LONG READ
After 1917: Civil war and
‘modernising counter-revolution’
Gareth Dale develops the argument that by the 1930’s internal counterrevolution had buried the revolutionary hope of 1917
F
or the scattered forces of the revolutionary
left this year’s celebrations of the centenary
of Russia’s October revolution are timely
and valuable. They shine a light on what history
revealed to be possible. But do they also provoke
a slight sense of unease? We are accustomed to
commemorating events that are packaged as a
fixed moment: it happened, in that specific year.
For wars this generally works breezily enough:
it began in 1914, or 1939, and so on. But we then,
some years later, commemorate its end – for
some nations in victory, for others in defeat.
In celebrating the Russian Revolution we are
remembering its commencement. A mass, largely
bloodless, communist-led insurrection successfully
overthrew the provisional government and
transferred political power to the soviets, thereby
opening the possibility of a radically new
direction of the course of human history – a social
revolution. But this begs questions. Did the social
revolution happen, or not? If it did, when and
how? Given that we evidently inhabit a global
capitalist society, when did the revolution reach its
terminus – or derailment? When did the counterrevolution triumph?
The conventional answer is that a social
revolution did occur, in Russia and later
exported to Eastern Europe and beyond, a
revolutionary experiment that staggered to its
inish in the 1980s. A version of this account
is adopted by many Marxists too. For the
historian Arno Mayer, for example, Soviet
socialism represented a radical development of
Enlightenment modernity. Whether in 1917, the
1930s or the 1960s, the Soviet order embodied
commitments to social progress, economic
planning, industrialisation and urbanisation,
and the universal destiny of socialism.1
Ranged against it, and in the 1918-21 civil war
personiied in the White Guards, was counterrevolution, understood as a continuation of the
Counter-Enlightenment, i.e. based in the clergy
and landowning aristocracy and espousing a
pessimistic view of history and human nature, a
conservativism rooted in ecclesiastical authority
and agrarian custom. Counter-revolution, in
this optic, is understood as the ight-back of
the incumbent privileged orders, deep-dyed
reactionaries who were hostile to modernity in
all its forms: industry, technology, democracy,
liberalism, socialism, the whole shebang. With
its patriarchal, militaristic and ultra-nationalist
politics, and its tarring of the revolution as
Jewish, cosmopolitan, secular and morally
decadent, it was able to gain a base beyond the
stately homes.2
In this essay I pitch against the conventional
account.
To be successful, the Bolsheviks knew, socialist
revolution required a rollback of capitalism. A
workers’ state in Russia could not subsist for
long in isolation. It was situated, as Lenin put it,
‘in a system of states,’ and it was inconceivable
for it ‘to exist alongside the imperialist states
for any length of time. One or the other must
triumph in the end.’3 The imperialist system
would be pushed back, or it would impose a
capitalist order on Russia. The wager of 1917
was that despite the inevitable assault, Russia’s
revolutionary trajectory could be consolidated
if similar gambles came off elsewhere,
rs21.org.uk | 25
undermining the number and vitality of enemy
states. But that assault – the invasion of over a
dozen powers, allied to the Whites, in the attempt
to crush the revolutionary regime – represented
a major counter-revolutionary challenge. The
attempt failed in an immediate, formal sense
but did succeed in shredding Russia’s economic
substance and its social fabric, which hardly
helped the socialist cause.
In most readings, the counter-revolutionary
telos would not arrive until 1989.
According to the International Socialist (IS)
tradition – following Tony Clif and others – the
counter-revolution took place far earlier. This
is the case I seek to present in this piece. I chart
the internal reconstruction of the Soviet regime
and argue that by the end of the 1920s the caste
of functionaries that controlled Soviet society
was beginning to act collectively as a capitalist
ruling class. This case demands a broader
understanding of counter-revolution than that
which is ofered by Mayer, and many others
who would perpetuate a similar view.
Militarism and socialism
In March 1919, Russia was consumed by
war. The counter-revolutionary international,
headquartered in Washington, London and
Paris, had funnelled astronomical sums into
Russia, preventing the (otherwise all but
inevitable) collapse of the White Guards (Britain
alone supplied them with as many new rifles as
Soviet Russia was able to produce during the
entire civil war.4) The Red Army was hemmed
in. Moscow’s writ was limited to a central
Russian-Ukrainian domain between Crimea,
St. Petersburg and the Urals, a sliver of the
Okhotskian coast, and a patch of Central Asia
east of the Aral Sea. Against this backdrop,
Lenin addressed the central committee of the
Communist Party. Social democrats – he named
Karl Kautsky – had accused the Bolshevik
government of having introduced “militarism”
rather than socialism. Lenin smiled and
shrugged his shoulders: no major revolution in
history had escaped war. The revolution had to
be defended.5
Kautsky’s charge was simple to rebut. The
civil war, he held, had been instigated by the
Bolsheviks, who were therefore responsible for
the measures that followed.6 Against this, it was
straightforward to show that militarism had
been imposed on the regime from without; it
had not been autonomously introduced, as if a
manifesto commitment. Nor was the implication
that socialism hadn’t been introduced in any
26 | revolutionary socialism in the 21st century
Both Kautsky
and Lenin
advocated ‘world
revolution,’ and
one didn’t have
to be drunk and
sentimental to
see its potential
way damaging for the Bolshevik leaders,
because none had made the supposition that
it had. ‘I have no illusions about our having
only just entered the period of transition to
socialism,’ Lenin clariied in January 1918.7
Russia in his view was simply a workers’ state,
deined not in terms of a complete societal break
with logics of capitalist power but by whether
the working class exercised political rule, by
whether the soviet state is one ‘in which the
power of the workers and the poor is assured.’8
As the war rolled on, however, that claim
looked increasingly tenuous – as Lenin himself
recognised. Militarism was indeed undermining
the workers’ state.
Both Kautsky and Lenin advocated ‘world
revolution,’ and one didn’t have to be drunk
and sentimental to see its potential. Mass
movements were toppling regimes across
Europe and beyond. In 1918 a councils’
movement had surged in Germany as old
order collapsed. The following year saw a
highly politicised strike wave in Britain and the
establishment of councils’ republics in Bavaria
and Hungary. In 1920, resistance to the Kapp
putsch in Germany threatened to do to the SPD
government what resistance against Kornilov
had done to Kerensky’s government in Russia.
Revolutionary struggles were in the ascendant:
in Italy and Spain, in China and Latin America.
For Kautsky, world revolution would
occur through a process of social-democratic
encroachment on centres of capitalist power.
It would ind expression in a growing
receptiveness to socialist ideas and swelling
electoral shares for social democratic parties,
leading to an expansion of their inluence
on a growing number of states. For Lenin,
by contrast, states in capitalist society are
inherently bastions of class rule. Prospects of
socialist transformation therefore depend on
mobilising working people into a counter-force
capable of dividing and disrupting the military
basis of state power, constructing an alternative,
council-based, power structure, and defending
it against challenges from within and without.
That defence required the use of military
force – indeed, a militarisation of society. It was
necessary. But it came at a price.
War and its anti-revolutionary outcome
In Mayer’s presentation of the civil war and
the associated imperialist interventions and
sabre-rattling, their effect on Russia in 1918-21,
and in the late 1920s and 1930s, was akin to
that of the war between revolutionary France
and foreign powers in the early 1790s. War, he
writes, ‘decisively revolutionized the French
Revolution in 1792-94’ and war and its threat
‘revolutionized the Russian Revolution in
1917-21 and in the 1930s.’9 Both revolutions
‘were revolutionized by foreign war’; both the
Committee of Public Safety and the Council of
People’s Commissars ‘used terror to enforce
conscription, price and wage controls, food
requisitions, and the confiscation of church
valuables.’10
With regard to France this is cogent
enough – and the point is seen yet more
plainly in the English Revolution, inextricable
as it was from civil war. But to model the
kinetics of socialist revolution on bourgeois
predecessors won’t get us far. In England and
France militarisation did have an essentially
revolutionising efect. Peasants had existed
in an atomised condition; now, many of them
were rallied together in a people’s army, a
manifestation, en marche, of a keystone capitalist
institution: the nation state. In France, the
exigencies of war cleaved the bourgeoisie and
brought the plebeians into the streets, on whom
the Jacobins increasingly leant. It was in the
years of the ‘Second Revolution’ that direct
action by the Parisian masses led to the arrest
of the king and the calling of a general election
with universal male sufrage. It was in 1792
that Toussaint led the slaves of St Domingue
into battle, and in 1794 that the National
Convention abolished slavery. War did also
incubate the Terror, but in terms of mass action
and institutional reform the dominant wartime
tendency was radical and democratic – indeed
even social democratic, in the case of price
regulation.
Socialist revolution, by contrast, requires,
from the of, a compact tissue of popular
organisation. In Russia, urban workers, and in
many precincts peasants too, were politically
mobilised. They had established the councils
that gave the workers’ state its being. But then
the military draft drew workers – often militants,
the main bearers of the soviet project – out of
workplaces and into the trenches and barracks.
Everywhere, the imperious demands of war
prompted, and were used to justify, elevated
authority gradients. The material requirements
of the war efort, for labour, supplies, and
funds, squeezed the peasantry, putting
strain on the smychka (alliance) of workers
and peasants. Military invasion, economic
embargo and capital light combined with the
accompaniments of war (blockade, famine,
epidemics, and so on), to reduce economic
output to less than one third of its pre-war
level.11 The industrial workforce slumped: as a
percentage of the 1917 igure it fell to around
39 in 1919 (23, in Red-controlled territory), and
even three years later it was only at 31.12 By 1920
Petrograd had lost 58 percent of its population
and Moscow 45 percent.13 In 1922, an estimated
7.5 million children were ‘starving and dying.’14
Social and economic disintegration on this scale
was without precedent. When the civil war
ended, Mike Haynes notes, ‘on average some
rs21.org.uk | 27
17 cartloads of ilth’ were schlepped from every
house in Moscow. ‘Piles of excrement, cholera
and typhoid,’ he concludes, ‘were no basis for a
leap into the realm of freedom.’15
The Red Army saw of the Whites and
the umpteen states of the anti-communist
international, but the efect of war was not to
revolutionise the revolution. The achievements
of War Communism – communal dining halls
and suchlike – were limited, elementary, and
emergency-enforced. On balance the efect
of war was, pace Mayer, to de-revolutionise.
Whereas in France the tendency in 1792-94
was democratic, in Russia of 1918-21 it was
the reverse. Political pluralism was abolished,
inner-party democracy restricted, trial by
jury abolished, and so on. Yes, the White
Guards were vanquished, but the outcome
was not as clear cut as some would have it.
By 1921-22, in Mayer’s view, not only was
‘the counterrevolution crushed and shut out
of Russia’ but ‘the new-wrought political
revolution went essentially unchallenged from
the right within Russia.’16 This is misleading,
and is the crux of the issue. War had not simply
threatened the regime directly, from without; it
had also challenged it insidiously and indirectly,
by enforcing its internal recomposition. In that
process a new brand of conservative counterrevolution – posing as moderate pragmatism but
in practice ofering a challenge to the revolution
‘from the right’ – began to take shape.
Towards rearmament
Already by 1920, having lost its coalition
partner (the Left Social Revolutionaries), with
the working class in a state of dissolution
and the factory committees atrophying, the
Bolshevik party-regime found itself hollowed
out from within. The democracy of the soviets
had expired, replaced by a one-party state.
The Communist Party, having been swept to
power by social movements that had largely
dissolved, now saw its ranks swelled by the
officials on whom it increasingly relied to
govern. Increasingly aloof from a shrinking
working class, sections of the party inclined
towards those forces which recommended
the strengthening of commercial relations
in agriculture (the ‘right opposition’) or to
those, concentrated within the party and state
bureaucracies, which advocated a programme
of national modernisation, the build-up of
state power as an end in itself (Stalin’s faction).
Trotsky’s ‘left opposition’ retained a significant
presence until the late 1920s. Its prospects were
28 | revolutionary socialism in the 21st century
heavily reliant on the global wave of workers’
struggle, but the curtain fell on that – the final
acts were the stabilisation of Germany (1924),
the defeat of the British general strike (1926)
and the crushing of communist-led uprisings
in China (1926-27). In shivering isolation,
the difficulties confronted by anti-capitalist
revolution in a backward country could only
deepen.
That a socialist rupture had occurred in
Russia was, Victor Serge reasoned, in part
due to the Bolsheviks’ ‘intransigence’ but also
‘because the system here was weakest …,
because the socialist revolution beneited from a
bourgeois revolution which, though necessary,
was feeble and tardy, unable to complete itself;
because on the ruins of the tsarist regime the
Russian proletariat found itself faced only with
an inexperienced, disarmed bourgeoisie.’17
These same factors, however, also account for
the fragility of the regime to which it gave rise.
If bourgeois frailty and the military defeats
sufered by tsarist armies were symptoms
of Russia’s economic and technological
competitive disadvantage relative to rival
powers, this same friability aggravated the
diiculties confronted by the revolutionary
regime: a small working class, rudimentary
physical and institutional infrastructures, and
a military that was inadequately equipped
in comparison with most of those that had
invaded, or supplied the Whites, in 1918–21.
In the mid-1920s, functionaries and army
generals, such as Mikhail Tukhachevsky,
began to press for a militarisation of society,
rearmament and state-led industrialisation.
During the civil war, Tukhachevsky, a
successful general, had disposed over ‘more
than 50,000 regular troops, three armoured
trains, three armoured units, several mobile
machine-gun units, about seventy ield guns,
hundreds of machine guns, and an aircraft
unit.’18 All such materiel had to be paid for.
(‘We plundered all Russia to conquer the
Whites,’ Trotsky acknowledged.19) It had
enabled resounding victories, and would
they not have to be repeated? States hostile to
soviet power remained a menace. Citing the
international counter-revolution that encircled
the Soviet state, and the ongoing mechanisation
of warfare, Tukhachevsky and others called
for more of what had enabled success against
the Whites: resources for the munitions
industries. Until 1927, this programme had
the support only of lower layers in the party,
but in that year it began to gain traction in the
upper echelons – especially in Stalin’s faction,
geared as it was to a programme of national
modernisation.
The programme of national modernisation
had to confront the progressive consequences
of revolution. The post-1917 regime had
acted to lessen social inequalities and, where
possible, improve workers’ and peasants’ living
standards. This, together with the depletion
of foreign capital and technology imports
that had been vital to industrialisation under
tsarism, curtailed the resources available
for investment. Although the soviet regime
succeeded in stabilising the postwar economy
more successfully than some European states
of the time, notably Britain, its per capita
GDP remained paltry, as Table 1 shows. If a
strategy of national modernisation was to
entertain a chance of success, therefore, the
obstacles to rapid industrialisation, above all
the legacy of the 1917 revolutions, as embodied
in the control of land by the peasantry, in
■ Table 1, per
capita GDP ($) of
Russia and other
states, 1917-27
Source: www.ggdc.
net/maddison/
maddison-project/
home.htm
the Communist Party’s commitment to
raising workers’ living standards, and in the
continued power and militancy of workers
and peasants, would all have to be overcome.
For despite the devastation of seven years of
war and civil war, Kevin Murphy points out,
Soviet citizens could still, in the mid-1920s,
‘openly criticise the regime; they had the right
to practice their religion; workers continued
to have considerable control in the factories;
seven hundred thousand women participated
in the proletarian women’s movement; the
regime enacted favourable policies for national
minorities, and the peasantry for the most part,
was left alone.’20
In his indispensable account of late 1920s
Russia, the Czech historian Michal Reiman has
shown that the obliteration of these progressive
legacies, although a necessary consequence
of the policies of Stalin’s faction, was not
planned in advance. The new system arose in
rs21.org.uk | 29
LONG READ
an unpremeditated manner, as the emerging
strategy of sections of the nomenklatura linked
to Stalin responded to a set of interconnected
crises that intensified at the end of the decade,
commencing in 1927.
A concatenation of repressive moves
The crises of 1927 unfolded in several dimensions:
international relations, economic affairs,
workers’ and peasants’ discontent, and nonRussian republics chafing against Moscow’s
rule. Policymakers reacted with short-term
expedients. Nonetheless, the measures taken
indicate in their general direction a clear set of
underlying perspectives and priorities. The first
and most important was the perception that
external invasion threatened once again. ‘With
increasing urgency,’ Reiman has documented,
‘demands were made for the quickest possible
strengthening of the army and the defensive
capacity of the Soviet state’ and ‘for a reorientation
of the economy and social relations toward a
perspective of imminent war.’21 This imperative
connected with a second priority, industrialisation.
Even in 1926–8 the pace of industrialisation,
measured against the meagre surplus released
from agriculture, was fairly intense (or even, as
Bukharin – a leader of the ‘right opposition’ – saw
it, excessive). By the unbending yardstick of
modern warfare, however, its level remained
totally inadequate. The New Economic Policy
of encouraging a market-mediated siphoning of
agricultural surplus into industry had run into
difficulties due to the rudimentary state of market
relations in the countryside, combined with a
‘goods famine’: the scarcity of industrial products
available for which peasants could exchange their
harvest. Opting to prioritise preparations for war,
therefore, constricted the policy options available
to tackle the crisis in agriculture, in particular
with regard to the ‘procurements’ problem. The
growing conviction of sections of the Communist
Party around Stalin that rapid industrialisation
was required at any cost helps explain why resort
was made, in 1927–8, to forced procurements of
grain, and why brute repression was meted out to
those who resisted (and, notoriously, to many who
did not).
The programme wasn’t planned in advance, or
at least not in detail. Rather, through haphazard
responses to short-term crises, the faction
around Stalin stumbled upon what became their
deining cause: rearmament through forced
industrialisation. It required, moreover, the
sidelining and eventual routing of those political
forces that championed the interests of the
30 | revolutionary socialism in the 21st century
Both Kautsky
and Lenin
advocated ‘world
revolution,’ and
one didn’t have
to be drunk and
sentimental to
see its potential
peasantry and the working class, expressed within
the Party by the ‘left’ (later, ‘united’) opposition
and what Trotsky misleadingly called the ‘right’
opposition (Nikolai Bukharin and his allies).
Trotsky assumed counterrevolution would come
from rural Russia and foreign powers. In fact it
was spearheaded from within the communist
party, and not least by oicials in repressive
ministries and oicers of the security forces – the
classic counterrevolutionary milieu.22 He failed
to see the counter-revolutionary implications
of Stalin’s industrialization proposals and, as
Clif pointed out, he failed to grasp that the
bureaucracy was becoming a ‘ruling class bent
on pursuing its own independent interests in
fundamental opposition to both the working class
and the peasantry.’23 In retrospect, it is clear that
Trotsky should have sought unity with Bukharin
against Stalin, in the mid-1920s when the abiding
strength of workplace militancy and other social
movements bore at least some slim potential for a
revival of workers’ democracy.24
The great war scare
It was in the concatenation of repressive moves
that flowed from the imperative to accelerated
industrialisation, triggered by a security scare,
that the distinctive structures of bureaucratic
state capitalism began to take shape. In 1927,
concern for the Soviet Union’s security escalated
into full-blown war fever when the crushing of
the most militant section of the Chinese labour
movement by Moscow’s putative ally, Jiang
Jieshi,25 in the ultimate defeat of the revolutionary
ferment of the 1920s, was followed by a series
of attacks on Soviet functionaries in Poland,
Germany, and China and the abrogation by
Britain’s Conservative government of trade
agreements and diplomatic relations with Russia.
This latter act in particular, the journalist Karl
Polanyi perceptively observed at the time, had
‘created a new global conjuncture,’ for it was
bound to heighten tensions throughout Eastern
Europe, with ramifications across Western
Europe too (an emboldening of fascist Italy, for
example).26
Stalin’s faction exploited the war scare.
Invocations of an external threat were deployed
wholesale to justify internal repression:
against peasants resisting requisitioning and
collectivisation, against labour unrest, and
against internal party opposition. If we are to
portray these years faithfully, historian Sheila
Fitzpatrick enjoins, we must use ‘the imagery of
war.’ Russia was caught up in a ‘psychological
state of war emergency [that] began with the
great war scare of 1927’ and which quickly
became entrenched in the forms of ‘a war against
Russia’s backwardness,’ and at the same time
a war against the Party’s ‘class enemies inside
and outside the country.’27 Groups that resisted
Stalin’s authority were branded enemies of
the state and allies of British imperialism. Just
as Britain threatened communism ‘with war
and intervention,’ leftist forces at home, Stalin
opined (with a red-baiting casuistry that even
Joe McCarthy would hardly outdo), threatened
his party ‘with a split. Something like a united
front from Chamberlain to Trotsky is coming into
being.’28 Moral panics were concocted to threaten
and cajole, to turn the population against the
enemy within: the ‘kulak menace,’ the ‘saboteur
in foreign pay,’ the ‘right-wing appeaser,’ the
‘Trotskyist,’ and the other stock miscreants and
evildoers of the Stalinist imaginary. From here it
was a straight line to the great purges of the 1930s
and the extermination of the ‘Old Bolsheviks.’
‘Overtake and pass’
Meanwhile, still in 1927, the panic buying and
hoarding that the war scare elicited exacerbated
food shortages that were in any case approaching
crisis proportions as government procurements
of grain dwindled. By the end of the year the
country was sliding toward an acute economic
crisis. Peasants faced increased taxation and
forcible requisitioning of grain. Wages slumped.
Social tensions escalated, and found a variety
of expressions: a sharp uptick in labour unrest
together with growing activity by the united
opposition within working class districts and
the army; a wave of disturbances in rural areas,
including attacks on officials and scores of
peasant revolts; and an upsurge in nationalist
sentiment in Georgia and Ukraine.29
Policymakers reacted with short-term
expedients, notably the arbitrarily-enforced
procurements of grain in 1927–8 – but this
only deterred the muzhik from sowing, thus
intensifying the crisis, and turning peasants
further against the regime. This was the moment
of the Five-Year Plan, the most paradoxical
aspect of Stalin’s late-1920s ‘revolution from
above’, in which something so apparently
progressive as ‘economic planning’ could form
the centrepiece of counter-revolution. For it was
with the irst Five-Year Plan that ‘coercion and
repression supplanted tolerance and persuasion
in every aspect of Soviet society.’30 This was the
moment when the government, as historian
Moshe Lewin relates, completely reshaped its
relations with the peasantry. ‘The irst ive-year
plan with its ambitious targets and insatiable
pressures for ever more investment resources,
had just been launched and was becoming a
huge national efort on an unprecedented scale.
The countryside, if not properly controlled and
mastered, could wreck the whole efort: such was
clearly the conclusion drawn by some of the key
leaders from the ‘grain crisis.’31 Industrialisation
targets were revised upwards, with the goal of
catching up with the capitalist powers. ‘Overtake
and Pass’ was the motto launched by a central
committee meeting in 1928.
rs21.org.uk | 31
In 1929, crisis continued to rip through all
sectors. The politburo responded with a ‘light
forwards’: ratcheting industrialisation targets
again upward and imposing state ownership and
continual operational control over agriculture.
The four years that followed witnessed ‘the most
precipitous peacetime decline in living standards
known in recorded history,’ accompanied by
what one historian has called ‘the unleashing of
massive political and social conlict on a scale
rarely seen in history.’32 In this compressed
period much of the existing social fabric – above
all, protective institutions such as the traditional
peasant community, trade unions and factory
committees – was either torn up or stitched into
the state bureaucracies. This enabled a dramatic
rise in the rate of exploitation. Net investment
soared from 1928 to 1937, rising from 10 to 23 per
cent of net national product, while household
consumption plummeted: from 82 to 55 per
cent.33 Russia’s industrial structure, which had
been dominated by consumer goods industries in
the 1920s found itself, only a decade later, geared
to producer industries and arms.34 In Russia,
Peter Binns explains,
32 | revolutionary socialism in the 21st century
‘the subordination of consumption to
the needs of accumulation took on an
extreme form.... Acting as the agent for the
accumulation of capital, the bureaucracy
emerged as the collective capitalist at the
same pace as the economy itself took on
the same features of the giant corporations
in the nations of the west that Russia was
competing against.... From the beginning
of the 5-year plans, armaments dominated
the accumulation process. For instance
in machine-building plants … already by
1932 munitions plants accounted for as
much as 46 per cent of total iron and steel
consumed.’ By 1938 this figure had risen
to a staggering 94 per cent, i.e. ‘virtually
all other machinery plant construction
had ceased.’35
The government now occupied, in relation
to the national economy, ‘the position which
a capitalist occupies in relation to a single
enterprise,’ as Trotsky portrayed the Soviet
Union in the 1930s.36 Trotsky didn’t draw the
conclusion that the system had become state
capitalist, but Cliff did. In his reading the Soviet
Both Kautsky
and Lenin
advocated ‘world
revolution,’ and
one didn’t have
to be drunk and
sentimental to
see its potential
Union operated as a unit of capital, with internal
differentiation (not unlike a multi-divisional
enterprise), its ‘laws of motion’ governed by
economic and military competition with rival
capitals and states.
Economising the party
Thanks to forced collectivisation, the
proletarianisation of Russia’s agricultural labour
force occurred in a compressed period, without
historical antecedent in its scale and speed.
Within a few years, a traditional agricultural
arrangement consisting largely of petty
production was subordinated to a single capitalist
landlord. This was no feudal fusion of economics
and politics, nor did it resemble the exaction
of tribute from peasant smallholders by such
empires as Ming China or Mughal India. It was,
rather, the sundering of peasants and their means
of production into absolute property, on one
hand, and a proletariat, on the other. No longer
did the state need to batten upon the peasantry,
as feudal landlords or tributary tax collectors had
done. Rather, it inserted itself between the means
of production and the agricultural labour force,
assuming coercive command of the former as
well as direct control over the labour process. This
gave it an unparalleled ability to appropriate the
agricultural surplus and to funnel it directly into
industry and the military, without the need to
engage in the delicate and sometimes futile task
of squeezing tribute from private landholders.
The smallholding peasantry, for its part, was
thrust en masse onto the labour market – or into
the forced-labour zones known collectively as the
Gulag. Whereas in 1794 France abolished slavery,
in 1930s Russia the tendency was towards wage
labour and slavery.
Had the functionaries who implemented the
collectivisation programme been readers of Marx,
they could have gained stimulating insights
from the chapters on agriculture in Theories of
Surplus Value. The ‘only requirement’ of the
capitalist mode of production, in respect of land,
Marx writes, is that it ‘should not be common
property, that it should confront the working
class as a condition of production, not belonging
to it.’ This purpose will be ‘completely fulilled’
if land ‘becomes state-property.’ The ‘radical
bourgeois’ therefore aspires to ‘a refutation of
the private ownership of the land, which, in the
form of state property, he would like to turn into
the common property of the bourgeois class, of
capital.’ In practice, he ‘lacks the courage, since
an attack on one form of property – a form of the
private ownership of a condition of labour – might
cast considerable doubts on the other form.’37
However, in the peculiar circumstances of
counterrevolution in 1920s Russia this is indeed
what came into being – the ‘radical bourgeois’
appearing in the guise of the Stalinist state.38
In this analysis, the agent of the accumulation
drive arose not, as Trotsky had forewarned,
from peasants and other petit-bourgeois layers
but rather, as some of his fellow oppositionists
proposed and as Clif later traced in detail, from
within the party-state bureaucracy, which began
to act as the “personiication of capital.”39
The penetration of state into society that
occurred during Stalin’s counter-revolution
should thus be understood as a precisely
capitalist moment. As Wolfgang Streeck has
pointed out, the Stalinist economy-cum-state bore
an uncanny resemblance in its core dynamic to
‘unreconstructed’ laissez faire capitalism, of the
sort that, Polanyi suggested, was impelled to
‘subordinate the social order entirely to rationaleconomic objectives’ and to marginalise any and
all ‘social institutions capable of representing a
logic other than that of economic accumulation.’40
Just as in Britain, in Polanyi’s thesis, the road to
rs21.org.uk | 33
the free market was opened and kept open by
a tremendous increase in continuous, centrally
organised state intervention, so in the Soviet
Union the mobilisation of society behind the
drive to catch up with Western market economies
occurred through an enormous expansion
of state ownership but also, simultaneously,
the ‘economisation’ of the state – and of the
Communist Party. The party, as Lewin describes,
underwent a process of ‘depoliticisation’ in the
1920s and 1930s. Its cells:
became brokers in the service of their branch
of the economy, sometimes even of just one
enterprise. … The economy was declared to be
the most important ‘front,’ to use the martial
terminology of the times. … Hence the tendency
to control and to mobilize institutions and
activities in all walks of life and sectors of the
state in order to harness them to the building of
the country. In this way the country’s cultural,
artistic, and other activities were ‘economized.’
Everyone, from writers to judges and procurators,
had to contribute to the battle for the productivity
of labor, the quality of industrial products, or the
building of dams.41
That battle was prosecuted in the workplaces
through techniques of individual competition, via
income and status. What Martha Lampland has
identiied in the case of Soviet Hungary applied
equally to Russia: notwithstanding the ‘pageantry
of enforced collectivity’ (mass rallies and so on),
the Stalinist era saw an ‘intensive individuation of
persons,’ the goal of which was to create ‘a mass
of individuated workers unfettered by the drag of
an antiquated collectivity.’42
34 | revolutionary socialism in the 21st century
Reinventing empire
‘Stalin’s revolution,’ we’ve argued, centred on
the conversion of the soviet party-state, spurred
by geopolitical competition, into an agent of
proletarianisation and capital accumulation.
The party-state could project political power
throughout society with such determination
and resolution precisely because it was itself
undergoing a process of ‘economisation.’
The fusion of state and economy implied a
particularly direct geopolitical transmission
of the law of value, and enabled the central
state bureaucracy, in command of all channels
of international competition, to prioritise the
military sector. Stalin’s celebrated ‘catch up or
go under’ speech encapsulates the overriding
strategic goal: ‘We are 50 or 100 years behind
the advanced countries. We must catch up this
distance in ten years. Either we do it or we go
under.’ That imperative – of geoeconomic and
geopolitical competition – underpinned the
programmes of breakneck industrialisation and
forced collectivisation, as well as the extreme
repression that these called for.
In short, the same historical transformation
that ‘married the state and capital,’ in Mike
Haynes’ description, also ‘completed the
subordination of the Soviet economy to the world
economy.’43 That ‘marriage-and-subordination’
was so successfully accomplished that within a
matter of years the Soviet Union had punched its
way to the top. By the 1940s the Red Army was
proving a match for the Wehrmacht: its T34 and
KV tanks outnumbered and outperformed their
German rivals, enabling Russia to conquer most
of Eastern Europe and to reign for half a century
as the planet’s second power, with nuclear
weapons, a permanent seat on the UN Security
Council, allies across four continents, and legions
of imitators. And not only was this an imperialist
state, it also rescued the pre-Soviet imperial
form. That is to say, in an age of declining
empires (Ottoman, Habsburg Austro-Hungary,
Wilhelmine Germany, and, in the mid-twentieth
century, the Japanese and West European
empires), the Soviet Union under Stalin
succeeded in replicating, if in formally national
guise, the tsarist model (Russia dominating a
non-Russian periphery), at the very moment
that, on the world stage, the imperial polity was
experiencing its inal, convulsive demise.
Modernising counter-revolution
The Stalinist project, as it crystallised in late
1920s Russia, is best seen as a ‘modernising
counter-revolution.’ In that it crushed the social
and cultural gains of 1917, it was counterrevolutionary. Civil liberties, dissent, and
intellectual freedoms were stamped out, workers’
organisations were subordinated to the partystate, oppositionists were exiled or murdered. Pace
Mayer, this was in many respects a conservative
regime. A hybrid national-imperial state was
created. The reforms that had made the early
Soviet Union ‘the world’s first Affirmative Action
Empire,’44 were dialled back. The radical social
agenda of 1917-24 was overturned. The ‘fierce,
libertarian commitment to individual freedom
and “the withering away” of the family’ that had
characterised official gender politics in the early
period of revolution gave way to ‘a policy based
on a repressive strengthening of the family unit.’45
Abortion was outlawed, and the Zhenotdel was
shut down, signalling the end of the proletarian
women’s movement.
This ‘deep cultural and political regression’ was
accompanied by an ‘abundance of terror, magic
and rituals,’ Lewin observes, exempliied in the
Stalin cult, which took of in 1928-29.46 Marxism,
as taught in Soviet institutions, was redesigned as
a conservative philosophy, with society conceived
as an organism based on the family unit, the
nation, and a strong paternalistic state, with the
division between leaders and led naturalised, with
national, corporate and class harmony assumed,
and with deviant groups identiied as foreign
bodies in the social tissue, to be quarantined or
eradicated.47 Great Russian chauvinism received
a new lease of life, and anti-semitism too. The
new rulers and the newly-elevated middle classes
chucked out the experimental and modernist
aesthetic in favour of conservative staples; they
surrounded themselves with ‘chintz curtains and
polka-dotted tea cups, thick pile carpets, red-plush
hangings and monumental architecture.’ Stalin’s
police state ruled not only through murder, cruelty
and paranoia but also through kitsch.48
For all the conservatism of the Stalinist
counter-revolution, however, it was not
cut from White cloth. The White counterrevolution was constituted by an alliance of
liberal-capitalist states (Britain, the US, France,
Czechoslovakia, etc) with the ultra-conservative
Russian nobility. The Whites aspired not only to
crush the revolution but to return to the ancien
regime – to tsarism. This was conservativism in
an unqualiied and adamant sense: a countermovement opposed to almost all liberal and all
socialist values, in particular social equality and
internationalism. Stalin’s counter-revolution
was diferent. Its social base was not the ‘ancient
order’ of private landowners but an emergent
Both Kautsky
and Lenin
advocated ‘world
revolution,’ and
one didn’t have
to be drunk and
sentimental to
see its potential
class of public functionaries. Its organising
instrument was the communist party. Yet its
principal antagonist, the movements, policies
and ideas of October 1917, had of course been
concentrated in that same party. To become an
agent of counter-revolution it had to be reengineered, and purged of bearers of the earlier
traditions. Of the members of the Bolshevik
Central Committee in 1917, by 1940 most had
been murdered, only Stalin remained in position.
The pivotal moment was the irst Five-Year
Plan (1928). For Italian Marxist Amadeo Bordiga,
1928 was the year that saw the counterrevolution
triumph.49 For Clif, the Five-Year Plan was
the ‘turning point.’ The bureaucracy, able to
control the means of production for its own
ends, ‘sought the rapid creation of the proletariat
and accumulation of capital, in other words,
as quickly as possible to realize the historical
mission of the bourgeoisie.’50 This required
an embrace of science and technology, of
mechanisation, rationalisation and urbanisation,
of social and occupational mobility, and a
veneration of industry and labour (including
the incorporation of women into the industrial
workforce, and the socialised childcare on which
that depended). All of these, at the level of ideas,
could be adapted, with a degree of imagination
and violence, from the Bolshevik templates of
1917 – typically, formal similarities masked a
reversal of substance.
Under ‘Red’ despotism, then, the Soviet Union
was able to slot into the groove of global capitalist
restructuring in the mid-twentieth century,
characterised by the systematic application
of science to production, large-scale industry,
Taylorism, national monopolies and dirigiste
economic management, in a manner that could
hardly have been achieved under a landlorddominated White despotism. If the growth of
the metallurgical industries, or of GDP, is one’s
yardstick, then ‘Stalin’s revolution’ was indeed a
historic achievement, Soviet degeneration began
under Brezhnev, and Communist China today
(or Modi’s India, choose your poison) currently
occupies the vanguard of history.
In closing, let me return to this year’s
commemoration. The October Revolution was
a ‘historical event,’ in William Sewell’s sense
of a ‘ramiied sequence of occurrences that is
recognized as notable by contemporaries’ and
results in social-structural transformation.51 But
while unanimity exists on its commencement,
battle continues regarding not only its meaning
and value, but its fate, and even its end-date – we’d
propose: circa nineteen twenty-eight. ■
rs21.org.uk | 35
(Endnotes)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Arno Mayer (2002) The Furies: Violence
and Terror in the French and Russian
Revolutions, Princeton University
Press, p.493. For this book tip, and
his stimulating thoughts on counterrevolution, thanks are due to Jamie
Allinson. This paper has benefited,
too, from Mike Haynes’ detailed
comments and a stylistic hint from Tithi
Bhattacharya.
Jamie Allinson (2016) ’Why is there
no counterrevolutionary theory?’
Unpublished manuscript.
Lenin (1919) ‘Report Of The Central
Committee,’ www.marxists.org/archive/
lenin/works/1919/rcp8th/02.htm
Mike Haynes (2002) Russia: Class &
Power, 1917-2000, Bookmarks, p.48.
Lenin (1919) ‘Report Of The Central
Committee,’ www.marxists.org/archive/
lenin/works/1919/rcp8th/02.htm
Karl Kautsky Terrorism and Communism,
www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1919/
terrcomm/ch08b.htm
Lenin, quoted in Neil Davidson (2015)
‘Is Social Revolution Still Possible in
the Twenty-First Century?,’ Journal
of Contemporary Central and Eastern
Europe, 23:2-3, p.123.
Lenin, quoted in Neil Davidson (2015),
p.123.
Arno Mayer (2002) The Furies: Violence
and Terror in the French and Russian
Revolutions, Princeton University Press,
p.4.
Arno Mayer (2002), p.11.
Alec Nove (1992) An Economic History of
the USSR, 1917-1991, Harmondsworth,
p.62.
Mike Haynes (2002) Russia: Class &
Power, 1917-2000, Bookmarks, p.51.
Neil Davidson (2015) ‘Is Social Revolution
Still Possible in the Twenty-First
Century?,’ Journal of Contemporary
Central and Eastern Europe, 23:2-3,
p.121.
Wendy Goldman (1993) Women, the State
and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and
Social Life, 1917–1936, Cambridge UP,
p.59.
Haynes, quoted in Neil Davidson (2015)
‘Is Social Revolution Still Possible in
the Twenty-First Century?,’ Journal
of Contemporary Central and Eastern
Europe, 23:2-3, p.121.
Arno Mayer (2002), p.67.
Victor Serge (1992) Year One of the
Russian Revolution, Bookmarks.
Arno Mayer (2002) The Furies: Violence
and Terror in the French and Russian
Revolutions, Princeton University Press,
p.392.
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
36 | revolutionary socialism in the 21st century
NLR Editors (1969) ‘Introduction to
Tukhachevsky, New Left Review I/55,
May-June.
Murphy, quoted in Neil Davidson (2015)
‘Is Social Revolution Still Possible in
the Twenty-First Century?,’ Journal
of Contemporary Central and Eastern
Europe, 23:2-3, p.121.
Michael Reiman (1987) The Birth of
Stalinism, Tauris, p.13.
Arno Mayer (1971) Dynamics of
Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870-1956:
An Analytic Framework, Torchbook, p.73.
Cliff, quoted in John Marot (2012) The
October Revolution in Prospect and
Retrospect, Brill, p.92.
Reiman, op cit.; Marot, op cit.; Murphy, op
cit.
In non-pinyin transliteration: Chiang Kaishek.
Karl Polanyi (2003 [1927]) ‘Die neue
Weltlage,’ in Michele Cangiani and Claus
Thomasberger, eds., Chronik der groβen
Transformation, Band 2, Metropolis, p.64.
Sheila Fitzpatrick (1984) The Russian
Revolution 1917-1932, Oxford, p.110.
Stalin, quoted in Tony Cliff (1991) Trotsky,
Volume III, Fighting the Rising Stalinist
Bureaucracy, Bookmarks, p.228.
Reiman, 1987.
Murphy, quoted in Neil Davidson (2015)
‘Is Social Revolution Still Possible in
the Twenty-First Century?,’ Journal
of Contemporary Central and Eastern
Europe, 23:2-3, p.121.
Moshe Lewin (1985) The Making of the
Soviet System, Methuen, p.144.
Alec Nove, p.207; Peter Rutland (1985)
The Myth of the Plan: Lessons of Soviet
Planning Experience, Hutchinson, p.75.
Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff (2002)
Class Theory and History: Capitalism and
Communism in the USSR, Routledge,
p.266.
Patrick Flaherty (1992) ‘Cycles and Crises
in Statist Economies,’ Review of Radical
Political Economics, Vol. 24, No. 3, p.125.
Peter Binns (1975) ‘The Theory
of State Capitalism,’ www.marxists.
org/history/etol/writers/binns/1975/01/
statecap.htm
Leon Trotsky (1972) The Revolution
Betrayed, Pathfinder, p.43.
Marx (1863) Theories of Surplus Value,
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch08.
htm
A similar point was made by Walras,
albeit with the neoclassical economist’s
attention to relations of circulation rather
than production, in his argument that
the nationalisation of land is a means
of spurring the mobility of agricultural
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
labour and hence of hastening the
attainment of the ‘general equilibrium of
exchange.’ In Robert Heilbroner (1996)
Teachings From the Worldly Philosophy,
New York., p.219.
Tony Cliff, (1974 [1948]) State Capitalism
in Russia, Pluto, p.165.
Wolfgang Streeck (1997) ‘Beneficial
Constraints: On the Economic Limits
of Rational Voluntarism,’ in Rogers
Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer,
eds, Contemporary Capitalism;
The Embeddedness of Institutions,
Cambridge, pp.208–9.
Lewin, 1985, p.32.
Martha Lampland (2016) The Value of
Labor: The Science of Commodification
in Hungary, 1920-1956, University of
Chicago Press
Mike Haynes (1985) Nikolai Bukharin
and the Transition from Capitalism to
Socialism, Croom Helm, p.110.
Terry Martin (2001) The Affirmative
Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism
in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, Cornell
University Press.
Wendy Goldman (1993) Women, the State
and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and
Social Life, 1917–1936, Cambridge UP,
p.337.
Moshe Lewin (1997) ‘Stalin in the Mirror
of the Other,’ in Lewin and Ian Kershaw,
eds, Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships
in Comparison, Cambridge University
Press, pp.107-117.
Nigel Harris (1971) Beliefs in Society: The
problem of ideology, Penguin.
Vera Dunham, paraphrased by Larry
Ray (1996) Social Theory and the Crisis
of State Socialism, Edward Elgar, p.54.
China Mieville (2017) October: The story of
the Russian Revolution, Verso, p.315.
Amadeo Bordiga (1953) ‘Lessons of the
Counterrevolutions,’ https://libcom.
org/library/lessons-counterrevolutionsamadeo-bordiga
Cliff, quoted in Neil Davidson (2015)
‘Is Social Revolution Still Possible in
the Twenty-First Century?,’ Journal
of Contemporary Central and Eastern
Europe, 23:2-3, p.126. Cf. Kevin Murphy
(2005) Revolution and Counterrevolution:
Class struggle in a Moscow metal factory,
Berghahn.
William Sewell (1996) ‘Historical Events
as Transformations of Structures:
Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,’
Theory and Society, 25, p.844.