Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (30 page)

Or would it? The one policy no one was contemplating in public, though in many ways it corresponded to a kind of subliminal, unspoken attitude in the minds of many, was unconditional surrender. For four months Lenin tried to evade implementing this logical consequence of his other policies.

Since 1914 Lenin had interpreted the war as a revolutionary opportunity. Its potential in this respect would be tapped by a popular uprising sparked off by opposition to the imperialist struggle. In the
April Theses
Lenin had toyed with notions of revolutionary defensism and later of revolutionary war. However, there was a gap. How would the imperialist war be transformed? How would the required popular uprising be realized? In the
April Theses
there was only one word about this – fraternization. In October the Decree on Peace presented to the Second Congress along with the other key documents did not go much further. The Decree called on ‘all the belligerent peoples and their governments to start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace’. Such a peace was defined as ‘an immediate peace without annexations … and without indemnities’. [SW 2 459] The Decree went on to expound Lenin’s views on international relations and the coming revolution in the usual terms and added a number of provisions. The most important were the promise to publish all secret treaties and abandon secret diplomacy and to offer an immediate three-month armistice. Any terms offered in response would be considered ‘but that does not necessarily mean that we shall accept them’. [SW 2 462] Lenin even contemplated the fact that ‘War cannot be ended by refusal, it cannot be ended by one side.’ [SW 2 462] He did not, however, offer a solution to the dilemma of no one responding to the Decree.

Despite saying ‘we are not living in the depths of Africa but in Europe, where news can spread quickly’ [SW 2 463] the Decree did not spread. It was barely known outside Russia but, like the other decrees of the Second Congress, had considerable propagandist weight in Russia. That was all very well but it didn’t budge the German Army. They would not be moved back by a piece of paper.

Even worse, Lenin had to contemplate what to do about the Russian Army which was, essentially, the remnants of the Russian Imperial Army increasingly denuded of General Staff and senior officers who drifted away to join the counter-revolution. Troops, too, began to drift away. One of the great myths of 1917 was that the October Revolution was led, to a significant degree, by insurgent deserters from a collapsed army. In reality, the army was holding together and the problem of desertion, though worrying throughout 1917, was still under control. In fact, it was the October Revolution which unleashed the tide of desertion, not the other way round. Lenin was caught in a major quandary here. He knew very well, from Engels above all, that no revolution could succeed unless it overcame the police and military resources of the state. But the Bolsheviks still needed an army between them and the Germans. There were two contradictory imperatives. One, disband the Imperial Army so it could not become a weapon of counter-revolution. Two, maintain the army to defend Russia’s true revolution. The third option, reforming a more politically acceptable army, was an impossibility in the time available. What was to be done? For the next few weeks and months the new government tried to kick the problems around, like autumn leaves, in the hope they would go away.

On 22 November Lenin ordered the Commander-in-Chief, Dukhonin, to begin peace negotiations with Germany immediately. His refusal led to his replacement by Krylenko, the assault on
Stavka
and the lynching of Dukhonin but no peace negotiations. On 10 December Lenin was still drafting a peace programme following the line of ‘no annexations or indemnities’. However, real peace negotiations were getting nowhere and the German Army was picking away at a collapsing front. At this point Lenin not only considered continuing the war but, on 21 December, even consulted with the US representative, Colonel Robins, about bringing in American specialists to bolster Russia’s war effort. Ten days later the bellicose tone remained in a Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars) draft resolution submitted by Lenin which called for ‘intensified agitation against the annexationist policy of the Germans’ and ‘Greater efforts to reorganize the army’. [CW 26 397] During much of this time fighting had been intermittent because Trotsky had been at the front-line town of Brest-Litovsk conducting negotiations with the enemy. His brief, as much as anything, was to stall and wait to see what turned up. However, German patience was not interminable. On 15 January 1918 Lenin called him and suggested breaking off negotiations. The previous day, apart from being shot at in his car, an attack which wounded his old friend and organizer of the return from Switzerland, Fritz Platten, Lenin had formally sent off the first detachments of the socialist army and had encouraged the overcoming of ‘every obstacle on the way to world revolution’. [CW 26 420]

Despite this apparent dalliance with war, Lenin, on 21 January, dropped one of his greatest bombshells in the form of theses on what he called the ‘immediate conclusion’ of peace. In them he proposed accepting the draconian terms offered by Germany. The ensuing debate was immensely illustrative of the standing of Lenin in the Party and the difficulties he had come to face. Of the sixty-three Bolsheviks at the Conference, thirty-two voted against Lenin’s proposal and only fifteen supported him. The thirty-two supported the policy of revolutionary war. For Lenin, this would only be viable in the event of the German revolution breaking out in three to four months, otherwise one would risk the whole revolution in Russia on the mere possibility of a future German revolution. Trotsky tried to compromise calling for a policy of ‘neither war nor peace’ which only attracted sixteen votes. Lenin moved on to the next battleground. Addressing a meeting of Bolsheviks on 24 January during the Third Congress of Soviets, he outlined the three strategies – immediate peace (the one he continued to support); revolutionary war and neither peace nor war – but again could not command a majority. Calling, instead, for a delay in signing the peace he won the vote twelve to one and the proposal for revolutionary war was thrown out by eleven to two. Trotsky’s compromise was then supported by nine votes to seven.

However, everyone seemed to have forgotten Lenin’s earlier injunction that war cannot be ended by a refusal. The Germans simply advanced against the faltering Russian Army and presented ever more onerous peace terms. On 17 February the Central Committee narrowly rejected Lenin’s call for immediate peace by six votes to five. Despite this, the following day he radioed his acceptance of terms to the German command. Only on 23 February did he get the Central Committee to accept the increasingly inevitable. Even though the Germans were advancing and resistance was apparently impossible Lenin’s proposal hardly received a ringing endorsement. Seven voted in favour, four against and four abstained. Lenin was under no illusion that the decision was serious. ‘We have signed
a Tilsit peace
’ he said on 3 March alluding to the disastrous peace made by Alexander I in July 1807 as Napoleon advanced after subduing the continent at the battle of Austerlitz in December 1805 and in the campaign which followed. A Fourth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets was called to ratify the Treaty which it did by 784 votes to 261 with 116 abstentions. Clearly there was still a major opposition to Lenin and a strong faction, calling itself the Left Communists, which wanted to continue what they saw as the proactive revolutionary policies of 1917, in this case revolutionary war which, they rightly argued, had been part and parcel of Bolshevik thinking throughout the war. They were soon to clash with him on other apparent u-turns.

For the moment, however, the peace was signed and the disastrous terms made known. Not only did Lenin face pressure from within the Party, the entire Left SR group, which was still in coalition, favoured revolutionary war. They left the government complaining that it was German-dominated. For them, not to mention enemies on the right, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was the clearest proof of the Bolsheviks being ‘German agents’. Indeed, on 6 July, they began an insurrection in Moscow against the Soviet government by assassinating the German ambassador, Count von Mirbach, whom they denounced as the real dictator of Russia. Such accusations were false. Lenin had feared they would be made but his reasons for signing the peace simply arose from the need to face up to the inevitable consequences of his policies. Having wrecked Russia’s already-declining defence capability, unconditional surrender, which is what it virtually was, remained the only way out.

Lenin had, however, based his decision on two other closely related calculations. First, he believed that any price was worth paying in the short run for the revolution to survive. To last out the year, in whatever form, would be a victory from which they could consolidate and move on. Second, he believed the terms would be short-lived because the party with which he agreed them, Imperial Germany, was on its last legs. The latter point was more accurate than the former in that one could argue that the cost of survival was the stifling of the revolution. However, before turning to Lenin’s policies after Brest-Litovsk we need to look at the Soviet government’s early attempts at the transition to socialism in the crucial area of the economy.

Bread

The nineteenth century provides many examples of socialist utopias. As well as Marx’s communism, socialists from Fourrier and Robert Owen to Chernyshevsky painted visions of a perfect future society. While such dreams might be inspirational they left a practical void. How did one get from the confused conditions of today to the beauty of tomorrow? One could easily distinguish journey’s end on a distant sunlit peak, but what was the first step to take, then the second and so on? There were no route maps for the voyage. Indeed, Marx had scoffed at other forms of socialism precisely because they were ‘utopian’ whereas his and Engels’ version was ‘scientific’, by which they meant that they had identified the mechanisms which would bring communism into existence. What were those mechanisms? Capitalism itself – through the pursuit of profit, the ensuing competition, declining surplus value available and consequently increasing level of exploitation – would force proletarians, having nothing to lose but their chains, to unite to overthrow the system and use its potential to fulfil the needs of the many rather than the whims of the rich. But how did this apply on 26 October 1917?

Lenin knew Russia was ‘backward’ in terms of capitalist development and had not been very explicit about how the economy should be reformed and made to catch up. Given that Marxism was understood at the time largely though not exclusively as a form of economic materialism – that is that economic relations were the basis of political, social and cultural relations – it is surprising that, as we have already remarked, Lenin had little to say about economics. What he did say was wrapped up in political prescriptions. Can we piece together his first plan for the transition to socialism?

First, the key writings of the time –
April Theses
and
State and Revolution
above all – showed a preoccupation with institutions. First, banks were to be seen as the key to the first stage of economic control. Amalgamate the banks into a single bank and then nationalize it. Since managers rather than owners of capital controlled investment flows the banks could continue to function without a glitch under their new state controllers. Second, a political revolution would have brought the soviets to power in order for this to have happened in the first place, so the soviets would become the supervisors of the banks. Lenin had also said on several occasions and continued to do so after October, that socialism could not be ‘introduced’. He usually used the inverted commas himself. He meant it had to grow organically out of the revolution, through the multiple action of a creative working class and so on. It could not be artificially decreed from above. It would take time to evolve, though the actual scale of the time needed was never explicit, varying at different times from what looked like months or years to intimations that the task would not be completed for a whole epoch, that ‘we of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.’ [SW 1 802] In the words of the
April Theses
, the first task was ‘to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the
control
[i.e. supervision] of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.’ [SW 2 14]

The model implied seems to be one of political supervision exercised by soviets over a slowly transforming capitalist and market economy, since there are no proposals whatsoever to make private investment illegal or to replace the market immediately by an alternative. Indeed, the model sounds a reasonable one. The capitalists and their institutions would be nudged bit by bit towards socially beneficial rather than privately beneficial policies by the constant pressure of the soviets, which he later called the dictatorship of the proletariat. Any resistance would be dealt with ruthlessly. A few exemplary arrests and occasionally even executions of speculators, Lenin thought, and the rest would soon accept the hopelessness of attempting to thwart the will of the vast majority.
⁸
It was absolutely crucial to Lenin’s strategy that the majority would hold very firm against the recalcitrant minority in the early days and quickly break the remnants of its power. It explains the uncharacteristic ferocity and, occasionally, near-hysterical bloodthirstiness, apparent in a few of his statements of the early months.

In the last weeks before the revolution a further refinement was added to the model. The soviets must take over to
avert
approaching economic catastrophe and they ‘would soon learn’ how to supervise the collection and distribution of key goods.

Practice can be cruel to even the most elegant theories and here was no exception. Confronted with the declining situation of the real world, the optimistic gloss of the ‘gradual, peaceful and smooth’ transition was soon ripped away. The model collapsed at all of its major points. Resistance to Bolshevik proposals grew rather than diminished. Capitalists would not carry on as best they could for the sake of the revolution. The civil servants and groups such as the managers and employees of banks, who were supposed to move transparently to working for the new controllers, in fact resisted bitterly, bringing the financial system to its knees. Finally, the dependence of a complex modern economy on a mass of small groups of educated and trained personnel was brought into focus. Not only engineers and managers but accountants, cost analysts, quantity surveyors, quality controllers and all the rest were needed for a modern, complex factory, let alone economy, to operate. Deep opposition within this petty-bourgeois class of clerks and white-collar workers sabotaged many crucial economic enterprises. Add to that political opposition, even from some workers such as the railwaymen, and the vast implosion of transition model number one becomes clear.