https://socialistaction.org/2017/12/17/the-relevance-of-the-russian-revolution-part-ii/
The relevance of the Russian Revolution, Part II
/ 2 days ago
Dec. 2017 Trotsky Red Army
Leon Trotsky speaks to Red Army soldiers.
By JEFF MACKLER
This is the second part of a series of articles. Part I appeared in the
October 2017 issue of Socialist Action.
The Russian Revolution of Oct. 25, 1917 (Nov. 7 in the new calendar)
remains the seminal event in modern human history, if for no other
reason that it marked the first time a consciously-led revolutionary
struggle brought to political, economic, military, and social power the
vast majority of a nation’s people—the working class and poor peasants.
The rule of the “one percent,” (actually one thousandth of one percent
or less) was abolished in one earthshaking blow. It was replaced by the
institutionalized rule of workers, peasants and soldiers.
Organized on a local, regional, and national basis and having initiated
and ratified the Oct. 25 revolutionary seizure of power from the
capitalist Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky, this Soviet
[council] Government was established on Day One as the official and only
government of what would become the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics.)
Contrary to its vilifiers around the world, it was this Soviet
Government (not the revolutionary socialist Bolshevik Party) that ruled
the new revolutionary workers’ state that encompassed one-sixth of the
earth’s land surface. Its representatives were directly elected by
soviets at every workplace and region, from the cities to the
countryside to the military garrisons. Soviet delegates, paid the wages
of skilled workers, were subject to immediate recall if they failed to
carry out the mandate of their constituency.
This simple notion that the working people should govern their own lives
through their own institutions, and in their own interests has been
central to the ideology and practice of revolutionary socialism from
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to the co-leaders of the Russian
Revolution, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and to every serious
revolutionary socialist today.
The Stalinist perversion of this elementary conception—substituting the
rule of a political party, not to mention the cult of a single
individual, for the institutional rule of the working class—has been a
boon to all seeking to discredit socialism as a minority dictatorship.
In my previous article on this subject (Socialist Action, October 2017)
I reviewed some of the immediate and unprecedented decrees approved and
implemented by this Soviet government, including granting the land to
the peasantry, who were 90 percent of the population, granting the right
of self-determination to Russia’s conquered and colonized nations,
ending Russia’s participation in World War I, establishing workers’
control of all basic industries, and implementing an unprecedented range
of social measures. These ended the subjugation of women by socializing
key nuclear family institutions, establishing free health care and
education, abolishing all laws restricting and punishing gender
preference, legalizing free abortion and the right to immediate divorce
at the request of either partner, as well as opening up an amazing range
of scientific, artistic, and cultural endeavors that astonished the world.
The Preface to Leon Trotsky’s monumental “History of the Russian
Revolution” succinctly captures the above: “The history of a revolution
is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses
into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.” Unfortunately, many
of these achievements were undermined, distorted, or reversed during the
Stalinist reaction that followed within less than a decade after the
October 1917 victory.
Ending Russia’s participation in World War I
Flush with an excess of revolutionary optimism following the seizure of
power, an almost immediate division emerged within the Bolshevik Party
as well as within the Soviet Government over the critical question of
how to meet the party’s promise to end Russia’s participation in World
War I. A current inside the Bolshevik Party, the “Left Communists,” as
well as other soviet parties, including the Left Socialist
Revolutionaries, were incensed by the spurious imperialist accusation
that the new Soviet Government was nothing less than an “agent of the
German empire.”
In opposition to Lenin, who demanded the immediate signing of a peace
accord with Germany and its allied Central Powers and the Ottoman
Empire, they proposed that the Soviet Government transform the
imperialist war into a revolutionary war, which they envisioned as
virtually an immediate prelude to world revolution. A temporary
compromise was reached based on Trotsky’s proposal to proceed to the
negotiations at Brest-Litovsk (now in Belarus, near the Polish border)
based on the proposition, “neither war nor peace”—that is, that Russia
would not sign a peace treaty but would not engage in any further
military actions.
While Trotsky’s brilliant delaying speeches at Brest-Litovsk were a
model for socialist propaganda at that time, one German general
negotiator aptly noted that the Russian Army was “a figment of the
imagination.” The truth of this assertion was measured on the ground as
Germany and its allied troops proceeded to march across Russia
unimpeded. Russia’s ill-equipped, war weary, demoralized, and until
recently imperialist-led troops, who had been conscripted under Tsarism
to fight for imperialist conquests and booty, were in no condition to be
overnight transformed into a revolutionary fighting force for world
revolution.
Within a few months, this reality became obvious to the great majority
of the Soviet Government. Trotsky dropped his original delaying
proposal, sided with Lenin, and thus established a majority in the
soviet to sign the humiliating but absolutely necessary March 3, 1918,
peace treaty at Brest Litovsk.
The imperialist world invades the USSR
The terms of this treaty gave Germany control of Finland, the Baltic
States (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), and the Ukraine. Parts of the
Caucasus region had to be ceded to the German-allied Ottoman Empire.
“Shameful,” said Lenin of this “peace” treaty, but it was absolutely
essential to fulfill the promise of his party to end the war. Fully
one-third of Russia’s population was now under German control, as was
half its industry, 90 percent of its fuel production, and 55 percent of
its grain and wheat production. The Soviet Government’s signing of this
treaty provided an historic example of real-life politics wherein
revolutionary rhetoric was no match for the patient consolidation of a
fragile revolution, beleaguered on every side.
Russia’s wartime “allies” and “enemies” alike took advantage of the
Soviet Government’s promise to its people that peace would be
forthcoming. An article published in the May 2017 International Courier
adequately describes the predation that both sides of the imperialist
World War I had in store for the nascent workers’ state:
“On April 3 [a month after Brest Litovsk], Japanese troops invaded in
Vladivostok and occupied southern Siberia. The next day the Turks took
Batumi, Georgia at the Black Sea and reached the Caucasus. The Romanians
took Bessarabia. The fearsome Czechoslovak Legion, sponsored by France,
revolted and joined the [Tsarist] White Guards in western Siberia and
began a military campaign seizing the entire region. French troops
occupied the southern Ukraine and the Crimea; and the British Army took
Archangel on the banks of the North Dvina River, while Turkish units
took the oil-field center at Baku. The White Army was created, commanded
by the [former Czarist] Generals Nikolai Yudenich, Lavr Kornilov,
Alexander Kolchak and Anton Denikin fighting on several fronts.”
We might add that the U.S. took its turn to send invasion troops to
Russia’s Siberia to defeat the world’s first workers’ state. In total 14
nations invaded, wreaking untold horrors. The Courier concludes: “In
late 1918, the … Soviet Republic was about the size of medieval Muscovy
before the [year 1547] conquests of Ivan the Terrible. In Lenin’s words
it was ‘an oasis in a raging sea of imperialist banditry.’”
The Red Army and Soviet war strategy
But there is another side to this complex equation, the side that at
least partially explains why the combined counterrevolutionary efforts
of the world’s imperialist powers failed to reverse the fundamental
gains of October 1917. The day after the signing of the Brest Litovsk
“peace” agreements, Trotsky was appointed by the Soviet Government to be
president of the Supreme Council of War. A month later, he became
People’s Commissar of War and proceeded to construct and lead the Red Army.
Until that time the fighting forces under the direct control of the
Soviet Government were essentially the Bolshevik-organized Red Guards,
which had successfully defeated General Kornilov’s effort to defeat the
approaching October insurrection in Petrograd and Moscow. These forces
numbered an estimated 7000 worker-soldiers, recruited from the ranks of
the city’s vanguard workers and soldiers.
Under Trotsky’s leadership a highly professional, technologically
equipped and disciplined Soviet Army, the Red Army, became an impressive
fighting force numbering 5 million. From a near-enslaved army of poor
peasants compelled by their autocratic masters to fight against their
own interests, the Red Army was transformed into an unprecedented
powerhouse that defeated the combined militaries of most of the
imperialist world.
This carefully constructed army was consciously begun with a central
core of seasoned worker-Bolsheviks, whose political training,
experience, and loyalty to the revolution’s highest aspirations were
unmatched in history. With this core the Red Army was politically armed
to not only inspire its broad ranks but to see the Soviet Government’s
future as inextricably tied to the world revolution. It became a
political force on the battlefield, whose impact reverberated in
capitals across Europe and beyond. Internationalist fighters from around
the world joined its ranks.
While Trotsky’s army used thousands of former Tsarist officers as its
military commanders, in every instance each was accompanied by a Soviet
political commissar, whose critical assignment was to educate and
inspire the ranks with the revolution’s highest ideals, not to mention
to keep a sharp eye on the political loyalty of the officer core. This
responsibility included, when necessary, making recommendations to the
appropriate soviet body for an abusive or incompetent officers’
immediate removal.
International support for Russian Revolution
In the course of the terrible years of the 1918-22 Civil War between the
Red and White armies, the latter abetted by the armies of world
imperialism, simultaneously fighting on 14 fronts, the Red Army emerged
victorious.
While the world revolution that the Bolsheviks expected to come to their
immediate aid did not materialize due to the crisis of leadership and
betrayal of the reformist, chauvinist, pro-war “Socialist”
International, in a real sense the revolutionary fervor and ideals
imbued by the October Revolution in the world’s working masses did
become a critical factor in the revolution’s survival.
The three revolutionary upheavals in Germany and Austria-Hungary between
1919 and 1923, including the formation of soviets in some key German
cities, forced the abdication of the German Kaiser, effectively
nullified the onerous provisions of Brest Litovsk, and led to the
withdrawal of German and allied troops from Russia. So frightened was
the German capitalist class with the return of the radicalized and often
revolutionary-minded soldiers that they were initially banned from
German cities where rebellious worker mobilizations vied for power.
Similarly, stunned by the revolt of Black Sea-based French sailors,
France ceased its military operations in the Soviet South. Massive
working-class mobilizations in England compelled the British government
to withdraw from the Soviet North. In the U.S., among the actions of the
five-day 1919 General Strike in Seattle, involving 65,000 workers, was
the longshore union’s refusal to load U.S. arms destined for the White
Armies fighting the Soviet Government. Indeed, the longshore workers
physically challenged anyone who attempted to load ships bound for Russia.
Similar and massive working-class actions across Europe and beyond
cautioned Europe’s would-be Soviet occupiers to proceed with
caution—indeed, to retreat from their intentions to divide up Russia for
future occupation and colonization.
Thus, on every front the inspiration that the October Revolution
provided to the world’s working masses, consciously advanced by Soviet
propagandists in every nation on earth, combined with the revolutionary
zeal and self-sacrifice of the Soviet masses and their army to make the
impossible a reality. Terribly crippled, near starvation, plagued with
war-induced famine coupled with an imperialist embargo and blockade,
some 9.5 million Russians perished. But the revolution survived.
Among those who perished first were the central working-class cadre of
Russia’s Bolshevik Party, a generation of hundreds of thousands of youth
in whom the revolution inspired the greatest dedication and sacrifice.
This unavoidable imperialist-imposed catastrophe and resulting
leadership void provided the future basis for the emergence of the
Stalinist bureaucracy.
In a future article we will discuss how this bureaucracy then
replaced—or better, physically exterminated—virtually the entire
Bolshevik Party Central Committee leadership team of the 1917
Revolution. But again, the conditions that led to Stalin’s rise to
power, as we shall see, were above all, the product of the world
imperialist invasion as opposed to any inherent flaw in the ideology or
practice of revolutionary socialism.
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December 17, 2017 in Marxist Theory & History, Russia.
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