24.02.2005
Trotting out time-honoured falsehoods
Roy Bainton A brief history of 1917: Russia's year of revolution Constable and Robinson 2005, pp315, £8.99
Many hundreds, probably thousands, of books have been written about the Russian Revolution. What then makes this latest offering from Roy Bainton any different? Bainton seeks to apply the currently fashionable technique of 'oral history' to the revolution. Thus, whereas other books are written almost entirely about the main players - Lenin, Trotsky, Kerensky and so on - Bainton claims to focus on the events of 1917 largely through the eyes of the "ordinary Russian workers and soldiers of the Red Army". In reality, however, and perhaps inescapably for a book on 1917 Russia, Bainton does still largely focus on the leaders. The idea for this book came by a chance encounter the author had with a "bedraggled old man", who declared, "My parents were taken away by Stalin. Will you buy me a beer?" This was the first of a series of interviews, which Bainton crafts together with a fairly standard chronological description of the traumatic events of 1917. The number of surviving people who remember the events of that great year is very low, and to that extent this project could well be the last of its kind. Which is unfortunate, since Bainton's motives are totally reactionary and dishonest. For example, his characterisation of the Russian Revolution as a "chapter written by peasants, workers, soldiers and sailors, hijacked midstream by a caucus of determined intellectuals", is utterly false. For example, the Bolshevik Party was a huge organisation consisting primarily of workers. What did the Russian people want? An end to the war, the peasants to own the land they worked and food in the cities. These were exactly the things the Bolsheviks stood for, and the things the provisional government failed to deliver. In other words, there was a dialectical unity between the "peasants, workers, soldiers and sailors" and the "determined intellectuals" - both were essential for the revolution to succeed. The extreme contradictions in Russia of a small but heavily politicised proletariat and a huge, backward peasantry could in reality, though, only be resolved by a successful pan-European revolution. Another example of Bainton's complete dishonesty (or stupidity) is his comparison of the campaign to "eliminate the propertied classes" to the Nazi genocide of the Jews! How does the dispossession (not extermination) of a tiny minority of privileged exploiters equate to the attempted mass murder of an entire ethnic group? Bainton himself later points out that those elements of the old order prepared to cooperate with the new workers' state were allowed to retain their positions. Another particularly painful paragraph is where Bainton recycles the time-honoured falsehood that Marxism "makes too many demands on human nature" and that the driving force for the century is "that age-old motive, greed". So does he think the struggle to be rid of oppression, to achieve freedom and emancipation, is really about the failure of malcontents to accept what for him is presumably a perfectly satisfactory lot? Despite his simplistic, not to say reactionary, political outlook Bainton does clearly grasp the immense troubles the Bolsheviks and working class faced in retaining state power - one interviewee describes post-revolution Russia as being like "a chicken with its head chopped off". The leaders of the Bolshevik Party had for their entire adult lives "written, debated and theorised. They had studied Karl Marx, formulated plans of action", yet, when thrust into power, were faced with the huge task of building an entirely new proletarian state apparatus against the backdrop of counterrevolution and imperialist invasion. One example of the chaos given is the beginning of the campaign to nationalise the banks. Lenin had sent Piatakov, the new director of the state bank, to "remove" ten million roubles from a private bank. When Piatakov returned with the money, according to the author, "it was taken to a Smolny bedroom and kept in a wardrobe, around which was placed a ring of chairs and a worker with a rifle. This then was the first treasury of the Soviet Union." The difficulties of building this new state were increased hugely by internal pressures, and Bainton seems to focus particularly on the actions of those groups of workers not yet persuaded of the need for soviet power: the railworkers union, the Vikzhel, along with civil servants, postal workers and telephone operators, either went on strike or cut off services to the Bolsheviks. There were also, of course, the approaching forces of German imperialism. When the infamous peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, the conditions were devastating for Russia: "Sixty million Russians would now be subject to German puppet regimes; 32% of her arable land would be surrendered, 75% of her coal and oil production; 33% of Russia's factories and 26% of the railway network." But Russia was in no state to continue with the war. Bainton quotes the diary of a Red Cross nurse, Florence Farmborough, who describes soldiers declaring "Nam nuzhno mir! (We need peace)" and "Mir "¦ mir "¦ prezhde vsevo! (Peace above all else)". The Bolsheviks' resolute defeatism would come to gain massive support from soldiers and workers, once the initial patriotism of 1914 had been eaten away by the misery and cruelty of the imperialist slaughter. Years in the trenches and a thoroughly incompetent leadership, fighting a conflict the average peasant soldier had no understanding of, would erode support for the war effort to collapsing point. In any case Lenin and Trotsky fully expected a successful working class revolution in Germany within a few months. Hence Trotsky's tactic of 'neither peace nor war'. However, with the Germans approaching Petrograd, Trotsky was finally forced to sign the treaty in March 1918. From the first day of the revolution the bourgeoisie and their allies - both Russian and international - began to mobilise against the new regime. Reactionary generals such as Alexeev and Kolchak were assembling volunteer white armies. Over the course of the civil war there would be "1,250,000 Bolshevik deaths, equally as many whites, and around two million deaths from dysentery, typhoid and smallpox." One man interviewed by Bainton, 95-year-old Vladimir Abromovich Katz, vividly describes the interventionist forces who fought against the Soviet government: "Hundreds of soldiers disembarked from the ships. They were Greeks. It was horrific; they rounded up hundreds of people - men, women and children - and locked them in barns or warehouses, then set fire to them "¦ the Greeks shot lots of people." With so many enemies, both internal and external, determined to smash the new soviet regime, Bainton is right to exclaim: "It is amazing "¦ that the Soviets managed to ride out such compressed storms of horror to emerge victorious." Yet he is unable to understand that what went wrong in Russia was caused by the objective conditions, not some nonsense about 'human nature' and the alleged inseparability of Marxism and totalitarianism. The "ordinary Russian workers and soldiers of the Red Army", through whose eyes the events are supposed to be seen, often turn out somewhat differently. Bainton admits that the "few Russian survivors there are from 1917 appear to have had more of what the Soviets would refer to as a 'bourgeois' lifestyle in pre-revolutionary times, rather than a blue-collar, proletarian one". Those he interviews from previously wealthy backgrounds, or the young people (now "eagerly coming to terms with the wheeler-dealer atmosphere of a free-market economy"), are generally disapproving of their Soviet heritage and the memory of Lenin. To those from more working class backgrounds opinions of Lenin, and to some extent even Stalin, are more positive. Bainton does, however, give a detailed yet compact description of the main events of 1917. The February revolution, July days, Kornilov coup and October revolution are all thoroughly chronicled. The final two sections of the book consist of a chronological outline of 1917 and an "A-Z of political parties, prominent people and organisations". Whilst fairly basic, these are both useful summaries for someone new to this area of history. What it is necessary to demonstrate (and this book goes some way to achieving) is the dichotomy between the optimistic, mass-based 1917 revolution, intended as a spark for workers' rule throughout Europe, and the subsequent degeneration into 'socialism in one country' and the nightmare of Stalinism. These two phases are diametrically opposed and to portray the latter as the inevitable corollary of the former is the height of disingenuity. Ted North
Worker