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
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. 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)
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