The Thinking Reed

Indeed, Lenin, Trotsky and other ‘wise heads’ in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party5 had no intention of introducing socialism forthwith. Their general policy was aimed not at establishing socialism but at defending — by revolutionary-socialist methods — industry, transport, civilization and the Russian state itself in conditions of collapse and anarchy. The prospect of socialism was bound up with the victory of the proletariat in Germany. ‘The job of construction’, wrote Lenin, ‘is completely dependent on how soon the revolution will succeed in the more important European countries. Only after it succeeds there can we seriously get down to the job of construction.’6 This way of presenting the problem did not seem at all utopian at that time. Although Rosa Luxemburg, observing from Germany the struggle in Petrograd, was highly critical of Lenin and Trotsky she saw ‘proof of their farsightedness’ precisely in the fact that ‘the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution.’7

It was clear that the class foundation for socialism did not exist in Russia; the working class was too small and industry undeveloped. This gave N. Sukhanov grounds for saying:

the Bolshevik regime is doomed to perish not through armed force but through the inner defect which has corroded it from the first moments of the Bolsheviks’ ‘state’ activity. This defect is the absence of objective conditions for their rule.8

In an agrarian country a regime which tried to base itself on the working-class minority, ignoring the will of the other groups in the population, was bound to degenerate and give place to something different. However, Sukhanov could not know in advance the form that this process would take. Another Russian Marxist, B. Avilov, declared that a socialist revolution was possible only on the basis of a highly developed industrial capitalism, ‘and not as an amateurish creation based upon small-scale economy and ruined capitalist industry’, and he considered a transition to socialism unrealizable in practice.9 In his paper Novaya Zhizn', which in 1917-18 became the mouthpiece of the left-wing intelligentsia, Gorky described — perhaps more realistically than did many socialists in the West — the attempt to accelerate the world revolution by using the Russian Revolution to urge it on, as ‘a cruel experiment which is doomed to failure beforehand’,10 and warned that the working class itself would suffer as a result: ‘And if the working class is crushed and destroyed, that means the best forces and hopes of the country will be destroyed.’11

Lenin and his comrades were aware that there was no majority in favour of socialism in Russia, that they lacked sufficient support in this peasant country, that the conditions for socialism had not matured. They realized, too, that ‘the only stable power is the one that has the backing of the majority of the population.’12 Nevertheless, they regarded it as their duty to take power. ‘It does not occur to any of them,’ Lenin wrote in reply to Sukhanov and his comrades,

to ask: but what about a people that found itself in a revolutionary situation such as that created by the first imperialist war? Might it not, influenced by the hopelessness of its situation, fling itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilisation that were somewhat unusual? [emphasis added]13

And later, on the same page of his notes (written not long before his death) on Our Revolution, he asks again:

What if the complete hopelessness of the situation by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West-European countries? [emphasis added]14