Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Came to Power, NLB, 1979
Most of the European far left parties expel dissidents for their views at the first sign of difference. The result is the division of revolutionaries into a multitude of sects. It is often said that Lenin built a party able to win power in the October Revolution precisely by expelling every ‘opportunist' and ‘reformist' from its ranks. In reality, however, the Bolshevik Party was rather different.
The main theme of The Bolsheviks Come to Power is that the Bolshevik Party of 1917 ‘bore little resemblance' to the conventional view of a party ‘by-and-large united, authoritarian, conspiratorial' and ‘effectively controlled by Lenin'. According to Professor Rabinowitch, the party's internal life was ‘relatively democratic', ‘tolerant' and ‘open'. Indeed, he believes this to have been one of the chief reasons for the party's success in October.
A subsidiary aim of the book is to show that the aims of the Bolsheviks were shared by the mass of the workers and soldiers of Petrograd. This is well known. The real value of the book, which concentrates on the tactical disputes in the party between July and October 1917, is that it demonstrates that the Bolsheviks decided their political course by dialogue rather than by the modern methods of splits, heresy hunting and the expulsion of dissidents. And the differences among the Bolsheviks at this time were serious.
The political choices facing the Bolsheviks in 1917 were difficult and critical. In July, almost every worker and soldier in Petrograd, angry with Kerensky's order for an offensive against the Germans, took to the streets demanding an end to the war. Some Bolsheviks wanted to turn these armed demonstrations into an insurrection. Lenin's policy was to continue pressing the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries to remove the capitalist ministers from the government and take power — a peaceful policy because as a result of the strength of the February uprising these ministers governed only by permission of the Soviet leaders.
The July demonstrations were bloodily suppressed by the government and the Soviet leadership. Lenin fled to Finland; other Bolsheviks were thrown into prison. Had the counter-revolution triumphed? Had the Mensheviks and SRs sold out completely? The Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Party held in late July answered yes. Lenin now decided that the party must make plans for an armed uprising. But when General Kornilov attacked Petrograd in August, the situation changed once more.
At the General's approach, the Mensheviks and SRs, together with every conceivable mass organisation of workers, soldiers and sailors, took up arms. The Bolsheviks hesitated, then joined in. Petrograd became an armed camp and Kornilov was defeated by an impressive display of working class unity.
The Kornilov experience revived the hopes of some Bolsheviks that the Mensheviks and SRs might yet be persuaded to expel the bourgeois ministers from the government. The Soviets would then be sovereign, the revolution could proceed peacefully, and the Bolsheviks turn their [illegible]. Unfortunately, the Mensheviks and SRs, after some hesitation, renewed their support for Kerensky's coalition with the bourgeois ministers. Lenin was now convinced that the bourgeoisie would remain in the government unless the Bolsheviks took it upon themselves to organize its armed overthrow. Moreover, the Bolsheviks were beginning to win majorities in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets, and the peasant war, which the Bolsheviks supported, had begun in earnest.
After a furious internal struggle the Leninists finally got their way at the historic Central Committee of October 10: the insurrection was on. Fresh disagreement broke out in September and October: this time over how the uprising should be carried out. Should the party call on the masses in its own name, or use the authority of some soviet body? Should the Bolsheviks sail a battleship up the Neva and arrest the government without further delay, as Lenin demanded, or follow the more cautious plan, devised by Trotsky, and eventually adopted, to arrest the government on the pretext of protecting the Second National Congress of Soviets planned for late October?
These were serious tactical conflicts, and behind some of them lay differences which Rabinowitch rightly calls ‘programmatic'. They came into the open during the debate in September over whether to boycott the Democratic State Conference, and, more spectacularly, when Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed the October uprising itself.
What was the nature of these differences? Mensheviks held the view that the coming revolution in Russia, if successful, would turn Russia into a democratic capitalist country. The main difference between them was that the Mensheviks believed the liberal bourgeoisie should straightway hold political power, whereas Before 1917, both the Bolsheviks and the [illegible] the Bolsheviks envisaged a ‘Jacobin' interlude of worker and peasant dictatorship.
However, in 1917, Lenin changed his mind about the goal of the Russian revolution. Believing the socialist revolution in the West to be at hand, he adopted Trotsky's view that a revolutionary government in Russia should take over private property and start to build socialism. This, of course, ruled out a bourgeois democratic republic. It meant the permanent transfer of power to the workers and peasants. Here was something that the Mensheviks and SRs would never accept. Zinoviev and Kamenev, Lenin's oldest and closest lieutenants, resisted Lenin's change of mind and remained as keen as ever for the Bolsheviks to maintain the bloc with the parties favouring a democratic capitalist republic. So it was that they insisted on attending the Democratic State Conference, opposed the October insurrection, and were caught during the uprising negotiating with the Mensheviks and SRs for a coalition of the three soviet parties (even after the Mensheviks and SRs had joined Krasnov's Cossacks to crush the Bolsheviks). In effect, these right-wing Bolsheviks were still trying to persuade the Mensheviks and SRs [illegible] of traditional Bolshevism: break the coalition with the bourgeois liberals and form an all-worker and peasant coalition that would create a bourgeois-democratic republic.
Unfortunately, Rabinowitch's treatment of these, the most fundamental differences among the Bolsheviks, is sketchy and inadequate. This may have something to do with his evident belief that an all-socialist coalition was still feasible in late 1917. The Bolshevik Insurrection, he writes, ‘prevented the creation by the (Soviet) congress of a socialist coalition government in which the moderate socialists might have had a strong voice'. In reality, however, a coalition of this sort had already become impossible, the divergences between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks having become too wide. Furthermore, Rabinowitch under-estimates the extent to which the workers themselves favoured a government of the Bolsheviks as distinct from a coalition of all the Soviet parties. Finally, he overlooks the fact that the Bolsheviks had not organised the armed overthrow of the Provisional Government (and it was this, rather than the timing of the uprising, which angered the Mensheviks and SRs) it would not have fallen, at least not to the left. Kerensky no longer considered himself bound by the instructions of a Soviet Congress, especially one with a Bolshevik majority.
That differences existed among the Bolsheviks is not a newly-discovered fact. Trotsky discussed them at length in his History of the Russian Revolution, Lessons of October, and elsewhere. A recent book by A.V. Daniels, Red October, covers much the same ground as The Bolsheviks Come to Power. Yet no other account shows in such a detailed way that inner-party struggle, far from being restricted to the Central Committee, raged at all levels of the Bolshevik organization. A creative relationship between party leaders, party members and the broad masses was indispensable to victory.
This is not to say that the party was without discipline. Controversy was heated and the danger of botching the revolution by a wrong decision was obvious to all. And yet, by and large, the party respected a common discipline. It is true that during the July Days, as Rabinowitch has shown in an earlier study, Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising, some of the hotheads of the Military Organization and the Petrograd Committee were doing their own thing. The indiscipline of Zinoviev and Kamenev in October is, of course, well known. Nevertheless, these occasions were rare, and the Bolsheviks remained the most coherent and effective of all the popular parties in the revolution.
Nor does inner-party democracy cancel the importance of certain leading individuals. The role of individuals in the historical process should never be under-estimated. Without Lenin's April Theses, the Bolsheviks would not have made the October Revolution. Without his restraint, there would have been a disaster in July. Without his vociferous campaign in September and October, the party might not have turned to insurrection in time (for Trotsky did not have Lenin's influence among the old Bolsheviks). The nerve and judgement of Lenin and Trotsky contrast sharply with Liebknecht's foolery in Berlin on November 9, 1918, and his repeat performance in January 1919. These three men between them altered the course of European history. Nevertheless, Lenin was shaped by the party, which did not hesitate to oppose his views, sometimes for the better. If, for example, the Bolsheviks had followed to the letter his advice to pre-empt the Soviet Congress, they may have bungled the revolution. One thing is certain: a party run by command and blind obedience would have made a fiasco of the Russian Revolution. (With regard to that other great leader, Trotsky, Rabinowitch fails to deal with Trotsky's perspectives on the Russian revolution, or to fully rehabilitate him as the organizer of the October Revolution, giving too much importance to the effect of Lenin's arrival [illegible] Institute on the night of October [illegible].)
The tolerance of wide-ranging differences within the best revolutionary party of the century surely holds lessons for the fissile left-wing parties of today. For example, in his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky refers to the right-wing Bolsheviks as ‘centrists'. In Lessons of October, he describes them as a ‘social democratic' tendency ‘in sharp opposition to the proletarian revolution'. Their line, he writes, would have paralysed the party in October. The workers would have risen without party leadership and the revolution in all probability ended in blood. And yet, as Rabinowitch makes clear, there was never any suggestion that Kamenev and Zinoviev should be expelled merely for expressing their views. Lenin raised the question of expulsion only when they broke party discipline — which they did by publishing a public attack on the Central Committee in a rival paper, and by disobeying orders in October to stop negotiating with the other parties for a coalition.
The Bolshevik Party was not alone in tolerating a wide range of views in their ranks — a range of differences wider than those which divide the far left today into separate parties. The Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, for example, were members of one party, the RSDLP, until 1912; the German section of the Second International embraced both Luxemburg and Kautsky; Lenin and Trotsky worked in the Third International alongside ultra-leftists like Bordiga; Trotsky remained in the Comintern long after it had adopted the theory of social fascism, of socialism in one country, and neo-Menshevik perspectives for the colonial revolution (China). It is also useful to remember that Marx and the anarchist leader Bakunin co-existed for several years in the First International, which foundered in 1873 upon Bakunin's organizational practices rather than his political views.
Lenin split with the Second International only after the historic betrayal of 1914, which convinced him of the need for a demonstrative [illegible] sure, after the historic betrayal in Germany, that it had become too rotten to allow him to put up a serious fight for his views among its members. [It is] hard to believe that things have reached this stage on the modern far left. This is not to say there are no serious differences among us. The theory of state capitalism, for instance, is surely not an example of revolutionary Marxism. Nor is the decision of many leftists to give political support to a bourgeois coalition government in Nicaragua, on the grounds that it is being ‘controlled' by the FSLN (analogous, this, to the support given by Stalin and Kamenev in March 1917 to the Lvov-Kerensky government, which was being ‘controlled' by the Soviet that emerged from the February uprising). But these differences are insufficient by themselves to justify separate parties.
A demonstration of all this was perhaps furnished in Portugal in 1974-75. There the revolutionaries presented the workers with half-a-dozen far left parties. No other revolution has witnessed such curious behaviour. In no proletarian revolution of the past has there been more than [illegible] (Menshevik and Bolshevik), and two in the German (SPD and USPD). The Spanish revolution was [illegible] in having four (SP, CP, POUM, and CNT-FAI). These party divisions expressed, at least at some stage, a choice between proletarian revolution and counter-revolution. In Portugal, with the exception of parties like the MRPP, which acted in a counter-revolutionary manner, this was surely not the case as far as parties like the LCI, the PAP-OR, the MES, or the LUAR, are concerned. These parties had disagreements over tactics, style, and sometimes elements of programme, but little, in my opinion, that justified the existence of separate parties. The Portuguese revolution had no historical idiosyncrasy requiring six parties of the far-left. That was the product of thirty years of the European revolutionary movement, [illegible] which the Portuguese working class paid the bill. If these far left parties had fused in 1974 they might have been able to challenge the reformists at the level of government in 1975. A historic opportunity was wasted.
Portugal should be a lesson to us all. In the 1980s, one of the most important tasks of all those fighting for a socialist revolution is to unite in a common party, disciplined but democratic. If, during the next decade, another Portugal should find us in the same disunited condition we are in today, we shall infallibly repeat the farce of 1975. In the eyes of history, what criminals we shall be! NLB's decision to publish Rabinowitch's book on the Bolshevik Party is to be welcomed.