Re: [Marxism] Data Request

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Review of Books
Volume 24, Number 5 · March 31, 1977

Two Years That Shook the World
By Leonard Schapiro

The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd
by Alexander Rabinowitch

Norton, 393 pp., $14.95
The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization
by John L.H. Keep

Norton, 614 pp., $19.50
Class Struggles in the USSR: First Period 1917-1923
by Charles Bettelheim, translated by Brian Pearce

Monthly Review Press, 567 pp., $18.95
The File on the Tsar
by Anthony Summers, by Tom Mangold

Harper & Row, 416 pp., $12.50
The Secret Police in Lenin's Russia
by Lennard D. Gerson

Temple University Press, 368 pp., $15.00

Nearly sixty years have passed since the Bolsheviks seized power in 
Petrograd?traditionally on November 7, 1917, because that was when the 
Second Congress of Soviets voted them into power. Actually power had been 
in their hands for some time before, but it is regarded as more democratic 
to stress the vote of the Congress rather than the military coup d'état, 
and hence the myth of the date, one of many, which has become firmly rooted 
in the popular presentation of the Russian revolution. Seizure of power 
without enacting any democratic pantomime was Lenin's determined plan: he 
was opposed on this by Trotsky and others, who realized that there was a 
wide divergence between Lenin's intention of establishing communist party 
rule, disguised as democratic, mass rule, and that of the "masses" 
concerned who wanted power to be taken over by the Soviets, which they saw 
as a coalition of numerous left-wing parties, both communist and socialist.

It is not possible to establish on available evidence (and not even the 
late Professor S.P. Mel'gunov, the leading historian of 1917, succeeded in 
doing it) whether the way things actually worked out was the result of 
chance or design. The Bolsheviks Come to Power is largely concerned with 
the way in which Lenin maneuvered his supporters in the capital in order to 
achieve what he wanted, rather than what they believed was happening. The 
second book under review, John L.H. Keep's The Russian Revolution, is also 
concerned with the way in which Lenin dealt with the "parliamentary 
illusions" which long outlasted the Bolshevik seizure of power. The 
Bolsheviks survived, at times very precariously. But the Kronstadt rising 
in March 1921 showed that these "illusions"?that the Bolshevik revolution 
had been intended to install rule by the popular councils called Soviets 
and not by the communist party?had considerable vitality in the popular 
imagination.

In spite of their titles, neither of the two books on the revolution in 
fact deals with more than some aspects of it. Professor Rabinowitch covers 
the story in detail as it unfolded in Petrograd from the July 1917 rising 
until the seizure of power in October. He has amassed an immense amount of 
material which has been published in recent years in the Soviet Union, and 
there is no doubt that his work illuminates many details in the story that 
have hitherto been unknown. I am not sure that it throws any real new light 
on the main events. Dr. Rabinowitch claims to have put right "many" or 
"most" Western accounts in three respects: by showing that the October 
revolution was neither a "historical accident" nor a "well-executed coup 
d'état without significant mass support," nor yet the work of a "united, 
authoritarian, conspiratorial organization effectively controlled by Lenin."

But where are these Western accounts to be found? Not so far as I am aware 
among serious historians. I should have thought that most historians who 
have studied the sources (I disregard those who have merely repeated Soviet 
propaganda) are broadly agreed that in Petrograd (and in a number of other 
cities) the Bolsheviks had substantial popular support, or at the least 
benevolent neutrality, because the "masses" of the workers and the soldiers 
in the garrison believed that they were the main hope for ensuring the 
victory of the Soviets and the defeat of the "counterrevolution" which, in 
large measure thanks to Kerensky's hysterical behavior, they associated 
with General Kornilov.

As to the party, I should have thought that most reputable studies of 1917 
agree that it was neither united nor disciplined?how on earth could a party 
which had grown from around 24,000 in January 1917 to around 240,000 by 
August, recruiting all kinds of rabble in the process, have been 
disciplined? Both the judgments which I have summarized are fully borne out 
by Dr. Rabinowitch's analysis, but they are not new. (If I may be forgiven 
for speaking pro domo sua, I tried, in a modest way, to establish these two 
propositions over twenty years ago).

Let me enumerate some of the merits of Dr. Rabinowitch's book. It is very 
well written?and nothing is more tedious than good research spoiled by bad 
writing. Dr. Rabinowitch handles the great amount of material which he has 
amassed with great skill, and his book is enjoyable to read. I know of no 
previous work which has so skillfully presented the fluctuating state of 
the mood of the "masses" in the Russian capital in those fateful months. In 
his treatment of the planning of the insurrection he brings out fully the 
dominant and decisive role played by Lenin. However, in giving all credit 
to Lenin as a revolutionary leader one is well advised to keep a sense of 
proportion. Had the insurrection taken place in the way Lenin intended, and 
frantically tried to persuade his colleagues to accept?in other words, as a 
military coup d'état unconnected with the forthcoming Congress of 
Soviets?it could have failed. Whether by luck or by design (one element of 
luck was the postponement of the opening of the Congress for a few days), 
the coup was camouflaged sufficiently to hoodwink the "masses" into 
believing that what they wanted?a Soviet government?had been achieved.

In a work which is so complete and detailed there are some surprising 
omissions. There is very little, if any, analysis of the policy of the 
leaders of the Provisional Government?if such it can be called. Dr. 
Rabinowitch scarcely discusses their attitude to the Red Guards?the private 
army first clandestinely and then openly maintained by the Bolsheviks 
(which, however, as Professor Keep shows, was not nearly so important as 
Soviet legend would have us believe). Nor does Rabinowitch discuss their 
policy toward the Constituent Assembly, the land problem, or the war. True, 
these issues were not specifically related to Petrograd. But they were 
vital factors to Lenin's success. And since Bolshevik policy in 1917 (as 
Soviet policy today) was almost entirely improvised as a reaction to their 
adversaries' mistakes rather than based on any overall rigid plan, a 
Bolshevik revolution without some adumbration of the Provisional 
Government's catalogue of inanities is a bit like Hamlet without the Prince 
of Denmark. There is no full analysis of the money supplied to the 
Bolsheviks by the Germans, which Dr. Rabinowitch (unlike Professor Keep, 
who regards the question of German money as still open) accepts as proved, 
but not very important. It obviously was not the decisive factor in 
Bolshevik victory. But there is evidence in Soviet sources to show that the 
money flowing in from various channels to the Bolsheviks from the 
Auswärtiges Amt was used by the Bolsheviks in a special fund (managed by 
Molotov) for intensive propaganda in the army?surely a not insignificant 
factor.

I also very much regret that Dr. Rabinowitch has not analyzed in any detail 
the morale of the vast Petrograd garrison. This idle, demoralized, and 
corrupt mob had a vested interest in revolution since so many soldiers and 
sailors had murdered so many of their officers and would have been hanged 
in the event of a failure of the revolution. The Petrograd garrison has 
often been assumed to have been a decisive factor in the Bolshevik victory, 
but was this so? One would have liked to see the evidence analyzed.

Dr. Rabinowitch's treatment of the Kornilov affair and its effects covers 
three chapters of the book. It is the fullest analysis to date of a vital 
turning point in the Bolshevik revolution. This was set off when Kornilov, 
the commander in chief after the February revolution, sent troops to 
Petrograd in August 1917. He was dismissed by Kerensky, who called on the 
Bolsheviks to oppose him.

It is unfortunate that S.P. Mel'gunov died before completing the study of 
the Kornilov affair which he was planning. It is no disparagement of Dr. 
Rabinowitch's work to say that one misses Mel'gunov's cool and balanced 
judgment. Dr. Rabinowitch has certainly labored hard to settle the 
controversy about whether Kerensky deceived Kornilov, or Kornilov deceived 
Kerensky, and seems to treat this issue fairly. Where he appears to me to 
lack detachment is in his assumption throughout his narrative that Kornilov 
really was a "counterrevolutionary"?as Kerensky proclaimed far and wide 
once he realized that Kornilov was not prepared to let the politician 
continue at the helm of Russia after he and the army had taken over.

But "counterrevolutionary" suggests someone who wants to restore the 
monarchy?and there has never been a jot of evidence to support the view 
that this was Kornilov's intention. All the evidence that I have seen 
suggests irresistibly that this simple soldier ("with the brains of a 
sheep," according to an estimate quoted by Dr. Rabinowitch) was above all 
anxious to restore discipline and order in a country that was galloping 
toward anarchy under the weak leadership of the Provisional Government. It 
may have indicated the brains of a sheep to believe that this was possible: 
but there is no evidence to support the view which Dr. Rabinowitch seems to 
hold both expressly and by implication that Kornilov had "personal ambitions."

Professor Keep is concerned with an aspect of the Russian revolution that 
has hitherto received very little attention from historians, who have for 
the most part concentrated on events in the capital. He has investigated, 
on the basis of immense and meticulous research, the urban and peasant mass 
organizations across the country, their function in 1917 in relation to the 
Bolshevik victory, and the various ways in which, during the first six 
months of the regime, the Bolsheviks dealt with the disillusionment among 
workers and peasants which their victory swiftly brought. His work thus 
complements Dr. Rabinowitch's in that it studies at a different level the 
effects produced in the country when the Bolsheviks, while pretending to 
effect a Soviet victory, in reality produced a party victory.

Dr. Keep shows, with an objectivity and impeccable scholarship which place 
him easily in the first rank of historians of modern Russia, the skill and 
ruthlessness with which Lenin's policies adopted toward the peasants in 
1917 and 1918 were designed to neutralize a potentially hostile peasantry 
during the crucial months when the power struggle was being decided in the 
towns. (The words are Lenin's, at the Eighth Congress of the Communist 
Party in March 1919.)

Dr. Keep, in a fascinating hundred pages or so, shows the growing revolt of 
the countryside in 1917, which played so vital a part in bringing about the 
"revolutionary situation" that the Bolsheviks could exploit in the 
cities?not that the peasants were politically minded so much as intent on 
settling private scores or making use of the breakdown of order to grab 
what they could. In this context, Dr. Keep is fully aware of the 
responsibility of the Provisional Government in bringing about this 
breakdown of order, though I do not think that he sufficiently stresses the 
populist sentimentality of the members of this government which really 
destroyed any resolve to maintain order. There is an equally important 
section on "neutralizing" the peasantry after the seizure of power, by a 
mixture of force and bribery?a story which has never before, so far as I 
know, been told in English.

The rest of this impressive book, apart from a valuable introductory 
section which examines the social background leading to the February 
revolution, deals with the urban organizations, again on a national 
scale?the factory committees, the Workers' Militia out of which the Red 
Guards emerged, the trade unions, and the Soviets. As in the case of the 
peasants, Dr. Keep discusses these organizations first during the period of 
the Provisional Government and then during the six months after the seizure 
of power. Bolshevik aims in the two periods were, of course, different: in 
the first to unleash the greatest possible chaos and disruption, in the 
second to impose Communist party discipline on industry and Soviets and to 
get the workers accustomed to the idea that what they had achieved was not 
a worker-run state, but a party-run state. There is evidence of worker 
resistance right up to 1922 or 1923, at any rate. Solzhenitsyn has 
published one document with such evidence recently.[*] A largely worker 
army of up to 50,000, organized in the industrial towns of Izhevsk and 
Votkinsk, fought against the Bolshevik regime until 1922. In 1920 a 
delegation of the British Labour Party which visited Soviet Russia actually 
witnessed something of the repression of worker democracy and brought back 
documentary evidence of resistance to this repression. All of it remained 
unpublished, no doubt in the interests of "true socialism." Even so, one 
cannot help wondering (and Dr. Keep does not supply the answer) how it came 
about that a whole working class proved unable, or unwilling, to put up 
more effective opposition to a creeping tyranny.

Charles Bettelheim's Marxist analysis does not seem to me to provide any 
kind of realistic answer to this perennial Russian problem. Bettelheim, 
like so many Marxists who have the honesty to admit it, is concerned to 
explain why, in spite of public ownership of the means of production, the 
USSR is not a socialist state. This book is only the first volume of a 
projected monumental trilogy which will take the story up to the present 
day. He is, very laudably, opposed to applying "rigidified" Marxism to the 
interpretation of Soviet reality. The problem I find is to see any 
relevance of any Marxism in the interpretation of Soviet politics.

Bettelheim argues that the abolition of private property does not of itself 
do away with the bourgeoisie, a view once forcibly argued by Djilas, and 
long before him by Preobrazhensky. He lays great stress on an analysis made 
in 1922 which shows that only a small percentage of government 
functionaries favored the Soviet regime. I dare say. But what has lack of 
support of the Soviet regime got to do with "bourgeoisie"? One does not 
have to be "bourgeois" to object to the Cheka, concentration camps, 
atheism, and arbitrary violence. In fact, the real opposition to the Soviet 
regime came mostly from the working class and the peasants. Arguments by 
Marxists that the Kronstadt rising, for example, was caused by "petty 
bourgeois" prejudices, and similar nonsense, by implication suggest that 
communist rule was the only true "proletarian" rule. But this is what 
Bettelheim actually starts off by denying. So where are we in the end? I 
very much hope that we shall one day get a more convincing explanation of 
the triumph of Bolshevik communism from historians like Rabinowitch and Keep.

Messrs. Summers and Mangold have spent four years of research (and goodness 
knows how much money, supplied by the BBC and CBS) in endeavoring to prove 
that most of the Imperial Russian family were not, as hitherto believed, 
murdered in Ekaterinburg on July 16, 1918, along with servants and the 
family doctor. It is fair to say that the authors have been indefatigable 
in their search for evidence and that their claim to have disproved the 
accepted version is moderately made. Similarly, while they plainly believe 
that a lady now living in Charlottesville, Virginia, is the Grand Duchess 
Anastasia, they do not go further than put forward the suggestion as a 
possibility. But the mass of contradictory evidence on Anastasia apart, the 
key to her story still lies in Ekaterinburg on July 16, 1918.

The first question one asks is why the Bolsheviks should have proved so 
humanitarian as to spare the women and servants. In order to trade them to 
the Germans is the suggested answer?though I cannot see that Chicherin 
would have been inhibited from tentative bargaining with the Germans for 
some arrangement over the imperial women even if he knew they were all 
dead. Be that as it may, the evidence on which the authors rely is 
unconvincing. They dismiss, on the flimsiest grounds, a key telegram 
reporting the killings from the local Commissar Beloborodov to Moscow, 
discovered by anticommunist forces when they occupied Ekaterinburg soon 
after the murder. They dismiss four Soviet eyewitness accounts of the 
massacre?one, by Beloborodov, they do not appear to know; two they 
discount; one they disregard on the grounds that Besedovsky, who published 
it in 1930, probably became an NKVD agent after the Second World War. They 
rely on the evidence of a distinguished pathologist to dismiss as 
physically impossible the absence of any human remains in the pit in which 
the bodies are said to have been destroyed. But one of the Russian 
eyewitnesses, Bykov, says that the remains were destroyed as far as 
possible with sulphuric acid, and that what was left was then cast into a bog.

The authors' most effective argument is based on the report of the White 
Army's investigator of the murder, Sokolov. Having studied the full dossier 
on which his report was based, now at Harvard, they were able to show that 
a great deal of evidence suggesting that the empress and her daughters were 
alive many months after they were supposed to have been murdered was 
apparently ignored by the investigator. Much of this evidence is very 
circumstantial, and, of course, the investigator should have discussed it 
in his report. But I suspect that he dismissed it less from a desire to 
blacken the Bolsheviks than because he was acquainted with the Russian 
tradition of weaving popular legends about the survival of dead emperors.

Certainly these omissions are the strongest part of the case presented. But 
it still leaves unaccounted for the subsequent fate of the imperial women 
except Anastasia, assuming they were not killed in July 1918. As for 
Anastasia, I doubt if the authors would claim that the account of her 
escape is very convincing. The most interesting part of the book, in my 
opinion, is the chapter based on documents in the Public Record Office in 
London which have recently been opened for inspection. These show that it 
was not, as hitherto widely believed, Lloyd George who persuaded King 
George V not to grant asylum to Nicholas II and his family, but, 
surprisingly, the other way around.

Professor Gerson's book is a scholarly, clear, and balanced account of the 
so-called "secret police" (though nothing could be less "secret"), the 
Vecheka and its successors the GPU and the OGPU, during the first ten years 
of the Soviet regime. This study has been made possible by the very 
considerable amount of material on this early instrument of terror (in 
which the Soviet authorities take great pride) published in the USSR since 
the celebration of the centenary of the Vecheka in 1967. The two most 
significant facts which emerge from this important contribution to the 
history of the Soviet system are: first, the way in which arbitrary and 
uncontrolled power, exercised in complete disregard for the law (such as it 
was), formed part of the political regime from its very outset; and 
secondly, that the blemishes usually associated with Stalin?concentration 
camps for forced labor and the use of arbitrary terror against political 
opponents, for example?were already firmly established under Lenin. Which 
makes particular nonsense of the fashionable left-wing view that Lenin was 
fine, and that it was only the wicked Stalin who spoiled everything.
Notes

[*] "An Extraordinary Meeting: A Document from the Archives of Alexander 
Solzhenitsyn," in Kontinent 2, edited by Vladimir Maximov, Anchor Press, 1977.


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism