Socialist and Peoples' History

The Russian Revolution: A Century of Historiography—Part I

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Published on Thursday, 07 November 2019 18:12

Written by Radical Socialist

(This is the first part of a multi-part historiography, mainly a translation of my Bangla essay. All parts will be translated and eventually uploaded)

Kunal Chattopadhyay

Though over a century has passed since the Russian Revolution of 1917, it remains the subject of intense political wars. So the historiographic debates over it are not mere academic disputes, but a significant aspect of a wide-ranging political battle. Bourgeois historians, political scientists, sociologists, journalists, even psychologists pitch in to explain why this revolution was an irrelevancy and why it was harmful. For the last three decades or close to them, they have been joined by once leftists, even once Marxist authors who have bowed profoundly to liberalism, or have discovered “better ideologies than Marxism”, as well as those who have discovered that after Marx they are the first true Marxists, or have measured exactly how many inches separate Lenin and Trotsky from the Gulag. Eric Hobsbawm, delivering his 1997 Deutscher Memorial lecture, claimed that the facts coming from the archives should be accounted for in order to junk half-truths and official lies, and move to improved understandings.[1] Yet if the archives were enough, then the writing of the history of 1917 should have taken a considerable left turn. The main problem is ideological. The collection and arrangement of data has taken a deep rightward turn. Hence the historiography needs to be checked against the ups and downs of global class struggle.

From the Revolution to Stalin’s Consolidation of Power:

The early writings did not pretend to academic neutrality. In the years of revolution and Civil War (1918-1921) there were few Russians who wrote, though I will mention the exceptions. The immediate accounts included several left wing US journalists and their books. Louise Bryant published her Six Months in Red Russia in October 1918.[2] Bessie Beatty wrote The Red Heart of Russia, saying that to fail to see hope in the Russian revolution was like a blind person watching the sunrise.[3]

The book that became famous was the third one.  An already well-known leftwing journalist, John Reed, was to become closely involved with the Bolsheviks while reporting on the revolution, and on his return to the USA, became active in organising a mmunist party in his own country. Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World  impressed the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin, who wrote a short foreword, recommending the book to the workers of the world, in millions of copies.[4] But when governmental pressures began in the USSR on writing according to current reinterpretations, the book came under attacks. Reed had given virtually no space to Stalin in his eye-witness account, and had put Totsky alongside Lenin as a central leader of the revolution. So from the 1930s till Stalin’s death his book would not be reprinted inside the USSR, whatever Lenin recommended, and in the West, where Reed had given the copyright to the British Communist Party, the book was often published with positive references to Trotsky truncated.[5]

After the end of the Civil War, the defeated sides, licking their wounds, found time in their hands and wrote numerous accounts, claiming to be the voices of “democratic” Russia. Histories and memoirs were written by Pavel Miliukov, liberal historian and central leader of the main bourgeois liberal party, the Constitutional Democrats or Cadets; by the Whiteguard General Denikin; by the man who stood at the exact balancing point between the liberals and the socialists, the one time head of government Alexander Kerensky; and by various socialists including one who did not go into emigration, the left Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov.[6] It is not that nobody on the revolutionary side wte. Already in early 1918, durig the rest-Litovsk Peace discussions, Lev Davidovich Trotsky wrote the first of his accounts, mainly from memory, in order to put before the workers outside Russia a picture of the Russian revolution.[7] Since however, I will discuss his major work later, there is no need to take up this one.

If we look at the principal differences of this period, we can highlight three dimensions. Mensheviks, Sociaist Revolutionaries, Liberals, all wanted to portray the February Revolution as a purely spontaneous revolution. Up to the morning (in some cases the afternoon) of 27^th February, that is, during the period of unfolding general strike and military revolt, leaders of these parties had been silent, or even against the revolution. To look for leaders of the revolution, one would have to look at women workers, often Bolshevik women, then the Bolshevik Vyborg District Committee and the Inter-Borough Organisation [strictly the RSDRP—Internationalists, popularly called Mezhraionka] who merged in 1917 with the Bolsheviks. By calling the revolution spontaneous it became easier to claim that the afternoon of 27^th February was the first moment of conscious action. This was when the Cadets initiated steps to form the Provisional Government and the socialists initiated the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. In the stalin era the same approach was taken, because the actual leaders of the leftwing, Shlyapnikov or Kayurov among Bolsheviks, or Iurenev of the Mezhraiontsi, needed to be cut down and Great Stalin had to be built up (and Great Stalin was not even around during those days of insurrection).

The second issue raked up was the question of Bolshevik strategy and aims in the July Days (2-4 July by the Russian clandar, 16-17 July by the Western calendar) and the claim that Lenin had taken German gold in order to bring about Russian defeat in the war. The Juy Days saw a military led armed explosion in the capital. The Bolshevik leadership, despite opposing the aim of the soldiers, did not want to abandon them. But the anti-Bolsheviks claimed they had attempted an insurrection, withdrawing only at the last moment. Kerensky in particular went o claiming that Lenin had taken German gold. But the German empire collapsed in 1918. Despite the passage of a century, no documents have been produced to show that Lenin was a German agent, or that Ludendorff had funded him.

The third debate that emerged was over the nature of Bolshevism.Did they participate in the revolution to establish autocracy by overthrowing democracy? This would be a central debate reappearing in the hands of ostensible academic specialists during and after the Cold War.

The First Histories and Debates: 1924-1938

When the Civil War ended, revolutionaries started writing memoirs of revolution and the civil war. A Central Committee member of February 1917, Alexander Shlyapnikov was one of the principal leaders of the faction Workers’ Opposition in 1921-22. After defeat, he turned to writing his memoirs. Though respectful to Lenin, he was profoundly contemptuous towards the group that replaced his group in the leadership in March 1917, namely Lev Borisovich Kamenev and Joseph Stalin. His four volume memoirs were first published in 1923[8], and he wanted to show that in February the Bolsheviks were fully opposed to the Provisional Government and the imperialist war, but the return of the Kamenev-Stalin-Muranov trio led to a toning down of party policy. As a result, later Stalin forced him to recant. The first two volumes came out in English in 1982, but the narrative for 1917 even now remains available only in Russian.

Following Lenin’s death, open confrontation developed between bureaucracy and democracy in party and state.The Left Opposition wa formed aroud the demand for proletarian democracy. As art of its struggle, Trotsky’s Collected Wroks, volume 3 (dealing with 1917) included a long preface by him, titled Ooroki Oktyabriya or Lessons of October. In this he claimed that under the hammer blows of class struggle, a left-riht polarization had developed within the Bolshevik party leadership. The inertia of old, outmoded thinking had to be removed by class struggle from below. As flag bearers of this outmoded thinking he identified Kamenev, Zinoviev, Nogin etc. And moreover, he stressed that it was not the party ale that had led the revolution, harking back to soviet democracy when the party bureaucracy was consolidating power.

A huge debate broke out. In 1917, the current triumvirate of Stalin-Kamenev-Zinoviv had palyed nothing like the role played by Trotsky. So they began a slander campaign, combining partial truths and total lies about Trotsky’s pre-1917 role and ideas (his being a Menshevik in 1903, which they extended to all the way till 1917; his pamphlet criticizing Lenin in 1904; his role in the August Bloc; his alleged ignoring of peasants; falsehoods about his anti-war stance) as well as the first careful re-writing of what had happened in 1917. Apart from party leaders, party-member historians like Pokrovsky and Yaroslavsky weighed in. Two claims made were—that Stalin-Kamenev and Lenin had little difference in 1917, while Trotsky’s alleged anti-peasant line meant his line had no resemblance to Lenin’s 1917 line; and that he had played down the role of working class and had also refused to give adequate importance to the role of the party.[9]

From this time, the concept of official history begins to take shape. But the consolidation of power by Stalin resulted in repeated re-designing of the party line history. In 194 Trotsky had targeted Zinoviev and Kamenev. But in 1925, under pressure from proletarian Leningrad, Zinoviev turned against Stalinism. So now Stalin needed to show him as a vacillator. In 1929 Bukharin fell out of power, and history had to be written again. At last, in the mid-1930s, with Stalin established as God under Lenin, it was necessary to write an account showing most old leaders as traitors and counter-revolutionaries. The new history of Lenin, guided and aided by Stalin, fighting all the traitors, was to take final shape in the History of the CPSU(b) – Short Course. One chapter of the book was actually written by Stalin, with all the rest bearing his imprint. Along with the infallible party, a few new elements were added. First was the personal infallibility of the Great Leaders – Lenin, and then Stalin. Second cme a narrative of a linear evolution of Bolshevism from What Is To Be Done? (1902), the 2^nd Party Congress (1903) to 1917, and a myth of a complete identity between party and class leadership. Third was the story of Stalin as Lenin’s main ally. Though after 1953, and especially after the 20^th CPSU Congress and Khruschchev’s Secret Speech, some of the worst lies were removed, this book remained the fountainhead of Stalinist lies and myths about the Russian revolution all the way to the present. I. I. Mints, who wrote the most well known official history in the USSSR in the 1960s[10], was to dip deeply into the Short Course for his basic structure. This three volume work of over three thousand pages remains the most detailed narrative of the Stalinist foundational myth. Lenin is infallible. Russian history must be freed from foreign distortions (from the Stalin era, Great Russian nationalism would become another component of the historiography). After Lenin the key role was played by Stalin. Kamenev constantly made mistakes. Trotsky, depite voting for insurrection, actually did not want an insurrection. Indeed, Trotsky’s role in October was a fable made up by Western historians. The continuity of class struggle and class consciousness came from the continuity of ideas of Lenin and the “leading cadres”, not from actual class struggle. The anarchy of events was turned into discipline by the party and its “active cadres”.

A few years before the History of the CPSU(b) – Short Course, two books  very different from it it in content and tone came out. William Henry Chamberlin was a journalist by profession who had access to much documentation from the Soviet archives before they were put out of the reach of scholars. So he was able to write a two volume book, The Russian Revolution 1917-1921, providing to readers a comprehensive narrative of the revolution and the civil war that even today is worth reading.[11] Sheila Fitzpatrrick, noted Soviet/Russian history scholar, calls it the book with the best overall description of the revolution and the civil war. Chamberlin’s major achievement was to incorporate the civil war in his account of the revolution. This underscored the reality that the victory of the Red Army was part of the class struggle, not merely the victory of superior military forces or superior strategies. The civil war brought about political crises, because not only the bourgeoisie, but also the reformist/moderate socialist parties and at times parts of the peasantry took up arms against the Soviet state. So working class democracy was constantly being squeezed. But western historians habe all too often remained silent about the role of the civil war in throttling workers’ democracy. There are also some “Marxists” who piece together quotations from Marx, but who ignore the ferocity of the civil war and the role of the Whiteguard forces, and instead jump at Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov and others, claiming that they ceased to be good Marxists because they built a standing army, they fought a ferocious war,  they took away the democratic rights of opponents, etc. It is to be admitted that Lenin , Trotsky and their comrades made important mistakes. One example is the building of the Cheka as an institution. But it is necessary to ask questions about the class standpoint of any historian who wants to know why those who began the civil war, who used barbaric violence to smash working class rule, were not allowed to proceed peacefully? This was why Chamberlin’s book was so important. Long before the systematic distortions introduced in the name of academic objectivity during the Cold War, he had highlighted, why he civil war, and why too the Red victory?

Though written in Russian in 1930, Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution was published first in English and other West European languages, and only much later in Russian.[12] Side by side with Stalin’s assault on working class power there was a massive stream of lies. To respond to lies, about Marxist theory, about Trotsky’s personal role, about the history of the Bolshevik party, etc, Trotsky published three books and a number of essays. Based on documents, he published The Stalin School of Falsification.[13] This revealed the real role of the Stalin-Kamenev-Muranov leadership in March-April 1917. A lot about his own role, and about Kerensky’s lies concerning Lenin and German gold, were examined in his autobiography.[14] But it was in The History that he wrote a ful-length account of the revolution. This was a book on  broad canvas. He looked at the evolution of Russian society and economy, Russia’s entry into World War I, the intensification of exploitation on workers and peasants due to the war, and then moved to a consideration of the Czar and the Czarina. The palace conspiracy revealed how deeply divided the old ruing class was, how unable to continue to go on ruling in the old way. As a historian, he did not display any casualness, and certainly did not feel that the inevitability of the revolution made it unnecessary to look into details. The five days of popular explosion and the fall of Tsarism, the evolution of the agitation into a general strike and uprising, were traced in such a way that out of the events he could proceed to generalizations, and let his readers know his opinions about certain debated issues. Was the February Revolution spontaneous? This raised the question – what did spontaneity mean? Actually it simply meant that the leaders were less famous, many of whom were lost later on – though we do get firmly the names of the Vyborg District Committee of the Bolsheviks, and of the Mezhraiontsi. But the revolution was carried out by the working class ad by peasants wearing the uniforms of soldiers. In that case, in what sese was the revolution a bourgeois democratic revolution?

Outside the USSR, and beyond the official communist writers, Trotsky’s History was the result of a massive research that would play a central role in course of the next three quarters of a century for a third position historiography outside Stalinism and anti-communist rightwing writings. The new progressive writings from the 1970s, once placed next to his book, appear to be no longer so novel. There was one major gap in his research. This was the role of women workers in the Russian revolution, the conflicts between bourgeois feminism and the Bolshevichki, the persistence of male domination among the Bolshevik men and the sustained struggles of the women Bolsheviks to overcome that. It is difficult to accept that Trotsky did not know anything about this, since at other times he wrote sharply about the subject. So we need to assume that he had limitations in his theoretical framework, did not recognize that class is divided by gender, and to present a full picture of the class struggle the struggles of the women workers required separate elaboration. Of course, till the rise of Second wave feminism in the 1960s nobody was to write such accounts. But that the tallest leader of the October insurrection also did not reveals an important weakness.

On the other hand, Trotsky brings out the dialectical relationship between class and party in an excellent way in the History. He shows why the role of a revolutionary party is so important, but at the same time he shows that if a revolutionary party substitutes itself for the working class no proletarian revolution in the classical form is possible.

Rightwing Historiography of the Cold War Era: 1949-1991

From the beginning of the Cold War, Russian/Soviet Studies and the study of Marxism were undertaken as political tasks in the West. As the leader of the Cold War this task was most widely taken up by the USA. In many Universities in that country Soviet Studies centres were opened, Professor posts created, and a University centric “Marxology” emerged. The academics hired for these purposes were mostly expected to launch aggressive ideological offensives. So propaganda often overlay any adherence to truth. But it is also necessary to understand why even such rightwing propaganda was often so successful. The Stalinist claims, that there was a broad socialist democracy in the USSR, that only genuine criminals were sent to the camps; that the Bolsheviks, or at least those certified by Stalin, were saints, that the party never made mistakes, were patently false. By contrast the Western Cold War distortions, despite the bad framework, could at least be seen to be often backed by some archival data. So liberals, non-Stalinist leftists, various kinds of people accepted its claims. The Cold War in fact made possible a meeting of minds between liberals and conservatives concerning Soviet Studies. To them also came ex-communists who had left or had been expelled. Hundreds of books and essays were written. Just to list them would create a thick pamphlet. I intend to look at the main currents and discuss a few significant authors and books. The first person to be highlighted should be Bertram David Wolff. A left wing socialist along with John Reed and Louis Fraina, a member of the CPUSA, the first editor of the party paper, a leader of the Lovestone faction and considered a “Bukharinist”, a defender of the First and Second frame-up trials by Stalin (the Zinoviev-Kamenev and the Radek-Pyatakov trials), Wolff turned against Stalin during the Third Trial (Bukharin-Rykov). Duing World War II and afterwards, he became a rabid rightwinger. Thereafter he was an adviser to the US State Department, and was connected to the Universities of Stanford and Columbia. His theory about the USSR would be later termed the “continuity thesis” by Stephen Cohen.[15] The essence of this thesis is the position that in 1902, Lenin’s book What Is To Be Done? Created a programme for a bureaucratically centrlised party, which was to impose the dictatorship of a vanguard elite. According to Wolff, from 1903 Lenin began his control over the autonomous party machine. And from then to Stalin’s death in 1953, Bolshevism had only two really authoritative leaders – Lenin and Stalin.[16] This was soon to become a well worn path. Alfred Meyer asserted that Stalinism emerged as ideology and tactics from Leninism.[17] Robert Daniels, despite tracing the many faces of opposition currents within Soviet communism, including the struggles for democracy, also insisted that the Trotskyists differed from Stalin and Lenin’s closer adherents, and that in two decisive ways Leninism gave birth to Stalinism.[18]

A major work of the continuity thesis was Leonard Schapiro’s The Origins of the Communist Autocracy.[19] Schapiro denied flatly that the Bolsheviks had ever any democratic credentials. His aim was to show that they were a determined minority who kept more democratic forces out of power. In his book, he cited quite a bit of evidence about how the Bolsheviks had used force against opponents between 1917 and 1922. However, in Schapiro’s narrative, only the Bolsheviks wear hooves and horns. The civil war, the White Terror, the fact that moderate socialists chose to join hands with the Whites, all disappear or become marginal.

Another very significant author is Richard Pipes. Professor Pipes has written 22 books on Russia history and the USSR, so a full scale assessment of his work is beyond the scope of this essay. However some points need to be covered. Pipes was an all out soldier of the Cold War. In the 197s he condemned the détente, and when Reagan was the US President, he served in the National Security Committee. In 1990 Pipes wrote a thick book on the Russian Revolution. In 1993 came his book on the first phase of Bolshevik rule. In 1996 he published a book on the ‘unknown Lenin’.[20]

According to Pipes, Tsarist Russia was different from semi-feudal Germany, Austria-Hungary etc because the Tsars treated the state was a patrimonial property. Apparently, this was why the Russian revolution was so all out while the rest were not. Pipes had the great ability to totally ignore views different from his own. So he has nothing to say about Arno Meyer’s presentation of a picture of the Europe of the old order in a crisis.[21]  In the second and third parts of his book on the revolution he looks at the period from the February Revoution to the October Revolution, and from October to the first months of Bolshevik rule. Pipes does not believe in social history. The vast numbers of studies that have emerged from the 1970s, looking at history from below, struggles of workers, peasants, nationalities, soldiers, as well as histories of various parties, ideologies, role of women – all these leave him cold. In his narrative of the civil war he spends seven chapters, of which one entire chapter is on the killing of the Tsar and his family. But Whiteguard brutality finds no space in his descriptions.

Evey historian has her own viewpoint, and having that is no crime. But if she distorts facts to serve the viewpoint, then she is carrying out a crime against the craft of the historian. Russia under the Bolshevik Regime does precisely that. Here Pipes claims that thre was no such thing as ‘imperialist intervention’.[22]All he does show is, not all the imperialist powers could unite, and Llyod George had thought that accommodation with the Bolsheviks was possible. So the view of One Western leader is cited to ‘prove’ that there was no imperialist intervention. That imperialism had set troops, and had assisted local counter-revolution militariy and financially, appears to be no proof.[23]

On the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, Pipes is laughable. It is well-known that Trotsky was the main strategist on the Bolshevik side.[24] Ignoring most researchers Pipes cites only Dmitri Volkogonov to assert that Trotsky was weak as a military strategist.[25]One fails to realize why the Reds were able to smash their opponents in that case.