Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (29 page)

Coincidentally, further signs of the well-founded nature of their fears became apparent. On the same day, Trotsky called for a curtailment of press freedom, arguing that earlier demands for complete freedom of the press had represented the Party’s ‘minimum programme’ while control of the counter-revolutionary press, which soon came to mean virtually any non-Bolshevik paper, was its ‘maximum programme’. Fears were growing as to what other surprises the ‘maximum programme’ might reveal. The response of the Central Committee majority, determined largely by Lenin, was as uncompromising as it was possible to be. The dissidents were accused of ‘totally disregarding all the fundamental tenets of Bolshevism’. That implied a clear enough definition of what ‘Bolshevism’ was at that point – one-party dictatorship. As if that were not enough they were also accused of ‘criminal vacillation’, ‘sabotage’ and being ‘enemies of the people’.
⁴

However, two qualifications to the extremism of the response should be noted. First, despite the language, the minority was not expelled but presented with an ultimatum to accept Central Committee authority immediately. Most did so, though some resigned. Those who accepted continued working as normal in the leadership, again showing that Lenin’s political personality permitted reconciliation, if the political conditions were right, as readily as enforcing a split where they were not. Second, though slightly hollow, the majority protested that it was not their fault that the one-party government was emerging. The majority declared that:

The Central Committee affirms that, not having excluded anyone from the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, it is fully prepared even now to re-instate those who walked out and to agree to a coalition within the Soviets with those who left; therefore the claim that the Bolsheviks do not want to share power with anyone is absolutely false.
⁵

Sceptics might argue that the other parties were certainly not going to return to the fold and therefore the promise was hollow. They might also add that the previous paragraph but one in the resolution rather contradicted the later one:

The Central Committee confirms that there can be no repudiation of the purely Bolshevik government without betraying the slogan of Soviet power, since a majority of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, barring no one from the Congress, entrusted power to this government.
⁶

The majority also claimed several times that the collapse of negotiations for the Left SRs to join the government was not their fault. In fact, largely because of pressure from the Railwaymen’s Union (
Vikzhel
), the Left SRs did join in a coalition that lasted four months. However, the weight of the above arguments tends to indicate that Lenin was not only ready but very willing to march on alone. In any case, the only acceptable terms for a coalition would have been complete acceptance of the Bolshevik programme. Those were virtually the terms on which the Left SRs joined the government and it was at the first major obstacle, the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, that it broke down.

However, the alliance did last long enough for it to get Lenin past another potentially fatal obstacle, the Constituent Assembly. Here was another issue over which the contradictions of Lenin’s personality came to a head. On 26 October (OS) he presented the Second Congress of Soviets with a manifesto it approved which stated clearly that the new Soviet government ‘will ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly’. [SW 2 457] The new government was ‘to govern the country until the Constituent Assembly is convened’. [SW 2 471] On another occasion he claimed the new government would submit proposals for peace ‘for consideration to the Constituent Assembly’. [SW 2 462] In discussing land he said the new decree ‘is proclaimed a provisional law, pending the convocation of the Constituent Assembly’. [SW 2 470] He even went so far as to speculate that ‘even if the peasants continue to follow the Socialist-Revolutionaries, even if they give this party a majority in the Constituent Assembly, we shall still say – what of it? Experience is the best teacher and it will show who is right.’ [SW 2 470]

How could one doubt Lenin’s commitment to the Constituent Assembly? Indeed, the elections went ahead more or less on schedule with little controversy in early November. However, once the results became known and it was clear the Bolsheviks did not have a majority Lenin’s tone was less accepting. In a
Pravda
article of 13 December (OS), entitled ‘Theses on the Constituent Assembly’, he attacked the legitimacy of the elections. They did not reflect post-October realities, he said, for two reasons above all. First, the party lists were drawn up before October and did not reflect the split of the SR Party into left and right segments so the electors could not take that major fact into account. Second, the elections took place before the electorate had had time to digest the meaning of October, which, he claimed, they now supported more deeply. The result was, in Lenin’s view, a ‘divergence between the elections to the Constituent Assembly, on the one hand, and the will of the people and the interests of the working and exploited people, on the other’. The solution was for the elected Assembly to accept the broad lines of soviet government policies up to that point and to support new elections to bring the Assembly into line with the electorate’s supposed new allegiances. [SW 2 502]

The Assembly, perhaps naively on Lenin’s part, was allowed to convene on 5 January (OS) in the hope that it would accept Lenin’s ‘painless solution’ [SW 2 502] to the dilemma. When it did not, it was forcibly dissolved in the early hours of 6 January (OS). While there were some significant demonstrations in its support in Petrograd, in the course of which there were many deaths and the brutal murder of two former Provisional Government ministers in their hospital beds, the dissolution of the Assembly did not spark off much resistance on the part of the masses. The elections did, however, give some indication of the political allegiances of the nation. The entire right wing, represented almost exclusively by the Kadet Party, received support from no more than a rump of, if generously calculated, around 10 per cent of the voters. The Bolsheviks took about 25 per cent and the, undivided, SR list and allies took about 50 per cent. The Mensheviks got next to no votes. At the actual meeting the best indication of the affiliation of delegates was in the election of a chair. Maria Spiridonova, the Left SR candidate supported by the Bolsheviks, received 153 votes while Victor Chernov, the SR candidate, received 244 votes and was duly elected.

However, that was not the end of the story. Immediately after the Constituent Assembly was dissolved the Third Congress of Soviets was convened as a kind of counterweight. Lenin addressed it on 11 January (OS). Indeed, had it agreed to do so, the Constituent Assembly, or at least that part of it amenable to Bolshevik blandishments, was intended to be merged with the Congress to form – the French Revolution providing the model – a revolutionary Convention. However, it was not to be. The Third Congress showed the Bolsheviks tightening their grip on power with 441 out of the 707 delegates at the first session. The Fourth Congress, which met in emergency session in mid-March to discuss the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was even more heavily Bolshevik with 795 Bolsheviks out of 1,232 delegates. In effect, this was the last public meeting at which a significant proportion of non-Bolsheviks was able to take part and it also ratified, as it were, the split between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs. We will have cause to return to it in discussing the peace question. As far as the question of power is concerned, by the end of March soviet power had been definitively replaced by Bolshevik power. No one other than Bolsheviks ever sat in the Soviet government. Other parties were reduced to token status in central and local soviets. In this respect, Lenin’s will had been done.

Land

Compared to the complexities of the central issue of power, the story of the struggle over land in the first few months of the Revolution was a simple one. The complications were to come later. At the Second Congress Lenin quite simply stole the land policy of the SRs, adding a few embellishments. Nominally, land was handed over to the local land committees and soviets with a frequently unheeded proviso that large estates, that is the landowners’ land, should be maintained as large model estates under local soviet/committee control. The point was to try to prevent the break up of the large estates because they produced the bulk of the surplus needed for the towns and the army. If they were to be broken up and added to the peasant near-subsistence economy, production might fall and markets collapse. Some estates were transformed into state farms but usually with a hugely reduced land area. Problems were being stoked up for the future.

It was in his speech on land that Lenin made his magnanimous comment that if the peasants continued to follow the SRs, so what? They would soon learn. However, it was unlikely that they would desert the new authorities since the Bolsheviks had implemented the central item of peasant and SR policy. Lenin’s tone switched between the laconic and the magnanimous when confronted by hecklers in the Congress who pointed out the proposed decree was essentially SR policy:

Voices are being raised here that the decree itself and the Mandate were drawn up by the Socialist-Revolutionaries. What of it? Does it matter who drew them up? As a democratic government, we cannot ignore the decision of the masses of the people, even though we may disagree with it. In the fire of experience, applying the decree in prac
tice, and carrying it out locally, the peasants will themselves realize where the truth lies. [SW 2 470]

He then went on to talk about the possibility of an SR majority in the Constituent Assembly. Critics might also detect a large vein of disin
genuousness as well!

In Lenin’s favour it can be said that he took the obvious pragmatic decision any sensible government would have taken. Since September, largely as a reaction to fears arising from the Kornilov affair, the peasants were no longer ready to wait for the Constituent Assembly to hand out the land. The Kornilov affair demonstrated the danger that the opportunity would be taken away from them. Very sensibly they took action while they could. As a result, from September to February/March 1918, almost all landowner estates were taken under peasant control and most of the land redistributed.
⁷
There was no way to stop this tidal wave. Lenin recognized that and held on to power. The Provisional Government – despite the ever more desperate appeals of the former Minister of Agriculture, Chernov, who had been replaced in August – did not feel able to implement it. They had kept it in the background, like other key issues, to avoid breaking up the alliance with the bourgeoisie and thereby risking civil war while the external enemy was still at the gates. This sensible and honourable policy had ceased to be viable after Kornilov. Had Kerensky himself implemented the radical programme things might have been very different, but he did not. He was still hanging on to the extinct hope that the country might be kept together. Kornilov had made this impossible. Even so, in Kerensky’s eyes the alternative was an abyss of destruction from within and without. He was not prepared to condemn Russia to such a fate. Lenin, of course, was spared such thoughts by his discourse of revolution as the only path to save Russia from the abyss. Events were soon to prove Lenin wrong, but for the time being bold initiatives won the day.

Potential food shortages and social collapse were not the only delayed problems. No one knows exactly which voices Lenin heard raised when he announced his policy, because they might have come from outraged Bolsheviks as much as from outraged SRs. While the SRs might fume to see their policies stolen, Bolsheviks might also get steamed up at seeing their policies betrayed. The provisions announced by Lenin were very different from the Bolsheviks’ real long-term beliefs about land. Above all, the traditional Bolshevik line was to encourage the disappearance of the peasantry, whom they saw as a transitional class. In modern society they would dissolve away. Some would remain as labourers on much larger collectively owned farms which could benefit from economies of scale and compete with American farms in the production and productivity stakes. The remainder would leave the countryside and become urban workers. Thus, whichever path they took, they would be proletarianized and thereby join the chosen people. To achieve this, basic Bolshevik policy was to nationalize land. In fact, they had done the opposite. They had opened the way for a last golden age of the peasant commune and the small peasant economy. It flourished in the 1920s but suffered immensely when Stalin judged that the time had come to tidy up the contradiction through the collectivization campaign. However, there were twists and turns to come in Lenin’s own attitude to the peasants, but it was only when the dire consequences of the land decree began to assert themselves that he refocused on rural issues in spring 1918. From October 1917 to March 1918 the peasants were left to themselves. They conducted a complete revolution in landholding.

Peace

Elevation into a position of power meant Lenin had to make real decisions with real consequences over the question of war. Before October, ‘peace’ polices had been crucial in attracting or repelling popular support. Various approaches existed. ‘War to a victorious conclusion’ was the slogan of the right; ‘revolutionary defensism’ and peace negotiations was the policy of the centre; ‘peace without annexations or indemnities’ (that is, reparations) was the policy of the internationalist left. Lenin, as he stated at several points, was prepared to become a revolutionary defensist once Russia had a real, that is, people’s revolution to defend. The far left also lauded the prospect of revolutionary war, meaning exporting revolution on the bayonets of Russian proletarian soldiers. Despite this plethora of policies and their symbolic importance in attracting support, in real terms there was less to choose between them than met the eye. Victorious war and defensive war meant much the same thing to those caught up in it – carry on fighting. In fact, peace without annexations and indemnities meant exactly the same. The implication, that the borders of 1914 could be magically restored, was not on. As Russia fell to rack and ruin, as it was seen in Berlin, so the prospect of the German Army packing up and going home was more remote than ever. That’s what no annexations meant. Since that was impossible, fighting would have to be carried on.