Still working to recover. Please don't edit quite yet.
An Anarchist FAQ - Did the Bolsheviks really aim for Soviet power?
It seems a truism for modern day Leninists that the Bolsheviks stood for "soviet power." For example, they like to note that the Bolsheviks used the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" in 1917 as evidence. However, for the Bolsheviks this slogan had a radically different meaning to what many people would consider it to mean.
As we discuss in section 25, it was the anarchists (and those close to them, like the SR-Maximalists) who first raised the idea of soviets as the means by which the masses could run society. This was during the 1905 revolution. At that time, neither the Mensheviks nor the Bolsheviks viewed the soviets as the possible framework of a socialist society. This was still the case in 1917, until Lenin returned to Russia and convinced the Bolshevik Party that the time was right to raise the slogan "All Power to the Soviets."
However, as well as this, Lenin also advocated a somewhat different vision of what a Bolshevik revolution would result in. Thus we find Lenin in 1917 continually repeating the basic idea: "The Bolsheviks must assume power." The Bolsheviks "can and must take state power into their own hands." He raised the question of "will the Bolsheviks dare take over full state power alone?" and answered it: "I have already had occasion . . . to answer this question in the affirmative." Moreover, "a political party . . . would have no right to exist, would be unworthy of the name of party . . . if it refused to take power when opportunity offers." [Selected Works, vol. 2, p 328, p. 329 and p. 352]
He equated party power with popular power: "the power of the Bolsheviks -- that is, the power of the proletariat." Moreover, he argued that Russia "was ruled by 130,000 landowners . . . and they tell us that Russia will not be able to be governed by the 240,000 members of the Bolshevik Party -- governing in the interest of the poor and against the rich." He stresses that the Bolsheviks "are not Utopians. We know that just any labourer or any cook would be incapable of taking over immediately the administration of the State." Therefore they "demand that the teaching should be conducted by the class-consciousness workers and soldiers, that this should be started immediately." Until then, the "conscious workers must be in control." [Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power? p. 102, pp. 61-62, p. 66 and p. 68]
As such, given this clear and unambiguous position throughout 1917 by Lenin, it seems incredulous, to say the least, for Leninist Tony Cliff to assert that "[t]o start with Lenin spoke of the proletariat, the class -- not the Bolshevik Party -- assuming state power." [Lenin, vol. 3, p. 161] Surely the title of one of Lenin's most famous pre-October essays, usually translated as "Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?", should have given the game away? As would, surely, quoting numerous calls by Lenin for the Bolsheviks to seize power? Apparently not.
This means, of course, Lenin is admitting that the working class in Russia would not have power under the Bolsheviks. Rather than "the poor" governing society directly, we would have the Bolsheviks governing in their interests. Thus, rather than soviet power as such, the Bolsheviks aimed for "party power through the soviets" -- a radically different position. And as we discuss in the next section, when soviet power clashed with party power the former was always sacrificed to ensure the latter. As we indicate in section H.1.2, this support for party power before the revolution was soon transformed into a defence for party dictatorship after the Bolsheviks had seized power. However, we should not forget, to quote one historian, that the Bolshevik leaders "anticipated a 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' and that concept was a good deal closer to a party dictatorship in Lenin's 1917 usage than revisionist scholars sometimes suggest." [Sheila Fitzpatrick, "The Legacy of the Civil War," pp. 385-398, Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War, Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds.), p. 388]
While modern-day Leninists tend to stress the assumption of power by the soviets as the goal of the Bolshevik revolution, the Bolsheviks themselves were more honest about it. For example, Trotsky quotes Lenin at the first soviet congress stating that it was "not true to say that no party exists which is ready to assume power; such a party exists: this is our party." Moreover, "[o]ur party is ready to assume power." As the Second Congress approached, Lenin "rebuked those who connected the uprising with the Second Congress of the Soviets." He protested against Trotsky's argument that they needed a Bolshevik majority at the Second Congress, arguing (according to Trotsky) that "[w]e have to win power and not tie ourselves to the Congress. It was ridiculous and absurd to warn the enemy about the date of the rising . . . First the party must seize power, arms in hand, and then we could talk about the Congress." [On Lenin, p. 71, p. 85]
Trotsky argued that "the party could not seize power by itself, independently of the Soviets and behind its back. This would have been a mistake . . . [as the] soldiers knew their delegates in the Soviet; it was through the Soviet that they knew the party. If the uprising had taken place behind the back of the Soviet, independently of it, without its authority . . . there might have been a dangerous confusion among the troops." Significantly, Trotsky made no mention of the proletariat. Finally, Lenin came over to Trotsky's position, saying "Oh, all right, one can proceed in this fashion as well, provided we seize power." [Op. Cit., p. 86 and p. 89]
Trotsky made similar arguments in his History of the Russian Revolution and his article Lessons of October. Discussing the July Days of 1917, for example, Trotsky discusses whether (to quote the title of the relevant chapter) "Could the Bolsheviks have seized the Power in July?" and noted, in passing, the army "was far from ready to raise an insurrection in order to give the power to the Bolshevik Party." As far as the workers were concerned, although "inclining toward the Bolsheviks in its overwhelming majority, had still not broken the umbilical cord attaching it to the Compromisers" and so the Bolsheviks could not have "seized the helm in July." He then lists other parts of the country where the soviets were ready to take power. He states that in "a majority of provinces and county seats, the situation was incomparably less favourable" simply because the Bolsheviks were not as well supported. Later he notes that "[m]any of the provincial soviets had already, before the July days, become organs of power." Thus Trotsky was only interested in whether the workers could have put the Bolsheviks in power or not rather than were the soviets able to take power themselves. Party power was the decisive criteria. [History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 2, p. 78, p. 77, p. 78, p. 81 and p. 281]
This can be seen from the October insurrection. Trotsky again admits that the "Bolsheviks could have seized power in Petrograd at the beginning of July" but "they could not have held it." However, by September the Bolsheviks had gained majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. The second Congress of Soviets was approaching. The time was considered appropriate to think of insurrection. By in whose name and for what end? Trotsky makes it clear. "A revolutionary party is interested in legal coverings," he argued and so the party could use the defending the second Congress of Soviets as the means to justify its seizure of power. He raises the question: "Would it not have been simpler . . . to summon the insurrection directly in the name of the party?" and answers it in the negative. "It would be an obvious mistake," he argued, "to identify the strength of the Bolshevik party with the strength of the soviets led by it. The latter was much greater than the former. However, without the former it would have been mere impotence." He then quotes numerous Bolshevik delegates arguing that the masses would follow the soviet, not the party. Hence the importance of seizing power in the name of the soviets, regardless of the fact it was the Bolshevik party who would in practice hold "all power." Trotsky quotes Lenin are asking "Who is to seize power?" "That is now of no importance," argued Lenin. "Let the Military Revolutionary Committee take it, or 'some other institution,' which will declare that it will surrender the power only to the genuine representatives of the interests of the people." Trotsky notes that "some other institution" was a "conspirative designation for the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks." And who turned out to be the "genuine representatives of the interests of the people"? By amazing co-incidence the Bolsheviks, the members of whose Central Committee formed the first "soviet" government. [Op. Cit., vol. 3, p. 265, p. 259, p. 262, p. 263 and p. 267]
As we discuss in section H.3.11, Trotsky was simply repeating the same instrumentalist arguments he had made earlier. Clearly, the support for the soviets was purely instrumental, simply a means of securing party power. For Bolshevism, the party was the key institution of proletarian revolution:
"The party set the soviets in motion, the soviets set in motion the workers, soldiers, and to some extent the peasantry . . . If you represent this conducting apparatus as a system of cog-wheels -- a comparison which Lenin had recourse at another period on another theme -- you may say that the impatient attempt to connect the party wheel directly with the gigantic wheel of the masses -- omitting the medium-sized wheel of the soviets -- would have given rise to the danger of breaking the teeth of the party wheel." [Trotsky, Op. Cit., p. 264]
Thus the soviets existed to allow the party to influence the workers. What of the workers running society directly? What if the workers reject the decisions of the party? After all, before the revolution Lenin "more than once repeated that the masses are far to the left of the party, just as the party is to the left of the Central Committee." [Trotsky, Op. Cit., p. 258] What happens when the workers refuse to be set in motion by the party but instead set themselves in motion and reject the Bolsheviks? What then for the soviets? Looking at the logic of Trotsky's instrumentalist perspective, in such a case we would predict that the soviets would have to be tamed (by whatever means possible) in favour of party power (the real goal). And this is what did happen. The fate of the soviets after October prove that the Bolsheviks did not, in fact, seek soviet power without doubt (see next section). And as we discuss in section 4 of the appendix on "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?", the peculiar Bolshevik definition of "soviet power" allowed them to justify the elimination of from the bottom-up grassroots democracy in the military and in the workplace with top-down appointments.
Thus we have a distinctly strange meaning by the expression "All Power to the Soviets." In practice, it meant that the soviets alienate its power to a Bolshevik government. This is what the Bolsheviks considered as "soviet power," namely party power, pure and simple. As the Central Committee argued in November 1917, "it is impossible to refuse a purely Bolshevik government without treason to the slogan of the power of the Soviets, since a majority at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets . . . handed power over to this government." [contained in Robert v. Daniels (ed.), A Documentary History of Communism, vol. 1, pp. 128-9] Lenin was clear, arguing mere days after the October Revolution that "our present slogan is: No Compromise, i.e. for a homogeneous Bolshevik government." [quoted by Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution, p. 65]
In other words, "soviet power" exists when the soviets hand power over the someone else (namely the Bolshevik leaders)! The difference is important, "for the Anarchists declared, if 'power' really should belong to the soviets, it could not belong to the Bolshevik party, and if it should belong to that Party, as the Bolsheviks envisaged, it could not belong to the soviets." [Voline, The Unknown Revolution, p. 213]
Which means that while anarchists and Leninists both use the expression "All Power to the Soviets" it does not mean they mean exactly the same thing by it. In practice the Bolshevik vision simply replaced the power of the soviets with a "soviet power" above them:
"The success of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution -- that is to say, the fact that they found themselves in power and from there subordinated the whole Revolution to their Party is explained by their ability to substitute the idea of a Soviet power for the social revolution and the social emancipation of the masses. A priori, these two ideas appear as non-contradictory for it was possible to understand Soviet power as the power of the soviets, and this facilitated the substitution of the idea of Soviet power for that of the Revolution. Nevertheless, in their realisation and consequences these ideas were in violent contraction to each other. The conception of Soviet Power incarnated in the Bolshevik state, was transformed into an entirely traditional bourgeois power concentrated in a handful of individuals who subjected to their authority all that was fundamental and most powerful in the life of the people -- in this particular case, the social revolution. Therefore, with the help of the 'power of the soviets' -- in which the Bolsheviks monopolised most of the posts - they effectively attained a total power and could proclaim their dictatorship throughout the revolutionary territory . . . All was reduced to a single centre, from where all instructions emanated concerning the way of life, of thought, of action of the working masses." [Peter Arshinov, The Two Octobers]
Isolated from the masses, holding power on their behalf, the Bolshevik party could not help being influenced by the realities of their position in society and the social relationships produced by statist forms. Far from being the servants of the people, they become upon the seizing of power their masters. As we argue in section 7 of the appendix on "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?", the experience of Bolshevism in power confirmed anarchist fears that the so-called "workers' state" would quickly become a danger to the revolution, corrupting those who held power and generating a bureaucracy around the new state bodies which came into conflict with both the ruling party and the masses. Placed above the people, isolated from them by centralisation of power, the Bolsheviks pre-revolutionary aim for party power unsurprising became in practice party dictatorship.
In less than a year, by July 1918, the soviet regime was a de facto party dictatorship. The theoretical revisions soon followed. Lenin, for example, was proclaiming in early December 1918 that while legalising the Mensheviks the Bolsheviks would "reserve state power for ourselves, and for ourselves alone." [Collected Works, vol. 28, p. 213] Victor Serge records how when he arrived in Russia in the following month he discovered "a colourless article" signed by Zinoviev on "The Monopoly of Power" which said "Our Party rules alone . . . it will not allow anyone . . . The false democratic liberties demanded by the counter-revolution." [Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 69] Serge, like most Bolsheviks, embraced this perspective wholeheartedly. For example, when the Bolsheviks published Bakunin's "confession" to the Tsar in 1921 (in an attempt to discredit anarchism) "Serge seized on Bakunin's passage concerning the need for dictatorial rule in Russia, suggesting that 'already in 1848 Bakunin had presaged Bolshevism.'" [Lawrence D. Orton, "introduction," The Confession of Mikhail Bakunin, p. 21] At the time Bakunin wrote his "confession" he was not an anarchist. At the time Serge wrote his comments, he was a leading Bolshevik and reflecting mainstream Bolshevik ideology.
Indeed, so important was it considered by them, the Bolsheviks revised their theory of the state to include this particular lesson of their revolution (see section H.3.8 for details). As noted in section H.1.2, all the leading Bolsheviks were talking about the "dictatorship of the party" and continued to do so until their deaths. Such a position, incidentally, is hard to square with support for soviet power in any meaningful term (although it is easy to square with an instrumentalist position on workers' councils as a means to party power). It was only in the mid-30s that Serge started to revise his position for this position (Trotsky still subscribed to it). By the early 1940s, he wrote that "[a]gainst the Party the anarchists were right when they inscribed on their black banners, 'There is no worse poison than power' -- meaning absolute power. From now on the psychosis of power was to captive the great majority of the leadership, especially at the lower levels." [Serge, Op. Cit., p. 100]
Nor can the effects of the civil war explain this shift. As we discuss in the next section, the Bolshevik assault on the soviets and their power started in the spring of 1918, months before the start of large scale civil war. And it should be stressed that the Bolsheviks were not at all bothered by the creation of party dictatorship over the soviets. Indeed, in spite of ruling over a one party state Lenin was arguing in November 1918 that "Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic." How can that be when the workers do not run society nor have a say in who rules them? When Karl Kautsky raised this issue, Lenin replied by saying he "fails to see the class nature of the state apparatus, of the machinery of state . . . The Soviet government is the first in the world . . . to enlist the people, specifically the exploited people in the work of administration." [Collected Works, vol. 28, p. 247 and p. 248]
However, the key issue is not whether workers take part in the state machinery but whether they determine the policies that are being implemented, i.e. whether the masses are running their own lives. After all, as Ante Ciliga pointed out, the Stalinist GPU (secret police) "liked to boast of the working class origin of its henchmen." One of his fellow prisoners retorted to such claims by pointing out they were "wrong to believe that in the days the Tsar the gaolers were recruited from among the dukes and the executioners from among the princes!" [The Russian Engima, pp. 255-6] Simply put, just because the state administration is made up of bureaucrats who were originally working class does not mean that the working class, as a class, manages society.
In December of that year Lenin went one further and noted that at the Sixth Soviet Congress "the Bolsheviks had 97 per cent" of delegates, i.e. "practically all representatives of the workers and peasants of the whole of Russia." This was proof of "how stupid and ridiculous is the bourgeois fairy-tale about the Bolsheviks only having minority support." [Op. Cit., pp. 355-6] Given that the workers and peasants had no real choice in who to vote for, can this result be surprising? Of course not. While the Bolsheviks had mass support a year previously, pointing to election results under a dictatorship where all other parties and groups are subject to state repression is hardly convincing evidence for current support. Needless to say, Stalin (like a host of other dictators) made similar claims on similarly dubious election results. If the Bolsheviks were sincere in their support for soviet power then they would have tried to organise genuine soviet elections. This was possible even during the civil war as the example of the Makhnovists showed.
So, in a nutshell, the Bolsheviks did not fundamentally support the goal of soviet power. Rather, they aimed to create a "soviet power," a Bolshevik power above the soviets which derived its legitimacy from them. However, if the soviets conflicted with that power, it were the soviets which were repudiated not party power. Thus the result of Bolshevik ideology was the marginalisation of the soviets and their replacement by Bolshevik dictatorship. This process started before the civil war and can be traced to the nature of the state as well as the underlying assumptions of Bolshevik ideology (see "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?").
