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Av Sol Temayüllü.
To what extent was the Red Terror avoidable? This will be the central question of this text. But before any more can be written, some introductory remarks are necessary.
While I will attempt to fill in various gaps and blanks to help an audience with cursory knowledge along, this text is not intended for someone completely unfamiliar to the events and actors of the Russian Revolutions of 1917, and the Civil War in the year that followed. The Red Terror that this text concerns itself with is mainly the one that happened in Civil War Russia, lasting from around 1918 to 1922. But more broadly, this text concerns itself with evaluating “Terror” as a historical political strategy as such and its impacts for the purposes of communists. “Terror” in this sense does not refer to “terrorism” as more broadly used today but is used in the sense of capital “T” Terror, such as in the case of the Reign of Terror, or the White Terror, etc. This strategy, as opposed to “terrorism” in the modern sense, involves having already captured some degree of power, and using this power to repress oppositional forces through means such as executions, imprisonment, torture et cetera that are broadly characterised by a lack of precision. ((We can note that, despite bourgeois historiography’s focus on the instances of “revolutionary terror”, even some of the most “democratic” bourgeois dictatorships frequently make use of torture, arrestations, imprisonements and executions with little precision to suppress oppositional forces — even under times of normalcy.))
This text is not concerned with apologia. So many times, communist engagement with the issue of Red Terror stays on the superficial level of responding either to Cold War propaganda or giving perspectives that would justify the motives of the actors involved. Both of these are necessary to counter the senseless moralising that orbits this issue. But this sort of engagement itself deals with the issue on only a moral level. One (who is so inclined) can well find in the horrors that Bolsheviks had to endure the emotional and human justification for the Red Terror. But the moral debate and apologia are essentially fruitless, and many communists end up as merely reactive to anti-communism, simply accepting the Red Terror as a valid, in fact the only valid, strategy. What happened is not understood as the consequence of specific choices people made in the face of concrete circumstances, but as if it was the only course in which history could unfold itself. That practice is a measuring stick for theory is too often used to justify seeing history as an answer sheet, simply to be copied. My concern is precisely to analyse the Red Terror as a specific strategy, and not an unchangeable fact of history. Even without concerns to justification, the Red Terror should always be considered in its natural context, not in vacuum, but in the face of assassinations, famine, foreign interventions, White Terror and a global proto-fascist reaction.
So then, to what extent was the Red Terror avoidable? To answer this question I think we need to ask ourselves “who was responsible for the Red Terror” — not for apologetic or moralistic purposes, not to understand who we should “blame” for it, but to understand the mechanics that have unleashed it and if a better solution was possible. I think it was mainly the Left SRs ((Left Socialist Revolutionaries: The left-wing split from the agrarian Socialist-Revolutionary Party)) who initiated, prompted the Red Terror, by their choice of open rebellion and assassinations. The point is not to speculate about an alternate timeline where the Left SRs did not rebel, but to choose a starting point (not because our account should start simply here and disregard everything before, but because this is a distinct turning point which the previous events lead to and later events follow from).
The first question then is if this could have been prevented. There are three variables that we could reasonably expect Bolsheviks to have an effect on in a cursory examination — for the purposes of my own contemplation and its presentation; (1) the decision to sign Brest-Litovsk, (2) decision-making mechanisms with regards to signing Brest-Litovsk, (3) the existing features of proletarian rule with regards to other classes.
(1) Was it correct for the Bolsheviks to sign Brest-Litovsk? We need to have an at least nuanced appreciation of the Left SR opposition to the signing of Brest-Litovsk. This seemed like a death sentence for significant components of the revolutionary alliance, particularly for the Left SRs and for the anarchists, because it posed a threat to their support bases amongst the peasantry. It seemed terrible, and indeed it was terrible. Bolsheviks had the sense that refusing to do so would be akin to repeating what the Provisional Government did, they wanted to stop the slaughter of imperialist war, and they thought that this would be remediable. In a sense they were right about this being remediable, and in another sense their intentions to stop the slaughter was shortsighted. This would be remedied some years later. But before then, it would start another slaughter (perhaps more deadly for especially the Russian proletariat). From the Left SRs perspective, one could pursue a revolutionary war against the aggressors, without necessarily continuing the imperialist war, and that the Council Republic could shoulder this fight against the German invaders. It is hard to say if this were the case in retrospect. Though, we can easily say in retrospect that the Left SRs had delusions of grandeur at least with regards their own standing within the Council Republic. Their attempts at a third revolution only gave the reactionaries (both inside and outside) the opportunity to gather their forces and start a “civil” war (and in the process, unleash their own White Terror, which was a central building block of the fascist movement as a whole ((Efforts for a “cordon sanitaire” (“sanitary cordon”) to isolate the Soviet Union from the rest of Europe, and the alliance against the communists more broadly — such as that between the MSPD and Freikorps — generally supported the most militant and reactionary forces, which were usually the only forces “capable” of meeting the “Bolshevik threat”)) ). I think whatever the answer to this question of whether it was right to sign Brest-Litovsk or not, it is not very conducive to actually drawing lessons for future revolutions.
(2) Were there problems with the decision-making mechanisms of the Council Republic that could be remedied? A typical criticism directed at the Bolsheviks is that they dissolved the Constitutional Assembly, and this was what started the imbalance of power (or “authoritarianism”) that would lead to the Civil War. Many have pointed out that the Soviet society in the period after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was far from “authoritarian”. In fact, it was the model Council Republic, the model dictatorship of the proletariat. As Paul Le Blanc (in part quoting from Kamenev) writes in his Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution, p. 122:
Immediately after power was transferred to the soviets, he recalled, the opponents of working-class rule were unable to maintain an effective resistance. The revolution had “its period of ‘rosy illusions,'” Kamenev continued. “All the political parties — up to Miliukov’s [pro-capitalist Kadet] party — continued to exist openly. All the bourgeois newspapers continued to circulate. Capital punishment was abolished. The army was demobilized.” Even fierce opponents of the revolution arrested during the insurrection were generously set free (including pro-tsarist generals and reactionary officers who would soon put their expertise to use in the violent service of their own beliefs).
((Because I know that this is usually the argument of defenders of bureaucracy, police, etc. I think a point should be addressed here. I think one could well have implemented various means to “repress” — in the proper sense of the verb — the reactionary forces, one could have limited their movements for the time being and kept them under watch, without having to resort to any professional monopolies on violence (i.e. those held by professions) — that is, police, standing army, and all that comes with the prison complex, which is not the same as the monopoly that the armed proletariat (and the revolutionary coalition) has on violence as a class. This would have helped prevent some of the worst catastrophes later on, but this would not have solved the problem either, considering that the period of destabilisation that unleashed the Terror and the Civil War was started by the betrayal of the Left SRs, which were by no means the reactionaries in this period.))
I will take up the precise nature of this period, and the period leading up to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, but for now I think it should be pointed out that the accusation of “authoritarianism” made little sense for this period. The councils were democratic institutions, in which Left SRs and others could also participate. They were far more democratic than a sort of parliamentary republic the Constituent Assembly would probably create. Police, bureaucracy, and all the shackles of the old bourgeois (and even feudal) society were cast aside. But quite possibly, even with the participation of the Left SRs in the October Revolution and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the council system prioritised the rule of the urban proletariat over a still partially independent rural semi-proletariat/peasantry, and the SRs were after all, their party. Could (or for that matter, should) a more balanced approach be sought?
This question in my mind is very integrally connected to the third variable: (3) What were the existing features of the proletarian rule with regards to the other classes? All the Social-Democrats (in this context, Marxists, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) in Russia had understood the necessity for “class alliances” for any progress to be made towards socialism. Mensheviks thought in their mind that a bourgeois “democratic” republic needed to be established, with the leadership of the bourgeoisie, so that Russia would properly develop as a capitalist, industrial, country, which would, combined with an electoral system, facilitate the political education and maturation of a proletariat (that would now, presumably, be countrywide) that could take power on its own. Bolsheviks argued that the time where the bourgeoisie could play a progressive role was over, at least in Russia, as the emergence of the proletariat and power dynamics of that class society had made it so that the bourgeoisie would prefer the Tsarist autocracy, rather than the proletariat or peasantry, as its ally. Which I think is fair to say, is in fact what happened. Instead, there was the need for the proletariat to lead an alliance with the peasantry (in part still feudal, in part petite bourgeois, in part semi-proletarian) to push through a democratic revolution incessantly towards socialism.
A lot of the problems of the aftermath of October, I think, followed from how to actually manage that. Bolshevik goals — such as an immediate end to the war, or getting rid of the Provisional Government, and general sympathy with Bolsheviks themselves — were already gaining popularity amongst the peasantry preceding the elections for the Constituent Assembly (and already preceding the October Revolution), there was a developing proletarian hegemony over especially the landless peasants, which expressed itself in the split of the SRs into Right and Left. But by the time of the Constituent Assembly elections, this split was not complete — not just as it was not represented in the ballots, although this is a very good symbolic indicator, but in the actual organic integration of the semi-proletarian (and other) peasantry, their proletarisation, and in the politics of their party, the Left SRs. Even though the Constituent Assembly represented a fundamentally less democratic form of politics, had the revolutionaries gained a majority in the Assembly, it is unlikely that they wouldn’t have used it to further legitimise the Council Republic. That is to say, it did not need to be dissolved from outside, it could be dissolved from inside. More importantly, that the revolutionaries (Bolsheviks, Left SRs and the anarchists in this phase) could not gain a majority in the Constituent Assembly was emblematic of how the proletariat had not yet thoroughly won leadership over the critical mass of people (and forces).
The point about “organic integration” of the peasantry deserves further elaboration. What I mean here is the organisation of these sections of the peasantry by the proletariat, in the organisations of the proletariat with proletarian methods of organisation — those methods of organisation that cultivate critical consciousness, and a new political existence for these sections with the ability of collective self-governance (not only in a political sense, but also in an economic sense, for example collective self-governance of the land). We see this in the attempts of the Chinese Red Army (particularly Zhu-Mao army) during the Chinese Civil War, and most significantly under the Cultural Revolution, especially in the People’s Communes. We see such an organic integration being set as a goal already by Lenin, in his various speeches and reports. For example he writes that:
[T]he Communist International’s theses should point out that peasants’ Soviets, Soviets of the exploited, are a weapon which can be employed, not only in capitalist countries but also in countries with pre-capitalist relations, and that it is the absolute duty of Communist parties and of elements prepared to form Communist parties, everywhere to conduct propaganda in favour of peasants’ Soviets or of working people’s Soviets, this to include backward and colonial countries. Wherever conditions permit, they should at once make attempts to set up Soviets of the working people …. Not only should we create independent contingents of fighters and party organisations in the colonies and the backward countries, not only at once launch propaganda for the organisation of peasants’ Soviets and strive to adapt them to the pre-capitalist conditions, but the Communist International should advance the proposition, with the appropriate theoretical grounding, that with the aid of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development, to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage. ((From the Report on the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions, to the Second Congress of the Communist International, relevant text can be found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x03.htm#fw1, the abridged version is from page 28 of Kevin B. Anderson’s Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, the entire subsection on Kautsky and Lars Lih’s interpretation is suggested reading, as seen on the next footnote))
In the first place, Bolsheviks’ break with the Kautskyist analysis of the peasantry’s role and status within the development of class society (and with regards to the revolution in Russia) was already forced upon them by the realities of the 1905 Revolution. As Loren Goldner analyses in detail in the article “The agrarian question in the Russian revolution: from material community to productivism, and back”:
The peasants in 1905 themselves submitted, all told, 60,000 petitions to the government. (The substance of numerous peasant demands for all land to the mir was not taken seriously by any Russian Marxist at this time.) The peasants invaded forests and grazing lands from which they had been excluded; they robbed stores, warehouses and manors, burning estates and killing the squires. The large majority of rural strikes in Russia in 1905–07 were strikes of peasant small holders, partly or seasonally employed. Most of these strikes were directed by the communal assemblies. In 1905, the crops had failed again in 25 of Russia’s provinces, closely linked to the locales of the uprisings. As Shanin put it “Once the tsar’s will could no longer be treated as a force of nature…the whole social world of rural Russia came apart. Everything seemed possible now.” The uprisings peaked initially in June 1905.
[…]
Under the impact of these events, Lenin, still in Zurich exile in the spring of 1905, prior to his return to Russia, proposed a “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasants” to establish a provisional government for the bourgeois-democratic revolution. “This formulation was so inconsistent with pre-revolutionary Marxist programs that Lenin would be forced to prove again and again that he had not sacrificed his Marxist principles.”
Lenin’s peasant policy, during all the struggles of the summer of 1905, is summarized by Crisenoy as “support the peasant movement, but above all don’t tie one’s hands for the future. It is necessary to advance and strike hard blows for revolutionary bourgeois democracy…to march separately and strike together, not hiding divergent interests, and to watch over one’s ally one would an enemy.” There remained, she points out, still a sort of fear about peasant struggles, fear of the their spontaneity, and great contempt for the peasant’s “lack of culture.”
[…]
Under the impact of these cumulative events, Lenin called for the revision of the RSDLP’s 1903 Agrarian Program and said, in contrast to his 1899 book, that “the economy of the squires in Russia is based on repressive enserfing and not on a capitalist system…Those who refuse to see it cannot explain the contemporary broad and deep peasant revolutionary movement in Russia.” Most Social Democrats now admitted that the 1903 program was overly pessimistic about the peasants’ revolutionary potential. ((The entire text is recommended supplementary reading and analyses many aspects of this question in more detail than I do, even though I disagree almost entirely with the initial impetus and some of the significant premises (and thus, unsurprisingly, some of the broader conclusions that are reached). Not surprising that I would disagree with this text’s evaluation of the ideas of Lenin, of “vanguard party”, and of Maoism. Goldner, it should be pointed out, banally agrees with Lih about Lenin being essentially a Social-Democrat, a “developmentalist”, and a bourgeois materialist. These are obviously not the case considering that Lenin openly advocates communist movements in countries where pre-capitalist forms are still dominant to aim to skip over capitalism altogether, directly into communism. Goldner, unlike Lih, is not entirely blind to the developments in Lenin’s view, but prioritises the narrative. The entire text can be found here: https://libcom.org/article/agrarian-question-russian-revolution-material-community-productivism-and-back-loren-goldner ))
But unlike what Goldner’s narrative allows him to concede, Lenin’s perspective and break with the Social-Democracy went much further especially post-1917 — as demonstrated by the previous Lenin quote where Lenin says precisely what Goldner believes he cannot, that various countries can under certain circumstances establish a communist society without going through capitalism, and that peasants can be mobilised as political subjects for this goal. This should not be confused with tailism behind the petite bourgeoisie by adopting their slogans and their methods of organisation, with their slogans, etc. It should also be emphasised once again that “peasantry” is a vague concept and can imply different things in different circumstances, different countries — in a lot of cases not just one class. In Russia, it seems like it consisted of semi-proletarian, petite bourgeois, and importantly, feudal elements (variously at odds and in alliance with each other). ((Goldner would, one imagines, disagree with this separation of peasantry in this case, though it should also be emphasised that class distinctions that may exist amongst the peasantry need not correspond to simply possession of property, as there are different modes of ownership. One could also criticise Goldner for overemphasising to what extent sections of Russian peasantry actually differed from the patterns of political behaviour that characterise presumably analogous sections of the class society in other places.)) I think such a criticism of tailism behind the petite bourgeisie (with regards to the demands of farmers) was in part legitimate when applied to AKP-ml, for example, in part because of AKP-ml’s wholesale and sometimes uncritical adoption of the slogans and demands of farmers and in part because of the composition of farmers (or rural population) in Norway as opposed to peasantry in the Russian Empire. This should also not be confused with cross-class alliances as such, such as has been the case with many examples of the United Front or Popular Front strategies. Chinese Communists have also experienced such problems, and the United Front with the Kuomintang was effective for only limited periods, often intercut with terror unleashed by the Kuomintang that relatively often undermined the Communists’ existence as such (especially the earlier instance of the United Front that concluded in the Shanghai Massacre is an instance of the serious problems with the Comintern’s approach during that period). As Rebecca E. Karl writes:
By April 1927, Chiang’s forces had reached Shanghai. He finally was able to turn the fury of his counter-revolutionary convictions against the very revolutionary forces that had sustained him and his army. Beginning with a brutal assault on Communists and workers in Shanghai that eviscerated the CCP and their urban-based labor unions, the attack soon spread to the rural areas, where peasant leaders, organizers, and everyone close to them were summarily killed. The ensuing “White Terror” proceeded over several years. It took the lives of more than one million people, most of them the very peasants of whom Mao had written so glowingly. The White Terror led to the near extinction of CCP membership.
[…]
The rout of CCP social and organizational forces was complete. Of 60,000 Communist Party members, only 10,000 survived the end of 1927.
[…]
The possession of an army turned out to be one key to political power. This lesson was not lost on Mao or on others. In addition, the seeds of extreme distrust in Moscow’s directives were also sown, for, throughout the beginning of the terror, the Stalin-directed Comintern remained wedded to the United Front, advising the CCP to continue to work for national unity. By the time the Comintern and Stalin in Moscow realized the scale of disaster and betrayal befalling the CCP, it was much too late to save anything but their own skins. Comintern agents fled China forthwith.
The painful task of regrouping, rethinking, and revitalizing got under way among the remaining Chinese Communist Party members. Henceforth, this process was to take place primarily amongst the poorest and remotest of the peasants, amongst whom the remnants of the CCP were encouraged to gather. Communists in urban areas were hunted down like wild animals. Li Dazhao, erstwhile Beida professor and one of the co-founders of the CCP, attempted to take refuge with Soviet embassy officials in Beijing. They handed him over to GMD soldiers, who executed him. Made scapegoat for the disasters, Chen Duxiu was ousted as the Party Chairman. While Party Central continued to operate clandestinely out of Shanghai’s French Concession area—for the moment, out of the reach of Chinese law enforcement—most surviving Communists dispersed to the countryside and went underground. ((Rebecca E. Karl, “Toward the Peasant Revolution, 1921-1927”, Mao Zedong and China, pp. 33-34))
The example, if anything, seriously illustrates the problem with political directives and strategies that are relayed top-down and from sources not borne through the organic forces of struggle native to the terrain, a problem that many comrades of various sorts unfortunately replicate today. But this should not lead to a black-and-white analysis of the United Front strategy, for periods this strategy did significantly help the CPC especially in their peculiar circumstances of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggle. The particular conception of the United Front as advised by Comintern at the time (as opposed to the “United Front” strategy that elements in the CPC conceived the possibility of) was also shaped by stageist, linear-progressive ideas that had characterised the earlier Social-Democracy. This article does unfortunately not have the place to dedicate to the sort of nuanced analysis the issue of United Front deserves.
Back to Russia: The problem of the proletariat not yet having thoroughly won leadership over the critical mass of people and forces was intensified and brought to a breaking point over an issue like Brest-Litovsk where significant chunks of the peasantry (though, at least not significant enough that Left SRs actually succeeded with their “revolution”) separated themselves violently from the revolutionary alliance — which provided the reactionary forces to gather themselves with support from their foreign allies. Importantly, I think, the Russian Communist Party (b) as an institution did not have a good enough grasp over how to deal with peasantry as a class. This was a problem before the Revolution, and this would be a problem during the Civil War. Red Terror was not the result of careful consideration and well-thought-out politics (the only previous examples to compare in this area were unsuccessful to semi-successful bourgeois revolutions), but a knee-jerk reaction. Lenin, unsurprisingly, did not expect to almost be assassinated. This I think should be important to all our evaluations of revolutionary strategy. RCP(b)’s decisions and strategy during this period was like assembling a cabinet whilst one was falling from the sky. The experiences of the previous generations are important for us to plan for the future. This, significantly, does not mean copy-pasting (or affirming) all strategies in the past that avoided immediate extinction. We should also care to look for what can be improved (leaving aside the obvious fact that we should be wary of the differences in our conditions).
RCP(b), in complete surprise and desperation of this betrayal by their previous allies, implemented various emergency policies, which often led to arbitrary and downright cruel consequences. I don’t think it is useful for our analyses as revolutionaries to apologise for that. To some extent this represented, in my opinion, also an immaturity on behalf of the RCP(b), that was maybe unavoidable. The split in the Second International is often presented as simply the left-wing of the International staying loyal to Social-Democracy (now Communism). But Social-Democracy (“Orthodox Marxism” as it was synthesised by those like the Eisenachers, Kautsky, in part by those like Plekhanov, shaped in part by a Lassallean environment) in its institutionalised form had reached a variety of conclusions that in my opinion underlied their initial inability to adapt to and/or capture the revolutionary moment and their eventual betrayal of the cause of the international proletariat. Communists had not only stayed loyal to various principles of Social-Democracy, their loyalty to those principles (to Marxism) caused them to break with various positions of the Social-Democracy. I think the conception of the role of mass politics and bureaucratic institutions was one of them (as elaborated in the State and Revolution), the conception of the development of societies and class dynamics (their conception of historical materialism) was another. Social-Democracy had long grown too comfortable with the sort of bureaucratic state institutions that characterised the rule of exploiting classes, especially in the modern era such as standing army, police, parliamentarism and in general top-down appointed functionaries (already in Marx and Engels’ time, as criticised in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and in private correspondance — as also discussed by Lenin in State and Revolution). They had also a watered down conception of historical materialism as essentially a linear progressive development of societies through simple mechanical relationships, as the march of industry, heralded by the working class today — in such a picture there was little room for a nuanced appreciation of the complex organic processes that make up the class society in flesh and bones. ((Much more can and should be written about this, Kevin B. Anderson’s response to Lars Lih in the expanded edition of his Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, pp. 22-32, and more broadly throughout the rest of the book. The differences between Lenin’s developing positions and the positions of those like Radek, Trotsky and Bukharin is revealing for the point that follows.)) Importantly however, the sort of reevaluation of these positions and structural/organisational changes that accompanied them did not mean an instantaneous change in the hearts and minds of all Bolsheviks. Lenin might have personally nuanced his positions on historical materialism, dialectics, and other issues, and his lines on several issues may have won popular support both within and without the Bolsheviks, but a lot of Bolsheviks (and Bolshevik institutions) preserved much of the old Social-Democratic attitude.
I think it is important to emphasise that Bolsheviks were starting from scratch. No one had come as far as they did before. But in this respect I think, both Bolsheviks’ inability to deal with the peasants and how their approaches were not the only path forward, are demonstrated with comparison to the Chinese Revolution. The question was similar: How to integrate the peasantry to the mode of politics of the revolutionary proletariat? ((It was, importantly, not the same. The labour movement in China had diminished by the point that the CPC had to move its focus drastically to the peasants, in large part due to the repression by Kuomintang referred to earlier.)) Importantly both in situations where the proletariat was a minority (and needed the majority on its side). Bolshevik response, regardless of an emphasis on turning peasants into political subjects (which would strengthen especially later on) ((Such as in the aforementioned examples, another example just to highlight the point could be the terms of admission to Comintern — known widely as Moscow Theses in Norway — such as the article 5: “Regular and systematic agitation is indispensable in the countryside. The working class cannot consolidate its victory without support from at least a section of the farm labourers and poor peasants, and without neutralising, through its policy, part of the rest of the rural population. In the present period communist activity in the countryside is of primary importance. It should be conducted, in the main, through revolutionary worker-Communists who have contacts with the rural areas. To forgo this work or entrust it to unreliable semi-reformist elements is tantamount to renouncing the proletarian revolution.” see the document here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x01.htm)), was mainly an attempt to control the peasantry from outside. Not every mistake that led to the Red Terror (and the mistake of Red Terror itself) can be explained by appealing to larger political tendencies, but the institutions of Cheka and Red Army (with Kamenev and Trotsky at their heads respectively) demonstrate this general approach. In the transition from a mainly proletarian Red Guards to the mainly peasant Red Army we see the gradual stripping away of voluntary participation, political subjecthood and democracy, and increased use of compulsion. Of course, it is likely that the same kind of democratic institutions may be impractical for a politically isolated peasantry with genuine conflicts of class interests with the revolutionary proletariat, but there are regardless more and less effective ways to win them over to the struggle of the proletariat. The Chinese Red Army, especially under the left-wing of the CPC and Mao, also had to deal with winning over a peasantry that had differing class-elements, politically and geographically isolated, and who had even less access to education than the Russian peasantry. But their tactics were remarkably different. As Mao comments in conversation with André Malraux, in his Anti-Memoirs, pp. 372-374:
Our people hated, despised and feared soldiers. They soon realized that the Red Army was their own. Almost everywhere it had a friendly reception. It helped the peasants, especially at harvest time. They saw that there was no privileged class among us. They saw that we all ate the same food and wore the same clothes. The soldiers were free to meet and free to talk. They could inspect the accounts of their company. Above all, the officers did not have the right to strike the men or to insult them. We studied the relations between classes. When the army was present, it wasn’t difficult to show what we were defending: peasants have eyes. The enemy forces were much more numerous than ours, and helped by the Americans; yet we were often victorious, and the peasants knew that we were victorious on their behalf. One must learn to wage war, but war is simpler than politics: it is a question of having more men or more courage in the place where you give battle. An occasional defeat is inevitable; you simply need to have more victories than defeats
[…]
During the Long March, we took more than a hundred and fifty thousand prisoners, a few at a time; and many more during the march on Peking. They stayed with us for four or five days. They could see the difference between themselves and our soldiers. Even if they had almost nothing to eat—like us–they felt liberated. A few days after their capture, we would assemble those who wanted to leave. They would go off, after a farewell ceremony, as if they were our own men. After the ceremony, many of them gave up the idea of leaving. And with us, they became brave. Because they knew what they were fighting for.
As Rebecca E. Karl puts it:
Unlike the predatory armies of the warlords or the Nationalist government troops, who were usually not paid or fed and who often pillaged their way through villages in their path, the soldiers of the Zhu-Mao army had ideological coherence and a reason to fight. The Red Army soldiers neither were mere mercenaries nor had they been press-ganged into warlord armies. Their participation in the Red Army was voluntary, and beyond its military significance, it was also a social endeavor. As such, they were respectful and considerate of the villagers, on whose good will they relied for provisioning and quartering. ((Rebecca E. Karl, “Establishing Revolutionary Bases”, Mao Zedong and China, pp. 39-40.))
Of course, Communists in China have also engaged in episodes of Terror, including the left-wing of the CPC often associated with Mao (by this I mean, less Lin Biao, more the Gang of Four). But Terror was always a tactic of failure, it was a symptom of a long range of systemic and organisational errors, and a brute force solution that barely held-off the immediate threats, while cultivating systemic problems that would undermine the left and strengthen the right.
To quote Victor Serge:
The state of siege had now entered the Party itself, which was increasingly run from the top, by the Secretaries. We were at a loss to find a remedy for this bureaucratization: we knew that the Party had been invaded by careerist, adventurist, and mercenary elements who came over in swarms to the side that held power. Within the Party the sole remedy to this evil had to be, and in fact was, the discreet dictatorship of the old, honest, and incorruptible members, in other words the Old Guard. ((Victor Serge, The Memoirs of a Revolutionary, (New York Reviews Book Classic edition) page 140. The entire chapter is full of details that reveal the drama of passion that is revolution, and how the direction it took was not according to some universal, eternal requirements but the result of the sensuous activity of actual humans reacting to concrete conditions. Even as one might easily disagree with several significant aspects of Serge’s analysis.))
The Terror was a mistake, it was not the correct alternative. It was not a solution. All it did was to delay various problems it could not in fact solve, and when the time came that these problems could no longer be delayed, consequences of the Terror were such that it was no longer possible to solve those problems.
But was it ever possible to solve those problems? We should distinguish between what Bolsheviks could do with their knowledge and methods available to them — this is only useful for apologia — and think about whether we, under similar circumstances, could have solved the problems that unleashed the Terror. Bolsheviks essentially did not have the right levers to pull to channel the tension created by the underlying contradictions. Terror is not a sensible strategy, because it is no strategy of any kind, it is the lack of a strategy. It is brute force. It is a situation in which the proletariat and its party is forced to minority rule, this shows also the problem with the Workers’ Opposition’s analysis. In essence, the Workers’ Opposition were not offering any solution whilst calling for “proletarian rule”, of course that demand was correct but the problem was precisely about how to maintain proletarian rule when the majority is lost. Lenin was correct to respond to various forms of anti-bureaucratic oppositions by pointing to the fact that platitudes of how things should be are not concrete solutions for how to get to how things should be. As Lenin comments to the Second All-Russis Congress of Miners ((The text can be found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jan/23.htm. This text is used by Arghiri Emmanuel, in his “The State in the Transitional Period”, as an example that Lenin in fact dropped all opposition to bureaucracy, and finally reached the Kautskyan social-democratic “realism”, that socialism is when the state does stuff. Emmanuel’s creative contributions to the discussion on the nature of imperialism breathed fresh-air into what was at the time a stale discourse but his opinions on the dictatorship of the proletariat are just old social-democratic theses resurrected with a good dash of superficial historiography.)):
Shlyapnikov [Of the Workers’ Opposition] concluded his speech by saying: “We must eliminate bureaucratic methods in government and the national economy.” I say this is demagogy. We have had this question of bureaucratic practices on the agenda since last July. After the Ninth Congress of the R.C.P. last July, Preobrazhensky also asked: Are we not suffering from bureaucratic excesses? Watch out! In August, the Central Committee endorsed Zinoviev’s letter: Combat the evils of bureaucracy. The Party Conference met in September, and endorsed it. So, after all, it was not Lenin who invented some new path, as Trotsky says, but the Party which said: “Watch out: there’s a new malaise.” Preobrazhensky raised this question in July; we had Zinoviev’s letter in August; there was the Party Conference in September and we had a long report on bureaucratic practices at the Congress of Soviets in December. The malaise is there. In our 1919 Programme we wrote that bureaucratic practices existed. Whoever comes out and demands a stop to bureaucratic practices is a demagogue. When you are called upon to “put a stop to bureaucratic practices”, it is demagogy. It is nonsense. We shall be fighting the evils of bureaucracy for many years to come, and whoever thinks otherwise is playing demagogue and cheating, because overcoming the evils of bureaucracy requires hundreds of measures, wholesale literacy, culture and participation in the activity of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection. Shlyapnikov has been People’s Commissar for Labour and People’s Commissar for Trade and Industry. Has he put a stop to bureaucratic practices? Kiselyov has been on the Central Board of the Textile Industry. Has he put a stop to the evils of bureaucracy?
Bureaucracy was something that had already emerged, and it had emerged not through individual values or personalities, but it had emerged out of/in response to a situation —to say that it should be “abolished” was nothing but demagoguery at this point, and, as Lenin remarked, ((“Trotsky accuses Lozovsky and Tomsky of bureaucratic practices. I would say the reverse is true. It is no use reading any further because the approach has spoiled everything; he has poured a spoonful of tar into the honey, and no matter how much honey he may add now, the whole is already spoiled.” — From the previously cited text.)) essentially a bureaucratic “solution” to the problem of bureaucracy, it was pretension. Lenin’s opinions in this period also reveal that he was aware that mistakes were made in the choice of how to handle the problem. He consistently calls them “bureaucratic excesses” and “bureaucratic mistakes”, that is to say, his approach is not fatalism, or “pragmatism”, or “realism”. This is Lenin’s most “right-wing” period, the one that Neo-Kautskyists and various Marxist-Leninists (and others who share similar bureaucratic conceptions of the proletarian rule) draw from most to justify their positions ((Importantly, even in this period, Lenin consistently emphasises that he shares the concern about the growing bureaucracy, and had warned about it previously. Never does Lenin end up justifying or even taking a neutral attitude towards bureaucracy.)), and yet his position is not that the bureaucratic situation was inevitable, and just some eternal fact of governance, but rather that there have been mistakes and unfortunate developments.
That Lenin’s criticisms of the Workers’ (and various other) Opposition(s) were correct, does not mean that he is able to provide a better alternative. Trotskyists tend to believe that had Lenin lived longer, or had Trotsky come to power following Lenin, Lenin’s slow remedy of various democratising and anti-bureaucratic commissions and active struggle within the Party and the state apparatus would have eventually solved the issue. Maoists of the modern variety tend to have a similar solution, though in the form of mobilising people outside of the state and party machinery through cultural revolutions to stave off bureaucratisation. I think there is validity to both perspectives, but I can’t get myself to find the answer satisfactory. In the case of (modern, particularly MLM variety) Maoist analysis, bureaucratisation of a kind that happened in the Soviet Union and China are assumed almost to be universal constants — whereas Trotskyist analysis tends to reduce bureaucratisation to a matter of policy (on behalf of Stalin) and an external fact of the failure of the proletarian revolution elsewhere.
I think it is important to seek the causes of bureaucratisation in the development of class forces and institutions, where class is reduced to neither personal nor impersonal forces (whilst both need to be acknowledged). The Red Terror is precisely therefore a useful case study, because it shows a decisive moment that needed to be remedied, but could not be solved merely through adoption of platforms or through the right persons being in the right positions.
But the insight to not push through with the kind of brute force tactics as was done during the Red Terror was already present amongst the Bolsheviks, amongst those like Victor Serge or Bukharin, and it seemed to them like another solution was possible. It was suggested that Kronstadt Uprising could have been resolved through mediation and concessions (some of the kind of concessions that Bolsheviks ended up going for anyway, after the Civil War). The case of the Chinese Red Army supports their case, that another solution was possible, and points at the direction of how the entire military and political approach could have been remedied. As Serge writes about Kronstadt:
I was in Petrograd at that time, working together with Zinoviev, I saw these events first-hand. I read very attentively, afterwards, all the issues of lzvestia (official organ. – Ed.) of the rebellious Kronstadt Soviet. It is true that the country was starving; it would even be true to say that the country was at the end of its resources, that it was literally dying of hunger everywhere. It is inexact to say that the Kronstadt sailors had demanded privileges; they demanded for the cities in general the suppression of the special police (zagraditelnye otriady) which surrounded the city to prevent the population from supplying itself with food from the country by its own means; later, when they saw themselves engaged in a mortal combat, they formulated a series of political demands which were extremely dangerous for that moment, but which were prompted by a sincere revolutionary spirit. Those were the demands of freely elected Soviets.
It would have been easy to avoid the events by listening to the grievances of Kronstadt and discussing them, even in giving some satisfaction to the sailors (we’ll prove that later on). The Central Committee committed the enormous mistake of sending Kalinin, who had already behaved as a harsh and incapable bureaucrat. He was hooted down.
It would have been easy, even after the fighting had begun, to have avoided the worst: it would have been sufficient to accept the mediation offers of the Anarchists (Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, notably) who had strong ties with the rebels. Because of reasons of prestige, and because of an overweening authoritarian spirit, the Central Committee refused. The main responsibility for all this must be laid to Zinoviev, President of the Petrograd Soviet, who had just deceived the whole Party, all the proletariat of that section, and all the population by saying that the “The White Guard General Kozlovski had treasonably taken possession of the Kronstadt”. It would have been easy, more humane, more politic and more in keeping with the spirit of socialism after the military victory over Kronstadt by Voroshilov, Dibenko, Tukachevsky, not to have had recourse to such massacre… The massacre which followed was abominable.
The economic demands of Kronstadt were so legitimate, so far from being counter-revolutionary, so easy to satisfy that, at the very time when they were shooting down the last mutineers, Lenin satisfied these demands in adopting the New Economic Policy. The N.E.P. was imposed by the events at Kronstadt, Tambov and other places. For we must say clearly: Lenin’s foresight, and that of the Central Committee did not wish to see what the whole country felt: that war communism had reached an impasse where one could no longer live.
I don’t think we need to agree with Serge about the causes of Terror, though I don’t think we should disregard his observations completely. The rebellion of the Left SRs (and other elements) was created in part by, and in turn amplified, the most significant problems of the Bolshevik party culture, of the structures of the party, and of the structures of the Council Republic. RCP(b) was not created in vacuum, it shared continuity with Social-Democracy, and naturally, Social-Democratic conceptions of the class society and leadership. Examples like the CPC under Mao, and importantly the kind of approach adopted towards the peasantry and to the questions of bureaucracy, leadership of the party, and its relation to state, demonstrate not the limits of what can be done to remedy these problems, but rather demonstrate that something can be done to remedy these problems and points at the direction of how. If any tentative conclusions can be made, it is the necessity to reject mechanistic and fatalistic conceptions that justify both terror and its consequences of bureaucratisation as necessities, as laws of nature. Both Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communists succeeded to the extent they did precisely because they rejected such foregone conclusions.
I find it appropriate to end this text with a wholesale quotation from Lenin, from a brilliant and beautiful metaphor found in The Notes of a Publicist:
Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a much higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He finds himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible. He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveller than the ascent—it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. One has to tie a rope round oneself, spend hours with all alpenstock to cut footholds or a projection to which the rope could be tied firmly; one has to move at a snail’s pace, and move downwards, descend, away from the goal; and one does not know where this extremely dangerous and painful descent will end, or whether there is a fairly safe detour by which one can ascend more boldly, more quickly and more directly to the summit.
It would hardly be natural to suppose that a man who had climbed to such an unprecedented height but found himself in such a position did not have his moments of despondency. In all probability these moments would be more numerous, more frequent and harder to bear if he heard the voices of those below, who, through a telescope and from a safe distance, are watching his dangerous descent, which cannot even be described as what the Smena Vekh people call “ascending with the brakes on”; brakes presuppose a well designed and tested vehicle, a well-prepared road and previously tested appliances. In this case, however, there is no vehicle, no road, absolutely nothing that had been tested beforehand.
The voices from below ring with malicious joy. They do not conceal it; they chuckle gleefully and shout: “He’ll fall in a minute! Serve him right, the lunatic!” Others try to conceal their malicious glee and behave mostly like Judas Golovlyov. They moan and raise their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: “It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! But did not we, who have spent all our lives working out a judicious plan for scaling this mountain, demand that the ascent be postponed until our plan was complete? And if we so vehemently protested against taking this path, which this lunatic is now abandoning (look, look, he has turned back! He is descending! A single step is taking him hours of preparation! And yet we were roundly abused when time and again we demanded moderation and caution!), if we so fervently censured this lunatic and warned everybody against imitating and helping him, we did so entirely because of our devotion to the great plan to scale this mountain, and in order to prevent this great plan from being generally discredited!”
Happily, in the circumstances we have described, our imaginary traveller cannot hear the voices of these people who are “true friends” of the idea of ascent; if he did, they would probably nauseate him. And nausea, it is said, does not help one to keep a clear head and a firm step, particularly at high altitudes. ((The text can be found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/feb/x01.htm ))