FRFI 103, October/November 1991
The Russian revolution of 1917, born amid the hope of millions, has finally collapsed. That this colossal and noble effort consciously to seize and control human destiny should have lasted 74 years in the beleaguered Soviet Union is almost miraculous. In the entire history of humanity, it was the first sustained attempt to create a society in the interests of the majority rather than a dominant minority class. EDDIE ABRAHAMS and MAXINE WILLIAMS argue there is much to learn from its successes and failures.
This fragile vessel, the world’s first socialist state, navigated uncharted waters amidst a host of dangers. It was holed many times, its timbers became rotten and finally it succumbed to attack from within and without. But not before it had transformed the lives of millions of its own citizens and given substance to the aspirations of billions more throughout the world.
The imperialists greeted the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union with ecstasy. They always feared, loathed and waged war against Soviet power. In unrelenting propaganda they equated communism with tyranny, the destruction of civilisation and the denial of individual human nature. They tried to bury the revolution in this dungheap of abuse precisely because of the simple and terrifying truth it proclaimed – the poor, the majority, can take power from their oppressors.
From day one of the revolution, when they heard that workers and peasants had taken charge, that foreign debts had been cancelled, that the property of their rich Russian cousins had been confiscated, the capitalists declared war. It began with the 1918 invasion by no less than 14 capitalist powers, with Britain at the head. That war has never ceased.
But their current, grotesque dance upon the grave of the revolution is quite futile. The grave contains only old bones. Its flesh and blood, its life and spirit, have long since passed to other parts of the world. There, the oppressed know only too well that capitalism, far from representing the pinnacle of human civilisation, represents poverty, dead children, hungry bellies and murdered freedom fighters. They have heard the message that once heard is never forgotten – poor people can take power. That is the gift that the Bolsheviks bequeathed to history. They tried, against all odds, to give life to the most liberating and noble ambitions of humanity.
Communism and human liberation
‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however is to change it’ – Marx
Every age has produced thinkers who have fashioned ideas to free humanity from material and spiritual poverty, unleashing its creative potential. In some periods they remained isolated thinkers and dreamers. But in others, periods of turbulent social change, those ideas were taken up by vast masses of people and used to shape new institutions. Voltaire, Rousseau and others saw their ideas emblazoned on the banners of the French revolution as ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. When that revolution had consolidated the rule of the capitalist class, such dangerous ideas ceased to have any appeal to the rich and privileged. Henceforth they would devote themselves to the protection of their riches and their philosophers would be paid to pronounce only that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. From the mid-19th century the task of pushing forward the ideas of progress fell to quite different forces.
Marx and Engels forged the communist outlook during the youth of the working class. This class produced by the capitalist system:
‘is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity [of capitalism] … The proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own l life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own condition.’
Marx and Engels elaborated the fundamental principles of scientific socialism and communism. They proved that capitalism, based on production for profit, could neither fully develop the forces of production nor meet the needs of the majority of humanity. The institutions of the capitalist state, however democratic, expressed only the interests of the minority who owned the means of production. A central condition for emancipation from the horrors of capitalism was proletarian power – the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Paris Commune of 1871 furnished the first brief experience of working class power and the guidelines which inspired the Russian working class of 1917.
The Bolshevik achievement
Perhaps only those alive in 1917 can fully understand the earthquake of the first socialist revolution. Its shockwaves swept the world, a world of war, suffering and starvation. Through the trenches, in the stinking slums, in the factories and the streets the thrill was felt. Men and women who previously rotted in the Czar’s gaols were now creating the first socialist state. Soviets, councils of workers and soldiers, were now making the political decisions that previously were the province of a tiny elite.
The Bolshevik programme was Bread, Peace and Land, simple demands that still today represent what two-thirds of human beings in the world lack. This essentially modest programme is precisely what capitalism cannot give them. When the people took power the Russian bourgeoisie resisted with every weapon at its disposal. The majority had spoken but the bourgeoisie, who only talk of democracy to disguise their own dictatorship, resorted to civil war to suppress them. But the lesson of the Commune had been well learned.
‘The working class cannot simply lay hold of the old state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.’ (Marx)
‘It must destroy the old capitalist state and use its own organs of power – the people armed – for the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, ie an insignificant minority of the population, the landowners and the capitalists.’ (Lenin)
It was precisely these measures that the bourgeoisie has always called ‘tyranny’. It is not ‘tyranny’ to starve millions of people, to keep them illiterate, to turn women into chattels, to drive millions into beggary and prostitution? Apparently real ‘tyranny’ was to execute the Czar, to divide aristocrats’ land among poor peasants, to take the mansions of the rich to house the poor, to forbid the publication of fascist propaganda, to confiscate factories and prohibit individual enrichment through the work of others or speculation. The achievements of Bolshevik ‘tyranny’ include: huge strides towards the elimination of poverty, hunger and disease; the education of a previously illiterate population; the survival and cultural advance of nationalities threatened with extinction; the nationalisation of land; and the industrialisation of this vast, backward country through the planned economy.
The torch is passed on
But perhaps the greatest achievement of 1917 came not in the Soviet Union itself but in its international impact. Lenin recognised that capitalism had entered a new stage – of imperialism and parasitic decay. Competing imperialist powers had divided up the world between them, drawing every corner of the globe into their web of exploitation. Henceforth the world was divided between oppressed and oppressor nations. A large section of workers in the imperialist nations had benefited from imperialism and become infected with the diseases of chauvinism and opportunism. The opportunist workers’ movements of the imperialist nations had become a major obstacle to the struggle for socialism and against imperialism. The Bolsheviks understood that in this century the torch of revolution would pass to the peoples of the oppressed nations who: ‘will participate in deciding the destiny of the whole world and will cease to be simply an object for the enrichment of others.’
Reality has confirmed this. The Russian revolution swept through the Czarist Empire to produce the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The revolutionary torch passed to Germany, whose workers’ revolution was only defeated in blood in 1919, with the complicity of the opportunist Social Democrats. The impulse towards socialism may have begun in Europe but it moved inexorably elsewhere. It is no accident that after 1917 the most authentic socialist revolutions took place in China, Vietnam, Korea and Cuba. The existence of the Soviet Union, its material aid and political support, has been a major factor in allowing these revolutions to survive for so long in the face of such enormous imperialist opposition.
Communism was an international force for democracy. In the 1930s as the threat of fascism grew, the progressive forces of Europe, led by communists, turned to the defence of the Spanish Republic. Huge anti-fascist and Resistance movements were formed and with the prolonged sacrifices of the Soviet people laid the basis for the defeat of Nazism.
In the post-war period communists stood on the verge of power in Greece and were a serious threat in other European countries. In the wake of liberation by the Red Army and national resistance movements, socialist governments were established in the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Albania, Rumania and Bulgaria. The peoples of Asia, Africa and the Arab world continued their resistance to colonialism. Communist North Korea was established in 1948, China in 1949 and North Vietnam in 1954. In 1961 socialist Cuba was established and with Vietnam provided the focus for imperialist aggression which continues to today. The post-war period saw the overthrow of colonial regimes in most of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The 1970s witnessed the establishment of revolutionary regimes in Grenada, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. And these are just some, by no means all, of the changes which came in the wake of, and drew strength from, 1917. As Marx once said, ‘Well grubbed old Mole’.
Only the first steps
The current round of setbacks, defeats and surrenders may tempt some to say that the old Mole is dead. They are quite wrong. Imperialism has plunged much of the world into terrible poverty. The people of the oppressed nations simply cannot survive in the existing international order. And in the imperialist countries a growing number of people live in poverty, insecurity, pollution and cultural privation. The imperialist countries are armed to the teeth and limbering up through economic competition for redividing the world. There is no peace, progress or security in the new world order. It is as inevitable as day following night that socialism will revive anew.
And it is thanks to the efforts, sacrifices and hard-won lessons of the Bolsheviks and the revolutions which have followed, that the next round of the socialist revolution will begin from an incomparably higher stage. Future socialist efforts will not blindly follow the Soviet model. Its gains, and there were many, were made in the most difficult of circumstances (including a war in which 25 million Soviet citizens died) and against the most concerted imperialist opposition. These pressures exhausted the revolution. The leaders and masses alike were drained, and lost their connection with each other. The impetus dwindled and development became ossification; timeserving careerists replaced revolutionaries; sacrifice became privilege; communism lapsed into social democracy.
But as Marx said of the Commune:
‘The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men.’
The twentieth century has been the century of first steps in this ‘historic process’. There is much for socialists now to learn from the successes and failures, the tragedies and sacrifices. There is an indescribably rich tradition which this international effort has left us. All the revolutions and uprisings adapted their programmes to suit their conditions and fought to produce solutions to immensely varied problems. But all took their inspiration from 1917. It is now the task of communists everywhere to study those lessons, absorb the contributions of nearly a century of international effort before we can go forward again.
‘Across the horizon spread the glittering lights of the capital, immeasurably more splendid by night than by day, like a dike of jewels heaped on the barren plain. The old workman who drove held the wheel in one hand, while with the other he swept the far-gleaming capital in an exultant gesture. “Mine!”, he cried, his face all alight. “All mine now! My Petrograd!”’ JOHN REED, TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD
‘In the colonies Lenin opened a new era which is truly revolutionary. He was the first to realise the full importance of drawing the colonial peoples into the revolutionary movement. He was the first to realise that without the participation of the oppressed peoples, the socialist revolution could not come about.’ HO CHI MINH, 1926
‘The women who took part in the Great October Revolution – who were they? Isolated individuals? No, there were hosts of them; tens, hundreds of thousands of nameless heroines who, marching side by side with the workers and peasants behind the Red Flag and the slogan of the Soviets passed over the ruins of tsarist theocracy into a new future. When one recalls the events of October, one sees not individual faces but masses. Masses without number, like waves of humanity. But wherever one looks one sees women – at meetings, gatherings, demonstrations . . .’ ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI, BOLSHEVIK CENTRAL COMMITTEE
‘But, when the first socialist revolution took place in this country and the revolutionary movement was crushed in other parts of Europe, the general circumstances were difficult and the Bolsheviks were faced with one alternative. What was it? The alternative of surrendering or that of building socialism even under very difficult conditions. This historical challenge, this enormous task, was imposed on them. They didn’t surrender; they didn’t consider themselves defeated by the fact that the revolution had been defeated elsewhere, and, considering the natural resources and the size of the country they opted to build socialism.’ FIDEL CASTRO
‘Are you glad about the Russians? Of course, they won’t be able to maintain themselves in this witches’ Sabbath – not because statistics show that their economic development is too backward, as your clever husband has worked out, but because Social Democracy in the highly developed West consists of a pack of piteous cowards who are prepared to look on quietly and let the Russians bleed to death. But such an end is better than “living on for the fatherland”; it is an act of world-historical significance whose traces will not be extinguished for aeons.’ ROSA LUXEMBURG TO LOUISE KAUTSKY
‘And we also, as Negroes, mourn for Lenin. Not one but four hundred million of us should mourn over the death of this great man, because Russia promised great hope not only to Negroes but to the weaker peoples of the world.’ MARCUS GARVEY, 1924
