(Transcript of a talk given by me at an event hosted by the Young Communist League of Canada to mark the 100th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution)
Hello comrades, it’s an honor to have been asked to
speak on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Great October Socialist
Revolution of 1917, to honor the event that led to the creation of the world’s
first socialist state and the beginning of a new era in human history that
witnessed the downfall of colonial empires, a worldwide struggle against
capitalist exploitation, and the successful defeat of fascism in World War
II. What I want to do today is to talk
about how this world changing event came about, because it’s not a history that
has been well understood, which is no surprise given that so many people have
built their careers on distorting it. The Great October Socialist Revolution was
made possible by many factors, but in the interest of time I’m going to focus
on two of them: the increasingly well-organized and militant working class in
the Russian Empire, who were on the frontlines resisting the terrible
exploitation they faced at the hands of the bosses, landowners, and
militarists. That’s the first thing I’m
going to talk about, and then I’m going to talk about the rise and development
of the revolutionary tradition in Russia, which ultimately gave rise to the
Bolshevik Party, the political driving force of the revolution, because, just
like every revolutionary movement in history, it developed through hard
experience.
Now first of all, it’s important to understand that
Russia in 1917 was a capitalist country.
For while the legacy of feudalism still loomed large, the aristocracy
still had considerable power, and the majority of the population was still made
up of peasant farmers, the profit motive and industrial production were clearly
in command by the time the first abortive Russian revolution took place in 1905,
and had replaced the earlier tributary economy that had existed in the days of
serfdom.
When serfdom ended in Russia in 1861 there were only
3.25 million urban industrial workers in the empire, less than 5% of the
population, but in the next thirty years their numbers doubled and in the first
decade of the 20th Century they would double again. The proletariat would be by far the fastest
growing segment of Russia’s population by the time the First World War broke
out in 1914. Many of these workers were
former peasants who had fled to the cities in search of work, and again this
was the result of capitalism.
After serfdom collapsed in 1860s, peasants were
increasingly unable to survive in an economy dominated by cash transactions,
farming small plots of land with crude hand tools and having to pay off massive
debts which they owed to their former masters along with heavy taxes to the
Tsarist government. Many poorer peasants
had no choice but to sell their land and move to the city, while wealthier
peasants bought up the land of their neighbors and became landlords (kulaki).
Many of Lenin’s earlier works actually deal with the breakdown of feudal
social and economic structures in the Russian countryside, and how the “peasant
commune” that some 19th Century Russian revolutionaries actually
idealized as the social base of a future Russian revolution, was in the process
of disintegration as industrialization and financialization took hold in
society.
Many former peasants were forced into the slums of
industrial cities like St Petersburg, Moscow, Ivanovo-Voznesensk and others,
struggling to pay rent on what were often tiny rooms which whole families had
to share. In the last decade of the 19th
Century, every one of Russia’s heavy industries – iron, steel, coal, oil,
railroads, machine tools, and chemicals – doubled or tripled its output and
then doubled it again by 1905. Foreign
investors poured money into industrial and commercial ventures and some British
and French firms even moved to Russia to exploit the cheap labor of its
proletarians. For workers in capitalist Russia
had no job security, no legal protections to speak of, no safety regulations,
no minimum wage, no pensions, no social security, and no protections against
child labor, which was widespread, even among kids as young as three who worked
in the plants alongside their mothers.
In the matchworks of Vladimir, six out of every ten workers was under
the age of fifteen and these child workers could expect to make less than one
ruble a month. Women often had to give
birth on the factory floor because there was no maternity leave, women who
typically made less than 1/3rd of the wages men earned. Fourteen, sixteen, and even eighteen hour
days were the norm.
It was from the ranks of these factory workers that
the core of the Russian labor movement would be built. In the face of these horrible conditions,
proletarians supported each other, taught each other how to read, went on
strike together and organized a militant labor movement together. People like Fedor Samoilov, who worked at a
textile plant in Ivanovo, and Ivan Babushkin who worked at an arms foundry in
St Petersburg, would become radicalized by their own hard experiences and ultimately
go on to join the Bolshevik Party. But
it was not just working men who became radicalized, by 1907, 20% of the
leadership of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party were women, and of the
20%, more than 90% belonged to the Bolsheviks.
The Russian labor movement, consisting almost entirely of illegal
worker’s leagues and trade unions, grew to the point where it was able to
practically shut down the entire country with a general strike in October 1905,
which very nearly brought the Tsarist government to its knees.
This was the first Russian revolution, the revolution
of 1905, and while rural peasant rebellions also took place that year, it was
an overwhelmingly urban working class affair.
In the face of the increased hardship that the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese
War brought to the masses of the Russian people, practically every industrial
city in the empire revolted and the collapse of the regime was only prevented
by loyalty of the army, which killed hundreds, if not thousands of striking
Russian workers, and by concessions to the liberal-minded elite, including the
creation of a parliament and a written constitution. None of this eased the plight of ordinary
Russian workers, to say nothing of the plight of the oppressed peoples
colonized by the Russian Empire in Central Asia and the Caucasus region.
Therefore, by the time the workers and peasants of
Russia were drafted and sent off to die in their millions in a First World War
that they did not want or understand, there was already a strong militant tradition
of working class struggle in the country, that, in response to the horrors of
an imperialist war, would truly blossom in 1917. Unlike in 1905, this time the peasant
soldiers in the army, tired of war and tired of a system that offered them
nothing but death and suffering, did not shoot at the striking workers, many of
them women, who marched in the streets of St Petersburg on International
Women’s Day, February 1917, to demand bread and an end to war. This time, they shot their own officers and
joined the demonstrations. With this military
mutiny, the Tsar was doomed, and when the new provisional government of Russian
elites tried to continue the war in defiance of the people’s wishes, the stage
was set for the triumph of the Bolsheviks in the Great October Socialist
Revolution. But this would only be made
possible by another unique institution of working class resistance that emerged
from the Russian labor movement: the soviet.
Worker’s soviets, councils that represented working
people across whole cities and regions, had first appeared on May 15 1905 when
striking workers in the great textile center of Ivanovo-Voznesensk formed an
elected assembly in an effort to better impose their demands on factory owners
across the entire region. The workers of
the Ivanovo soviet were intensely loyal to it, for they understood it very
consciously as an instrument of their collective power as a class. During the October 1905 general strike,
soviets spread across Russia as a vehicle of proletarian resistance which the Tsarist
state only managed to suppress through bloody violence and repression. When soviets re-emerged as form of working
class organization in 1917, they were joined by mutinous soldiers and effectively
became an armed force in defiance of the state, a dual power in society capable
of imposing its will. This high level of
working class organization would then be combined with the leadership of
Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, which ultimately pushed these soviets to seize power
and create a whole new revolutionary order that would change the world.
This brings us to the history of the Russian
revolutionary movement, which in many ways pre-dated the Russian labor
movement. Although it in many ways began
in the same historical circumstances, for a whole host of reasons, it was many
years before the goals of the labor movement and the goals of Russia’s radical
intelligentsia would converge. Of course
when they did, they changed the world forever, but it was a long time coming.
In discussing the origins of the Russian revolutionary
movement, I’d like to begin with a quote from W. Bruce Lincoln’s excellent book
“In War’s Dark Shadow: The Russians Before The Great War”. This is what he says about the first Russian
revolutionaries:
“Before
1905, there seemed almost no hope of revolution in Russia. Revolution meant the overthrow of the Tsar, a
ruler who, most Russians believed, had received his autocratic power directly
from the hands of God…Against those who dared, Russian Tsars had weapons other
than divine sanction to defend their crowns.
Throughout the nineteenth century, they were supported by the nobility,
legions of state officials, and an army that numbered well over two million as
the twentieth century dawned. Few
revolutionaries in history ever faced such crushing odds.”
Thus, from its beginnings, Russian revolutionaries had
to deal with the harsh reality of a repressive state apparatus that possessed
many, many, many ways of destroying them.
The Tsarist government, by the dawn of the 20th Century,
possessed the largest and most powerful intelligence apparatus of any
government on the planet. The question
of how to navigate an intensely repressive society and how to reach the masses
of the Russian people with a revolutionary message, along with what kind of
people would form the foundation of revolution in Russia, would consume the
revolutionary movement from its origins in the 1860s to its ultimate triumph in
1917.
The Russian revolutionary movement really began in the
1860s following the end of serfdom in the country in 1861. Before that time, the peasantry had been
bound to the land under the control of aristocratic feudal landowners who had
life and death power over them. When the
Tsar freed the serfs, largely in response to the need to modernize Russian
society in the face of international realities, the Crimean War of the 1850s in
particular demonstrated the Russia’s agrarian economy could not compete with
the industrial powers of Britain and France on the battlefield, it was only
after giving major concessions to the serf-owning nobility. Peasants had to pay their former masters for
their freedom, and for most, this meant taking on a debt that they could not
possibly repay within their lifetimes and which effectively forced them into
new forms of economic and political bondage.
This was seen as a colossal betrayal by those liberal
Russian activists, who had fought for the abolition of serfdom and had high
hopes for progressive reform in Russian society once it had been
abolished. They lost faith in the
system. They lost faith in the Tsar’s
willingness to “free his people”. They
lost faith in the idea that the Russian monarchy could be reformed, and even
prominent liberals like Alexander Herzen and Peter Lavrov, who was himself an
aristocrat, came to the understanding that only revolution could bring about
meaningful change. Hundreds of student
radicals actually forced the St Petersburg University to close in the fall of
1861, protesting against the government’s broken promises of reform and
proclaiming that what the Russian people needed was “land and liberty” and an
end to autocracy.
It was liberals like Lavrov, along with anarchists
like Mikhail Bakunin, who urged educated radical urban youth to “go to the
people” to agitate among them and prepare them for revolution. And by “the people”, they meant the masses of
the Russian peasantry. Bakunin likened
the peasants of Russia to a massive bomb that only needed to be lit by
revolutionaries for revolution to take place.
As I mentioned before, some Russian radicals at this time idealized the
peasants as being “primitive socialists” who were somehow “pure” and even saw
the collapsing feudal institution of the peasant commune as a kind of model for
a new and uniquely Russian society ruled by equality and social justice.
Now it has to be said that Russian revolutionaries at
this time came, almost without exception, from privileged backgrounds, and most
had never even seen a peasant, let alone lived in a rural village. So when hundreds of these idealistic young
men and women “went to the people” in the course 1874, they were in for a rude
surprise. The peasants, an illiterate
rural folk trying to stay alive in the face of immense hardships, didn’t have
any use for their anarchist utopian visions, and the radicals, who were truly
horrified by the primitive and brutal conditions they found in the villages,
were actually rounded up in their hundreds by the Tsar’s police – often after
peasants informed on them. The “go to
the people” movement, this top-down effort by urban intellectuals to radicalize
the Russian peasantry was a total failure, and it was just as much a failure
when they tried it again in 1877-78.
The wake of the “go to the people” movement’s collapse,
many Russian revolutionaries, still overwhelmingly consisting of educated elite
youths, turned to terrorism, forming tightly knit organizations such as the
Narodnaia Volia (“People’s Will”), with the goal of assassinating key
government figures, particularly the Tsar, in an effort to bring on the
revolution through conspiracy. The
Narodnaia Volia actually succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1879,
but, far from bringing down the government, it only led to a massive
reactionary backlash that effectively destroyed the Russian revolutionary
movement for many years, with its leaders either dead, in prison or in exile.
Two major early currents of Russian revolutionary
thought thus ended in failure. Agitating
among the peasants in their villages had gotten nowhere and terrorist
conspiracies had not led to the downfall of the system. Vladimir Lenin’s own brother, Alexander
Ulyanov, was himself executed by the Tsar’s government for plotting against the
life of Alexander III. And while Lenin’s
supposed remark to his grieving mother that “we shall go a different way” is
probably apocrayphal, it did play itself out in reality, for Lenin and other
like him came to understand that no revolution could take place in Russia
without mass support. While effective
political leadership was critical, revolution ultimately had to come from the
people themselves, well-organized and fully conscious of their own interests.
This brings us to the history of Marxism in
Russia. While Georgii Plekhanov has
often been credited as Russia’s “first Marxist”, the same could be said of
Pavel Axelrod or Vera Zasulich, all of whom were Russian revolutionaries in
exile in Switzerland who had participated in previous revolutionary movements
and had developed their theories more from intensive study rather than from direct
experience of Russian conditions. Russian
society was changing rapidly by the 1880s as industrialization continued, so
even the conditions these men and women had experienced in the country in the
1870s were gone. By the founding of the
Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903, it had been almost twenty-five
years since Plekhanov had last been in Russia.
Nonetheless, these Marxists in exile were able to
grasp how dramatically capitalism was changing Russian society, that
traditional peasant society was collapsing, and that, if there was to be any
hope of revolution in Russia, it must come from the swelling ranks of the
Empire’s proletarians in the industrial cities – conscious of their interests
as a class and mobilized for revolutionary action. However, the revolutionaries in exile, who
founded the Emancipation of Labor Group, Russia’s first Marxist organization,
with a mere five members in 1883, were unable to connect with the masses of the
Russian working class, who were themselves only just beginning to organize into
underground unions and take strike action against their insufferable living and
working conditions. This was mainly due
to censorship by the Tsarist state.
Workers like Ivan Babushkin report to have toiled for years in the
factories of St Petersburg without seeing any revolutionary pamphlet or having
access to any political literature whatsoever, let alone the works of exiled
Russian radicals living in Zurich.
It was not until ten years later, when Lenin and
another major revolutionary leader, Martov, formed the Union of the Struggle
for the Liberation of Labor in St Petersburg, that Russian revolutionaries
really began to connect with working people directly. And this was a massive development, as people
like Lenin actually took a leadership role in worker’s struggles for better
wages and shorter hours, pushing for the concrete demands of working people
while at the same time building revolutionary consciousness among them.
In a series of major strikes in 1896, workers in St
Petersburg won real victories with regard to both wages and working hours,
gaining a sense of their own collective power along with a militant sense of
identity as a class. The Union of
Struggle played a major role in this, publishing leaflets that read: “We have
only ourselves to rely upon. But we have
strength in unity. Our weapon – a
unified, unanimous, and unyielding resistance to factory owners. The working men and women of the Russian land
are beginning to rise up and soon shall strike fear into the hearts of the
capitalists and all the enemies of the working class.”
As I mentioned previously, the harsh conditions faced
by Russia’s proletarians forced them to organize, effectively in self-defense,
against the brutal regime imposed on them by the factory owners, the police,
and the landlords. It was the decision
of Russia’s revolutionaries to connect with the struggles of the working class
that would ultimately prove decisive.
Compared with the clumsy efforts to radicalize peasants with anarchist
utopian visions back in the 1870s, this was a massive step forward. Even though the Union of Struggle would be
broken up the police in 1896 and its leaders arrested and exiled, it set a
major precedent and set the stage for the founding of the Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party in 1898, its subsequent split into the Bolshevik and
Menshevik factions in 1903 and ultimately the forging of the Bolsheviks as a
revolutionary political party capable of seizing the day in 1917 and providing
leadership to the world’s first working class socialist revolution.
All of this came through bitter trial and error and
harsh experience. The increasingly
militant Russian working class was almost always ahead of the
revolutionaries. While the Bolsheviks
and Mensheviks were sparring at the congress of the Russian Social Democratic
Labor Party in Brussels in 1903, Russia’s first general strike was sweeping
across the Caucasus, the Ukraine, and east as far as the Ural Mountains.
As W. Bruce Lincoln writes, “While those who presumed to instruct them in the tactics of revolution
debated the finer points of rules and programs, the workers of Rostov, Kiev,
Odessa, Baku, Ekaterinoslav, and a score of other cities faced the thrusts of
Cossack lances and sabres. Workers in
the Urals, in Rostov, and in Kiev fell before volleys of infantry fire, and
hundreds came to know the terror of being ridden down by Cossack cavalry. As would happen in October 1905 and in
February 1917, the workers themselves…led the way into the battle against the
old order, while the Social Democrats followed, their leaders surprised and
unprepared, frantically endeavoring to give their own direction to the workers’
outrage.”
The Great October Socialist Revolution did not emerge
out of thin air, but was the product of decades of organizing, resistance, and
struggle by working people against their exploiters. It was born of a working class movement that
produced leaders, who, in Lenin’s words, were not “trade union secretaries,”
but “tribunes of the people”, able to envision a future where workers did not
merely bargain with their exploiters, but removed them entirely and seized
power. It was born of a worker’s
movement that produced institutions like the soviet, which provided not only a
vehicle for collective bargaining, but effective self-governance and ultimately
self-determination for working people. The
transformation of militant trade unions into soviets capable of unifying all
workers under one banner showed the way to a future in which the downtrodden
became masters of society. The
Bolsheviks would ultimately be successful in October 1917 because they most
embodied the spirit of the original Union of Struggle founded in St Petersburg
in 1893 and put the interests of the workers first and foremost – learning from
a half-century of Russian revolutionary experience. They didn’t try to impose their will on the masses
from the outside, but instead worked with the masses, pushed for the demands of
the masses, and worked to radicalize those demands further, until the working
class, for the first time ever, had a state of its own and controlled its own
destiny as a class. The Great October
Socialist Revolution was thus made possible by the Russian revolutionary
movement and the Russian worker’s movement converging, uniting, and together showing
the way to a bright future for the working and oppressed peoples of our planet.
