled (Gavril Myasnikov’s expulsion was one of the earliest, dating from February 1922) or murdered in Stalin’s great purge of 1937 (Shlyapnikov was executed in September 1937). Myasnikov was a metalworker from the Urals who had joined the party in 1906. He was deeply troubled by the “oligarchical tendencies within the party, the drift towards authoritarianism and elite rule” and lashed out at the rise of bureaucratism, the “arbitrariness and high-handedness of party officials, and the growing number of nonworkers in the party ranks and in positions of power”. In May 1921, Avrich tells us, “[Myasnikov] exploded a bombshell in the form of a memorandum to the Central Committee, calling for sweeping reform… The most striking demand of the memorandum was for unrestricted freedom of the press. Criticizing the Tenth Party Congress for stifling debate, Miasnikov called for freedom of the press for everyone, “from monarchists to anarchists inclusive”, as he put it…Miasnikov was the only Bolshevik to make such a demand. He saw freedom of the press as the only means of curbing the abusive tendencies of power and of maintaining honesty and efficiency within the party. No government, he realized, could avoid error and corruption when critical voices were silenced.”

Shlyapnikov, for his part, formed and led the Workers’ Opposition, the only platform to argue consistently for a workers’ control perspective, seeking management of the economy by the unions. This was a grouping with a purely working-class base, much of this among skilled metalworkers, the milieu Shlyapnikov was most familiar with.

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Also read: The October Revolution Is Now a Historical Footnote in Russia

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The growing culture of repression ties in directly with these challenges both because it utterly disabled them through reprisals (Myasnikov was closely watched by the Cheka, eventually arrested and finally escaped to France via Iran) and because it was a cardinal symptom of what was wrong with the party: its rapid transformation into an authoritarian-bureaucratic machine, the antithesis of a workers’ democracy which at the very minimum would have meant a regime whose vital principles were ‘freedom of criticism, the right of different factions freely to present their views at Party meetings,and freedom of discussion’, as Alexandra Kollontai puts it in a pamphlet specially written to explain the platform of the Workers’ Opposition.

Kollontai’s pamphlet, never properly published in Russian because it was quickly banned, ended with a scathing attack on bureaucracy and what the Russians called ‘appointism’, the practice of appointments from above, that is, through the secretariat of the Central Committee which, she complained, was ‘breeding an atmosphere altogether repugnant to the working class’. Simon Pirani’s recent study adduces abundant evidence of this. As a new party elite began to emerge in a more forceful way by 1921, many of the civil-war communists were becoming deeply disillusioned and there was a “steady stream of resignations, by valuable worker members among others”. Officials complained that “not only individual workers, but whole worker cells, are leaving”, a statement which substantiates Myasnikov’s charge that in centres like Petrograd, “Bolshevik influence among the workers was swiftly declining. Within the party, favoritism and corruption were rife…” (so Avrich). Pirani argues that by 1922, when the outflow from the party reached epidemic proportions, “As the party further consolidated its role in the state, its base among workers weakened. Its factory-based membership dwindled to a minority, and those who worked ‘at the bench’, rather than in management, to a minority of this minority.” It should be noted, of course, that the CC secretariat was dominated by Stalin once he became party general secretary in April 1922.

In the welter of dissidence that grew up in the years 1919-23, a third oppositional current emerged as late as October 1923. This was the ‘platform of the 46’ and of the various oppositions it was the one the party leaders (Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Stalin) feared most. Its leading signatory, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, was an able economist known to be close to Leon Trotsky. Like the Workers’ Opposition and Myasnikov before them, the platform, comprising 46 leading party members, complained, “The regime established within the party is completely intolerable”. “We observe the ever increasing, and now scarcely concealed, division of the party between a secretarial hierarchy and “quiet folk”, between professional party officials recruited from above and the general mass of the party which does not participate in the common life” (quoted in Carr, Interregnum). But the platform’s call for ‘internal party democracy’ was almost certainly too late by now (October 1923). To take one example, earlier that year Stalin had gotten away with the outrageous arrest and trial of the Tatar Bolshevik Sultan-Galiev on thoroughly fabricated charges of having ‘factional’ relations with Turkestani and Kazakh nationalists. By cleverly implicating the entire CC, including Trotsky, in the arrest of Sultan-Galiev, Stalin was effectively serving notice that ‘the nationalities could appeal to no one against the apparat’, Stephen Blank wrote in ‘Stalin’s First Victim’. (Blank’s paper underscores the almost overtly racial/Russian-chauvinist aspects of the trial. Sultan-Galiev’s overriding problem was how a revolutionary politics could make any headway in the Muslim world if communists themselves were unwilling to allow for the Muslim cultural heritage. He was executed in 1940, after repeated arrests and ten years of hard labour.)

The emasculation of the Soviets and unions, repression of dissidents, ‘packing’ of conferences, remoulding of the party into a machine and reemergence of mass apathy were all tendencies that had matured fully by the mid-1920s, when, on Victor Serge’s testimony, Stalin was in full control of the party. In short, the Stalinism of the end of the twenties and thirties has inextricable roots in the period 1922–1926.  By 1927 the earlier generation of Bolsheviks whispered among themselves that the workers’ opposition “had been right”; they had “analyzed the bureaucratization of the Party and the condition of the working class in terms that we scarcely dared repeat aloud seven years later”. For Serge himself, “the perpetuation of terror after the end of the Civil War…was an immense and demoralizing blunder”. As GPU repression began to be used against party members, the opposition was both silenced and decimated. By 1930, the prisons were full of some 4,000-5,000 oppositionists. And although Serge himself was an active part of the Left Opposition following Trotsky’s expulsion and exile, he never ceased to retain his critical faculties. He would reproach Trotsky for what he saw as a misconceived ‘Party patriotism’ that had repeatedly led to serious miscalculations. “As for the idea that…a new despotic State had emerged from our own hands to crush us, and reduce the country to absolute silence – nobody, nobody in our ranks was willing to admit it. From the depths of his exile in Alma-Ata Trotsky affirmed that this system was still ours, still proletarian, still Socialist, even though sick; the Party that was excommunicating, imprisoning, and beginning to murder us remained our Party…We were defeated by Party patriotism…”