Anyone but Lenin

February 19, 1997
Issue 

A People's Tragedy: The Russian revolution 1891-1924
By Orlando Figes
Cape, 1996
Review By Phil Hearse

This year is the 80th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and among the liberal intelligentsia it's going to be open season on the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks and Lenin.

Figes' book, already hailed as a classic by Eric Hobsbawm, tells the story of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary period in a lively way: his literacy skills are probably related to the fact that his mother is the writer Eva Figes. But there, the book's merits stop.

Figes takes what has become, since the fall of Stalinism, a well-beaten track, following in the footsteps of people like Hobsbawm, Irwin Silber and Donald Sassoon.

The point now is not to explain why the revolution degenerated into Stalinism, but to argue that it should never have taken place — or rather, it should have stopped at its bourgeois democratic stage, February 1917. This argument was recently repeated on British TV by Mikhail Gorbachev.

In fact, Figes is torn even over this argument. At the beginning of the book, we find him arguing that there was no reason for tsarism to collapse, provided the reforms of the 1860s (abolition of serfdom) had been continued. In the final chapters, we find him first arguing that a fully fledged European-style bourgeois democracy could have been created, and that the social preconditions for such a solution were indeed emerging.

In between, he grasps at the straw that the moderate socialists, the Mensheviks and the right Socialist Revolutionaries, could have taken power after February, governing through really democratic soviets, linked perhaps to a democratically elected Constituent Assembly.

Figes thus returns again and again to the question: how could the system have been reformed/renewed/replaced to avoid the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks? Anything or anyone will do — anyone but Lenin.

Even if we were to accept the utterly fallacious argument that Figes takes for granted — that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were dictatorial monsters — the overall logic of his argument could not be substantiated.

He constantly rails against the blindness, the short-sightedness, of Tsar Nicholas II, the feudal aristocracy, the emerging bourgeoisie and all their political representatives for refusing to reform the system. Why couldn't they see that if they didn't give the masses, especially the debt-ridden and utterly poverty-stricken peasants, reforms — then the masses would give them revolution? Through his argument, the "people's tragedy" of Bolshevism is put down to mistakes of the rulers.

This line of thinking is shallow and goes nowhere. In particular, it leaves out of account the position of Russia in the international division of labour, and the political repercussions of that internally.

Nicholas II may have been obtuse even by Romanov standards, but his obtuseness was a product of social circumstances. Tsarism and the feudal system of which it was the apex could not have simply been "reformed" by a progressive-minded tsar.

It was deeply embedded in a centuries-old system which could have been shaken up from top to bottom only by a self-confident and politically ruthless capitalist class prepared to fight to sweep away the feudal nobility or force it into a compromise. But that was exactly the problem: where was the Russian Cromwell or the Russian Robespierre?

The nearest candidate Figes can come up with is Stolypin, prime minister 1906-11. "Hangman Stolypin", as the revolutionaries called him, pressed for reforms, but never outside the strict bounds of tsardom. His actions when shot in a theatre — turning to the tsar's private box and crying "I am happy to die for my tsar" — says it all.

Why was the emerging capitalist class so supine before the feudal system? This is ABC for anyone who has read Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky explains that Russian capitalism, though a dynamic sector compared with the torpor of the feudal countryside, was a dependent capitalism, dominated by French and British capital.

A powerful indigenous capitalism, capable of struggling to assert itself on the world stage as an autonomous centre of finance capital, was not developing. Russian capitalism was marked by its historically late development. An economically dependent capitalism gave rise to a supine and deferential bourgeoisie.

This is what, in their different ways, both Trotsky and Lenin understood: that the national and democratic tasks of the revolution, the elimination of the feudal system, would not led by the liberals or other political representatives of the bourgeoisie. These tasks would have to be accomplished by a movement led by the working class.

This strategic fight underlay Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution and Lenin's notion of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry".

What about Figes' third option — a democratic government of the moderate Soviet parties, the Mensheviks and the SRs? This is like saying, "If my bungalow had 200 more floors, it would be like the Empire State Building" — formally correct but practically useless.

If the Mensheviks and the SRs had been prepared to take power through the Soviets and break with the old Duma government, instead of dithering during the months of "dual power", they would have been like the Bolsheviks! Here, of course, Figes would violently disagree, because for him the Bolsheviks were the unique embodiment of a totalitarian project.

There are two aspects of Figes' argument here. On the one hand is the question of whether the Bolsheviks were prepared to govern with others, through the Soviets, or wanted to monopolise power for themselves. In fact, the first post-October government included representatives of the left SRs as well as the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks moved towards one-party government only when the SRs and the anarchists actively supported counter-revolution.

The other question is the character of Lenin and the Bolshevik party. Here Figes descends into the psychological crudity of the typical liberal offerings of the 1950s and 1960s: Lenin was an authoritarian personality, a real tyrant, consumed with bitterness by his brother's execution, etc, etc. Moreover, "Krupskaya was more like Lenin's secretary than his wife" and "it was perhaps no accident that their marriage was childless".

This kind of nonsense is unworthy of a serious historian: at least other liberal critics, like Neil Harding, do Lenin the justice of treating him as a serious theoretician and political leader (see his recent book Leninism, MacMillan 1996, and his two-volume Lenin's Political Thought, MacMillan 1983.)

For Figes, like all liberal critics, Stalinism was already implicit in Leninism. And Leninism came to power merely because the other potential agents of radical change in Russia lacked the foresight or the political nous to bring it about. The "people's tragedy" was an accident of history.

The truth is much less trivial. The October Revolution occurred because tsarist feudalism was unreformable; and because the historical process had simultaneously brought onto the stage a domestic capitalist class incapable of leading the fight against tsarism, and another class, which through the mechanism of the Bolshevik wing of the social democratic movement, showed that it could — the working class.

October was not contingent — tragedy or not. It was deeply rooted in the realities of the new, imperialist, epoch.

Equally, the fate of the Russian Revolution, its isolation and degeneration, was determined by deep-going international factors. Those who try to explain the victory of the Stalinist bureaucracy merely by interrogating Bolshevik policy, the actions of Lenin and others, are barking up the wrong tree. Orlando Figes is barking up the wrong tree in numerous ways because, lacking a Marxist method, he has no framework for measuring one "factor" against another.

When I wanted to find out about the Russian Revolution as a teenager in the 1960s, I was, like tens of thousands of others, pointed in the direction of E.H. Carr, Issac Deutscher and Trotsky's History. As we enter a year when both TV and the print media will deluge us with abuse about Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the advice to turn to these three authors can only be repeated with renewed vigour.

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