The Russian Revolution was one of the most important events of the 20th century.  It had a massive impact on the world and revolutionary movements, especially in the period after world war two when many groups seeking to imitate the Bolshevik triumph in Russia came to power.  The revolution itself shows two main things.  Firstly, the revolution validates anarchist critiques of the “workers state” or “dictatorship of the proletariat” advocated by Marxists and other authoritarian socialists.  Anarchists have long predicted that these schemes would inevitably result in the creation of a new bureaucratic ruling class that dominated and exploited the proletariat, a prediction that was proven correct in Russia and subsequent state socialist revolutions.  Second, the early phases of the revolution provide an example of how society might be run in an anarchistic manner without capitalism, the state or other authoritarian systems.  This period saw the creation of non-hierarchical organizations on a mass scale very similar to those advocated by anarchists.  These organs of self-management can be compared to the systems set up by anarchists during the 1936 Spanish Revolution.

The 1917 revolution was preceded by the 1905 revolution, the “dress rehearsal” for the 1917 revolution.  As a result of Russia’s loss in the war with Japan mass rebellions broke out against the king of Russia, Tsar Nicholas Romanov the second.  The Tsar quickly made peace with Japan and granted a few concessions including changing Russia to a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, the Duma, limiting his power.  This, combined with a good deal of repression, succeeded in ending the rebellions and saving the monarchy.  After the revolution was defeated most of the concessions the Tsar made were undone and the Duma lost most of its power.

In 1914 Russia joined the First World War on the side of the entente.  As in the Russo-Japanese war Russia took heavy loses and was severely strained by the war.  Unlike the Russo-Japanese war the Tsar could not simply end the war when it threatened to topple his kingdom.  The stress was too much and the Tsar was overthrown in February 1917, thus beginning the Great Russian Revolution.  In the Tsar’s place a provisional government was set up which was to hold elections to create a Russian Republic.  In October 1917 another revolution occurred which overthrew the Provisional government and brought revolutionary socialists to power.  The Bolshevik party led by Vladimir Illyich Lenin and Leon Trotsky played a leading role in the October revolution, but did not do it alone.  Although initially democratic the new government quickly evolved into a totalitarian state under the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party.  This was followed by a civil war from May 1918 until November 1920 and the solidification of the state bureaucracy into a new ruling class.

Revolution in the Cities

The February Revolution began on February 23rd, international women’s day.  In the capital, Petrograd, spontaneous demonstrations, strikes and battles with the police erupted.  Their main slogan was a demand for bread, other ones included “down with the autocracy” and “down with the war.”  Over the next several days the rebellion spread and became bigger, by the 25th it had turned into a general strike.  “The workers come to the factories in the morning; instead of going to work they hold meetings; then” (1) demonstrations.  Troops were called in to suppress the insurrection, on the 27th they mutinied en masse.  The government lost control of the capital and on March 2nd the Tsar abdicated.  The Provisional Committee of the Duma created the provisional government.  This group of politicians (who were not elected to these posts) was to run the government until they could hold elections for a constituent assembly that would write a new republican constitution for Russia.

During and after the February revolution mass meetings were held by ordinary people to discuss the situation and organize themselves.  In workplaces workers held worker assemblies, in villages peasants held peasant assemblies, soldiers had soldier assemblies.  These operated on principles of direct democracy and served to organize revolutionary action by the masses.  These popular assemblies have appeared in many revolutions – the French had the Sans-Culottes sectional assemblies, the Mexican had peasant assemblies, the Portuguese had worker and neighborhood assemblies and the Spanish had worker and peasant assemblies.  They have also been formed in recent rebellions in Argentina and Algeria.  Many anarchists see an anarchist society as being organized by popular assemblies such as the ones formed in these revolutions.

The wake of the February revolution also saw the creation of another anarchic institution – the soviets.  These were decentralized directly democratic institutions created by the workers to coordinate their struggle.  "The Russian Soviets fulfilled a double function: during great events they served as rallying points for the direct initiative of the masses, throwing into the scale their enthusiasm, their blood and lives.  In periods of relative stability they were organs of popular" (2) self-management.  As the struggle intensified they took on more power and threatened the power of the state and ruling class, acting as an alternative way to organize society.  Workers in each workplace would elect a number of delegates to the soviet based on the number of people who worked there.  Delegates were not only recallable but also mandated.  Most cities had soviets and there were eventually soldier and peasant soviets set up.  Large cities also had local borough soviets for different parts of the city.

As historian Oscar Anweiler pointed out in his definitive history of the Russian soviets, they came quite close to ideas advocated by many anarchist thinkers, including Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin:

"Proudhon's views are often directly associated with the Russian councils, and sometimes even held decisive for their establishment. Bakunin … much more than Proudhon, linked anarchist principles directly to revolutionary action, thus arriving at remarkable insights into the revolutionary process that contribute to an understanding of later events in Russia.

In 1863 Proudhon declared ... 'All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization.’...

Proudhon's conception of a self-governing [society] ... founded on producers' corporations [i.e. federations of co-operatives], is certainly related to the idea of 'a democracy of producers' which emerged in the factory soviets. To this extent Proudhon can be regarded as an ideological precursor of the councils.  But his direct influence on the establishment of the soviets cannot be proved. ...

Bakunin … suggested the formation of revolutionary committees with representatives from the barricades, the streets, and the city districts, who would be given binding mandates, held accountable to the masses, and subject to recall. ... Bakunin proposed the ... organization of society 'through free federation from the bottom upward, the association of workers in industry and agriculture -- first in the communities, then through federation of communities into districts, districts into nations, and nations into international brotherhood.' These proposals are indeed strikingly similar to the structure of the subsequent Russian system of councils ...

Bakunin's ideas about spontaneous development of the revolution and the masses' capacity for elementary organization undoubtedly were echoed in part by the subsequent soviet movement. ... Because Bakunin - unlike Marx - was always very close to the reality of social struggle, he was able to foresee concrete aspects of the revolution. The council movement during the Russian Revolution, though not a result of Bakunin's theories, often corresponded in form and progress to his revolutionary concepts and predictions." (3)

In classical anarchist theory popular assemblies (or other local groups) would coordinate their activities through the use of mandated and recallable delegates (also called spokes or contact people).  Delegates are mandated meaning they must represent the position the group (assemblies, etc.) they come from has decided.  They are instructed by the group(s) they come from, at every level, on how to deal with any issue. These instructions will be binding, committing delegates to a framework of policies within which they must act and providing for their recall and the nullification of their decisions if they fail to carry out their mandates.  Decision-making power stays with the assemblies (or other local groups), delegates simply implement and communicate them to delegates from other assemblies.  This differs from representative institutions in that decision making power stays in the assemblies whereas representatives can make whatever decisions they want and have authority over others.  With this system assemblies (or other groups) can coordinate their actions with each other without authority, organizing things from the bottom up instead of centralizing power.  Rather than top down organizations, there are decentralized confederations and networks.  Contemporary North American anarchists often call these spokescouncils; sometimes they are called workers’ councils.

Initially the soviets came very close to this system, but they did not match exactly.  The first soviets, which were born in the 1905 revolution (and suppressed along with the defeat of the revolution), appear to have come closer to the anarchist ideal.  “This was the first experience of direct democracy for most of those involved. The Soviets were created from below, by the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and reflected their desires--which were expressed in non-sectarian resolutions. No political party dominated the Soviets, and many workers were opposed to allowing representation for political parties.” (4)  Anarchists raised the slogan “all power to the soviets” in this revolution. (5)

After the February revolution the soviets were created once again.  In 1905 the soviets were just a working class phenomenon, in 1917 soldiers set up soviets and eventually so did peasants.  In some cases the worker, soldier and/or peasant soviets would merge together to form joint soviets.  Regional federations of soviets were set up and on June 3rd an all-Russian congress of soviets was held.  That soviet congress agreed to hold another soviet congress every three months.

Like the 1905 soviets, these soviets initially were very close to the anarchist system of mandated and recallable delegates.  However, there were small differences that appeared.  In the 1917 soviets political parties eventually came to play a more important role and began to dominate them.  Mandates were not always strictly followed.  Soviets tended to go from being made up of mandated delegates to being representative bodies, where delegates followed the party agenda instead of the decisions of the workplace that elected them.  Party discipline over any party member that became a delegate interfered with the directly democratic nature of the soviets.  In addition, political parties were often allowed to send their own delegates regardless of their popular support, giving them disproportionate influence.  The higher-level soviets tended more to become representative institutions, while the borough and local soviets stayed closer to the masses.  The transformation of soviets into representative, instead of mandated delegate, bodies was rapidly accelerated by the October revolution but their tendency to act as representative instead of delegate bodies already existed prior to October.  “Even before the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, actual political authority had been shifted to the Executive Committee while the soviet plenum was left with only approval or rejection of ready-made resolutions and with decisions on basic questions.” (6)

Since anarchists constituted only a small minority of those who participated in the soviets it is not surprising that they deviated from the anarchist ideal.  The Tsar had only recently been overthrown and so most was not as familiar with the dangers of representative democracy.  Mandates weren’t strictly followed and the attempts of political parties to take them over were not resisted as much as they should have been.  What is remarkable is that the soviets (and other organizations) were very close to what most anarchists had advocated for decades even though most were not only non-anarchists but knew very little of anarchist theory.

The February revolution began with the mutiny of the military and the collapse of military discipline.  Within the military participatory democratic structures were created by rank-and-file soldiers that had the effect of undermining the power of the government and military command.  Soldiers (most of whom were peasant conscripts) set up their own soldiers’ soviets similar to the workers’ soviets.  In some cases they merged with worker soviets and in some with both worker and peasant soviets.  Officers and soldier committees were elected and subject to recall by soldier assemblies.  This kind of military democracy has appeared in many revolutions – the soldiers’ councils among the Levellers in the English revolution, the minutemen in the American Revolution, the anarchist militias in the Spanish revolution and other popular revolutions.

Another anarchic institution that appeared after the February revolution was the factory committees.  These were initially set up to coordinate the workers’ struggle against their bosses and limit the power of management.  "Because the committees represented the worker right at his place of work, their revolutionary role grew proportionately as the soviet consolidated into a permanent institution and lost touch with the masses.” (7)  Many committees ended up taking over the factories.  Factory takeovers began first as a response to the closing down of factories by their owners (usually due to un-profitability), the workers took them over and were usually able to run them where capitalists had failed.  Eventually the expropriations spread to factories not abandoned by their owners, accelerating with the October revolution. (8)

Many historians have noted the similarity of these factory committees to the worker self-management advocated by anarcho-syndicalists (and other anarchists).  In anarcho-syndicalist theory, the workers using worker assemblies would run their own workplaces.  Factory committees would be created to carry out coordination and administrative tasks.  They would be elected, mandated and subject to recall.  Decision making power would stay with the workers in their assemblies.  The committees would simply implement the decisions made by the workers in their assemblies and would not have authority over workers.

This is what was implemented in the Spanish revolution; the factory committees in the Russian Revolution were virtually identical.  There were two differences.  The first was that, whereas the takeover of industry in the Spanish revolution was done rapidly in the space of a few weeks, the takeover of industry in Russia was comparatively slow, taking the better part of a year.  The second was that the self-managed factories in Russia sold their products on the market, producing largely the same thing and for the same customers.  The majority of anarcho-syndicalists are opposed not only to capitalism but also to markets and so in Spain eventually set up non-hierarchical forms of coordination between workplaces.  Industry in Spain was reorganized to be more effective and adapt to changing circumstances brought on by civil war.

Agrarian Revolution

Prior to the revolution most Russian peasants were organized into repartitional communes called the Mir.  Each household in the Mir was assigned land, which they farmed themselves and kept the product of for themselves (minus taxes, rent, etc.).  A village assembly consisting of all the household heads called the skhod ran the commune.  Except in times of rebellion or revolution, male elders dominated the skhod.  It was patriarchical and ageist, women and the young were excluded.  The land assigned to each household would be periodically repartitioned by the skhod, the intention being to maintain an egalitarian village as much as possible.  Peasant villages were rather egalitarian, but there was some stratification between poor peasants, middle peasants and Kulaks on the top.  A disproportionate amount of the land was owned by a landlord aristocracy, which had descended from the feudal nobility.  The landlords exploited the peasants through rent or other means.

Many revolutionaries, including the populists, social revolutionaries (SRs) and many Russian anarchists, believed the Mir could play an important role in overthrowing the Tsar and, if democratized, in building a socialist society.  They were right.  During both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions the communes played a major role, serving as a ready-made organization through which the peasants rebelled against the landlords and the state.  After the 1905 revolution reforms were implemented with the intention of staving off another revolution, including an attempt to undermine the Mir.  Petr Arkadevich Stolypin, prime minister of Russia from 1906 until his assassination in 1911, in addition to using state terror to suppress all opposition to the Tsar implemented land reforms designed to weaken and destroy the Mir.   He attempted to convert the peasantry into small holding farmers, each owning his own plot of land instead of living in the communes.  It was hoped that doing this would generate a conservative class of farmers (as had arisen in many West European countries) and make it more difficult for peasants to organize against the regime.  The Stolypin land reforms failed to achieve its goal, only a tiny percentage of peasants became small holding farmers, the vast majority stayed in the Mir.

In 1917 the communes played a major role in the overthrow of the old order.  The Volga region is not unusual in this regard.  "During the second half of March 1917 news of the February revolution in Petrograd and the abdication of the Tsar filtered down to the villages ... During the following weeks open assemblies were held in almost every village to discuss the current situation and to formulate resolutions on a broad range of local and national issues.” (9)  These assemblies acted as a counter-power against the landlords and state in the villages and were used to organize against them.  "The district and provincial peasant assemblies of 1917 served as an important focus for the articulation of peasant grievances and aspirations. ... As the power of the state collapsed in the provinces during 1917, the political initiative passed to these district and provincial assemblies." (10)

These assemblies were not the same ageist and patriarchical assemblies that had previously run the communes.  The revolution transformed not only the relationship of the commune to landlords and the state, but transformed relations within the communes as well:

"The village assemblies which met during the spring of 1917 marked a process of democratization within the peasant community.  Whereas village politics before 1914 had been dominated by the communal gathering of peasant household elders, the village assemblies which came to dominate politics during 1917 comprised all the village inhabitants and were sometimes attended by several hundred people.  The patriarchical domination of the peasant household elders was thus challenged by junior members of the peasant households (including the female members), landless laborers and craftsmen ... [and others] who had formerly been excluded from the communal gathering." (11)

After the February revolution the communes began expropriating the landlord’s land and incorporating it into the communes.  "It was very rare indeed for the [landlord] himself to be harmed during these proceedings." (12)  The peasants aimed to re-divide the land to give everyone a fair share.  The landlord’s land was added to the commune’s land and then the land repartitioned, with each household assigned it’s own plot of land by the (newly democratized) peasant assemblies.  "The meadows and the pasture were usually left in communal use (i.e. were not partitioned), in accordance with traditional custom." (13)  The peasants’ aim was:

"to restore the idealized 'good life' of the village commune, a life which had been irrevocably lost in the modern world.  They appealed to the ancient peasant ideals of truth and justice which, since the Middle Ages, had been inextricably connected in the dreams of the peasants with land and freedom.  The village commune ... provided the organizational structure and the ideological basis of the peasant revolution … Every family household, including those of the former landowners, was given the right to cultivate with its own labor a share of the land." (14)

Most landlords who did not flee after the expropriations began were incorporated within the communes as equal peasants.  They were usually given a portion of their former land to farm themselves, but no more than any other peasant and only an amount they could farm themselves (without hired labor).  "Most of the peasant communities … recognized the right of the ex-landowner to farm a share of his former land with the labour of his family. ... A survey in Moscow province on the eve of the October revolution showed that 79% of the peasantry believed the landowners and their families should be allowed to farm a share of the land." (15)

Returning peasant conscripts from the soldiers often played an important role in radicalizing the village and leading the revolution.  “The return of the peasant-soldiers from the army during the winter and spring of 1917-18 had a profound effect on the course of the revolution.  These young men presented themselves as the natural leaders of the revolution in the villages. ... The mood of the soldiers on their return from the army was radical and volatile." (16)  Peasant conscripts who otherwise may never have left their village were placed in a situation (the army) very different from the villages where they learned about large-scale organization and came in contact with radical ideas.

The expropriation and repartitioning of land accelerated with the October revolution.  Without the peasant rebellions bringing down the old order the insurrections in the cities would never have succeeded.  For a while after the October revolution Bolshevik power was very weak and most villages were largely left to themselves.  A kind of semi-anarchy prevailed in many villages, with the landlords expropriated and the Bolsheviks not yet imposing their authority on the village.  The peasant assemblies and communes that prevailed in this period are quite similar to many of the institutions advocated by many anarchists but, as with the soviets, there were some small differences.

The democratized village assemblies are quite similar to the community assemblies (or “free communes”) advocated by many anarchists since the early 19th century.  However, while anarchists envision their community assemblies as being purely voluntary bodies that would respect the individual freedom of its members (and this was the case with the village assemblies during the Spanish revolution) in some cases the Russian village assemblies turned into a “tyranny of the majority.”  In Spain those who did not want to participate in the collectives were not coerced into doing so and were given some land but only as much as they could work themselves (without hired labor).  In Russia there were instances of small holding farmers who had separated from the commune as a result of the Stolypin land reforms being forced to rejoin the commune, sometimes violently.  Peasant assemblies were sometimes hostile towards people from outside the village, especially if they had no previous connection to the village.

Unlike Russia’s repartitioned communes, peasants in agrarian collectives during the Spanish revolution generally cultivated the land in common rather than assigning each household it’s own plot.  What was produced was shared as well.  In some cases money was abolished and things distributed on the basis of need.  The Russian peasant’s repartitional commune did not cultivate all land in common or share what was produced.  Although quite different from the collectives advocated by anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists (and set up during the Spanish revolution) these repartitional communes were similar to systems advocated by mutualist anarchists like Joseph Proudhon.  In many mutualist schemes the land would be farmed by peasants who would work their own land (without wage-labor or collectives) and trade any surplus on the market with other peasants, self-employed artisans and/or cooperatives.  This is quite similar to what prevailed in rural Russia during the high point of the revolution.

Villages often suffered from excessive parochialism and sometimes came into conflict with each other.  Unlike in revolutionary Spain there was no confederations set up between communes to coordinate their actions or equalize the wealth of different communes.  The closest thing was the peasant soviets, however these did not play as big a role in the countryside as they did in the cities and soon transformed into a hierarchical power over the villages.

As in the cities, the majority of peasants were not anarchists and so it should not be surprising that these revolutionary agrarian structures did not completely match the anarchist ideal.  Despite this they came very close.  The embryo of an anarchist society was created before and for a short while after October.

All of revolutionary Russia was covered with a vast network of workers' and peasant soviets, which began to function as organs of self-management. They developed, prolonged, and defended the Revolution. … a vast system of social and economic workers' self-management was being created … This regime of soviets and factory committees, by the very fact of its appearance, menaced the state system with death. (17)

Rise of the Bolsheviks

The February revolution was a spontaneous and leaderless revolution.  It left all the political parties behind, including the revolutionary ones.  This contrasts with Lenin’s vanguardist conception of the revolution.  In his book What is to be Done?, published in 1902, Lenin said that:

"The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia." (18)

By Social Democracy Lenin meant revolutionary Marxism, this was written before Social Democracy became a synonym for the welfare state.  Lenin argued that “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.” (19)  Only intellectuals (“educated representatives of the propertied classes”) could develop revolutionary socialism, not by workers on their own.  The task of these revolutionary intellectuals was to form a vanguard party run by professional revolutionaries that would spread socialist ideology among the workers and lead them to make a revolution.  The party would be organized hierarchically, with a powerful central committee at the top, based on a highly centralized version of representative democracy called “Democratic Centralism.”  This position caused a split in the Russian Marxist movement.  One faction, the Bolsheviks, supported Lenin’s advocacy of a vanguard party while the other faction, the Mensheviks, advocated a more traditional political party.  These two factions later broke into two separate parties, with the Bolsheviks organizing theirs along the vanguardist lines Lenin advocated.

Lenin’s claim that socialist ideology cannot be developed by the workers’ exclusively by their own effort but can only be brought to them from without is false.  It may be true for Marxism, but it is not true for all forms of socialism.  There have been many examples of workers’ developing revolutionary anti-capitalist consciousness and going beyond “trade union consciousness” without the aid of intellectuals.  The anarcho-syndicalist movement, which was once massive, is an excellent example.  It was literally created by ordinary workers, not by intellectuals, and grew into a mass movement in many countries – even launching a revolution in Spain.  In the 1905 Revolution Lenin’s “vanguard” was left behind by the revolutionary workers, the Bolsheviks were initially suspicious of the Soviets and opposed them.  In 1917 revolutionary workers again left behind the “vanguard”, both in the February Revolution and again in the July days.

Even if Lenin was right and revolutionary ideology could only come from the intellectuals his vanguardism would not follow.  The intellectuals could simply spread socialist ideology amongst the workers without attempting to impose their authority on the workers.  Hierarchical organization is not necessary; the intellectuals could spread socialist ideology to workers who would self-organize against capitalism.  They can organize non-hierarchically, instead of using “Democratic Centralism.”  Just because one group persuades another that a certain philosophy is a good idea it does not follow that the persuading group has to have power over those they persuade.

After the February revolution the Bolsheviks took a position not that far from the Mensheviks.  The Mensheviks claimed that the current revolution was a “bourgeois revolution” which would lead to the establishment of capitalism and the rule of the bourgeoisie.  A working class socialist revolution would only be possible after a long period of industrial capitalism.  The task of socialists was thus not to push for another revolution to overthrow the capitalists but to help consolidate the current revolution, build capitalism, prevent a counter-revolution and build a reformist workers movement.  The so-called “vanguard of the revolution,” the Bolshevik party, was initially not revolutionary at all!

This changed with Lenin’s return to Russia.  The provisional government decreed an amnesty for all persecuted dissidents, which resulted in hordes of revolutionaries returning to Russia from exile in the months following the February revolution.  The Germans granted Lenin safe passage through German territory to return to Russia, hoping that he would stir up unrest and possibly force Russia to withdraw from the war.  Lenin arrived in April; shortly afterward he presented his April Theses at a meeting of the Bolshevik party.  In it he called for an end to the First World War, another revolution to overthrow the provisional government, establishing a “workers’ and peasants’ state” based on the Soviets, “Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy,” and “a state of which the Paris Commune was the prototype.”  Initially most Bolsheviks reacted very negatively to his position.  One Bolshevik, “Bogdanov (Malinovksy), beside himself, shouted that Lenin's speech was the raving of a madman; pale with rage and contempt, he showered blame on those who had applauded: ‘One should be ashamed to applaud this rubbish, you cover yourselves with shame!  And you are Marxists!’”  The old Bolshevik Goldenberg declared that “Lenin has presented his candidacy for a throne in Europe vacant these thirty years: Bakunin's throne.  Lenin's new words tell the same old story of primitive anarchism.  Lenin the Social Democrat, Lenin the Marxist, Lenin the leader of our militant Social Democracy is no more!” (20)  Only one senior Bolshevik leader, Alexandra Kollontai, supported Lenin’s April Theses from the start.  Despite this, Lenin was able to persuade the Bolshevik party to adopt his revolutionary stance, overcoming major resistance.

In April Theses, his book The State and Revolution (probably his most libertarian work) and other writings Lenin put forth an ultra-democratic and libertarian vision of society.  He believed in a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” also called a “workers’ state,” which would be the “proletariat organized as ruling class.”  Under this “workers’ state” the “the police, the army and the bureaucracy” would all be abolished and “the standing army [was] to be replaced by the arming of the whole people.”  Every government official would be elected, recallable and paid a workman’s wage.  It was to be a truly democratic state, controlled by the majority.  The working class would use this state to oppress the capitalists (a minority of the population) and put down their resistance to the new order.  He said that “for a certain time … the bourgeois state remains under communism, without the bourgeoisie!” (21)  After the revolution society would pass through two phases, first socialism and then communism.  Under socialism individuals would be paid based on how much they worked, communism would be a classless society without following the principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”  The ultimate aim of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was to bring about the end of the state, as it abolished classes and brought about communism the state would begin to “wither away” and eventually disappear completely.  He claimed that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was needed only temporarily to suppress the capitalists and build the new order, as communism comes about it about it was supposed to disappear.  Since Russia had a peasant majority in Russia the “workers’ state” would be a “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” – a joint workers’ and peasants’ state controlled by the majority.  The revolution in Russia was to be the opening shot in a world revolution that would topple capitalism around the globe.

The allegations made by some Bolsheviks that Lenin had gone over to anarchism, though incorrect, are not without merit.  Lenin’s views between the February and October revolutions incorporated a considerable degree of libertarian rhetoric and ideas.  Anarchists have long advocated the arming of the people and called for the abolition of the police, standing army and bureaucracy along with the state in general.  Anarchists had already begun pushing for another revolution to overthrow the Provisional government and criticizing the Mensheviks and SRs for cooperating with it.  The Bolsheviks took up many slogans the anarchists had already raised, including “All Power to the Soviets” and “the factory to the worker, the land to the peasant” but meant very different things by them.  By “All Power to the Soviets” the Bolsheviks meant that the Soviets would run the new “proletarian” state, they would assume state power.  The anarchists meant that the state should be abolished and society instead organized by voluntary non-hierarchical associations such as the Soviets.  By “the factory to the worker, the land to the peasant” the Bolsheviks meant putting these under state control.  Because the state would supposedly be controlled by the workers and peasants this would, they claimed, be equivalent to putting the factories and land under the control of the workers’ and peasants.  Lenin claimed that, “socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people.” (22)  The anarchists meant the slogan literally – the workers in the factory should directly control it themselves and the peasants who work the land should control the land themselves.   Lenin even declared that “While the state exists there is no freedom.  When freedom exists, there will be no state.” (23)  It is likely that the libertarian influence on his thought at this time was more the result of the libertarian structures created by the Russian masses, the Soviets, factory committees, etc. rather than as a result of anarchist theory.

Party as a result of the Bolshevik’s libertarian rhetoric the Russian anarchist movement allied with the Bolsheviks against the Provisional government, this alliance was broken after the October revolution.  The Bolsheviks also allied with the Maximalists (who had a position between the Left SRs and the anarchists) and the left wing of the Social Revolutionary party, the Left SRs.  The SRs were a peasant party, the oldest and largest party in Russia.  The Left SRs were very critical of the right SRs for cooperating with the Provisional government, it’s failure to pass land reform and it’s capitalist policies.  They advocated Soviet Democracy, land reform and the overthrow of the provisional government.  Shortly after the October revolution the Left SRs broke off and formed their own political party.

The vision of a hyper-democratic state outlined by Lenin in 1917 is not feasible and even if it could be implemented it would not be able to make the state an instrument of majority rule instead of minority rule.  In order to enforce it’s rule the state must have it’s own armed bodies of people (police, military, etc.) with a top down chain of command to make the population obey it’s laws.  Abolishing the police, military, etc. and arming the people would make it impossible for the state to enforce its’ orders.  These armed bodies of people have to have a top down chain of command because if they are autonomous they won’t necessarily do what the state wants.  Theoretically it is possible to have a state without bureaucracy but all states create hierarchical organizations in order to implement their orders.  In the modern state this comes in the form of bureaucracy.  Non-hierarchical organizations cannot serve this role because a non-hierarchical organization, by virtue of the fact that it is non-hierarchical, can choose not do what those in the top levels of the government hierarchy order it to do.  If it has to follow the government’s orders then it is hierarchical.  Theoretically there are pre-modern forms the state could use instead of bureaucracy (such as a system of vassals) but these are based on personal authority rather than impersonal rules and so it would be impossible to portray them as a implementing the decrees of a “proletarian democracy.”  Thus any “proletarian” state would have to be a bureaucratic state.  The modern state has thousands upon thousands of government officials, as did most pre-modern states.  Having every single one of them be elected is impossible; there are far too many positions to be able to choose candidates.  At best everyone would spend all his or her time voting, and doing nothing else.  In addition this would lead to paralysis within the state since only the electorate could fire officials, not their superiors, interfering with discipline.  The different levels of the state would all come into conflict with each other and gridlock would ensue.  These anti-authoritarian elements were infeasible and thus abandoned shortly after October.

The state is a hierarchical organization, based on centralization of power; that maintains a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the legitimate use of violence.  All states implement the rule of an elite over the majority and are never controlled by the majority because of this centralization of power and monopoly of force.  Decisions are not actually made by the majority but by those on the top of the hierarchy.  Ordinary people have no real control over elected politicians after winning power.  Once in power elected representatives are isolated from the general population but subjected to great pressure from state bureaucracies, political parties and (in bourgeois democracies) big business.  Elected politicians are in power temporarily, whereas the bureaucracy is there permanently.  Thus the bureaucracy tends to gain more power than the representatives.  In addition the bureaucracy can use black ops, disinformation, bureaucratic slowdowns, media manipulation, coups, brute force and other means to force representatives to go along with their wishes.  They can rig elections and repress parties with platforms they do not like to insure that elections are won by parties with platforms they approve of.  The right of recall does not give the majority control over the state since officials can use their monopoly of force to disregard or otherwise subvert recall attempts (which is exactly what happened to Russia in spring 1918) and even ignoring that actual decision making power still lies with the elected officials.  The majority doesn’t actually make the decisions itself.  In State and Revolution Lenin focuses on administration and accounting but says little about actual decision-making.  Once in power elected officials can not only use their authority to subvert elections and recall (insuring that the same elite stays in power regardless of who wins the election) but they can use it to pay themselves higher salaries than the average workman as they do in every state.  They will not give up power and “wither away” but actually form a new ruling class over the proletariat.  Even if Lenin’s program could be implemented it would not result in a state controlled by the majority. (24)

In State and Revolution Lenin said, “We want the socialist revolution with human nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control and ‘managers.’” (25)  “Human nature” is an ancient excuse used to justify tyranny for eons.  If human nature is such that humans are inherently evil then hierarchy should be abolished because those on the top will abuse their power.  If human nature is good then there is no need for hierarchy.  Either way, hierarchy should be abolished.  If people are too evil (or stupid) to rule themselves then they are far too evil (or stupid) to rule others.  The whole point of a social revolution is to change human behavior.  Present human behavior is also based on private property, markets and imperialism yet that did not prevent Lenin from calling for the revolution to abolish them “overnight.”  The workers and peasants in the Russian revolution were already beginning to abolish subordination and managers, creating alternative non-hierarchical forms of organization.  Doing away with subordination/hierarchy was not only possible; it was already starting to be implemented.

In State and Revolution Lenin also claimed that “the post office [is] an example of the socialist system.  … Our immediate task is to organize the whole of national economy on the lines of the postal system.” (26)  The post office is a highly bureaucratic and authoritarian organization.  It is based on a bureaucratic hierarchy, with those on the top giving orders to those on the bottom.  It is no surprise that a society organized along the lines of the post office would end up being highly bureaucratic and authoritarian.

Lenin argued that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was necessary to prevent the capitalists from using armed force to launch a counter-revolution, to defeat them in civil war.  He misrepresented anarchist theory by claiming that anarchists think the working class should lie down its’ arms after the revolution and not defend it from armed counter-revolutionaries.  He then attacked this misrepresentation of anarchism.  Revolutionary anarchists, excluding anarcho-pacifists, do believe that the workers should defend the revolution from violent counter-revolutionaries, with force if necessary.  A “proletarian” state is not the only way to defend the revolution.  If necessary the population can be armed and democratic militias formed to wage a guerilla war against counter-revolutionary armies.  Anarchists have done this repeatedly in Ukraine, Manchuria, Nicaragua and Spain.  A communal militia system, rather than a state, should be used to defend the revolution.

The Marxist theory of the state claims that the state is an instrument of whichever class happens to be dominant.  Under feudalism the state is the instrument of the aristocracy, under capitalism it is the instrument of the capitalists, under socialism it is the instrument of the workers, etc.  This theory is incorrect.  The state is not merely an instrument through which the dominant class suppresses other classes; it is a means through which a small elite dominates and exploits the majority. Because it is a hierarchical, centralized organization the state always develops a small elite on the top - those in the upper levels of the hierarchy. The "state elite." This elite dominates and exploits the population. Sometimes it does this directly, as would happen in the USSR and Maoist China. Other times it is more effective for this elite to defend the interests of a separate economic elite – such as a corporate elite or a landlord elite.  The economic elite and state elite have very similar interests and so it often appears as if the state is merely the instrument of the state elite.  Both seek to keep the subordinate classes subordinate, in order to maintain their authority and keep the extraction of surplus going.  The state elite benefits from the economic elite's exploitation in many ways - it can leach off the surplus (taxes, bribery, etc.), it can use the surplus to mobilize for war or other goals, etc.

The state elite and economic elite (dominant class), although they have broadly similar interests, do not always see eye to eye and sometimes conflict.  An example is Russia in the 1860s. Russia lost the Crimean war because it was behind the times - hadn't industrialized, had a backwards system. The Russian Bourgeoisie didn't really exist yet. The loss of this war threatened the power of the state (it could be conquered) and so the state implemented a bunch of reforms designed to modernize the country. Part of this was the abolition of serfdom – which the feudal landlords were overwhelmingly opposed to. The state threw the dominant class overboard in order to save itself. Of course, the manner in which the end of serfdom was implemented allowed the landlords to maintain a position higher over the peasantry - by owning more land - but it was still a major blow to their position opposed by most landlords. Thus, the state is not automatically the instrument of whichever class happens to be dominant - although the state and economic elites do usually share very similar interests, and often tend to intermingle.  Other examples of the state not doing what the economic elite wants are France under Napoleon the third, Peru’s revolutionary military dictatorship in the late sixties and early seventies, Peron’s regime in Argentina, and the later period of Nazi Germany.

The most common attempt by Marxists to explain these instances of the state conflicting with the dominant class is the theory of Bonapartism.  When the classes are evenly powerful there is no dominant class and so the state gains a certain degree of independence.  Lenin claimed that both of France’s Bonapartist regimes, Bismarck’s Germany and Europe’s absolute monarchies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were all examples of Bonapartism.  This theory fails for empirical reasons.  There have been many cases of states conflicting with economic elites when different classes clearly were not equally powerful.  Tsarist Russia in the 1860s (when the Russian capitalist didn’t really exist) and Nazi Germany provide two clear examples where the ruling class and the subordinate classes were most definitely not equally balanced yet they did not see eye to eye with the economic elite.  There have been several cases where the workers and capitalists were equally powerful yet Bonapartism did not develop, such as Italy in the early twenties.  And even in the case of Bonapartist France it is debatable whether the workers and capitalists actually were equally powerful.

Even if the theory of Bonapartism were correct it would effectively refute the Marxist advocacy of a “proletarian” state.  In the process of going from a situation where the capitalists are more powerful than the workers to a situation where the workers are more powerful than the capitalists there is a high probability that they will pass through the point where the workers and capitalists are equally powerful.  In the course of the revolution(s) and attempted counter-revolutions that will characterize the transition from capitalism to socialism it is almost inevitable the workers and capitalists will be equally powerful for a time, perhaps repeatedly.  Bonapartism is thus almost inevitable during the transition from capitalism to socialism.  Hence, the workers’ cannot rely on the state to defeat the bourgeoisie because when the class struggle is most intense, when the capitalists and workers’ are equally powerful, Bonapartism will come about and give the state a degree of independence, making any “workers’ state” completely unreliable.  The only time the workers’ would be able to rely on any state would be in the period when the bourgeoisie has been decisively defeated, but according to Lenin a “workers’ state” is most needed when the bourgeoisie are resisting the strongest.  When they have been decisively defeated the state is no longer needed by the workers and can begin to “wither away.”

Some, including much of the right and some anarchists & contemporary social democrats, portray Lenin and the Bolsheviks as Machiavellian schemers who set out from day one to impose a totalitarian one party state on Russia.  The Bolsheviks just wanted to seize power for themselves; the October revolution was just an elitist coup with no popular support.  This view is false.  Lenin and the other revolutionaries would not have risked their lives, spent countless years in jail and gone into exile if they only wanted power for themselves.  They genuinely believed their actions would create a better society.  Nor did Lenin’s vision prior to seizing power explicitly call for the dictatorship of one party.  In State and Revolution and other writings Lenin put forth a highly democratic vision of the state, not a one-party dictatorship.  Just a few weeks before the October revolution Lenin said, “By seizing full power, the Soviets could … ensure … peaceful elections of deputies by the people, and a peaceful struggle of parties inside the Soviets; they could test the programmes of the various parties in practice and power could pass peacefully from one party to another.” (27)

After Lenin came to power he eventually came out in favor of a one-party state (and not just for Russia), but prior to seizing power he held a highly democratic vision.  There were statements that could be seen to imply a one-party state, such as his reference in State and Revolution to “the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of crushing the oppressors” (28) but this was not explicit, as it would become after seizing power.  His theory, like the Marxist theory of the state in general, was internally contradictory – is it to be “the proletariat organized as ruling class” or “the vanguard of the proletariat organized as ruling class”?  This contradiction was really just the Marxist version of a contradiction inherent in all democratic theories of the state – they all advocate a society run by the majority yet advocate an institution, the state, which is inherently a system whereby a small minority rules.  Ordinary bourgeois democracy is also internally contradictory – is it to be “the people” who hold decision making power or elected representatives?  That Lenin’s vision of the state, one of the most democratic in history, could turn into a totalitarian dictatorship is an indictment not only of Marxism but also of all democratic theories of the state.

In early July dissatisfied Petrograd workers and soldiers (including sailors from the nearby Krondstadt Naval base, a stronghold of radicalism) staged demonstrations against the provisional government.  They marched under revolutionary slogans including “all power to the soviets,” beginning what would be known as the “July days.”  This turned into a semi-insurrection against the provisional government.  Once again, the so-called “vanguard” was left behind by the workers.  The Bolsheviks initially opposed the rebellion and attempted to prevent it but, as it got under way, subsequently decided to support it.  The July days failed to overthrow the provisional government and were defeated.  The leadership of the provisional government was changed as a result of the July days, making Kerensky head of the government.  Kerensky was one of the best-known socialists in the country, a member of the SR party, but a right-wing very conservative “socialist,” basically a sell-out to the capitalists.  A period of reaction followed the defeat of the July days.  Kerensky persecuted revolutionary groups, including the Bolsheviks.  Lenin and several other leaders of the party had to go underground and flee the country.  Prospects for revolution looked increasingly dim as the right advanced.

What changed this and radicalized the population was the Kornilov affair.  The most common account of this is that General Lavr Kornilov launched an attempted coup against the provisional government, intent on imposing a right-wing military dictatorship.  This was Kerensky’s story.  What actually happened is less clear and the details remain murky.  There are many conflicting accounts of this story, some say Kerensky tricked Kornilov into revolting, others that there was a miscommunication between Kerensky and Kornilov and still others say Kerensky was trying to play Kornilov and the Bolsheviks against each other.  In A People’s Tragedy Orlando Figes claims that Kerensky received a miscommunication from Kornilov that he intentionally misinterpreted as implying that Kornilov was about to launch a counter-revolutionary coup.  Kerensky used this for his own advantage, warning that Kornilov was about to launch a counter-revolutionary coup and setting himself up as a great hero fighting against Kornilov’s coup, causing Kornilov to revolt against the government.  This is a plausible account, though not necessarily correct.  Whatever actually happened between Kornilov and Kerensky, the effect was to cause Kornilov to rebel against the provisional government and march on Petrograd.  The Bolsheviks played a major role in defeating his march on the capitol, giving them more popularity.  The attempted “coup” was seen as confirmation that the provisional government could not defend itself from the forces of counter-revolution, as the Bolsheviks claimed.  It radicalized many people, initiating a mass movement that would culminate in the October revolution.  The revolutionaries, mainly Bolsheviks but also Left SRs and anarchists, won majorities in the Soviets.

The revolutionary movement built up over the next two months, eventually coming to comprise the majority of the population.  The provisional government got weaker and weaker, until the October revolution finally overthrew it.  The insurrection began on October 25th, not long before the opening of the second soviet congress.  Paramilitary forces and revolutionary soldiers, including sailors from Krondstadt, stormed the government buildings.  Though the Bolsheviks played a major role in the insurrection, it was not purely a Bolshevik affair.  Other revolutionaries, including anarchists, Maximalists and Left SRs, participated as well.  “The October Revolution was not a mere coup, but the culmination of an authentic mass movement, notwithstanding the ideology and scholarship inspired by the cold war.” (29)  The October revolution “was but the moment when the Provisional Government, whose power and authority had been completely undermined by popular revolts, was finally officially pushed aside.” (30)  Worker and peasant rebellions, the takeover of land and factories, accelerated with the October revolution (had it not the case for viewing it as a mere coup would be much stronger).  By the time the provisional government was destroyed the soviets, factory committees and popular assemblies had already shattered most of its power.  It is true that the October revolution was not the leaderless spontaneous event that the February revolution was, but just because a revolution has leaders and some amount of planning does not change it into a coup.  Many non-Bolsheviks participated in the insurrection and, as shown by the revolutionaries’ victories in the Soviets, most of the population supported the overthrow of the provisional government (although they did not support the one-party dictatorship that would later evolve).

Most Mensheviks and right-wing SRs walked out of the second congress of soviets in protest of the October revolution.  They formed “committees to defend the revolution” and attempted to stop the revolution.  The insurrection in Petrograd was followed by a brief miniature “civil war” in which soviets seized power throughout the country.  Local governments were toppled and replaced with Soviet governments.  Over the next several months rightists attempted to form armies in order to launch a counter-revolution, but they were defeated and frequently saw their troops mutiny or desert.  In April 1918 Lenin declared:

"We can say with confidence that in the main the civil war is at an end. There will be some skirmishes, of course, and in some towns street fighting will flare up here or there, due to isolated attempts by the reactionaries to overthrow the strength of the revolution—the Soviet system—but there is no doubt that on the internal front reaction has been irretrievably smashed by the efforts of the insurgent people." (31)

Of course, the “civil war” he was referring to here was merely the initial resistance to October and an assortment of failed counter-revolutionary plots and skirmishes.  The real civil war would not start until late May of 1918.

The October revolution created a Soviet state; the Soviets became the government.  The Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic was declared.  The second congress of soviets created the Council of People’s Commissars or Sovnarkom that ran the state, many local soviets set up local Sovnarkoms to run local governments.  The Bolsheviks formed a coalition government with the Left SRs and passed a number of decrees and reforms.  They embarrassed the entente by publishing secret imperialist deals the old regime had made with its entente allies.  They legalized the peasant seizure of lands, decreed separation of church and state, legalized abortion, decreed equality of the sexes, and made divorce easier.  A women’s section of the Bolshevik party was eventually created to fight for women’s equality and help the party control the female population.  On February 1st/14th Russia switched it’s calendar to the Gregorian calendar, putting it in sync with Western Europe.  In March 1918 the Bolshevik party renamed itself the Communist party.  Initially the power of the central government was extremely weak, local soviets and party organs were relatively decentralized.  Some soviets even declared their own local republics and dictatorships that ignored the directives of the national government.  Some parts of Russia were in near-anarchy.  “Kaluga Province became proverbial for its resistance to centralized authority in 1918.  There was a Sovereign Soviet Republic of Autonomous Volosts in Kaluga.  It was the closest Russia ever came to an anarchist structure of power.” (32)  As the Bolsheviks consolidated their power things became more centralized as the national government asserted its’ authority over the country.  This process of centralization was greatly accelerated after the civil war broke out but began prior to it.

Prior to the revolution the Bolsheviks had criticized the provisional government for its failure to hold elections for the Constituent Assembly.  The Bolsheviks hoped that electoral victory in the Constituent Assembly would solidify the power of the Soviet government and held elections to the Assembly on November 12th.  The socialist parties won overwhelmingly, although the Bolsheviks did not gain a majority as they had hoped.  The Bolsheviks received 24 percent of the vote, the SRs 38 percent, the Mensheviks 3 percent, and the Ukrainian SRs 12 percent.  The Kadets (liberal capitalists) received only 5 percent of the vote.

It was not an entirely fair election on account of the split in the SRs.  The left SRs officially split from the SR party just after the election lists had been drawn up and were therefore unable to run their own slate.  The right SRs also had a greater control over the party nominating mechanisms then their support warranted.  As a result the right SRs were over-represented in the Constituent Assembly.  Because the left SRs were pro-October and the right SRs were anti-October this was not a minor difference.  Had the left SRs been able to run their own slate in the election there would probably have been more left SRs and less right SRs in it, especially if there had been enough time to conduct a lengthy electoral campaign against the right SRs.  It is not unlikely that had the left SRs run their own slate the Bolsheviks could have formed a majority coalition with them, having the Constituent Assembly rubber-stamp the Soviet government and dissolve. (33) 

Having failed to gain a majority in the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks decided it should be disbanded.  After losing the election, Lenin now argued that Soviet democracy represented a higher form of democracy than the parliamentary democracy of the Constituent Assembly.  This argument was not without merit, since Soviet representatives could theoretically be recalled although bourgeoisie (and allied strata) could not vote in Soviet elections, (34) but if Soviet democracy were a better form of democracy then elections to the Constituent Assembly should have never been held in the first place.  Armed forces dissolved the Constituent Assembly on January 6, the day after it met.  The right-wing socialists whined about the closure of the Constituent Assembly, but most ordinary Russians weren’t very bothered by it.  “There was no mass reaction to the closure of the Constituent Assembly.” (35)  For most “the constituent assembly was now a remote parliament.  The peasants had greeted its closure by the Bolsheviks with a deafening silence.” (36)

Zhelezniakov, an anarchist sailor from Krondstadt, led the detachment that dispersed the Constituent Assembly.  Unlike the Bolsheviks, Anarchists had always opposed the constituent assembly - its purpose, after all, was to establish a state and consequently the rule of a small elite over the majority.  The anarchists were opposed to even holding the elections for the Constituent Assembly, whereas the Bolsheviks only turned against the Constituent Assembly when it was clear that it wouldn’t do what they wanted.  Anarchists wanted to take this a step further, dissolving the Sovnarkom and abolishing the Soviet state.  After October anarchists diverged from the Bolsheviks, their former allies.  Many called for a “third revolution” to overthrow the “Soviet” government, establish a federation of free soviets and abolish the state.

In March 1918 the Soviet government signed a humiliating peace treaty, the Brest-Litovsk treaty, with the Central Powers, bringing Russia out of the First World War.  Russia was not in a good position to negotiate and had to give up large amounts of territory.  This treaty was very controversial within Russia.  The left SRs and the left wing of the Communist party argued that they should not give in to the German imperialists and should instead wage a guerilla war against them.  The coming world revolution would supposedly topple the German government within a short time, bringing them to victory.  They were outvoted and Russia signed the treaty.  The left SRs left the government in protest.

Counter-Revolution

There were really two October revolutions – the worker & peasant revolution, which expropriated land and industry, and the Bolshevik “revolution” which established a “dictatorship of the proletariat (and peasantry).”  In the months and years after October the Bolshevik revolution would smash the worker & peasant revolution.  Many anarchists in the 19th century predicted that if Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" were ever implemented it would result in the creation of a new ruling class that would exploit the workers just as the old one did.  The "dictatorship of the proletariat" inevitably becomes a "dictatorship over the proletariat."  Mikhail Bakunin (and others) provided a materialist explanation for this.  Few predictions in the social sciences have come true so dramatically.  Not only in the USSR but also in every single instance where "workers’ states" have been implemented (at one point they ruled a third of the world) this prediction has come true.

The state is a hierarchical organization with a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the legitimate use of violence.  It is a centralized rule making body that bosses around everyone who lives in its territory.  It uses various armed bodies of people (police, militaries) with a top down hierarchical chain of command and coercive institutions (courts, prisons) to force its subjects to obey it.  It has a pyramidal structure, with a chain of command and a few people on the top giving orders to those below them.  Because of this pyramidal structure and monopoly of force the state is always the instrument by which a minority dominates the majority.  It was precisely this kind of organization that the Bolsheviks set up immediately following October.  This led to the formation of a new, bureaucratic, elite ruling over the masses.  The libertarian elements of Lenin’s thought conflicted with the interests of this new elite (which he was a part of) and so were dropped one by one.

At the top of the state pyramid was the Council of People's Commissars or Sovnarkom; below it were several other bodies.  It made laws and set up various hierarchical organizations to implement its’ decrees.  These were bureaucracies because that was the most efficient way for its orders to be implemented and to run the country.  In order to enforce the state’s laws armed bodies of people with a top down bureaucratic hierarchical chain of command were set up.  The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage or Cheka (secret police) was created not long after October to enforce the rule of the state.  Although at first they employed a relatively light amount of repression, the Cheka soon went out of control and used excessive force against anyone who did not agree with the state.  The Soviets gained a near-monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and hierarchical authority over the population.  This caused them to become isolated and detached from the masses, transforming into representative instead of directly democratic institutions.

During the course of the revolution the workers had taken over the workplaces and ran them themselves through their factory committees and factory assemblies.  For a brief period a kind of “free market syndicalism” prevailed, with self-managed workplaces selling their products on the market.  There were initial moves within the factory committees towards setting up non-hierarchical forms of coordination between workplaces without relying on the market, but the Bolsheviks defeated these proposals.  On November 15th a decree on Worker's Control was passed that rubber-stamped the factory committee movement but undermined workers’ self-management.  The factory committees were legalized but required to obey the state planners rather then the workers in their factory.  A system of central planning was set up, with a set of top-down authoritarian councils giving the committees orders.  Workers lost control over the factories they had expropriated to the state.  This effectively killed worker self-management in favor of centralized power.  In December this process continued with the creation of the Supreme Economic Council to centrally manage the economy.  The regime started nationalizing industries, centralizing the economy under the control of the Supreme Economic Council. (37)

Starting in March 1918 the regime began abolishing the factory committees (which had already been subordinated to the state) in favor of outright one-man management. (38)  The dictatorship of the bosses was restored; capitalist relations in the workplace returned in the form of state planning.  Over the next several years the factory committees would be eliminated in industry after industry until, by the early 20s, all workplaces were under one-man management. (39)  In 1920 Trotsky claimed that, “if the civil war had not plundered our economic organs of all that was strongest, most independent, most endowed with initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management in the sphere of economic administration much sooner, and much less painfully.” (40)

In April Lenin was arguing that

"We must raise the question of piece-work and apply and test it in practice; we must raise the question of applying much of what is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system; we must make wages correspond to the total amount of goods turned out, or to the amount of work done … The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field. … We must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system." (41)

As Marx said, piece-wages are the “most fruitful source of reductions of wages, and of frauds committed by capitalists,” (42) a way for capitalists to increase the exploitation of workers.  Its usage by the state is increased exploitation by the state.  Lenin continued this counter-revolutionary theme, arguing, “that large-scale machine industry … calls for absolute and strict unity of will … But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one.”  He now claimed that “unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of processes organized on the pattern of large-scale machine industry” and that the “revolution demands—precisely in the interests of its development and consolidation, precisely in the interests of socialism—that the people unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of labour.”  In the same document he said:

"That in the history of revolutionary movements the dictatorship of individuals was very often the expression, the vehicle, the channel of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes has been shown by the irrefutable experience of history. … There is, therefore, absolutely no contradiction in principle between Soviet (that is, socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals." (43)

The new regime exploited the peasants through grain requisitions, begun a few weeks before the start of the civil war. In early May a state monopoly on all grain was decreed.  Any grain they produced in excess of what they needed for themselves was to be given to the state; peasants got little of value in return.  The actual implementation of this was fraught with difficulty.  Determining exactly how much a peasant needed for himself was not easy and telling whether a peasant was violating the grain monopoly by hording more grain than he needed for himself was, as a result, extremely difficult.  "The calculations of the [grain requisitions] made no allowance for the long-term production needs of the peasant farms.  The consumption norms left the peasant farms without any grain reserves for collateral, or insurance against harvest failure." (44)  Lenin himself admitted that under the grain monopoly, “we actually took from the peasant all his surpluses and sometimes not only the surpluses but part of the grain the peasant needed for food.” (45)  This policy eventually led to famine.  The state exploited the peasants by appropriating anything they produced in excess of what they personally needed to survive and sometimes more than that.

All this resulted in the creation of a new bureaucratic ruling class.  Decisions in this immediate post-October period were not made by the working class but by the small group of commissars and bureaucrats who ran the state (a tiny minority of the population).  Neither the workers nor the peasants were running the state at any point in time.  The state did not later degenerate but was an instrument of minority rule from the moment it established its authority, as are all states.  This is clearly shown by where decision making power lay: in the hands of the Sovnarkom and hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations subordinated to it.  When the Sovnarkom makes the decisions the working class does not.  If the majority of the population is unquestioningly subordinated to the “leaders of the labor process” then it is those leaders who rule, not the workers or peasants, and form a new ruling class over the workers and peasants.  These authoritarian policies, combined with the disruption from war and revolution, caused Russia to sink deeper into economic crisis in the first months of Bolshevik rule.

The extreme degree of repression eventually employed by the “soviet” state arose out of this process of class formation and the class struggle between this new ruling class and the previously existing classes.  Both the Russian working class and peasantry were highly combative and had just overthrown the previous ruling class.  Subjugating them to a new ruling class was not easy and required massive amounts of repression, which is why all opposition was eventually suppressed.  If this hadn't been done the new ruling class would have been overthrown.  In doing this the Bolsheviks were not defending the working class (much of their repression was directed at the working class), they were defending their own dictatorship.  The suppression of opposition groups (both left and right) could not have been caused by the civil war as many Leninists claim because it started prior to the start of the civil war.

At first government repression was relatively light and directed mainly at the right-wing socialists and supporters of the old ruling class.  Although the actual dispersal of the constituent assembly was bloodless, a protest in support of it held after it’s dissolution wasn’t.  Bolshevik troops opened fire on the demonstration.  In December 1917 the Kadet party (constitutional democrats who advocated a liberal capitalist republic) was outlawed and some of its leaders arrested.  On January 6th 1918 Kokoshkin and Shingarev, leaders of the Kadets, were murdered by the regime.  Many bourgeois papers were shut down, as were some anti-October socialist papers.  A few right-wing socialist leaders were arrested and harassed.  Compared to what would come later this was a very light degree of repression.  Most of the groups attacked were actively opposed the October revolution and/or were attempting to overthrow the new government.  The Kadets, for example, were attempting to form counter-revolutionary armies to overthrow the government.  This repression wasn’t all that worse than the repression most governments, including western “democracies,” employ against groups attempting to overthrow the government. (46)

Late winter and spring of 1918 saw rising working class opposition to the Bolshevik regime.  Life for most workers had not significantly changed for the better and many began to organize against the new regime.  In March there were a number of peaceful protests by workers against the Bolshevik regime and organizing against the Bolsheviks by workers stepped up. (47)  They did this in a manner similar to how they had struggled against the old bosses - they formed worker assemblies and conferences of worker delegates, which functioned similarly to the way the Soviets originally had - as organizations (similar to spokescouncils) designed to coordinate worker actions against the regime.  The Soviets by this time had degenerated into weak parliaments controlled by the Bolshevik party and were denounced by the workers, who claimed they "have ceased to be the political representatives of the proletariat and are little more than judicial or police institutions." (48)  They criticized the subordination of the factory committees and demanded that they "out immediately to refuse to do the things that are not properly their real tasks, sever their links with the government, and become organs of the free will of the working class, organs of its struggle." (49)  In the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks lost elections in Soviet after Soviet.  The Mensheviks and SRs, the only other parties on the ballot, won by a large margin.  Just a few months after coming to power, most workers were opposed to the continued rule of the Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks reacted to this resistance with repression.  Where they lost soviet elections they resorted to various forms of electoral fraud; usually they simply disbanded Soviets after losing.  In order to maintain their rule they destroyed the Soviets. (50)   The right of recall, of even free elections, was destroyed and party dictatorship fully implemented.  This resulted in a wave of worker and peasant protests and revolts, which the Bolsheviks put down with force.  On May 9th armed guards shot at a group of workers in Kolpino protesting shortages of food and jobs.  This touched off a wave of strikes and labor unrest that resulted in more arrests and attacks from the state. (51)

This early workers’ movement against the Bolsheviks was largely reformist, with a high degree of Menshevik influence.  Some workers’ just wanted “good Bolsheviks.”  Most workers’ and groups involved in the movement lacked “a compelling explanation for the new disasters besetting Russian workers or a clear and convincing vision of a viable alternative social order.” (52)  An exception to this was the anarchists, who had both an explanation of the problems in Bakunin’s (and others’) warnings about authoritarian socialism and their own ideas about how to organize society.  So the anarchist movement had to be smashed.  In early April Anarchist organizations were raided; many anarchists were killed and many more were arrested.  This was the start of a major attack on the Russian anarchist movement that eventually wiped it out. (53)  Continuing the crackdown on anarchism, in early May Burevestnik, Anarkhia, Golos Truda and other major anarchist papers were shut down by the state. (54)  The “Communist” press put out all sorts of slanders against the anarchists – calling them bandits and other nonsense.  Other opposition groups suffered similar fates - the Mensheviks, SRs, Left SRs and Maximalists all saw many of their activists arrested or killed and publications censored.  All of this occurred prior to the start of the civil war.

Civil War

This pre-civil war terror played a role in the start of the civil war.  The SRs, tired of being persecuted, let themselves be caught up in the Czechoslovak adventure.  The Czech legion was a group of Czech P.O.W.s in Russia who had been organized by the Entente to fight against the Central Powers in exchange for the promise of Czech independence.  After the Bolsheviks made peace with the Central Powers the Czech legion was stuck in Russia, and started making their way out of Russian territory via the East.  Neither the Bolsheviks nor the Czechs really trusted each other so the Czechs revolted on May 25th and launched an attack against the Bolsheviks.  The SRs took advantage of this to form a new government based in Samara.  They created a coalition government very similar to the provisional government.  The civil war began as a war between the Bolsheviks and one of the rival socialist groups they tried to suppress.  The civil war did not cause the Bolshevik’s suppression of rival trends, but rather the suppression of rival trends was a catalyst that helped started the civil war.

In the wake of this several more counter-revolutionary governments were set up against the Bolsheviks:

"Between the Volga and the Pacific, no less than nineteen governments … arose to oppose the Bolsheviks.  Most prominent among the former, the government of Komuch in Samara [set up by the SRs] and the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia in Omsk, vied to establish their claims as the Constituent Assembly’s legitimate heirs since both had been formed by men and women [from the constituent assembly] " (55)

The politics of these anti-Bolshevik governments ranged from right-wing socialists, like the SRs, to the far right, including Monarchists.  In September these governments united by forming a Directorate of five people, including both socialists and reactionaries.  The Directory was in a precarious situation from the start.  The right continued to demand the creation of a one-person dictatorship while the SRs advocated a moderate socialist republic.  The rising landlord counter-revolution threatened the Directory and the SRs.  The Directory, and the preceding anti-Bolshevik governments, instituted a traditional military hierarchy and began the building of their own army.  Because most of the population did not support them, and thus would not volunteer to fight for them, they had to implement conscription.

The Bolsheviks were greatly hurt by the loss of popular support they had held in the wake of October.  Most did not support either side of the conflict; some village communes passed resolutions calling on both sides to end the civil war through negotiation and even declared themselves ‘neutral republics.’ (56)  However, the loss of popular support made the advance of anti-Bolshevik armies easier since few were willing volunteer to risk their lives defending the Bolsheviks.

The civil war greatly accelerated the centralizing trends that were already present in Bolshevik-controlled Russia and helped give an upper hand to the more hard-line & repressive factions within the ruling class.  Power gradually transferred from the Sovnarkom to the party to the Politburo.  This process had already started prior to the civil war; the civil war merely accelerated it.

At the start of the civil war the Bolsheviks had a very small military.  Most of it had disintegrated after October, as soldiers took the opportunity to leave and go home.  What was left consisted of a few small units, some paramilitary groups and partisan units.  Given their lack of popular support, these were completely incapable of halting the offensive by even the small Czech legion, let alone the large armies that were later used.  Trotsky was made Commissar of War, head of the military, in March 1918.  He reorganized the Red army.  Because most people opposed the Bolsheviks, and thus wouldn’t volunteer to fight for them, conscription was instituted.  The Bolsheviks claimed to support military democracy during the run up to October, but now that they were in power it was abolished in favor of a traditional military hierarchy.  If military democracy were maintained while simultaneously conscripting huge numbers of people who didn’t want to fight and who were opposed to the Bolsheviks it would result in the soldiers voting against the Bolsheviks, refusing to fight for them and possibly even overthrowing the Bolsheviks.  Obviously they were not going to let that happen.  Trotsky defended the abolition of military democracy:

"So long as power was in the hands of the enemy class and the commanders were an instrument in the hands of that class, we had to endeavor, by means of the principle of election, to break the class resistance of the commanding personnel. But now political power is in the hands of that same working class from whose ranks the Army is recruited.  Given the present regime in the Army … the principle of election is politically purposeless and technically inexpedient, and it has been, in practice, abolished by decree." (57)

Former Tsarist officers were made officers in the Red army.  In order to insure that the Tsarist officers obeyed the Red command, and didn’t launch a coup, commissars were assigned to each unit to keep the officers in line.  Both sides of the civil war suffered from massive desertion.

On August 31, 1918 SR assassins attempted to kill Lenin and nearly succeeded.  In response “the Communists inaugurated … mass arrests and executions, accompanied by the suppression of practically all the surviving non-Communist newspapers.” (58)  The few civil liberties Russians had left were shredded.  The Red Terror is usually dated to have begun with this heightened repression.  “Hundreds of Cheka prisoners are thought to have been summarily executed in the heightened paranoia that followed the assassination attempt … By the end of 1918 there had been 6,300 official executions,” (59) and an unknown number of unofficial executions.  “There was hardly a single town where executions did not take place.” (60)

At this point the civil war was still a war between socialists, although the SRs were in a coalition with the right.  In November 1918 a right-wing coup deposed the directory and installed a military dictatorship under Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak. (61)  By allying with the far right the SRs helped launch a right-wing counter-revolution that suppressed the SRs and all other socialists.  Two months after the Red Terror was fully launched, eight months after it was partially launched, the civil war was transformed from a war between socialists into a war between Bolsheviks and reactionaries, between Reds and Whites.  The right-wing counter-revolution rose ascendant against the Bolshevik counter-revolution.  The Whites reinstated private property, restored the rule of the landlords, and launched a White terror just as bad as the Red terror, arguably worse.  The Whites were officially Republicans, but in reality were closet Monarchists.

From this point on the civil war was basically a three-sided class war: the new ruling class (Reds) vs. the old ruling class (Whites) vs. the workers and peasants (most Greens & Blacks).  Greens were partisan groups formed mostly by peasants against both the Reds and the Whites:

"Some deserters formed themselves into guerilla bands.  These were called the Greens partly because they hid out in the woods and were supplied by the local peasants; sometimes these peasant armies called themselves Greens to distinguish themselves from both Reds and Whites.  They even had their own Green propaganda and ideology based on the defense of the local peasant revolution.  During the spring of 1919 virtually the whole of the Red Army rear, both on the Eastern and the Southern Fronts, was engulfed by these Green armies." (62)

The Greens advocated ideas similar to both the Maximalists and the anarchists, though not identical to either.  Some of these peasant rebels appeared to have a poor understanding of the political situation, but their rebellions were nonetheless an expression of class struggle against Reds and Whites.  Anarchists also formed their own Black partisans that fought against Reds and Whites, mainly in the Ukraine.  Some historians group the Black forces in with the Greens, but this isn’t really correct because the Greens did not fully agree with anarchism (though there were some strong similarities).  There were also Blues – local nationalists who fought to establish an independent nation-state in a country formerly ruled by Russia.  They frequently came into conflict with the Whites, because the Whites aimed to restore the Russian empire, and also with the Reds because the Blues were usually right-wing capitalists.  In addition, there were also various wannabe warlords, like Grigor'ev, who attempted to take advantage of the instability of civil war to establish their own little fiefdoms.

Throughout the civil war both the Bolsheviks and the Whites were continually beset with worker and peasant unrest.  There were numerous peasant revolts against them throughout the civil war, some quite large:

"if we were to look in greater detail at any one area behind the main battle lines in the eastern Ukraine, in western Siberia, in the Northern Caucasus, in parts of White Russia and Central Asia, in the Volga region and Tambov province, then we would find a series of smaller 'peasant wars' against the Reds and the Whites.  These wars ... aimed to establish peasant rule in the localities against the authority of the central state." (63)

Whole provinces were engulfed in rebellion including Tambov, Riazan, Tula, Kaluga, Smolensk, Vitebsk, Siberia, Pskov, Novgorod, Mogilev and even parts of Moscow. (64)  "The peasant uprisings were localist in their aspirations, and hostile to any form of central government." (65)  The peasant rebels desired “to restore the localized village democracy of the revolution, which had been lost” and “aimed not to march on Moscow so much as to cut themselves off from its influence by fighting a guerilla and terrorist war against the Red Army and the state officials in the countryside." (66)  One peasant uprising against the Bolsheviks at Simbirsk and Samara, the 'War of the Chapany' (Chapany was the local peasant term for a tunic) in April of 1919 had as it's main slogan ‘Long live the Soviets!  Down with the Communists!’  "The politics of the uprising were couched in terms of the restoration of the soviet democracy established during the October revolution." (67)  According to statistics from the Cheka there were 245 anti-Bolshevik uprisings in 1918 (68) and 99 in the first seven months of 1919. (69)  Most of these were provoked by the grain requisitions against the peasants.

The Whites faced at least as much peasant unrest as the Reds, arguably more:

"By the height of the Kolchak offensive, whole areas of the Siberian rear were engulfed by peasant revolts.  This partisan movement could not really be described as Bolshevik, as it was later by Soviet historians, although Bolshevik activists, usually in a united front with the Anarchists and Left SRs, often played a major role in it.  It was … a vast peasant war against the [Whites] … the partisan movement expressed the ideas of the peasant revolution … Peasant deserters from Kolchak’s army played a leading role in the partisan bands." (70)

The peasant partisans used guerilla tactics to destroy White railroad tracks, harass and destroy enemy forces, ambush trains, and disrupt supply lines. (71)  This forced the Whites to divert troops away from the front in order to combat unrest in their rear.  In the Ukraine Makhnovist partisans waged a peasant war against the Whites.  Workers in Omsk, the White Capital, launched a revolt against Kolchak on December 22, 1919.  They managed to free more than a hundred political prisoners before being brutally crushed. (72)  Railway workers generally would not work for the Whites except at the point of a gun. (73)

The Bolsheviks claimed to be a working class party but were opposed by the majority of workers who rebelled against them ever since the spring of 1918.  The wave of labor unrest caused by the shooting of protesters on May 9, 1918 continued through the start of the civil war and culminated in a Petrograd general strike called for July 2.  The state responded with mass arrests, forcibly breaking up worker assemblies and other standard union-busting tactics that succeeded in defeating the general strike.  On June 28 the Sovnarkom issued its’ famous decree nationalizing all remaining industries not already nationalized, which helped break the resistance of the working class by giving the state control over the entire economy. (74)  Industrial unrest continued throughout the civil war.  Workers denounced the “commissarocracy” and rebelled against it.  In March 1919 strikes and riots against the Bolsheviks again broke out.  A worker assembly at the Putilov Works, which had originally been a stronghold of Bolshevism and militant supporter of the October revolution, passed a resolution on March 10, 1919 saying:

"We, the workers of the Putilov Works, declare before the labouring classes of Russia and the world that the Bolshevist government has betrayed the ideals of the revolution, and thus betrayed and deceived the workers and peasants in Russia; that the Bolshevist government, acting in our names, is not the authority of the proletariat and peasants, but a dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, self-governing with the aid of Cheka and the police ... We demand the release of workers and their wives who have been arrested; the restoration of a free press, free speech, right of meeting and inviolability of person; transfer of food administration to co-operative societies: and transfer of power to freely elected workers’ and peasants’ soviets." (75)

Several thousand workers participated in the assembly, only 22 voted against the resolution.  The Bolsheviks responded to the strikes and unrest by firing strikers without compensation, banning meetings and rallies, evicting dissident workers from their homes and using armed force against strikers.  Workers were forced to “confess” to being lead astray by provocateurs and “counter-revolutionaries.”  June and July of 1919 saw another wave of strikes and worker unrest against the Bolsheviks, (76) as did 1920. (77)

In July 1918 the Left SRs, hoping to restart the war against Germany, assassinated the German ambassador and launched an uprising against the Bolsheviks.  The assassination failed to restart the war and the Bolsheviks suppressed the uprising.    In 1919 Left SRs and anarchists detonated a bomb at the Moscow headquarters of the Communist party, managing to wound Bukharin. (78)

Strikes, insurrections and riots against both the Reds and Whites continued all throughout the civil war.  Conscripted troops often mutinied or deserted, sometimes joining the greens.

As a result of the resistance of the other classes to the new bureaucratic ruling class an extremely repressive police state was implemented in “soviet” territory to maintain the power of the new ruling class.  There have been many instances of ruling classes implementing totalitarianism when it was needed to keep them in power.  That is how fascism came about.  The Bolsheviks implemented Red Fascism in order to keep themselves, the new ruling class, in power much as the German and Italian rulers implemented Fascism to keep themselves in power.  The center of power went from the Sovnarkom to the central committee to the politburo.

The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was in reality the dictatorship of the Communist party; ever since early 1918 (before the civil war began) the “soviets” did nothing more than rubber-stamp the decisions of the party.  “The borough soviets in the major cities disappeared.  In areas near the front and in territories conquered by the Red Army, special revolutionary committees with unrestricted powers replaced constitutionally provided soviet organs.  They were frequently identical with the Bolshevik Party committee.” (79)  “The soviets, designed to prevent bureaucratization through constant control by the voters, their right to recall deputies, and the union of legislative and executive branches, turned into bureaucratic authorities without effective control from below.  ... The 'soviets,' allegedly ruling in Russia since 1918, are only powerless adjuncts of the party bureaucracy.” (80)

All opposition groups were severely persecuted, although they were not wiped out until the early twenties and the intensity of the persecution varied in different parts of the civil war.  This included the anarchists:

"From 1918 to 1920 the fragmented anarchist groups were almost constantly persecuted, with only occasional concessions.  Echoing Bakunin's animosity to any [state], the anarchists fought Bolshevik "dictatorship of the proletariat" and its threatening centralism, commissars, and terror.  They considered soviets a first step toward the anarchist commune, but thought existing soviets were flawed and usually refused to cooperate in them.  …  The group of anarcho-syndicalists active in Petrograd and Moscow called soviet power an 'exploitation machine for subjugation of most workers by a small clique.'  Many anarchist slogans and demands subsequently turned up during the Kronstadt revolt." (81)

The Bolsheviks waged a class war on the poor.  Under the grain monopoly all grain produced by the peasants in excess of what they needed for themselves was the property of the state.  Often the state would take some of what the peasant need as well.  This policy provoked countless peasant rebellions as they resisted Bolshevik exploiters.  The government sent armed forces into the villages to take the grain and suppress peasant resistance.  Peasants resisted by reducing the amount they planted, which ultimately lead to less food being produced and a famine.

A black market flourished during the civil war; the Bolsheviks outlawed it and attempted to stamp it out. 'Bag traders' traveled to and from the city and countryside, attempting to trade city goods with the peasants. These traders were not petty capitalists but ordinary workers and peasants attempting to gain things they and/or their community needed. The peasants were willing to trade when they could get around the Bolsheviks. During the revolution co-operatives had often been set up to trade between city and country. This system, though greatly flawed, could have been used to feed the cities but the Bolsheviks instead attempted to suppress it. The new ruling class, the Bolsheviks, was waging a class war against the peasants & workers and so obviously could not allow this independent system to continue. Unless they successfully imposed their control over the food supply their control over the economy would be damaged, greatly threatening their position.

These policies, combined with the civil war, lead to famine and de-urbanization.  Workers fled the cities to the villages, where they had a better chance of feeding themselves.  The workers most likely to flee the cities were those who still had connections with the villages, who had moved to the city more recently.  Those who were left in the city tended to be more connected to the city, often born in the city – hardcore proletarians. (82)

Trotsky advocated iron control over the working class by the state, completely crushing workers’ freedom and de-facto defending the domination of the workers by a bureaucratic ruling class.  In a speech at the 9th party congress Trotsky argued that, “the working masses cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers … Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps."  In 1920 he claimed that:

"The very principle of compulsory labor service is for the Communist quite unquestionable.  … The only solution of economic difficulties that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the necessary labor power—an almost inexhaustible reservoir—and to introduce strict order into the work of its registration, mobilization, and utilization. … The introduction of compulsory labor service is unthinkable without the application, to a greater or less degree, of the methods of militarization of labor. … It would … be a most crying error to confuse the question as to the supremacy of the proletariat with the question of boards of workers at the head of factories. The dictatorship of the proletariat is expressed in the abolition of private property in the means of production, in the supremacy over the whole Soviet mechanism of the collective will of the workers, and not at all in the form in which individual economic enterprises are administered." (83)

The Whites launched their own White terror against the populace just as brutal and bloodthirsty as the Red terror, arguably worse.  All opposition was suppressed, even groups like the SRs who had helped in the fight against the Bolsheviks.  “Peasants were flogged and tortured, hostages were taken and shot, and whole villages were burned to the ground.” (84)  Many White soldiers indulged themselves in mass rape and pillage of the villages. (85)  Workers in many cities were shot en masse.  In Yuzovka one in ten workers would be shot whenever factories and mines failed to meet their output expectations. (86)  In the town of Taganrog the Whites blinded, mutilated and then buried alive anti-White workers. (87)  Similar events happened on a regular basis in White territory.

The Whites were also anti-Semites who carried out many pogroms against Jews.  Anti-Semitism had long been a part of Russia and had been used by many Tsars to their advantage in the past.  Anti-Semitism was more of a hangover from the old regime than an outgrowth of the revolution.  Many on the right unfairly blamed Jews for the revolution and Communism.  Although most Jews were not Communists, many Bolsheviks were Jews and Jews faced less persecution from the “Soviet” state than it’s Tsarist predecessor.  “White propaganda portrayed the Bolshevik regime as a Jewish conspiracy.” (88)  Whites would burn and destroy whole Jewish towns, execute Jews en masse, rape Jewish women and display Jewish corpses in the street with a red star cut into their chest.  White officers rarely attempted to halt any pogrom, but in several cases encouraged them.  During early October in Kiev White soldiers in Kiev, with the encouragement of officers and priests, went around pillaging Jewish homes, taking money, raping and killing Jews.  The Whites cut off limbs and noses of their victims and ripped fetuses from their mothers’ wombs.  They forced Jews to run inside houses they had set on fire.  Jewish girls were frequently gang raped; in Cherkass hundreds of preteen girls were gang raped by the Whites.  In the town of Podole hundreds of Jews were tortured and mutilated, many women and young children, and had their corpses left in the snow for the dogs to eat. (89)  When the Whites occupied the village of “Gulyai-Polye, a large number of peasants were shot, dwellings were destroyed, and hundreds of carts and wagons filled with food and other possessions of the Gulyai-Polye inhabitants were [seized] … Almost all the Jewish women of the village were raped." (90)  Similar things happened all throughout White territory.

The Whites demonized anyone who opposed them as “Bolsheviks” including those who most definitely were not.  They set up a false dichotomy – either you were with the Whites or you were with the Bolsheviks.  Any opposition to them was equated as support for the Bolsheviks.  The Bolsheviks did the same thing – any opposition to the Bolsheviks was equated as being support for the Whites.  They labeled their opponents “counter-revolutionary” and other names – even groups like the anarchists, Left SRs and Maximalists who were militantly opposed to the Whites were smeared as “counter-revolutionary.”  All peasants who opposed the Bolsheviks were smeared as “Kulaks” regardless of whether they actually were Kulaks or not.  A Kulak was supposedly a rich peasant, but in the hands of the Bolsheviks it lost all real meaning and became little more than a term of abuse applied to any peasant opposition  (91):

"Soviet historians, unable to admit the existence of popular resistance to the Bolshevik regime, have dismissed [peasant] uprisings as 'kulak revolts', stage-managed by the opposition parties and their allies abroad.  The empirical poverty of this interpretation is such that it does not warrant a detailed critique.  Suffice to say that the few Western studies so far completed of the Makhno uprising in the Ukraine and the Antonov uprising in Tambov province have established beyond doubt the mass appeal of these movements among the peasantry." (92)

The agrarian revolution had a leveling effect on the peasantry, decreasing stratification within the villages.  Lenin overestimated peasant stratification even before the revolution (93) and after the revolution it became even more egalitarian.  Russian peasant villages were generally very egalitarian especially after the revolution.  Bolshevik supporters “have laid a great deal of stress on the 'class struggle' between rich and poor peasants during the land re-divisions.  Yet the records of the village and volost' soviets leave little evidence to suggest that such a struggle played anything more than a very minor role.” (94)

There was also military intervention by foreign imperialists who backed the Whites and attempted to destroy the “soviet” state.  Pro-Bolshevik accounts of the revolution often leave the impression that, immediately upon coming to power the whole world declared war on the Soviet Union.  They tell stories about how 17, 25, 33 or some other made up number of countries invaded and waged full-scale war on the Bolsheviks.  However, the military interventions were not as major as they portray it as, nor were the imperialist powers as universally hostile to the Bolsheviks as they imply.  The Germans had actually helped deliver Lenin from exile into Russia in the hopes that he would stir up unrest and possibly force Russia to make a separate peace with Germany.  During the negotiations for the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which pulled Russia out of the First World War, the Entente made friendly gestures towards the Bolsheviks in the hope that they would continue the war, thereby keeping two fronts against Germany open.  They offered military and economic assistance to keep the war going, which the Bolsheviks refused.  These were capitalist countries, both Entente and Central Power, making friendly advances towards the Bolshevik regime in order to further their own imperialist interests.

The Entente initially landed troops in the hopes of reopening the Eastern Front and to retrieve supplies they had given to the Russians to aid them in the war.  They were too busy fighting World War One to launch a serious intervention against the Bolsheviks until after the war was over.  A blockade was imposed on the country.  The British were the most active of the interventionists; their forces repeatedly clashed with the Reds.  Both the Japanese and United States landed forces in the Far East.  France attempted to intervene but their troops mutinied.  The most significant place of intervention was in the North, in Murmansk and Archangel.  Allied forces landed and propped up the local Whites, who came close to taking Petrograd.  This was mainly a British operation, but included other countries (including small Canadian and Serbian detachments). (95)  Troops from newly independent Finland also made a few small forays into Russian territory.  In 1920 Russia fought a border war with Poland, which had become independent from Russia in the wake of the Revolution.  Probably more significant than the military intervention was the aid supplied to the Whites.  The Whites were greatly helped by the money, weapons and supplies provided to them by foreign powers – without it they probably would have lost much quicker.

The existence of the Bolshevik government was a threat to the other capitalist countries not only because it nationalized the property of foreign companies but also because it provided the threat of a good example.  The Bolshevik government had the potential to inspire similar revolutions in other countries, and so they had to destroy it to ward off that threat.  Despite this the imperialist intervention into Russia was rather limited.  The Whites bitterly complained that they were not receiving enough aid. (96)  The countries involved had just finished fighting the First World War and were in no shape for another full-scale war.  In addition, the period after the Russian Revolution was a period of global unrest that restricted the amount of intervention possible without causing a revolution in the homeland.  The intervention was also hampered by conflicts between the different imperialist powers, which were all competing with each other for greater influence within Russia. (97)

The Bolsheviks had a military advantage in that they controlled the center of the country while the Whites were based on the periphery.  The Whites were divided into several different areas, with their main bases in the south and the east (for a while there was also a northern front near Petrograd).  For much of the civil war General Anton Denikin commanded the south.  The White forces in the south evolved from failed attempts to launch a right-wing counter-revolution in the wake of October but they had no real success until the later part of 1918.  Although Admiral Kolchak was officially the head of state for the entire White army, in practice he only ran the east.  The south (and north) was autonomous, with little direction from Kolchak.  Bolshevik control of the center of the country also gave them control over most of the industrial areas and many of the railroads, which gave them another advantage.

One of the main reasons the Whites lost was because they had even less popular support than the Bolsheviks.  Many “feared the return of Tsarist and of the pomestchiki, the big land-owners, much more than Bolshevism.” (98)  The Whites wanted to restore the Russian empire, making enemies out of anti-Bolshevik nationalists.  Although most of the population was opposed to both the Reds and the Whites, a substantial portion of the population regarded the Reds as a “lesser of two evils.”  Their reactionary policies cost the Whites victory; White decrees made excellent propaganda for the Reds.  Near the end of the civil war General Wrangel attempted to remedy this by implementing limited reforms, but it was too little, too late.

The height of the civil war was in 1919, when the Whites came closest to victory.  Admiral Kolchak launched a major offensive from the east in early 1919 but it was defeated in April.  Denikin launched a major offensive from the south in May that came the closest to victory of any of the White forces.  Denikin’s offensive came within 120 miles of Moscow before being defeated in October, the closest of any White army. (99)  Black partisans inflicted serious damage on Denikin’s army in Ukraine, which aided his defeat.  By early 1920 the Whites were in retreat everywhere.  In November Kolchak abandoned Omsk, formerly his capital, and fled east towards Irkutsk.  On his way to Irkutsk Kolchak’s train was held up by rebellious Czech troops and a popular uprising erupted in Irkutsk.  The uprising overthrew the Whites and established a new government, the Political Center, run by SRs and Mensheviks.  The Political Center was later taken over by the Bolsheviks.  The Reds captured Kolchak and executed him on the morning of February 7th, 1920.  The war in the east was effectively won; they only had to finish mopping up the remnants of Kolchak’s forces. (100)  In early 1920 it looked as if the war was about to be won in the South as well.  Denikin resigned and handed command over to General Petr Wrangel.  Wrangel managed to launch one last offense against the Reds, but was also defeated after a few months.  In November 1920 Wrangel fled Russia.  The Reds had won the civil war.

Revolutionary Ukraine

The revolution in the Ukraine took a different course from many other parts of the former Russian empire mainly as a result of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, in which the Bolsheviks agreed to allow the Central Powers to take over the Ukraine.  In addition, the Bolshevik party was relatively weak in Ukraine and the Ukrainian anarchists were better organized than the Russian anarchists.  An anarchist revolution developed in the Ukraine, based on village assemblies, communes and free soviets.  A partisan militia was formed to fight against counter-revolutionary armies that were attempting to forcibly re-impose the state and class society.  This militia succeeded in defeating the Germans, Austrians, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the White armies of Denikin and Wrangel.  It was not, however, able to defeat the Bolsheviks, who used their far superior resources to conquer the Ukraine in 1921.

At first the revolution in the Ukraine took a course similar to the rest of the Russian empire.  Soviets were formed, land was expropriated, etc.  The Germans and Austrians set up a puppet dictatorship headed by Hetman Skoropadsky.  This government launched a counter-revolution, restoring the landlords to power and oppressing the peasants.  The people living in Ukraine did not have a say in the treaty delivering them to the Austro-German imperialists and did not particularly want to be ruled by the Central Powers.  So they rebelled.  Peasant insurrections erupted all throughout the Ukraine against the Hetman government and it’s imperialist masters.  Peasants formed partisan units to wage guerilla warfare. (101)  These partisans formed links with each other and eventually formed the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of the Ukraine.  The existence of this movement lends support to left-wing critics of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, who argued in favor of a revolutionary guerilla war.

A major organizer in this peasant war was the anarcho-communist Nestor Makhno.  Prior to the German takeover Makhno had been active in the peasant and workers movement, acting to help expropriate the means of production and overthrown capitalism.  The RIAU was also called the Makhnovists (after Nestor Makhno), the insurgent army and the black army after it’s distinctive black flags (black being the color of anarchism).  Although named after Makhno, "The movement would have existed without Makhno, since the living forces, the living masses who created and developed the movement, and who brought Makhno forward merely as their talented military leader, would have existed without Makhno." (102)  Many other anarchists also played significant roles in organizing the insurgent army, although it was not a purely anarchist army.  Most members of the movement were not well versed in anarchist theory; they became anarchists more on the basis of their own experience:

"Ukrainian peasants had little reason to expect any good from the state.  For decades the Russian regime gave the peasants only national and sociopolitical oppression, including conscription for military service, [and] taxation, … Experiences with the ‘Reds,’ ‘Whites,’ Germans, and Austro-Hungarians had taught them that all governments were essentially alike – taking everything and giving nothing.  Therefore, the peasants were more apt to revolt than to create or support a national government.  They felt the Revolution gave them the right to secure the land and to live peacefully on it. … they wanted to be left alone to arrange their lives and affairs." (103)

There was also a civilian anarchist organization during the revolution, the Nabat confederation.  This was a synthesist organization that combined all the different anarchist tendencies into one organization.  In Ukraine at this time the main forms of anarchism were anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-individualism.  The Nabat federation published anarchist newspapers, spread anarchist ideas and attempted to defend and further the revolution.  Nabat occasionally criticized the Makhnovist army as well, neither was simply the tool of the other.

The RIAU was not a traditional army but a democratic one.  In many ways this was a continuation of the military democracy created during 1917, with soldier committees, general assemblies, etc.  It was similar to the democratic militias created by anarchists in the Spanish revolution and the democratic militaries in many other revolutions.  Officers in the ordinary sense were abolished; instead all commanders were elected and recallable.  "Unlike the Red Army, none of the well-known Maknovist commanders came from the ranks of Tsarist officers." (104)  Regular mass assemblies were held to discuss policy.  The army was based on self-discipline, with all of the army’s disciplinary rules approved by soldier assemblies.  Unlike the Red and White armies the RIAU relied on voluntary enlistment instead of conscription.

This partisan army was quite effective.&n