THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: LENIN, TROTSKYAND STALIN

 Marx’s own thought, as has been increasingly realised, is a far cryfrom ‘Marxism-Leninism’, which was an invention of the Stalinistperiod, and would not have been recognised as his own by eitherof its alleged progenitors. Furthermore, we need to recall, therewere many other analyses besides those of Marx and Leninconcerned with the revolutionary direction that Russia was takingboth before and even after the Revolution of 1917. Here, we willtake just two examples of the constitutional persuasion.Maxim Kovalevsky was for a time a close collaborator of Marxbut came to the conclusion that it was possible for constitutionalgovernment on the Western model to find roots in Russia. Inparticular, disagreeing with Marx here as well as elsewhere,Kovalevsky argued that communal property would become privatein Russia as a wider process already nearer completion in otherlands began to gather momentum nearer home. In a Preface to atranslation of Woodrow Wilson’s The State published in the year1905 he declared:Not cut off by a Chinese wall from the civilised world,possessing in our past those selfsame rudiments of freedevelopment as were shown by Western Europe in theMiddle Ages, and in the contemporary transformation ofstate estates into economic classes—the guarantee of thechangeover to the system of self-government of society,we, evidently, are bound by necessity to interest ourselvesin the solutions reached by the races of the German-Romanworld. These solutions might be reached by us in the nearfuture, but not because of inorganic borrowing, but becauseof the force of circumstances, by our intellectual andeconomic development, by the transformation of ourcontemporary state order.18Not so optimistic as Kovalevsky was the leading historian ofthe period, V.O.Kliuchevsky. In the early nineteenth century,N.M.Karamzin and his contemporaries had produced an account
of the story of Russia centred on successive rulers and implyingthat the general direction was progressive. Nearly a hundred yearson, Kliuchevsky sought to present an analysis of the many-sidedactivities of the empire’s peoples, a ‘historical sociology’. Hebelieved that he could achieve his aim only if the national historywas taken to be part of a larger whole, with outside as well asinternal pressures given their due weighting. But while he mighthave liked to have adopted the same forward movement asKaramzin, Kliuchevsky found himself inhibited by a number ofconsiderations. To take first the most important of them:The law of the life of backward states or peoples amongthose which have outstripped it is that the need for reformarises earlier than the people is ready for reform. Thenecessity for accelerated movement in pursuit leads to theover-hasty adoption of the ways of others.Moreover:the means of west European culture, falling into the handsof some narrow strata of society, have been turned to theirdefence rather than the advantage of the country,strengthening social inequality, have been changed into aweapon for the many-sided exploitation of the culturallydefenceless masses, lowering the level of their socialconsciousness and strengthening their class animosity, bywhich they are prepared for revolt rather than freedom.Meanwhile, the tragedy of the opposition was that ‘the patriotenlightened at government expense was struggling against his owncountry, while not believing in the power of enlightenment or inthe future of the motherland.’19Unlike his counterparts in Great Britain, France and the UnitedStates of America, then, Kliuchevsky was unable to present a‘Whig’ view of Russian history, that is ‘to praise revolutionsprovided they have been successful, to emphasise certainprinciples of progress in the past and to produce a story which isthe ratification if not the glorification of the present’.20 He livedlong enough after the Russian Revolution of 1905 to realise thatthe hopes held out for meaningful constitutional reform werecoming to naught, and that it was unlikely that Russia wouldfollow the path of its Western predecessors
Oddly enough, the individual who did most to divert Russiaalong its own way, V.I.Lenin, himself at first appears to haveargued that Russia would follow the Western path. In his firstlarge-scale work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, comingout in 1899, he indicated the manner in which the stratificationof the peasantry was leading towards the arrival of capitalism inrural areas. In other words, at this point, he was in agreementwith the Marx of Capital, rather than of the Preface to the 1882Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto, which suggested thepossibility of direct passage from the peasant commune to thehigher form of communism, with the Russian Revolution as acomplement for the proletarian revolution in the West. FollowingMarx, as well as the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, Leninargued in What is to be Done?, published in 1902, that theproletariat was the key class in the movement forward, guidedby a party equipped with the appropriate theory.Then came the Revolution of 1905, which confirmed for Leninthe impossibility of Russia following any road other than theMarxist, and encouraged him to pour scorn on those who offeredalternatives. For example, he ridiculed the assertion of theémigré Paul Vinogradoff, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford,that it was necessary to strive with all possible might to ensurethat Russia should move forward along lines comparable tothose of Germany in 1848 rather than those of France in 1789. InVinogradoff’s view, the latter would lead Russian society intodanger, even to ruin. For Lenin, Vinogradoff was a lackey of theRussian bourgeoisie who feared the victory of the people, andapproved of revolution only when, as in 1848, it wasunsuccessful, rather than when, as in 1789, it enjoyed at leastsome success.21After the limited success and ultimate failure of theRevolution of 1905, Lenin argued that Russia could proceedalong one of two paths: either towards a capitalist landlordJunker economy, comparable to Germany; or towards thedevelopment of small peasant farming, comparable, at least inits basic freedom, to the USA.22 In such analogies, and in hisconsideration of Europe, Asia and the USA, as always Lenintook a worldview, if concentrating on Russia rather than itswider context. From 1907, Lenin saw his homeland followingthe Junker path, although he also perceived that industrialdevelopment in some regions would allow the proletariat to gain
strength. The outbreak of war in 1914 persuaded him to thinkof the possibilities of revolution on a wider scale.Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline waswritten by Lenin between January and June 1916, and publishedin 1917. It begins by asserting that during the previous fifteen totwenty years, especially since the Spanish-American War of 1898and the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, the economic and politicalliterature of the two hemispheres had increasingly adopted theterm ‘imperialism’ to describe the ensuing era. For example, a bookwith the term as its title had been brought out in London and NewYork by J.A.Hobson, an English economist with a point of view of‘bourgeois social-reformism and pacifism’. While borrowingheavily from Hobson, Lenin would also seek to deal with theprincipal economic aspects of the phenomenon in a differentmanner.By the end of the nineteenth century, Africa and Polynesia hadbeen divided up by the capitalist countries to complete their seizureof the unoccupied territories of the planet. In 1852, Disraeli haddeclared: ‘The colonies are millstones round our necks’, but justover thirty years later, Britain was leading the scramble for theiracquisition, fairly closely followed by France, with Germany,Belgium and Portugal among the European powers in pursuit. Bythe end of the century, the field had broadened beyond Europe;Russia, Japan and the USA were also variously involved in therace for empire, which Joseph Chamberlain was now describingas a ‘true, wise and economi-cal policy’, while Cecil Rhodes wasdeclaring: ‘If you want to avoid civil war, you must becomeimperialists.’As well as quoting bourgeois authorities as much as possible,since they were forced ‘to admit the particularly incontrovertiblefacts concerning the latest stage of capitalist economy’, Lenin setout what he saw as the five basic features of imperialism:1. the concentration of production and capital hasdeveloped to such a high stage that it has createdmonopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;2. the merging of bank capital with industrial capital,and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital’, of afinancial oligarchy;3. the export of capital as distinguished from the exportof commodities acquires exceptional importance;the formation of international monopolist capitalistassociations which share the world among themselves; and5. the territorial division of the whole world among thebiggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism iscapitalism at that stage of development at which thedominance of monopolies and finance capital isestablished; in which the export of capital has acquiredpro-nounced importance; in which the division of theworld among the international trusts has begun; in whichthe division of all territories of the globe among the biggestcapitalist powers has been completed.Towards the end of his work, Lenin referred to the three periodssuggested by the American writer David Jayne Hill in A History ofDiplomacy in the International Development of Europe: (1) the era ofrevolution; (2) the constitutional movement; (3) the then presentera of ‘commercial imperialism’. And he concluded by affirmingthat, although such a new stage in human development had beenreached, its fundamental nature was already apparent in Marx’s‘precise, scientific analysis’.23In the Preface to Imperialism which Lenin wrote in the spring of1917, he pointed out how it had been written with an eye on thecensor, and that therefore he had been forced to omit theobservations that:the period of imperialism is the eve of the socialistrevolution; that social chauvinism (socialism in words,chauvinism in deeds) is utter betrayal of socialism,complete desertion to the side of the bourgeoisie; that thissplit in the working-class movement is bound up with theobjective conditions of imperialism.Just over three years later, in another Preface, to the French andGerman editions of Imperialism, Lenin claimed that his work hadproved that ‘the war of 1914–18 was imperialist (that is, anannexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides;it was a war for the division of the world.’ With the war over, the‘booty’ was shared between ‘two or three powerful worldplunderers armed to the teeth’ —America, Great Britain, Japan,who were involving the whole world in ‘their war over the divisionof their booty’. Tens of millions were ‘dead and maimed’ in the
war, while the ‘peace treaties’ were opening the eyes of the samenumber and more—‘downtrodden, oppressed, deceived andduped by the bourgeoisie’, while a thousand million more werebecoming further embroiled in imperialism through theconstruction of railways. Thus: ‘out of the universal ruin causedby the war a world-wide revolutionary crisis is arising which,however prolonged and arduous its stages may be, cannot endotherwise than in a proletarian revolution and in its victory.’24By this time, the summer of 1920, Russia itself had been involvedfor about two years in a civil war in the wake of the OctoberRevolution of 1917 which had brought Lenin and his fellowBolsheviks to power. At home, then, in a sense, the revolutionarywas becoming a constitutionalist, or, at least, having sought formost of his adult life to overthrow a government, he was nowattempting to keep a government in power. And not just anygovernment, but one representing both the workers and thepeasants of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic and theircomrades in the wider world. On the other hand, Russia’s regimecould not become fully constitutional until the achievement ofsocialist modernisation at home and of revolution in the widerworld. To put it another way, at the same time, he had to beconscious of the sets of circumstances which he had described in,respectively, The Development of Capitalism in Russia and Imperialism:The Highest Stage of Capitalism.A further dimension to the years immediately following theOctober Revolution was the confrontation of the highest hopes withthe deepest difficulties. Lenin himself considered these continually,for example in a speech to the Congress of School ExtensionWorkers in the spring of 1919, with arguments suggesting an updateof those of Robespierre at the end of 1793:We say to the bourgeois intellectuals, to the adherents ofdemocracy: ‘You lie when you reproach us with theinfringement of freedom. When your great bourgeois revol-utionists of 1649 in England and of 1792–3 in France carriedthrough their revolutions they did not concede to themonarchists the freedom of meetings. The FrenchRevolution was called the Great one because it was notlike the weakly phrase-making revolution of 1848: afteroverthrow-ing the monarchists it crushed them out ofexistence.... He who imagines that the transition to
socialism will be effected by one man convincing another,and this other a third, etc., is at best a child, or a politicalhypocrite. You can, if you have luck, smash an institutionat one blow: it is impossible to smash a habit, whateveryour luck. We have given the land to the peasant, freedhim from the squire, thrown off all his fetters, and yet hegoes on thinking that liberty is free trade in corn, andserfdom the duty to surrender the surplus at a fixed price.’25Here again, then, was Lenin necessarily thinking of the problemsof the peasantry as part of the transition via proletarian revolutionto socialism, a combination that was to lead to the introduction ofthe New Economic Policy in 1921.According to the assessment of the thirteenth edition of theEncyclopaedia Britannica in 1926, up to Lenin’s death early in 1924,his ‘thoughts never ceased to labour at the task of freeing theworkers’.26 This was the conclusion of the author of that assessment,none other than Leon Trotsky, about to fail in the struggle forsuccession with Stalin, but determined to continue the fight forinternational proletarian collaboration and world revolutionbeyond his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929 right up to hisassassination by Stalin’s agent in 1940.Trotsky set out his overview of history, following the law of‘uneven and combined development’, in the first chapter of TheHistory of the Russian Revolution, which he completed in exile abouta dozen years after playing a major part in that great drama: ‘Thefundamental and most stable feature of Russian history is the slowtempo of her development, with the economic backwardness,primitiveness of social forms and low level of culture resulting fromit.’ In comparison with the leading countries of the West inparticular, Russia would be numbered among those backwardcountries which revealed with the greatest sharpness andcomplexity in their destiny the most general law of the historicprocess—unevenness. From that law derived another involving ‘adrawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combiningof separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporaryforms’, a law which was to be called ‘the law of combineddevelopment’.Thus, medieval Russia lacked cities as centres of commerce andcraft, with significant social consequences. And so when it cameto the Pugachev Revolt of the late eighteenth century, there could
be no conversion into revolution because of the lack of an ingredientmost apparent in France—a Third Estate. A century later, however,the Europeanisation and modernisation of Russia were especiallynoticeable in industry, which went on to double its productionbetween 1905 and 1914. Now, the law of combined developmentrevealed itself most forcibly in this economic sphere. While morethan 80 per cent of the people were involved in agriculture, whichstill often used seventeenth-century methods, Russian industry insome aspects had caught up with and even outstripped itsadvanced rivals—for example, in the number of large-scaleenterprises and in the confluence of industrial with financial capital.But this latter circumstance meant the subjection of much of Russianindustry to the Western European money market.27As with capitalism, so with socialism, ‘uneven and combineddevelopment’ would continue in a global situation characterisedby Trotsky as ‘permanent revolution’. Looking backwards, heargued that in 1905 revolutionary Russia had revealed to the worldthe most advanced form of proletarian organisation, the soviet,moving on from the Paris sansculottes of 1789 and even thecommunists of 1871 to a higher level of proletarian consciousness.Then, in 1917, the soviet forces had achieved a great victory incombination with the peasants, for whom the proletarians hadprovided leadership. However, in Trotsky’s estimate, there wereother lessons to be drawn from 1905 and 1917. For backwardcountries the road to democracy was by way of the dictatorship ofthe proletariat. Consequently, a permanent state of revolutionarydevelopment was established between the democratic revolutionand the socialist reconstruc-tion of society. At the same time,indefinitely and constantly, all social relations were undergoingtransformation, with attendant periods of war and peace, scientificand moral adaptations, never allowing the achievement ofequilibrium. A final aspect of permanent revolution was itsinternational character. The socialist revolution might have begunon national foundations, but it could not continue in that fashionwithout succumbing through contradictions.28Trotsky made these observations in 1930, revising others madeat the time of the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. By 1930, of course,Lenin had been dead for about half a dozen years, Trotsky hadbeen recently ejected from the Soviet Union, and power had beeneffectively commandeered by Stalin and his supporters. Duringthe next decade, a brand of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ was to be
developed that was in fact Stalinism. Most succinctly, Stalin himselfhad declared in ‘The Foundations of Leninism’ first published inPravda soon after Lenin’s death in 1924: ‘The combination ofRussian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is theessence of Leninism in Party and state work.’ Lenin, he argued,had ridiculed the theory of permanent revolution, whose advocates‘have not only underestimated the role of the peasantry in theRussian revolution and the importance of the idea of the hegemonyof the proletariat, but have altered (for the worse) Marx’s idea of“permanent revolution” and made it unfit for practical use.’29By 1931, the peasantry had been crushed by collectivisation andthe proletariat committed to the fulfilment of the grandiose targetsof the first Five-Year Plan. In a famous speech, Stalin hammeredhome a simple message:To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. Andthose who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want tobe beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of thehistory of old Russia was the continual beatings shesuffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten bythe Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys.She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She wasbeaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beatenby the British and French capitalists. She was beaten bythe Japanese barons. All beat her—because of herbackwardness, because of her military backwardness,cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrialbackwardness, agricultural backwardness.... We are fiftyor a hundred years behind the advanced countries. Wemust make good this distance in ten years. Either we shalldo it, or we shall go under.30In a sense, Stalin’s argument was vindicated by the fact thatthe Soviet Union was able to withstand the attack launched byNazi Germany in the summer of 1941. On the other hand, notonly did that attack take him by surprise, he had previouslydetracted from the success of the Five-Year Plans by his purges.Furthermore, his repetitious rhetoric distorted the nature ofRussian history. From victory over the Swedes in 1709 to thetriumph over Napoleon in 1812, tsarist Russia had won morebattles than it had lost. In the years leading up to 1914, somewould claim, tsarist Russia was catching up with the advancedcountries more quickly than the Soviet Union would manage todo after 1917.The historical debate continues while the argument about theMarxist inheritance is by no means over. What would Marxhimself have to say about the Soviet Union, and about the viewsand policies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin concerning both it andthe Revolution leading to its formation? If some of his lastrecorded views are any guide, he would have been surprised bythe events of 1917:I would consider a European war a misfortune; this time aterrible misfortune. It would inflame chauvinismeverywhere for years, as every country would have to fightfor its existence. The whole work of the revolutionaries inRussia, who stand on the eve of victory, would be annihil-ated and made in vain.31And then, we might ask, could it be that his analysis ofStalinism in particular would lead him back to his early viewthat, unlike the converse norm in Britain, France and evenGermany, the development of Russian society was mostlyinfluenced by the development of the state? Of course, we shallnever know: perhaps we cannot remind ourselves too oftenthat Marx died in 1883, several decades before the course ofevents that he had sketched just before his death came to theirfull development in circumstances far different. But certainlyhis ideas were used to promote revolution as much as those ofMontesquieu had previously been used to underpinconstitutions. At the same time, arguably, at least some of thewould-be leaders of a Russian Revolution looked back beyondMarx for guidance to the French precedent, updating theretrospection of Robespierre and his colleagues beyond thephilosophes to classical times.