1917 and the revisionists

National Interest, The, Spring, 1993 by Richard Pipes

To what extent were Russia's industrial workers really Bolshevized? The figures are available, and they indicate that in the fall of 1917 a mere 7 percent of Petrograd workers belonged to the party; the nationwide proportion was lower still (5.3 percent).(14) With somewhere between 1 in 15 and 1 in 20 of Russia's workers in its ranks, the Bolshevik Party can hardly be said to have represented the working class or to have enjoyed its overwhelming support. In the October 1917 events in Petrograd only a tiny proportion of the city's "proletariat" was involved.

True, in the elections to the Constituent Assembly many workers voted the Bolshevik ticket, but the meaning of this vote demands explanation. The Bolshevik Party won the electoral support of a good proportion of industrial labor by promoting the slogan of "worker control." They encouraged the creation of Factory Committees to replace the national trade unions, dominated by their rivals, the Mensheviks, and incited workers to take over factory management. "Worker control," however, was an anarcho-syndicalist slogan which the Bolsheviks held in contempt even as they exploited it for tactical ends, implementing Lenin's strategy of mobilizing all potential enemies of the Provisional Government.

Because they neglect intellectual history, the revisionists are ill equipped to find their way through the thicket of political programs and slogans. Unlike European radical historians, who are likely to have undergone an apprenticeship in Marxism, American revisionists are largely innocent of ideology: essentially, their ideological equipment consists of liberal sentiments. This causes them to misunderstand the very social movements on which they lavish so much attention. Ignorant of the history of European syndicalism, they misinterpret the movement for factory control as indicative of sympathy for Bolshevism.

The Bolsheviks exploited the trend for worker control, as they exploited the Socialist-Revolutionary program of land socialization in order to court the peasants, and the slogan of national self-determination to win over the ethnic minorities. None of these promises they intended to honor and all of them they violated after coming to power. The factory committees did not survive for long: having served their purpose, they were abandoned in favor of conventional management practices. Here lay the seed of the conflict between the Bolshevik regime and the labor movement that broke into the open in 1920-21, a conflict that simply cannot be explained in terms of the analysis of 1917 provided by the revisionists.

THE GREATEST difficulty of all that the revisionists confront is in attempting to explain how a mass revolution instantly turned into a one-party dictatorship. For, according to its chronicler, revisionism perceives a "profound discontinuity" between an "essentially popular revolution" and the "highly authoritarian regime which emerged" from it.(15) Here little guidance was provided by Communist historians who denied that Lenin's government was a dictatorship and never came up with an explanation of Stalin that made sense to a Marxist believer in historical "inevitability." When pressed, the revisionists blame the collapse of "Soviet democracy" on the Civil War, but they neither demonstrate how this transformation occurred nor explain why, once the Civil War ended in 1920, Soviet Russia failed to revert to its supposed democratic origins. They also ignore that the Bolsheviks took power with the explicit intention of unleashing a civil war, so that it cannot be treated as an historic deus ex machina which upset their plans.