We are publishing here a response to the analysis drafted by Emma Goldman (1869-1940) in the first years after the October 1917 revolution. After her expulsion from the United States in January 1920 she spent two years in Russia, then published three books:[1] “I consider then, and still consider, that the Russian problem is entirely too complex to speak lightly of it”, she wrote in the introduction to her first book. We are responding to Emma Goldman because she was a central figure of the revolutionary workers’ movement in the United States at the time of the First World War. Because of her determination to defend a clearly internationalist position against the war she was nicknamed “Emma the Red - America's Most Dangerous Woman” by the American ruling class. But there are two other reasons to examine Goldman's positions in more detail. On the one hand, her important influence in the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist milieu up until today – “the Rosa Luxemburg of the anarchists”; and on the other because her early analysis of the Russian Revolution and the problems it faced shows great honesty and responsibility. Today, although we do not share at all some of her positions, Goldman's efforts are a valuable contribution to the understanding of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution.

 

Goldman, an anarchist of Russian origin, was inspired by the theories of the influential anarchist Peter Kropotkin, but defended an anarcho-syndicalist position in her activity. She clearly rejected marxism as a political and theoretical orientation. What distinguished Goldman from Kropotkin was her determination, along with Malatesta, Berkman, and others, in February 1915, to take a firm stand against the “Manifesto of the Sixteen”, whereby Kropotkin and other anarchists debased themselves by their shameful approval of the First World War. Goldman defended a clear internationalist position condemning any participation, support or tolerance of the war, thereby providing an internationalist point of reference in the United States.

Our aim in this article is to examine Goldman’s political assumptions regarding the Russian Revolution, her experiences and conclusions. To anticipate: Goldman's observations, underpinned by a deep proletarian instinct, and her significant advances, must in our view be distinguished from some of her central political conclusions. In order to allow sufficient insight into Goldman's position, it is necessary to include long quotations. Since it is not possible to address all aspects of her analysis, we are forced to make a selection and so urge a direct reading of her writings on the Russian Revolution and her autobiography.

Goldman was constantly preoccupied with two questions: the fusion of the Bolsheviks with the state apparatus and its consequences; and her own self-laceration over the moment that would allow or even force her to expose her criticism of the Bolsheviks – which she eventually did after months of painful hesitation. We cannot address here Goldman’s other political concerns, like the “red terror”, the Cheka, Brest-Litovsk, Makhno’s movement in the Ukraine, the Razvyorstka (the relentless requisition of food from the peasants, which therefore includes the relationship between the working class and the peasantry), the catastrophic situation of children[2] or her position regarding the workers' councils. However, her experiences and analyses of the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921 are important because they signified Goldman's break with the Bolsheviks.

"The truth about the Bolsheviki"

The outbreak of the October Revolution filled her with great enthusiasm: “From November, 1917, until February, 1918, while out on bail for my attitude against the war, I toured America in defence of the Bolsheviki. I published a pamphlet in elucidation of the Russian Revolution and in justification of the Bolsheviki. I defended them as embodying in practice the spirit of the revolution, in spite of their theoretic Marxism.”[3]

In 1918, in the anarchist magazine Mother Earth, she published an article entitled “The Truth about the Bolsheviki”:

“The Russian Revolution can mean nothing to him unless it sets the land free and joins to the dethroned Tsar his partner, the dethroned land-owner, the capitalist. That explains the historic background of the Bolsheviki, their social and economic justification. They are powerful only because they represent the people. The moment they cease to do that, they will go, as the Provisional Government and Kerensky had to go. For never will the Russian people be content, or Bolshevism cease, until the land and the means of life become the heritage of the children of Russia. They have for the first time in centuries determined that they shall be heard, and that their voices shall reach the heart of, not of the governing classes – they know these have no heart – but the heats of the peoples of the world, including the people of the United States. Therein lies the deep import and significance of the Russian Revolution as symbolised by the Bolsheviki (…) The Bolsheviki have come to challenge the world. It can nevermore rest in its old sordid indolence. It must accept the challenge. It has already accepted it in Germany, in Austria and Romania, in France and Italy, aye, even in America. Like sudden sunlight Bolshevism is spreading over the entire world, illuminating the great vision and warming it into being - the new life of human brotherhood and social well-being.”[4]

So Goldman's view of the Bolsheviks in 1918 was anything but negative. On the contrary, her defence of the Russian Revolution and of the Bolsheviks was a highly responsible reaction to the American bourgeoisie's campaign of lies and its role in the brutal, internationally coordinated campaign against revolutionary Russia. Her radical criticism after two years in Russia was always motivated by the intention of defending the October Revolution against its external enemies, as well as against internal degeneration; this was the main concern of her activities and writings.

Enthusiasm and disappointment

Two brief quotes impressively illustrate the change in Goldman's assessment of the evolution of the Russian situation. She describes her arrival in Petrograd in January 1920 in exuberant terms: “Soviet Russia! Sacred ground, magic people! You have come to symbolise humanity’s hope, you alone are destined to redeem mankind. I have come to serve you, beloved Matushka. Take me to your bosom, let me pour myself into you, mingle my blood with yours, find my place in your heroic struggle, and give to the uttermost to your needs!”[5]

But then, two years later, as a final description of her stay in Russia, we find the following: “In the train, December 1, 1921! My dreams crushed, my faith broken, my heart like a stone. Matushka Rossiya [Mother Russia] bleeding from a thousand wounds, her soil strewn with the dead. I clutch the bar at the frozen window-pane and grit my teeth to suppress my sobs.”[6]

“It was just one year and eleven months since I had set foot in what I believed to be the promised land. My heart was heavy with the tragedy of Russia. One thought stood out in bold relief: I must raise my voice against the crimes committed in the name of the Revolution. I would be heard regardless of friend or foe.”[7]

What happened between her arrival in 1920 and her departure two years later? And was her disappointment exclusively the result of a naive expectation overtaken by reality? We will return to this second question at the end of the article.

The encirclement of the Russian Revolution

Goldman rightly attaches great importance to the question of the encirclement of the Russian Revolution, which, according to her, was a real cause of the difficulties of the first years of soviet rule. But, as we will show later, she speaks little of its political isolation as due to the fact that the world proletariat had not been able to take power in other countries, which was the essential question, and which did not allow the important errors of Bolshevik power to be corrected.

In her book The Crushing of the Russian Revolution written in 1922, Goldman stresses from the outset how the encirclement of Russia stifled the revolution and that the situation of a world war created the worst conditions for the revolution.

“The march on Russia began. The interventionists murdered millions of Russians, the blockade starved and froze women and children by the hundred thousands. And Russia turned into a vast wilderness of agony and despair. The Russian Revolution was crushed and the Bolshevik regime immeasurably strengthened. That is the net result of the four years conspiracy of the imperialists against Russia.”[8]

The internationally coordinated war against Russia resulted in a brutal strangulation. It would be very erroneous not to take this tragic situation into account in the analysis of the degeneration and failure of the Russian Revolution. Goldman constantly evokes it in her personal experiences; for example she describes the terrible situation resulting from the ruthless starvation of Russia and its consequences for millions of children in 1920-21, a situation further aggravated by the scheming of many state bureaucrats to enrich themselves. On this issue, despite all her harsh criticisms, Goldman defended the Bolsheviks' efforts to improve the situation of the children:

“It is true that the Bolsheviki have attempted their utmost in regard to the child and education. It is also true that if they have failed to minister to the needs of the children of Russia, the fault is much more that of the enemies of the Russian Revolution than theirs. Intervention and the blockade have fallen heaviest upon the frail shoulders of innocent children and the sick. But even under more favourable conditions the bureaucratic Frankenstein monster of the Bolshevik state could not but frustrate the best intentions and paralyse the supreme effort made by the communists on behalf of the child and education (...) More and more I came to see that the Bolsheviki were trying to do all they could for the child, but that their efforts were being defeated by the parasitic bureaucracy their state had created”[9]

So, concretely, she describes what were called the “Dead Souls”[10]: names of children who had already died and were registered on the lists of those entitled to food rations by the lower bureaucracy, who then diverted these fraudulent rations for their own consumption or to sell for themselves; all this to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of starving children, the most vulnerable victims of the asphyxiation caused by the international blockade!

Goldman cannot be reproached for having analysed the decline of the Russian Revolution without taking into account the decisive and deadly situation of its isolation in Russia. She also attempted, as is shown by the quotes from her texts, to distinguish between the Bolsheviks and the state bureaucracy, to which we will return later.

Her weakness lies rather in the absence of a clear analysis of the fact that the war and the blockade against Russia were only possible because the working class, specifically in western Europe, was progressively defeated, particularly in Germany. The working class in western Europe, and also in the United States, was confronted with a much more experienced bourgeoisie and a more sophisticated state apparatus than in Russia. But it is not only the defeat of the international revolutionary wave that produced the desperate situation of Russia; it is also the backwardness of the international working class compared to Russia.

In Germany, the attempted revolution only began more than a year after October 1917, which left a long time free for the strategy of Russia's isolation, as shown in the months following the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. The seizure of power by the proletariat in the central states of western Europe was the only way to break the strangling of the Russian Revolution and put a stop to armed intervention. It is only possible to understand the roots of the defeat of the Russian Revolution by examining precisely the international balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; this aspect appears only occasionally in the writings of Goldman, barely developed, and which leaves the impression that the fate of the revolution was sealed mainly on Russian soil.

The isolation and strangulation of Russia after October 1917 in no way explains every aspect of its internal degeneration, which was ultimately the most traumatic experience for the working class, nor should it serve as justification for this internal degeneration. With regard to the problem of the Bolsheviks’ catastrophic errors, in particular their policy of identification with the state apparatus, it is crucial to see that this could only have been corrected under the influence of a victorious revolutionary working class in other countries, which was tragically not to be the case.[11]

On closer inspection, there is a contradiction in Goldman's central theses about the relationship between the international situation and the causes of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. On the one hand she writes: “All my observations and studies over two years gave me the clarity that the Russian people, if not continuously threatened from without, would have soon realised the danger from within and would have known how to meet that danger (…)”.On the other hand, however: “If there was ever a doubt as to what constitutes the greatest danger to a revolution - outside attacks or the paralysed interest of the people within - the Russian experience should dispel that doubt completely. The counter-revolutionists, backed by Allied money, men and munitions, failed utterly (...)”[12]

As we have already said, Russia’s isolation must in no way serve as an excuse for its errors. But Goldman draws a curious conclusion in which she contradicts all her “observations and studies” quoted above: the salvation of the revolution depended essentially on the forces and politics of the working class in Russia, the international situation becoming for her a much more secondary factor. Goldman develops a logic here that reminds us of Voline, without however going so far;[13] she presents the defeat of the Allied counter-revolutionary forces as proof that the counter-revolution had been a perfectly surmountable obstacle for the revolution, which is shockingly simplistic when you consider the huge damage caused by the this bloody confrontation,[14] including the deaths of tens of thousands of determined revolutionaries, which Goldman herself had well described. Those conscious revolutionaries who had voluntarily put themselves in the front line in their thousands and fallen in battle could probably have opposed in some way the internal counter-revolution.

These two factors; isolation and strangulation on the one hand, and the errors of the Bolsheviks on the other, were mutually reinforcing. The main difference between them was that the war against Russia was obvious to all, while the internal degeneration began in a much more hidden way, eventually becoming the trauma of the century for the international working class. Goldman's conclusions are, in essence, a common way of taking into account both the question of the external counter-revolution and that of the internal counter-revolutionary degeneration; a problem with which all the revolutionaries of the 1920s were confronted.

War does not create the best conditions for revolution

One of Goldman's notable contributions to understanding the defeat of the Russian Revolution – even though we do not share her conclusion – is her reflection on the conditions for a revolution during and after a war: “Perhaps the Russian Revolution was doomed at its birth. Coming as it did upon the heels of four years of war, which had drained Russia of her best manhood, sapped their blood, and devastated her land, the revolution may not have had the strength to withstand the mad onslaught of the rest of the world.”[15]

Here she rightly points out the direct result of the war and responds to the false and schematic ideas whereby the crisis automatically aggravates the war and war automatically strengthens the consciousness of the working class, thus leading to the break out of revolution. Goldman emphasises that fundamentally the revolution suffered from exhaustion in Russia resulting from the war itself. But the idea that the fate of the revolution could somehow be “doomed at its birth” shows a fatalistic approach.

An important potential factor must be considered that was not realised. The First World War ended in November 1918, one year after October 1917. As we have already pointed out, the only hope for October was for the revolution to break as quickly as possible in other countries and, above all, for a rapid revolutionary surge in western Europe. This was a historically possible perspective, and the working class had no choice but to engage the struggle in that direction.

The war ended with victorious and defeated countries. If the defeat shook the defeated governments and could, therefore, facilitate their weakening and the revolutionary dynamic, this was not the case for the victorious governments which, on the contrary, were strengthened. In the victorious states where the working class had been painfully dragged to slaughter by the bourgeoisie for four years, it was the aspiration for peace and stability that prevailed and significantly undermined the possibilities for a revolutionary assault by the proletariat in France, Britain, Belgium, Holland and Italy. It was not only the balance of power between the imperialist states that was different after the war, but also the state of mind of the masses who were thus divided according to whether they were in a victorious or vanquished country. Goldman raises the problem of the war which creates poor conditions for the revolution, but she reduces it mainly to the case of Russia itself

What possibilities for change after a revolution?

What possibilities for change existed in Russia at a time of total encirclement and famine? In the anarchist camp, there were very different opinions on this subject but what was significant was the great expectation of immediate improvements in living conditions, especially in terms of economic measures and the fundamental reorganisation of production. So what were Goldman's expectations at that time, just two years after October 1917? Was she expecting on her arrival in Russia in January 1920 to find a society that already met human needs? At her first meeting with Maxim Gorky, on a train to Moscow, she told him: “I also hope you will believe me when I say that, though an anarchist, I had not been naive enough to think that anarchism could rise overnight, as it were, from the debris of old Russia.”[16]

She describes conversations with Alexander Berkman, her closest political and personal companion for decades, as follows: “He dismissed the charges [against the Bolsheviki] as the irresponsible prattle of ineffective and disgruntled men. The Petrograd anarchists were like so many in our ranks in America who used to do least and criticise most, he said. Perhaps they had been naive enough to expect anarchism to emerge overnight from the ruins of autocracy, from the war and blunders of the Provisional Government.”[17] Goldman did not judge the Russian Revolution by a naive measure based exclusively on the immediate improvement of living conditions and the economy.[18]

On the question of the immediate possibilities of a social upheaval in the interest of the working class and other oppressed layers, like the millions of peasants in Russia, Goldman puts her point of view again in a framework that does not ignore the international situation. Nor did she hesitate to defend the efforts of the Bolsheviks (as we have seen with regard to the situation of children which demanded immediate and drastic action) and to severely criticise the positions of other anarchists. Goldman did not submit to the law of silence and the rejection of any mutual criticism within the anarchist camp. We do not know what arguments she used against impatient anarchists who expected the immediate upheaval of society. But these controversies between anarchists show that there was no homogeneous anarchism in Russia during the revolution.

The question of possible immediate measures to rapidly relieve suffering was of crucial importance for the working class and for the peasantry as a whole, and was not only a theme of the most impatient parties of anarchism, among whom this question often uniquely decided their attitude towards the Bolsheviks. For the working class, revolution is not an abstract historical logic. After decades of brutal exploitation, and having endured the sufferings of the butchery of 1914-1918, the great hopes of a sunrise on the horizon of life were more than understandable and fitting. They constituted an important driving force of the revolutionary conviction and combativity that enabled October. Given the immediate reality of the strangulation of revolutionary Russia, of hunger and the war against the white armies, the expected sun had not risen on the horizon. Hunger and demoralisation weighed heavily on the working class. In this almost desperate situation, Goldman adopted a responsible attitude of patience and perseverance which, with the progressive defeat of the world revolutionary wave after the war and for all revolutionaries could only be maintained with enormous political will and clarity.

The Bolsheviks and the state apparatus: the shipwreck of marxism?

In her analysis of the dynamic of the state apparatus in full growth after October, Goldman was totally faithful to her own idea according to which the Russian problem was much too complicated to be explained away by a few superficial phrases. She gave a great deal of attention to this question and distinguished herself by precise observations and reflections. Nevertheless, we absolutely do not share a good number of these conclusions! Her writings contain contradictions on the question of the relations between the Bolsheviks and the developing state apparatus.

In 1922 she was not yet ready to make a profound analysis; this was only possible at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s when the Italian Communist Left took up the task. There was no doubt that certain anarchist principles on the question of the state strongly dominated her analyses and the conclusions that flowed from it.

First of all it's indispensable to broadly present Goldman’s vision on the issue:

“The first seven months of my stay in Russia had almost crushed me. I had come with so much enthusiasm, with a passionate desire to throw myself into the work, into the holy defence of the revolution. What I found completely overwhelmed me. I was unable to do anything. The chariot wheel of the Socialist State rolled over me paralysing my energy. The wretchedness and distress of the people, the callous disregard of their needs, the persecutions and the repression tore at my mind and heart and made life unbearable. Was it the revolution which had turned idealists into wild beasts? If so the Bolsheviks were mere pawns in the hands of the inevitable. Or was it the cold, impersonal nature of the state which by foul means had harnessed the revolution to its heart and was now whipping it into channels indispensable to the state? I could not answer these questions. Not in July 1920, at any rate.”[19]

“Yet neither in the conservative not even in the revolutionary sense do the trade unions in Russia represent the need of the workers. What they really are is the coerced and militarised adjunct of the Bolshevik state. They are “‘the school of communism’ as Lenin insisted in his thesis on the functions of the trade unions. But they are not even that. A school presupposes the free expression and initiative of the pupils, whereas the trade unions in Russia are military barracks for the mobilised labour army, forced into membership by the whip of the state driver.”[20]

“I am certain that neither Lunacharsky nor Gorky knew about it [the imprisonment of children by the Cheka]. But therein lies the curse of the vicious circle; it makes it impossible for those at the head to know what the host of their subordinates are doing (...) Does Lunacharsky know of such cases? Do the leading communists know? Some no doubt do. But they are too busy with ‘important state affairs’. And they have become callous to all such ‘trifles’. Then, too, they themselves, are caught in the vicious circle, in the machinery of Bolshevik officialdom. They know that adherence to the party covers a multitude of sins.” [21]

And concerning relations between the state apparatus and its bureaucrats:

“In the village where he [Kropotkin] lived in little Dimitrov, there were more Bolshevik officials than ever existed there during the reign of the Romanov's. All those people were living off the masses. They were parasites on the social body, and Dimitrov was only a small example of what was going on throughout Russia. It was not the fault of any particular individual, rather it was the state that they had created, which discredits every revolutionary ideal, stifles all initiative and sets a premium on incompetence and waste.”[22].

Goldman's observations on the concrete reality of the state very precisely describe how it developed more and more and began inexorably to consume everything. It's to her great credit that she gives a detailed perception of the “daily life” of the bureaucratic apparatus and its profound contradiction with the interests of the working class and other exploited classes. In 1922, her descriptions were highly pertinent faced with all the glorifications circulating in the international workers' movement on the situation in Russia and faced with a blindness towards the problems it confronted. There's no doubt that Goldman’s efforts to warn against the dangers of the state as it was developing in Russia were precious at this time, even if her analysis was based on what she saw and only provisional.

But what conclusions did she draw from it?

“It would be an error to assume that the failure of the revolution was due entirely to the character of the Bolsheviki. Fundamentally it was the result of the principles and methods of Bolshevism. It was the authoritarian spirit and principles of the state which stifled the libertarian and liberating aspirations. Were any other political party in control of the government in Russia the result would have been essentially the same. It is not so much the Bolsheviks who killed the Russian Revolution as the Bolshevik idea. It was marxism, however modified; in short, fanatical governmentalism (...) I have further shown that it is not only Bolshevism that failed, but Marxism itself. That is to say, the STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolise all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevails. (...) The main cause of the defeat of the Russian Revolution lies much deeper. It is to be found in the whole Socialist conception of revolution itself.”[23]

“And while the workers and peasants of Russia were laying down their lives so heroically, this inner enemy rose to ever greater power. Slowly but surely the Bolsheviki were building up a centralised state, which destroyed the Soviets and crushed the revolution, a state that can now easily compare, in regard to bureaucracy and despotism, with any of the great powers of the world.”[24]

“The marxist policies of the Bolsheviki, the tactics first extolled as indispensable to the life of the revolution only to be discarded as harmful after they had wrought misery, distrust and antagonism, were the factors that slowly undermined the faith of the people in the revolution.”[25]

Goldman’s thesis is the following: marxism, because of the policy of the Bolsheviks towards the state following the revolution, has turned out to be useless. Contrary to the viscerally anti-organisation sections of anarchism, Goldman never defended the position that the problems of the Bolsheviks fundamentally resulted from the organisational strength of their political party. She rejected rather their concrete policy. And she had good reason to on two counts when she said that the state is by nature "institutional and static". Manifestly, she refers here to the experience concerning the bourgeois state and its nature before the revolution. Goldman’s position is not exclusively emotional, as some anarchists constantly reproached her for at the time, but is based on historic experience. The state in feudalism and capitalism is by its nature completely static and, above all, unconditionally defends the interests and power of the dominant class; it is openly reactionary. Secondly, we share the point of view according to which the problem is not that of individual personalities in the ranks of the Bolsheviks, but the enormous confusion within the party concerning the state after the revolution, which in fact reflected the immaturity of the workers' movement at that time on the question of the state.

Even after a world proletarian revolution (which was never the case at the time of the Russian Revolution, being largely limited to that country), the "semi-state" – necessary but limited to minimal functions and subordinate to the workers' councils – remains in its essence always conservative and static, and in no way constitutes a driving force for the establishment of a communist society; nor is it an organ of the working class. The Italian Communist Left described it thus: “... the state, even with the adjective ‘proletarian’ attached to it, remains an organ of coercion, and in sharp and permanent opposition to the realisation of the communist programme. In this sense it is an expression of the capitalist danger throughout the development of the transition period ....”[26]

Consequently, it is absolutely false to speak of a "proletarian state" as an organ of the revolution, as the Trotskyists claim with regard to Russia, but also the Bordigist current concerning the theoretical analysis of the transition period. Such an idea is completely incapable of grasping the danger of identifying the workers' councils and the political party with the state apparatus – as tragically happened in Russia.

To avoid any false debate, a remark is necessary: Goldman often speaks of a "centralised state" built by the Bolsheviks. But this was not because she was a partisan of the federalist concept, like Rudolf Rocker who advocated the principle of an extremely federalist class struggle. [27]  The term "centralist" used by Goldman was rather a characterisation of the impenetrable, unresponsive, corrupt and hierarchical state apparatus in Russia, which sabotaged the implementation of even the smallest measures for the working class and other oppressed layers of society, like the peasantry.

But does the test of revolution signify the collapse of marxism as Goldman claims? And was anarchism, on the contrary, confirmed by the Russian Revolution? If one wants to understand the events around the Russian Revolution, standing as an arbiter of two historical political currents on the "field of the revolution" to give a winner and a loser is hardly useful.

We cannot deal with all aspects of the tragic degeneration of the Bolshevik party and the Russian Revolution in this response, but we have already dealt with these in numerous ICC texts. But we must respond to Goldman on the alleged shipwreck of marxism as a whole. The Bolshevik party degenerated, which was clearly expressed by its fusion with the state apparatus; that’s a fact – but marxism has not failed.

With her method, how does Goldman explain the fact that faced with the question of war, it was precisely within the marxist workers' movement, and on the basis of its historical legacy, that the clearest, most determined internationalist positions emerged, such as those embodied in the Kienthal Conference of 1916? And all this led by a marxist organisation, the Bolsheviks, a spearhead against the reformism which was gaining ground faced with the question of war.

With her method, how does Goldman explain the fact, mentioned at the beginning of this article and correctly denounced by herself, that within anarchism and even around the central figure of anarchism at the time, Kropotkin, a tendency appeared which abandoned internationalist principles and openly proclaimed so in a manifesto – a deviation that gave rise to great uncertainty, tensions and resistance within the anarchist ranks? According to Goldman's own method anarchism hit the rocks here since internationalism had just been thrown overboard by its most influential representatives. As in the marxist workers' movement this produced a lively confrontation faced with the test of war and a determined part of anarchism, which also included Goldman, fought against any support for either of the two imperialist camps involved.

It would be absolutely false to say that anarchism as a whole became bankrupt in 1914. On the contrary, it's precisely because such a drastic decantation took place within the anarchist and marxist workers' movement that it was possible in the struggle against war and in October ‘17, revolutionary, internationalist anarchists fought side-by-side with revolutionary marxists. If the necessary positioning between war and the revolution indeed produced such a result, it was just as much among marxists as among anarchists, producing a determined and intransigent defence of internationalism and the interests of the working class.

And that's not all. With her approach and the thesis of the bankruptcy of marxism, how does Goldman explain the fact that the Bolsheviks, an organisation of the marxist tradition, were able in 1917, with the April Theses formulated by its most determined representatives, to bring clarity against the democratic confusions still existing in the Russian working class?

It's a fact that the majority of the Bolsheviks gradually moved away the spirit of the October revolution, turning their backs on it. By identifying with the state apparatus and taking repressive measures against those who criticised, they became locked into the absurd belief that they could save the revolution and thus became the incarnation of the counter-revolution from within. But it wasn't the totality of the Bolsheviks who embarked on this path, because there were different organised reactions within the party in the face of these signs of degeneration.

Goldman describes her great sympathy for and closeness to one of these oppositional groups within the party; the "Workers' Opposition" around Kollontai and Shliapnikov. Clearly, marxism was capable of producing a militant revolutionary opposition, which Goldman expressly welcomed. On the other hand, she (and more so still her political comrade Alexander Berkman) described the organised tendencies within anarchism in Russia, the so-called "soviet anarchists", who openly supported the policies of the Bolsheviks; and this even in 1920 when the terror of the Cheka[28] was already set up. She also honestly describes what followed: " Unfortunately, as was unavoidable under the circumstances, some evil spirits had found entry into the Anarchist ranks – debris washed ashore by the Revolutionary tide. (…) Power is corrupting and anarchists are no exception".[29] So, if we follow Goldman’s method, has anarchism in its entirety failed because of such facts? Such a conclusion would be wrong from our point of view. Her approach and conclusion does not take into account all the post-October 1917 debates within a so-called "bankrupt marxism".

The question of the state after the revolution wasn't resolved within the workers' movement of the time and this is equally valid for the anarchists. An essential reason was the absence of any concrete historical experience for what happened in Russia after 1917. Up to then the workers' movement had always started from the perspective of a rapidly extending revolution. The insurmountable isolation of the Russian Revolution and the obligation to defend its territory brutally and rapidly reinforced it suffocation and its degeneration; the state and the Bolshevik Party "fused" to become an active factor in this dynamic.

Even Goldman's political reference point, “Father Kropotkin” as his political entourage called him, was also unable to answer the questions of the role and function of the state after a revolution in his book The State: its Historic Role. The radical rejection of the state by the great majority of anarchists on the basis of an instinctive distrust, came from the experience of a brutal confrontation with the state under feudalism and the capitalist state apparatus; it rightly demanded the destruction of the bourgeois state by the proletarian revolution as was advocated by Lenin in his book The State and Revolution.

Even though this merit of the anarchist movement must be recognised, a false conception nevertheless prevailed in its ranks: the reorganisation of society, immediately after the revolution, by the workers' councils, the unions and cooperatives. Such a scenario hopelessly pushes the organs of the defence and political interests of the working class, the workers' councils, which constitute the dynamic element of the society, to fuse with the organism charged with the management of society (what we call a reduced and controlled transitional state.[30] If this happens, the workers' councils can only lose their autonomy in relation to the state (which would mean the working class losing its autonomy as a class), and themselves becoming a cog in the bureaucratic machine. Goldman also shares this position, even if only in an implicit and undeveloped form.

Let's return to the question of the so-called shipwreck of marxism. The majority of anarchists criticised the tragic developments in Russia. But anarchism wasn’t confirmed in its totality in the Russian Revolution, just as marxism did not fail as a whole. There were without any doubt two false ideas among the Bolsheviks on the subject of the relations between workers' councils, party and state. At the time of the Russian Revolution the idea of unity between party and state apparatus dominated, and of a party which, alongside the workers' councils, had to be involved in the exercise of power. The dominant conception was that a minority within the class, its party, because of the confidence placed in it, would be called to take power in the name of the working class. This point of view clearly expressed the immaturity that existed on the question of the state after the revolution.

Through their conceptions of the post-revolutionary state and their relationship with it, the Bolsheviks became caught in a destructive spiral which, in the situation of complete isolation of the revolution, saw a false idea turn into a tragedy. Although the Bolsheviks never openly rejected the principle of the seizure of power by the workers 'councils, one of the first signs of degeneration was the gradual denial of the powers of the workers' councils, a process in which the Bolsheviks played a decisive role.

It’s not fatalistic sarcasm but a historical fact to say it was the tragic experience of the Russian Revolution that clarified all these questions. Salvation could only come from the international extension of the revolution on the basis of the vitality of the soviets. This would also have denied any retrospective determinism according to which the fate of the Russian Revolution was already sealed at its birth. But wanting to save the revolution with "the strong arm of the state", as the Bolsheviks initially attempted, was a pure and simple impossibility.

Goldman draws a static conclusion from the reality of the growing domination of the state apparatus after October and of the process of degeneration. The weakness in her method is not to take into account the struggle in the marxist ranks against the dynamic of state domination: nor does it take into account the enormous difficulties that this situation generated among the anarchists, even if this figures in the detail of her observations. Added to this weakness is her idea that the Bolsheviks – as a party of marxism and for that very same reason – were doomed to failure from the very start because of their supreme goal, that of seizing power, just as all the detractors of the Bolshevik Party claimed. It seems that, according to Goldman, it is the elementary existence of marxist positions which decided the fate of the revolution. In her conclusion on the question of the state she also expressly denies the fact that it was a process of degeneration resulting from the world context rather than a question "settled" from the start. With her proclamation of "the failure of marxism" in the experience of the Russian revolution, she gives too much away too easily, finally leading to another thesis.

"The end justifies the means" and Kronstadt: a break with the Bolsheviks

One of Goldman's theses where she goes furthest in her criticism is:

“The Bolsheviks are the Jesuit order in the Marxist church. Not that they are insincere as men or that their intentions are evil. It is their Marxism that has determined her policies and methods. The very means they have employed have destroyed the realisation of their end. Communism, Socialism, equality, freedom – everything for which the Russian masses have endured so much martyrdom – have become discredited and besmirched by her tactics, by their Jesuit motto that the end justifies the means.” (…) “But Lenin is a shrewd and subtle Jesuit; he joined in the popular cry: ‘All power to the Soviets!’. When he and his follow-Jesuits were firmly in the saddle, the breaking up of the Soviets begun. Today they are like everything else in Russia – a shadow with the substances utterly crushed.” (…)  “To be sure, Lenin often repents. At every All-Russian Communist conclave he comes forth with his mea culpa. ‘I have sinned’. A young Communist once said to me: ‘It would not surprise me if Lenin should some day declare that the October Revolution was a mistake.’”[31]

Yes, the objectives of the Bolsheviks, communism, socialism, equality and freedom, which Goldman did not deny to be the true goals of the Bolsheviks, could not be realised. In other places in her writings on Russia, she describes how she was confronted with a question that was full of hope and asked many times by many Bolshevik leaders: "Will we soon see the revolution in Germany and the United States?" This too from Lenin in a meeting with Goldman. The Bolsheviks she spoke to were eager to receive a positive reply from her, she being closely in touch with the situation in the United States. It was clear from her descriptions that the Bolsheviks lived in constant fear of isolation and desperately awaited the least sign of revolutionary developments in other countries. This itself proves that in the ranks of the Bolshevik Party, which was anything but homogeneous, the hope of a world revolution had continued to live despite the increasingly clear degeneration. And so it was not just about a greed for power in Russia, as she runs the risk of claiming with the idea of the "Jesuitism" of the Bolsheviks.

 

Goldman's concerns revolved around the contradiction between the initial objectives of the Bolsheviks and their specific policies and methods. This led to a definitive break after the bloody repression of the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921 under the banner of saving the revolution, and where there was use of brutal violence within the working class, which was in stark contradiction with communist principles. Her experience with the Cheka also played a decisive role in her break with the Bolsheviks.

The method according to which the end justifies the means must be vehemently fought against by the working class. Goldman is honest in not to hiding her own hesitations about it. But her descriptions clearly refute the thesis that the Bolsheviks' thinking was that of the "Jesuits of Marxism", who would stop at nothing in the pursuit of their goals, and that here there would be a fundamental difference between the Bolsheviks and the anarchism.

How was this question posed among anarchists? She described her discussions with Berkman on the question of the legitimate means for defending the revolution:

"It was absurd to denounce the Bolsheviki for the drastic measures they were using, Sasha urged. How else were they to free Russia from the stranglehold of counter-revolution and sabotage? So far as he was concerned, he did not think any methods too harsh to deal with this. Revolutionary necessity justified all measures, however we might dislike them. As long as the Revolution was in jeopardy, those seeking to undermine it must pay the penalty. Single-hearted and clear-eyed as ever was my old pal. I agreed with him; still, the ugly reports of my comrades kept disturbing me."[32]

This debate with Berkman went on in the sharpest way:

“For hours he would argue against my ‘impatience’ and deficient judgement of far-reaching issues, my kid-glove approach to the Revolution. I had always depreciated the economic factor as the main cause of capitalist evils, he declared. Could I fail to see now that economic necessity was the very reason which was forcing the hand of the men at the Soviet helm? The continued danger from the outside, the natural indolence of the Russian worker and his failure to increase production, the peasants’ lack of the most necessary implements, and their resultant refusal to feed the cities had compelled the Bolsheviki to pass those desperate measures. Of course he regarded such methods as counter-revolutionary and bound to defeat their purpose. Still, it was preposterous to suspect men like Lenin or Trotsky of deliberate treachery to the Revolution. Why, they had dedicated their lives to that cause, they had suffered persecution, calumny, prison, and exile for their ideals! They could not go back on them to such an extent!”[33]

For the working class, the means used must not be in contradiction with its fundamental objectives.[34] However, we reject the assertion that marxism alone, and the Bolsheviks in particular, would be vulnerable to the penetration of the dominant class ideology by adopting means that conflict with the goal of communism. The discussions described by Goldman are characteristic of the fact that anarchism has always had enormous difficulties in this regard. An example of the use by many anarchists of means that contradict the goal is the attack on Lenin by Fanny Kaplan on August 30th, 1918, justified by allegations of Lenin's so-called betrayal of the revolution. Given the long tradition of assassinations of representatives of the hated tsarist regime, which exposed the anarchists to a brutal repression, part of Russian anarchism resorted to what is called "propaganda by deed" by having recourse to "the ends justifies the means". This included targeting working class fighters, as the attack on Lenin shows!

It is not a matter of mourning the hated figures of Tsarism targeted by the methods of one part of Russian anarchism, which expressed a reductive understanding of feudalism, identifying it with some individuals. But, as Berkman defended it correctly against Goldman, this system was not based on the malevolence of individuals, but on social and economic bases in contradiction with the needs of the exploited classes. The "propaganda by deed", the individual violence against the hated representatives of feudalism, conceived as "triggering reflection" also expressed a false conception of the development of class consciousness, since these methods in no way demonstrate the necessity for a united struggle of the whole class against the foundations of exploitation.

It is understandable that Goldman showed allegiance to Kaplan as a prisoner, since she was tortured by the Cheka. She did not herself call for the same methods as Kaplan. But why in this situation did she not dare go a step further and criticise the "Jesuit" methods in the ranks of anarchism, rather than circumscribing it to the Bolsheviks?

Goldman suffered greatly in September 1921 with the Cheka's execution of friends, of anarchists such as Fanya Baron, with the approval of Lenin. Although Lenin was one of the most determined and clearest personalities of the October Revolution, such measures are unacceptable. Goldman developed a growing antipathy, especially towards Trotsky and Lenin, describing them as clever and cunning Jesuits.[35]

The Cheka had become uncontrollable and used hostage-taking and torture to extract information and carried out executions to spread fear. It was often used against political opposition groups coming from the very ranks of the Bolsheviks and anarchists, but also against workers who participated in strikes. Goldman's criticism of prisoners – defenceless individuals – being condemned to death, whether members of bourgeois counter-revolutionary organisations, criminals, or those taken prisoner from the white armies, is absolutely justified because such measures were not only meaningless acts of violence, but were also an expression of the view that people cannot change their opinions, their behaviour and political positions and they must, in a word, be liquidated.[36] Within the Bolsheviks, the fight against the suppression of opposition voices inside the party and the working class began in 1918. Although Goldman herself witnessed debates and the existence of different positions among the Bolsheviks, she draws too simplistic a picture in order to condemn the latter as "Jesuits of Marxism", as if they were forged from a single block, which never corresponded to reality. The central problem was the sliding into a militarist approach to political problems rather than turning to working class consciousness, to which most of the Bolsheviks succumbed in the false belief that they were saving the besieged revolution. But this does not correspond to a thirst for power allegedly rooted inside the Bolshevik Party.

Marxism has never defended the principle according to which the end justifies the means; this was never a principle or practice of the Bolsheviks before and during the October Revolution. Kronstadt's suppression, however, the tragic culmination of a growing repression, showed how much the degeneration had already progressed, the forms it would take and the logic behind it. Its political justification was derived from its underlying goal (the "iron cohesion" of Russia against the international attacks) justifying the means (bloody repression).

Goldman's personal and utterly demoralising experiences of Kronstadt led to a break with the Bolsheviks and marked a turning point. In the last days before the crushing of the sailors, soldiers and workers of Kronstadt, she was part of a delegation (including in addition to her, Perkus, Pertrowski, Berkman) who tried to negotiate with the Red Army. "Kronstadt broke the last thread that held me to the Bolsheviki. The wanton slaughter they had instigated spoke more eloquently against them then aught else. Whatever their pretences in the past, the Bolsheviki now proved themselves the most pernicious enemies of the revolution. I could have nothing further to do with them."[37]

Kronstadt was a terrible tragedy, a tragic mistake much more than a simple "error".

The crushing of Kronstadt with several thousand dead proletarians (on both sides!) was based on an absolutely false assessment of the character of this uprising by Bolshevik leaders that could have had several causes: the fact that the international bourgeoisie had perfidiously seized this opportunity to hypocritically declare its "solidarity" with the insurgents; also the growing fear that Kronstadt had passed into the camp of the counter-revolution or was even already an expression of the counter-revolution. Goldman responded correctly to both of these aspects. In her autobiography dating back to 1931, however, she was unable to draw the most important lesson from the Kronstadt tragedy, as was the case for the entire Marxist Left during the repression, which mostly supported it. Neither, even with the passage of time, would she be able to understand, contrary to certain currents of the Communist Left, that violence within the working class must be firmly rejected and that this must be a principle.[38]

As with the question of the state, Goldman falls far too easily into the question of the so-called "continued Jesuitism of the Bolsheviks". She calls the Bolsheviks Jesuit, which is in total contradiction with their history. The dynamism of the majority of the Bolsheviks, who did not hesitate to use violence in Kronstadt in 1921 as an alleged means of class struggle, was by no means "their tradition" but rather, as we have seen, an expression of the process of their progressive degeneration.

Instead of looking fundamentally at the question that all revolutionaries without exception faced, namely what means can be used in the class struggle and in the revolution, the "Jesuit" label that Goldman loosely attributed to the Bolsheviks was rather an obstacle to understanding the degeneration of the revolution as a process.

Silence or criticism?

One question is found in Goldman's writings on Russia like a red thread: when was it justified to formulate an open criticism of the Bolsheviks? She described an encounter with anarchists in Petrograd with great indignation:

"These charges and denunciations beat upon me like hammers and left me stunned. I listened tense in every nerve, hardly able clearly to understand what I heard, and failing to grasp its full meaning. It couldn’t be true — this monster indictment! (…) The men in that dismal hall must be mad, I thought, to tell such impossible and preposterous stories, wicked to condemn the Communists for the crimes they must know were due to the counterrevolutionary gang, to the blockade and the White generals attacking the Revolution. I proclaimed my conviction to the gathering, but my voice was drowned in the laughter of derision and jeers.”[39]

As regards the question of the changes to come immediately after the revolution, Goldman's despondency with the positions of the other anarchists shows that anarchism was anything but homogeneous, especially with regard to the attitude towards the Bolsheviks. Anarchism in Russia had again divided into different camps.[40] The following passages from Goldman's writings once again testify to her responsible attitude in not ignoring her own uncertainties, but they also show the evolution of her attitude towards the Bolsheviks.

"Well could I understand the attitude of my Ukrainian friends. They had suffered much during the last year: they had seen the high hopes of the Revolution crushed and Russia breaking down beneath the heel of the Bolshevik state. Yet I could not comply with their wishes. I still had faith in the Bolsheviki, in their revolutionary sincerity and integrity. Moreover, I felt that as long as Russia was being attacked from outside I could not speak in criticism. I would not add fuel on the fires of counterrevolution. I therefore had to keep silent, and stand by the Bolsheviki as the organised defenders of the Revolution. But my Russian friends scorned this view. I was confounding the Communist Party with the revolution, they said; they are not the same, on the contrary they were opposed, even antagonistic.”[41]

 “At the first news of war with Poland I had set aside my critical attitude and offered my services as a nurse at the front (…) But he (Zorin) never did. That of course could have no bearing on my determination to help the country, in whatever capacity possible. Nothing seemed so important just then.” (…) “I was not denying Makhno’s services to the Revolution in the struggle against the White forces, nor the fact that his povstantsy army was a spontaneous mass movement of the toilers. I did not think, however, that anarchism had anything to gain from military activity or that our propaganda should depend on military or political spoils. But that was beside the point. I was not in a position to join their work, nor was it a question of the Bolsheviki any more. I was ready to admit frankly that I had erred grievously when I had defended Lenin and his party as the true champions of the Revolution. But I would not engage in active opposition to them so long as Russia was still being attacked by outside enemies.”[42]

“I was oppressively conscious of the great debt I owed to the workers of Europe and America: I should tell them the truth about Russia. But how could I speak out when the country was still besieged on several fronts? It would mean working into the hands of Poland and Wrangel. For the first time in my life I refrained from exposing grave social evils. I felt as if I were betraying the trust of the masses, particularly of the American workers, whose faith I dearly cherished.”[43]

"I found it necessary to observe silence so long as the combined imperialist forces were at the throat of Russia. (…) Now, however, the time for silence has passed. I therefore mean to tell my story. I am not unmindful of the difficulties confronting me. I know I shall be misappropriated by the reactionaries, the enemies of the Russian Revolution, as well as excommunicated by its so-called friends; who persist in confusing the governing party of Russia with the Revolution. It is, therefore, necessary that I state my position clearly towards both.”[44]

At that time other revolutionaries, such as Rosa Luxemburg, were quick to make criticisms of the Bolsheviks, even when they expressed total solidarity with them and defended the decisive role they had played in the Russian Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg wrote her pamphlet The Russian Revolution in 1918 at the same time as Goldman published the article "The Truth about the Bolsheviks" in Mother Earth with boundless enthusiasm. The example of Rosa Luxemburg shows how difficult it was to make the decision to publish her own criticism at the right time, and always with the concern not to strike a blow to the revolution. In her text written in the Moabit Prison, Luxemburg expressed a criticism of the Bolsheviks, where her concern was, by clarifying the problems posed in Russia, to show her support and solidarity:

"Lenin and Trotsky, on the other hand, decide in favour of dictatorship in contradistinction to democracy, and thereby, in favour of the dictatorship of a handful of persons, that is, in favour of dictatorship on the bourgeois model.” (…) “But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class – that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people. Doubtless the Bolsheviks would have proceeded in this very way were it not that they suffered under the frightful compulsion of the world war, the German occupation and all the abnormal difficulties connected therewith, things which were inevitably bound to distort any socialist policy, however imbued it might be with the best intentions and the finest principles. (...) The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics.”[45]

Luxemburg did not refrain from criticism. Why did Goldman not follow the example of Rosa Luxemburg when, in her writings, she repeatedly expressed her sadness following the assassination in January 1919 of Luxemburg, whose positions she knew? Why in her pamphlet The Crushing of the Russian Revolution did she never make reference to Luxemburg’s criticisms written three years previously?

The reason is simple: she did not know of it. Indeed, Luxemburg's text became the victim of a gross fear of "stabbing the revolution in the back" and of playing the bourgeoisie's game in raising criticisms. The publication of Luxemburg's criticism of the Bolsheviks, which she wanted to make known immediately after drafting it, was deliberately withheld by her closest political friends and did not appear until four years later, in 1922.[46]

Unfortunately, Goldman did not have the opportunity to draw inspiration from Luxemburg's criticism of the Bolsheviks. Her excitement on arrival in Russia is understandable given the horrors in which the World War had plunged humanity. Goldman's “Soviet Russia! Sacred ground” and her subsequent utter disillusionment is also an example that euphoria is most of the time condemned to suffer great disappointment. It is not surprising that 13 years later she rejected as "naive" her initial defence of the Bolsheviks.

Luxemburg was never inclined to political excitement and formulated her criticism on the basis of the first experiences of the months following October 1917, concluding with the famous words that the future belongs to Bolshevism. Goldman wrote her criticism three years later, based on her own experience of a later phase of the revolution in Russia, after the workers' councils were dispossessed of their power at the time of the unleashing of the Cheka and the inescapable identification of the Bolshevik Party with the state apparatus. Nevertheless, it harboured great hopes: "Lenin and his retinue are sensing the danger. Their attack upon and the persecution of the Labour Opposition and the Anarcho-Syndicalists are continuing with even greater intensity. Is it that the Anarcho-Syndicalist star is rising in the east? Who knows- Russia is the land of miracles.”[47] What would have been Luxemburg's analysis at the end of 1921, after the onset of a clear degeneration and after Kronstadt? Sadly, we will never know.

Goldman oscillated between silence and her "I have to raise my voice against the crimes committed in the name of the Revolution”. But how should that happen? During her stay in Russia, the bourgeois newspaper World in New York repeatedly asked her to publish articles on Russia. Goldman at first refused, after hard discussions with Berkman, who was strictly against such an approach, with the argument that everything published in the bourgeois press could only be used in the service of the counter-revolution and proposed she produce her own leaflets for distribution to the workers. A few weeks later, as Goldman had left Russia at the end of 1921, she allowed World to publish her texts.

"I wrote her that I preferred to have my say in the liberal and labour press in the United States, and that I should be willing to have them publish my articles without any pay rather than have them appear in the New York World or similar publications. (…) Now that I knew the truth, was I to be forced to slay it and keep silent? No, I must protest. I must cry out against the gigantic deception posing as truth and justice.”[48]

Goldman had waited a few months in Russia to make public her criticism because she did not want to "stab the revolution in the back". And because of this unthinking decision, she was pilloried from various directions:

“My Communist accusers were not the only ones to cry ‘Crucify!’ There were also some anarchist voices in the chorus. They were the very people who had fought me on Ellis Island, on the Buford and the first year in Russia because I had refused to condemn the Bolsheviki before I had a chance to test their scheme. Daily the news from Russia about the continued political persecution strengthened every fact I had described in my articles and in my book. It was understandable that Communists should close their eyes to the reality, but it was reprehensible on the part of people who called themselves anarchists to do so, especially after the treatment Mollie Steimer had received in Russia after having valiantly fought in America for the Soviet régime.“[49]

The charge of treason by some parts of the American workers' movement had largely deprived her analysis and reflections of the attention and recognition they deserved. But in a world where two classes confront each other in an absolutely antagonistic way, it was a desperate act to criticise herself and to explain it from the fact that she had no other choice. Indeed it was extremely dangerous to want to use an instrument of the bourgeoisie, whatever it may be, even briefly, as a means of expressing a working class position. What a pity that such a strong militant had fallen into this trap!

What Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg have in common is undoubtedly the enormous desire to understand the problems of the Russian Revolution, to defend the revolutionary character of October 1917 and to not succumb to the dramatic situation without criticising. Goldman never accepted the tactical method of simply considering the Bolsheviks as a "lesser evil" and to support them only for the duration of the war against the white armies, a position openly defended in Russia by the anarchist Machajski in the journal The workers’ revolution.

Expressing open criticism of the policies of the Bolsheviks was from the outset less risky outside Russia than in Russia itself. But Goldman's doubts did not stem from fear or repressive measures against her. Owing to her status as a well-known American revolutionary, she enjoyed much greater protection than other revolutionary immigrants. Although she did not hide her sympathy for the Workers' Opposition and allied herself with the imprisoned anarchists (for example when she spoke at Kropotkin's funeral), she was only placed under "soft" surveillance by the Cheka, to intimidate her.

Would her criticisms have destroyed the shining example of the October revolution within the international working class? Certainly not. The alternative was posed not in the terms of "either being silent or denouncing the Bolsheviks". On the contrary, a mature political critique of Bolshevik policies at that time provided support for the entire international revolutionary wave. The working class is the class of consciousness, not of thoughtless action. Therefore, criticism of its own actions and mistakes is a legacy of the workers' movement which had to be maintained even in such tragic times. It is not part of the nature of the working class to conceal its problems, unlike the bourgeoisie. As Luxemburg’s text shows, criticism of the Bolsheviks must not be limited to indignation but should also be mature enough to support the struggle against the degeneration of the revolution. Later it was a criterion for the Italian Communist Left to refrain from expressing hasty analyses and criticisms that did not permit lessons to be drawn.

Goldman's analysis of the Russian Revolution went beyond mere indignation. But in different places, with its characterisation of Lenin and Trotsky as "cunning Jesuits", she slipped into a method of criticism which fixated on charismatic individuals, which cannot be justified by the great influence that these individuals had on the policy of the Bolsheviks. Lenin does not personify the disarming of the councils and their fusion with the state, any more than Trotsky personifies the crushing of Kronstadt.

Later on, Goldman developed the position vis-à-vis Trotsky that his actions – especially Kronstadt – were sufficient to make him a pioneer of Stalinism.[50] The use of violence that he had directed as commander of the Red Army at Kronstadt did not reflect his personal inclinations but was the implementation of a decision of the whole Bolshevik power and, let us again recall, was supported at the time by the entire marxist left. The tragic error of Kronstadt was an illustration of both the immaturity of the workers' movement on the question of violence (no violence within the working class) and the degenerate course of the revolution in Russia, which would much later end up in to the openly counter-revolutionary politics of socialism in one country and the emergence of Stalin as leader of the world counter-revolution. Whatever the inadequacies of Trotsky's political denunciation of Stalinism and its organised apparatus of repression aimed at the complete physical and ideological crushing of the working class, it nonetheless expressed a proletarian reaction against them.

The value of Goldman's analysis lies in her raising the central questions confronting the Russian Revolution. The contradictions in her analysis and the conclusions, that we absolutely do not share, are not a reason to reject or ignore her efforts altogether. On the contrary, they are the expression of the enormous difficulty of producing a complete analysis of the Russian problem since 1922. She was not alone in this matter. She has the merit of having rejected the fusion of the party with the state apparatus, the seizure of power by the party and the repression of Kronstadt.

In this sense, she made an important contribution to the working class, which must be welcomed but also criticised. Goldman never claimed that October 1917 ultimately gave birth to Stalinism, as the ruling class still does today, in its deceitful campaigns, but stubbornly defended the October Revolution.

Mario 07/01/2018

 

The events of spring 1968 in France, in their roots and in their results, had an international significance. Underlying them were the consequences for the working class of the first symptoms of the world economic crisis, which was reappearing after well over a decade of capitalist prosperity.

After decades of defeat, disorientation and submission, in May 1968 the working class returned to the scene of history. While the student agitation which had been developing in France since the beginning of spring, and the radical workers’ struggles which had broken out the previous year, had already changed the social atmosphere, the entry en masse of the class struggle (10 million on strike) overturned the whole social landscape.

Very soon other national sectors of the working class would enter the struggle. After the huge strike of May 1968 in France, the struggles in Argentina (the Cordobazo), the “Hot Autumn” in Italy and many other movements across the world provided proof that the world proletariat had left behind the period of counter-revolution. In contrast to the crisis of 1929, the one now emerging would not lead to world war but to the development of class battles that would prevent the ruling class from imposing its barbaric solution to the convulsions of its economy.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of this major event, we are publishing on our website a dossier made up of some the main articles the ICC has written about it, in particular:

• ‘Understanding May [9]’, re-published from Revolution Internationale 2, 1969, which polemicises in particular with the situationists who at the time denied the return of the economic crisis as one of the causes for the upsurge of the movement;
• ‘May 68 and the revolutionary perspective’ from International Review 133 (The student movement around the world in the 1960s [10]) and 134 (End of the counter-revolution and the historic return of the world proletariat [11]), which goes in detail into the events themselves and examines their historical importance.

We also begin the publication of a series of three articles aimed at drawing a balance sheet of the period since 1968, motivated by the concern to examine the extent to which the conclusions we have drawn about the meaning of May 1968 have been verified by history. The first article looks at the course followed by the aggravation of the economic crisis, and the following two will deal with the dynamic of the class struggle and the development of the revolutionary milieu.

                                          ******

Sinking into the economic crisis [12]

The advances and retreats in the class struggle since 1968 [13]

The report we publish below was presented and discussed at an international meeting of the ICC in November 2017, with the aim of drawing out the main tendencies in the evolution of imperialist tensions. In order to do this, it based itself on the organisation’s previous texts and reports which had made an in-depth analyses of these tendencies, i.e. the orientation text ‘Militarism and Decomposition’ [19] in 1991 (published in International Review 64) and the report to the 20th International Congress [20] (published in IR 152, 2013).

Since the latter report was written, there has been a series of major events in the aggravation of imperialist tensions in the Middle East: first, the direct military incursion by Turkey in Syria on 20 January, to confront the Kurdish troops based in the region of Afrin in the north of Syria. This intervention, which had at least the tacit agreement of Russia, is heavy with future military confrontations, in particular with the USA, which in this region is allied with the Kurdish forces of the YPG, and expresses important divisions within NATO, of which both Turkey and the USA are members. Then there was the US military strike in Syria (supported by Britain and France), aimed at the presumed sites for the construction of chemical weapons, and marking a clear increase in the growth of tensions between the USA and Russia. Still more recently we had Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme, which has led to a sharpening of tensions between Israel and Iran but also to a more global destabilisation, since the American decision has been condemned by the majority of countries. All this highlights the risk of an uncontrolled escalation of conflicts in the Middle East (see our article), and shows that capitalism is a growing threat to humanity [21].

Over the last four years, imperialist relations have gone though some major developments: the war in Syria and the fight against IS, the Russian intervention in the Ukraine, the refugee crisis and the terrorist attacks in Europe, Brexit and the pressure of populism, the election of Trump in the USA and the accusations about Russia’s involvement in his election campaign (“Russiagate”), the tensions between the US and China over the provocations by North Korea, the opposition between Saudi Arabia and Iran (including the tensions over Qatar), the failed coup d’Etat against Erdogan and the subsequent repression in Turkey, the conflict over Kurdish autonomy, the upsurge of nationalism in Catalonia, and so on. It is thus important that the IB evaluates the extent to which these events are consistent with our general analyses of the period, but also what new orientations do they reveal?

To do this, it’s crucial, as the 1991 orientation text “Militarism and decomposition” puts it right from the start, to use a method that is adequate for understanding a situation which has no precedent:

“Contrary to the Bordigist current, the ICC has never considered marxism as an "invariant doctrine", but as living thought enriched by each important historical event. Such events make it possible either to confirm a framework and analyses developed previously, and so to support them, or to highlight the fact that some have become out of date, and that an effort of reflection is required in order to widen the ap­plication of schemas which had previously been valid but which have been overtaken by events, or to work out new ones which are capable of encompassing the new reality.

Revolutionary organizations and militants have the specific and fundamental responsibility of carrying out this effort of reflection, always moving forward, as did our predecessors such as Lenin, Rosa, Bilan, the French Communist Left, etc, with both caution and boldness:

• basing ourselves always and firmly on the basic acquisitions of marxism,
• examining reality without blinkers, and de­veloping our thought "without ostracism of any kind" (Bilan).

In particular, faced with such historic events, it is important that revolutionaries should be capable of distinguishing between those analyses which have been overtaken by events and those which still remain valid, in order to avoid a double trap: either succumbing to sclerosis, or "throwing the baby out with the bath water"

Applying this approach, which is imposed by current reality, has been the basis of our ability to analyse the fundamental evolution of imperialist relations for the past 26 years.

In this perspective, the present report proposes that we should try to grasp recent events at three levels, in order to locate their importance within our framework of analysis:

1. To what extent are they in accord with the framework of analysis developed after the implosion of the eastern bloc? Here we will remind ourselves of the main analytical axes of the orientation text on militarism and decomposition (IR 64, first quarter of 1991)
2. To what extent do they follow the major trends of imperialist tensions on a world scale, described in the report of the 20th international congress (IR 152, second quarter of 2013)?
3. What are the most significant developments in imperialist tensions today?

The orientations of the 1991 OT

This text puts forward the analytical framework for understanding the question of imperialism and militarism in the period of decomposition. It advances two fundamental orientations for characterising imperialism in the current period:

The disappearance of the blocs does not call into question the reality of imperialism and militarism

On the contrary, they become more barbaric and chaotic: “The constitution of imperialist blocs is not the origin of militarism and imperialism. The oppo­site is true: the formation of these blocs is only the extreme consequence (which at certain mo­ments can aggravate the causes), an expression (and not the only one), of decadent capitalism's plunge into militarism and war…the end of the blocs only opens the door to a still more barbaric, aberrant, and chaotic form of imperialism”.

This is expressed in particular by the outbreak of extreme imperialist appetites and the multiplication of tensions and conflicts: “The difference with the period that has just ended is that these conflicts and antagonisms, which before were contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs; will now come to the forefront, because with the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the presence of the blocs, these conflicts risk becoming more violent and more numerous, in particular, of course, in zones where the proletariat is weakest”

Similarly we are seeing the development of “every man for himself” and their corollary, the attempts to contain the chaos, both of which are factors aggravating military barbarism: “the chaos which is threatening the major developed countries and their inter-relations.….. faced with the tendency towards generalized chaos which is specific to decomposition and which has been considerably accelerated by the Eastern bloc's collapse, capitalism has no other way out in its attempt to hold together its different compo­nents, than to impose the iron strait-jacket of military force. In this sense, the methods it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody state of chaos are themselves a factor in the aggravation of military barbarism into which capitalism is plunging”.

The OT thus centrally underlines the fact that there is a historic tendency towards every man for himself, towards the weakening of US control over the world, particularly over its former allies. And at the same time, there is an attempt on its part to use military force, where it has an enormous superiority, to maintain its status and impose its control over these same ex-allies.

The reconstitution of blocs is not on the agenda

The increasingly barbaric and chaotic character of imperialism in the period of decomposition is a major obstacle to the reconstitution of new blocs: “the exacerbation of the latter (militarism and imperialism) in the present phase of capitalism's life paradoxically constitutes a major barrier to the re-formation of a new system of blocs tak­ing the place of the one which has just disappeared….  the very fact that military force has become - as the Gulf conflict confirms - a pre­ponderant factor in any attempt by the ad­vanced countries to limit world chaos is a con­siderable barrier to this tendency…the reconstitution of a new pair of imperialist blocs is not only impossible for a number of years to come, but may very well never take place again”.

The USA is the only power that can play the role of world cop. The only other possible candidates for the leadership of a bloc are Germany and Japan: “the world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of ‘every man for himself’ will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterized the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the mo­ment. A world of bloody chaos, where the American policeman will try to maintain a mini­mum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force”.

At the same time, the USSR will never be able to regain a role as challenger: “It is, for example, out of the question that the head of the bloc which has just collapsed - ­the USSR - could ever reconquer this position”.

Here again the analysis remains essentially accurate: after 25 years in the period of decomposition, there is still no perspective for the reconstitution of blocs.

In conclusion, the framework and the two main axes presented in the OT have broadly been confirmed and remain profoundly valid.

However, further reflection is needed about certain elements of the analysis

The role of the USA as sole gendarme of the world has evolved a great deal over the past 25 years: it’s one of the key questions to deepen in this report. However, the OT puts forward an orientation which has become even more concrete than the predictions we made in 1991: the fact that the actions of the USA would create further chaos. This has been strikingly illustrated by the development of terrorism today, which is to a large extent the result of the US policy in Iraq, and secondarily of the French-British intervention in Libya.

We can also say today that the analysis overestimated the potential role attributed to Japan and even Germany. Japan has been able to build up its weaponry and has gained more autonomy in certain sectors, but this is not at all comparable to the tendency towards the formation of blocs since Japan has had to submit to US protection faced with the threat from North Kore and above all from China. The potential still exists for Germany without having been seriously strengthened over the last 25 years. Germany has gained more weight, it plays a preponderant and even leading role in Europe, but on the military level it remains a dwarf, even if (unlike Japan) it has had its troops participating in as many UN “mandates” as possible, By contrast, the period has seen the emergence of China as a new rising power, a role we considerably underestimated in the past.

Finally for Russia, the analysis remains basically correct, in the sense that its position as a bloc leader in 1945 was already an “accident” of history. But the prediction that “despite its enormous arse­nals, the USSR will never again be able to play a major role on the international stage” and that it. is “condemned to return to a third-rate posi­tion” have not really been confirmed: Russia has certainly not become a world-wide challenger to the USA but it plays a far from negligible role as a “troublemaker”, which is typical of decomposition, which through its alliances and military interventions is exacerbating chaos all over the world (and it has had a certain success in Ukraine and Syria, has strengthened its position vis-a-vis Turkey and Iran and has developed a cooperation with China). We undoubtedly underestimated the resources of an imperialism with its back to the wall, ready to defend its interests tooth and nail.

The analyses of the report to the 20th ICC Congress (2013)

Locating itself in the framework of an increasingly barbaric and chaotic imperialism and of the growing impasse facing US policy, which could only further exacerbate military barbarism (axes of the report to the 19th congress[1]), the report puts forward four orientations in the development of imperialist confrontations which concretise the axes of the 91 OT:

 - The growth of every man for himself, expressed in particular by a multiplication of imperialist ambitions. This was expressed concretely by:

• (a) the danger of military confrontations and the growing instability of the states of the Middle East: unlike the first Gulf war of 91, which was stirred up by the US and waged by an international coalition under its leadership, this highlights the terrifying extension of chaos;
• b) the rise of China and the exacerbation of tensions in the Far East. The report’s analysis partially corrects the underestimation of the role of China in our previous analyses. However, despite an impressive economic expansion, growing military power and a more and more marked presence in imperialist confrontations, the report asserts that China does not have the industrial and technological capacities to impose itself as the head of a bloc and constitute itself as a global challenger to the USA.

 - The growing impasse of the policies of the USA as a global cop, in particular in Afghanistan and Iraq, has led to a further plunge into military barbarism “The striking failure of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan has weakened the world leadership of the USA. Even if the American bourgeoisie under Obama has chosen a policy of controlled withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been able to reduce the impact of the catastrophic policies of Bush, it has not been able to reverse the tendency and this has lead to a further plunge into military barbarism. The execution of Bin-Laden was an attempt by the US to react to this retreat in its leadership and underline its absolute military and technological superiority. However, this reaction has not called into question the underlying trend towards retreat”.

 - The tendency towards the explosive extension of zones of permanent instability and chaos: “in whole swathes of the planet, from Afghanistan to Africa, to the point where certain bourgeois analysts, such as Jacques Attali in France, talks openly about the ‘Somalisation’ of the world”

 - The crisis of the eurozone (the PIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) is accentuating tensions between European states and centrifugal tendencies in the EU “On the other hand, the crisis and the drastic measures being imposed are pushing towards the break-up of the EU and a rejection of the idea of submitting to the control of a particular country, i.e. are pushing towards every man for himself. The UK radically oppose the proposed measures of centralisation and in the countries of Southern Europe there is a growing anti-German nationalism. The centrifugal forces can also lead to a tendency towards the fragmentation of states, through the autonomisation of regions like Catalonia, Northern Italy, Flanders or Scotland….Thus the pressure of the crisis, through the complex inter-action of centripetal and centrifugal forces, is accentuating the process towards the break-up of the EU and exacerbating tensions between states”.

The four major orientations developed in the report also remain valid. They show clearly that the tension between on the one hand the push towards every man for himself and the efforts to control chaos, underlined by the 91 OT, are leading to an increasingly chaotic and explosive situation.

 The general development of instability in imperialist relations

Since the 2013 report, events confirm the slide towards increasingly chaotic inert-imperialist relations. But above all, the situation is marked by its highly irrational and unpredictable character, linked to the impact of populist pressures, in particular the fact that the world’s number one power is today led by a populist president whose reactions are extremely unpredictable. An increasingly short-term approach by the bourgeoisie and the strong unpredictability that results from it are above all features of the policy of the US gendarme, but can also be seen in the policies of other imperialist powers, the developments of conflicts in the world, and the growth of tensions in Europe.

The decline of the US superpower and the political crisis in the American bourgeoisie

The arrival in power of Donald Trump, surfing on the populist wave, has had three main consequences:

The first concerns the unpredictability of decisions and incoherence of US foreign policy. The actions of this populist president and his administration, such as the denunciation of transpacific and transatlantic treaties, of the climate agreement, the putting into question of NATO and the nuclear treaty with Iran, unconditional support for Saudi Arabia, the bellicose set-to with North Korea or the tensions with China, are sapping the bases of international policies and agreements which had been defended by different US administrations. His unpredictable decisions, threats and poker moves have had the effect of undermining the reliability of the US as an ally: the detours, bluffs and sudden changes of position by Trump not only make the US look ridiculous but are leading to less and less countries having any confidence in the US.

At the same time,: even if the American bourgeoisie under Obama, by opting for a policy of controlled retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, was able to reduce the impact of Bush’s disastrous policies, it hasn’t been able to reverse the basic tendency towards the decline of the sole superpower, and the impasse of US policy has been sharply accentuated by the actions of the Trump administration. At the G20 the isolation of the USA on climate change and the trade war was obvious. What’s more, Russia’s involvement in Syria to save Assad made the US step back and led to a strengthening of Russia’s influence in the Middle East, particularly in Turkey and Iran, whereas the US has not been able to contain China’s advance from outsider status in the 90s to that of a serious challenger which presents itself as a champion of globalisation.

The risk of destabilising the world situation and augmenting imperialist tensions has never been so strong, as we have seen with North Korea or Iran: the policy of the US is more than ever a direct factor in the aggravation of chaos on a global level.

The second consequence of Trump coming to power has been the opening of a major political crisis within the US bourgeoisie. The constant need to try to contain the unpredictable decisions of the  president but above all the suspicions that Trump’s electoral success was largely due to support from Russia (“Russiagate”), a prospect which is totally unacceptable for the US bourgeoisie, points to a particularly delicate political situation within the US bourgeoisie and a difficulty in controlling the political game.

The incessant battle to “contain” the president plays out at several levels: the pressure exerted by the Republican party (the failed votes on getting rid of Obamacare), opposition to Trump’s plans by his own ministers (the minister of Justice Jeff Sessions refusing to resign or the ministers of foreign affairs and defence who “nuance” Trump’s proposals), the struggle for control over the White House staff by the “generals” (McMaster, Mattis). And yet these efforts don’t always stop things getting out of hand, such as in September when Trump made a deal with the Democrats to stymie Republican opposition to raising the debt ceiling.

Whatever the approach towards Russia (about which there can be divergences within the US bourgeoisie, as we shall see)), the accusations that Russia was mixed up in the presidential election campaign and that Trump has ties to the Russian mafia are extremely serious, since this would mean that for the first time ever a US president has been elected with the support of the Russians, which is unacceptable for the interests of the US bourgeoisie. If the inquiries confirm the accusations, they can only lead to impeachment proceedings for Trump.

The final consequence of Trump coming to power is the development of tensions over the options for US imperialism. The question of links with Russia is also a focus for clan confrontations within the US bourgeoisie. Since the main challenger today is China, would a rapprochement with the former head of the rival bloc and an important military power be acceptable for the US bourgeoisie in order to contain chaos, terrorism and the push from China? Could America contribute to the re-emergence of its Cold War rival and accept negotiating with it in certain areas? Would this make it possible to contain Chinese ambitions and also strike a blow against Germany? Within the Trump administration, there are numerous partisans of such a rapprochement, like Tillerson in foreign affairs and Ross in trade, as well as the president’s son-in-law Kushner. However, a considerable part of the US bourgeoisie (particularly within the army, the secret services and the Democratic Party) don’t seem prepared to make concessions at this level. In this context, the investigations into Russiagate, which imply the possibility of a US president being manipulated and blackmailed by an external enemy, are being widely exploited by these factions to make any rapprochement with Russia totally unacceptable.

The crisis of the US gendarme further exacerbates the push towards every man for himself among the other imperialist powers and the unpredictability of relations between them

Trump’s protectionist orientations and the USA’s exit from various international agreements is leading various powers, especially those in Europe and Asia, to strengthen their ties – without for the moment completely excluding the US – and to express their wish to become more independent from the USA and defend their own interests. This appeared clearly through the collaboration between Germany and China during the last G20 in Hamburg, and this collaboration between European and Asian countries could also be seen at the Bonn climate conference which aimed to concretise the objectives drawn up at the Paris conference.

The USA’s withdrawal is exacerbating the every man for himself tendency among the other big powers: we have already pointed to the aggressive imperialist stance of Russia which has enabled it to regain footholds on the global imperialist battleground (Ukraine, Syria). As regards China, in the previous report we still underestimated (a) the rapidity of its economic modernisation and (b) the internal political stability of China, which seems to have been strongly reinforced under Xi. China presents itself today as the defender of globalisation in the face of US protectionism and as a pole of planetary stability in contrast to the instability of US policies, while at the same time developing a military strategy aimed at increasing its military presence outside of China (the South China Sea).

This development of every man for himself can go hand in hand with the establishment of circumstantial alliances (China and Germany to orient the G20, the Franco-German tandem to reinforce military cooperation in Europe, China and Russia in relation to Iran), but these remain fluctuating and can’t be seen as bases for the emergence of real blocs. Let’s consider at this level the example of the alliance between China and Russia. The two powers share common interests, for example in relation to the USA in Syria and Iran, or in the Far East (North Korea) in relation to the US and Japan. They have also held joint military manoeuvres in both regions. Russia has become a major supplier of energy to China, thus reducing its dependency on the West, while China has massive investments in Siberia and supplies Russia with considerable amounts of consumer goods. However, Russia does not want to be subordinated to a powerful neighbor which it is already dependent upon to an unprecedented degree. What’s more, the two countries are also rivals in central Asia, South East Asia and the Indian peninsula: the project of the “New Silk Road” goes directly against Russian interests, while Russia is renewing its links with India, the main adversary of China in Asia (along with Japan). Finally, the rapprochement between China and the EU and with Germany in particular represents a deadly threat to Russia which could find itself squeezed between China and Germany.

The extension of zones of war, instability and chaos

Faced with the explosion of every man for himself, the efforts to “hold together the different parts of a body that is tending to break up” seem to be more and more futile, while the instability of imperialist relations makes for an unpredictable extension of areas of conflict.

The defeat of Islamic State will not reduce instability and chaos: the confrontations between Kurdish militia and the Turkish army in Syria, between Kurdish units and the Iraqi army and pro-Iranian Shia militias in Kirkuk in Iraq herald new bloody battles in the region. The stance taken by Turkey, which plays a key role in the region, is both central to the evolution of tensions and full of danger for the stability of the country itself. Turkey has important imperialist ambitions in the region, not only in Syria and Iraq, but in all the Muslim countries, from Bosnia to Qatar and Turkmenistan to Egypt, and is playing its own imperialist cards to the full: on the one hand, its status as a member of NATO is very unstable, given its taut relations with the USA and the majority of countries in Western Europe who are members of NATO, and also the tensions over the refugees and its difficult relations with Greece; on the other hand, it is now heading towards a rapprochement with Russia and even Iran, which is a direct imperialist competitor in the Middle East, while at the same time opposing itself to Saudi Arabia (refusal to withdraw troops from Qatar). At the same time, the struggle for power inside the country has sharpened, with the increasingly dictatorial practices of Erdogan and the revival of Kurdish guerilla activity. At this level, the USA’s refusal to extradite Gülen but also its support, arming and training of Kurdish militias in Iraq by the USA, are heavy with menace for the development of chaos inside Turkey itself.

The unpredictability of certain foci of tension is especially evident in the case of the North Korea. But while the root of this conflict is the increasingly overt confrontation between China and the USA, a certain number of elements make the outcome of this situation highly uncertain:

• The ideology of the besieged fortress in North Korea, the advocacy of atomic weapons to respond to an inevitable attack by the Americans and the Japanese as an absolute priority, implies a high level of distrust towards its Chinese or Russian “friends” (and this in turn is based in certain experiences of the Korean partisans during the Second World War) and means that China’s control over North Korea is limited;
• Trump’s poker moves, threatening North Korea with total destruction, raises the question of his credibility. This is leading on the one hand to an accelerated rearmament of Japan (already announced by prime minister Abe); but on the other hand, the unbalance in atomic weapons between the USA and North Korea (a different situation from the “balance of terror” between the USA and the USSR during the Cold War) and the sophistication of “limited” atomic weapons, does not rule out the threat of their unilateral use by the USA, which would be a qualitative step in the descent into barbarism.

In short, the zone of war, decomposition of states and of chaos is tending to widen more and more, stretching from Ukraine to South Sudan, from Nigeria to the Middle East, from Yemen to Afghanistan, from Syria to Burma and Thailand. Here we also have to point to the extension of zones of chaos in Latin America: the growing political and economic destabilisation in Venezuela, the political and economic chaos in Brazil, the destabilisation in Mexico which will get worse if Trump’s protectionist policies towards the country are carried through. To all this must be added the extension of terrorism, its presence in the day-to-day reality of Europe, the USA, etc. The chaos spreading across the planet means that there is less and less possibility for reconstruction (whereas this could still be envisaged for Bosnia or Kosovo), as shown by the failure of the policy of the reconstruction and re-establishment of state structures in Afghanistan.

The development of tensions in Europe

This factor, already seen as potentially present in the report to the 20th Congress, has accentuated in a spectacular manner in the last few years. With Brexit, the EU has entered a zone of considerable turbulence, while under the cover of protecting citizens against terrorism police and army budgets have risen noticeably in Western Europe and still more in Eastern Europe.

Under the pressure of economic measures, the refugee crisis, terrorist attacks and above all the electoral victories of populist movements, fractures within Europe are multiplying and antagonisms sharpening: economic pressure by the EU on Greece and Italy, the result of the Brexit referendum, the pressure of populism on European policies (Holland, Germany) and victories in the countries of Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary and recently the Czech Republic), internal tensions in Spain with the “Catalan crisis”. A gradual dismemberment of the EU, for example via a “several speed Europe”, as currently advocated by the Franco-German duo, would produce a marked intensification of imperialist tensions in Europe.

The relationship between populism (against the “elites” and their globalist, cosmopolitan ideas, and for protectionism) and nationalism was highlighted by Trump’s speech to the UN in September: “nationalism serves an international interest: if every country thinks of itself first, things will arrange themselves for the world”. This exacerbated glorification of every man for himself (Trump’s “America First”) weighs heavily on the Catalan conflict. Against the background of the euro crisis and the drastic austerity which came in its wake, we are seeing a dramatic interaction between populism and nationalism: one the one hand a part of the middle and petty Catalan bourgeoisie which “no longer wants to pay for Spain”, or the provocations of Puigdemont’s Catalanist coalition dominated by the left and faced with a loss of credibility in power; on the “Espagnolist” side, the nationalist reaction of the Spanish prime minister Rajoy who has to deal with a crisis in the Partido Popular, which is deeply mired in corruption.

“Militarism and war have been a fundamental given of capitalism's life since its entry into decadence…  if militarism, imperialism, and war are identified to such an extent with the period of decadence, it is because the latter corre­sponds to the fact that capitalist relations of production have become a barrier to the devel­opment of the productive forces: the perfectly irrational nature, on the global economic level, of military spending and war only expresses the aberration of these production relations' contin­ued existence”. (“Militarism and decomposition”). The level of imperialist chaos and military barbarism today, far worse than we could have imagined 25 years ago, expresses very clearly the obsolescence of the system and the need for its overthrow.

 

As we expected, the megaphones of the bourgeoisie have not remained quiet on the centenary of the 1917 October revolution. As in every decade, lies and contempt have animated newspaper articles, documentaries and televised speeches which have followed one after the other for several weeks. Without any great originality, intellectuals have rehashed the story of a coup d'état made by a handful of men in the service of a neurotic boss greedy for power and motivated by personal vengeance[i]. Thus, in this view, the struggle for a society without social classes and without the exploitation of man by man is just a fig-leaf for an expressly totalitarian undertaking which has its origins in the thoughts of Marx himself[ii].

It would be useless to look for any semblance of honesty among these guard dogs of democracy and the capitalist mode of production. But if this event is so well classified in the archives of history, why the desperation to deform it every ten years with so much arrogance? Why does the bourgeoisie denigrate one of the most precious episodes in the history of the struggle of the proletariat? Contrary to the words that it spreads through its media, the bourgeoisie knows very well that the class that failed to overturn its world a hundred years ago still exists today. It is also aware that its world is still more ailing than it was in 1917. And its survival depends on its capacity to intelligently and unfailingly use the weapons at its disposal so as to avoid a new October which could, this time, see a result for the historic aim of the working class. Very quickly the bourgeoisie understood the weight that the revolution in Russia could have on the world's social order. Thus, after tearing themselves apart for four years, the principal powers of the time made common cause in order to stem the proletarian wave which threatened to submerge a society which had nothing more to offer, except war.

Against official history, according to which the October 17 revolution contained in embryo the traces of its degeneration, this article aims to show that the isolation of the Russian proletariat is first of all due to the coordination of bourgeois governments ready to take up this class war whose outcome would turn out to be decisive for the course of history. It will also show that from 1917 to today, different factions of the dominant class have used all the weapons at their disposal to block and repress the revolution, then mislead and denigrate its memory and its lessons.

The provocation of the July days

In June 1917, faced with continuing war and the imperialist programme of the Provisional Government, the proletariat reacted with animation. During the enormous demonstrations of June 18 in Petrograd the internationalist slogans of the Bolsheviks became the majority for the first time. At the same time, the Russian military offensive ended in a fiasco when the German army pierced the front in several places. The news of the setback for the offensive arrived in the capital and stoked the revolutionary flames. In order to confront this very tense situation, the idea appeared of provoking a premature revolt in Petrograd: crush the workers and the Bolsheviks by putting the responsibility for the military offensive's setback on the proletariat of the capital who had "stabbed in the back" those at the front. For this the bourgeoisie came up with several machinations aimed at pushing the workers in the capital into a revolt. The resignation of four members of the Cadet Party from the government and pressure from the Entente on the Provisional Government led the Mensheviks and the Social-Revolutionaries to rally to the bourgeois government[iii]; which only re-launched the clamour for the immediate taking of power by the soviets. Further, the threat of sending the regiments of the capital to the front only increased the soldier's discontent, which then moved in the direction of an armed uprising against the Provisional Government. The July 3 demonstration would have turned out to be catastrophic for the continuation of the revolution if the Bolshevik Party hadn't succeeded in calming the ardour of the masses and preventing them from a premature confrontation with troops under the command of the government. In these crucial days the party remained faithful to the proletariat by turning it away from the trap laid by the bourgeoisie. But these provocations were small-scale compared to the repression and the campaigns of lies that confronted the Bolsheviks in the days following. As today, the Bolsheviks were charged with the worst accusations: German agents paid by the Kaiser, snipers who fired isolated shots at the troops entering Petrograd. All means were used in order to discredit the party in the eyes of the workers in the capital. It was the deployment of enormous energy and thanks to a great political discernment that the Bolsheviks were able to defend their honour. If the July Days revealed the indispensable role of the party, they also revealed the real nature of the Mensheviks and S-Rs. In fact their support for the bourgeois government in these crucial days [iv] was the cause of their discrediting among the masses. Thus, as Lenin wrote: “A new period is coming in. The victory of the counter revolutionaries is making the people disappointed with the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties and is paving the way for the masses to adopt a policy of support for the revolutionary proletariat. "[v].

The bourgeoisie tries to prevent the proletarian revolution

In an interview given to the journalist and militant socialist John Reed some time before the taking of the Winter Palace, Rodzianko, the Russian "Rockefeller" stated: "the revolution is a sickness. Sooner or later, the foreign powers will have to intervene, as one must care for a sick child and teach him how to walk".[vi]

This intervention wasn't long in coming. Very quickly, diplomats of the big powers were in agreement with the Russian bourgeoisie in order to settle this question with some urgency. For the chief of British intelligence in Russia, Sir Samuel Hoare, the best solution was the installation of a military dictatorship. The Officer's Union of the army and the fleet proposed the same solution. This was also expressed by the Culture Minister, Kartachev, a member of the Cadet Party: "whoever is not afraid of being cruel and brutal will take the power in their hands".[vii]

The attempted Kornilov[viii] coup d'état in August 1917 was supported by London and Paris and the setback for this first counter-revolutionary attempt was far from discouraging for the world bourgeoisie. Henceforth for the Allies, it was a question of stopping the growing influence of the Bolsheviks among the ranks of the proletariat of Russia. On November 3, a secret conference took place of military allies in Russia in the office of the chief of the Red Cross, Colonel Thompson. Faced with the "Bolshevik peril", the American, General Knox quite simply proposed picking up the Bolsheviks and shooting them[ix]. But on November 7, the Military Revolutionary Committee took the Winter Palace and power was in the hands of the Petrograd Soviet. For the world bourgeoisie, military intervention now remained the sole option; much more so as the echo of the revolution was being felt throughout Europe.

Straightaway, the 2nd Congress of Soviets adopted the decree on peace which proposed to the belligerents an immediate peace without annexations. But this appeal found no response among the allied powers who wanted to draw the conflict out while waiting for American help. For the Central Powers, the liberation of the Eastern front allowed them to reorganise before the United States entered the war. A truce of three weeks was thus signed at Brest-Litovsk November 22, with the General Staff of Austria and Germany. Negotiations opened on December 9 between the two parties, but the same day, the battle of Rostov-on-Don between the Red Guards and the White armies, heralded the opening of the civil war.[x] After seizing power, the hardest test now stood in front of the proletariat of Russia. While waiting for an extension of the revolution to the rest of Europe, it was necessary to prepare for a confrontation with the counter-revolutionary forces of the interior that were well supported by the major powers.

Beginning of the civil war and of the encirclement

The counter-revolution was really organised in the days following the elections to the Constituent Assembly which was marked by a majority hostile to the Soviet government. At the end of November, generals Alexiev, Kornilov and Denikin, and the Cossak Kaledin, set up the army of volunteers in the south of Russia. At the beginning it was composed of about 300 officers. This army was the first military reaction of the Russian bourgeoisie. Its financing was provided by: "the plutocracy of Rostov-on-the-Don which raised six-and-a-half million roubles, that of Novocherkassk about two million". Made up of officers favourable to a restoration of the monarchy, it held, "the embryo of a class character" according to the Russian general Denikin[xi].

The Soviet government couldn't allow this army to be set up without reacting and the revolution had to strengthen itself on the military level. On January 28, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars adopted a decree aimed at transforming the Red Guard into a workers’ and peasants’ Red Army made up "of the most conscious and best organised elements of the labouring classes"[xii]. But the organisation of this army remained a difficult task. In fact, due to the lack of competent communist leaders, Trotsky recruited from the officer corps of the Tsarist army. By the beginning of 1918, the balance of force was hardly in favour of the Russia of the Soviets. Germany and Austro-Hungary profited from the breakdown of the army and then from its demobilisation on January 30 in order to put an end to the armistice signed some weeks before. In a radio programme reported in Pravda, the Council of People's Commissars protested: "regarding the offensive launched by the German government against the Soviet Republic of Russia which proclaimed the end of the state of war and begun to demobilise the army on all fronts. The workers and peasants government of Russia could expect a less similar attitude; the armistice had not been denounced by any of the contracting parties neither directly nor indirectly, neither February 10, nor any other moment as both parties were bound by the agreement of December 2,[xiii] 1917."

In fact Germany used the pretext of the independence of Ukraine to go onto the offensive with the consent of the Rada, the bourgeois government of Ukraine. A rout of the Red Guard followed, recalled by the Bolshevik Primakov:

"The retreat of the Red Guard resembles a great exodus. More than a hundred thousand, accompanied by their families, fled Ukraine. Tens of thousands of others dispersed into the villages, the hamlets, the forests and the ravines of Ukraine (...) The heavy burden of war, the violence of the occupying troops, the arrogance of the German lieutenants, the impudence of the haidamaks (Cossack paramilitaries), the bloody vengeance of the big owners, the betrayal of the Rada central, the open pillage of the country only inflamed popular hatred. The government of the central Rada was known as the Government of Betrayal."[xiv]

It is in this very difficult situation that the first mass levies of the Red Army took place while the question of peace was more and more pressing for the survival of the revolution.

The peace of Brest-Litovsk and the military offensive of the bourgeoisie

If, in order to gain time in the first place, the Republic of Soviets adopted a strategy of "neither war, nor peace", the delayed European revolution made the signing of the peace inevitable despite the shameful conditions imposed by the Central Empire which amputated a huge part of Russian territory. We know that afterwards the question of the peace gave rise to debates within the Bolshevik Party and the left S-R's. It's not the place here to dwell on these. But with this setback the position defended by Lenin, accepted by the Seventh Party Congress, turned out to be the best adapted to the situation.[xv]

In the weeks and months that followed, the Republic of Soviets was encircled on all fronts and the White Armies were set up in several parts of the country. In Samara, the Czechoslovakian legion was set up by the Entente powers[xvi] sowing terror along the Trans-Siberian railway line in important conurbations, thus facilitating the uprisings. Subsequently, the Anglo-Americans landed at Murmansk, the Whites occupied the south of western Russia, the Germans and Austrians came into the Don region and Japanese troops landed at Vladivostok...

At the beginning of summer 1918, the situation of the Republic of Soviets was becoming very alarming. On July 29 Lenin wrote: "Murmansk to the north, the Czechoslovak front in the east, Turkestan, Baku and Astrakhan in the south-east, we are seeing that all the chains forged by imperialism are in place." We can see that the engagement of the powers of the Entente was decisive for the organisation of the counter-revolution - a detail that our good democrats prefer to avoid. At the beginning of 1919, about 25,000 British, French, Italian, American and Serb soldiers were mobilised between Archangel and Murmansk[xvii] in a fight to the death against "the Bolshevik peril", which would continue to spread "if it wasn't stopped", according to Clemenceau.

The testimony of a member of the Expeditionary Force, Ralph Albertson, bears eloquent witness to the determination and barbarity used by this anti-communist coalition: "We used all the exploding gas shells possible against the Bolsheviks... We laid all the booby-traps possible when we evacuated the villages. Once we shot more than twenty prisoners... And when we took the commissar at Borok, a sergeant told me that his body had been left in the street, wounded by more than sixteen bayonet cuts. We took Borok by surprise and the commissar, a civilian, had no time to take up arms... I heard an officer tell his men that they weren't to take prisoners, that they had to kill them even if they were unarmed... I saw unarmed Bolshevik prisoners, causing no trouble, slaughtered in cold blood... Every night a battalion of incendiaries caused masses of victims."[xviii]

The peace of Brest-Litovsk only stirred up the hatred of the different counter-revolutionary factions but also of the left S-R's against the Bolsheviks. From this time on, the Russia of the Soviets appeared like a besieged fortress where hunger "is at the door of many towns, villages, factories and mills", as Trotsky related. The alliance of the Whites and the western powers plunged the revolution into a situation of a permanent struggle for survival. Moreover, from March 15, 1918, the different governments of the Entente decided to reject the peace of Brest-Litovsk and organised an armed intervention. But while the Entente powers were intervening directly in Russia, they also counted on the betrayal of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in order to advance the counter-revolution. In June 1918, the ex-assistant of Kerensky, the S-R Boris Savinkov, forecast the assassination of Lenin and Trotsky and started up an insurrection in Rybinsk and Yaroslav so as to facilitate landings by the Allies. In other words, in view of the extreme weakness of the Red Army, a great offensive was put into action in order to finish with the revolution once and for all.

As Savinkov relates, the Whites hoped to "encircle the capital with uprisings in the towns and, using the support of the Allies and Czechoslovaks to the north, who had just taken Samara on the Volga, putting the Bolsheviks in a difficult situation". We now know, thanks to the memoires published by several foreign secret agents and to investigations appearing in Pravda some years later, as well as diplomatic sources, that Britain and France were at the heart of this plot. The plans for insurrections in the towns around Moscow, the foreign landings, the Czechoslovak offensive were part of one and the same scheme orchestrated by the foreign military and diplomats and executed by leading S-R's who were ferociously opposed to peace with Germany and to the extension of the revolution.[xix]

The Czechoslovak regiments, guided by the Allies, took Samara on June 8 and then laid siege to Omsk. A month later they took Zlatoust in the Urals then, a few days later, they approached Yekaterinburg where the Imperial family was interned. The liberation of this family would have allowed the unification of the counter-revolutionary forces that were having a difficult time settling their own arguments and divergences. The Bolsheviks didn't want to run this risk and decided to execute the whole family. This decision was motivated by the necessity to intimidate the enemy and to show it, as Trotsky wrote some years later, "that there was no retreat possible, that the issue was total victory or total defeat". Despite everything, this decision was turned back against the Bolsheviks. The execution of the Tsar's children was utilised by the international bourgeoisie in its propaganda campaigns so as to present the Bolsheviks as barbarians thirsty for blood.

In July and August the offensive continued with the French and British landing in Murmansk in the north where they installed an “autonomous” government. The Turks and the British occupied Azerbaijan. The Germans went into Georgia with the consent of the Mensheviks while the Czech legions continued their advance towards the west. These weeks turned out to be decisive for the defence of the revolution, whose survival was hanging by a thread. At Sviajsk, close to Kazan, after several days of fighting, the extremely weakened high-command of the 5th Army could have all been captured with its main military chiefs beginning with Trotsky. A lack of information and strategic errors by the White generals allowed Trotsky and his men to escape. Given the extreme weakness of the Soviet power, the capture of its main leaders would have dealt a fatal blow to the morale and determination of the troops.

In the north, the British took command of all the armies of the region. Outside of four or five British battalions, the force was composed of four or five American battalions, one French, one Polish and one Italian plus some mixed formations[xx]. A Russian army was also organised but remained under the command and supervision of the British. At the beginning of August, this northern army took Archangel, overthrew the soviet and set up a provisional government composed of S-R cadets and controlled by British general Pool.

At the same time, the Commune of Baku fell in mid-August faced with an offensive by the Turkish army, some moussavatists (Azerbaijan nationalists) and some British regiments. Twenty-six people's commissars were gunned down on September 18 by the British[xxi].

Different factions of the Russian bourgeoisie profited from this difficult context in order to destabilise the power of the Soviets by fomenting plots which could have turned out to be disastrous for the revolution.

The time of plots

 A counter-revolutionary bloc was formed from May and June 1918, going from monarchists to some Mensheviks and S-R's. All these rallied around a "National Centre" that was originally created by the Cadets. The main leaders of the movement worked to collect political and military information which they transmitted to different White armies and maintained close relations with British, French and American secret agents. Moreover, a special conference was held in October 1918, composed of representatives of the Entente countries and the National Centre. The Cheka reacted rapidly, taking account of the existence of this single centre of the counter-revolution.

But that didn't prevent attempts aiming to destabilise the Soviet Republic. August 30, the chief of the Cheka, Ouritsky, was assassinated by an S-R. Some hours later an attempt was made on the life of Lenin when he came out of the Michaelson factory. But these two attempts were part of a much wider enterprise aimed at liquidating all of the leading Bolsheviks: "On August 15, Bruce Lockhart (a British secret agent) received a visit from an officer who presented himself as Colonel Berzine, the commander of the Latvian Guard of the Kremlin. He handed over a letter of recommendation written by Cromey, the British naval attaché to Petrograd. Berzine declared that, although they had initially supported the Bolsheviks, the Latvians didn't want to fight against the British who had landed at Archangel. After discussing with Groener, the French General Counsel, Lockhart put Berzine in touch with Railey. At the end of August, Groener presided over a secret meeting of certain Allied representatives. It was held at the General Consulate of the United States. Railey and another spy, George Hill, as well as Moscow's Figaro correspondent, René Marchand, were in attendance. Raily recounts in his memoires that he made it known that he had bought Berzine for two million roubles. It was a question of a single blow seizing the leading Bolsheviks who were due at a meeting of their Central Committee. The British were in touch with General Yudenitch and were preparing to supply him with arms and material. (...) After the assassination of Ouritski, the Cheka, who were on the plotters’ scent, had penetrated the British embassy in Petrograd. Cromey fired on the police, killing a commissar and several agents. He was shot and so was the naval attaché who was about to burn some compromising papers. But there was still enough left to enlighten the investigators; Raily managed to escape. After several months he got back to London where he accused Marchand of having betrayed him... As to Berzine, the Soviet press subsequently revealed that he had indicated to his chiefs that Bruce Lockhart and Raily had offered him two million roubles to participate in the assassination of the leading Bolsheviks."[xxii]  

The arrest of Bruce Lockhart concluded an enquiry that fully demonstrated the foreign participation in the plot and the scheming of the Whites[xxiii].

This failed plot was nonetheless one of the culminating points of the counter-revolution. At this stage the fall of the Soviet Republic seemed imminent. Faced with such a situation, the Red Terror was decreed on September 6. But if this measure was a major error[xxiv] we must admit that it was imposed by the force of events, that's to say by the terrorist practices of the foreign powers and the White armies.

"Without the help of the Allies, it is impossible to liberate Russia"

Officially, the bourgeois governments intervened in Russia in defence of democracy and against the "Bolshevik Peril". But in reality, the installation of a democracy was the last thing on the minds of the powers of the Entente who, before everything, were determined to avoid the extension of the revolutionary wave which was gaining ground in Germany by the end of 1918. The French, British and American bourgeoisies were prepared to do anything in order to defend their interests. Thus, from the beginning of the civil war, the invading armies acted like bloody hordes, supporting or installing military dictatorships in the territories re-taken from the Red Army. This is what happened for example at the beginning of January 1919, when General Miller landed at Archangel and proclaimed himself Governor General of the town and Minister of War. Leading an army of 20,000 men, made up of peasants and monarchist fishermen who hated the communists, he unleashed a reign of terror on the region. The old prosecutor of the province, Dobrovolsky, recalls that "the partisans of Pinet were so ferocious that the commander of the 8th regiment, a Colonel B., decided to produce a pamphlet on the human attitude to have towards prisoners".[xxv]

Moreover, the Allies didn't hesitate in directly supporting the armies of the main White army chiefs, partisans of a very authoritarian power such as Denikin and Kolchak. The offensive of the latter, undertaken from Siberia to the outskirts of Moscow at the end of 1918, was in great part made with a military arsenal supplied by the foreign powers: "The United States delivered 600,000 rifles and hundreds of cannons, many thousands of machine-guns, munitions, tools, uniforms, Britain 200,000 tools, 2000 machine-guns, 500 million bullets. France 30 planes and more than 200 automobiles. Japan 70,000 rifles, 30 cannons, 100 machine-guns, the necessary munitions and 120,000 tools. In order to pay for these deliveries which allowed him to furnish an army of more than 400,000 men, Kolchak sent from Hong-Kong 184 tonnes of gold, treasure which had been given to him"[xxvi].

It was this military division of labour between the Allies and the White Armies which the proletariat in Russia had to face up to throughout the year 1919. Lenin was well aware of the extreme fragility of the Soviet power and this is why he saw the need to denounce the role of the Tsarist generals in collaborating with the foreign armies:

“Kolchak and Denikin are the chief, and the only serious, enemies of the Soviet Republic. If it were not for the help they are getting from the Entente (Britain, France, America) they would have collapsed long ago. It is only the help of the Entente which makes them strong. Nevertheless, they are still forced to deceive the people, to pretend from time to time that they support ‘democracy’, a ‘constituent assembly’, ‘government by the people’, etc. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries are only too willing to be duped.

The truth about Kolchak (and his double, Denikin) has now been revealed in full. The shooting of tens of thousands of workers. The shooting even of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The flogging of peasants of entire districts. The public flogging of women. The absolutely unbridled power of the officers, the sons of landowners. Endless looting. Such is the truth about Kolchak and Denikin”.[xxvii]

This great counter-revolutionary alliance was even more vital when the revolution broke out in Germany in 1918. As the American historians, M. Sayers and A. Khan relate in The Great Conspiracy against Russia:

"The reason why the Allies didn't march on Berlin, and definitively disarm German militarism, resides in their fear of Bolshevism. The Allied Commander-in-Chief, Marshall Foch, revealed in his memoirs that, from the opening of peace negotiations, the German spokesmen constantly evoked the threat of the ‘Bolshevik invasion of Germany'... General Wilson of the British High Command recalled in his 'War Diary' that, November 9, 1918, two days before the signature on the Armistice, 'the cabinet met this night, from 6:30 to 8 o'clock, Lloyd George read two telegrams from 'Tiger' (Clemenceau) in which he told of an interview of Foch with the Germans: Tiger dreads the fall of Germany and the victory of Bolshevism in this country: 'Lloyd George asked me if I wanted that to happen or if I preferred an armistice. I replied without hesitation 'Armistice'. The whole cabinet agreed with me. For us, the real danger from now on wasn't the Germans, but Bolshevism'".

The fear of the extension of the revolution to the whole of Europe sharpened the determination of the bourgeois powers to definitively break the power of the Soviets. At the Peace Conference, Clemenceau was the most ferocious defender of this policy: "The Bolshevik danger is very great at this present hour; it is spreading. It has won over the Baltic Provinces and Poland; and, this morning, we have received very bad news, because it has spread to Budapest and Vienna. Italy is also in danger. The danger is probably greater there than in France. If Bolshevism, after spreading to Germany, crossed Austria and Hungary, taking in Italy, Europe would have to face a very great danger. That is why it is necessary to do something against Bolshevism."

Affirming loud and clear at this conference, "the right of peoples to self-determination", the bourgeoisie would not leave the world proletariat to make up its own mind at the risk of putting bourgeois society in peril. For both camps, the key to victory resided in the extension or isolation of the revolution. Also the fear of the bourgeoisie can be measured against the degree of violence and the atrocities which they carried out in Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy. Because behind the veil of "the rights of man" hides the interests of a ruling class which always uses the worst measures when it's a question of its own survival.

Economic strangulation

The striking speeches of Clemenceau (above) allow us to understand his insistence on decreeing a total blockade of Russia and working for the neighbouring states to remain hostile to the Soviet Republic[xxviii].

And also arising from this, his determination to combat the revolutionary wave. The delay in making the revolution by the European and world proletariat plunged the Russian bastion into complete isolation. The Soviet Republic henceforth became a "besieged fortress" trying to resist immense difficulties. In 1919-1920, the effects of rationing and the subjugation of production to the needs of war applied during the course of the war, was making itself felt still more in this country. To this could be added the devastation of the civil war and the economic blockade imposed by the democratic powers between March 1918 and the beginning of 1920. All imports were blocked, including solidarity parcels sent by the proletariat of other countries. The White armies and those of the Entente had the coal of the Ukraine and the oil of Baku and the Caucasus in their grip, engendering a shortage of combustible material. The combustibles which reached the towns were down to 10% of that consumed before World War I. Famine in the towns was terrible where everything was in short supply. Heavy industry workers received first category rations which didn't go beyond 900 calories.

Evidently, this situation also had repercussions on the state of the soldiers of the Red Army who were prey to hunger, cold and sickness. In October 1919, the White troops of Yudenitch threatened Petrograd and the brigade commander, Kotovsky from the Ukraine, appealed for reinforcements. On November 4 Kotovsky sent an edifying report: "A generalised epidemic of typhus, scabies, eczema and sickness due to the cold following a lack of laundry, uniforms and baths. All this puts out of action 75 to 85% of our old fighting force who are, on the way to, or remaining in clinics and hospitals". Faced with the protests of some regiments, the brigade was rested. It could have been worse: "we were confronted with other difficulties, wrote a soldier. A typhoid epidemic has broken out and sicknesses due to the frost have ravaged the brigade. Soldiers and officers live in unheated barracks and receive starvation rations: 200 grams of 'soukhari' (a sort of grilled bread) and 300 grams of cabbage. It makes my heart ache to see our horses dying for lack of forage"[xxix]. Trotsky depicted in sombre terms the appearance of these same troops who were supposed to defend the main bastion of the Russian proletariat: "The workers of Petrograd do not look good: pasty-faced because of their hunger and lack of food, ragged clothed, boots with holes in, mismatched clothes."

After 1921, shortages continued and rationing became yet more drastic: "the ration of black bread was still on 800 grams for the workers of refineries and 600 grams for the model workers. The ration was decreased to 200 grams for holder of a ‘B card’ (unemployed). Herring stocks, which in other circumstances had saved the day, were completely lacking. Potatoes arrived frozen in the towns because of the lamentable state of the railways (running at hardly 20% of their pre-war potential). At the beginning of spring, 1921, an atrocious famine ravaged the western provinces of the Volga region. According to statistics recognised by the Congress of Soviets, between 2 and 2.7 millions suffered from hunger, cold, typhoid, diphtheria, influenza, etc."[xxx]

In the factories, the super-exploitation of workers didn't prevent the fall in production. The lack of food and the chaos of the economy pushed some to migrate to the countryside and others to leave the big firms for small workshops making barter easier. In these conditions, it was decided to enact the New Economic Policy (NEP) which put a brake on the statification of production.

The civil war left behind it a country bled white. Close to 980,000 deaths in the ranks of the Red Army and 3 million in the civil population. The already existing famine was amplified in the summer of 1921 with a terrible drought spreading throughout the Volga basin.

Even if, faced with the development of mutinies and the revolutionary "danger" on their own territory, the foreign powers withdrew their own troops during 1920, and if the counter-revolutionary armies had never really been up to re-taking power, gangrened as they were by internal quarrels, the lack of discipline and the absence of coordination, the world bourgeoisie nevertheless succeeded in stopping the revolutionary wave which had burst out after four years of imperialist war. The total isolation of Soviet Russia signalled the kiss of death for the revolution and plunged it into degeneration[xxxi].

As we will see in the second part of this article, it is in this context that Social Democracy and then Stalinism delivered the coup de grace to the October revolution and to its heritage.

Narek, April 8 2018.