On Bolshevism and the Development of the Revolutionary Movement in Russia

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Greetings brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, this is Back in the USSR, I am Siegfried.  This month I’ve been doing a series of shows to mark the occasion of the 100^th 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.  And as I talked about last week, this process began with 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.  In addition, there were the masses of the Russian peasantry, who for centuries had lived under the harshest conditions imaginable and, who, in 1917, refused to play the role of cannon fodder for the Russian elite in a war that they did not want or understand, shot their officers, and joined the working class demonstrators in the streets to tear down the last bastions of Tsarism, found the soviets of workers and soldiers, and ultimately support Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the Great October Revolution, which saw the triumph of socialism in Russia and the emergence of a new revolutionary order.   

Tonight I want to talk about the Bolsheviks in particular, the political driving force of the revolution, where they came from, and really unpack the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia, because just like the history of working class organization, it’s very important to understand, and, just like every revolutionary movement in history, it developed through hard experience.  Please stay tuned.

(Georgi Sviridov – Ural Song)

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 question of how to navigate these conditions 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 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, as I talked about last week, the introduction of capitalism into the Russian countryside meant that many peasants lost their land and had to move to crowded urban slums.

It was in response to this harsh reality, that radical Russian activists, who had fought for the abolition of serfdom and had high hopes for progressive reform in Russian society, really became revolutionaries.  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”.

It was liberals like Lavrov, along with anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin, who urged radical Russian 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.  Some Russian radicals at this time idealized the peasants as being “primitive socialists” who were somehow “pure” and even saw the peasant communes as a kind of model for a new society ruled by equality and social justice. 

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 peasant villages, were actually rounded up in their hundreds by the Tsar’s police – 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 this failure, many Russian revolutionaries then 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.  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.

So two 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.  It could not come from the top-down, but from the people themselves, 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 developed their theories more from intensive study rather than direct experience of Russian conditions.  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, they 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.

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.  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 on both wages and working hours, gaining a sense of their own collective power along with a sense of identity as a class, and the Union of Struggle played a major role in that, 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.”

Like I talked about last week, the harsh conditions faced by Russia’s proletarians forced them to organize, effectively in self-defense, against the 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 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, 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 and ultimately uniting, and together building the future.

(Play Georgi Sviridov – Time Forward)

Back in the USSR's Great October Socialist Revolution 100th Anniversary Show

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You’re listening to Back in the USSR here on 93.3 FM CFRU, I am Siegfried.  And I admit that I was absent last week, and if you were listening in you would have heard a show I did in 2015, a very important show decrying the conservative militarism and celebration of imperialism that surrounds Remembrance Day in this country.  But I was not sorry to be absent, for last Saturday I attended what I can only describe as one of the most moving and significant events that I have ever attended in my whole life.  Last Saturday, November 11, while the Canadian government did its thing and trotted out its usual parade of sentimentality and lies about the First World War, a war between empires over colonies in which working class people paid the price and were butchered in their millions on the battlefields of France, Flanders and Russia, the Communist Party of Canada and its allies instead paid tribute to the 100^th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917. 

It was a packed house, and the mood was celebratory as we proud and conscious proletarians remembered our greatest victory, a true victory for the people, that ushered in a century of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles around the world, and which rose from the darkness of World War I like a red phoenix to light a new path forward for humanity – showing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that working class and oppressed people everywhere can fight against their oppressors and become masters of their own destiny.  That is what we celebrated last weekend, with our speeches, our musical performances, our dancing, and everything we did.  While the ruling class in this country celebrated war and sacrifice for “our home and native land” (aka “our colonial home ON stolen native land”), we celebrated revolutionary liberation, international solidarity among peoples, and peace between nations.

The Canadian ruling class still tells us we should be proud that young men went out to fight and die for the colonial expansion of the British Empire and that this is how we should define ourselves as a nation.  These apologists for empire and colonialism tell us that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was evil, totalitarian, and anti-democratic.  Many people in this country have grown up with these lies and believe them with all their hearts.  But just because a lie is believed by many, does not make it true.  Just because Canadian schools do not teach their students the real history of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist revolutionary movements, doesn’t mean that they never existed and do not still exist today in this age of neoliberalism.  Red October really did happen, and because it happened, the world would never be the same again and the writing was on the wall for the empires that had led the world into war in 1914, because the people were waking up.  All over the world, not just in Russia, working class and oppressed people were waking up, fighting back, and taking control – and the worst nightmares of the bankers, arms dealers, war profiteers, sweatshop owners, colonial plantation elites, aristocrats and robber barons were coming true.

(Play Georgi Sviridov “Time Forward”)

In the last show I did this month, I discussed the significance of the October Revolution of 1917 with regard to the great anti-colonial struggles of the 20^th Century and how the Soviet Union inspired and supported many of these movements against empire.  Today I’d like to look a little more at the history of the revolution itself and the material conditions in Russia that led to the downfall of Tsarism and ultimately the downfall of Russian capitalism in 1917.

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.  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 20^th 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.

Once in the cities, 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 19^th 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 British and French firms even moved to Russia to exploit the cheap labor of its proletarians.  For factory workers in 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 1/3^rd 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 revolutionary 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 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 1905, which very nearly brought the Tsarist government to its knees. 

In the face of the increased hardship that the 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 peoples colonized by the Russian Empire in Central Asia and the Caucasus region. 

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 revolutionary tradition in the country and a powerful history of working class resistance that, in response to the horrors of an imperialist war, would blossom in 1917.  This time the peasant soldiers in the army 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 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.

Worker’s soviets, councils that represented working people across whole cities and regions, and which had first appeared during the 1905 general strike, were joined by mutinous soldiers and became an armed force in defiance of the state.  This level of working class organization would 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.  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.  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.

This struggle would give rise to the world’s first socialist state, a state that would emancipate workers, emancipate women, grant self-determination to oppressed nations, fight against empire worldwide, defeat fascism, and make the exploitation of workers a crime.  While at the same time unleashing the talents of a population that had been, one generation before, made up mostly of illiterate peasants – now they were scientists, engineers, teachers, builders, writers, composers.  A country which had been locked in the depths of poverty and ignorance, would become the second most developed country on the planet following World War II.  For the colonized peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Great October Socialist Revolution showed what could be achieved.

Long live Great October on its Centenary! Long live Lenin, the leader of the world proletariat! Long live the socialist revolution!

(Play “Lenin is Young Again”)