1917: Communism - a New World Religion

In October 1917 the pent-up fury, misery and grievances of generations of Russians erupted in a bloody revolution. The revolution began innocently enough on 8 March 1917 with a peaceful women's march through Petrograd (St Petersburg) against bread rationing. The women were joined by other dissidents in an antigovernment demonstration. On 10 March there were strikes in many parts of the city. Attempts to break the strikes by military force failed. On 11 March troops of the Petrograd garrison mutinied and joined the uprising. On 12 March, in a vast explosion of feeling, the people of Petrograd took to the streets. Unplanned, unforeseen and uncoordinated, the revolution was underway. This time, unlike the earlier uprising of 1905, which had followed Russia's defeat by Japan, nothing could stem it. Panic seized the city. In an attempt to restore order, the Duma1 formed a Provisional Government. On 15 March Tsar Nicholas, who was hurrying back to the capital from the front, was forced to abdicate.2 The 300-year-old Romanov dynasty died.

A month later, in April 1917, the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, who for most of the past 17 years had lived in exile in Switzerland, reached Petrograd. The German High Command, hoping that Lenin would undermine the Russian Provisional Government and thus take Russia out of the war, had done everything (including providing a sealed train) to get Lenin back to Russia. It is thought that secret German funds were made available to the Bolsheviks.3 Hastening to join Lenin were two other Bolsheviks: the Ukrainian, Leon Trotsky,4 from New York, and Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, alias Stalin5 (1879-1953), from Siberia. Although Stalin alone was of working-class origin, the Bolsheviks intended to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat along Marxist lines. Contrary to the Provisional Government's

Ill-conceived aim to continue the war against the Germans, the Bolsheviks called for peace, land and bread. Appeals to nationalism were conspicuously absent. In spite of their efforts, the revolutionaries did not succeed in unseating the Provisional Government. By July, Lenin had been driven into exile again; Trotsky was jailed on charges of treason; other leading figures had gone to earth; only Stalin remained free.6

For a moment it looked as if the head of the Provisional Government, Aleksandr Kerensky (1881-1970) a socialist, had succeeded in closing the floodgates of revolution. But then came the purported attempt by the ex-Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, General Kornilov, to overthrow the Provisional Government from the right. To help fight Kornilov, Kerensky turned to the Bolsheviks for help. Trotsky and others were released from jail. Lenin, still in hiding in Finland, agreed to support Kerensky.

In recruiting the Bolsheviks, Kerensky replaced Kornilov's challenge from the right with a much more dangerous threat from the left. By September the Bolsheviks had won control of the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets (councils of delegates from the land, factories and barracks were springing up elsewhere). In October Lenin decided that the time was ripe to overthrow the Provisional Government, which would, he hoped, ignite a revolution throughout Europe. According to Marxist doctrine, unless the revolution was taken up elsewhere, the Bolsheviks themselves would fail. In the night of 23-24 October at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party attended by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and nine others, the decision to seize power was made.

On the eve of 25 October 1917,7 almost without bloodshed, the Bolsheviks seized the centres of government, transport, communications and energy in Petrograd. The Provisional Government, having neither the strength nor the will to defend itself (two of its members had been beaten to death), was forcibly disbanded; the Winter Palace, its last stronghold, was overrun. Kerensky fled the country never to return. The Duma died. So far, Lenin had been proved right: all that was necessary in a country of age-old submissiveness was to seize power, and society would submit.

Overnight, the Soviet of the People's Commissars, with Lenin as Chairman, Trotsky as Foreign Minister and Stalin as Commissar for National Minorities, became Russia's only legitimate central government. All others, including the freely elected Constituent Assembly,8 which met on 5 January 1918, and which was forcibly dispersed by Lenin's militia never to reconvene, were treated as counter-revolutionary. Russia's first real experiment with democracy had been destroyed by Lenin at its birth. Without the interim experience of bourgeois democracy, Russia had passed from feudalism to socialism; the absolute autocracy of the tsar was exchanged for the absolute autocracy of the People's Commissars. Marxism was declared the official doctrine of the state. In place of Orthodox Christianity, atheistic communism was declared Russia's new secular religion.

Marxist theory - not the sovereignty of the people - legitimized Bolshevik rule. The doctrine that made the will of the proletariat supreme also made coercion of the rest of society inevitable. Under Lenin, and later Stalin, terror was substituted for popular support. For those it crushed in the name of the new ideology, the revolution offered neither hope nor consolation.

Earlier, on 15 December 1917, Russia had been forced to sign a humiliating armistice with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. Lenin's insistence on having peace at all costs proved in vain. No sooner had hostilities against the Germans ceased, than the Russians fell upon each other. In what came to be known as the Great Civil War (1918-21), Russia proceeded to tear itself to pieces. Untold numbers (from 13 to 20 million) perished. The numerically inferior Bolshevik army (Reds) was besieged by several anti-Bolshevik armies (Whites) made up of a wide spectrum of political opponents including socialists, anarchists, monarchists, nationalists, conservatives, Balts, Ukrainians, Georgians and Poles. Finland, and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - assisted by the occupying Germans - declared their independence (and kept it until 1940). The Ukraine established an anti-Bolshevik regime, as did Byelorussia, parts of the Urals, the Don, western Siberia and the Caucasus.

Feeling that Petrograd was too exposed to invasion by the Germans or the Allies, in 1918 the Bolshevik leaders fled inland to Moscow. Although the main threat to the Soviet regime first came from the east, by early 1919 the Bolshevik army was under attack from the north, east, south and west. In July 1918, while counter-revolutionary armies controlled most of the country from the Volga River to the Pacific Ocean, Lenin ordered the assassination of the Romanov imperial family. On 30 August 1918, an attempt on his own life unleashed a new reign of terror during which many of those who opposed the communist regime were either systematically killed or banished by Lenin's secret police, the Cheka.9 The idea that Lenin was unaware of slaughter on this scale is a Soviet myth. In eliminating opponents, Lenin could be as ruthless and as paranoid as his successor Stalin.

In a vain attempt to restore a Russian front against Germany and strangle communism at its birth Allied armies invaded Russia in 1918. Led by Britain, and including French, Italian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak, American and Japanese contingents, they entered Russia10 via Archangel in the north and Vladivostok in the east. In mid-1919 a White army coming from the Ukraine reached the outskirts of Moscow. to the ruthlessness, revolutionary fervour and single-mindedness of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, and to the fact that the anti-communist forces in Russia (which at one time controlled three-quarters of the country) could never unite or gain widespread peasant support, by 1919 communism had triumphed.

In 1919 the Third International (Comintern) was formed in Moscow with its aim of world revolution. Russia had become the centre for all socialist and anti-imperialist forces. The Russian revolutionaries did not divide themselves into western or eastern camps, or thought of themselves as Slavophiles,11 but remained united as socialists who wanted to serve mankind. By 1920 most of the invading armies had been driven from Russian soil. The last great task of the Red Army was to drive a Polish army, which in May 1920 had invaded the Ukraine as far as Kiev, back to Warsaw.

By 1921, by which time the communists had reasserted Russian rule in Georgia, Russian Armenia and Azerbaijan, but not in the Baltic states, the civil war had brought the nation close to collapse. Production from industry and the land had fallen precipitously. Industrial production was about one-fifth of the 1913 figure. Drought and famine added to Russia's hardship. As an emergency measure in March 1921, in his New Economic Policies (NEP), Lenin abandoned his war communism in favour of a modified version of the economic system existing in Russia before the war. In agriculture and small businesses the market economy was reintroduced alongside the communist command economy. 'We have conjured up the devil of the market,' Trotsky warned. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin replaced him. With the civil war ended, the economic conditions in Russia improved.

With the triumph of communism in Russia a new experiment in living began. Supporting the experiment was the Marxist doctrine which had first appeared in the Communist Manifesto, written by two German emigres in England, Karl Marx12 (1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95), and published in German in 1848. (The English translation did not appear until 1888.) Marx, the son of Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity, was a freelance writer, a born agitator and a political revolutionary. Banished from Germany because of his political activities, driven from France, often beset by poverty, he eventually found asylum in London. Engels was the son of a well-to-do Manchester textile manufacturer. It was in London that Marx wrote his most important work, Das Kapital (1867).13 The book was translated into Russian in 1872. The Russian censor felt the work was so dull that he allowed it to appear. Neither the Communist Manifesto nor Das Kapital attracted much attention. Das Kapital remained almost unknown to the European labour movement until Marx's writings became the holy writ of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Adopted by Lenin as the new Russian ideology, the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital became two of the most influential pieces of writing in world history. They not only recounted history; they made history. Their central message is clear: the whole of history (since the dissolution of primitive tribal societies) has been a history of class struggle, a contest between exploiters and exploited, between oppressor and oppressed. To that extent, economic injustice is the sole cause of human conflict. To Marx, drawing upon the German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), the process of history is fundamentally a dialectic (a conflict of opposites producing progress). Marx argued that history is the history of the economic process, all is derived from the material conditions of life. From the conflict between the feudal lord and serf, to the conflict between capital and labour, the eternal antagonism between classes develops its changing forms. Its last and most virulent form was precipitated by the capitalistically inspired Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Because the capitalist system polarizes the enmity between capital and labour, as no other conflict has ever done, revolution - a violent climax - is inevitable. In the Marxist dialectic there is no place for compassion, accident or chance.

Marx provided a most convoluted explanation why this must be so. In a capitalist system, he held, the labourer must sell his labour in such a way that the difference between the value which the labourer creates and the bare cost of his own subsistence inevitably accrues to the capitalist in the form of surplus-value. It is a process in which, inexorably, the rich must get richer and the poor poorer. Despite the productive power of the bourgeoisie,14 for which Marx had great praise, the condition of the poor must worsen until they are forced to revolt. With the revolt, the injustices which had caused the conflict, would be abolished. 'Workers of the world,' Marx cried, 'you have nothing to lose but your chains.' The right to rebel, nay, the necessity to rebel, was established.

Marx had thought that with the decisive dictatorship of the proletariat, private property and the resultant class conflict would end. The dialectic process - the conflict of opposites - would be no more. The state (hitherto the political implement of the bourgeoisie) would wither away. Darwin's 'law of organic nature' and Marx's 'economic law of motion', as well as the work in psychology of Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), strengthened the deterministic trend of western society.

Where Marx differed from earlier communalists or communists, such as Plato, St Luke, St Thomas More and countless Benedictine monks, is that he sought a solution through violence. He also differed from them in his belief that the ultimate reality is economic - that God was dead. In promoting the notion of determinism, in arguing that social conditions rather than conscience determine existence, Marx stood the western tradition (which emphasizes personal and collective responsibility) on its head. At least it is to his credit that like the writers of the Enlightenment he was concerned with the whole of mankind. In an age of growing nationalism, he was one of the first to appreciate that the spread of European capitalism and European systems of production were creating problems of a world-wide nature. 'Capitalism', he is said to have concluded, 'knows no flag.' Marx would have been fascinated with the manner in which international capitalism operates today. Now as then, capitalism has never been happy with national barriers that stand in the way of profit. According to Marx, the social problems of nineteenth-century Europe would eventually spread to the world; under capitalism, social injustice would not lessen but grow.

Marx was not alone in protesting the social conditions of the time. Many others, including the German Catholic social pioneer Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler (1811-77) and the French sociologist

Gustave le Bon (1841-1931), were also concerned with the growing social evils accompanying societies in transition from a rural to an industrial way of life. They too were appalled at the degrading working and living conditions that the Industrial Revolution had created in England, France and Germany. Like Marx, they deplored the regimentation of workers, the growing industrial unrest and the alarming injustice and instability associated with a capitalist economy. It did not require Marxist analysis for them to be able to recognize capitalist exploitation. While upholding the right to private property, they opposed capitalist wage slavery as much as they had opposed African slavery. The two papal encyclicals on social conditions, 'De Rerum Novarum' (1891) and 'Quadragesimo Anno' (1931), show that the Vatican was well aware of the momentous consequences of the economic and social changes taking place.15 Where the Christian message differed from Marx was in its attempt to reduce class conflict through charity and understanding, rather than enlarge it through violence. The Church rejected Marxist atheism outright. The hope of the world lay not in class hatred - in godless malice - but in Christian love. In particular it rejected the Marxist tragic view of life which must end in blood and fury. 'There is only one way', Marx wrote, 'to shorten and ease the convulsions of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new - revolutionary terror.'

While the study of Soviet communism must begin with Marx, the conclusions reached will depend as much on one's faith (or lack of it) in the Marxist system as on one's intellect. The true Marxist does not recognize bourgeois objectivity. He will defend the Marxist economic law of motion, which to him is gospel truth, with the same faith and fervour as that shown by a religious fundamentalist waging war for the literal interpretation of the Bible. The inevitability of Marx's perfect society must be believed, it cannot be proved.

Indeed, there is about Marxism the same dogmatic orthodoxy, the same apocalyptic vision, found in the Old Testament. One cannot help being struck by the fact that, for Marx, the eventual and inevitable destruction of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat was simply another way of restoring the chosen people (in this case the proletariat) in an earthly rather than a heavenly kingdom. A myth, of course, but no less powerful for that. In his dogmatism, in his condemnation of evil (capitalism), in his belief that right will prevail, in his grandeur of conception, in his vision and his messianism, in the blazing passages which from time to time light up his often turgid prose, in the white-heat of his moral judgments (he denies moral motives but is passionately moral) - in all these things Marx is like an old Testament prophet whose voice thunders across the world.16 He realized, as the early Christians did before him, that we must not only have something to live for, but something to die for as well. He was a prophet among prophets, yet unlike Jesus or Mohammed, he was a prophet without a god.

Marxism is ethical judgment rather than economic history. 'Das Kapital', said the economic historian John Maynard Keynes (18831946), 'is an obsolete economics textbook which I know to be not only erroneous, but without interest or application for the modern world.' Economics alone - as Marx would have it - are not the cause of human conflict; human beings are. The conflict between economic classes is not the only conflict. Ethnic, religious, linguistic and national differences are also the source of discord. Indeed, Max Weber17 maintained that an economy is derived from a society's underlying ideology and ethics, and not the other way round. Even if Marxism had been deduced from history, which it was not, by the nature of things it could not provide the positive prescription (the ability to be clever for the next time) which Marx expected of it. Irrational, emotional nationalism has often been a far more powerful force in history than rationalistic, scientific socialism.

Moreover, as with all visionaries, some of the things Marx predicted never materialized. His prediction that the revolution would not come in Russia, but in the advanced countries in the West (particularly Germany and Britain which had undergone the Industrial Revolution) proved false. But then, he had a low opinion of the Russians: 'I do not trust any Russian,' he wrote to Engels. 'As soon as a Russian worms his way in, all hell breaks loose.' He was equally wrong in believing that the state would 'wither away' as an instrument of oppression; the Soviet state, in fact, became more oppressive than that of the tsars. He erred in stressing the primacy of economics at all times, in all situations. It was false for him to assume that change would come about because of class conflict. History is not merely the story of class conflict as he believed it to be (if it is, he certainly does not prove it). The First World War did not arise because of poor and

Rich nations, or for that matter because of poor and rich classes. Change is always the work of a small resolute minority - regardless of class.

Marx was equally wrong in putting his faith in international workers' solidarity. The workers of the world did not unite; the capitalists did. Nationalism has proved a much more powerful force than he reckoned. To think of the world of tomorrow as a single community shows a lack of human psychology. It is unrealistic and perhaps unappealing to aspire towards a world state with common values and common institutions. Finally, Marx was as wrong in ascribing selfishness and greed to the middle class (the bourgeoisie) rather than to incalculable human nature, as he was in placing so much stress upon the power of the intellect and so little upon the power of passion and feeling. Marx not only misread history, he misread human nature as well. Marxism is too exact, too certain to be true of life. Private property, profit and individualism are not particularly bourgeois qualities, but the outcome of human instincts.

Regardless of whether one is a supporter or a critic of Marxist doctrine, the world would have been a very different place had Marx never lived. Without him there would still have been a labour movement in Europe - perhaps a revolution in Russia - but it would have been a different labour movement, and a different revolution. Had Lenin never heard of Marx he would have lived and worked and perhaps made history, but it would not have been the history it came to be under the influence of Marxist doctrine. Lenin did for Marx what St Paul did for Christ. Without Lenin and the Russian revolution, Marx might have remained unknown.

However heretical it may be to say so, the Great Socialist Revolution of 1917, far from its being the outcome of the Marxist doctrine of historical and social determinism, was a straightforward coup. It depended more on a disastrous war, the desperation of the common people, mutiny at the front, the excesses of capitalism, the social and political decay of the Romanov dynasty, an enfeebled aristocracy, self-seeking politicians and a corrupt officialdom, than it did on doctrinal exactitude.

The strength of Marxism (and the communism to which it gave birth), does not rest on doctrinal exactitude. Marx's influence does not depend on his theory being proved true or false. Communism grew because Marx provided a weapon (in the Communist

Manifesto) with which the poor of the world (particularly the poor of the non-western world) could fight the rich - a psychological weapon which no other political system had devised. For the underdeveloped, agrarian countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Marxism was a revolutionary call to arms - a philosophy of action designed to change the world, not to interpret it.

After 1917 Marxism gave way to Leninism, Leninism to Stalinism, Stalinism to the policies of his successors. Doctrinally, the changes were slight. Lenin converted Marx's doctrine of dialectical, historical materialism into a practical instrument of revolution. In order to seize power it was permissible to transcend the economic situation - to leap across the historical stage. 'A Marxist', Lenin said, 'must take account of real life... and not hang on to the tails of the theories of yesterday.' It was the Party's job to lead the proletariat in the revolutionary struggle. Lenin also developed the theory that western imperialism would prove to be the final stage of capitalism. Stalin also made changes in communist doctrine concerning the paramount importance of class war. 'The right of self-determination' - he was referring to the states that had broken away from Russia during the civil war -'cannot and must not be an obstacle to the working class in the exercise of its dictatorship.'

By 1928, contrary to early party doctrine, Stalin had settled for communism within Russia. His decision to change the course of the revolution - to 'betray the revolution' - was challenged by those who supported the Marxist-Leninist ideal of ecumenical world-wide communism. The dispute led to Trotsky's exile in 1927, his founding of the Fourth International in 1938, and his assassination in 1940 in Mexico City.

By 1938 Stalin had succeeded in removing - by death or exile - most of those who stood in his way. The record is staggering.18 He is accused of having murdered more of his own countrymen (14 million) than the Germans killed in their invasion of Russia. In the 1920s he ruthlessly collectivized agriculture. In the early 1930s he committed genocide against the people of the Ukraine, whom he distrusted. On the political front, few of the leaders of the October Revolution escaped him. The more senior they were, the more they had helped him to get where he was, the more certain their fall. His execution of political opponents culminated in the great purges of party leaders in Moscow in the late 1930s.

Prior to hostilities with Germany, he was especially harsh in ridding himself of army officers whom he suspected of disloyalty. He executed three of the Red Army's five field marshals, 14 of its 16 army commanders, all the navy's admirals, and more than 20,000 other officers.

By the eve of the Second World War, Stalin's power was supreme throughout the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). By then Russia's agricultural and industrial base was far stronger than when he had assumed power. So were the country's defences. Contrary to popular opinion, he was well aware of the nature of Germany's growing military might, and of Hitler's intention to colonize Russia. To buy time and avoid war, he signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler in August 1939. Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940) had done likewise at Munich a year earlier. In anticipation of a German attack, in November 1939 he made a pre-emptive strike against Finland, for which the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations. Russia had joined the League in 1934, a year after Germany and Japan had left it.

Whether Stalin signed his pact with the Germans in 1939 in the hope that it would enable Russia to stand aside while the capitalist world destroyed itself is a matter of conjecture. Certainly, Russia made no move to help the West in its moment of peril. On the contrary, the Russians did everything they could to placate the Germans. They dismissed envoys friendly to the western powers from Moscow; they recognized a pro-German government in Iraq; and they continued to supply the German armed forces until on 22 June 1941 they were attacked themselves. A few days earlier, the Soviet Tass News Agency had denied the obvious absurdity of a German attack. Stalin disregarded Churchill's eleventh hour warning of the coming German assault on Russia because he thought that Churchill was plotting to involve Russia in a western war. Germany's build-up of troops in the east was provocation and scaremongering. He was proved wrong in believing that time was on his side.