It would be expected that the theories that led to the success of the Russian Revolution would be seen in the subsequent policies of the Third (Communist) International (CI). Unfortunately, there were a number of factors which complicated the issue.
Firstly, explicit references to the ToPR should not be expected as Trotsky arrived at the original theory from a study of the specific conditions in Russia and, until about 1925, until the revolutionary upsurge in China, did not extend his theory to beyond Russia. During the first years of the Third International Trotsky was engaged on such crucial domestic tasks as the building of the Red Army, and internationally was concerned primarily with the situation in the French CP[61]. Where the ToPR appeared in the documents relating to the CI, it was in the form of Lenin’s more fundamental formulations, such as his descriptions of the overthrow in Russia of the landlords, and how realising land to the peasants was not possible “without overthrowing capitalist rule, without all state power being transferred to the proletariat, without the peasant poor supporting the most resolute, revolutionary measures of a proletarian state power against the capitalists”[62].
Secondly, Lenin suffered a severe stroke at the end of May 1922, which totally incapacitated him for some four months and he did not return to active work until 2 October, only a few weeks before the Fourth Congress (November – December 1922). His state of health restricted his participation to a single report on the first five years of the Russian Revolution, given on 13 November. Thus, Lenin’s relevant writings are largely restricted to those for the Second Congress of the CI, from about the end of 1919 to mid-1920. The National and Colonial Question (including reference to Turkey, India and China) was discussed at the Fourth Congress of the CI, but Lenin’s contribution was minimal.
Thirdly, key figures in the CI, especially Zinoviev (President of the CI), had important deeply-rooted political differences with Trotsky over domestic matters, such as the question of the role of trade unions during the dictatorship of the proletariat. Typically, Trotsky had insulted Zinoviev before several thousand party members at a debate held at the Bolshoi Theatre in late December 1920, calling him “an apologist, defender, advocate and proponent of what is purely unproductive”[63].
However, Zinoviev, as President, dominated much of the Third International and was not above using his presentations to justify his political position of 1917; “The Mensheviks … were quarter-Bolsheviks. … Objectively the Menshevik government was best adapted to make a hash of capitalism by making its position impossible. … they made steps which are objectively against the bourgeois state”[64]. By the Fourth Congress the triumvirate of Kamenev, Stalin and Zinoviev had begun to prepare for their battle with Trotsky, and the ground chosen was the ToPR: in 1923, Zinoviev published his History of the Bolshevik Party[65], which sought to downplay Trotsky’s role in the 1905 Petrograd Soviet and the October Revolution, and vilify the ToPR. Trotsky replied at the beginning of 1924 by writing Lessons of October as an introduction to Volume Three of his collected works, containing his writings of 1917[66]. By the time of Lenin’s death, the Troika’s faction struggle against Trotsky (and Lenin) was well developed, and the fight that subsequently took place for the continuity of Leninism was couched in terms of Permanent Revolution against socialism in one country.
Fourthly, the Soviet government was initially much more interested in Europe than in Asia as, simultaneously, both the main danger to it (war with one or more of the major capitalist countries), and its main opportunity (revolution in Germany), came from the centre of world capitalism[67].
Some seven to eight months before the Second Congress of the CI, Lenin addressed the Second All-Russian Congress of Communist Organisations of the Peoples of the East where, after describing the majority of the Eastern peoples as exploited peasants and victims of feudalism, he explained the process by which the October Revolution overthrew such conditions in Russia. “The Russian revolution showed how the proletarians, after defeating capitalism and uniting with the vast diffuse mass of working peasants, rose up victoriously against medieval oppression”[68]. That is, medieval oppression was ended in Russia after the proletarian revolution overthrew the bourgeoisie. Lenin returned to this theme in June 1920, just one month prior to the Second Congress, in his Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question[69]. Here, he articulated the form of the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry that led to the success of the Russian Revolution. The similarity with Trotsky’s position as described in 1906 “The proletariat in power will stand before the peasants as the class which has emancipated it.”[70] is, once again, striking:
“ … a truth which has been fully proved by Marxist theory and fully corroborated by the experience of the proletarian revolution in Russia, namely, that …. the rural population – who are incredibly downtrodden, disunited, crushed, and doomed to semi-barbarous conditions of existence in all countries, even the most advanced – are economically, socially, and culturally interested in the victory of socialism, they are capable of giving resolute support to the revolutionary proletariat only after the latter has won political power, only after it has resolutely dealt with the big landowners and capitalists, and only after these downtrodden people see in practice that they have an organised leader and champion, strong and firm enough to assist and lead them and to show them the right path”[71].
That this analysis was presented to both the CI and Communist Organisations of the East is significant. It analysed the process of the revolution in Russia, a backward capitalist, semi-colonial country, a country of which Lenin had said in Democracy and Narodnism in China: “In very many and very essential respects, Russia is undoubtedly an Asian country and, what is more, one of the most benighted, medieval and shamefully backward of Asian countries”[72]. There can be little doubt, that Lenin meant his analysis to be taken seriously as a guide to action in, e.g., China, and as a basis for the CI’s strategic orientation towards the peasant masses in the semi-colonial countries. The analysis is unapologetically permanentist. The proletariat first took state and governmental power, overthrew capitalism and then won the support of the peasantry as a whole by dispossessing the landlords. This confirmed exactly the analysis proposed by Lenin in August 1917, in From a Publicist’s Diary[73], where he said the solution of the land question was not possible without all state power being transferred to the proletariat (and the poor peasants). There is no question here but that the proletariat took power relying on the support of the semi-proletarians in the countryside (though, in fact, enacting the SR land programme gained the support of the peasantry as a whole). In Lenin’s description we see the proletariat standing before the peasantry as its liberator. There is no suggestion in this analysis of a RDDPP type solution to the agrarian problem, engendering a subsequent class differentiation in the countryside, and then the overthrow of the capitalist class and seizure of state power by the proletariat.
In the immediate term, Lenin’s appraisal strongly suggested that the emerging communist parties in the colonial countries had to establish relations with the peasants using the same fundamental slogan as won the Russian peasants to the October Revolution: an end to feudal relations on the land, expropriation of the land and its division amongst the peasants by the peasants themselves. This was to be achieved by peasant Soviets set up in opposition to the local bourgeoisie and landlords who were tied to imperialism and would not support the necessary radical land reforms.
The Bolsheviks in Russia had used all manner of means to conduct their campaigns including participation in elections to the autocratic Duma, day-to-day-work in police-organised trade unions, etc., so it was to be expected that the CI recommended work in, and with, the bourgeois national revolutionary movement, provided it was a genuinely revolutionary movement against imperialism, which allowed the communists to organise and educate the workers and peasants separately[74].
However, the material and human base for socialism – a developed industry, high productivity of labour and a working class conscious of its own interests, simply did not exist in the backward and colonial countries. What perspective did the CI offer? In an important passage in his Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Question, Lenin confirmed that he considered there was a non-capitalist road to socialism:
“The question was posed as follows: are we to consider as correct the assertion that the capitalist stage of economic development is inevitable for backward nations now on the road to emancipation and among whom a certain advance towards progress is to be seen since the war? We replied in the negative. If the victorious revolutionary proletariat conducts systematic propaganda among them, and the Soviet governments come to their aid with all the means at their disposal – in that event it will be mistaken to assume that the backward peoples must inevitably go through the capitalist stage of development. Not only should we create independent contingents of fighters and party organisations in the colonies and the backward countries, not only at once launch propaganda for the organisation of peasants’ Soviets and strive to adapt them to the pre-capitalist conditions, but the Communist International should advance the proposition, with the appropriate theoretical grounding, that with the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage”[75].
It is noticeable that Lenin never recommended the RDDPP either as a strategy or goal for the revolutionary movements in the colonial world. There was one occasion on which Lenin did refer to the RDDPP in passing (quoted by both Jenness and Lorimer[76]). Lenin was arguing that due to the semi-feudal nature of Russian society the agrarian revolution and the proletarian revolution had merged, and it was this that made the initial success of the October 1917 Revolution so easy. He then refers to the RDDPP to demonstrate that the Bolsheviks recognised the importance of allying the proletarian revolution with the goals of the peasantry, an element which Two Tactics has in common with the ToPR and Lenin’s own post-July 1917 goals:
“As long ago as 1856, Marx spoke, in reference to Prussia, of the possibility of a peculiar combination of proletarian revolution and peasant war. From the beginning of 1905 the Bolsheviks advocated the idea of a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”[77].
Lenin did not elaborate his point, he simply used it to demonstrate that the Bolsheviks recognised the importance of the worker-peasant alliance in a semi-feudal country, at least as far back as 1905. There was no suggestion that the RDDPP itself was being recommended as a correct strategy for the CI. A search of Lenin’s Collected Works reveals this to be the one and only reference to the RDDPP in his writings for the CI, and this is taken as confirmation that he considered the formula – as a guide to action – obsolete, no good at all, as dead, and that it was no use trying to revive it[78].
What alliances a Communist Party adopted on the way to the overthrow of capitalism, and how it worked with the national bourgeois movements, were matters that, as Lenin put it, must be based on a concrete appraisal of actual national and international conditions. The point is that Lenin was quite clear that the national bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia was carried through to success with the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a Soviet system. Hybrid state forms such as the RDDPP, or transitional stages, are significant by their absence, an omission that is all the more significant when we consider that Lenin was including in this discussion, countries with an even more overwhelmingly peasant population than Russia.
In April 1919, Lenin made the point,
“How is it that one of the most backward countries of Europe was the first country to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to organise a Soviet republic? We shall hardly be wrong if we say that it is this contradiction between the backwardness of Russia and the ‘leap’ she has made over bourgeois democracy to the highest form of democracy, to Soviet, or proletarian, democracy …”[79].
Lenin, then, considered that in Russia, bourgeois democracy had been leapt over. It is obvious that he is talking about governmental and state forms and not such bourgeois-democratic tasks as the abolition of the monarchy, or the right to civil marriage and divorce, but this again confirms Lenin’s view that the bourgeois-democratic revolution was carried through under the Soviet regime, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
However, Lenin did refer to the slogan of the RDDPP just once more between June 1917 and his death in January 1924. In October 1920 Lenin wrote an article A Contribution to the History of the Question of the Dictatorship (CW 33:340-361) and in this (on p 359) examines events in Russia in the revolutionary period October, November and December 1905. He compares the use of slogans of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the RDDPP at that time. How come Jenness and Lorimer missed this? Almost certainly because in this article Lenin comes the closest he ever did to saying Trotsky had been right and he had been wrong.
Lenin compares the slogan of Trotsky’s paper The Beginning (dictatorship of the proletariat) with that of the Bolshevik paper New Life (RDDPP) and says, for him, some truly amazing things. He begins the comparison by saying the arguments were “over matters of detail in the appraisal of events”. Yes reader, by 1920, Lenin was saying that the differences between the ToPR and the RDDPP were “matters of detail”! He then plays down the differences even more; “have not disagreements of this kind been observed at every stage of development of every socialist party in Europe?” Lenin, usually so keen to clarify and contrast political differences is here playing down the very real divergence of ToPR and the RDDPP. Why was Lenin so reticent in criticising the ToPR? It was because in 1917 Lenin had adopted a position that was in every important point the same as Trotsky’s. As the 1917 revolution unfurled Lenin had come to understand that “without all state power being transferred to the proletariat” the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution could not be achieved (CW25:280 From a Publicist’s Diary, August 1917). Why then was Lenin so reticent about criticising the RDDPP? For three reasons, (i) he had already argued just this against Kamenev and Zinoviev in April 1917[78], (ii) Lenin was keen to stress the continuity of Bolshevik politics against the criticisms of opportunism from Kautsky and others, and (iii) Lenin was very reluctant to admit past mistakes (see page 80 above) and in this case has forgotten that, in the event, he condemned the Petersburg Soviet because it did not have the goal of convening a Constituent Assembly (CW10:24-25, Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, Nov 1905).
Lenin, with Trotsky, organised the Bolshevik October Revolution and brought into power the first dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin, Trotsky, and all the Bolshevik leaders agreed that the dictatorship of the proletariat (also referred to as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government) began in Russia with the October Revolution. A review of Lenin’s post-October 1917 publications, speeches and reports, demonstrate he was consistent and never changed his opinion on the character of the October Revolution. The failure of Lenin to recommend, after 1917, the RDDPP as a strategy at any time, in any way, and the wealth of material where he stated unambiguously that the dictatorship of the proletariat was initiated in Russia by the October Revolution, confirm that Lenin dropped a dead slogan and embraced a permanentist perspective.
It should be noted that the arguments of Jennes, Johnstone, Mavrakis, and Lorimer, do not challenge the undeniable fact that the international socialist revolution began in backward, semi-feudal Russia. They merely argue over how it was implemented. Their differences are not with the essence of Trotsky’s idea but the manner in which Lenin carried it out. We are dealing here with the touchstone of the proletarian revolution and the heart of Marxist politics – the class character of the state. When we deal with this question the utmost scrupulousness is required of us, but in the works of these authors, particularly Lorimer, the method of the amalgam replaced factual, scientific analysis.
After 1917, and during Lenin’s leadership, Trotsky’s writings such as 1905 and Results and Prospects were republished, in many languages, making the ToPR an authoritative statement of Communist doctrine.
During and after the October 1917 Revolution, the Bolshevik leaders had more to do than analyse past errors. However, there is a footnote that appeared in Lenin’s Collected Works Moscow 1921, that makes more than a nod in this direction: “Before the Revolution of 1905 he (Trotsky) advanced his own unique and now completely celebrated theory of permanent revolution, asserting that the bourgeois revolution of 1905 would pass directly to a socialist revolution which would prove the first of a series of national revolutions”[80]. As this statement appeared in his officially published Collected Works, one can assume that, at the very least, Lenin was aware of it and raised no objections.
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Thatcher, I. D., Trotsky, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, p110
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Lenin, V.I., From a Publicist’s Diary, August 1918, CW 25:278-286
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Quoted in Thatcher, op cit, p109
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Zinoviev, G., Theses on Tactics, Minutes Fourth Congress C.I. November 1922
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Zinoviev, G., History of the Bolshevik Party, New Park Publications, London, 1973
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Thatcher, I. D., op cit, p6
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Trotsky, L., The First Five Years of the Communist International, New Park Publications, London, 1973
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Lenin, V.I., Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist Organisations of Peoples of the East, November 1919, CW 30:161
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Lenin, V.I., Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question, June 1920, CW 31:152-164
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Trotsky, L.D., Results and Prospects, New Park Publications, London, 1962, p203
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Lenin, V.I., Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question, June 1920, CW 35:155-6
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Lenin, V.I., Democracy and Narodnism in China, July 1912, CW 18:164
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Lenin, V.I., From a Publicist’s Diary, August 1917, CW 25:278-286
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Lenin, V.I., Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Question, July 1920, CW 31:240-5
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 31:244
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Lorimer, D., op cit, p6
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Lenin, V.I., Third International and its Place in History, April 1919, CW 29:310
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Lenin, V.I., Letter on Tactics, April 1917, CW 24:50
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Lenin, V.I., Third International and its Place in History, April 1919, CW 29:307-308
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Quoted in Lenin and Trotsky: What They Really Stood For, by Woods, A. and Grant, T., Wellred Publications, London, 1976, p78 – (Lenin, V.I. Moscow 1921, CW 14 (Part 2):481-2)