‘October Song’ – A challenging portrayal of the Russian Revolution
By John Riddell
Ocotber 26, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddell's Marxist Essays and Commentaries — Amid a flock of volumes marking the Russian revolution’s centenary last year, Paul Le Blanc’s October Song is
set apart by its unique method. Working from English-language sources,
Le Blanc offers us an anthology of assessments and viewpoints on the
revolution with “a strong inclination to privilege older things” – that
is, testimony and opinions from its early years.
The result is a kaleidoscope of observations, some by respected
historians and many by unknown or forgotten voices, which, taken
together, constitute a far-ranging debate over the meaning of these
world-shaking events.Among these comments are many vivid on-the-spot recollections, such
as the portrayal by Eduard Dune, then a Bolshevik worker-activist, of a
factory debate in May 1917. Since workers had taken effective control of
the factory, their conditions had improved dramatically, the Bolshevik
speakers pointed out. “If we could organize a revolutionary government
in one factory, then why could we not create a similar order across the
whole of Russia?” (104)In the same vein Maurice Hindus, returning in the 1920s to the remote
Russian village where he had been born and raised, noted changes among
the peasants: “Their imagination had been stirred…. [T]heir minds teemed
with new concepts, new ideas, new beliefs. They were aware of a world
outside of their village. They were awake to the darkness around them
and to the need of ushering in enlightenment.” (170)We also hear the testimony of Victor Krawchenko on how, as a
16-year-old foundry worker, he joined the Communist youth movement
(Komsomol) in 1921, a time of “general distress and pessimism.” As a
Komsomol member, however, his life now had “an urgency, a purpose, a new
and thrilling dimension of dedication to a cause” (172-73).Then there is Katia, a young factory woman writing to a friend in
exile, an opponent of Soviet rule, in the 1920s, as clouds gather over
the revolution. Referring to the legend of the Golden Fleece and the
myth of the Garden of Golden Apples, Katia writes:
I am not so simple as I used to be. I know
that our generation will never reach the Fleece nor the Apple. We
thought we held it in our hand, but it rolled away into the dirt and
blood. Then, splashed and stained, we saw how it shone as it rolled
along. It is the light that leads us.” (249–50; 323-4)
Le Blanc’s narrative thus unfolds as not so much a reinterpretation but an invitation to reflection.
Global dimension“The Bolsheviks saw their revolution as only the beginning of a
global insurgency,” Le Blanc declares, (183) citing Lenin’s dramatic
appeal in his 1918 letter to U.S. workers:
We are banking on the inevitability of
world revolution…. We have raised the banner of struggle for the
complete overthrow of imperialism for the whole world to see. We are
now, as it were, waiting for the other detachments of the world
socialist revolution to come to our relief. (185)[1]
The chapter that Le Blanc devotes to the revolution’s global
dimension thus sparkles with urgency. His collection of quoted reactions
of imperialist chieftains highlights the obstacles faced by the
revolution. Necessarily compressed, his account ably summarizes the
Communist International’s first four congresses, to which I have devoted
6,000 printed pages, in a mere seven – in itself a noteworthy
achievement.It was the International’s dependency on the Soviet Communist Party
that, in Le Blanc’s view, became the overriding factor in its decline
and degeneration. This explanation, widely accepted and valid in a
general sense, leaves a lot to be explained. For example:
- Why was the Comintern weak in advocating defense of democratic
rights, a characteristic strength of the Bolshevik Party that it took as
a model?
- Why did the Comintern, after rejecting ultraleftism at its Second
Congress (1920), become entangled in a damaging ultraleft adventure (the
“March Action”) only one year later?
- Why was united front policy, among the early Comintern’s most
enduringly useful innovations, effectively dropped only two years after
its adoption?
In this sense, the unavoidable limitations of global analysis in October Song pose relevant questions for future attention on this blog.Theoretical blind spotsLe Blanc deploys varied testimony to buttress his conviction that the
Russian revolution was necessary and that the course of the early
Bolshevik party, which led the Soviet government, was broadly speaking
the best possible under the circumstances. While forceful, his argument
here is not original. Of greater interest is his discussion of the
weaknesses he perceives in the Bolshevik’s understanding of this
revolution’s dynamics.Le Blanc praises the Bolsheviks’ wisdom on agrarian policy after the
October Revolution. They then accepted what Lenin called “the decision
of the [peasant] rank and file, even if we disagree with it,” to divide
the landlords’ estates. (258) Yet Le Blanc criticizes the Bolsheviks’
failure to sustain that approach, particularly in their commitment to
conducting a class struggle against a bourgeois layer in the villages –
the “kulaks.” In reality, no such crystallized layer existed, Le Blanc
says, and very few peasant farms employed hired labour.Le Blanc draws here on Lars T. Lih’s Bread and Authority in Russia and Theodor Shanin’s Late Marx and the Russian Road as well as on two dissident Soviet agronomists of the 1920s, Nikolai Sukhanov (better known for his Notes on the Revolution) and Alexander Chayanov. It
is unfortunate, in Le Blanc’s view, that the latter two theorists were
marginalized in Soviet discussion of agrarian policy, while Marxist
theory on the peasantry stagnated. Implications of Le Blanc’s analysis
are evident for today’s world, where peasants remain prominent in
anti-neoliberal coalitions in many countries. (See “World Farmer Alliance.”)Le Blanc does not discuss the analogous “blind spot” in Bolshevik
policy toward national minorities. But here, by contrast, Bolshevik
policy underwent a significant evolution often missed in present-day
studies (see “The Russian Revolution and National Freedom”).Organized diversityA second blind spot, in Le Blanc’s view, involved “an insufficient
theorization and comprehension of the dynamics and requirements of
democracy,” particularly with respect to the “closing off of organized
diversity” as represented by contending parties and collective
viewpoints. (357) Bolsheviks understood democracy as both a means and an
end, but not the complexities of its realization, Le Blanc states. In
particular, the need for freedom “to join to gather in order to develop
and argue for [dissident views],” although realized in Bolshevik
practice in the revolution’s early years, was not acknowledged in the
plane of theory – at least, not by the party as a whole. (358)Bureaucratic perilThe third Bolshevik “blind spot” concerned the character of
bureaucracy. To be sure, Bolsheviks leaders gave much thought in the
early years of Soviet rule to problem of a state apparatus mushrooming
beyond workers’ control. In 1921, Lenin made an apt comparison
of the Soviet administration with an automobile “going not in the
direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired;
as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows
whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private capitalist, or of both.”[2]In Lenin’s view, the sinister hidden hand was that of administrative
cadres drawn from or reflecting the outlook of former ruling classes.
This was certainly part of the story. It was this malign influence that
led Lenin in 1921 to define the Soviet republic in 1921 as a “workers’
and peasants’ state with bureaucratic distortions.”[3]Still, Le Blanc is right in noting the absence in Bolshevik and, more
broadly, socialist thought in that period of “the notion of a
bureaucracy developing a will of its own and for its own benefit.”[4]
(359) It was not until 1928, Le Blanc tells us, that Leon Trotsky
acknowledged that a “bureaucratic hierarchy with all its ministries and
departments” had “raised itself over and above society.” (359) But for
Le Blanc, resistance to bureaucratization is linked with preservation
for an extended period of a mixed economy under Soviet rule, which he
rightly identifies as the Soviet government’s original policy in
1917-18.Le Blanc writes that “Destruction of the mixed economy in 1918” –
however inevitable this may have been under the circumstances – “was a
disaster … [one] matched only by the disaster of the isolation of
Bolshevik Russia” combined with the “militarism generated by foreign
invasion and brutal civil war.” (161) Sweeping nationalizations in
conditions of civil war and social disintegration made it necessary to
replace capitalist economic relations across the entire economy right
away, a process that created the overgrown and ultimately uncontrollable
bureaucracy.Of course, market relations did not vanish during the Russian civil
war; in part they took refuge underground. The return to a mixed economy
in 1921, under the New Economic Policy (NEP), brought market relations
back into the light of day where they could be regulated and taxed –
arguably a step forward toward Soviet economic planning.Le Blanc portrays the vitality of Soviet society under the NEP but
also highlights its negative side: the evils of capitalist relations
(mass unemployment, austerity, etc.) all returned within a year.
Moreover, the bureaucracy took shape as an ultimately dominant political
current securing elite privilege and closing off avenues for control
from below.In subsequent decades, socialists worldwide projected several methods
of avoiding such a bureaucratic takeover, including workers’ enterprise
self-management and worker-run cooperatives. Yet an economy of such
self-managed units faces an urgent question: Who speaks for the
interests of the working class as a whole? This challenge has been
addressed above all by Canada-based Marxist Michael Lebowitz and is
taken up in his Contradictions of Real Socialism.[5] An unanswered questionIn one respect, October Song does not fulfil the promise of
its subtitle: the narrative, which closes in 1924, does not portray the
consummation of the “Communist tragedy” to which the title refers. Le
Blanc portrays the life of working people in the first half of the 1920s
as marked by an unprecedented degree of freedom; in the words of
historian W.H. Chamberlin “a sense of release, of social liberty.”[6]
(303) In Le Blanc’s view, at the time of Lenin’s death (1924), “the
road seemed open to different possibilities of development.” (297)Yet 15 years later the Bolsheviks’ leading cadres had been in their
vast majority executed by Stalin; their party was transformed beyond
recognition. Soviet democracy, limited as it was, vanished, Le Blanc
explains, while brutalization and repression overwhelmed the humanism
and creativity unleashed in 1917. Somewhere in that period the party of
Lenin suffered a definitive defeat: the “Communist tragedy” that Le
Blanc’s subtitle refers to.Lenin and his comrades made a “wager on revolution,” Le Blanc tells
us, and – although they ultimately lost – “the greater failure would
have been never to have tried.” (377-8) Very true, but still we must ask
whether this failure was so complete. A strong case can be made that
despite its degeneration under Stalin, the Russian revolution survived
and was vindicated by its overall impact on world history.Even after the end of Bolshevism, as Trotsky pointed out just before
his assassination in 1940, the Russian revolution was still alive in the
hearts of Soviet working people.[7] (See, in this blog, “Did Trotsky Retreat…?”)
Its survival found expression in the Soviet victory over Hitlerism,
postwar social gains of Soviet working people, and the inspiration and
material aid provided to the Chinese and other anti-imperialist and
anti-capitalist revolutions. Even the Soviet Union’s ignominious
collapse in 1991 did not erase the historic memory of the 1917
revolution.The entire range of attempts during the twentieth century to achieve
some form workers’ power needs to be analyzed as a single process – a
task well worth our collective attention.Notes[1]. Lenin, “Letter to American Workers,” August 29, 1918, Collected Works, 28:62-75.[2]. Lenin’s views are taken up in more detail in a book, still in print, for which I wrote the initial draft, Lenin’s Final Fight, Speeches and Writings 1922-23, New York: Pathfinder, 1995.[3]. See Lenin, “The Party Crisis,” Collected Works, 32:43-54.[4]. Le Blanc is quoting here from J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, London: Oxford UP, 1966, vol. 1, p. 406.[5]. Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of Real Socialism: The Conductor and the Conducted, New York: Monthly Review, 2012.[6]. William Henry Chamberlin, Soviet Russia, A Living Record and a History, Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, pp. 397-401.[7]. See, on this blog, “Did Trotsky Retreat from Viewing the USSR as a Workers’ State?”, including footnotes 6 to 9.
