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No Less Than Mystic
A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left
By John Medhurst Watkins Media Ltd
Copyright © 2017 John Medhurst
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-910924-48-8
CHAPTER 1
The Spark
In 1883, several members of the "Land and Freedom" populist revolutionary party who had recently become Marxists–the first to do so within the Russian revolutionary movement–reassessed the best route to the overthrow of autocracy in their homeland. Led by George Plekhanov, "the father of Russian Marxism", they formed a small group called the Emancipation of Labour. This group rejected Russian "exceptionalism" (the theory that Russia, because of the unique communal nature of Russian village life, might skip the full development of capitalism and instead advance straight to socialism) and stated bluntly that a revolution in Russia could only take place if it was based on a fully developed industrial proletariat. The Emancipation of Labour group sought to lead the infant Russian working class from Switzerland. They had hardly any connection to the Russian labour movement and limited resources. Many of the group's books and pamphlets were regarded by Russian state censors as so esoteric and boring that they allowed them to be officially published. Not for the first or last time the Russian authorities made a historic and suicidal mistake.
The Emancipation of Labour group was the seed of the Bolshevik Party, but it was itself the inheritor of a unique Russian revolutionary tradition. Given the nature of Russian society, this had of necessity been a tradition of revolution from above, and one could argue that the Bolshevik Party did not, ultimately, depart from this. The Romanov dynasty was established in 1613 as a result of a shifting of dynastic fortunes, with Mikhail Romanov offered the throne by the Zemsky Sobor, a feudal Estates parliament, after a "Time of Troubles" which saw the fall of the Rurik dynasty. Although the Zemsky Sobor was summoned annually for a while under Mikhail I, it was soon abandoned.
Since then, all attempts at radical reform, let alone revolution, had been instigated from the top, from the modernising programme of Peter the Great to the liberal aristocratic "Decembrists" of 1812. Only the unruly mass rebellions of Stenka Razin in 1671-72 and Yemelyan Pugachev in 1773-74 had deviated from that pattern, being movements of discontented peasants led by renegade Cossacks. Significantly, these rebellions, the only truly mass-based "revolutionary" initiatives before 1905, had fought for ethnic and peasant autonomy rather than political liberalisation.
The gravitational centre of Russian politics from 1613 to 1917 was Tsarist absolutism. The growing governmental and police apparatus (including the infamous Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery, a political police that was the precursor of the Okhrana, Cheka and KGB) existed to serve the Tsar alone and not, as in Western Europe, a growing professional middle class. This top-heavy bureaucracy was directed by an aristocratic, landowning elite. Underneath it rested a massive, mostly illiterate peasantry that up until 1861 were literally serfs. There was no breeding ground for a Russian variant of John Stuart Mill's philosophical radicalism or Gladstone's political and economic liberalism.
The most likely candidate for the role of Mill and/ or Gladstone in 19th-century Russia, Alexander Herzen, set the template for the Russian political exile and for the "intelligentsia", a nebulous social category that had no real equivalent in Western Europe. The intelligentsia did not correspond to either the aristocracy (which with some notable exceptions supported the Tsar) or the bourgeoisie (which was miniscule before the second half of the century), but was a particular coalescence of critical intellectuals whose signature was its "impulse to criticise and oppose the fundamental iniquities and occasional barbarities of Tsarism". Although its members came invariably from the bourgeois professions–writers, artists, doctors, teachers and lawyers–by no means all (or even a majority) of these professions were part of the intelligentsia. Yet those within its ambit would instinctively know where they stood in relation to each other and to the power structures of autocracy. Priests, Cossacks and policemen despised them, and were despised back.
The role of the intelligentsia as the unofficial opposition within Tsarist Russia arose from the failure of the 1812 Decembrist rebellion. As a young man, Herzen, who revered the memory of the Decembrist martyrs, wrote a few mild condemnations of police corruption. He was arrested, harassed and eventually driven to exile, where he had little option but to put his literary ability to use in advocating a complete overthrow of Russia's autocratic state. From this grew his establishment of the Free Russian Press and the beginning of decades of work to guide and instruct the opposition to Tsarism, mainly through the influential The Bell, a political periodical that for a while after the accession of Alexander II in 1855 had a hearing even within Russia itself. The Bell's combination of ethical socialism and practical reform ensured it was loathed by autocrats and reactionaries, but it was also attacked by a growing revolutionary subculture that saw progress only in violent revolution based on the peasantry. Herzen, a romantic liberal at heart, could not tolerate the violent terrorist actions of the new revolutionary groups Young Russia and Land and Freedom, lauded by his great contemporary Nikolai Chernyshevsky.
Chernyshevsky's writing was designed to stir emotions and incite action rather than analyse issues and suggest solutions. He came to prominence as the author of impassioned attacks on the Tsarist state in the pages of The Contemporary, a vibrant literary magazine established by the socialist writerVissarion Belinsky and the radical poet Nikolai Nekrasov. Although nominally within the same revolutionary current as Herzen and a great admirer of his earlier work, Chernyshevsky and his comrades at The Contemporary took their political cues from French utopian socialism. From this they forged "Narodism" and its political vehicle the Land and Freedom party, the first and most authentic expression of Russian radical populism.
The course of Russian agrarian populism has much to teach today's left about developing durable campaigns with indigenous and rural populations. In an era of globalised neoliberalism it is often native indigenous peoples that are at the sharp end of economic exploitation. Amongst examples of mobilised indigenous resistance are the Yaruro Indians of Venezuela, whose culture Hugo Chavez incorporated into the project of Bolivarian Socialism, and the Quechua and Amarya peoples of the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America, whose political militancy resulted in the creation of the Movement Towards Socialism (mts) and the election of the first indigenous President of Bolivia, the radical ecosocialist and former cocalero trade union activist Evo Morales.
In deprived towns like El Alto, the Aymara utilised their social and kinship networks to create a Federation of Neighborhood Committees, a mixture of an informal local government and a political campaign network. In 2003 the Committees were the focus of an uprising that ousted the corrupt President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. This built on earlier struggles in Cochabamba where unionised water irrigators and cocoa growers, aided by urban-based anarchist activists, mobilised against the multi-national company Bechtel. As soon as it won the contract for Bolivia's privatised water utilities, Bechtel hiked charges and prosecuted those who collected rainwater in buckets. Having turned off the rain, it threatened the same to the water supply of those who could not pay the increased water bills. In 2000 protestors called a general strike in Cochabamba and demanded that the privatisation be reversed. The protests spread to the capital La Paz and were joined by teachers and students. Faced with an incipient revolution the government reversed water privatisation. This successful campaign led to the creation of the Movement Towards Socialism and the election of Morales as President in 2005.
These and other manifestations of indigenous resistance arise from a philosophy of " Comunalidad". Broadly, this revolves around four pillars of native life: communal governance via a popular assembly; communal territory, or land held in common; communal celebration, or feast days; and communal work for the benefit of the whole. These models of self-governing communities fundamentally challenge the Western model of economic growth advanced by the imf and World Bank in favour of models of local sustainability that do not mindlessly exploit the environment or its resources with no regard for social consequences. In Noam Chomsky's summary, "Many don't see any particular point in having their culture and lifestyle destroyed so that people can sit in traffic jams in New York".
One of the most useful effects of Comunalidad has been the erosion on the left of an unhelpful divide between urban and rural, working class and peasantry, and a recognition that the marginalised and exploited poor of the global south — and those of the supposedly more affluent bric countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China–do not easily fit into 19th- and 20th-century Marxist categories. And that the packaging of them into these, with the explicit assertion that one category (the urban proletariat) was the only one that really mattered, has prevented the emergence of global anti-capitalist movements with common aims.
19th-century Russian revolutionaries had none of this experience to draw upon. In 1874, the first stage of the Populist insurgency took the form of a "Pilgrimage to the People", in which young Narodniks from privileged backgrounds went to live and work amongst the villages of the Russian countryside. Their aim was to relate to the peasants as fellow human beings, working with them, learning from them, and thus generate a truly mass-based revolutionary culture. Some tried to actually become peasants, whilst some sought to put their educational, technical and medical skills at the service of peasant communities. With a few exceptions the crusade did not go well. Most of the young idealists were met with suspicion and even hostility. After several summers of repeated but pointless endeavor the vast majority of them were disenchanted with the peasants and their lack of revolutionary fervor.
From this fiasco grew the more hardened freedom fighters of the Zemlya I Volya (the People's Will), a splinter group from Land and Freedom. They did not spend their energies trying to teach illiterate peasants the theory of evolution. They targeted the most prominent and powerful men in society for assassination. For a few years in the late 1870s and early 1880s the idealistic terrorists of the People's Will engaged in a series of actions that defied the mighty Third Section and reached the pinnacle of aristocratic power around the Tsar. In 1881 they finally succeeded in murdering the "Tsar Liberator" Alexander II.
The assassination led to the complete opposite of its stated aims. On the eve of his murder, Alexander II approved reforms which might have opened a road to the kind of pluralist, democratic state the Narodniks wished to see. The newly appointed liberal Minister of the Interior, Loris-Melikov, had proposed a limited constitution to be implemented through a Supreme Commission consisting of appointed experts and representatives elected by rural and city Councils. The Commission would put legislative proposals to the appointed Council of State, which would have a new tier of fifteen delegates directly elected by the public. It was a toe in the water of representative democracy.
However, the assassination of his father led Alexander III to follow the lead of ultra-conservatives who opposed these reforms. They wished to strengthen the landed nobility and weaken aristocratic liberals such as Prince Georgy Lvov, who sought to increase the powers of the Zemstvos–elected rural local councils introduced by Alexander II in 1864. Although their franchise was weighted to give landowners and rural magnates greater power than the peasants and the merchants of the towns, in the context of 19th-century Russia the Zemstvos were a great step forward.
The hostility of Tsarist governments to the Zemstvos arose from the growing number of semi-urban professionals, such as doctors, teachers and agronomists, who worked within them. These were known as the "Third Element", to distinguish them from the First and Second Elements (the governors and the elected Deputies) who were drawn from long-established landowning families. The Third Element, however, had worked their way up from peasant or lower-class backgrounds and their politics were brusquely democratic. In response to their growing influence, the Ministry of the Interior introduced reforms to Zemstvo procedures in 1890 that denied Jews or landowning peasants the right to be elected to the assemblies, and gave direct control of Zemstvo policies and personnel to provincial governors who answered only to the Ministry. The possibility of local democracy promised by the Zemstvos slammed shut.
At the turn of the century, approximately 80% of the citizens of the Russian Empire were classified as peasants, and the majority of these were illiterate (although by 1914 a growing number of rural primary schools were bringing literacy to the villages). The urban proletariat itself was still half peasant–many were seasonal workers whose main attachment was to their families back in the village. Even so, between 1865 and 1917 the urban population of the Russian Empire grew from 7 million to 28 million. By 1914 half of St Petersburg's population of 2.2 million people had arrived there in the previous twenty years. In the capital, and even more so in socially conservative Moscow, these workers initially kept to the patterns of life and cultural traditions of the peasantry. So did the vast army of migrant labour which in autumn and winter headed to the cities to find factory, transport or construction work, returning to their villages in the spring.
The Russian bourgeoisie, in turn, lacked the collective ethos of the politically assertive middle class of Victorian England. This only started to appear after the great famine of 1891. After a terrible crop failure, a famine began in the Volga region which spread rapidly to the Urals and the Black Sea. Had the government directed grain to the affected regions it might have been curtailed but it did nothing, not even banning export of grain, and by 1892 half a million peasants had starved to death. This led to fierce public criticism of the government's slow and incompetent reaction. After first denying the existence of a famine and censoring newspapers who reported it, the government finally authorised the creation of voluntary bodies to coordinate famine relief. The result was the emergence in Russia's political life of an organised civil society, disgusted and angry with the official organs of its own state.
Meanwhile, the Russian government set out on a grand industrial experiment, the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway between 1892 and 1903, that would define the efforts of the progressive bourgeoisie to drag the country out of its feudal past. As conceived by Count Witte, the most intelligent and far-sighted Minister to serve under Alexander III and Nicholas II, the Trans-Siberian Railway was one element of a conscious industrial strategy by the Ministry of Finance. The overriding necessity for economic growth was a stable financial climate. To this end the ruble was linked to gold in 1897. At the same time taxation was raised to ensure the state had enough reserves to fund and support projects such as railway modernisation.
Foreign investors were granted generous tax concessions and subsequent investment from Britain, France and Germany provided the impetus to new industries like oil, chemicals, metallurgy, rubber and electrical engineering. Between 1865 and 1890, the number of enterprises employing more than a hundred workers had already grown from 706,000 to 1,432,000. Aided by a growing railway network, Russian industry took off in the 1890s. In the decades before the First World War the production of coal in Poland and the Donetz Basin, iron and steel in Ukraine, and oil in Azerbaijan increased ten-fold. But this did not mean a national capitalism. By 1913, out of a total 5.25 billion rubles invested in Russian industry, about a third was foreign capital.
Many of these new industries were on the semi-colonial fringes of the Empire. The Russian Empire had a social and administrative core–Greater Russia–but it also encompassed the "national territories" of Poland, Finland, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Bessarabia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and numerous Muslim provinces in Central Asia. By the reign of Nicholas II non-Russians formed more than half the population of the Russian Empire. In response the Russian state imposed a policy of "Russification", the persecution of non-Orthodox religions and the banning of non-Russian native languages from schools, literature, newspapers, street signs and other public displays. Russification invariably provoked movements for political and cultural independence within the territories it dominated. It made little difference if these were "political" or not. Faced with an inflexible Russian state, they all assumed revolutionary characteristics.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from No Less Than Mystic by John Medhurst. Copyright © 2017 John Medhurst. Excerpted by permission of Watkins Media Ltd.
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