Loren: My name is Loren and what we’re going to deal with today is Lenin and Luxemburg. This is a huge topic. Both of these people are great revolutionaries and there are libraries of books written about them. So in two hours, I’m going to try to sort of summarize what I think is really important about them. First of all, how many people had a chance to read Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike? I’m sure on a first read a lot of it struck you as kind of strange or unfamiliar. But I think the more you get into it you’ll understand what a radical text it is. I re-read it last night for the first time in many years, and it just hit me between the eyes like the first time or second times I read it. I’m sure there are a lot of references in it that wouldn’t be terribly familiar. I’m going to start with Luxemburg. It’s kind of arbitrary but here we go. I think towards the end you’ll see how it all fits together.

Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1870. She was Jewish, born in a Polish-speaking area. The first thing we’ve got to realize is that at this time , Poland did not exist on the map. Poland was wiped off the map in the late 18th century. It only became a country again after World War 1. Polish nationalism was a tremendously powerful force that Rosa Luxemburg had to deal with and she was very critical or hostile to it. So by the time the Socialist movement in Poland became a mass movement, there were two major wings. One was Polish nationalist, almost proto-fascist ,and the other one was Internationalist Marxist, and Rosa Luxemburg was a major figure in the latter. Poland, even though it didn’t formally exist, always played an important role in the European revolutionary movement. Much of what I’m going talk about today will strike you as ancient history, and what they call “Eurocentric” today. I think it’s really important, as I hope you’ll see in the course of our discussion, and I do want it to be a discussion. So please feel free to interrupt, and ask questions if I make references that aren’t clear. All of these questions are totally alive today, such as the question of nationalism, in a different form but still completely contemporary. So the Polish question was a very important question in the revolutionary movement in Europe. The Poles were famous for failed uprisings. Poland was divided between Russia, Austria and Germany; each had a share of it. In 1846 and in 1863 there were these massive insurrections which were mainly crushed by the Russian Czar’s Army. But there were also rallies of support all over Europe; Marx was involved. There were demonstrations for Polish independence, Polish liberation and so on. So the Polish question was just all over the place. One of the interesting things about Rosa Luxemburg is that she broke with the tradition of support for Polish nationalism. Why did she do that? She was smuggled out of Poland in a pile of hay, on a farmer’s cart, in about 1890, to get to Germany where she could participate in a more open Socialist movement. A few years after that she went to graduate school in Switzerland.

Switzerland, as some of you probably have known, was a major magnet for revolutionaries at this time. And particularly Russian revolutionaries and from those other repressed nationalities in those different empires. So the graduate schools in the big cities of Switzerland were basically seminars of revolutionaries, arguing about all these questions of the revolutionary movement. Rosa wrote her doctoral dissertation on the topic ‘The Industrial Development of Poland’. This may sound like a dry topic but her purpose in writing it was to demonstrate that the project of an independent Poland was a utopia, because; the Polish economy was so integrated into the Russian economy that there had to be a revolution in both places. So, she said, ‘’Polish independence is utopian within capitalism and it is reactionary within socialism’’. This became a very controversial thing. She was really disliked, and hence much later, in the Polish Solidarnosc movement in 1980 and 1981, Rosa Luxemburg was never mentioned because she was known for her anti-nationalist views. That’s a whole other story, but she became a militant, an agitator, a journalist, and a revolutionary in the German socialist movement. She was really tri-national. She became fluent in German; she was active in the German, Polish and Russian movements, and she spoke all these languages and probably a couple of others.

She was such a great speaker that she was greatly in demand on the circuit of conferences, meetings and things like that. There is a pretty interesting movie about her you might want to see. It’s just called “Rosa Luxemburg”; it was made in 1980s by a German woman named Margarethe von Trotta. It’s well worth seeing. It’s a full length feature film and it’s just very curiously makes absolutely no mention of Lenin or of Rosa Luxemburg’s relationship to Lenin because the film had to be approved by the highest levels of the (then) East German authorities. East Germany of course still existed at that time. But aside from that, it’s really worth seeing. Now, why did Rosa Luxemburg go to Germany and get involved in the SPD? The SPD was and is a Social Democratic Party in Germany. At that time, the German Socialist party was the “queen” of all socialist parties in the world. It was, then, what Russia became after 1917; everybody went to Germany to find out about it. The works of its main theoreticians were translated into all kinds of languages. It was kind of the orthodoxy in the international movement. I am going to skip over a lot of details, so anytime you want to ask this or that please feel free.

Speaker 2: Wasn’t she very high up in the Polish socialist party?

Loren: Oh yeah! She was in the central group. It was called the…, it had this very long name. It was called the “Socialist Party of Poland and the Kingdom of Lithuania”, another country that was completely submerged by the Russian empire. Luxemburg’s party was known for being very orthodox Marxist and very anti-nationalist. So they were always fighting with the pro- nationalist, you might say, a proto-fascist Polish Socialist Party, led by a man named Pilsudski,who after World War I became the strong man, not to say dictator, of newly independent Poland.

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I want to get back to the SPD. By the time Luxemburg got to Germany it was a mass party with hundreds of thousand of members, thirty newspapers, journals, a whole network that it’s almost impossible to imagine today in a capitalist country. It had gone through this long history; it had been repressed from 1878 to 1890, for twelve years, under Bismarck. It was just more or less completely underground, but allowed to participate in elections. So in the course of the twelve years it was repressed, it grew stronger and stronger; finally it was so strong they had to legalize it. So, it was legalized in 1890. Luxemburg got there shortly after that. If I go off into what the SPD was, we will be here until 10 PM. I just want to say a few things about it. Even though it was known as the party of orthodox Marxism, Marx and Engels privately thought it was very highly problematic. In their own private correspondence they referred to it as these idiot social democrats. Engels attacked the very idea of Social Democracy as having nothing to do with communism and their projects because… Engels was ambiguous about the nature of bourgeois democracy, they were not —

Speaker 3: So why were they against [inaudible] democracy?

Loren: Well! Because they were communists and they realized that the party couldn’t call itself

Communist. The liberal forces at that time was still battling with all these monarchies, at that time most of Europe was under one kind of monarchy or another. So when the revolutions of 1848 failed, Marx and Engels had to flee to England. This was before Switzerland became this big centre; at that time, London was kind of the place revolutionaries could go and be tolerated. Volume 2 of Marx’s Complete Works is a 400 page polemic called The Great Men of Exile, which is a portrait of the exile scene in London, denouncing them all as worthless sectarians that…, kind of imagine fifteen different groups like the today’s Spartacist League all in this very intense exile scene and that gives you a certain idea. After the revolution died away, Marx went off to the British museum to write Capital. He wasn’t turning his back on activity at all; he was just waiting for the next wave. Which he for a long time was expecting the day after tomorrow, but that’s another story. In 1857, he wrote to Engels that he expected revolution imminently and regretted that no one would read his book.

So, meanwhile, while he was in exile; these different forces in Germany started to organize. There was this guy name Ferdinand Lassalle who was the most important of them. Ferdinand Lassalle was not a Marxist and not even a materialist. He was very intelligent, a great speaker, charismatic, and kind of a natural leader. His idea of socialism was essentially having a bunch of cooperatives in which the market would not be abolished, and also relying on the state. Later he got into a secret relationship with Bismarck, who was a key unifier of Germany about ten years later. Lassalle and his group were socialist; they hated the liberals, Bismarck hated the liberals, so they had these negotiations about sticking it to the liberals together, which ultimately didn’t come to anything. These negotiations remained secret for forty years until after the Russian Revolution. So Lassalle was always this great hero of the revolutionary movement until these documents were found that showed he had these secret meetings with Bismarck. Meanwhile this other faction of pro- Marx people also developed in Germany and they finally fused in 1875 to form the SPD. Then they were banned three years later and re-emerged in 1890, becoming this mass party. But this Lassallean influence always remained strong; for example, after the Russian Revolution, at one of the first congresses of the Communist (Third) International, there were three massive photographs behind the speakers’ podium: Marx, Engels and Lassalle.

And once it was discovered that Lassalle was secretly involved with Bismarck, that all came to an end, but that just shows how powerful his influence was.

So Rosa Luxemburg stepped into this situation and what emerged were basically three factions in the SPD. There was the left wing, of which she was the most important spokesperson; then there was the center, around a guy named Karl Kautsky. At that time Karl Kautsky was known throughout the world the way Lenin was known after the Russian Revolution. He was considered THE heir of Marx. But in fact he had all kinds of problems and he was no way near Marx’s level. But he was in those years the guy who would decide on questions of orthodoxy. So he headed the centre, though it wasn’t really called the centre at that time, I’ll get to that in a minute. Then there was the right wing , which was based on the trade unions. Now, in The Mass Strike, Rosa Luxemburg is mainly denouncing that right wing and the trade union leaders and the people in the party who were oriented to them. Just like trade unions today, (though at that time they were bigger and more powerful), they became conservative forces. They became more and more interested in preserving themselves as trade unions and less and less interested in revolution, but they hid behind the orthodoxy of the party. Luxemburg talks about this dual relationship between the party and its ideas, then about the trade unions and their ideas. She was constantly getting into trouble; she would go to some city and make some radical speech, and would offend the centre and the right bureaucrats of that city, and there would be turmoil in the party etc.

Things really came to a head in 1898 when a guy named Bernstein published a book in which he basically said…, I think it’s called Evolutionary Socialism. Bernstein said in effect that Karl Marx was a great thinker, but let’s face it, his ideas are completely out of date. Marx was imagining a collapse of the capitalist system, he was imagining the that workers were getting poorer as time went on, when in fact we’re seeing the workers are getting better and better off. There was some amount of temporary truth to that, but Bernstein was just basically throwing Marx out the window. This led to this huge battle that was known as the Revisionist Debate. That’s when the term “revisionism” first came into the Marxist lexicon. On paper, the left won the debate, and Kautsky sided with Luxemburg…

Speaker 3: Bernstein was arguing that there would be like a gradual evolution.

Loren: Right! His slogan was “the goal is nothing, the movement is everything” and therefore all we have to do is just keep fighting for better conditions and one day we’ll have socialism. We don’t have to worry about the revolution. Every aspect of Marx just went out the window except the trade unions struggle.( Anybody want to ask a question at this point?)

So, nominally the left won that debate but in reality and practice the right just kept on doing what it was doing and got stronger and stronger. That’s where 1905 came in and Luxemburg’s pamphlet is about the 1905 revolution. The 1905 revolution is what brings Lenin and Luxemburg together to some extent.

As I was saying earlier, Poland, Russia and Germany were all involved in this area where the revolution took place. If you read The Mass Strike, you’ll remember these incredible passages about thirty different cities all going out on strike at once. It’s just suddenly something happens and it electrifies everybody and in no time hundreds of other cities are doing the same thing. I’d say the key thing, we’ll go over the text more carefully in a bit, is that Luxemburg is distinguishing here between what Marx in different writings called the ‘class in itself’ which is the class when it’s like sort of typical trade union struggle. One industry, one factory, one town, as opposed to the “class for itself” when it emerges as a force in the whole country actually fighting the state! The 1905 revolution was as important, maybe in some ways as important as a social movement as the 1917 revolution itself. Because it’s the first time that these institutions called ‘’soviets’’ appeared’. (“Soviet” in Russian just means ‘’council’’.)

Speaker 3: What does a council mean in English?

Loren: Okay! Let me just back up for a second. Up until that time most people, even radical people (I’m not sure about Luxemburg), but most people imagined that socialism, whether gaining power by election or revolution, that a socialist party would capture the state and do all kinds of good things. There was very little thought about what a socialist society would really look like. Suddenly in 1905 came along and these soviets appeared all over Russia and Russian Poland. Soviets are councils but they’re like regional councils. They’re not just based on the workplace, they’re based on class so all kinds of proletarian people, such as the unemployed and the retired, could participate in them. And for brief periods they had actual power in these different cities. They were so unique, so novel that Lenin, who was off in Switzerland in exile, was very suspicious of them for weeks until he began to realize this is the way in which working class power expresses itself. Along with the soviets came workers’ councils, which were councils that took over specific workplaces and ran them under workers’ control. And of course they are related to each other. Workers’ councils elected delegates for the soviets and it kind of , for a very short period, solved the question of what a real society run by ordinary working people would look like. So it was just an incredible breakthrough and it was not something out of any book. No one before 1905 had talked about these institutions. It was a classic example of the discovery by a movement in motion.

It was truly a working class creation. People like CLR James for example, had the idea that the role of revolutionaries is to “recognize and record”. Well, this is the classic example of where that approach is right in the mark. It is recognizing the importance of something that the class itself developed while it was in motion and seeing that as a theoretical breakthrough. The theoreticians come along and say “well this is very important, this is the class for itself.” I don’t totally agree with James overall but if you ever want to have a situation that confirms his way of looking at things, this is it.

Speaker 3: How did the revolution in 1905 begin?

Loren: The way it began was Russia and Japan got into a war in 1904. This war itself was incredibly significant on the world scale because; it was the first time that a non-European country, using modern weapons and modern strategy and a modern army, defeated a European country. It was celebrated all over the world, all over the colonial world because most of what we call the Third World, the developing world today, at that time was under different colonial empires. It actually helped to inspire the founding of the NAACP in the United States, which was founded in the same year. It was something way beyond just a Japanese victory. The Japanese victory itself was very important in terms of the emergence of real capitalism in East Asia because; up until that time…

Speaker 3: I know that the Japanese won in the war; Japan became like a big political center for East Asian revolutionaries and nationalists. So could it be argued that while this was happening in like Germany it was happening also in Japan? Like with this epicenter like propagation of revolutionaries and nationalists?

Loren: Sure! Tokyo became around that time was for East Asian revolutionaries what London was for revolutionaries in Western Europe. It’s where you went to really immerse yourself in politics, Marxism etc. The Japanese translated Marx probably before many western countries translated Marx. Korea at that time was a Japanese colony, and China was very weak and was divided up among different western powers. Revolutionaries just flocked to Tokyo, so it created this real international scene. It was of tremendous importance. The other thing that was remarkable in that 1904-05 war is that the Russians actually sent a fleet all the way around Africa and the Indian Ocean to take care of this new country and the Japanese just sank virtually every ship in the fleet. There were a couple of very famous naval battles and then there were battles on land as well. The world was absolutely stunned because no one expected Japan to win the war or even do well in the war. So, the shock of the defeat, the Russian loss set off…, Russia was a tinder box, I’ll get to that more when I talk about Lenin. But that’s what started the revolution; just a bunch of protests against the war which escalated into these s soviets and workers’ councils.

Let me now shift over to Lenin. During World War 1 and after World War 1, Lenin and Luxemburg were in closer touch. Luxemburg was quite aware of Lenin. Probably one of the most important points I want to emphasize is at that time Russia appeared to the rest of the revolutionary movement like some backwater that nobody else knew much about, nobody cared much about. The Russian revolutionaries were mainly in exile in Western Europe.

They would hold these congresses of a few hundred people that would last for six weeks with people getting into fist fights, shouting at each other in a language that few outsiders understood. They were just considered very weird. No one ever imagined that Russia would become the centre of a revolutionary breakthrough. In a certain sense I would say it was kind of an accident that it did. Somebody once described it as if a platoon on the western front during World War I that accidentally captured a huge division of German troops. That was certainly how it struck people at the time. Let’s get to that when we go through Lenin.

Lenin was also born in 1870. He came from almost an aristocratic background. After the revolution the Communist party took a poll asking everybody to describe their class origin, Lenin proudly wrote down “aristocrat”. His father was as petty aristocrat who was actually a civil servant in the Tsarist bureaucracy. Russia, as you probably, know at that time was one of the most repressive societies on earth. The Tsarist autocracy meant the rule of one person, and dominated society even much more than any empire in western Europe like the Austrian or German, which were repressive enough. Even the nobility in Russia was essentially almost appointed by the Tsar, which was absolutely not the case in Western Europe. The Tsar could more or less take land from the nobles.

Speaker 3: Sorry to interrupt! I’m having difficulty trying to imagine that.

Loren: As you can imagine Russia was economically backward, and until the late 19th century the great majority of people were peasants. As you know, Russia was a huge country. It was expanding eastward the way the United States was expanding westward. Actually, I remember reading somewhere that the empire grew by 365 square miles a day for three hundred years. The Russians were incorporating all the countries on the southern tier, the Muslim countries like Uzbekistan, Turkestan, and all the other stans. They were constantly being incorporated into the Russian empire by military expansion and by pioneers sent out to colonize, start farms and things like that. It was a dynamic system in its own way. Russia started to industrialize in the 1860s. Of course, almost entirely foreign investment began industry. But even by the time of the revolution itself in 1917, only about 10% of the population was working class. So the peasantry was 80% to 90% of the population. Needless to say, the peasant question was the question of the early revolutionary movement in Russia. From the time that I spent in East Asia and Korea, I was quite interested to learn that the early revolutionary movements in Japan and Korea and China they all looked to Russia much more than they did to Europe. They followed events in Russia because… it was the country that seemed most similar to their own situation with this mass peasant majority. So writers like Tolstoy, for example, were widely read in translation in Asia from the 1880s onward, and many other examples like that.

Russia developed revolutionary movements of sorts well before industrialization, and it was mainly in the aristocracy. The aristocracy was a very small group of people on top of this peasant mass. You have to realize that like, for example, when Lenin was going to university, there were probably two thousand or three thousand university students in all of Russia in a population of a hundred and fifty million people. So when Lenin was talking about the role of intellectuals in the movement you’ve got to remember that he is talking about this very small group of educated people within this vast mass of people, most of whom were illiterate. And most of whom were almost literally owned by the local landlords whose estates they worked on. So the movement started from a very difficult level. So industrialization began, and with industrialization came a lot of western ideas that had already began to percolate after the French Revolution and Napoleon invaded Russia . The Russian elite was totally hooked into French culture. The aristocrats actually spoke French among themselves. They considered Russian to be a backward, barbaric language.

So, by the middle of the 19th century the Utopian Socialists like Fourier and others were all the rage in this very small world of the intelligentsia. If you’re familiar with Dostoyevsky, he was arrested in 1849 as a member of an underground Fourierist socialist group, and he was sent off to Siberia for ten years. It totally turned his head inside out, completely changed him. He became something of a reactionary, but we don’t have to get off into that. He wrote a great book , by the way, called The Devils, which is a portrait of the Russian revolution milieu; we can get to that in a minute. Marx was very disappointed that the first foreign language translation of Volume One of Capital was into Russian, as he was expecting it be into French and English. I don’t think Capital came out in English until the 1880s if I’m not mistaken. The German original came out in 1867: the Russian translation (largely done by Bakunin by the way), came out a few years later. Bakunin thought Marx’s Capital was a great book even when they had totally fallen out. But because of; the agrarian nature of Russia, the movement that really took off was called Populist, the Populist movement.

The Populist movement was a few thousand people from this educated elite that, starting in the early 1870s, decided that they were going to foment a peasant revolution by going to the people. Their main organization was called The People’s Will. In 1874 thousands of students dropped out of school and went to the countryside to try to arouse the peasantry to revolution. There had been a number pf great peasant revolutions pver several hundred years but as you can imagine, these highly educated people trying to pass themselves off as ordinary peasants in the backwaters of Russia didn’t work out too well, and most of the time the peasants actually turned them over to the police, things like that. So it was kind of a fiasco. The Populists also, after that disappointment, turned to terrorism. They managed to assassinate two Tsars, in 1881 and 1888. They assassinated a lot of other Russian officials as well. One of the things that is important for understanding Lenin is that there was no comparable social stratum anywhere in the world, then or since, really, like this Russian intelligentsia. It was just in a world of its own of extremely hardened people. The conspirators who killed the first Tsar in 1881, when they went to the scaffolds, one of them had talked. I think there was six of them and they didn’t even look at the traitor. They just were there, the hoods went on and they were hung. They didn’t say a word except “down with the Tsars” or something like that. You’ve got to realize these were just incredibly repressive conditions.

Anybody arrested with a book or a pamphlet, not to mention attending a meeting, could be sent off to Siberia or sent to these prisons that were a virtual death sentence. A very important twist on this (there is, by the way, a great book which I highly recommend. Franco Venturi, The Roots of Revolution) is a history of the whole revolutionary movement up to the appearance of Marxism. It covers everything from the French Revolution to the history of the last Populists. In the mid-1870s this young charismatic brilliant guy named Nechayev became part of the revolution. Nechayev was the ultimate conspirator. I think it’s somewhat controversial, but he apparently killed a member of his own group who was suspected of being a police spy. It became a cause celebre in the world press. Nechayev was in and out of jail many times. He was such a charismatic guy that he actually managed to recruit the guards to his own cause and they would let him escape or they would bring him books. He was really quite a character. Then he went to the west, where he met Bakunin and he convinced Bakunin that he had an underground organization of a hundred thousand people behind him in Russia and they were going to set up a new international organization. This “Nechayev episode” really gave Bakunin something of a black eye. He’d been so taken in by this. The reason I’m mentioning Nechayev is that he theorized the hard, exceptional quality of the Russian revolutionary milieu. It’s called the Revolutionary Testament. Let me just read to you briefly a couple of passages from it. This was something that did not exist in the west. Karl Marx would never had written something like this.

“The revolutionary is a lost man. He has no interests of his own, no cause of his own, no feelings, no habits, no belongings…Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion – the revolution.” “In the depths of his being, not just in words but in deed, he has broken every tie with the civil order, with the educated world and all laws, all conventions and generally accepted conditions of this world.”

“He will be an implacable enemy of this world and if he continues to live in it that will only be to destroy it… The revolutionary despises all doctrinaires; he has rejected the science of the world, leaving it to the next generation. He knows only one science, that of destruction. He despises public opinion, he despises and hates the existing social ethic and all its expressions. For him everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, everything that stands in its way is immoral. The character of a true revolutionary has no place for any romanticism such as mental enthusiasm or seduction, nor has it any place for private hatred or revenge. The revolutionary passion becomes a daily hourly passion, which most people liken to cold calculation” etc.

You get the idea? This was in extreme form the mentality of this hardened underground elite from generation to generation. I mentioned that some of the Bolsheviks later officially denounced Nechayev . But there was something about that mentality that ran through this whole milieu… Maybe when get to the origins of Stalinism, that’s something we can talk about. People like Lenin, Trotsky, all the people who were off in Switzerland or England in exile writing books and so on, they were shaped by this but people in Russia, the underground, the people who were known as the “praktiki”, the people who really did the daily work, were imbued with this ethos.

Even though the Bolsheviks were anti-Populist and criticizing Nechayev. It’s a very touchy subject. I’m going to just go off on a tangent for one minute, When Dostoevsky’s book came out, The Devils, it had a fictional character based on Nechayev. It portrayed this whole episode, the execution of the suspected spy and the whole scandal that emerged from that. After the Bolshevik Revolution and the triumph of Stalin, the complete works of Dostoevsky were published for decades, but always without that book. The Stalinists knew that he had put his finger on something important. Finally; in the 1950s, after Khrushchev came in, they published The Devils for the first time in over 30 years. Some of the Soviet bureaucrats would read it and they were just say: “how did he know?” “This guy is writing in the 1870s and he’s got down to the smallest details what would later happen when the revolution took power.”

So Lenin was growing up in the provinces; his father was this low level conventional bureaucrat but his older brother got involved with the Populist movement. He was arrested in a plot to assassinate the Tsar in about 1886. He was executed almost immediately along with other comrades. Up until that time Lenin was a kind of a dreamer, sitting in the backyard reading novels, making fun of his brother who was a biologist always studying insects and other species; “why are you wasting your time with that stuff?” The execution of his brother totally changed Lenin. He took over all of his habits.

Of course it all went into the study of society, economics and theory, and so on. He is out in the provinces; he was not immediately exposed to Marxism. By the early 1890s after he got a law degree he was already influenced by revolutionary ideas, in a confused way. But he finally got to the big time in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, the city that was then called St Petersburg was later called Leningrad; that’s where he entered the revolutionary milieu. He immediately rose very quickly because he was so brilliant, articulate and knowledgeable. He was incredibly thorough, always studying conditions, statistics and so on. He was very quickly arrested and he was sentenced to Siberia. A friend of mine who much later went to Harvard used to say “in Russia when you failed in politics you went to Siberia; in America when you fail in politics you go to Harvard.” Going to Siberia at that time was not what it became later under Stalin. If you read any biography of Lenin, you can see that the revolutionaries had books, they had access to newspapers and correspondence. Lenin himself was out hunting, fishing, ice skating in the winter, hiking; it wasn’t a bad life. Lenin’s wife came with him and they had a circle of people. So during these five years in Siberia, as you can just imagine in the days of the internet, if the newspaper came one day late from Moscow he would be pacing back and forth; he really wanted to stay on top of things.

So, he wrote his first important book, which is called ‘’The Development of Capitalism in Russia’’. It’s a massive 500-page book; I never managed to get all the way through it. Some people say it’s more important to understand what Lenin did in power than What is to be done?, which is the work that is conventionally cited. I should cite also one other aspect to the backdrop of Lenin. In the 1860s there was this guy named Chernyshevsky, who was the hero of the young Populist movement at that time. He was an older revolutionary; he also wrote all kinds of books. He was exiled and sent to Siberia around 1863, I don’t think he ever came back. But he wrote this novel that’s called What Is to Be Done? Lenin took that title for his own pamphlet. The novel portrays a main character, Rakhmetov, who more or less leads the life that is described later by Nechayev. . In other words, self-sacrifice, self-denial, everything for the revolution… Again illustrating this very special quality of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, Lenin apparently read that book twenty times, so it was one of his favorite novels. From a literary point of view, it’s unreadable, but it was absolutely a “best seller” in the revolutionary milieu in Russia in 1860s.

Victor Serge in his Memoirs has a portrait of Chernyshevsky, just as he was being humiliated in public, just as he was being sent into exile. and he writes “the old man, his head hung, grey hair, looking really miserable and he was going to be riding in a cart all the way to Siberia.. But would it have been better if he had become an academic?” I really always loved that formulation; it’s one of the reason I never became an academic.

So Lenin wrote his book; the reason why this book The Development of Capitalism in Russia is considered to be so important is that Lenin identifies (I think) five different strata of the Russian peasantry. When he actually took power, all the agricultural policies were based on the analysis of that book. Recently, this guy name John Marot has written a book about the peasant question in the Russian revolution. If you look on my website ‘Break Their Haughty Power’ ( breaktheirhaughtypower.org )you’ll find a review of it, which summarizes what he says. He basically said that Lenin got it all wrong.

Indeed there were rich peasants, poor peasants, peasants in between, these five different groups but, in reality, when they were threatened as peasants, they all came together in a certain way. So a lot of Lenin’s policies on the agrarian question were kind of wrong, at best. But that’s something else to talk about more when we get to Stalin.

Lenin finally was freed from Siberia, and goes back, and then he goes into exile in the west, Switzerland and later to England. Then he writes his other important book. It’s a little book, I thought of having us reading it for today, but it is a hundred pages; it’s called What Is To Be Done? Lenin sets out what he considers to be the way of having a revolutionary organization in the conditions of Tsarist repression and its police state; that’s where he comes up with this idea of the vanguard party. It’s not often pointed out but I will point it out that this guy Lassalle in Germany had really anticipated much of what Lenin said; because; what Lassalle was always arguing for was this military-like grouping of special professional revolutionaries. You will never find anything in the writing of Karl Marx about professional revolutionaries. Lassalle theorized it and it was taken over generally; it was considered like the blue of the sky in certain parts of the Russian movement. That’s what Lenin theorizes in this book What Is To Be Done?

There is a huge controversy about what exactly it means. There is whole eight hundred page book called Lenin Rediscovered by a guy named Lars Lih, which is definitely worth reading. He reconstructs the whole milieu to which Lenin addresses this book. It’s also interesting that on the title page of the first Russian edition of What Is To Be Done?, there is a quote from Lassalle saying “the party strengthens itself by purging itself.” Lars Lih in his appendix, actually provides his own translation of What Is To Be Done? in which Lenin comes across as a nice guy and that quote is missing from the translation. I contacted a couple of people I know who read Russian and asked if this word “purge” is the same word which was used in the mass trails and executions.Yes, indeed. It’s a frightening subject and people been arguing about it ever since, particularly since 1905 and particularly since Stalinism. What exactly does this pamphlet mean?

Speaker 3: When was it published and whem it was written?

Loren: It was written in 1902, and published in 1902 or 1903. In 1903 there was a congress of the Bolshevik party in Russia where this famous split occurred between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. It was really over the questions raised in What Is to Be Done? What it really came down to was a party resolution on who could be a member of the Bolshevik Party. Lenin was arguing for a tighter, more disciplined definition of membership. Whereas Martov, who was kind of the leader of the other faction said “people who pay dues and come to an occasional meeting and involve themselves in a peripheral way, they should be considered members too.” It’s funny that at the congress itself Lenin and Martov kept going back and forth saying “why don’t you make the formulation? No! No!, you do it.” Finally Lenin’s resolution carried and that became the beginning of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split. We’ll talk about that more when we get to the origins of Trotsky and Stalin next week. So these are the two major theoretical works of Lenin. By the way, Rosa Luxemburg wrote several critiques of Lenin – Problems of Russian Social Democracy and so on, in which she already zeroed in on the kind of elitist character of some of Lenin’s formulations. It’s a very complicated debate… Rosa Luxemburg is somebody that everybody likes. The liberals like Rosa Luxemburg because they saw her as kind of a democrat with a small “d”. Mensheviks like her because they see her as a critic of Lenin. Leninists like her because; she was a tough- minded revolutionary. When she was murdered in 1919, Lenin gave a funeral oration for her in which he said “Rosa Luxemburg was wrong on the national question.

She was wrong in the question of organization. She was wrong about economics. But as we know an eagle can sometimes fly lower than a chicken, but a chicken can never fly as high as an eagle, and Rosa Luxemburg will always be for us an eagle.” So even Lenin who disagreed with her on so many things recognized her as kindred spirit, another revolutionary that he disagreed with. So, there is a whole spectrum of opinion about Rosa Luxemburg. I believe that…, actually one of her pamphlets was published in the 1960s in the United States in English under the title “Leninism or Democracy?” which is absolutely not the title in German or Russian. But that’s how she was kind of integrated into a certain kind of ideology.

Lenin is off in Switzerland in 1905, and was puzzled by these things called soviets; what are they? But pretty quickly he recognizes that they are something very unique and very important. I don’t think he ever got back to Russia at that time. “1905” lasted for almost two years, just as Luxemburg describes in her pamphlet; one strike after another in whole regions. But finally, the revolution dies down.

Let me just go into hopefully one more theoretical background here. At this time, everybody and I mean everybody thought that the Russian revolution was going to be a bourgeois revolution. So when 1905, came along, the big demand of the movement was for a constitution, the constitutional assembly, elections, freedom of the press, right to trade union organizing etc. And the feeling that is striking when you read The Mass Strike, as great as this revolution is, it’s about putting an end to the Tsar’s autocracy and replacing that with bourgeois democracy, even though she is very clear that the actual liberals, the Russian bourgeois, are bunch of weaklings and in no position to lead this revolutionary movement for their own bourgeois democracy.

So, it would be a bourgeois revolution made by the working class. It’s only Trotsky who already in 1905 realized that, because of this fragility of the Russian bourgeoisie, there could be a working class revolution in Russia. He began to work this out in what’s called the theory of permanent revolution, which was a term already used by Marx. Let’s talk about that next time when we do Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky was way out in left field at that time. He’s the only important person who was arguing that. So twelve years later, in January 1917, Lenin was still in Switzerland and was invited to speak to the Swiss Socialist Youth. He talked to the Swiss Socialist Youth and said, ‘’Oh, you know, the bourgeois revolution will happen in Russia maybe in about 1950’’. Eight months later, he’s in power at the head of a working class revolution. So, it just shows how removed from reality theory can be, how this reality was moving so quickly. Even the most radical people were having a hard time keeping up. Lenin had the slogan “be as radical as reality”. This is a perfect illustration of it.

Okay! So in 1905 the Tsar is half-defeated, and does grant a constitutuent assembly. But within a couple of years he’s turned that just into nothing but a showpiece. I think at one point in the later years of ebb, in about 1910 or 1911, Lenin had eleven correspondents in all of Russia. Three or four years before he had been in touch with hundreds of people all over the place, lots of people were driven into exile in Siberia, and then World War 1 started. So this is where Lenin and Luxemburg really came together. Now one important thing to tie this all together; you recall this guy Kautsky and the so-called “center” of social democracy. Lenin revered Kautsky, whereas Rosa Luxemburg by 1910, from a whole series of incidents inside the German Social Democracy , had decided that Kautsky was not.., they were not in the same camp. There was effectively a break between them. The war started and, this is really quite remarkable. Up to that time it was always believed, and there was congress after congress of the Socialist International saying that in the event of a war in Europe all working class parties will oppose their own bourgeoisie and unite with the working class parties of all other countries and do whatever they could, maybe make the revolution.

Along comes World War I and every party in Europe collapsed into the patriotic hysteria in its own country. There were just massive crowds in the street and anybody who openly opposed the war in the street ran a good chance of being lynched. Interestingly, for some damn reason, only the Serbian Socialist Party refused to support its own bourgeoisie in the war. But that again is a whole other story. And interestingly the American Socialist Party also opposed American entry into the war. The U.S. didn’t enter the war for two and a half years but there was a strong left opposition, with the IWW as well, against the war. So the Second International collapses and you know Lenin is sitting in Switzerland and he gets the first newspapers and he can’t believe it; he thinks that the newspapers were police forgeries, about the German Social Democrats voting the war credits in the German parliament. But in fact it was true, so this already shows a very important difference between Lenin and Luxemburg in terms of their different insights into what was going on in the European movement as a whole. But Lenin quickly recovered and in 1915 there was a congress in a small town in Switzerland called Zimmerwald , where all the anti-war socialists of all of Europe came together and debated what to do. Even there, Lenin stood out as the extreme radical, more radical than Rosa Luxemburg. Some people were for peace without annexations, others were for a negotiated settlement. Whatever! There were all these different solutions. I think Luxemburg’s formulation was “peace without annexation.” Lenin said “turn the inter-imperialist war into civil war.” This was the opportunity for the working class revolution in the western world, and very shortly after this, things started to happen that looked like they were going that way, and there are mutinies in the French army. There were also mutinies in 1918, in the German Navy.

It was just clear that the different governments in Europe were barely keeping the lid on and forcing people to go on fighting. And finally in February 1917, there was a demonstration for Women’s Day in Petrograd and I think the police attacked the demo and maybe fired on it, and it led to the overthrow of the Tsar. Again showing how nobody, as Luxemburg says in this mass strike pamphlet, nobody plans these things. (Her formulation was “The mistakes of a mass movement in motion are more valuable than the decisions of the best central committee.” We can see the conditions; we can see that these governments were sitting on a volcano. But when, how, where, it’s all going to break out? It’s just totally beyond the control of the most intelligent central committee. So the Tsar falls and an actual bourgeois democracy is set up. It goes through a whole series of changes and winds up within a few months under the leadership of this guy Kerensky. And what does Kerensky do? Everybody who made the revolution wants the war to end and they want land to the peasants. And so even though the government continues to pursue the war, the peasants en masse start go back home and start seizing the land of the aristocracy. By the time of the October Revolution, most of the estates have been broken up and seized by the peasants living on them. There was nothing that this so-called provisional government could do about it. Lenin comes back in April of 1917 and he’s greeted at the Finland Station, which is the big train station in Petrograd, by fifty thousand people, masses of people cheering him.

They’re all taken with this idea that it’s a two stage bourgeois revolution and that bourgeois democracy is the goal of the revolution, it’s already there. And Pravda, the main newspaper of the Bolsheviks, edited by Stalin, is printing these articles about how great Kerensky and how great all these people in the provisional government are. Lenin gets off the train and makes a speech in which he denounces his own party and denounces its whole collaboration with the Kerensky regime, and says “look at what the working class is doing; the working class is headed for proletarian revolution” which will be as radical as reality. It’s kind of “We are the leaders, we must follow them.” And the most hardened Bolsheviks were just totally shocked by this speech. Some people said Lenin had become a Bakuninist or a putchist or whatever. It just led to an uproar within the party. But, Lenin being Lenin, with his prestige, , years of hammering away… This is the point at which, according to Trotsky, (and I think it’s true) Lenin and Trotsky are reconciled. Lenin accepts this idea of permanent revolution as the idea that the proletariat was going to go beyond the bourgeois revolution and make the proletarian revolution, together with revolution in the West. And that’s a very important point because they never imagined that a working class socialist revolution in backward Russia with 10 to 15% of the population in the working class could possibly build socialism. I think maybe I should stop there because; everything after that sort of leads very quickly to the Stalin and Trotsky battle, which we’ll deal next. But please some questions, comments. Let me drink some water…

Speaker 3: You didn’t finish the story about what happened to Luxemburg’s party collapsing.

Loren: That’s a very good point! Okay! So, back to Germany; Rosa Luxembourg is imprisoned first of all, after she makes some speeches against the war; she and a number of other anti-war socialists go to jail. And she wrote (you can look it up online) what is called the Junius Pamphlet which she published anonymously under the pseudonym Junius, denouncing the war, and denouncing the Social Democrats’ support for the war. Of course at the beginning just like everywhere else it’s a very small group of people who were seriously against the war but they started to make contact with each other. By 1916 they led a major split in the SPD and they’ set up another party that was called the Independent Social Democratic Party. It had a very serious working class base including a whole network of shop stewards in Berlin and other major cities, who were very antiwar and ready to move. So the war continues, the naval mutiny happens shortly after that. But it was very curious that from a purely military point of view at that time, it looked to many people like Germany still had a very good chance of winning the war because it hadn’t been defeated anywhere. The United States had just entered and hadn’t yet really become a factor. Then all of a sudden, a month or two before Germany surrendered, the top general staff said “this is hopeless, we’re going to lose. Let’s try to make peace now and get the best possible deal.”

But after the war, because of that situation; it gave rise to this thing that was known as the ‘stab in the back legend’ that blamed the Socialists and the Jews for having sabotaged Germany’s victory. But this is now getting into the post-war period, something of another story. So then as the government collapses, the revolution breaks out all over Germany. Workers’, soldiers’ and sailors’ councils are set up all over the place, with red flags. But it’s very curious; in the main plaza in downtown Berlin, a million people congregated on the first day. At one end of the plaza were Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the other major anti-war figure; who had both been in jail. They’re calling for the immediate establishment of the Soviet Republic of Germany, while at the other end of the plaza, with the same crowd, all the Social Democrats were talking about the need to immediately establish a bourgeois Republic and the crowd is cheering both of them. So it kind of shows a certain level of confusion about what exactly was going on.

The Kaiser, the head of Imperial Germany, had to flee into exile, and the military begged the Social Democrats to take power. They were the only group that could control the working class. Maybe we should do another session on the German revolution because; it gets very complicated. So suddenly the centre and right wing of the Social Democratic Party are the government in Germany, supported by the army and getting ready to crush the left wing. By that time, Luxemburg and her faction had split off into what became known as the Spartakusbund, and shortly after that, they would rename themselves the Communist Party of Germany. In January 1919, some members of the Spartacists and other people from around Germany tried to make a revolution. And it was a little premature but Luxemburg and Liebknecht both said “when the masses go into the streets, we go with them.” They were both killed in January 1919. This begins a whole different chapter in the development of German Socialism and Communism but that’s essentially what happened. That’s what happened to Rosa Luxemburg. Almost immediately after her death all these different versions of the true Rosa began to be developed, but again it gets off into a whole other story. So, let’s have a discussion and questions but also let’s go over this text a little bit because; there’s just some really great formulations are in there. So, I hope I didn’t overwhelm everyone with all kinds of facts and stories. You know it’s just an incredible period of history.

Loren: I photocopied a little map of Russia. Unfortunately it’s from a book in French but I think you can figure it out, all the names are pretty much the same. I know some people probably are not so familiar with the geography that we are talking about. So here you have some kind of a reference.

Last week, we were talking about Lenin and Luxemburg, and I was trying to work up some notes for today; I just realize that the topic of Stalin and Trotsky is far more complicated. Why? First of all, because it was in this period that Bolshevism became an international phenomenon. Things were going on back and forth between what was happening in the Soviet Union and what was happening in other countries, where the Soviet Union, through the Third International, the Communist International, had great influence. So, the order will be a little bit skewed but try to bear with me. Just a couple of things I want to mention, from last week, I said one thing that I want to kind of modify, which is on the question of leadership. When I said that there are leaders and that there are people who speak better and who write better and who have more organizing skills and so on.

And that this should be recognized and not fetishized. I also want to emphasize the old Wobbly idea, we are all leaders. That is one of the weaknesses of the Bolshevik form of organization because of its centralization is that if the state picks off and arrests certain people, the organization becomes deeply weakened. I don’t know if I have any obvious solution to this but it’s just something to keep in mind. I just wanted to modify that a bit from last week. Another thing I just wanted to point out is that if you really want to pursue, there is a really good book about Stalin by a Frenchman named Boris Souvarine, which translated into English by C.L.R James in the late 1930s. Boris Souvarine was a very interesting guy who was close to Lenin in the very early years of the revolution and slowly became disillusioned and wound up being a real Cold War reactionary. But nevertheless, he wrote this book before that happened. If you want to read one book about Stalin, that’s it. I’m going to start out talking about–

Speaker 2: What’s the name of the book?

Loren: It’s called Stalin.

Speaker 2: Oh it’s Stalin.

Loren: Yeah. Okay! So, I’m starting out talking about Trotsky. We’ll develop this as we go long. As I said, we’ll be kind of going back to some of the things that came up last week. Trotsky was born in 1879. He was born in the same year as Stalin. Trotsky’s family were Jewish farmers in the Ukraine, which is this big area down here, and which at that time and is still was a huge agricultural centre. It was kind of financing Russian industrialization by exporting wheat to the rest of the world. So much that even during famines in Russia, they were exporting wheat to raise money for buying more factories, things like that. So Trotsky grew up in what you might call a petty bourgeois kind of family and social milieu. He went off to school and he was extremely intelligent, a great speaker and very quickly got involved in an underground study group of the kind that existed all over the place in Russia at this time. This would be in the mid 1890s, but he was then nowhere near being a Marxist or a revolutionary.

He was just part of the general liberal socialist opposition to Tsarism, without any kind of clear focus. Then he fell in with the Marxist milieu. Actually one of the interesting things about Trotsky was that all his life, up until the time of the Russian Revolution, he was kind of a free floater. He did not side with either the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks in the split that occurred in 1903. To go back briefly to last week and for people who weren’t there, at the time of the original split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, nobody realized that it was history in the making. Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, and Martov, the leader of the Mensheviks, were presiding at a conference and the issue was the definition of membership. Lenin wanted a more narrow, tighter disciplined definition, Martov was more open. They kept saying “why don’t you introduce the motion? no no no, you do it.” It was like it didn’t seem like a big deal. It was only over the course of time that it really turned out to be this historical dividing point. But Trotsky didn’t join either faction. I think it was in 1899 that he got arrested as member of this underground group and was sent off to Siberia.

As I was saying last week about Lenin, going to Siberia for revolutionaries, particularly revolutionaries of middle class background, wasn’t exactly a vacation but it was nothing what it became under Stalin; where it was essentially a bullet in the back of the head, or being worked to death in a forced labor camp or being sent to the Arctic Circle. Prisoners then had books, they had newspapers, they were under loose police surveillance but people escaped all the time from Siberia. Bakunin, for example, was sent to Siberia sometime in the 1860s, I believe. He managed to escape to Japan, stopped over in Japan, founded Japanese anarchism for a couple of months while he was there, and then caught a boat to California, and he was back in action in Europe shortly thereafter. Siberia was kind of like a prison, but it was also more like a sort of a revolutionary graduate school where you did a lot of reading, lots of intense discussion, cliquish in-fighting and so on. Compared to imprisonment in western Russia, it was a step up. So Trotsky was out in Siberia for three years, and he escaped. Some of his comrades forged a passport for him. His real name was Bronstein and “it was that nice train conductor in such and such a place whose name was Trotsky, so let’s put that on the passport.” That’s how Trotsky got the name Trotsky.

Then he went to western Europe and without a penny and actually managed to get to London, where he knocked on Lenin’s door at six o’ clock in the morning. But he was already kind of famous, because he was a great journalist who already had been writing some very interesting stuff about the conditions in Siberia. Lenin and Trotsky just immediately warmed to each other. Trotsky overnight had access to the inner circle of the party which, even in 1903, was impressive.(Its official name was the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party). Because there was already a big network in Russia, and here were Lenin and Martov and all the other people had later become known as the leaders of RSDLP, all groups together either in London or (as I was talking about last week) in Switzerland. Probably one of the three most important things I wanted to mention in this whole presentation is about a theory of permanent revolution. I talked about it last week and I want to talk about it more now. The theory of permanent revolution goes back to Marx, but it’s much more generally associated with Trotsky. Marx developed it in 1850 when he was on trial after the revolution of 1848. When Marx wrote it, the only developed countries were England and France. Germany was a developing country, still not even unified.

In such countries, Marx said, because they are competing with already developed countries, the bourgeoisie in these western underdeveloped countries was too weak to fight for political power itself, as had happened in England or in France. In such situations, the working class tended to push behind the limits of the bourgeois revolution and not necessarily make the proletarian revolution but clearly go beyond the kind of bourgeois liberalism that was the ideology and practice of the bourgeoisie. As some of you probably know, there was a real working-class communist uprising in Paris in June 1848. The news of it rippled all around the world. If you can believe it, the White House at the time was lit up to celebrate the 1848 revolution. That was back in the days when America tended to side with people who were fighting against monarchy. The Paris communist uprising of June 1848 really scared the hell out of the bourgeoisie, not just in France but everywhere.

So, in Germany when red flags started appearing in the worker demonstrations, the weak bourgeoisie there was all the more frightened. Engels wrote a very good book called Revolution and Counter Revolution In Germany which I highly recommend, just to sketch the outline of what happened there. So Marx was on trial for getting associated with a communist publication and he first elaborated this theory of permanent revolution – the idea that the working class in developing countries can go beyond the weak bourgeoisie and make the revolution permanent. It kind of was forgotten and the reason it was forgotten was because people later tended to adopt this two-stage view of how the revolution would come about. First there would be the bourgeois revolution; then there would be the socialist-communist working-class revolution. Marx already criticized this point of view but Marx got caught up in writing Capital and in the politics of the First International; the question wasn’t posed practically really in any way in any country for a long time so it was kind of forgotten and buried by this mechanistic linear view that took over the Second International in particular.

We recall that the First International collapsed in the early 1870s because of the battle between the Marxists and the anarchists after the defeat of the Paris Commune, with different interpretations of why that happened, but it happened. The Second International was founded in 1889 on the strength of a strike wave throughout Europe and particularly in England, where a so-called “New Union” strike wave headed by longshoremen sort of got class struggle going again. As we discussed last week, this was the International at that time, with Germany and the German Social Democratic Party as the model for all other parties. Like in the United States for example, there were lots of German Marxists of different sorts who had come already after the defeat of 1848 and even more so in the later emigration and Bismarck’s crackdown on the Social Democrats in 1878; more refugees came to the United States. They also were presenting the model of the German Social Democratic Party as the socialist party.

So, Trotsky comes along and he hooks up with a rather colorful guy named Parvus (that’s his pseudonym). Parvus was a brilliant theoretician and he was also a very skillful businessman who actually made a lot of money through this whole period in places like Turkey during World War I. He was an arms dealer but at the same time was generally in agreement with the radical wing of the Russian revolutionary movement. He tried to see Rosa Luxemburg in 1915 and she just slammed the door in his face. Most revolutionaries had broken with him by that point but in 1904/1905, Parvus and Trotsky looked at what happened in Russia, the 1905 revolution that we discussed last week with Soviets, these regional councils and worker’s councils in the factory, and said, “here it is, here is the working class way ahead of the bourgeois revolution and the coming revolution in Russia will not be bourgeois, it will be proletarian”. Ten years later Lenin was still speaking in Switzerland to the Swiss Socialist Youth, as I mentioned last time and he said, “I expect the bourgeois revolution in Russia for 1950 or so.” Ten months later he was in power at the head of a working-class revolution. Just to show how out of touch ideology could be with reality. Lenin’s famous slogan was “be as radical as reality”. It was never more confirmed by that misunderstanding of the timing the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions.

Any Trotskyist you will meet to this day will give you some version of permanent revolution, in one form or another. Some Trotskyists for example say that India is not a bourgeois democracy because it’s impossible for the bourgeoisie to establish a firm bourgeois democracy because the proletarian democracy is on the agenda. Well, the proletarian revolution has been on the agenda a very longtime but yet in some parts of the world the bourgeoisie seems to have established parliamentary forms and the formality of bourgeois democracy and so on. It’s a complicated question; we certainly don’t have to get into it here. But this was what I would say, more than anything else, was Trotsky’s true great contribution to Marxism. I don’t think of myself as a Trotskyist, I disagree with Trotsky on a whole bunch of other questions but I do accept the theory of permanent revolution. Look at Iran, for example, in 1979 where they overthrew the shah and immediately workers’ councils appeared in the oil fields and different factories. The liberal bourgeoisie represented by people like Bani Sadr and so on, if you remember them, were just swept aside and unfortunately they were swept aside by the Islamists more than by the workers. But nonetheless , it just shows that fragility of liberal democracy in so- called developing countries.

So 1905/1906 is defeated and Trotsky spent the years up to World War I in western Europe, or in Europe generally. Another important part of his life was he was a journalist during the Balkan Wars of 1912/1913. (Unfortunately the Balkans really barely appear on this map.) But these are the different ethnic areas that became part of what was called Yugoslavia up until the early 1990s. The conflict also involved Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and Greece. There were two Balkan Wars and what it really was about was the decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Empire, that was going to fall apart in 1917 at the end of the war. So you have a question?

Speaker 2: Oh no. You answered my question.

Loren: Okay. And you have a question?

Speaker 3: You said the Balkan War was when

Loren: 1912 to 1913.

Speaker 3: Awesome!

Loren: They were kind of a dress rehearsal for World War I. Everybody has forgotten about them but Trotsky covered them in great depth as a journalist and that’s really where he learned military strategy. Trotsky never had formal military training and yet starting in 1917 he built the Red Army from scratch and was essentially a genius at strategy. The Red Army accepted a number of Tsar’s officers who decided they didn’t want to fight for the Whites; that’s the kind of revolution it was like. So, they would be in charge of different regiments and divisions with a political commissar with a pistol next to their heads in case they tried to sabotage. Then, after the war they said, Trotsky just made these unbelievable decisions on the spur of the moment and they were always right. It’s really kind of remarkable. So studying strategy later, that’s where Trotsky got that kind of ability. When World War I broke out, I’m not sure where Trotsky was, but he wound up in the Bronx, of all places. I think he lived in the Bronx for about six months. He was making a living as a bit actor in grade C films.

There are still apparently some ads for those films with him embracing some women or something like that. He established relations with American Socialist Party which he later called the “socialism of dentists” because it was such a middle-class, reformist, and basically conservative party. This was at a point where that the IWW was still going strong. He once asked some of the specialists of the Socialist Party, at the SP headquarters here in New York, “do the Negroes in America speak English?” And they said, “yes, at least we think so, we’ll send some of our people to find out.” That’s how disconnected they were from American realities. So Trotsky wasn’t terribly impressed with the American SP. After the fall of the Tsar in the February revolution, tens of thousands of revolutionaries from all over the world, including from United States, were going back to Russia to participate in the real revolution.

By the way, if you haven’t seen the Warren Beatty’s movie “Reds”, I really recommend it. Trotsky does not figure in it but it’s a pretty good portrayal. For a Hollywood movie released at the beginning of the Reagan years it’s kind of unbelievable as a portrayal of what actually happened.

So Trotsky gets on a ship to go back to Russia and the ship is diverted by the British navy off the coast of Canada because they know very well who is on it. Not just Trotsky but hundreds of other people and they’re put into a prison or work camp near Halifax, in Nova Scotia, with mainly German POWs. Trotsky, who spoke fluent German, spent the whole time haranguing the German soldiers who were there, and when he was finally released to continue his trip, he was carried to the gates of the camp on the shoulders of all these German soldiers. It was real internationalism and that by the way is a very important part of how the revolution happened in the very same year on the eastern front, with the German army and the Russian army and the Austrian army. There was tremendous fraternization going on which, of course, greatly frightened the heads of state and all of these countries.

So Trotsky, he was among the first to go back. Last week we also talked about the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915. That was when a very small number of revolutionaries from all European countries came together in this little town in Switzerland, Zimmerwald, to discuss strategy after all the the big working class socialist parties had collapsed in 1914, supporting their own bourgeoisie in the war, with the exception of the Serbians, for some damn reason, and also the Italian party which basically opposed the war, and the American Socialist Party of all things, with the left wing gaining dominance and opposing American entry. But the French, British, German, Austrian, Dutch, Belgian etc. All these big parties, just one week before the war, were holding massive antiwar rallies but when the crunch came they all voted for war credits for their own countries. So Zimmerwald happened and people were debating what to do. We are talking about 20 or 30 people. That’s where Lenin really stands out for raising the slogan “turn the inter-imperialist war into a civil war.”

(One thing I wanted to point out from last week also is the 1905 revolution was actually started by the defeat of Russia in the war with Japan, 1904/1905. Lenin raised the slogan “we favor the defeat of our own side, down with the Tsar.” The Japanese Socialist Party was very concerned by this formulation and so they wrote to Lenin saying “the defeat of your side means the victory of the Japanese empire, which we’re fighting against.” So by the time of Zimmerwald, Lenin had modified this “to turn the inter-imperialist war into civil war”. Even Rosa Luxemburg, I think her formulation was ‘peace with no annexations’ and Trotsky was also somewhere in the middle there as well. So again, Lenin kind of stood out for the radical perspective that he had. We went through the dynamic of the revolution last week but let us just touch on it again briefly. Lenin returns with most of the exiled revolutionaries in the spring of 1917 and launches the April Theses. Which are theses where more or less, a typical Trotskyist today will tell you, in the spring of 1917, Lenin and Trotsky finally came together. Trotsky joined the Bolshevik Party and Lenin accepted the thesis of permanent revolution that, yes, the coming revolution is going to be proletarian.

The bourgeois revolution had just happened so what else was there ? and the workers were getting more and more militant. In the summer of 1917 there were these events called the July Days, in which the working class seemed to be mobilizing for an insurrection in some cities but the Bolsheviks felt that it was going to be premature and that they would be crushed. One really remarkable thing, that’s coming up in a minute. The Bolsheviks went out into the streets and said, “not now, we’re not strong enough, we don’t have the momentum. The Mensheviks control too many of the Soviets so let’s just prepare and we’ll take power later.” But nevertheless there was a hard crackdown. Lenin had to disguise himself as a worker. He and many revolutionaries fled to Finland which was part of the Russian empire but kind of autonomous. As you see on this map, from Petrograd to Helsinki is a one hour or two hour trip. So it was not such a big deal; the party resumed its underground existence and finally in the fall of 1917 started to prepare the insurrection. Now here again is where Trotsky’s military genius came to the fore. There’s this huge controversy about the meaning of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917; it’s referred to as the October Revolution because Russia at the time was still on the Eastern Orthodox calendar, so by the western calendar it was on November 7.

So, you’ll see it referred to both ways. But finally they decided it was time and, very interestingly, two leading Bolsheviks, Zinoviev and Kamenev, not only opposed the insurrection, but they went to the press and said the Bolsheviks were preparing an insurrection. Just to show the difference between Bolshevism under Lenin and the Communist Party under Stalin, they were forgiven, “there was a real breach of discipline but you people have proved yourself to be revolutionaries so we’ll take you back into the party.” 20 years later, during the Moscow trials of course, Stalin would make a big thing out of this betrayal. Trotsky is kind of the architect of the actual seizure of the government buildings. And one thing that all histories will point out is that very few people were involved. The armed resistance to the Bolshevik seizure of power was minimal. It was a handful of troops who had remained loyal to the Kerensky government. So, it was at first almost a bloodless revolution. It was immediately followed by a huge carnival in all the major cities and in Petrograd, St. Petersburg, later in Leningrad. The first thing that happened was that thousands of soldiers poured into the wine cellars of the Tsar’s Winter Palace and had this wild festival. The Bolsheviks were sending one regiment after another to calm people down. That regiment would join the party; it only ended when they drank all the wine and finally woke up. In other words, it definitely was a popular revolution.

One of the most interesting radical things that the Bolsheviks did immediately, aside from recognizing all the land seizures of the peasantry and all power to the soviets and the workers’ councils, they published all the secret treaties that had been signed among the great powers in 1914 while the war raged in Europe. It was wiki leaks, ten times intensified. Because here were all these governments who were saying, “The American government and the British government, we’re fighting for democracy.” The treaties involving Britain and the United States showed that they were going to get this or that territory after the victory and Germany had been saying “we’re fighting to stop barbaric, Tsarist, Cossack Russia.” Germany was supposed to get this land and so on. It was a devastating blow to all the powers, the traditional powers fighting the war. It was a true popular proletarian gesture. A major debate erupted in the Bolshevik Party immediately. We can’t obviously go over the whole history every month of the revolution; we’d have to expand this group by several weeks at least. But I did want to throw it out, now that everyone is here. I was thinking I would kick this around with a bit, we really kind of didn’t do justice in the Lenin/Luxemburg session to the German revolution as such. So I was going to propose a fifth meeting in which we would go from the German Revolution to the triumph of Hitler, 1918 to 1933. Is that agreeable for everyone? So that would make five sessions instead of four. 

[Audience agrees]

Loren: Okay! We can talk about that later. The first thing that had to happen was to spread the revolution and end the war. Because what had brought the Bolsheviks to power was their recognition of the peasants land seizures, and also because they knew that the vast majority of the troops at the front were sick of the war. They were already mutinying, shooting their officers, returning home on foot to seize land on the estates they’d been working on. So ending the war was a real imperative. So, that meant peace negotiations with Germany and Austria, Austro-Hungary to be exact, that still had massive armies on the Russian border or and inside Russian territory. This huge debate again showed the tremendous difference between the Bolshevik Party with Lenin and Trotsky as opposed to later. Lenin wanted to make peace with Germany on any terms, just to stop the war, and the terms turned out to be very draconian. There was another faction led by Bukharin and some others who were saying “no, we send the Red Army; we build up the Red Army and send it into Europe to greet the coming proletarian revolution there.” Which sounded like a great idea except where was the Red Army? People had been at war already for four years; they did not know they were about to go off for three more years of civil war. It was a great idea, sounds great in theory but what about in practice?

Actually I believe that the Bukharin position had the majority. But Trotsky in very early 1918 went off to a little town called Brest-Litovsk, on the border of Russia and Poland, where he met with the German High Command and the Austro-Hungarian High Command and I think after two weeks of negotiations he just walked out. He said he couldn’t accept these terms; his position was “no war no peace.” He returned to Petrograd and immediately after the collapse of the negotiations, the Austrian and German armies started to advance. They wound up seizing this whole area, essentially the Ukraine, which was not only the bread basket of Russia but it was also where the Makhno movement and other radical peasant movements were active. And they carried out guerrilla activity against the German and Austrian occupation until it collapsed in November 1918. At the same time, the Civil War was starting, the White armies were massing and so the Makhnovites and others were fighting the Germans, the Austrians and the White armies. But the Red Army, under the terms of the ceasefire, just had to sit on the borders. They finally did sign a treaty, that conceded all of this land to Germany and Austria. They were withholding any kind of military support to the insurrectionary movements going on in the Ukraine. Some people say that that’s where the Russian revolution first went off the rails. Some people say the Russian Revolution signed its own death warrant with the post Brest-Litovsk agreement with Germany and Austria. Let’s not forget that put an end to all this fraternization that had been going on between all the armies on the eastern front. So I’ll just take a pass on that; it would have been great but I really don’t think they had the forces to do much of anything at that point.

Speaker 2: Could you just emphasize a little bit more on what’s the significance of that Brest-Litovsk treaty, signed in 1918, correct?

Loren 1: Yes.

Speaker 2: So, what’s the significance for a political tendency if it dated the degeneration of the Russian revolution from that point, regardless of whether that’s right or wrong: what’s the political significance of seeing it there instead of a later date?

Loren: The abandonment of internationalism.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Loren: There was just the first step towards “socialism in one country”, which would not even emerge as a slogan for another seven years. What the Bolsheviks and Lenin were doing with the Brest-Litovsk negotiation was basically a huge gamble which, in fact, paid off. Because their calculation was that the Allies were going to defeat Germany, Germany would collapse and they would just take the Ukraine back without having to fight for it, and that’s what happened. But before that happened, the Civil War got going. This was the period in which Trotsky actually did put together the Red Army. It used to be common coin among Stalinists and Maoists that Trotsky never built the Red Army. I don’t think Maoists today still assert that. But for a very long time they were even denying that. Trotsky was not only a genius in military strategy but he really had this organizational flair. In this country that had already been at war for four years, where the regular army had collapsed, Trotsky put together an army that defeated all the Whites. Just to put that into perspective, at one point in the civil war, the area controlled by the Bolsheviks was a relatively small area around Moscow and Petrograd. All the rest of the country was up for grabs or in the hand of different White armies.

There were three major White armies led by different factions, financed by western powers and for example, there were 70,000 Czech soldiers who had been prisoners of war in Siberia and they were just incorporated into the White armies; they ultimately deserted. Then, as I mentioned last week, seventeen capitalist countries invaded Russia, including the United States. This was at the end of World War I, and for one or two years after World War I, most of these countries were exhausted militarily as well. There was huge agitation going on in virtually every one of them. So the Russian Revolution definitely happened because of World War I, which was not to say that it was an accident because capitalism brings war like clouds bring rain. The war was what made it possible for the revolution to happen and it was the war and the aftermath of the war that made it possible for the Bolsheviks to stay in power. It’s not that they didn’t defend themselves brilliantly, as well with the forces that they had, and so over the course of the next two and half years they defeated the White armies one by one. Any questions at this point?

Speaker 3: Until you start to go off into the dynamics of the Civil War I was wondering, can you describe some of the criticisms you have about the Bolsheviks after they took power? I forget the exact date when the Civil War begins, is it 1918?

Loren: Very early 1918.

Speaker 3: Right! So the spring of 1918 because; that’s another defining point of where the continued degeneration of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution occurred. Could you spend a few minutes on that?

Loren: Sure! For those of you; who read the Simon Pirani chapter in the attachment that I sent around, Pirani started in 1920 but he does talk about things that happened up to that point. That’s an amazing book that was done with archival material that became available after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and actually this same archive has closed again under Putin because it’s just too explosive. But what Pirani found, what he shows in that chapter that we read for today is that this disconnect between the Bolshevik Party and the working class, certainly by 1920, and possibly earlier was already a reality. So as I mentioned last week, the Cheka, that’s the special secret police organized to repress the counter- revolution, they were shooting strikers as early as March 1918. They were executing masses of people who were declared to be bourgeois. A bourgeois could be a peddler who had a couple of pounds of coffee under his coat and was trying to sell them on the black market. I don’t know if it was specifically mentioned in anything we read for today, but even Dzerzhinsky who was the head of the Cheka (who was Polish by the way), admitted that a lot of innocent people had been executed by the Cheka by 1920.

There was just one funny point I forgot to mention, in the debate over the Polish-Russian War which happened in 1920, where the Red Army invaded Poland trying to come to the aid of the revolution in Poland and Germany. Lenin was against it and Dzerzhinsky was for it. So Dzerzhinsky attacked Lenin as a Polish nationalist and Lenin attached Dzerzhinsky as a Great Russian chauvinist. Not entirely seriously, but just kind of a role reversal. A police state was in place very early; what this actually meant in the Soviets and Workers’ Councils in this early months, I’m not sure. Alexander Berkman, an anarchist who I think wrote one of the best books, he and Emma Goldman were in Russia for those years and actually I think they got there in 1919 or 1920. But they wrote very observant reports of what they saw just in those years. There was this state apparatus that became later the overall new ruling class, you could hardly call it a new ruling class in 1918 or 1919, but part of it was in place. Let’s face it, civil wars are not pretty. The American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Civil War, everyone who has ever really studied them always says they that they were bloody and more cruel and violent than the average war. One has to be extremely careful when looking at the events from 1917 to 1921. In terms of, the Bolsheviks and the few other people who supported them, like the Left Social Revolutionaries, they were in a very difficult situation: reduced to a very small area, all these countries invading, huge numbers of people supporting the Whites: with this unprecedented seizure of power by a self-designated Marxist party, one has to be very careful.

Speaker 3: One more question! The reason I was asking is because in the Trotskyist tradition, the fact that the imperialists attacked us is the reason for the problems in the revolution; it’s kind of become a recurring argument to justify state communism, basically all over the globe.

Loren: Right.

Speaker 3: And then the claim, that before the summer of 1918 Bolshevism is like the starry-eyed organization whose political dynamic can be replicated. So that’s why I’m kind of asking because of if it’s a perfect organization before 1918 then it gets much harder to say, well there are some embryonic problems within the Bolshevik politics and organization, and it can’t be just blamed on “well we were in invaded by 17 armies and that’s why that you don’t understand.” That is one of Trotskyism’s de facto argument.

Loren: Well Victor Serge, if you haven’t ever read Victor Serge, look at his Memoirs of a Revolutionary; it’s one of the most beautiful incisive books ever written about the Russian Revolution, among other things. He started out as an anarchist in Spain and France, came to Russia in 1919, joined the Bolshevik Party and he became the bridge between Bolsheviks and the Anarchists for a couple of years. To people who said, “the virus of Stalinism was present in Leninism”, Serge said, “yes, that’s true, but in Leninism there were many other viruses that could have developed in other ways.” Let’s not forget that from Day One up until the early 20s, the top level of the Bolshevik Party had no illusions that they could do anything without revolution in western Europe and above all, in Germany. They were looking at Germany, Italy, France, England, where there was tremendous upheaval after the war and in some sense a near-revolution in Germany, which was a much more important country. It was much more industrialized , much more like the kind of country in which you would expect a socialist revolution to take place.

That’s where all the focus was so there was that Internationalist perspective. At the same time, it’s certainly true that for the reasons I was talking about last week about the special character of the Russian intelligentsia, its relationship to the working class not to mention the peasantry, being pretty tenuous already in the early going, definitely set the stage for the creation of this sort of independent bureaucracy that ultimately would destroy the revolution. That’s what I would answer to the typical Maoist and, in a different way, to a Trotskyist, who is a little more subtle.

I’ve probably gone talking too much about Lenin and Trotsky. Notice by the way, that I haven’t even mentioned Stalin yet. One reason for that is that Stalin was nowhere in the picture while these early events were going on. John Reed’s classic book, The Ten Days That Shook The World, written as an eye witness account in 1920, doesn’t mention Stalin. Same goes for (French revolutionary) Alfred Rosmer’s eye witness account. In these eye witness accounts by western revolutionaries who were on the scene, Stalin is just nowhere.

(The World Socialist website has just put out a DVD of film footage of the revolution. It actually goes back to the pre-revolutionary period; that film, which is called “From The Tsar To Lenin” came out in the United States in 1937. It was picketed all over the country by the Communist Party. Why? Because; Stalin does not appear in the film, Stalin was a faceless bureaucrat. It was not that he was a nobody, but from a political point of view, in terms of these major events, he was not at the centre of the action.)

So that’s what I would answer to the typical Trotskyist. The Civil War was going on, the Reds were winning and by the summer of 1920, it was basically over. During this time the Bolsheviks implemented what is called War Communism. War Communism was a kind of a state of emergency in which wages were frozen, prices were frozen and it was a command economy of the typical very beleaguered wartime state. During this period, of course, needless to say, strikes were outlawed and generally this was a period also during which the power of the Cheka and other repressive apparatuses really tightened up. Again without making a virtue of necessity, it’s hard to imagine how else the Bolsheviks could have responded given their extremely defensive position at the beginning of the Civil War.

But when the Civil War was over the question emerged… let’s talk a little bit about Kronstadt. We could have a whole session on Kronstadt. Kronstadt became the symbol of the moment in which the revolution began to really devour itself. In the 30s and 40s, in the anti-Stalinist left opposition, it replaced Waterloo. In the 19th century people always said “well so and so experienced his/her Waterloo at X time”. So Kronstadt replaced that and one ex Trotskyist once commented, I think in the 1940s, “my Kronstadt was Kronstadt.” It’s a question of when you think…I’m sure you have already gotten the impression that these Trotskyist groups in particular but other left groups as well are constantly arguing about “when was the revolution dead in the water?” My general feeling is it’s 1921, which we’re getting to, and Kronstadt was the symbol of that. Kronstadt had been the centre of the revolution of 1917. It was a big naval base in the harbor of Petrograd (later Leningrad), filled with revolutionary sailors who were called the “anvil of the revolution.” In 1921 when the war was over, the Kronstadt naval base rose up again, calling for a return of all power to the soviets, which was just essentially the basic goal of the October Revolution of 1917.

In order to understand what happened at Kronstadt you’ll have to peel away layers and layers of lies and ideology because the Bolsheviks by that time, again in their siege mentality, immediately denounced the Kronstadt uprising as a White insurrection against the revolution. In fact, an insurrection at Kronstadt had been announced in a French daily newspaper a week before it actually happened. There is no question, the French and British intelligence services were very active in Finland which was in the middle of the Civil War at that time, between the Reds and Whites, which the Whites won. The French and British intelligence services were 50 miles away. There is no question that they were trying to influence what was going on there. So that’s the number one claim by the Bolsheviks. Number two claim is that people in Kronstadt were not the same people who had been there in 1917. The best workers had been killed in the Civil War. By the way, that was absolutely true in general; Winston Churchill for example, who was in charge of the British counter-revolution said, “if we can’t beat them, at least we’ll kill as many workers as possible to weaken them.”

Nevertheless, Pirani and others have established that there was a lot more continuity of personnel at Kronstadt than the Bolsheviks claimed. The Bolsheviks were very hysterical about it because it had such symbolic power. Trotsky was in Moscow at the time but he was sending telegrams saying, “we’ve got to pin this on the Whites, we got to show this is a White counter revolution.”

Zinoviev, who was another leading Bolshevik, was in charge of the Petrograd Soviet. He was hysterical, he had a tendency to become hysterical, that’s a whole other story. Just before the Kronstadt uprising, there had been six weeks of strikes in Petrograd by workers, again the cream of the revolutionary working class. Demanding what? Demanding food. In some cases, now that the war was over, demanding a return to some kind of soviet power. The Bolsheviks had come in there, satisfying the basic demands, but at the same time keeping everybody on a very short leash. The real timing of the Kronstadt uprising was the attempt by the sailors of Kronstadt to hook up with these struggles. One of the things that really undermine the idea that it was a conspiracy of western intelligence was that the whole port was still frozen. You could walk from the city to the naval base on the island. But it was going to melt in seven to ten days, so if it was really a conspiracy, why not wait a week and take over when it would be much harder to attack the island? So the real impetus, I think, was to join up with what was going on in the strikes in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks sent a delegation to Kronstadt; they were welcomed. The Kronstadt Soviet met and bands were playing and banners welcomed comrades and it was a third tier Bolshevik leader, I can’t remember his name, who just got up and read the riot act to the Kronstadt Soviet: “resolve this nonsense right now or we’re going to attack.” That was what really pushed the uprising into a full blown insurrection.

One interesting detail in addition, is that the Kronstadt Soviet immediately arrested all Communist commissars and put them in jail. They were in jail through the whole thing and they were still there when the Bolsheviks recaptured the island. When the Bolsheviks finally did capture the island, they executed thousands of people.

A small rump escaped across the ice into Finland. But that’s another thing that indicates that the Kronstadt sailors were prepared to negotiate in good will and they just got slapped down by the Bolsheviks. The Kronstadt uprising occurred simultaneously with the Tenth Party Congress of the Bolshevik Party and of course it was one of the topics of discussion. It was at this time that a group called the First Workers Opposition arose. It included some Bolsheviks as well, in particular a woman named Alexandra Kollontai who was a very important feminist agitator. I don’t know how long she’d actually been in the party. She’d written some very interesting stuff on sexual emancipation during and after the revolution , and there were some other second-tier, third-tier Bolshevik figures in the First Workers Opposition; and again, their basic demand was: return to Soviet power, return to the all the power of the Soviets perspective in the first months of the revolution. Lenin got up and made a speech in which he said, “the Russian working class no longer exists,” because of the destruction of the Civil War. Once again, let’s keep in mind that after seven years of warfare there was famine breaking out down in the Ukraine for a number of reasons. It was a very grim situation and the people, even party members were surviving on very, very lean rations.

So Lenin says, the “Russian proletariat no longer exists” because, aside from all the people killed in the Civil War, many workers had gone back to the farm just to survive. Let’s keep in mind that at that time the Russian working class was largely half the year in the factory, half the year on the family farm or on the estate or whatever it was. So it really was a working class in formation. Shliapnikov, who was a leader of the working-Workers Opposition, jumped to his feet and said, “So! you are exercising a dictatorship in the name of a class which no longer exists” and the debate went on like that. The First Workers Opposition was defeated; Alexander Kollontai went on to become a diplomat for Stalin. I don’t know that there’s any real continuity between her position of 1921 and fifteen years later, but that’s one small anecdote.

So the Bolsheviks were confronting this very grim situation and by 1921 it was also clear that the revolution in Western Europe was not going to happen. It was still going on in Germany but in Italy early 1920, the workers had seized the factories in northern Italy and run up the red flags. The bourgeoisie just sat back and waited for two, three, four weeks. Workers did nothing with the factories and that was the turning point after which Fascist squads began to form, attacking union meetings, destroying socialists’ and communists’ offices, newspapers and so on. So that was the beginning of the rise of Mussolini.

In Britain, in January 1919, there was a massive strike wave with factory occupations. The heads of the Trade Unions Congress went to see Lloyd George who was the Prime Minister at that time and Lloyd George said to them, “listen guys, it’s all up, if you people want to take over you can” and they of course being just cowardly reformers just kind of shrugged and said, “who us?” and so things kind of petered out. In England there were these mass strikes taking place, major steel strikes in the United States and then also the seven-day general strike in Seattle. So things were happening but they weren’t happening fast enough and the Bolsheviks began to realize that there were going to have to deal with a long period of isolation.

Speaker 3: Is it correct from my understanding that large layers of the First Opposition also became crucial in attacking Kronstadt and were involved in the military [inaudible]?

Speaker 1: Yes, I believe so.

Speaker 3: It becomes important because that’s like the left wing of the Bolsheviks and they’re also participating and crushing the left-wing rebellion against Bolshevik power.

Speaker 1: Lenin made a speech to this congress in which he said, “you can be with us or you can be over there with a gun,” that is at Kronstadt, “but not in the opposition; the party, we’ve had it with opposition.” At that Tenth Congress some very important decisions were made and probably the most important was the banning of factions. Up to that time, as in the case of debate over Brest-Litovsk, there were factions all over the place. The Bolshevik Party had always had factions. The party congress decided on temporarily banning factions without banning discussion, with the idea that when the situation permitted, the right to faction would be restored, but of course it never was.

This is why I draw the line at 1921. The third congress of the Communist International happened a few months later and in the course of those months the following policies were developed. The crushing of Kronstadt, then the party congress also adopted the New Economic Policy, the NEP. The NEP as you saw in John Marat’s article was the decision to drop world communism, and let the peasants produce for the market and to basically enrich themselves. They could, in order to increase food production. Again, many people have said well, “NEP, that’s the restoration of capitalism” and most of the Bolsheviks were appalled. They said, “we just fought three years of Civil War in order to restore the market?” but that was adopted. In the spring, the Soviet government signed a trade agreement in England, the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement. The first official agreement with the western power and this was defended as a necessary move to break the blockade and isolation of the Soviet Union and to restore access to certain kinds of machinery and other goods that were desperately needed, but it was a step. The real question is, at what point, can one speak definitely of a counter-revolution? In some ways, and I want to keep insisting on this, there is a constant relationship between the international situation and foreign policy questions and policy questions of the Communist International on one hand and the domestic situation in Russia.

So, the decision to restore the market for the peasantry and the population at large, to restore trade relations with Britain, these are two parts of a general kind of ebb in which the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union begin to be a conservatizing force in international relationships, in my view. If there was an orthodox Trotskyist here, they would be howling because they see this is happening at least a few years later. Another less noticed aspect of this, and you can read about this; there is an article on my website called, Socialism in One Country Before Stalin – The Case of Turkey 1917/1925. In Turkey, there was an insurrection, there was a complicated situation, we don’t have time to go into it. But the key point is that while the Soviet Union was arming the bourgeois nationalists around Ataturk. Ataturk’s regime was massacring communist militants in Turkey. This is the first case of so-called national liberation where it was a Soviet foreign policy interest because people fighting against Ataturk were being armed and financed by Great Britain. So struggle against imperialism, but the reality was it was at the expense of the Turkish Communist Party.

You were going to ask a question?

Speaker 2: Repeat that again about Ataturk.

Loren: Ataturk was the leader of the Turkish nationalist movement and he was fighting a successful war against an invasion by Greek troops, but the Greeks troops were backed and financed by Great Britain and probably by France. They saw Ataturk as this dangerous figure; who had ties to the Soviet Union and stuff like that. The Soviet Union was arming Ataturk and financing Ataturk but this was going on, as I indicated, while Ataturk was massacring the Communist Party. The entire central committee of the Turkish Communist Party was murdered in a boat in the Black Sea, just a couple months before the formal agreement between Turkey and the Soviet Union. I once actually wrote about this. I wrote a letter’s to the editor of Workers Vanguard, the newspaper of the most orthodox Trotskyist group Sparticist League. I said, “what about this?”

And they actually replied with a two page article in which they’d done a lot of homework in which they said, “Well you see, the Soviets were still trying to subvert Ataturk’s state.” Here’s the Soviet Ambassador to Turkey, and many of the dissidents in the party were fleeing to the Soviet embassy in Ankara for refuge, and the Soviet embassy was handing them over to Ataturk’s police where they would be executed.

How exactly does this fit with a policy of undermining Ataturk? I don’t know. It’s a very interesting thing, if you want to read about it look up the article on my website. So with the question of Kronstadt, the NEP, the Anglo Russian Trade Agreement, the betrayal trail of the Turkish revolution and Turkish revolutionaries, and finally in Germany at the very same time (March 1921) was something called the March Action. We’ll talk about that next week, I think we should do Germany and… the March Action was carried out by people that one would generally characterize as Ultra Leftist. It was really kind of the last kick of the German Revolution. It took place in one or two important industrial provinces, with workers seizing the factories and so on. But many people both in Germany and the Soviet Union criticized it as a kind of putsch.

Speaker 2: Define putsch!

Loren: A putsch is like if we got together and decided to attack City Hall and declare a Soviet Republic in Manhattan; that would be a putsch. It’s just an action by a small group of people aiming to take over a government. We’ll go into the March Action next week. It’s yet another question like Kronstadt, not as volatile as Kronstadt, but still resonates today as something that people really disagreed bitterly about. So all these things are happening at once but what they all have in common is this flashing yellow light, the revolution is slowing down and being isolated and the whole international strategy of the Bolsheviks with the idea that they were just a rearguard side show and the real action was in Germany and the West was going down the drain. So this is the beginning of the rise of Stalin. How many of you had a chance to read the article that I wrote about Max Eastman? Eastman wrote some incredible portraits of what happened when all of the shooting stopped. He was this brilliant guy, he was a Greenwich Village radical. He was indicted for sedition twice during World War I.

Speaker 4: What does that mean?

Loren: Sedition? It means trying to undermine the power of the state. What he had done particularly, he called on people to refuse the draft for World War I and he was acquitted twice because they just couldn’t find a jury that would convict him.

Speaker 2: Wasn’t Chaplin charged with sedition around that time? Was he extradited or did he leave on his own?

Loren: I don’t know.

Speaker 2: Charlie Chaplin.

Loren: I thought that was later. After World War II?

Speaker 2: That was World War II? I feel like he was kicked out of the country or he left on his own.

Loren: He was driven out because he was believed to be a–

Speaker 2: Was he indicted for the same type of reasons?

Speaker 1: I don’t recall. But it was World War II; let’s not jump ahead.

So Eastman goes to Russia in 1922. So after all these events we’ve been talking about, and he learned Russian fluently in a matter of months. He learned it so well that he actually wrote poetry in Russian that was appreciated by Russians. He was a brilliant guy, he stayed in Russia for two years with a plan of writing a book about the Bolshevik leadership. So he got to know all these people extremely well. The only one he didn’t get to know was Lenin, who by that time had been shot and had had a stroke and was ordered by his doctors to work only one hour a day. So by early 1923 Lenin was out of picture, even though he lived for another year. So Eastman is going around interviewing all these people and he got, for those of you who read the article, he got this incredible portrait of all these different individuals but this is at a time when almost no western radicals had any idea what was really going on in Russia.

As I mentioned last week, anarchists were joining the Third International and flocking to the Soviet Union because they read Lenin’s most libertarian statement State and Revolution, and were saying, “the revolution is on.” Anarchists had taken power in Russia and Anarcho-syndicalists. Bill Haywood went to Russia to get away from an indictment in the United States and some other Wobblies; from all over the world, that was this kind of a disconnect, in terms of an understanding of what was actually going on. So, Eastman was there kind of seeing this whole thing but as he says, in the different quotes that I include, he still was just looking at the surface because, behind the scenes, this battle for power had already really taken off. And what was going on was this guy Stalin, who had been appointed General Secretary of the party, which was considered like the postmaster. He seemed to be a cipher and he was given this position that no one took seriously at the time and this brings up a very important point. In this whole period, all these people imagined counter-revolution as being the return of Tsar and the return of the capitalists whose factories have been taken away. It’s very normal; just as we’re conditioned by the periods of struggle we’ve lived through and we understand progress and reactions in contemporary terms, and so off in left field that there was emerging this other danger that nobody saw.

This again, to get back to the Trotskyists. All through the battle, the factional struggles in the 1920s which I am just about to get to, Stalin was always referred to as the center. The left was Trotsky and his allies, the right was Bukharin and his allies and Stalin was the center because Stalin was trying to jockey between those two factions. As Amadeo Bordiga put it, “nobody was more reactionary than that center”, as would be proved by subsequent developments. But this was a ways in the future. The overall sense was holding out against counter revolution. Counter revolution meant a return of the Tsar and of the expropriated capitalists. Nobody ever imagined the counter-revolution in the form of a totally revamped and bureaucratized Bolshevik Party itself and the creation of a new form of class exploitation.

In 1924, Eastman has this description of Stalin, I’ll just say a few words about Stalin. I mentioned him a little bit last week, I mentioned is best friend Kamo (his real name was Ter-Petrosian) The two of them were carrying out these very daring bank robberies in Georgia, down in this area called the Caucusus that includes several other countries such as Azerbaijan, Armenia and so on. Kamo was Armenian, Stalin was Georgian. They were both brilliant underground operators and were very successful bank robbers who were really financing the Bolsheviks Party in western Europe. I mentioned some of the more dramatic bank robberies last week. So it was out this milieu that Stalin was recruiting his followers and as Eastman describes, those intellectuals who were the leaders of the party, who had spent years and years in exile and in Switzerland and France and England, they just didn’t know what to do with these people who were were basically thugs. And similar people had been them taken into the Cheka during the repression that I mentioned earlier. Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka, he really didn’t know what to do with these people either but they needed cold-blooded killers for the repression during the Civil War and after the Civil War; what are they going to do with them? So this is the beginning of a really important change from the whole sociology of the Bolshevik Party.

So, the debate erupts and the key question… let me just pull back here for a minute as John Marot points out in his article, none of the Bolsheviks factions, not the left, center or the right understood the situation in the countryside. They had these schemes in their heads about the kulaks who were the rich peasants, and different strata, little peasants and poor peasants and the landlords workers’ that might be interesting as sociology, but they didn’t correspond with real forces on the ground when Bolshevik detachments of soldiers from the cities would arrive to confiscate grain from the countryside, which they were doing right from the beginning of the Civil War. The only reason the Bolsheviks won the civil war is because the peasants hated the Whites more than they hated the Reds. They knew that the Reds at least would let them keep their land, while the Whites wanted to restore the old aristocrats, but meanwhile the Bolsheviks were making themselves very unpopular by confiscating grain, pigs and cows and so on all over the place to feed the city. So, the agrarian question became the question, in some in these debates in the party.

Again, I think Marot is right. If you didn’t read it before today, please read it subsequently because what he shows is that for all these years’ people had been looking at what happened in the 20s through the prism of these three fractions. When in fact, if Marot is right , and I think he is, they were all wrong. All of them misunderstood the question of the countryside and how to deal with it. The most important thing they didn’t understand was the Russian peasant commune. Last week I mentioned Lenin’s first important book, called The Development of Capitalism in Russia, which is a polemic against the idea that there is any non-capital sector left in the Russian country side. The most important institution there was called the mir, which just means commune in Russia. The Populists, the people who historically preceded Marxism in Russia, the people who were still into assassinations, terrorism and so on: they wanted to stop the invasion of Russia by capital. They saw the Russian mir, or commune, as the basis of a future communist society and, very interestingly, Karl Marx in 1882, one year before he died, in the preface to the last edition of the Communist Manifesto published before he died wrote, “the Russian mir could be the basis of an immediate transition to communism in Russia” when combined with revolution in the west. So it wasn’t that Marx and the best Marxists were unaware of this, but Lenin by 1900 had destroyed the idea that there was anything thing left of the mir. In fact, according to Marot, the mir still existed until the end of the 20th century in some form or another.

So, this debate takes off and what do the positions boil down to? Lenin and then Trotsky and the left were basically saying we have to have voluntary collectivization in the countryside. What we’re going to do is take our government subsidies and create model collective farms, and they’ll work so well that peasants were seeing that they are better than their private plots and that’s how we’ll have voluntary collectivization. Bukharin on the right, to the extent that he was on the right, was saying “no, what we’ve got to do is encourage the peasants, just like in the French Revolution, which was to get rich and we’ll just have totally free market in the countryside. Encourage the kulak class and we’ll have rapid development of agriculture and we can use the surplus from that for a slow industrialization.” The left position, particularly after Lenin died, was more and more “what we need is rapid industrialization.” We have to have rapid industrial development to be able to defend ourselves against the next invasion of western powers.

Speaker 4: That was the far left position?

Loren: I would say the left position. Rapid industrialization combined with voluntary… you are right, it was pretty dodgy. Stalin comes along and says, “The left is completely out of touch.Trotsky overestimates the peasants, overestimates the willingness of the peasants to involve themselves in this voluntary collectivization.” Amadeo Bordiga (in Italy) later came along and said, “Yes, Trotsky did overestimate the peasants because he assumed that they could have anything to do with the proletarian revolution.” The peasants clearly wanted land and, in this view, they wanted private land. (In fact they wanted to restore the mir, which they did (see my article on the Russian peasant commune
http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/the-agrarian-question-in-the-russian-revolution-from-material-community-to-productivism-and-back/ )That was one dominant trait. The whole debate was intensified by what was called the “scissors crisis.” The Scissors Crisis meant that the prices of industrial goods being produced in the factories, first under a war communism and then under the NEP, freeing up the market, were rising very rapidly and the peasants needed some industrial goods. They needed ploughs and tools and other things like that. In the meanwhile, they were producing so much grain that the price of grain was falling so they could buy less and less: this is the Scissors Crisis. It made everybody very nervous that all of the plans for any cooperation between the city and the countryside were going down the drain because of this reality.

I should also add that in 1923 a working-class strike wave erupted. Where was Trotsky,
leader of the Left Opposition? He was totally focused on the internal struggle in the party and refused to support the strikes.

What really intervened in the situation, what kind of broke the back of this city-country dynamic, was a famine in 1927/1928. Russia had already had years of famine during World War I and during the Civil War. Even Herbert Hoover had to involve himself in massive export of grain to Russia in 1922 to stop famine there. Of course, the idea was to use it to pry open the Soviet Union and destroy the Bolshevik regime, but they did send millions of tons of grain to Russia but lots of people had already died in that famine. So a new famine starts in 1927/1928 and Stalin uses that, because by that time he had totally taken over the party apparatus. He decrees the first five-year plan and what happened essentially is that Stalin took over the left-wing program and above all the idea of rapid industrialization; he dropped the part about voluntary collectivization. By the way, and it’s very interesting, Bukharin during all these debates had said if the left program is ever implemented, it can only be implemented by the creation of the biggest bureaucracy that ever existed in history and that’s exactly what happened. He was imagining it happening under the left but it actually happened under the so-called center, led by Stalin. Stalin took over this idea of rapid industrial development, developed his five-year plan which was launched in 1928 with massive forced collectivization that lasted for 6-7 years. Later, Churchill, during World War II, was having cocktails with Stalin at one of the international meetings, and said, “Come on, tell me Joe, how many peasants died in the collectivization, five million?” This was going through an interpreter and Stalin just said, “10”. By Stalin’s own account, 10 million peasants died during these collectivizations.

They died not merely from starvation but also they were being deported all over the country to supposedly richer agricultural areas and the peasants responded to the forced collectivization by destroying livestock. They killed the sheep, goats, pigs, cows etc. by the millions. So then when the Red Army detachments actually seized the land, there wasn’t much left. That just made the famine situation worse. This is really how Stalin consolidated his power in Russia itself, taking advantage of the isolation, advantage of the failure of the revolution in the west, using the slogan of “socialism in one country”, something that no one in the Marxist tradition had ever heard of before that. Finally when the situation created by this famine really created the opportunity, he smashed the left, he smashed the right and Stalin had really taken power.

I’ve said before that what’s going on through this whole period and contining is this dialectic between domestic Russia and foreign policy. Foreign policy meant above all the policy of the Third International; the Communist International which I would say by the early 20s was already essentially a tool of Soviet state foreign policy. It was not truly an internationalist organization. So let me just cover the foreign situations in which for one reason or another, the Bolsheviks just deepened their isolation. There was the German Revolution, which we’ll deal with next week. While I would never say it was the Bolsheviks’ fault that the German Revolution failed. There was talk of Trotsky going to Germany to organize the Red Army there and lead the revolution the way he had in Russia, but it just never happened for whatever reason. There were just terrible screw ups; in one case, in 1923; an insurrection was planned, then cancelled. Except in Hamburg, one of the major ports in northern Germany. At the last minute they decided to call it off because they knew that Hamburg was completely isolated. The Comintern, the messenger with the telegram, missed the train by a few minutes.

This guy was going with the orders to cancel, so the insurrection took place in isolation, the workers were crushed and that was really kind of the end of the real armed phase of the German Revolution. But as I said, we’ll deal with that next week. The German Revolution was botched. I’m not saying that necessarily it would have happened without the involvement of the Bolsheviks and the Third International, but it failed. In 1926 there was a general strike in England that in part, I’ll have to review the events but it really took off and I believe in the middle of it, some New York Post type newspaper published what was supposedly a telegram from Moscow, in which “the heads of the Trade Union Congress were to stage this general strike and go on to revolution,” and that definitely was an wrench in the whole process. From 1924 to 1928, this is the so-called “second period”. Bukharin was running the International or his people were running the International. That meant all over the world that pro-Bukharin people were being elevated to leadership of the different communist parties.

So, during Bukharin’s period there was the failure of the British general strike; then, far and away probably the most important event during this period was the defeat of the Chinese Revolution in 1927. We’ll deal with this in detail when we get to Maoism (see my article http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/notes-towards-a-critique-of-maoism/) But, just briefly, from 1919 to 1927 there was this constant ferment, this very small but very militant Chinese working class in key port cities, staging strike after strike up to this culmination in 1927 and what happened was a clear case of the results of Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country”. It goes right back to the two-stage theory. A Bolshevik-type revolution was on the agenda in China. Stalin ordered the Chinese Communist to make an alliance with the nationalist party of Chiang Kai-shek, and Chiang Kai-shek just turned on the Communists at a key moment in April 1927 and massacred tens of thousands of communist workers in both Shanghai and in (then) Canton, or Guangzhou as it’s known in Chinese. So the defeat of the Chinese Revolution was kind of the end. Every turn in policy both in Russia and in the Communist International ends is some bloody defeat. Germany in 1923, China in 1927 and now begins what was known as the Third Period. And the Third Period is the period in which the Communist parties all over the world were calling the Socialist parties “Fascists”.

I should say Social Fascists. That is they seem to be Socialist but in fact, they are really pushing Fascism or they are giving way to Fascism. In some places there was a grain of truth to it, particularly the latter formulation. But the key battle was being fought in Germany. In 1929 Germany was pulled into the world economic depression more deeply than any other country except United States. Unemployment was at 30% or more. There were street battles between Nazis and Communists going on constantly and the country was rapidly becoming ungovernable. So, one would think that the obvious thing to do was to have unity between the Socialist workers and the Communist workers. But since the Comintern line at that time was that the Socialist workers were Fascists, that kind of unity was impossible. It’s much more complicated than that in reality, for all kinds of reasons we can talk about that next week. It was highly unlikely. Trotsky was exile in in Turkey writing these brilliant pamphlets about what was going on. They were read by 200 people , and yet there were spontaneous attempts by Socialist and Communist workers to work together, but it was too late. So in January 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and just to show how abject German Socialists were, they petitioned to be recognized as a legal party in the Hitler regime. On May Day 1933, four months after Hitler came to power, the Social Democrats went out to march as they always did on May Day, and their offices all over Germany were shut down and tens of thousands of socialists were rounded up and sent to concentration camps or prison.