‘Ours is a workers’ state with a bureaucratic twist,’ Lenin said in 1921, aware the revolution was already off course. But there was nothing he, nor the best of the Bolsheviks, could do about it.

‘Lenin Proclaims Soviet Rule to Second All Russia Congress of Soviets, 25 October 1917’, Vladimir Alexandrovich Serov (1910-68) Sovfoto · UIG · Getty

Conservative historians, keen to discredit the very idea of revolution, believe the October Revolution was inherently flawed; according to Dominique Colas, ‘mass repression was not an accident or a response to a difficult situation, but an integral part of Lenin’s plan’ (1). Their leftwing colleagues emphasise the circumstances that drove the Bolsheviks to use coercive measures — adopted in haste, without a proper plan and intended as temporary — to defend the revolution against the White armies, foreign forces and peasant uprisings (2). They believe the dark Stalinist era that followed had little to do with the communist project itself, and everything to do with civil war.

Lenin’s choices were widely discussed during his lifetime, even before they began to trouble historians in their libraries. Inside and outside the Communist Party, some justified them as dictated by the political and military emergencies of the time; others were quick to denounce them as a slide into authoritarianism. There were three crossroads moments during the revolution, at which a choice had to be made between the use of force, democracy or state authority to further the revolutionary process: the seizure of power by armed insurrection in October 1917, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, and the repression of the sailors’ uprising at Kronstadt in 1921.

Only a few months after the overthrow of the tsarist regime, in the middle of a global conflict and after the establishment of a provisional government, the idea that the Bolsheviks should take power by armed force was gaining support. The worker grassroots of the Communist Party, and army conscripts outraged by the pursuit of the war, were pushing for it. Lenin, initially taken by surprise,began to defend this option in the Central Committee. The radicalisation of the Bolsheviks, in tune with the political atmosphere, scared other socialist forces — the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Left SRs) and the Mensheviks — and even fellow traveller Maxim Gorky. Representing a progressive intelligentsia attached to the gains of the February Revolution (civil liberties, universal suffrage, the abolition of the death penalty), Gorky was alarmed and horrified by the sometimes brutal expressions of political awakening in a population eager for peace and land. He accused the Bolsheviks of arousing the ‘dark instincts of the crowd irritated by the disintegration of life and by the lies and filth of politics ... poisoning us with anger, hate and revenge’ (3).

A genuinely democratic programme

But Lenin saw this chaos as proof of the inevitable disintegration of the structures of the ancien régime. In his eyes, Russia was already beyond the bourgeois stage of its revolution, which the Mensheviks believed they had a duty to maintain until the country became a real capitalist power, in line with a more literal reading of Marx. Lenin felt as early as February 1917 that the provisional government, linked to the Duma (parliament), and the soviets, which represented the workers (factory workers, peasants and soldiers), were bound to come into conflict. It would be necessary to overthrow the discredited provisional government by force, and to put in place a genuinely democratic programme that met the aspirations of the majority: immediate peace, the transfer of land to the peasantry, worker control of factories — and ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ This was accomplished during the night of 24-25 October, when the Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg (then renamed Petrograd), the seat of a provisional government now abandoned by all, without meeting any significant resistance.

The Bolsheviks claimed they had chosen armed insurrection to defend the Constituent Assembly from a military coup, like the one that had nearly succeeded in September. Though they were only a minority in the Duma (175 seats out of 703) after the November election, they achieved the dissolution of the assembly at its first session, in January 1918. This second decision roused doubts even among advocates of ‘socialism now’. In prison in Breslau, the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg pondered the issues. She knew that the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly had troubled only opposition socialists and trade unionists, while the population at large had been indifferent to it. She did not reproach Lenin for it, but was worried that the Bolsheviks might go further and abolish ‘democracy in general’.

It seemed to her that the socialist transformation of society should be based on the ‘bourgeois’ inventions of universal suffrage and freedom of the press (which the Bolsheviks denounced as fallacies): ‘To be sure, every democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found ... is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammelled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people ... It is the ... tasks which the Bolsheviks have undertaken with courage and determination that demand the most intensive political training of the masses and the accumulation of experience’ (4).

Russia could only have avoided the Red Terror by suffering the White Terror. I saw the revolution as a great sacrifice that must be made in order to secure the future Victor Serge

In the heat of events, such intellectual reservations did not always justify breaking with the revolutionary camp. Many leftwing activists — the anarchists and Left SRs, in government until March 1918 — were haunted by the memory of the bloody repression of uprisings in 1848, 1871, and 1905, and saw the use of coercive and centralising measures, such as the forcible requisition of grain, nationalisation of industries and arrest (even preventive) of political opponents, as indispensable during the civil war. Victor Serge, a Belgian libertarian of Russian origin, who was not naturally inclined to accept the party discipline that Lenin demanded, later wrote that ‘Russia could only have avoided the Red Terror by suffering the White Terror ... I saw the revolution as a great sacrifice that must be made in order to secure the future; and, to me, nothing seemed more important than maintaining or rediscovering the spirit of freedom’ (5).

Nevertheless, state constraint sometimes bordering on blind repression eventually brought the legitimacy of this ‘war communism’ policy into question. The political police, which at the height of the civil war had nearly 200,000 civilian and military personnel, was guilty of abuses no less violent than those perpetrated by the Whites when they retook ground. Its brutal methods were unable to contain famine, worsened by peasants hiding their harvest to avoid it being requisitioned, and having no grain to sow.

‘We stand for the power of soviets’

These tensions came to a head in March 1921 with the rebellion of the garrison of the fortress at Kronstadt on the island of Kotlin, the spearhead of the October Revolution. As in February 1917, the revolt was sparked by food rationing. Workers in Petrograd struck in February, and were joined in March by the soldiers and sailors of Kronstadt. An SR- and Menshevik-dominated committee politicised the protests, demanding new elections to soviets, the right to unionise, freedom of the press, and the abolition of armed food requisition detachments. In a radio message on 6 March, the Kronstadt garrison declared: ‘We stand for the power of soviets, not parties. We stand for freely elected representatives of the labouring masses. The [puppet] soviets manipulated by the Communist Party have always been deaf to our needs and demands; the only reply we have ever received was shooting.’

Kronstadt, on an island in Neva Bay, 30km west of St Petersburg, was a strategic military strongpoint at this time, when the peasant armies of the anarchist Nestor Makhno (in modern-day Ukraine) and the former Socialist Revolutionary Party member Alexander Antonov (Tambov region) were still defying the Bolsheviks. On the pretext of suppressing a White conspiracy, the Red Guards launched an offensive on 7 March and captured the fortress after a short siege, at the cost of 10,000 lives; thousands of executions followed. Alexander Berkman, an anarchist from the US who with his comrade Emma Goldman tried to mediate with the rebels, noted in his diary: ‘Days of anguish and cannonading. My heart is numb with despair; something has died within me.’ Later he wrote: ‘That day, I broke finally, irrevocably, with the Communists. It became clear to me that never, under any circumstances, could I accept ... that party chauvinism and state absolutism which had become the essence of the Communist dictatorship’ (6).

Michael Nicholson · Corbis · Getty

As well as the three crossroads moments, there was internal criticism of the Communist Party’s drift into bureaucracy. Shortly before the Kronstadt rebellion, the party was shaken by the ‘trade union controversy’, started by Trotsky in 1920. Trotsky, who founded the Red Army, maintained that to rebuild the Russian economy it would be necessary to militarise work and rein in the trade unions, which would be obsolete in a worker state. A number of leftwing opposition groups reacted. In January 1921 Alexandra Kollontai, one of their leaders, warned that victory over the last White army must be followed by a change of direction.

In a pamphlet (7), she wrote that the workers, exhausted by three years of civil war, were entitled to ask if they were a ‘prop of the class dictatorship’ or just ‘an obedient flock that serves as a support for those who, having severed all ties with the masses, carry out their own policy and build up industry without any regard to [their] opinions and creative abilities.’ Kollontai warned: ‘The more our industry establishments and unions are drained of their best elements by the party (which sends them either to the front or to the Soviet institutions), the weaker becomes the direct connection between the rank and file workers and the directing party centres.’ She recommended autonomy and a greater role in production for trade unions.

Kollontai’s call for a change of direction was heard, but not in the way she hoped. At its 10th congress, held during the Kronstadt rebellion, the Communist Party launched a new economic policy to appease the peasantry. A tax in kind replaced forcible requisition. Private property was restored to small and medium enterprises, and control of retail trade was slackened. Anxious to prevent the paralysis of the party while there was still a risk of widespread peasant revolts, Lenin tightened his grip on the party, as ‘the only fully reliable force at his disposal’ (8). The ban on factions, a decision he thought could be revised in the light of experience, weighed heavily on the country’s future, further strengthening the Politburo and its secretariat, where Stalin was in charge from April 1922.

Near the end of his life, Lenin was fully aware of the limitations of the formidable administrative apparatus that had enabled him to win the war. ‘Ours is a workers’ state with a bureaucratic twist to it. We have had to mark it with this dismal, shall I say, tag. There you have the reality of the transition,’ he said in 1920 (9). The civil war had destroyed the working class, the social foundation of Bolshevik power. Many party cadres, enrolled in the Red Army, died at the front. The spirit of sacrifice inherited from the days when the party had been an underground organisation vanished as it recruited in wider and less politicised circles, among those whose first concern was to secure their place in the new state apparatus. By 1921 the Bolshevik ‘old guard’ were only 2% of the party, which had quadrupled in size since 1918. ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat, which had been transformed by the pressure of circumstances into a dictatorship of a socially diverse minority, soon became a dictatorship of the party,’ according to the historian Moshe Lewin, who also wrote of ‘a dictatorship in the void’ and ‘pure political power’ (10).

In 1922 Lenin, weakened by several strokes, dictated to his secretaries notes that posterity would regard as his political testament. They outlined reforms (expanding the Central Committee, establishment of a Control Commission) that would make it possible to recreate a kind of balance of power despite the ban on factions. It was in vain: Lenin did not manage to impose his ideas. Moshe Lewin observes that, to the Bolsheviks’ credit, many of them tried to correct the course the country was taking, though unsuccessfully (11). Lenin, at the end of his life, was ready to go back to the drawing board and try to do the same.