Was the Bolshevik Regime and its Policies Marxist—or Blanquist?

• A pure conspiracy even when victorious can only replace one clique of the same ruling class by another – or still less, merely alter the governmental personages. Only mass insurrection has ever brought the victory of one social regime over another. Periodical conspiracies are commonly an expression of social stagnation and decay,…

• This does not mean, however, that popular insurrection and conspiracies are in all circumstances mutually exclusive. An element of conspiracy almost always enters to some degree into any insurrection. Being historically conditioned by a certain stage in the growth of a revolution, a mass insurrection is never purely spontaneous. Even when it flashes out unexpectedly to a majority of its own participants, it has been fertilized by those ideas in which the insurrectionaries see a way out of the difficulties of existence. But a mass insurrection can be foreseen and prepared. It can be organized in advance. In this case the conspiracy is subordinate to the insurrection, serves it, smoothes its path, hastens its victory. The higher the political level of a revolutionary movement and the more serious its leadership, the greater will be the place occupied by conspiracy in a popular insurrection.

—Leon Trotsky

With the exception of a few deprecatory comments about the Left Social Revolutionaries (the motivation for which, I will discuss later), Trotsky’s viewpoint is spot on, throughout his work, and this passage is no exception. The question I am about to raise, however, with regard to this passage from Leon Trotsky’s “The Art of Insurrection”, Chapter VI, Volume III, History of the Russian Revolution, (https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1935/v01n45/trotsky.htm) is as follows:

What happens to the “conspiratorial” element in the workers revolution—especially when the tasks of such a revolution become exceedingly complex, because the revolution is a “permanent” one—in other words,because it occurs in a society like Russia in 1917, or France in 1848—a society where the proletariat comprises nowhere near a numerical majority, and yet is advanced enough to wage a successful revolt?

In this article, I will argue that Lenin and the Bolsheviks made the serious, neo-Blanquist error in deciding to use the “conspiratorial” powers they had acquired, as the workers party of revolutionary leadership, to solve this problem: through the imposition of a minority party tyranny over Russian society. As a result, as in the striking image that Boris Pasternak presents to us in one of the early chapters of Doctor Zhivago (by presenting a character, representing Lenin, chewing on the tip of his beard), instead of actually advancing “permanently” forward, to prepare the ground for the World Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution became an ouroboros: the lizard that consumed itself, beginning with its own tail. Ironically, this tyranny over the masses, proletarian as well as petite-bourgeois, was justified in the minds of the leading Bolsheviks, as is readily apparent from George Solomon’s account of his interview with the newly triumphant Lenin in Solomon’s Among the Red Aristocrats, as the very means they thought would bring about that very same World Revolution!

In prison, after the October Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg strongly defended the Bolsheviks’ decision to overthrow the bourgeois Provisional Government,. She accompanied her expression of firm support, however, with a strong critique of the policies of the Bolsheviks, as opposed to the ideas of Marx and Engels, once they did take power. Her offering was published posthumously, by her attorney and last lover, Paul Leviⁱ. We will seek to evaluate her critique. Central to our evaluation, will be our exploration of the Bolsheviks’ disposition of the Left Social Revolutionary Party. Was it a good thing to first subordinate them to the status of junior partners—and then suppress them?

Marx and Engels’ Prescriptions for a Socialist Regime in an Intermediately Developed Society.

To evaluate Rosa’s claims, we should first discuss the prescriptions that Marx and Engels themselves wrote for social revolution in a society such as was Russia in 1917. This was certainly not an advanced industrial capitalist society. But nor was it, with its recent history of rapid industrialization, any longer a completely backward society. It was an intermediately developed society: between capitalism and feudalism, with a growing, socially significant, but by no means majoritarian, proletariat, and a feudal caste that still retained its large landed estates. Thus it resembled Marx and Engels’ own country of Germany, and, to a lesser extent, the relatively more developed political economy of France. It was for a social revolution in their own country, which they (mistakenly) expected would happen soon, that they wrote their Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March, 1850). These prescriptions were the basis from which Rosa measured the Bolsheviks’ policies, and found them deficient.

Before we begin our evaluation of how Marxist the Bolsheviks’ policies, once in power, really were, we must consider the following facts:

1. Marx and Engels did not have a crystal ball, and could not foresee how what real-life obstacles their prescriptions might encounter, 67-46 years later in another, albeit similar, society.

2. Lenin was a self-avowed disciple of the writings of the foremost Russian Blanquist (and Populist), Pyotr Nikitch Tkachev.ⁱⁱ

   Blanquism led Lenin to advocate for a highly disciplined, democratically centralized party—and this permitted the success of the Bolsheviks in leading the working class to power against the resistance of the Compromisers—even those within their own ranks: those who would later constitute the counterrevolutionary troika: Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin.

   And yet Blanquism also promoted a conspiratorial strategy not only for taking state power, but for wielding it once attained. It is apparent from the historical record that Lenin did not reject the Blanquist idea, at least, that an entire society could be run, if not by a tiny conspiracy, then by a vanguard leading (and controlling totally) a proletariat which itself only numbered 10% of the entire population.

Fact one can be construed as a factor for speaking favorably of the idea that the Bolsheviks creatively adapted the Masters’ prescriptions in the face of actual realities. But fact two opposes this interpretation, and argues that Lenin’s leadership of the Bolsheviks led them to a Blanquist, rather than a Marxist, policy, which unnecessarily led to the nightmare of Stalinism. This is not an either-or, however. I believe it was a mixture of both. But the conclusion we must draw is that, while of course we should be flexible in our fulfillment of the Masters’—democratic, social republican--prescriptions, we must studiously avoid Lenin’s Blanquist-totalitarian distortions. The which, I will attempt to show, were quite substantial.

As I discussed above, the question of what is the proper state policy of a revolutionary workers party that has led the working class to a successful insurrection, is a complex one, where that society whose economy has not yet been developed sufficiently by capitalism to spawn a working class that numbers in the majority of the population. As Trotsky writes about the class-demographic situation that the Bolsheviks faced before the insurrection, in “The Art of Insurrection”, Chapter VI of Volume III of his History of the Russian Revolution,

• These two fundamental camps, however – the big property holders and the proletariat – do not exhaust the population of a country. Between them lie broad layers of the petty bourgeoisie, showing all the colors of the economic and political rainbow. [Note: all capitalist societies contain such layers, but they are especially broad in intermediately developed and backward societies like Russia in 1917-TS.] The discontent of these intermediate layers, their disappointment with the policy of the ruling class, their impatience and indignation, their readiness to support a bold revolutionary initiative on the part of the proletariat, constitutes the third political premise of a revolution. It is partly passive – in that it neutralizes the upper strata of the petty bourgeoisie – but partly also active, for it impels the lower strata directly into the struggle side by side with the workers.

  That these premises condition each other is obvious. The more decisively and confidently the proletariat acts,the better will it succeed in bringing after it the intermediate layers, the more isolated will be the ruling class, and the more acute its demoralization. And, on the other hand, a demoralization of the rulers will pour water into the mill of the revolutionary class.

Again, Trotsky is spot on—about the situation faced by the Bolsheviks, pre October 25 (old Calendar), and the attitude they properly took in response: one of leading the proletariat to act “decisively and confidently”. And to lead in this manner, requires an element of “conspiracy”, as Trotsky writes earlier in the chapter. But the question begging to be answered here, for the post-insurrectionary regime, is as follows. Of course, the revolutionary workers party must continue to lead the workers to continue to act “decisively and confidently”. The bourgeoisie, as Engels wrote, must be “held down”, and as Marx wrote, “despotic inroads must be made against the realm of private property.” But what do we about the these “broad layers of the petty bourgeoisie”? How do we deepen the revolutionary process, and in that process, continue to raise their consciousness? By continuing with and even deepening our “conspiracy” with its secretive, and often amoral methods, tending toward a one party state tyranny over not only these broad layers, but over the working class itself? This puts us in the camp of the neo-Blanquists—and the Bolsheviks post October 24. Or do we rather, as I will show Marx and Engels promoted, embark upon a path where we open up the political process to these broad layers, along with the more ideologically backward elements of the proletariat itself?

What did Marx and Engels Mean by “It does not Lie within the Power of the Workers to Prevent the Petite Bourgeois Democrats...”?

To begin, I wish to address the section of The Address that begins with the following sentences,

There is no doubt that during the further course of the revolution in Germany, the petty-bourgeois democrats will for the moment acquire a predominant influence. The question is, therefore, what is to be the attitude of the proletariat, and in particular of the League towards them:

1) While present conditions continue, in which the petty-bourgeois democrats are also oppressed;
2) In the coming revolutionary struggle, which will put them in a dominant position;
3) After this struggle, during the period of petty-bourgeois predominance over the classes which have been overthrown and over the proletariat.

This passage, so central to the Address, might be construed as followed to the letter by the Bolsheviks, during 1917. But one of the sentences from this passage should give us pause:

 As in the past, so in the coming struggle also, the petty bourgeoisie, to a man, will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It does not lie within the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this [my emphasis—T.S.]; but it does lie within their power to make it as difficult as possible for the petty bourgeoisie to use its power against the armed proletariat, and to dictate such conditions to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier. 

The phrase that I have emphasized here-- It does not lie within the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this, is a translation of the original German, “Es liegt nicht in der Macht der Arbeiter, den kleinbürgerlichen Demokraten dies zu verwehren.ⁱⁱⁱ It may well be construed—by neo-Blanquists--as supportive of the idea that while the Bolsheviks could not prevent the Compromisers from handing back state power to the bourgeois Provisional Government initially, in February 1917, the Bolsheviks were correct. They were right, not only to wage the insurrection in October, but then to erect a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, by October 1917, which effectively excluded the vast, petite bourgeois majority from equal voting rights with the workers. They were correct to assume that the working class, despite the fact that they were decades away from comprising the majority of the Russian population, had nevertheless indeed developed the necessary organizational and intellectual power, through the aegis of their Bolshevik leadership, to do so. Thus the Bolsheviks had the right to share power with the Left Social Revolutionaries, which represented the peasant majority, only as a junior partner—and then, blow off and repress them, on the pretext that they had assassinated the German ambassador, Count Mirbach (we will consider below whether they actually did so).

This interpretation, however, flies in the face of Marx’s statements, as recording in the minutes of the Central Committee of the Communist League in their meeting of September, 1850: a meeting which precipitated the breakup of the League. The split was a result of the artisan majority of the League, in their frustration with the continuance of the post 1848 counter-revolution, and the threat that capitalism offered to their own (petite-bourgeois) artisanal economic class, had become Blanquist in their political orientation.

The debate between Marx and Engels, and these Blanquist artisans, led by Karl Schapper, was over the issue of whether the attainment of political rule (in German, Herrschaft) by the proletarian Party (In 1850, the Communist League; in 1917, the Bolshevik Party) was sufficient in itself for the Party to possess the power or the right [in German, Macht], to implement whatever “socialist” measures it wanted, without regard for the interests and desires of the rest of the population—the urban petite bourgeoisie and peasantry--and whether or not the proletariat had even grown sufficiently to comprise the majority of the population.

Three years earlier, artisan Schapper, obviously under the influence of Marx and Engels, sang a very different, democratic, social republican tune. He had wrote the following passage in 1847 for the one and only issue of the CL’s Kommunist journal: [Our goal is]

• a democratic State wherein each party would be able by word or in writing to win a majority over to its ideas…. We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. . . . We have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced … that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.^iv ,

However, as Richard Hunt writes, by September 1850, “With the succession of defeats that followed the glorious spring of 1848, a portion of the artisan element fell back into the older Blanquist patterns of thought.”^v Thus, in this breakup meeting of the League, according to Hunt, Schapper said the following:

• "I do not share the [i.e., Marxist] view that the [petty?] bourgeoisie will come to power [Herrschaft or “political rule”] in Germany, and I am fanatical about this." He perceived the controversy thus: “The question at issue is whether we are to chop a few heads off right at the start or whether it is our heads that will fall. In France the workers will come to power [Herrschaft] and when that happens, we will also come to power in Germany. Were this not the case, I would indeed lay myself down to sleep .... When we are in power, we can take such measures as are necessary to secure the rule of the proletariat. I am fanatical about this point.”

• Thereupon Marx rejoined: “If the proletariat came to power [here Marx also uses the word Herrschaft], it could not introduce directly proletarian measures but only petty bourgeois ones. Our party can only govern when conditions allow it to carry out its own program. Louis Blanc gives the best example of what is gained by coming to power too soon. Even in France, it is not the proletariat alone that will come to power but the peasants and petty bourgeois as well, and it is their measures that will have to be carried out, not the proletariat's.”^vi

If we interpret the passage I have highlighted from the 1850 Address, in the light shed upon it by this passage from the later September 1850 minutes, we must focus upon the use by Marx and Engels of the word “power,” of Macht. One of its connotations, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is “clout”.^vii If the Bolsheviks read this passage and used it as a basis of legitimization for their construction of a one-party State, they interpreted it in terms purely of the political rule (Herrschaft) they had developed in order to lead the working class to overthrow the Provisional Government. But if, to Marx and Engels, the word Macht meant “clout”, that sheds a different light on the matter. For it thus connotes “influence”, and even more so, “legitimacy”, within an “ensemble of social relations”, as Poulantzas might say. It is “rightful power”, power that is exerted because a Party-class has the historical, social right to do so.

Again, I am not suggesting that leading the October insurrection was the wrong thing to do. What I am questioning is the one party state that was built by the Bolsheviks to replace the bourgeois government. Marx’s use of the word ‘power’ would seem to connote an additional meaning: that of moral right, as well as the power to effect their goal of leading Russia, and the world, toward socialism. They may have had the power to construct a one party state, as the now Blanquist Schapper desired for Germany by 1850. But did they have the right: in other words, was this the right thing to do, to effect their long range socialist goal? Can we achieve socialism without the active democratic support of the majority? Blanqui, Tkachev, and Lenin (mistakenly) said “Yes!” But Marx, Engels, and Rosa decidedly said “NO!”

Let’s put it another way. Machiavelli said that “he who wills the ends, wills the means,” This is not the same thing as the (Blanquist) view that “the ends justifies the means”: a narrow, short-sighted, arrogant interpretation. In addition, Machiavelli’s original formulation mandates that its employer thinks carefully about whether the means he has chosen, are the right means. Will they lead to the ends he desires? Or will they culminate in a Pyrrhic victory: such as the Stalinist bureaucratic nightmare? If, for example, we need a dictatorship, in order to restore or create a republic, what measures will be in place to ensure that it is a republic that results? The aristocratic Senate concentrated power in the hands of Marcus Crassus, in order to crush the Third Servile Revolt led by Spartacus. But the requirements for the job entailed his giving up his dictatorial power after 6 months, and that he present himself for trial for any crimes he committed (not to Spartacus, assuredly, but to other Roman aristocrats!) during his tenure as dictator.

Whether or not an artisan-led Blanquist-style “dictatorship of the proletariat”/ conspiracy can take over the country in the name of a proletariat that numbers only in a minority, can such a conspiracy lead the society to socialism—to a social republic? Marx, in the Minutes, is saying they cannot. The dictatorship of the proletariat in an intermediately developed society such as France, and soon, Germany, must democratically represent the will of the petite bourgeois majority. That does not mean, of course, that the workers put up with the shenanigans of Compromisers, like Kerensky, or Plekhanov, or Dan, who seek to sell out the dictatorship to the bourgeois counterrevolution. We unmask and compete for election against such phonies, and if necessary, as individuals, if they openly betray the revolution, arrest them and put them in jail. But we must not strip the majority—as the Bolsheviks consistently did--of their right to elect delegates to the soviets, who run on party lines different from and competing with our own Party. We do not have the “power/right” to do so--in the broader, socialist-goal-directed meaning of the word. If what we want is socialism, than we must not arrogate to ourselves the right to do so.

The distinction between the “power” that we have to realize our immediate, arrogant interests, vs. our long term, humanitarian-socialist goals, harks back to the dialogues of Plato: specifically, The Gorgias, and The Republic, or What is Justice. In both dialogues, one or more of the characters—Callicles in The Gorgias, Thrasymachus and then, less brashly, with their myth of Gyges’ ring, Glaucon and Adeimantus in The Republic—reject this distinction. For Callicles, the good is what is immediately pleasurable, or as his spiritual descendant, the utilitarian hedonist Jeremy Bentham, argued, “pushpin is as good as poetry.” For Thrasymachus, “justice is the interest of the stronger.” What Thrasymachus meant was that since his and Socrates’ class of aristocrats was socioeconomically the strongest class, justice consisted of them ruling society and using that rule to get whatever they wanted from the ho-poloi, tyrannically, In both instances, Socrates, through the dialectic, forces each of these opponents to recognize that one’s immediate, selfish interest is not the same, and could be completely opposed, to one’s long term, intrinsically humanitarian interest.

This all may seem esoteric—very “Platonic”--except for the fact that Marx employs very similar language in his fight with Schapper’s advocacy of a Blanquist “proletarian” coup-d’etat in France and Germany at that September 1850 meeting. Against Schapper’s ridiculous idea that such a feat was do-able because, or so he felt anyway, the German proletariat was ready to do it, and that if anybody gets in their way, we can always use Madame Guillotine, Marx said, “Ich habe stets der momentanen Meinung des Proletariats getrotzt”: “I have always been aware of the momentary opinion [my emphasis] of the proletariat”.^viii You can almost see Marx waving one or both of his hands dismissively as he said that. Marx is expressing disdain at Schapper’s demagoguery: telling Schapper that he is indifferent to such opinion; that he doesn’t take such day-to-day survey data seriously. As Marx wrote elsewhere, what this or that individual proletarian thinks now, or even what the proletariat of an entire country thinks “momentarily”, is unimportant. What’s important is what the consciousness of the entire proletariat must become, as a result of the dialectic of historical materialism—and as guided, as the proletariat responds to that dialectic, by Marxism, when it fully becomes a “class-for-itself”.

That consciousness will not and cannot involve foolish, Blanquist notions that socialism can be brought about without the consent and the support of the majority of the population. In the meantime, it is the responsibility of the followers of Marx, rather than of Blanqui, to instruct the working class that democracy is in their long-term interest—not to appeal irresponsibly and demagogically to their “momentary” impulse toward attempting tyranny through a putsch, as Schapper is proposing to do. As the “universal class” that must, to liberate itself, liberate all of humanity, the fully developed, class conscious revolutionary proletariat will come to understand that a tyranny of their minority no more serves their long-term, liberatory humanist class interest, than it does the aristocratic Guardians’ class interest in Plato’s utopia.

Rosa’s and even early Trotsky’s Critiques of Lenin’s Authoritarianism

Thus Rosa’s objections to the undemocratic nature of the Bolsheviks’ policies should be taken up with the utmost seriousness. She is correct to argue that their policies have not been Marxist: their failure to enact universal suffrage, their banning of other socialist parties from participating in soviet elections, their rule through bureaucratic ukase, rather than encouraging criticism, discussion, and broad debate. The most telling passage from these chapters, is as follows:

The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical

product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of

its realization, as a result of the developments of living history, which – just

like organic nature of which, in the last analysis, it forms a part – has the fine

habit of always producing along with any real social need the means to its

satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously the solution. However, if such

is the case, then it is clear that socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed

or introduced by ukase. It has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force

– against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the

building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only

experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways. Only unobstructed,

effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to

light creative new force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts. The public life of

countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so

unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off

the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress. (Proof: the year 1905 and

the months from February to October 1917.) There it was political in

character; the same thing applies to economic and social life also. The whole

mass of the people must take part in it. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed

from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.

Public control is indispensably necessary. Otherwise the exchange of

experiences remains only with the closed circle of the officials of the new

regime. Corruption becomes inevitable. (Lenin’s words, Bulletin No.29)

Socialism in life demands a complete spiritual transformation in the masses

degraded by centuries of bourgeois rule. Social instincts in place of egotistical

ones, mass initiative in place of inertia, idealism which conquers all suffering,

etc., etc. No one knows this better, describes it more penetratingly; repeats it

more stubbornly than Lenin. But he is completely mistaken in the means he

employs. Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconian penalties,

rule by terror – all these things are but palliatives. The only way to a rebirth is

the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and

public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralizes.

When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the representative

bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down

the soviets as the only true representation of political life in the land as a

whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without

general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without

a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a

mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active

element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of

inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them,

in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the

working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to

applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions

unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not

the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of

politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule

of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month

periods to six-month periods!) Yes, we can go even further: such conditions

must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations,

shooting of hostages, etc. (Lenin’s speech on discipline and corruption)

We can see echoes here of earlier critiques she made of Lenin’s ideas for party organization: Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy” (1904). There Rosa wrote, against what she perceived as Lenin’s authoritarianism, “Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.” These jibe with similar criticisms made by Trotsky in his 1904 pamphlet, Our Political Tasks. Trotsky summarized his critique of Lenin’s methods: “These methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: The party organization is substituted for the party, the Central Committee is substituted for the party organization, and finally a ‘dictator’ is substituted for the Central Committee.”  Both Trotsky and Rosa attacked Lenin for his neo-Jacobin (neo-Blanquist) ideas about forming an ideologically pure party.^ix

Rosa’s and Trotsky’s attack on the extreme level of centralization advocated by Lenin for the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, was for the most part correct. I believe, however that the more democratic, less centralist organizational method later developed by the Bolsheviks-where the leadership is made strictly accountable to the rank and file, where each member must be an active member--is basically the only way to go. Ernest Mandel has discussed this in his pamphlet, The Leninist Theory of Organization (1970).^x

With their critiques, both Rosa and Trotsky correctly foresaw the dangers of what they both considered to be Lenin’s overemphasis on the need for ideological purity. This part of Blanquism—the good part about discipline—may easily lead, if not carefully checked, to the bad part: the danger that the Party will resort to one-party state tyranny. This passage from Rosa’s critique is a strangely prescient portent of things to come:

It is a mistake to believe that it is possible to substitute “provisionally” the absolute power of a Central Committee (acting somehow by “tacit delegation”) for the yet unrealizable rule of the majority of conscious workers in the party, and in this way replace the open control of the working masses over the party organs with the reverse control by the Central Committee over the revolutionary proletariat.

Unfortunately, Trotsky not only joined the Bolshevik Party in the summer of 1917—a very good thing to do. He also seems to have abandoned the reservations—which Rosa never did--he shared with her about the dangerous side of Lenin’s Blanquism, and what (ultimately Stalinist) tyranny it portended for the fate of the Russian Revolution.

If the Bolsheviks had desired to construct the post insurrectionary soviet government with an eye to giving the working class full “public control” of their own institutions, they would have done so, as the Paris Communards had done in 1871. Committees of the soviet delegates themselves, with each party’s delegated represented in proportion to the votes they had received in the soviet elections, would have constituted the executive departments. This truly would have permitted the dissolution of the boundary between legislature and executive in parliamentary arrangements, and granted a critical voice to every party elected to the soviet, in proportion to the votes they won. It would have kept the majority party accountable, as well.

Instead, a Bolshevik-controlled ministry was created, the Sovnarkum. Trotsky described this in Chapter 10, Volume III of his History, “The Congress of the Soviet Dictatorship”, as follows. One gets the feeling that he is not entirely comfortable with what happened, especially when he spells out the word, “M-i-n-i-s-t-e-r-s”, with a ? at the end. As if to ask, “Should we really have done this?”. The reply to this question in his mind, seems to be, “Sure we should have. Because we’re Blanquists! We won’t betray the masses; just because we wield absolute power!:

• During that day, the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks was at work in Smolny. It was deciding the problem of the new government of Russia. No minutes were kept – or they have not been preserved. Nobody was bothering about future historians, although a lot of trouble was being prepared for them right there. The evening session of the Congress was to create a cabinet of ministers. M-i-n-i-s-t-e-r-s? ’What a sadly compromised word! It stinks of the high bureaucratic career, the crowning of some parliamentary ambition. It was decided to call the government the Soviet of People’s Commissars: that at least had a fresher sound. Since the negotiations for a coalition of the “entire democracy” had come to nothing, the question of the party and personal staff of the government was simplifled. The Left Social Revolutionaries minced and objected. Having just broken with the party of Kerensky, they themselves hardly knew what they wanted to do. The Central Committee adopted the motion of Lenin as the only thinkable one: to form a government of Bolsheviks only

As the minutes of a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee around this time show, Trotsky was not opposed to a coalition government, as proposed by the Right Bolsheviks, led by Kamenev. Yet Trotsky insisted that within such a government, since the Bolsheviks had made the insurrection, they should receive 75% of its posts—regardless of how many votes by which the Party’s delegates were elected to the soviets!^xi

In his History, Trotsky presents the—inherently contradictory—ideal presented by the Bolsheviks to the Soviet Congress that Sovnarkum, despite the fact that it was a bureaucratic ministry, would nevertheless be accountable to the soviets, as follows:

• A last problem remains: the creation of a government.… The management of the various branches of the state life is allotted to commissions who are to carry into action the programme announced by the Congress of Soviets “in close union with the mass organisation of working men and women, sailors, soldiers, peasants and clerical employees.” The governmental power is concentrated in the hands of a collegium composed of the presidents of these commissions, to be called the Soviet of People’s Commissars. Control over the activities of the government is vested in the Congress of Soviets and its Central Executive Committee.

However, the ensuing reality, which all historians acknowledge, was that Sovnarkum quickly became increasingly unaccountable to the soviets. Increasingly, all executive decisions were made behind the closed doors of the Party committees of the Bolsheviks alone. To term this situation, as Lenin did, the successful dissolution of the bourgeois parliamentary boundary between the legislative and executive branches of the State, was a self-indulgent lie. This was the snake in the Garden of Eden: the foot in the door, so to speak, of the temptation for these middle class leaders to give fulfillment to their petite bourgeois authoritarian tendencies: “We the ‘Commissars’ know best, so why should we submit ourselves, in our superior knowledge about what the proletarian revolution requires, to the working class itself?”

The Left Social Revolutionaries: Should they Only have been the Bolsheviks’ Junior Partners?

As for the other parties, as well as the competing newspapers, the Bolsheviks suppressed them, one by one. At first, this repression began only with the Kadets, a Party openly committed to cultivating counterrevolution. But the other, socialist parties were suppressed because they began to score electoral victories within the soviets against the Bolsheviks; as a result of the masses’ dissatisfaction with Bolshevik policy. This culminated in the suppression of the Left Social Revolutionaries, originally touted by the Bolsheviks as representative of the country’s middle peasant majority, and thus deserving junior partners, initially, in the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary governing coalition.^xii

You can read, in his 1930 History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky describing the Left SRs as “strange... anarchist” Left SRs. Thus he sets them up as fitting targets for repression. By some inner teleologic—not so strangely enough matching Trotsky’s own increasingly shrill portrait of them as his History proceeds – they were headed for the “scrapheap”, anyway.

In his History, Chapter 46, “The October Insurrection”, writes about the insurrection that one of the most serious problems was that the need to conduct preparations for the insurrection in secret, had to be balanced against the need for

• democratic procedures, with all their advantages and all their delays…. To take advantage of the majority in the Soviet and compose the Committee of Bolsheviks alone, would have provoked discontent among the non-party men, to say nothing of the Left Social Revolutionaries and certain groups of anarchists. The Bolsheviks in the Military Revolutionary Committee would submit to the decisions of their party – although not always without resistance – but it was impossible to demand discipline of the non-party men and the Left Social Revolutionaries….

  Would it not have been simpler in that case to summon the insurrection directly in the name of the party? This form of action undoubtedly has weighty advantages. But its disadvantages are hardly less obvious. In those millions upon whom the party legitimately counted it is necessary to distinguish three layers: one which was already with the Bolsheviks on all conditions; another, more numerous, which supported the Bolsheviks in so far as they acted through the soviets; a third which followed the soviets in spite of the fact that they were dominated by Bolsheviks.

  These three layers were different not only in political level, but to a considerable degree also in social ingredients. Those standing for the Bolsheviks as a party were above all industrial workers, with the hereditary proletarians of Petrograd in the front rank. Those standing for the Bolsheviks in so far as they had a legal soviet cover, were a majority of the soldiers. Those standing for the soviets, independently and regardless of the fact that an overplus of Bolsheviks dominated them, were the more conservative groups of workers – former Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who dreaded to break away from the rest of the masses – the more conservative parts of the army even including the Cossacks, and the peasants who had freed themselves from the leadership of the Social Revolutionary party and were adhering to its left flank.

The question begged here in the mind of the reader familiar with what happened after the October insurrection, in March 1918, with the decision made by the Bolsheviks, but in reality, by Lenin himself, to sign the Brest Litovsk Treaty, and then in July, when the Left SRs were suppressed (after quite possibly being false-flagged by the Bolsheviks)—the ten thousand plus pound elephant in the room, is as follows. What the hell happened to these uneven “layers”, the need to include the voices and consent of as many of their members as possible, via “democratic procedures”?! Did the accession to absolute power by the Bolsheviks over the revolutionary process magically obviate any further need to take these into consideration? Or was it rather the case that Lord Acton’s famous adage was proven correct here?

In his 1980 pamphlet, From October to Brest Litovsk, Trotsky paints the Left SRs as wrongly desiring a “socialist coalition” of all the socialist parties. Such a coalition would have been effectively and democratically created, if the Bolsheviks had followed the Commune model, discussed above. But instead, Trotsky promotes the Bolsheviks’ actual policy: “Our policy was, on the contrary, to line up the toiling lower classes against the representatives of organizations which supported the Kerensky regime.” This sounds like it’s taken straight out of Marx and Engels’ Address—except that it definitely did not take place via competition in democratic, free and fair elections. What Trotsky seems to be talking about, instead, is the process by which the Bolshevik shut down all organizations, such as the Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, that felt more charitable to Kerensky and Chernov, than they did to the Bolsheviks, and replaced them with zombie Bolshevik alternatives. As Richard Pipes writes

• Their strategy.…, involved three steps. First, they sought to gain control of a given body’s Mandate Commission, which determined who could attend: this enabled them to bring in more Bolshevik and pro-Bolshevik deputies than they would have obtained in free elections. If such a body, packed with their followers, nevertheless failed to pass Bolshevik resolutions, they disrupted it with noise and threats of violence. If that method also failed, then they declared the meeting unlawful, walked out, and set up a rival meeting of their own.^xiii

Setting up their own meetings of their own supporters within, or outside, these popular organizations is one thing. Suppressing those popular organizations, because they are still popular, and without their present leaderships offering any threat of direct military opposition to the revolutionary regime, however, is quite another. Marx and Engels would hardly approve. Independent, militant organization by the proletariat to compete democratically with petite bourgeois Compromisers would have earned their approval, in accordance with their Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League. And this is something the Bolsheviks ably carried out from February to October 1917. But after that, what we seem to see, something of which Trotsky actually seems proud, is a movement from grassroots, democratic organizing, to top-down social engineering and totalitarian political mass manipulation, via rabble rousing. This is an early example of the Nazi policy of “leveling” or “synchronization”—die Gleichschaltung.

This bureaucratic attitude is critiqued by Rosa in chapter 7 of The Russian Revolution entitled “The Struggle Against Corruption”. Here she says that such a policy only exacerbates the corruptive tendency of bourgeois society, which she identifies with the lumpen proletariat. From Pipes’ account, the Bolsheviks enlisted the Left Social Revolutionaries in these terrorist, “synchronistic” operations. This brilliantly illustrates Rosa’s point: by so enlisting the Left SRs, they transformed them into a potential democratic rival with whom they might genuinely share the power to rule the country--thereby discouraging their “socialist” tendencies--into fellow members of a noisy, violent, repressive lumpen gang--encouraging their anarchist impulses--bent on repressing the very dissent that is the lifeblood of democracy and genuine socialism.

The Magic Lumpen Way of Lenin

The creation of such gangs is in fact central to Lenin’s plans for the new regime as he lays them out before the October Revolution, in his “Can the Bolsheviks Retain Power?” Yes they can, he answers to his title, by employing

“a magic way” to enlarge our state apparatus tenfold at once, at one stroke, a way which no capitalist state ever possessed or could possess. This magic way is to draw the working people, to draw the poor, into the daily work of state administration.

To explain how easy it will be to employ this magic way and how faultlessly it will operate, let us take the simplest and most striking example possible.

The state is to forcibly evict a certain family from a flat and move another in. This often happens in the capitalist state, and it will also happen in our proletarian or socialist state.

The proletarian state has to forcibly move a very poor family into a rich man's flat. Let us suppose that our squad of workers' militia is fifteen strong:

Note the class composition of this “squad of workers’ militia” envisioned by Lenin for the new Bolshevik regime:

two sailors, two soldiers, two class-conscious workers (of whom, let us suppose, only one is a member of our Party, or a sympathiser), one intellectual, and eight from the poor working people, of whom at least five must be women, domestic servants, unskilled labourers, and so forth.

So out of the fifteen members of this “workers”’ militia, at most, there is only a bare majority of of “poor working people”, only two of whom are “class-conscious!” One wonders of what the actual quality of this “class consciousness” itself consists: given the fact that these workers have consented to joining this magical “squad”. Mere membership to the Bolshevik Party? One senses, from what follows that it does not include the capacity to stand up to such sadistic cruelty, as directed by the party intellectual, toward middle class urban families.

Lenin’s narrative of this “working people” squad’s exemplary action seems to be taken right out of a scene from Boris Pasternak’s (and David Lean’s) Doctor Zhivago. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any Bolshevik half-brother Evgraf to save this “rich man’s family,” which consists of a mere four people living in five rooms (?! What scandalous luxury!) from the outrages Lenin is wants to inflict upon them (and their balalaika?):

The squad arrives at the rich man's flat, inspects it and finds that it consists of five rooms occupied by two men and two women—"You must squeeze up a bit into two rooms this winter, citizens, and prepare two rooms for two families now living in cellars. Until the time, with the aid of engineers (you are an engineer, aren't you?), we have built good dwellings for everybody, you will have to squeeze up a little. Your telephone will serve ten families. This will save a hundred hours of work wasted on shopping, and so forth. Now in your family there are two unemployed persons who can perform light work: a citizeness fifty-five years of age and a citizen fourteen years of age. They will be on duty for three hours a day supervising the proper distribution of provisions for ten families and keeping the necessary account of this. The student citizen in our squad will now write out this state order in two copies and you will be kind enough to give us a signed declaration that you will faithfully carry it out." ^xiv

It is true that Lenin’s scheme here is superficially similar to that which is proposed by Friedrich Engels in his pamphlet, On the Housing Question. Until new public housing for the working class could be built, the should be housed in rich people’s abodes. But four people in five rooms?! That’s rich man’s home? Certainly not. That is a middle class home, and Engels did not have such homes in mind, in his proposal for temporary housing for the poor. But it is part and parcel of Lenin’s disregard for the rights of the petite-bourgeoisie.

This gangsterism, on the part of the Bolsheviks, is not so surprising, after you read Yuri Felshtinsky’s book, Lenin and His Comrades. There, he compares the ethos and actions of the Bolsheviks—not just the bank robberies, but a policy of Bolshevik men marrying women from wealthy families so the Bolsheviks could get their inheritance, and even the murder of a wealthy benefactor who had (foolishly) left the Bolsheviks his fortune in his will!--with mobsters.^xv

You may consider yourself a revolutionary democratic socialist, like me. If so, are you feeling nauseous yet? Console yourself, if you have been a fan of the Bolsheviks, that up to October 25^th, 1917 (Old Calendar), your admiration was very much deserved. As Rosa herself ended her pamphlet, the Bolsheviks, to this day, provide a sterling model of how to lead the working class, against the opposition of the social democratic Compromisers, to overthrow capitalism and build the first workers state. But the same Blanquism that imparted to Lenin and the Bolsheviks the high degree of party discipline they required to perform this miracle, utterly poisoned and perverted the workers state they thus created. They utterly failed at the fundamental task, at this point, to open up the revolutionary, democratic centralist process to the rest of society, even to the working class. After all, in a genologic line that runs straight through the Blanquists, and then through the Jacobins, Lenin inherited his conception of democratic centralism for the internal workings of the Party from none other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s formula for a democratic republican polity within a small Swiss city—with a yearly convention by the citizens to elect their delegates and revise the Constitution—was the model. So why not, if you’re going to apply this model, as Lenin did, to the internal workings of the party, apply it, once in power, to the entire society? Yet Lenin did not, because he also channeled the tyrannical aspect of Blanquism, that Blanqui inherited from Buonoratti, Babeuf, and the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety. And so the latter—Lenin’s decisions with regard to the construction of a soviet workers’ state--was not at all admirable: a point most Leninists have missed.

Thus it is false to call the Soviet Union bureaucratically “degenerate”, while calling China, Vietnam, Cuba, East Germany, et alia, “deformed”. The Soviet Union was deformed, by Lenin’s Blanquism, from its inception. For certain, the acceptance, by the rest of the Bolsheviks, including Trotsky—who just as certainly should have known better—was encouraged by the imperialist encirclement, and invasion by numerous armies, along with the betrayal by the Compromisers by collaborating with the Tsarist, White Russian generals. But we cannot just blame this “degeneration”, or “deformation”, only on the imperialists. Lenin, with his Blanquist ideology, bore a heavy share of the responsibility here.

The Constituent Assembly

Most socialist revolutionaries brush aside Rosa’s critique of the Bolsheviks’ dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks’ rationale was that the way in which the ballots had been created, disabled the peasantry from voting from the revolutionary peasant party that had split off from the Social Revolutionary Party, and would have represented the peasantry’s real class interests. Thus, through this electoral sleight of hand, peasantry had been duped into voting for one of the same two “Compromiser” parties that had betrayed them to the bourgeoisie: the other being the Menshevik Party. These Compromiser Parties sought to undermine the soviets as institutions of direct rule for the broad masses of workers and peasants. Thus the Bolsheviks further maintained that as a result of this electoral victory of the Compromisers, the CA had proven itself to be an outmoded form of representation, succeeded by the soviets as the unique mode for class rule.

But Rosa cut through this Gordon Knot as ably as Jason of the Argonauts. If the peasants had been tricked, why not hold new elections, in which the Left SRs would be presented as a choice for which to vote on the new ballots?

If, through such a second election, the Compromisers would still have won a majority, then yes, the Bolsheviks, at that point, would have had to dissolve the CA, because it would have served as a center for counterrevolution.

But if the Left SRs had instead won at least a plurality of votes, then what reason would they have had to try to dissolve the soviets—to which, they were firmly committed?!

It was not, therefore, to defend the Revolution from the Compromisers, that the CA was dissolved. Not at all. For Lenin saw that the most favorable outcome that might come out of the holding of new elections for the CA, would be precisely a victory for the Left SRs: not the Bolsheviks. He revealed his intention to monopolize state power, regardless of whatever version of the Social Revolutionary Party attained a plurality within the CA, he revealed to George Solomon. From Solomon’s Among the Red Autocrats:

• I made a remark regarding the meeting of the constitutional assembly. With a malicious twinkle in his eyes and some despicable whistling, he answered:

  • This is a subject on which I do not like to speak. This constitutional meeting is but a romantic idea, which we have given up already. We have promised to assemble, yes; but in no case shall we alter our position!”

There were no new elections to the CA because the Bolsheviks did not want their revolutionary partners, the Left SRs, to gain so much clout within their revolutionary coalition as to become the “majority” party. Lenin did not want to create, in the words of Schapper in 1847, “a democratic State wherein each party would be able by word or in writing to win a majority over to its ideas….” Blinded by his ideology, he did not see the necessity, as Marx foresaw for the situation he faced, of the fact that in such a country as Russia in 1917, just like for France in 1850, it must not be “the proletariat alone that will come to power but the peasants and petty bourgeois as well, and it is their measures that will have to be carried out, not the proletariat's.”

Should the Left SRs have been Suppressed? Or Was the Assassination of Mirbach a False Flag Operation?

The Lenin-loyalists will assert, “But the Left SRs proved themselves to be counterrevolutionary! Didn’t they disagree with the Bolsheviks’ decision, which was absolutely necessary to save the revolution, to sign the Brest Litovsk Treaty? And then, in protest of the treaty, didn’t they leave the government, assassinate German Ambassador Count Mirbach, and plot the overthrow of the Bolsheviks?

However, once we examine the exposes of these notions by Robert Payne and Yurii Felshtinsky, then not much of this actually rings true. First, Felshtinsky documents that even within the Bolshevik Party, Lenin rammed through the decision to sign the Brest Litovsk Treaty by a completely undemocratic process, relying upon his authority as the party’s founder and leader. At one point during the process, Trotsky actually said in frustration, “We don’t have a party”. Contrary to the myth that he eventually acceded, Trotsky never conceded to Lenin the necessity or the advisability of signing the Treaty. The “pro” for signing it—the “breathing space” foretold by Lenin for the Revolution—was never really offered by the Germans. If push actually came to shove, the revolutionary government may have done better to go into hiding, or at least to Moscow, and try to conduct a guerrilla war against the Germans: as Bukharin was proposing. The “con” was the betrayal of the international revolution, felt by the German socialists left in the lurch, as well as the betrayal of democracy, felt so keenly by the Left Social Revolutionaries that they left the government. Felshtinsky charges that Lenin did not really want the Treaty in order to give the Revolution a breathing space, but instead, to maintain personal control of the World Revolution. Why not? At least in Lenin’s own, Blanquist mind, his mind and his alone was capable of conducting that Revolution correctly. Unfortunately, his decision effectively ended that Revolution.^xvi

As for the assassination of Mirbach, there are a few facts which are just as suspicious, as revealed by Lenin’s biographer, Robert Payne, as the 9-11 false flag operation. Immediately after the assassination, in preparation for a trip to the German consulate to offer his condolences, Lenin discussed the matter with his Bolshevik associates. He had the following conversation with Trotsky, according to Trotsky’s own account:

• Trotsky: It seems as though the Left Social Revolutionaries would be the cherry stone that we are destined to stumble over.

• Lenin: I have thought that very thing. The fate of the wavering bourgeoisie lies in that very point. They come to the help of the White Guards like a cherry stone.

Well that was certainly one way to look at the Left SRs—the Blanquist way. The Left SRs were a “cherry stone” over which the Bolsheviks must stumble—on their way to totalitarian control over the entirety of Russian society.

But another way to view them would have been as a great asset in the struggle with the bourgeoisie, for the support of the petite bourgeoisie and peasantry, in building a genuine social republic: if only the Bolsheviks had empowered the Left SRs, and let them become the formal national majority party, with the Bolsheviks serving as their junior partners for the country—while remaining the majority party, within the cities!

After this conversation, Lenin, according to Trotsky, “laughed a little.” Then “his face changed and became stone-gray.” As Payne asserts, this account gives us “a number of clues…. Lenin was delighted by the prospect of putting the blame on the Left Social Revolutionaries—the cherry stone.” By doing so, Lenin only added to the benefit the murder provided him—in so far as Mirbach had been sending dispatches to Germany, informing them of the military weakness of the Bolshevik regime, and thus encouraging the Germans to break the Treaty, and invade. Payne sums up these “clues”—and their meaning--as follows:

[Lenin] was in a good humor, laughing slyly, until the moment before he left the Kremlin and realized that he would have to go to the scene of the murder—[then] “His face changed and became stone-gray.” Trotsky’s picture describes a band of conspirators [my emphasis—TS] congratulating one another on their success.

Thus Lenin and Trotsky agreed in their contempt for the Left SRs as a “cherry stone”, an annoyance that they would like very much to get rid of.

This is something very much like what the treacherous Don Altobello (Eli Wallach) says about Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) to his nephew Vinny (Andy Garcia), in Godfather Three: “You are my 'ace in the hole,' as we say in America. I have a stone in my shoe. You can remove it.” Did the Bolshevik leadership say something similar about the Left SRs—to Blumkin?

There is also the curious fact that while the Left SR Central Committee claimed responsibility for the murder, many of the leading members of the Left SRs—a Party charged by the Bolsheviks with both planning this assassination, and overthrowing their regime violently—were at the time attending the same public function as the Bolshevik leadership. Is this the behavior of conspirators? (More to the point, were these the real conspirators?),

Finally, there is the curious fact, which, as Lieutenant Columbo (Peter Falk) says to Frank Brailie in the episode Grand Deceptions, “was mighty peculiar”, that the chief Mirbach assassin, Blumkin, “remained an officer of the Cheka, fought through the civil war, and was admitted into the Bolshevik party in 1921. He was never punished for murdering Mirbach; on the contrary he was given high positions [within the Bolshevik regime]. He later became one of the members of Trotsky’s Left Opposition—murdered on orders of Stalin^xvii. In light of these facts, it is difficult to believe that Mirbach’s assassination very much bothered the Bolsheviks—to say the very least!

And yet, meanwhile, the entire “rest” of the Left Social Revolutionary Party was repressed. Some of them were murdered while in the Bolsheviks’ jails. In the account of the murder he gave to Victor Serge, Blumkin asserted that “We knew of course that Germany was disintegrating and was in no position to begin a new war with Russia. We wanted to insult Germany. We were counting upon the effect it would produce in Germany itself.” But who is the “we” to whom Blumkin refers here? The Left SRs? Or the Bolsheviks? Just exactly who was employing him for this operation?

Payne reports that as a result of the assassination, “the Germans became acquiescent to Bolshevik demands, and within a few weeks a new ambassador arrived in Moscow.” Payne continues,

A few weeks later George Solomon [First Secretary to the Commissar for Commerce and Industry, Leonid Borisovich Krasin] discussed the assassination with Leonid Krassin in the Soviet embassy in Berlin…. They were both shaken by the recent events. Krassin had known Lenin well, and he explained the murder as an excuse for the destruction of the Left Social Revolutionaries.”^xviii

The Bolshevik Land Policy

Finally, let’s look at Rosa’s critique of the Bolshevik Land Policy. Luxemburg argues that the Bolsheviks should have followed the schema laid out by Marx and Engels in their Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League.

• The first point over which the bourgeois democrats will come into conflict with the workers will be the abolition of feudalism as in the first French revolution, the petty bourgeoisie will want to give the feudal lands to the peasants as free property; that is, they will try to perpetrate the existence of the rural proletariat, and to form a petty-bourgeois peasant class which will be subject to the same cycle of impoverishment and debt which still afflicts the French peasant. The workers must oppose this plan both in the interest of the rural proletariat and in their own interest. They must demand that the confiscated feudal property remain state property and be used for workers’ colonies, cultivated collectively by the rural proletariat with all the advantages of large-scale farming and where the principle of common property will immediately achieve a sound basis in the midst of the shaky system of bourgeois property relations. Just as the democrats ally themselves with the peasants, the workers must ally themselves with the rural proletariat.

In Marx’s formulation, a socialist government would leave the small plots of the middle peasantry alone, but encourage them to cooperate with the positive lure of financial credit, and the negative re-enforcement of competition from these feudal estates, on the market, now run collectively by the rural proletariat.

Trotsky himself promoted this program in his Results and Prospects. Lenin never did, however. He seems to have favored exactly the petite bourgeois program, with its resultant cycle of “impoverishment and debt”, that Marx and Engels opposed. The Bolsheviks seem to have borrowed this opponent program, wholesale, from the Social Revolutionary Party: thus “stealing their fire”, in opportunist fashion. In Blanquist fashion, Lenin hoped that his Bolsheviks could manage this cycle from above, producing a class division between the kulaks, and the impoverished, landless peasants that would result.^xix When the crisis of starving cities came, Lenin, leading the Bolsheviks, and attempting to accelerate and exploit the process of class division within the peasantry conducted the disastrous--gangsterish--policy of “war communism”: alienating the vast majority of the peasantry, and intensifying the Civil War.^xx

In his 1930 History, Trotsky’s account of the peasant movement to in fact seize the land and parcel it out, makes very clear that at least, in the summer of 1917, collective cultivation was not something the Bolsheviks could have effected anyway. For such a program, they did not have enough of a constituency within the rural proletariat, and the rural proletariat itself did not have sufficient social weight, or socialist consciousness.

And yet this begs the question of whether the parcelization of the land, once effected, might not have been reversed, had the Bolsheviks engaged in an honest and long-lasting partnership with the Left Social Revolutionary Party, which permitted the latter to become the national majority party, but which also the Bolsheviks might have successfully pressured for a policy that fed the cities.

Instead, what the Bolsheviks created was what Richard N. Hunt, throughout his 2-volume work, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, calls an “educational dictatorship”: an icon of the ideology of Blanquism that went all the way back to its progenitor, the neo-Jacobin conspiratorial communist Graccus Babeuf. As opposed to a dictatorship by the masses, as Marx and Engels desired, this was rather one over them, by an educational elite (contrary to Marx’s incisive question, “Who educates the educators?”. This is precisely the dubious principle by which Trotsky, in Chapter 10, Volume III of his History of the Russian Revolution, [falsely] denies that Lenin’s land policy was opportunist:

• A great many people, and not only enemies but friends, have failed to understand this far-sighted, and to a certain extent pedagogical, approach of the Bolshevik Party to the peasantry and its agrarian programme. The equal distribution of the land – objected Rosa Luxembourg for example – has nothing in common with socialism…. [However,] it would be possible to speak of [the Bolsheviks’ raising to the peasantry] socialist perspectives only after the establishment and successful preservation of the proletarian power. And this power could preserve itself only by giving determined co-operation to the peasant in carrying out his revolution. If the distribution of the land would strengthen the socialist government politically, it was then wholly justified as an immediate measure. The peasant had to be taken as the revolution found him. Only a new régime could re-educate him – and not at once, but in the course of a generation, with the help of a new technique and a new organisation of industry.… Opportunism? No, it was revolutionary realism.

No, it was opportunism, according to Trotsky’s own definition of the term, in his book, 1905, Chapter 25, “Our Differences”: “It may seem paradoxical to say that the principal psychological feature of opportunism is its inability to wait.” What he meant, in that book, anyway—is that revolutionaries need to stick to their principles, aussprechen was ist, as Engels said, and wait until the masses, upon the influence of the crisis, accept those principles as their own. Now Trotsky redefines Lenin’s opportunism, his refusal to confront the peasantry with the truth about their utopian schemes for the sustainability of a land policy that parcels out the land to individuals, as realism. First we get absolute, Blanquist power—then we can sit back, and act like laboratory scientists, observing the bacteria in a petri dish. Oh, we’ll wait, alright: wait until these peasant fools tear each other apart competitively, and reduce the vast majority to penury.

Notice the complete opposition of this sentiment to that presented for the land question by Marx and Engels. Where Lenin patronizingly, pedagogically, and opportunistically sought to indulge the illusions of the small peasantry in the sustainability of an individualist land grab, Marx and Engels instructed the proletariat to actively work against it. And this is the basis for Luxemburg’s, justified, critique. To Trotsky’s argument that such determined opposition would not have permitted the Bolsheviks to “preserve the proletarian power”, Marx, Engels, and Luxemburg, might be imagined to reply, “but how are you constituting that “power”? By creating a new, absolutist ministry, composed only of Bolsheviks?! Strive for a regime where your party holds a little less power—but the masses, much more. Don’t create a “m-i-n-i-s-t-r-y”, in the first place! Pattern the composition of the executive branch of the Soviet, on the proportion of delegates each party has achieved in the Soviet Congress! Yes, the Left SRs refused to join your m-i-n-i-s-t-r-y, because they wanted to play footsie with the Compromisers. But would they have joined the soviet government, if you had made your middle peasant party—the Left SRs—officially the senior partner in your coalition: As it seems, Marx was saying he wanted, to Schapper, at that break-up meeting of the Communist League in 1850? Could you not have then fought democratically, forcefully, and persuasively, for seizing the old feudal estates and farming them collectively?

Of course, some solution to the problem of urban, working class starvation had to be found. Was War Communism really the only solution? If the Left SRs had been permitted to continue to share power with the Bolsheviks, could their cooperation have been enlisted in a policy of reversing parcelization, to facilitate collective cultivation, or at least, more intense cooperation with each other and with the cities, which might have fed the cities, without exacerbating the Civil War? At the very least, tax in kind upon the landed peasants, of the grain that they could spare—rather than the draconian War Communist policy of pitting the landless peasants against the landed, and expropriating everything they had?

If we take the Blanquist-Leninist view of how the revolutionary socialist regime ought to be constructed in an intermediately developed, minority proletarian society like Russia in 1917, then we will place a premium on granting to the working class minority absolute political power. And we will come up, in Trotsky’s prescient 1904 formulation, “the dictatorship of a single man.”

But if the prescriptions of Marx and Engels had been followed, then the Russian working class would have still predominated—but not formally. The Left SRs would have been granted formal political power, in the soviets, and, perhaps, in the Constituent Assembly, if they had been successful in winning a second election. Much could still have been accomplished. The Bolsheviks would have controlled the urban soviets. If the Left SRs would have joined their Right SR brethren in attempting to betray the Revolution to the bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviks could have used these strongholds to undermine such efforts, and, eventually, as a result, won a majority for the entire country.

But the Bolsheviks should have given the Left SRs the opportunity to prove themselves loyal to the people, or betray them. And even if the latter, The Bolsheviks should still have made efforts to enable the peasant-petite-bourgeois majority to find an electoral voice within the revolutionary regime, that matched their numbers. The idea that the Bolshevik Party, all by itself, nominally representative only of 10% of the population (but increasingly only representing their own, corrupt, authoritarian, petite bourgeois selfish interests), could rule all of Russian society and lead it toward socialism, was a Blanquist pipe dream. We need to reject it, and explore the genuinely Marxist model for a revolutionary regime: democratic, republican, socialist.

iRosa Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution (1918) (marxists.org)

iiAlbert L. Weeks, The First Bolshevik: A Political Biography of Peter Tkachev, New York University, 1968.

iiiKarl Marx u. Friedrich Engels: Ansprache d. Zentralbehörde (März 1850) (marxists.org)

ivthe Kommuniste Zeitschrifte, (Journal of the Communist League) September 1847. cf. Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Vol. II, Classical Marxism, 1850-1895 p. 187

vThis example of petite bourgeois artisans, arguing for “proletarian” tyranny over the petite-bourgeoisie, can only seem paradoxical to those who can’t understand how Blanquist style authoritarianism itself, just as much as opportunism, can be rooted, was actually uniquely rooted, in the petite-bourgeoisie. Schapper and his associates—much like the Bolsheviks later on—promoted the illusion that their authoritarianism was pro-proletarian. But they proposed, unconsciously, was that they as petite bourgeois intellectuals would lord it over the proletariat as well as their middle class confreres—by creating a petite bourgeois, bureaucratic caste within the workers state they misled the workers to create.

viBoris Nicolaievsky, "Toward a History of 'The Communist League' 1847-1852," International Review of Social History 1 ( 1956) :234-52; pp. 250-52; with commentary by Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, vol. I, Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818-1850 p. 255.

viiMacht | translate German to English - Cambridge Dictionary

viiiNicolaievsky, ibid.

ixRosa Luxemburg, Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy, 1904, https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/index.htm

Leon Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, 1904; https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1904/tasks/

xErnest Mandel: Leninist Theory of Organisation (1970) (marxists.org)

xi The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution : Central Committee Minutes of the Russian Social - Democratic Party 1917-18 1974. cf. Tim Wohlforth, “The Two Souls of Leninism, ATC 4-5, 1986,

xiiSee Tim Wohlforth, ibid., and Sam Farber, Before Stalinism.

xiiiRichard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, Random House, 1990, p. 534.

xivV. I. Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain Power?, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/01.htm

xvYuri Felshtinsky, Lenin and his Comrades: The Bolsheviks Take Over Russia, 1917-1924. Enigma Books, 2010.

xviYuri Felshtinsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Germany and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: The Collapse of the World Revolution, November 1917-November 1918. Russell Enterprises, 2012.

xviiMartin Abern: The Proletarian Revolution and the Shooting of Blumkin (March 1930) (marxists.org) https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/abern/1930/03/blumkin.htm. Alexander Rabinowitch, in his The Bolsheviks in Power, (Indiana University Press, 2007) reports that the Left Central Committee claimed responsibility for the assassination. However, there is nothing in his book about Blumkin’s later, very suspicious trajectory. The suspicion naturally arises from this trajectory was a Bolshevik provocateur, and talked the Central Committee into sponsoring his action. Yet Rabinowitch also declares that he has found no evidence that the Left SRs were planning an insurrection against the Bolshevik regime. And he criticizes the Bolsheviks for driving the the entirety of the Left SR membership out of the soviets, whether or not they supported the assassination, and—with the exception, of course, of…Blumkin, the lead assassin!—jailing them, rather than simply arrest the Central Committee.

Frankly, this reads like a false flag operation, that served the Bolsheviks’ twofold purpose of pushing back on the German Empire, already growing weak from the victories of the Entente, and do away with their political “partners”, once and for all.

xviiiRobert Payne, The Life and Death of Lenin, Simon and Schuster, 1964, pp. 463-465. Please do not rush to dismiss Payne as merely another “bourgeois historian.” In the same biography of Lenin, Payne agrees with and further documents Trotsky’s assertion, in the latter’s biography of Stalin, that Stalin had Soviet intelligence agent and chemist Genrikh Yagoda poison Lenin.

Trotsky’s account quoted here is from his book, Lenin (New York, Garden City Books, 1959, pp. 156-57. The quote from Solomon, is in his Among the Red Autocrats, New York: Arno C. Gaebelein, 1935. Payne does not give the source for the quote from Serge. But it seems to come from Serge’s article, “The Execution of Count Mirbach”, Soviet Russia, (New York), Vol. 4 Nos. 15–16, April 19–26, 1921. originally published March 7, 1920. at Victor Serge: The Execution of Count Mirbach (7 March 1920) (marxists.org)

xix The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907, at

Lenin: The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907 (marxists.org)

xxCarmen Sirianni, Workers Control and Socialist Democracy:The Soviet Experience. Verso, 1987.