Revolutionary Russia ISSN: 0954-6545 (Print) 1743-7873 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/frvr20 LENIN S THE STATE AND REVOLUTION AND SOVIET STATE VIOLENCE: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS James Ryan To cite this article: James Ryan (2007) LENIN S THE STATE AND REVOLUTION AND SOVIET STATE VIOLENCE: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS, Revolutionary Russia, 20:2, 151-172, DOI: 10.1080/09546540701633452 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09546540701633452 Published online: 04 Dec 2007. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1927 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=frvr20 Download by: [37.44.206.4] Date: 09 December 2017, At: 18:41
Revolutionary Russia, Vol 20, No. 2, December 2007, pp. 151 172 James Ryan LENIN S THE STATE AND REVOLUTION AND SOVIET STATE VIOLENCE: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS FRVR_A_263191.sgm 10.1080/09546540701633452 Revolutionary 0954-6545 Original 2007 Taylor 2000000December JamesRyan james.m.ryan@student.ucc.ie and & Article Francis (print)/1743-7873 Russia 2007 Group Ltd(online) Through an examination of his pamphlet The State and Revolution, this article seeks to understand how Vladimir Lenin, on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in October 1917, conceptualized proletarian state violence. Building on certain key works on Lenin and his thought, both recent and not so recent, it demonstrates that the apparently large disparity between The State and Revolution and Lenin s years in power in the Soviet Union is, in fact, quite false. It is to be argued here that Lenin, in fact, envisaged a dictatorship of the proletariat not far removed from the violent and oppressive regime that emerged in Soviet Russia during his years in power. Lenin is to be understood as a complex theorist, whose conception of proletarian state violence was somewhat ambiguous but nevertheless clear in that force was to be the midwife not just of revolution but of full communism as well. Immediately before the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in October 1917, Vladimir Il ich Lenin was occupied with the writing of a pamphlet that was eventually published in 1918 under the title The State and Revolution. This work has become something of a mystery to historians of Lenin s political thought and to his biographers. Given that much of the works that fill the volumes of his Collected Works are short articles intended for immediate publication in the organs of the Russian Social-Democratic movement, State and Revolution, the English edition of which runs to a hundred pages, would appear to have been imbued with particular significance by its author. Indeed, it seems that Lenin intended the work as a theoretical contribution to Marxist literature that would transcend the demands of the moment and provide guidance to Russian Marxists (and, indeed, Marxists of all countries) regarding the nature and role of the state in a proletarian revolution, though it was also to have practical relevance for the coming proletarian revolution in Russia and Lenin surely recognized that such a revolution was imminent at the time of writing the pamphlet. The purpose of this article is to identify the significance of State and Revolution regarding the violence and terror that were to characterize the years of Lenin s rule in Soviet Russia. The principal question to be answered is that of whether or not the practice of the revolution was a betrayal of the text of State and Revolution, with regard to the use of political violence. Historians have traditionally regarded this work as utopian, unrealistic and out-of-step with reality. Those of a more cynical disposition have seen proof of Lenin s disingenuousness in the disparity between the arguments of the text and the subsequent record of Soviet power. But in order to understand the true significance of the text, a superficial reading that ISSN 0954-6545 print/issn 1743-7873 online/07/020151-22 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09546540701633452
152 REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA seeks an explicit avowal or disavowal of terror is not enough; the implications and assumptions of the text must be brought to the surface. Moreover, State and Revolution should not be divorced from the practice of Soviet power and should be understood by reference to the record of Lenin s years in power. The rationale for such a stance will be put forward below. In the corpus of Lenin s works, State and Revolution is the most detailed attempt made to delineate the course of the proletarian revolution but it is also the definitive work by which Leninism is to be assessed and understood, a work that contains Lenin s fundamental philosophy of man, his inner convictions on human nature, his ideals for a more humane world, as Rodney Barfield put it. 1 It demonstrates more than any other work that theory and practice were, for Lenin, inextricably linked. It also demonstrates that, despite his considerable intellectual ability, Lenin s world view was strongly conditioned by his interpretation of Marxism. The work was written in a lucid style and its arguments are clear; not surprisingly, it has been one of the most influential works of Marxist theory. The argument of this article is that the conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as advanced by Lenin in State and Revolution, was not as far removed from the violent and oppressive dictatorship that emerged in the early years of Soviet Russia as has often been supposed. It is argued here that Lenin is to be understood as a complex theorist whose conception of proletarian state violence was somewhat ambiguous but nevertheless made clear that force was to be the midwife not just of revolution but of full communism as well. However, that State and Revolution presents an unrealistic vision of the future organization of a socialist society is not completely rejected; elements of utopian thinking are very much in evidence in the work. Nevertheless, Lenin did not revoke the text once the difficulties of the task confronting him, when in power, became apparent. The last preface to the text appeared on 17 December 1918, 2 three months after two government decrees inaugurated the Red Terror following an attempt on Lenin s life. 3 It was written at a time when famine and murder were stalking the villages and iron discipline was being called for in the industrial centres. The Russian descent into dystopia had begun and Lenin was well aware of this. James White has argued that Lenin s intent to have the work translated into German in 1918 was in order that a foreign readership would sympathize with the Bolsheviks decision to disperse the Constituent Assembly earlier in 1918, with the assumption that the reader of the text would understand that Bolshevik democracy was of a higher form than bourgeois democracy. 4 The question, however, should also be posed as to whether The State and Revolution in fact prescribed the remedy to Lenin s problems in 1918. Why did Lenin feel the need to make only a small amendment (though as will be shown, a significant insertion) to the text after the revolution? The answer is to be found in a fundamental duality that existed in Lenin s thought, a duality that had its roots in the dialectical conception of the world that was held by all Marxists and especially by Lenin. Marcel Liebman has argued that the weapon of dialectics was wielded by Lenin with a skill exceeding that of many of his lieutenants. 5 This duality concerned the creation of peace through violence, the belief that humanity had to pass through periods of extreme cruelty in order to reach the ideal human society, communism. In this regard, the message of The State and Revolution would remain as Lenin s legacy to Marxists all over the world: a vision of how things should and could be under the rule of the proletariat, even if unexpected obstacles were placed along the path. This is not to argue that The State and Revolution was intended for a time far removed from 1917; rather, it was intended as a guide from the moment the proletariat seized
LENIN S THE STATE AND REVOLUTION AND SOVIET STATE VIOLENCE 153 power, which as it turned out was an eventuality that arose before the work could be completed. Lenin wrote in the postscript to the first edition that I was interrupted by a political crisis the eve of the October revolution of 1917. Such an interruption can only be welcomed It is more pleasant and useful to go through the experience of the revolution than to write about it. 6 The primary concern here is with an examination of the advocacy of violence in the text, which is both explicit and implied. This article will begin with a commentary on existing interpretations of the work and will then provide an in-depth analysis of the text itself, with references to other of Lenin s contemporary works. Though the basic argument here is not particularly original and the argument builds on much recent and not so recent research on Lenin and his thought, an indepth textual analysis of the work with specific regard to its violent implications has not hitherto appeared. Historiography and commentary Of all the works that Lenin wrote, none has received more attention from historians and political scientists than The State and Revolution, with the possible exception of What is to be Done? (1902). Historians of Lenin s political thought, such as Neil Harding, have paid particular attention to the text, in Harding s case devoting a substantial chapter to the work in his monumental two-volume Lenin s Political Thought (1977, 1981). A.J. Polan s published doctoral thesis, Lenin and the End of Politics (1984), was a critique of Lenin s humanism that was based on a scrutiny of State and Revolution. However, both Harding and Polan are more correctly regarded as political scientists than as historians and a similar focus on State and Revolution is unfortunately not forthcoming from historians. Perhaps there is a very good reason for this: though historians certainly look at the theoretical underpinnings of the Bolshevik regime, they are normally less willing than political philosophers and political scientists to explore the full extent of the implications of a text for practice, preferring to remain on the more solid foundation of empirical history. On the other hand, it can be argued that the political scientists and philosophers have a tendency to see in a text much more than is actually therein contained (though in the context of Lenin s pre-revolutionary works, historians have also been guilty of this). There is, consequently, a need for a careful and systematic study of the pre-revolutionary ideological basis of Soviet state violence, one taking as its underlying assumption that the violent and oppressive Soviet state regime did not arise in an intellectual and ideological vacuum, while also recognizing that Lenin and his supporters could not have completely envisaged how a revolution would evolve in practice. The most searing criticism of State and Revolution has come from A.J. Polan. In Lenin and the End of Politics he exposed what he saw as the anti-democratic, anti-humanist and authoritarian essence of Lenin s political thought. Indeed, Polan s work is all the more damning as it examines not the more negative aspects of the text, such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the strong points that are usually regarded as giving the text its libertarian flavour. 7 To summarize briefly Polan s thesis, the end of politics in the book s title refers to the assumption, held by Lenin and the Bolsheviks generally, that a general will could be constructed for Soviet society by the Bolshevik Party, that the toiling people of the Soviet Union would naturally implement the vision
154 REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA of the Party once power had been seized by them and the old bourgeois state machine smashed in the aftermath of the revolution. Within this framework, any opposition to the Party s line would be regarded as a counter-revolutionary plot and the culprits would therefore be construed as enemies of the people. In this way, politics would cease to exist in Soviet Russia because any independent thinking or even slight deviation from the Party line would be inadmissible according to the dictates of the general will. Polan argues that Lenin s human philosophy, rather than being truly humanist, was in fact bleak and demeaning ; indeed, according to Polan, it was Lenin s ability to be at once a humanist (in his own way) and a ruthless revolutionary that made him a truly unique politician. 8 Polan s work has made an immense contribution to our understanding of State and Revolution. However, the work has some shortcomings. First, though State and Revolution is central to the study, actual references to the work and, more importantly, substantial quotation from the work are surprisingly quite sparse. In this regard, Lenin and the End of Politics is not truly a textual analysis of its subject. Secondly, Polan places considerable emphasis upon the importance of Bolshevik culture, suggesting that it is an underlying Bolshevik culture or, to employ another term, Bolshevik discourse that links the text with Soviet power. 9 This concept is a valid one and remains useful, but it suggests that Lenin s views, as expressed in State and Revolution, were not explicitly thought out and accepted as beliefs or doctrines. This article will argue, in contrast, that Lenin was, for the most part, well aware of what he was urging when writing State and Revolution and that Bolshevik discourse regarding the issue of violence was primarily (though by no means exclusively) constituted by and conducted through consciously held beliefs, and not merely cultural assumptions of which the protagonists were barely aware. Nevertheless, certain cultural assumptions do certainly become apparent in the text, such as the leading role of the Party in the revolution, which, though not explicitly mentioned in the text, would seem to be accorded an important place by the logic of the argument. However, this article will mention an important assumption shared by the Bolsheviks and Marxists in general that is of significance in analysing the relationship between Lenin s writings (and, indeed, those of Marx and Engels) and the subsequent violence of the Soviet state, that of the ethical basis of Marxism-Leninism. Thirdly, Polan raises an interesting methodological issue with his argument that it is only through the subsequent history of the Soviet Union that we may attribute any meaning to State and Revolution as a text. 10 The danger with such an approach is that of the possibility of reading certain meanings into the text, meanings that were perhaps not intended by the author. Although it is important to understand the implications of a text, even those not intended by the author, one should study a text, especially one such as State and Revolution, both in the context of the author s frame of mind at that time in which it was written and in the context of its wider, historical implications. The danger implied by Polan s methodology is that Lenin s actual intentions on the eve of the October Revolution become overshadowed by the course of events after the publication of the text. This article will follow the methodological premise of Lars Lih, who, in a recent work on What is to be Done?, argued that to assume an author to be incoherent or disingenuous, especially when that author was writing in a very different time, should be a last resort of interpretation, not a first. Furthermore, Lih explicitly allows Lenin to know his own beliefs and to maintain a fundamental consistency in his outlook. 11
LENIN S THE STATE AND REVOLUTION AND SOVIET STATE VIOLENCE 155 Neil Harding s path-breaking two-volume Lenin s Political Thought provided a balanced and scholarly account of Lenin s thought and highlighted the importance of the intellectual heritage that he had imbibed from the founders of Marxism and, especially, from the early Russian Marxist movement. 12 In his later work, Leninism (1996), he develops his earlier thesis and argues more forcefully that Leninism was indeed a legitimate heir to the writings of Marx and Engels, arguing that Both its considerable strengths and its considerable weaknesses were derived almost wholly from Marxism and he criticizes the counterposing [of] a hypostasized and sanitized Marx to a mythic Lenin. 13 Regarding State and Revolution, Harding agrees that it was written for the immediate situation in Russia. Most interestingly, however, he points to the differing accounts of the state and commune forms of organizing society that existed between the thought of Marx and Engels. Marx had been deeply influenced by the Paris Commune of 1871 and had apparently abandoned the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat that he had earlier agreed upon as the form of administration in a proletarian revolution. The latter concept would seem to differ less from a state form than the commune, which would not be a state in the true sense of the term. Engels, however, equated the two and Harding s argument is that Lenin was left with the task of reconciling the two concepts. 14 The significance of this is spelt out more clearly in Leninism, wherein Harding comments on the slide to terror. Lenin s view of the state was at the outset of the revolution that of the commune form, where coercion would not be necessary and social harmony would replace the discord of the hierarchy and division of the bourgeois state. However, once objective circumstances changed, from 1918 onwards, Lenin and the Bolsheviks could almost imperceptibly draw upon the other legacy of Marxism the dictatorship of the proletariat which presupposed a coercive state apparatus controlled by the proletariat and poor peasants. 15 Historians have provided generally less stimulating interpretations of the significance of State and Revolution. From the early 1970s, however, a revisionist school of thought regarding State and Revolution appeared. Rodney Barfield argued that the text was evidence of an important strand of idealism in Lenin s thought but that it can only be regarded as a true work of Leninism when divorced from the practice of Soviet power, thus revealing itself as a utopian work integral to his ideological system as a whole. 16 Although Barfield did not challenge the orthodox (at that time) thesis that State and Revolution was a utopian work, he may be classified as a revisionist because he located the work as an integral part of Lenin s outlook rather than dismissing it as an aberration. Though Barfield s analysis was quite limited, a truly revisionist interpretation of the work was provided by Alfred Evans in an article published in Slavic Review in 1987. Evans argued that State and Revolution had been misunderstood by Sovietologists, for Lenin did not reject discipline and hierarchy in the work but differentiated, as Marx had done, between lower and higher phases of communism, the former retaining many of the features of a bourgeois state. 17 More recently, however, historians have provided a greater understanding of the text s historical importance and have gone some way to negating Polan s criticism of historians interpretation of the text. Polan s criticism in 1984 centred around his belief that Only if we can read the history of State and Revolution in the subsequent history of the Soviet Union and of mankind will it have a history that contains any meaning. 18 Robert Service, in his one-volume biography of Lenin published in 2000, argues that State and Revolution was intended to be Lenin s masterpiece. However, he also argues that Lenin avoided a discussion of terror in the
156 REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA work, which prompts Service to accuse Lenin of being disingenuous. 19 Nevertheless, Service points out that Lenin recognized that the dictatorship of the proletariat would mean a dictatorship of a violent nature. Furthermore, Service argues that the text is opposed to civic freedoms. He concludes his analysis of the work by claiming that Lenin and the Bolsheviks generally were prepared for a civil war as the ultimate outcome of the class struggle. 20 Lenin s most recent biographer, Christopher Read, writing in 2005, has argued that State and Revolution perhaps contains the assumption that any deviation from the party line would be interpreted by Lenin as evidence that that person was still not yet free of the shackles of bourgeois thought and that Lenin may have imbibed this, though subconsciously, from the Orthodox Church. 21 Nevertheless, Read accepts that there was a disparity between State and Revolution and subsequent Soviet state power. Beryl Williams has placed more emphasis upon the relationship between Lenin and violence than any other recent Western biographer. She rejects the idea that State and Revolution is a utopian document, though she does accept that there was an important element of utopianism in Lenin s thought regarding the identity of interests and outlook between party and class and that an important duality existed in his thought. Lenin advocated both radical libertarianism and authoritarianism and hence it was not surprising that he came to emphasize authoritarianism once faced with the difficulties of power. 22 James White, writing in 2001, sees no connection between the text of State and Revolution and the subsequent violence of the Soviet dictatorship, focusing as he does upon the economic content of the work. Indeed, he argues that State and Revolution did not appear in print until 1918. It did not play any part in determining the character of the Bolshevik revolution, but it did have a role in influencing how that revolution was perceived. 23 This article will build on these interpretations, which highlight the historical meaning of the text in the context of the subsequent history of the Soviet Union. However, the intention here is to present a more detailed analysis of the weak points of the work those more explicitly concerned with dictatorship in addition to the strong points that Polan was concerned with. Strangely, it is precisely these weak points that have not received much attention in the literature on the work. In this regard, a superficial reading of the text that seeks an explicit avowal or disavowal of violence and terror will not be sufficient; rather, the assumptions and implications that pervade it need to be examined. It is the argument of this article that the Lenin of State and Revolution needs to be reconciled with the Lenin of the Red Terror and War Communism, such that an interpretive framework is created that does not in essence reimpose the traditional antagonistic duality between the good and the bad Lenin. It is perhaps more accurate to understand this duality as existing simultaneously in Lenin s thought. In this way, State and Revolution stands as the definitive statement of Leninism and contains the seeds of the destruction of human life that was inflicted on the Soviet populace from late 1917 through to the civil war period. Analysis of The State and Revolution This section will look more closely at the text of The State and Revolution, with specific regard to its violent implications, and also at other works by Lenin in the years leading up to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. None of the works mentioned in the
LENIN S THE STATE AND REVOLUTION AND SOVIET STATE VIOLENCE 157 previous section deals in any great depth with the references to violence contained in these texts. Robert Service argues (as we have seen) that Lenin did not give any indications of a coming reign of terror, and in support of this he quotes from an article in Pravda where Lenin stated that The Jacobins of the 20th century would not set about guillotining the capitalists: following a good model is not the same as copying it. 24 There are other such statements from Lenin at this time that seem to rule out the use of violence and especially terror in a proletarian revolution. Then again, Lenin had consistently rejected terror as a means of forcing revolution and concentrated instead upon organizing the masses for their historic role in bringing about socialism. 25 This does not mean, however, that Lenin rejected political violence in itself. It is not necessary to assume that Lenin was being disingenuous in these remarks. Nor is there any reason to assume that he was bloodthirsty and looking forward to the opportunity of exterminating and suppressing his enemies and the enemies of the revolution. Furthermore, there is no reason to assume that Lenin would not have wished for a peaceful revolution. However, it is the argument of this article that in his more theoretical works of the time, Lenin did indeed advocate violence and even terror against the enemies of the revolution. Indeed, whether Lenin envisaged a reign of terror on the eve of the revolution or not, he and the Bolsheviks had at least prepared a theoretical justification for such an eventuality. What will be argued here, though, is that Lenin never in fact truly envisaged a non-violent dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, Lenin s spirits were high in the late summer and autumn of 1917. The Bolsheviks had achieved a majority of support in the soviets of the major cities and, confronted with the revolutionary enthusiasm of the people, Lenin must have felt that the task of making revolution would be much easier than previously thought and certainly much easier and less bloody than the French Revolution, which after all was a revolution for the bourgeoisie. The Russian Revolution of the early twentieth century was to be an event that would far surpass anything that had been previously achieved in human history. In Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, which was written at about the same time as State and Revolution, Lenin spelled out the fundamental preconditions that would legitimate a seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and demonstrated that these conditions were now in existence in Russia. The first precondition would be a Bolshevik majority in the soviets. 26 It seems clear, therefore, that Lenin believed that a Bolshevik takeover would be legitimate and a proletarian revolution successful in instituting the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, upon carefully reading State and Revolution, it seems strange that the text was ever thought to be utopian or out-of-step with the rest of Lenin s works. The message of the text is contained in other of Lenin s works at that time: that of the necessity of smashing the existing state power and replacing it with a new state, a truly people s state as opposed to the falsified bourgeois concept of a free people s state, which was according to Lenin a phrase that simply paid lip service to equal rights for all but was in fact an instrument to allow for the continued oppression of the weakest members of society. 27 Under the new state, however, there would be no bossing but, rather, everyone would work for the good of society. There would be a people s militia composed of the entire body of the people to suppress counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs, and all elected officials would receive no more than workmen s wages and would be recallable at any time. It is perhaps these aspects of the future society that have, when compared with subsequent Soviet history, led to charges of utopianism being levelled against Lenin. These, however, are merely the most striking passages of
158 REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA the text and must be read within the context of the text as a whole. The work is composed on ambiguity and apparent contradiction. It is the most definitive statement of Leninism and also the work that exposes more than any other the duality that existed within Lenin s thought, the dialectical reconciliation of good and bad. The distinction between lower and higher phases of communism (as pointed out by Alfred Evans and mentioned above) must be borne in mind here. Though Lenin was referring to a time immediately following the proletarian revolution when painting a picture of an end to bossing, he was also advocating a significant continuation of control over all sectors of society and the economy (see below). Lenin s argument was that a violent revolution would be absolutely necessary in order to dispose of the old state machine and lead to the liberation of the proletariat: it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this alienation [of the working class]. 28 This is a clear statement of Lenin s absolutism: there can be no middle course between a violent proletarian revolution and a peaceful acquiescence to the rule of the bourgeoisie. According to Lenin, history had reached that stage whereby the final conflict was about to take place, the conflict that would for the first time install in power the lowest, most downtrodden, most alienated members of society in place of those who had prepared the way for them, the bourgeoisie. These sentiments are perfectly within the orthodoxy set down by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The proletariat, allied with the poor peasants (the alliance with the peasantry was an example of Lenin s application of Marxism to the Russian situation) would, through their suffering and oppression, rise up in arms against their oppressors and, through their actions, redeem humanity. There is a distinctive parallel between Marxism and Christianity here, something also noted by John Plamenatz: He [Marx] is merely dogmatic, and resorts to forms of words whose persuasive power comes largely of their being echoes of Holy Scripture. 29 Indeed, to dwell further on the significance of the religious overtones of Marxism, Arno Mayer has argued that political terror is often very closely linked to a sort of religious fervour: Terror may be said to break in upon politics when politics becomes quasi-religious or when a utopia beckons or demands to be realized. 30 While it would be ahistorical to claim that such a consideration led directly to Lenin s terror, the almost messianic fervour of Marxism-Leninism was, it would seem, certainly a causal factor. The individual human being is rendered unimportant by the prospect of the final destruction of oppression, conflict and alienation. Despite the ultimate goal of Marxists, human beings are very much regarded as instruments of the historical process in Marxist theory, more or less corrupted by society until such time as the higher phase of Communism is realized. Besides, the individual human essence is, according to Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach, no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations. 31 In other words, a human being is no greater than the society in which he or she lives and it is through this society that one defines oneself. Although Marx believed in the importance of individuals in the revolutionary process, the social collectivity is what mattered most for the general advancement of humanity, not the well-being of individuals. Hence, to steer this society in the necessary direction is the ultimate act of true morality for a Marxist. It will be demonstrated here that Lenin, in State and Revolution, prescribed to this view also.
LENIN S THE STATE AND REVOLUTION AND SOVIET STATE VIOLENCE 159 It was Engels who, as pointed out by Neil Harding, attempted to clarify the Marxist stance on the state. In an article published in 1980, 32 Harding dealt with the influence of the ideas of Nikolai Bukharin, a close associate of Lenin s in the Bolshevik Party and a talented theorist, upon Lenin s ideas in State and Revolution. Lenin later adopted the message of Bukharin s article, Towards a Theory of the Imperialist State, which proclaimed the necessity to smash the existing state and to replace it with the direct democracy of proletarian self-rule, rather than simply utilizing the existing apparatus of the imperialist state for the purpose of the proletarian revolution. Although Lenin had initially refused to accept that Bukharin s exhortation was truly Marxist (as opposed to anarchist) in orientation, Bukharin s ideas made a great impact upon Lenin and he soon came to agree with his younger follower. Indeed, Bukharin s extreme left-wing revolutionary ideas on the subject appealed to Lenin, and Harding points out that Bukharin believed that The awful prospect now emerged [under the imperialist state] of the extinction of the heroic, militant role of the working class, the suicide of its historical mission as the inaugurator of a properly human existence. 33 It was precisely such a situation, the absorption of the working class into the existing imperialist regime and the blunting of its revolutionism, that Lenin had, after all, been fighting against for much of his career, and it was such a fear on Lenin s part that largely explains the break-up of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party into its Bolshevik and Menshevik factions at the Second Party Congress in 1903. 34 How, then, did Lenin come to define the proletarian state? Lenin quoted extensively from Engels in State and Revolution. Engels argued that the state is not abolished. It withers away, referring to the state form that would exist after the proletariat had come to power. 35 However, the state would remain in existence until there would be no longer any social class to be held in subjection, and during this time the proletarian state would, like all previous states, be a special coercive force. 36 However, the bourgeois state would need to be abolished as the first act of the proletarian revolution. 37 Lenin did not dwell too much on the semantics of what would take its place; he referred to a state or semi-state. 38 Neil Harding s emphasis on the difference between a communal form of organizing and a dictatorship of the proletariat would appear to be very relevant to a discussion of State and Revolution and subsequent Soviet practice. Throughout State and Revolution, Lenin returned to the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and quite categorically stated that Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. 39 This section of the work (Chapter 2, Section III) was added in December 1918 the only amendment to the text made after the revolution and was written at a time when a full-blown civil war was underway and a powerful state machine seemed necessary to the Bolsheviks. This section also recognizes that there would be an entire historical period separating capitalism from communism, 40 that is, an entire historical period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, even in the chapter where Lenin dealt with Marx s experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, he simply claimed that Marx propounded the Commune as the form at last discovered, by the proletarian revolution, under which the economic emancipation of labour can take place. 41 According to Lenin, Marx s experience of 1871 did not lead to a fundamental reappraisal of what was to replace the old state but, rather, the commune form of organizing proletarian society simply clarified what Marx could not have known before 1871. Therefore, Lenin accepted Engels
160 REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA reconciliation of the commune with the dictatorship of the proletariat and herein lies much of the ambiguity in Lenin s argument. Furthermore, writing after the October Revolution, Lenin was in no doubt that he was presiding over a state in the true sense of the term and that he was not simply Citizen Ul ianov but a leader of this state. In The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, written in November 1918, Lenin stated that the proletariat alone has created the Soviet state, which, after the Paris Commune, is the second step towards the socialist state. 42 The significance of these lines concerns much more than semantics or Marxist theory. Theory for a Marxist is always inextricably linked with practice and this was especially emphasized by Marx, most notably in his Theses on Feuerbach. Lenin was also a believer in the absolute importance of practice, quoting Goethe to the effect that Theory is grey but life is green. 43 What is clear from State and Revolution is that the word state carries with it certain distinct implications. A state, according to State and Revolution, is a special organization of force: it is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class. 44 Furthermore, Lenin noted that Marx, writing in 1847, stated that there would be a proletarian state and it would be defined as the proletariat organized [my emphasis] as the ruling class. 45 The word organized implies a certain amount of centralism and discipline. The state, therefore, was to be an instrument for coercion or suppression wielded by the proletariat. Two questions arise out of this: first, coercion against whom; and, secondly, what did Lenin mean by coercion and suppression? Lenin provided a categorical answer for the first question: Naturally, only the exploiting class, i.e., the bourgeoisie. 46 To the second question, Lenin was more ambiguous. He seems to have defined suppression as simply denying the exploiting classes the right to vote or take part in civil society. In this sense, the use of force by the proletarian state may not necessarily have implied violence. However, Lenin also advocated the latter in State and Revolution. To begin with, he did not accept the possibility of a peaceful resolution of the class struggle. Indeed, he criticized all those, especially Kautsky, who envisaged such an eventuality, accusing them of robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. 47 Furthermore, speaking about the state in general, he wrote that the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable. 48 What this meant was that the state, which would still be required under the dictatorship of the proletariat (but would begin immediately to wither away ), would be required to destroy non-proletarian classes, the annihilation of the bourgeoisie as a class, for their very existence would be incompatible with a socialist society. The important question here is how these classes were to be destroyed. Grigorii Zinov ev s remark in September 1918 may be taken as an extreme answer to this question: We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million Soviet Russia population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated. 49 The question here is that of Lenin s solution in 1917 to the problem of how to destroy the bourgeoisie as a class: in State and Revolution a transitional form of proletarian state would be democratic in a new way [for the proletariat and the property-less in general] and dictatorial in a new way [against the bourgeoisie]. 50 Indeed, Lenin made it clear in State and Revolution that he conceived of democracy itself as little more than the dictatorship of the proletariat, that democracy would be superseded with the withering away of the state and that:
LENIN S THE STATE AND REVOLUTION AND SOVIET STATE VIOLENCE 161 Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organization for the systematic use of force by one class against another, by one section of the population against another. We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed [emphasis added]. In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another will vanish altogether. 51 In this passage, Lenin argued that democracy is but the expression of a class dictatorship, resting as it does upon a state, which is defined as an organization for the systematic rule of violence and force against the minority. What Lenin was saying here was that the democratic rule of the proletariat would be exercised in the form of a democratic dictatorship (which was not a terminological contradiction for Lenin, as he believed democracy to be the expression of the right to rule the state of a particular class). The sentence above in italics has been emphasized because of its seeming ambiguity. It may appear to mean that Lenin was not expecting the minority (exploiting class) to move to reaction against the proletarian state. However, such an interpretation would be contradicted by other remarks in the text and indeed by the general ethos of the work. First, Lenin referred to the inevitable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie. 52 If such desperate resistance were forthcoming, one can only assume that Lenin would have advocated the most serious terror against such class elements, as indeed he was to do when in power. To take one example, when the White forces were threatening the oil reserves in the town of Gur ev (now Atyrau) in the Ural Cossack region during the civil war, Lenin sent the following telegram to the commander of the Red forces in the region: Discuss separately with extreme care how to seize the oil in Guriev. This is imperative. Use both bribery and threats to exterminate every Cossack to a man if they set fire to the oil in Guriev [emphasis added]. 53 Secondly, Lenin argued that Marx opposed the proposition that the workers should renounce the use of arms, organized violence [emphasis added], that is, the state, which is to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie. 54 Thirdly, when commenting on the Paris Commune of 1871, Lenin concurred with Engels that a contributing factor to the defeat of the Communards was the fact that they did not crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie with sufficient determination. 55 Indeed, Engels, in On Authority (1872), advocated terror as a necessary means of self-preservation for the proletariat and, indeed, advocated an authoritarian state. It is worth quoting him at length, especially as this quotation was included with approval in State and Revolution: Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries [emphasis added]. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority? 56
162 REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA What is apparent from the above is that Lenin was attempting to reconcile the experience of the Commune form of state with the dictatorship of the proletariat but that, regardless of which form of proletarian state he envisaged, he believed in the necessity of suppressing the exploiting classes with violence and terror and not simply depriving them of their votes. What is also apparent from the above quotation is that Engels was advocating terror not merely in response to reactionary terror but as a means of preventing such reaction. Indeed, what Lenin is more likely to have intended by the italicized sentence was that he expected his fellow socialists to recognize that the minority would be subordinate to the majority and not put on an equal, democratic footing with the proletariat. This remark may also have been aimed at Karl Kautsky, whose conception of proletarian democracy was far removed from the notion of a proletarian dictatorship. The duality of Lenin s thought, an important theme of this article, appears clearly here: he is working towards a society that will put an end to all violence, all oppression and institute the inviolability of human life, but this society will be secured through a violent dictatorship of the proletariat and can only be attained in this way. We now turn to look more closely at Lenin s attempt to reconcile the commune form of governing with a dictatorship and will discover that Lenin put forward a remarkably authoritarian argument that laid the theoretical basis for a campaign of violence against the exploited classes themselves. *** Although Lenin advocated that only the exploiting class should be suppressed, it was his conception that the working class itself would not live in freedom until the final abolition of the state, which would require the elimination of all classes and inequality. The functions of the bourgeois state would be transformed under socialism (or the lower phase of communism, as Marx termed it) into simple procedures of control and accounting that are within the scope and ability of the vast majority of the population, and, subsequently, of every single individual. 57 However, during the first phase of communism, there would remain a certain amount of inequality and even for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie! 58 Lenin was not saying here that a bourgeois state and bourgeois law would actually continue to exist; rather, he was accentuating the differences between the lower and higher phases of communism and making clear that full communism was as of yet quite far removed from the present time, that the inevitable withering away of the state would be a protracted process. 59 Nevertheless, there would be an end to exploitation, as the means of production would be socialized as opposed to concentrated in the hands of individual capitalists, 60 though Lenin was quite categorical when he stated that So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state. 61 The importance of this is that: Until the higher phase of communism arrives, the socialists demand the strictest control by society and by the state over the means of labour and the measure of consumption; but this control must start with the expropriation of the capitalists, with the establishment of workers control over the capitalists, and must be exercised not by a state of bureaucrats, but by a state of armed workers. 62 What was intended here was more clearly expressed elsewhere in State and Revolution. Lenin spoke of the establishment of strict, iron discipline backed up by the state power
LENIN S THE STATE AND REVOLUTION AND SOVIET STATE VIOLENCE 163 of the armed workers and argued that this discipline must be exercised against all members of society, for we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and foremen and accountants, since, after all, we are not utopians, we do not dream of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. 63 What Lenin intended here was that this iron discipline was to be extended to the proletariat itself and that all should be subordinated to the control of the proletarian state: this factory discipline, which the proletariat, after defeating the capitalists, after overthrowing the exploiters [emphasis added], will extend to the whole of society, is by no means our ultimate ideal, or our ultimate goal. 64 The working masses were, therefore, to be directed by the party. On 14 October 1917, nearly two weeks before the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, the newspaper of the Soviet Central Executive Committee, Izvestiia, carried a report on the founding of the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), which can be regarded as the forerunner of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka. Listed amongst the immediate tasks of the MRC was the maintenance in the working masses and the soldiers of Petrograd of revolutionary discipline, 65 almost as though the workers were to be regarded as foot soldiers in an army. The ultimate goal would be achieved when all members of society would learn almost be conditioned to learn to work for the general good without coercion or bossing. In the meantime, all would need to be under control and it follows logically from this, though not explicitly stated, that the proletariat s extension of control over the whole of society could only be achieved by a large amount of centralism, which would mean power being invested in the apparatuses of the proletarian state, which, however, would be staffed by the working classes themselves. Indeed, in State and Revolution, Lenin was very explicitly anti-federalist, believing in the concept of voluntary centralism, 66 i.e., that the various local communes would of themselves transfer all resources to the entire nation and that any compromise on centralist principles would be incompatible with socialism, attacking Eduard Bernstein for not believing that centralism could be voluntary. It may appear that in this regard Lenin s view of the Soviet worker and peasant was utterly unrealistic and, indeed, utopian. Such an unrealistic view appeared also in his belief that the more state power would be distributed among the bourgeois parties in the Provisional Government, the more keenly aware the oppressed classes would become of their irreconcilable hostility to bourgeois society. 67 What is contained in these sentences is, once again, evidence of Lenin s utopianism for those who subscribe to the orthodox thesis on State and Revolution. It is the argument of this article, though, that such statements, though indeed evidence of an important strand of utopianism in Lenin s thought, coexist with statements that have quite contrary implications. The true sentiment of State and Revolution with regard to the working class during the lower phase of communism is contained in the sentence that immediately follows Lenin s remark on the extension of control to the whole of society: It [the extension of discipline] is only a necessary step for thoroughly cleansing society of all the infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation, and for further progress. 68 The parallels with Christianity are apparent here once more the lower phase of communism was to be an equivalent of Purgatory, where the unclean would proceed to be cleansed of their sins so that they may join God.