But is it possible that Lenin, after due reflection, later changed his mind: that the October Revolution was not a socialist revolution and the regime that resulted from it was not the dictatorship of the proletariat? Is it possible, on the basis of Lenin’s published works, to maintain that he held, or later returned to, his 1905-06 schema of the RDDPP as accurately describing the events in Russia 1917-1918? Or could it be, that Lenin simply failed to see that his governmental strategy from 1905 for at least a decade had been realised, and was just plain wrong in the many speeches, pamphlets and articles, where he analysed and described the October Revolution as a socialist, proletarian revolution and the Soviet state immediately following it as a dictatorship of the proletariat? The suggestion would be that Lenin, at the height of his intellectual powers, did not understand the class nature of the revolution he had campaigned for, organised and led.
Nevertheless, a number of authors have attempted to square this particular circle, and in this chapter we discuss four more recent examples. The core of the argument, is proposed by, for example, Jenness[1],[2] and rests on the observations that:
(i) the Bolshevik Party adopted a policy which, at least initially, mobilised the peasantry as a whole in its support,
(ii) the participation of a peasant party (the Left SRs) alongside the Bolsheviks in the government, from mid-December 1917 to early March 1918, gave that government a two-class character,
(iii) the proletarian revolution did not extend to the rural districts before the summer of 1918. So, from October 1917 to that time, the Russian state rested predominantly on bourgeois and petty bourgeois property relations, and
(iv) the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, while it included the Left SRs, largely limited itself to carrying through the bourgeois-democratic revolution and did not begin to systematically overthrow the capitalist economy until the summer of 1918, after the peasant party had quit the government.
From these observations Jenness has concluded that from October 1917 to the summer of 1918 the Soviet regime was the RDDPP foreseen by Lenin in Two Tactics. Jenness’ arguments lack rigour because they do not contain a sufficient criterion to allow us to differentiate between the three schemas as proposed by Lenin pre-1917 in the RDDPP, Lenin post-July 1917 after he had adopted a permanentist perspective, and Trotsky in the ToPR in 1906.
(i) Common to the stated positions of Lenin in 1905 and 1917 was the proposition that the proletariat – by resolutely endorsing a consistently revolutionary solution of the agrarian problem – would obtain the support of the peasantry as a whole for the completion of the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the revolution. It has already been shown that Trotsky in 1906 was convinced that the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, by ratifying the peasants’ seizure of the land, would gain the support of the peasantry as a whole. Of course, because they were writing about likely future events, neither Lenin nor Trotsky could even hint in 1905 or 1906 that the mechanics of gaining the support of the peasants as a whole for the proletarian revolution, would require the RDSLP(B) to borrow without alteration the land programme of the SRs, and then implement it against the wishes of that party. All three schemas were clear that governmental endorsement of the revolutionary seizure of the land by the peasants and its distribution by the peasants to the peasants, would win for that government the support of the peasantry as a whole, at least in its early stages. Peasant support for the government is not the issue, what is in question is the class nature of the government and state required to have the will to nationalise the land without compensation, and ‘give’ it to the peasants.
(ii) Did the inclusion of the Left SRs in the government, offer a way of differentiating between Lenin’s position in 1905, his position post-July 1917, and Trotsky’s ToPR? Is it possible to argue sensibly that the participation of the Left SRs was essential for the government to successfully carry through the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the revolution? And, if essential, did such a requirement determine the nature of the state on which the government rested? The answer to these questions is “No”.
The necessary condition for entry and participation of the Left SRs in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government was acceptance of the core Bolshevik programme, which openly included the goal of socialism and taking the first steps towards it[3]. This alone effectively excluded the possibility of the Left SRs playing the determining role in the nature of that government.
That the presence of the Left SRs did not make the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government the RDDPP was unequivocally demonstrated when the Left SRs accepted the dissolution and dispersion of the Constituent Assembly – the governmental goal of the RDDPP.
The key bourgeois-democratic task, and the one of paramount importance to the peasants – nationalisation of the land – was carried out by the Bolsheviks alone, before the Left SRs joined the Government. We have already seen that Lenin claimed it was this action that won for the Bolsheviks the support of the peasants as a whole (support that had previously gone to the SRs), and won it quickly.
Neither the SRs joining nor leaving the government marked any significant change in that government’s direction or momentum. The Left SRs were participants for only three of the nine months for which Jenness claims the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government was, in fact, the RDDPP. The issue on which the Left SRs quit the government, was not the steps taken towards socialism, but the terms for peace with Germany. Such transitory participation (as junior partners who determined not one major item of policy), cannot be taken to mean that the inclusion of the Left SRs determined the class character of the regime.
The conditions imposed on the Left SRs were not accidental, they were the result of lengthy and acrimonious discussions within the Bolshevik Central Committee with Lenin, Sverdlov and Trotsky at one extreme, and the erstwhile supporters of the RDDPP, Kamenev, Rykov and Zinoviev at the other. The issue was the ultimatum of the Union of Railway Workers to bring the country to a halt by strike action unless the Bolsheviks agreed to a coalition government of leading members of all the socialist parties with the exception of Lenin and Trotsky[4]. Opposition within the Central Committee to Lenin’s view was founded on the belief that a Bolshevik-only government did not have the support required to carry through the necessary tasks, and that a coalition government of all the so-called socialist parties was required. Lenin’s response was to move a resolution at the Central Committee on 2 November denouncing any such coalition. Here Lenin was arguing against a core concept of the RDDPP: “The CC affirms that the purely Bolshevik government cannot be renounced without betraying the slogan of Soviet power”[5]. Compare this to Lenin’s writings of 1905, when a revolutionary dictatorship with a Social Democratic majority was not only undesirable, it was … “impossible”.
We have already visited Trotsky’s position regarding peasant representation in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, and seen that the only condition he imposed was that the proletariat wielded hegemony in the government, and through it in the country[6] Although written twelve years earlier, it was identical in principle with Lenin’s stated position of 1917.
While participation of the Left SRs in the government may have been desirable, it did not alter the essential nature of that government, and does not offer a rigorous basis on which to challenge Lenin’s opinion that this period was the dictatorship of the proletariat.
(iii) Jenness’ third observation is that the proletarian revolution did not extend to the rural districts before the summer of 1918, with the establishment of the Poor Peasants’ Committees (kombedy). Thus, during the intervening nine months, the Russian state rested predominantly on bourgeois and petty bourgeois property relations. From this Jenness draws the conclusion that because, in his opinion, a state can never have a distinctly different class character from its economic base, a state resting on a petty bourgeois economic base could not be the dictatorship of the proletariat. It then followed quite naturally, that the dictatorship of the proletariat did not become the state power in Russia until the summer of 1918, at the earliest, and thus the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government over the preceding period must have been a transitional regime leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is it must have been the RDDPP.
What Lenin would have made of such formalism, it is only possible to imagine, for such an argument fails to recognise that any real process takes time. In Russia, in 1917-18, with its antiquated communication systems and its vast distances, the revolution may have been completed quickly in the major towns, but it took months for it to extend into the countryside, and then only after the working class consolidated its hold on power in the towns. Lenin developed the argument that Trotsky had first proposed thirteen years earlier, and explained “the proletariat must first overthrow the bourgeoisie and win for itself state power, and then use that state power, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat, as an instrument of its class for the purpose of winning the sympathy of the majority of the working people”[7].
Trotsky addressed the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat during the transition from capitalist economy to workers’ state thus:
“During the first few months of the Soviet regime the proletariat administered a bourgeois economy. As regards agriculture the dictatorship of the proletariat supported itself upon a petty bourgeois economy … But what is the meaning of this kind of temporary contradiction between state and economy? It means revolution or counter-revolution. The victory of one class over another is gained precisely in order to transform the economy in the interests of the victor. But such a dual state of affairs is a necessary moment of every social revolution … it was accomplished, to use Marx’s words, in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasant war. …
The proletariat took power together with the peasantry in October, says Lenin. By that alone, the revolution was a bourgeois revolution. Is that right? In a certain sense, yes. But this means that the true democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, that is, the one which actually destroyed the regime of autocracy and serfdom and snatched the land from the feudalists, was accomplished not before October but only after October; it was accomplished, to use Marx’s words, in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasant war – and then, a few months later, began growing into a socialist dictatorship. Is this really hard to understand? Can differences of opinion prevail on this point today?”[8].
Lenin wrote State and Revolution in August and September 1917. He hadn’t finished when he was interrupted by the October Revolution, so we can take this pamphlet as representing his final thoughts on the nature of the transitional state as he analysed and planned what he later consistently referred to as a socialist revolution. Lenin was breaking new ground, so the pamphlet was primarily concerned with defining principles and the necessary strategic activities of the proletariat during their seizure of power. If Jenness were correct that the class nature of the regime was directly determined by its economic base, even during its initial transitional period, then he should have found something here to cite in his favour.
However, it turns out that State and Revolution was surprisingly unconcerned with the economic base of society during and immediately after the workers’ socialist revolution. Instead Lenin was absorbed with the question of the “power of the state”, the chief instruments of which were the special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their disposal, and so he placed great emphasis on the role of the army, police and bureaucracy[9]. In this respect Lenin understood that the immediate and crucial issue was governmental power. A party that gained governmental power thereby gained the possibility of smashing the old state structure and overturning capitalism.
Lenin argued that when (i) the proletariat had taken political power, (ii) the army and police had been smashed by the armed workers, and (iii) the bureaucratic machine smashed, then the dictatorship of the proletariat had been realised. Whilst the smashing of the standing army and police were essential pre-requisites, it was wishful thinking to expect to complete the abolition of the Tsarist bureaucracy overnight. What had to be achieved was the smashing of the old bureaucratic machine and to begin at once to construct a new one under workers’ control that would, in time, enable the abolition of all bureaucracy[10].
Specific measures Lenin recommended for the abolition of the bureaucratic machine included the well-known, simple and direct[11];
- All officials, without exception, elected and subject to recall at any time, and
- Salaries of all ‘servants of the state’ reduced to the level of ordinary workmen’s wages,
These simple and ‘self-evident’ democratic measures would, under a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, serve as a bridge leading from capitalism to socialism, and implementing these measures would show clearly the end of the state as a special force for the suppression of the majority, and its transition into a force composed of the majority of the people – the workers and the peasants – for the suppression of the minority. The economic condition Lenin set was that the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ was in preparation[12], i.e., the first steps of the transformation of capitalist private ownership of the means of production into social ownership had been taken. From this last point it is clear that Lenin considered that the dictatorship of the proletariat would require time to carry through the expropriation of the expropriators and, in its early days would be limited only to planning that expropriation. But what else could the situation have been in a Russia, where the predominant, small-scale, peasant economy formed an insurmountable barrier to the introduction of socialism without the aid of socialist revolution in the West? As an aside it is worth mentioning that nowhere in State and Revolution did Lenin propose any interim state forms such as the RDDPP.
A second serious flaw in Jenness’ argument that the dictatorship of the proletariat could not be the state power in Russia until the summer of 1918, due to the class nature of its economic base is that, to be self-consistent, he should defer classifying the post-October 1917 Russian state as the dictatorship of the proletariat until the end of the New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP, which was introduced in the middle of 1921 to increase food production, emphasised private enterprise, particularly private agriculture, and did not end until about 1929[13]. Here Jenness is at odds not only with Lenin, but virtually every member of the Bolshevik Party. The very moment that Jenness chooses to switch from claiming the regime was the RDDPP to confirming the existence of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is just the moment when – for the first time – rank and file Bolsheviks raised the question of whether the free market in agricultural produce would undermine the dictatorship of the proletariat.
It could be argued that agricultural production in the USSR remained petty-bourgeois until the fall of the Soviet Union, as the collectives were not statised but petty-bourgeois enterprises which, sold their “surplus” produce in the market place. The Kremlin legally granted collective farms the use of the land in perpetuity, and the individual collective farm families the use of private plots for the production of cattle and goods which they could dispose of in more or less any way they wanted. This petty-bourgeois mode of production was a significant factor in the disorganisation and collapse of the Soviet economy.
Contradictorily, the October Revolution greatly strengthened the petty bourgeois nature of agriculture in Russia. Bukharin in his ABC of Communism[14], describes how the outcome of the land revolution throughout Great Russia was that virtually all the large estates passed into the hands of those who had previously worked them, and were now farmed as small-holdings. The state had retained for Soviet agriculture less than 5% of the lands seized, and most of this was unsuitable for cultivation. In fact, both the number and proportion of poor peasants and agricultural labourers, on which state power was notionally resting, fell substantially. Indeed, as early as 1907, Lenin had foreseen that land distribution would transform the poor peasants into middle peasants, and this was one of the core reasons why, in the RDDPP, he had predicted the peasantry would desert the revolution, and an interim period of decades would be necessary between the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the beginning of the socialist[15]. Simultaneously, the number of rich peasants significantly decreased and landlordism was eliminated, so class antagonisms in the countryside were substantially reduced as a result of the October revolution.
On the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Lenin discussed the processes of expanding the revolution into the countryside. Having consistently defined the October Revolution as socialist, he makes the point that there was a deliberate delay in extending this socialist revolution from the towns into the countryside. The Bolsheviks saw themselves as, initially, limiting their rural activities to the democratic as a stratagem to protect the socialist, urban revolution and lay the ground for the expansion of that revolution into a socialist rural revolution:
“ … it was only in the summer and autumn of 1918 that the urban October Revolution became a real rural October Revolution. The Petrograd workers and the Petrograd garrison soldiers fully realised when they took power that great difficulties would crop up in rural organisational work, and our progress there would have to be more gradual … We therefore confined ourselves to what was absolutely essential in the interests of promoting the revolution … In October we confined ourselves to sweeping away at one blow the age-old enemy of the peasants, the feudal landowner, the big landed proprietor. This was a struggle in which all the peasants joined. …
The law we then passed was based on general democratic principles, on that which unites the rich kulak peasant with the poor peasant – hatred for the landowner. … We left the road open for agriculture to develop along socialist lines, knowing perfectly well that at that time, October 1917, it was not yet ready for it”[16].
The use of the adjective ‘transitional’ to describe the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government does not determine its class nature. Both Lenin and Trotsky saw the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government in Russia resting on the dictatorship of the proletariat. What was in transition was the nature of the economic base of the state. In the periods between revolutions, when progress is more gradual and linear, it is quite correct to say that the state power cannot have a different class character from its economic base. In the last analysis the economic base and political superstructure must correspond, but in the highly turbulent and non-linear situations that constitute a revolution, it is perfectly possible, for a short period in historical terms (months or even years), for the class that has seized power and destroyed the old state machine, to hold state power while it re-orders the economic base to its own requirements.
(iv) Neither Lenin pre or post-July 1917, nor Trotsky in 1906, suggested that every economic element of capitalism would be overthrown immediately, although both insisted that the initial tasks necessary for the introduction of socialism would begin at once. However, Lenin was keen for it to be widely understood that the Soviet regime moved ahead as fast as it could and accomplished “at one revolutionary blow, all that can, in general, be accomplished instantly”[17]. Lenin was fond of pointing out that not only was private ownership of land immediately abolished without compensation, but that within the space of a few months practically all the big capitalists, owners of factories, joint-stock companies, banks, railways, and so forth, were also expropriated without compensation. The pace of events may have been largely determined by the practical problems facing the Soviet regime due to the civil war, but Lenin never suggested there was a qualitative change in the class nature of the dictatorship, from democratic to proletarian, some time after October 1917. Is Jenness suggesting he just didn’t notice it?
(v) Jenness has challenged the statement that Lenin adopted a permanentist approach. However, his arguments ignore one of the most fundamental facts of all: that the Bolsheviks, under Lenin’s leadership, began the world socialist revolution in backward, semi-feudal Russia.
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Jenness, D., How Lenin Saw the Russian Revolution. International Socialist Review November 1981
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Jenness, D., Our Political Continuity with Bolshevism, International Socialist Review June 1982
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Lenin, V.I., From the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), Nov 1917, CW 26:303-307
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Cliff, T.C., Lenin: Revolution Besieged, Pluto Press, 1975, p22-29
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Lenin, V.I., Resolution of the CC, November 1917, CW 26:277
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Trotsky, L.D., Results and Prospects, New Park Publications, London, 1962, p202
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Lenin, V.I., The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, December 1919, CW 30:263
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Trotsky, L.D., The USSR; non-Proletarian and non-Bourgeois State? W.I.R. Publications, London. 1946
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Lenin, V.I., State and Revolution, Aug-Sept 1917, CW 25:394
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Lenin, V.I., ibid:p430
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Lenin, V.I., ibid:p 426
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Lenin, V.I., ibid:p 426
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Knei-Paz, B., The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978, p262
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Bukharin, N. and Preobrazhensky, E., op cit p296-297
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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., Extraordinary 6th All Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’, Cossacks’ and Red Army Deputies: Speech on the Anniversary of the Revolution November 6, November 1918, CW 28:141-142
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Lenin, V.I., Third International and its Place in History, April 1919, CW 29:307-308