Leonard Schapiro

The February Revolution

In 1914 the great majority of the socialist parties of the belligerent countries, faced with actual hostilities, proved incapable of putting into practice the resolutions against war which they had adopted while war still remained a question of theory. When put to the test by the outbreak of hostilities, international socialism suffered a blow from which it never recovered. With the exception of the representatives of two parties, the Russian and the Serbian, the socialists in the parliaments of the belligerent countries voted, on the grounds of self-defence, to support their governments’ war measures. In Russia, both the bolshevik and the menshevik deputies in the state Duma left the chamber and refused to vote the credits for the war. They were supported by the Trudoviki, the socialist revolutionary group in the Duma. Yet before long the Russian socialist parties proved to be far from united on the issue of defence. The Socialist Revolutionaries became, in the main, supporters of the war effort, with some exceptions such as Natanson (Bobrov), who had long been on the extreme left of his party, and Victor Chernov (Gardenin). Among the Mensheviks several trends appeared: the right wing became ‘defensist’; the left wing, which included Martov and Larin, preached various degrees of internationalism. Alexandra Kollontay, who was then among the most extreme internationalists of the menshevik party, co-operated throughout the war with the Bolsheviks, and formally joined them in 1917, The founder of Russian marxism, Plekhanov, and his small group which included Vera Zasulich and Deutsch, were no longer organizationally linked either with the Mensheviks or the Bolsheviks. They advocated victory over Germany.1

The International Department of the CPSU: Key to Soviet Policy

A few months ago, an official spokesman for the United States government at a very high level (a formula frequently used in the Kissinger era to identify rather than to disguise the Secretary of State) was reported to have told a gathering of European statesmen that there would continue to be tension between the vested interests of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and the foreign and defence policy machinery in the conduct of Soviet foreign policy. The view of the United States government was that the Soviet action in Angola, which had transgressed any acceptable concept of detente, represented a triumph of the party interest. This could, in the speakers view, have been due to several possible factors one of them being that Brezhnev was not in complete day-to-day control at the time. One is, of course, used to these theories of conflicting groups inside the Soviet hierarchy, pulling in different directions. Journalists love them and academics are not always immune from their fatal charm. It is, however, alarming to find so erroneous a notion of how the Soviet Union conducts its foreign policy prevailing at what appears to be the highest government level. At the basis of this misconception, which could have serious consequences if it should become current among those who are responsible for the conduct of United States foreign policy vis-t-vis the Soviet Union, lies the failure to understand the role played by the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (cpsu). This, one of the twenty (plus) departments

Marxism in Russia

The use of the term “Marxism” to denote a certain doctrine gives rise to complicated problems. For example, if “Marxism” is used in its widest and most political sense as it is by the leaders of the Soviet Union then everything that has happened in the Soviet Union since 1917 could be brought under the heading of “Marxism in Russia,” and a paper on this subject would amount to a history of Soviet power much more than to the history of certain ideas. The much more modest aim of this paper is to look at the views of Marx and Engels in their relation to Russia, both in the way in which, in the formative years of the Russian revolutionary movement, Marx and Engels understood this movement and in the way in which the Russian revolutionaries, when they first became acquainted with the ideas of Marx and Engels, were influenced by them and attempted to interpret them in relation to their own situation. This is not to say that all discussion of the writings of Marx and Engels that has taken place in Russia since those early years is irrelevant to the question of Marxism in Russia. However, one cannot escape the fact that after 1903, for example, after the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks as the two factions of the party were to become known, interpretations of what Marx and Engels were supposed to have said or written became an integral part of the political struggle and therefore belong much more to the history of that political struggle than they do to intellectual history. Or to take some other examples of a rather more extreme kind. Stalin’s propagandists in the ’thirties were able to find, or claim to find, justification in the writings of Marx for the view that the idea of a Leader, a supreme Leader such as Stalin became, was an integral part of the doctrine of Marxism. They were also able to show that the repressive policy of Stalin, which resulted in the doing to death of many millions of innocent people, was somehow or other justified by doctrines which were supposed to derive from Marx. All this is very interesting for those who study the nature of totalitarian rule. It has nothing whatever to do with the intellectual history of a doctrine.

The October Revolution

Trotsky had accepted Lenin’s leadership in July. After his release from prison on bail on 17 September, his ascendancy over the Petrograd Soviet grew. Probably Trotsky could have made the October Revolution without Lenin, at any rate in Petrograd. But it is doubtful whether without the control which Lenin gained over his party in the weeks before and after the seizure of power the revolution would have had any chance of surviving. Soviet historians of the revolution (and not only Soviet historians), with little regard for the very full published documentation which is available, have often falsified the story of the rising until it bears little relation to the known facts.1 One such falsification for example is the assertion that Trotsky had ‘boastingly blurted out’ the date fixed for the revolution, namely 7 November (25 October), with the result that it had to be hastily changed to 6 November.2 But while there is no truth in this and similar absurdities, there was in the last weeks before the rising a difference of opinion on tactics between Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin thought in terms of seizure of power by the ‘proletariat’, which he identified with the bolshevik party, its Red Guard, its factory committees, and its organizations in the army.

The Consolidation of Power

The bolshevik seizure of power and the resolution of the Congress of Soviets still left the question of government undecided. By 8 November the position of the Bolsheviks in the Congress was further consolidated. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, whose support of the rising had been somewhat hesitant, and who were strongly in favour of a coalition of all socialist parties, were finally won over to the bolshevik side by the bolshevik decision to adopt and to pass through the Congress their land decree. This complicated decree abolished private ownership for ever and re-distributed the land for the peasants’ use in accordance with a formula designed to secure to all an adequate standard of living. A left socialist revolutionary measure in all its detail,1 the decree ran counter to accepted bolshevik doctrines, in that it recognized that land would be held in usufruct for cultivation by individual peasants, and not as nationalized property by communal or collective bodies. But tactics demanded that the Bolsheviks should not appear to be taking power in complete isolation, and the support of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries was therefore essential to Lenin.2

The Socialist Revolutionaries

The Socialist Revolutionaries unlike the Mensheviks were not linked to the Bolsheviks by a common adherence to marxism. Moreover, when once their left wing had broken away to form the separate party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries, they were much more united than the Mensheviks in their support of national defence against the Germans. They therefore repudiated the bolshevik coup d’etat without any of the hesitations which beset the Mensheviks, and, unlike them, were not even prepared to discuss a coalition with the Bolsheviks. Again, in contrast to the Mensheviks, they enjoyed in 1917 very considerable popular support. They had made little attempt before November to assert the political authority to which this support entitled them, because they believed that no decisive legislative step should be taken until the Constituent Assembly had met. Within a few weeks of the October Revolution they had won a definite majority of the delegates’ seats in the elections to that Assembly. Yet they failed either at the time or later to exploit what would in normal political conditions have been a position of impregnable strength.

The Left Socialist Revolutionaries

At the time of the bolshevik revolution the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries offered its support to the Bolsheviks and soon after set itself up as a separate political party. In December 1917 its members formed a coalition with the new ruling party; on 6 July of the following year they were fighting the Bolsheviks in the streets of Moscow and Petrograd. These Socialist Revolutionaries had been won over to the Bolsheviks by their resolute policies on peace and on the land question. The gulf between the non-marxist Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks was in reality far greater than that between the marxist internationalist Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Yet, carried away by enthusiasm in which emotion predominated over reason, the more extreme Socialist Revolutionaries attempted a union which the greater foresight of Martov’s left menshevik group realized was impossible.