The greatest myth of Marxism must surely be the idea that the Russian Revolution failed solely due to the impact objective factors. For Leninist, the failure of the revolution was the product of such things as civil war, foreign intervention, economic collapse and the isolation and backwardness of Russia and not Bolshevik ideology. Anarchists are not impressed by this argument.

Leninist John Rees recounts the standard argument, namely that the objective conditions in Russia meant that the "subjective factor" of Bolshevik ideology "was reduced to a choice between capitulation to the Whites or defending the revolution with whatever means were at hands. Within these limits Bolshevik policy was decisive. But it could not wish away the limits and start with a clean sheet." From this perspective, the key factor was the "vice-like pressure of the civil war" which "transformed the state" as well as the "Bolshevik Party itself." For the Bolsheviks had "survived three years of civil war and wars of intervention, but only at the cost of reducing the working class to an atomised, individualised mass, a fraction of its former size, and unable to exercise the collective power it had done in 1917." Industry was "reduced . . . to rubble" and the "bureaucracy of the workers' state was left suspended in mid-air, its class based eroded and demoralised." ["In Defence of October," pp. 3-82, International Socialism, no. 52, p. 30, p. 70, p. 66 and p. 65] Due to these factors, argue Leninists, the Bolsheviks became dictators over the working class and not due to their political ideas.

Anarchists are not convinced by this analysis, arguing that is factually and logically flawed. Needless to say, it would be near impossible to discuss these issues in any real depth in just one section. As such, we need to summarise the major facts, issues and points. For those interested in a fuller discussion as well as the necessary documentation, we would recommend reading the appendix on "The Russian Revolution." With that caveat, we now turn to summarising the problems with the Leninist approach. These fall into four main categories.

The first problem is factual. Bolshevik authoritarianism started before the start of the civil war and major economic collapse. Whether it is soviet democracy, workers' economic self-management, democracy in the armed forces or working class power and freedom generally, the fact is the Bolsheviks had systematically attacked and undermined it from the start. They also repressed working class protests and strikes along with opposition groups and parties. As such, it is difficult to blame something which had not started yet for causing Bolshevik policies.

Although the Bolsheviks had seized power under the slogan "All Power to the Soviets," as we noted in section H.3.11 the facts are the Bolsheviks aimed for party power and only supported soviets when they controlled them. To maintain party power, they had to undermine the soviets and they did. This onslaught on the soviets started quickly, a mere four days after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks when their Council of People's Commissars unilaterally took for itself legislative power simply by issuing a decree to this effect. "This was, effectively, a Bolshevik coup d'etat that made clear the government's (and party's) pre-eminence over the soviets and their executive organ." [Neil Harding, Leninism, p. 253] The highest organ of soviet power, the Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) was turned into little more than a rubber stamp, with its Bolshevik dominated presidium using its power to control the body and maintain Bolshevik power by, for example, awarding representations to groups and factions which supported the Bolsheviks and circumventing general meetings.

At the grassroots, a similar process was at work with power moving increasingly to the Bolshevik dominated soviet executives who used it to maintain a Bolshevik majority by any means possible. One such technique used to postpone new soviet elections, another was to gerrymander the soviets to ensure their majority. For example, when workplace soviet elections were finally held in Petrograd, their results were irrelevant because more than half of the projected 700-plus deputies in the new soviet were selected by Bolshevik dominated organisations. The Bolsheviks had secured themselves a solid majority even before factory voting began. When postponing and gerrymandering failed, the Bolsheviks turned to state repression to remain in power. For all the provincial soviet elections in the spring and summer of 1918 for which data is available, Bolshevik armed force not only overthrew the election results, it also suppressed the working class protest against such actions. [Vladimir Brovkin, "The Mensheviks' Political Comeback: The Elections to the Provincial City Soviets in Spring 1918", The Russian Review, vol. 42, pp. 1-50]

When the opposition parties raised such issues at the VTsIK, it had no impact. In April 1918, one deputy "protested that non-Bolshevik controlled soviets were being dispersed by armed force, and wanted to discuss the issue." The chairman "refus[ed] to include it in the agenda because of lack of supporting material" and such information be submitted to the presidium of the soviet. The majority (i.e. the Bolsheviks) "supported their chairman" and the facts were "submitted . . . to the presidium, where they apparently remained." [Charles Duval, "Yakov M. Sverdlov and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK)", pp. 3-22, Soviet Studies, vol. XXXI, no. 1, pp. 13-14] Given that the VTsIK was meant to be the highest soviet body between congresses, the lack of concern for state repression against soviets and opposition groups clearly shows the Bolshevik contempt for soviet democracy.

Unsurprisingly, the same contempt was expressed at the fifth All-Russian Soviet Congress in July 1918 when the Bolshevik gerrymandered it to maintain their majority. With the Mensheviks and Right-SRs banned from the soviets, popular disenchantment with Bolshevik rule was expressed by voting Left-SR. The Bolsheviks ensured their majority in the congress and, therefore, a Bolshevik government, when the Bolshevik credentials committee allowed the Committees of Poor Peasants, which were only supported by the Bolsheviks, to be represented. "This blatant gerrymandering ensured a Bolshevik majority . . Deprived of their democratic majority the Left SRs resorted to terror and assassinated the German ambassador Mirbach." [Geoffrey Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War, p. 176] The Bolsheviks falsely labelled this an uprising against the soviets and the Left-SRs joined the Mensheviks and Right-SRs in being made illegal. It should also be mentioned that the Bolsheviks had attacked the anarchist movement in April, 1918. So before the start of the civil war all opposition groups had suffered some form of state repression by the hands of the Bolshevik regime (within six weeks of it starting, every opposition group had been effectively excluded from the soviets).

A similar authoritarian agenda was aimed at the armed forces and industry. Trotsky simply abolished the soldier's committees and elected officers, stating that "the principle of election is politically purposeless and technically inexpedient, and it has been, in practice, abolished by decree." [Work, Order, Discipline] The death penalty for disobedience was restored, along with, more gradually, saluting, special forms of address, separate living quarters and other privileges for officers. In industry, Lenin, as we discussed in section H.3.14, started to champion one-man management armed with "dictatorial" powers in April, 1918. This simply replaced private capitalism with state capitalism, taking control of the economy out of the hands of the workers and placing it into the hands of the state bureaucracy.

As well as repressing working class self-management, the Bolsheviks also used state repression against rebel workers. "By the early summer of 1918," records one historian, "there were widespread anti-Bolshevik protests. Armed clashes occurred in the factory districts of Petrograd and other industrial centres." [William Rosenberg, Russian labour and Bolshevik Power, p. 107] Thus the early months of Bolshevik rule were marked by "worker protests, which then precipitated violent repressions against hostile workers. Such treatment further intensified the disenchantment of significant segments of Petrograd labour with Bolshevik-dominated Soviet rule." [Alexander Rabinowitch, Early Disenchantment with Bolshevik Rule, p. 37]

Clearly, whether it is in regards to soviet, workplace or army democracy or the right of workers to strike or organise, the facts are the Bolsheviks had systematically eliminated them before the start of the civil war. So when Trotsky asserted that "[i]n the beginning, the party had wished and hoped to preserve freedom of political struggle within the framework of the Soviets" but that it was civil war which "introduced stern amendments into this calculation," he was wrong. Rather than being "regarded not as a principle, but as an episodic act of self-defence" the opposite is the case. As we note in section H.3.8 from roughly October 1918 onwards, the Bolsheviks did raise party dictatorship to a "principle" and did not care that this was "obviously in conflict with the spirit of Soviet democracy." [The Revolution Betrayed] As Samuel Farber notes, "there is no evidence indicating that Lenin or any of the mainstream Bolshevik leaders lamented the loss of workers' control or of democracy in the soviets, or at least referred to these losses as a retreat, as Lenin declared with the replacement of War Communism by NEP in 1921." [Before Stalinism, p. 44]

For more details see the appendix on "What happened during the Russian Revolution?" as well as section 3 of the appendix on "What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?"

Secondly, it cannot be maintained that the Russian working class was incapable of collective action. Throughout the civil war period, as well as before and after, the Russian workers proved themselves quite capable of taking collective action — against the Bolshevik state. Simply put, an "atomised, individualised mass" does not need extensive state repression to control it. So while the working class was "a fraction of its former size" it was able "to exercise the collective power it had done in 1917." Significantly, rather than decrease over the civil war period, the mass protests grew in size and militancy. By 1921 these protests and strikes were threatening the very existence of the Bolshevik dictatorship, forcing it to abandon key aspects of its economic policies.

This indicates a key flaw in the standard Leninist account, as Russian workers were more than capable of collective action throughout the Civil War period and after. In the Moscow area, following the lull after the defeat of the workers' conference movement in mid-1918 "each wave of unrest was more powerful than the last, culminating in the mass movement from late 1920." [Richard Sakwa, Soviet Communists in Power, p. 94] This collective struggle was not limited to Moscow. "Strike action remained endemic in the first nine months of 1920." In Petrograd province, soviet figures indicate that strikes involving more than half the workforce took place in both 1919 and 1920. In early 1921 "industrial unrest broke out in a nation-wide wave of discontent" which included general strikes. [J. Aves, Op. Cit., p. 69, p. 109, and p. 120] As Russian anarchist Ida Mett succinctly put it:

"And if the proletariat was that exhausted how come it was still capable of waging virtually total general strikes in the largest and most heavily industrialised cities?" [The Kronstadt Rebellion, p. 81]

An "atomised" and powerless working class does not need martial law, lockouts, mass arrests and the purging of the workforce to control it. So, clearly, the Leninist argument can be faulted. Nor is it particularly original, as it dates back to Lenin and was first formulated "to justify a political clamp-down." Indeed, this argument was developed in response to rising working class protest rather than its lack: "As discontent amongst workers became more and more difficult to ignore, Lenin . . . began to argue that the consciousness of the working class had deteriorated . . . workers had become 'declassed.'" However, there "is little evidence to suggest that the demands that workers made at the end of 1920 . . . represented a fundamental change in aspirations since 1917." [J. Aves, Op. Cit., p. 18, p. 90 and p. 91.] So while the "working class had decreased in size and changed in composition,. . . the protest movement from late 1920 made clear that it was not a negligible force and that in an inchoate way it retained a vision of socialism which was not identified entirely with Bolshevik power . . . Lenin's arguments on the declassing of the proletariat was more a way of avoiding this unpleasant truth than a real reflection of what remained, in Moscow at least, a substantial physical and ideological force." [Sakwa, Op. Cit., p. 261]

Then there is the logical problem. Leninists say that they are revolutionaries. As we noted in section H.2.1, they inaccurately mock anarchists for not believing that a revolution needs to defend itself. Yet, ironically, their whole defence of Bolshevism rests on the "exceptional circumstances" produced by the civil war they claim is inevitable. If Leninism cannot handle the problems associated with actually conducting a revolution then, surely, it should be avoided at all costs. This is particularly the case as leading Bolsheviks all argued that the specific problems their latter day followers blame for their authoritarianism were natural results of any revolution and, consequently, unavoidable. Lenin, for example, stressed in 1917 that any revolution would face exceptionally complicated circumstances as well as civil war. Once in power, he continually reiterated this point as well as noting that revolution in an advanced capitalist nations far more devastating and ruinous than in Russia.

Moreover, anarchists had long argued that a revolution would be associated with economic disruption, isolation and civil war and, consequently, had developed their ideas to take these into account. It should also be noted that every revolution has confirmed the anarchist analysis. For example, the German Revolution of 1918 faced an economic collapse which was, relatively, just as bad as that facing Russia the year before. However, no Leninist argues that the German Revolution was impossible or doomed to failure. Similarly, no Leninist denies that a socialist revolution was possible during the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Consequently, it is not hard to conclude that for Leninists difficult objective circumstances place socialism off the agenda only when they are holding power. So even if we ignore the extensive evidence that Bolshevik authoritarianism started before the civil war, the logic of the Leninist argument is hardly convincing.

We discuss these issues in more detail in the appendix on "What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution?"

Finally, there is a counter-example which, anarchists argue, show the impact of Bolshevik ideology on the fate of the revolution. This is the anarchist influenced Makhnovist movement. Defending the revolution in the Ukraine against all groups aiming to impose their will on the masses, the Makhnovists were operating in the same objective conditions facing the Bolsheviks — civil war, economic disruption, isolation and so forth. However, the policies the Makhnovists implemented were radically different than those of the Bolsheviks. While the Makhnovists called soviet congresses, the Bolsheviks disbanded them. The former encouraged free speech and organisation, the latter crushed both. While the Bolsheviks raised party dictatorship and one-man management to ideological truisms, the Makhnovists they stood for and implemented workplace, army, village and soviet self-management. This shows the failure of Bolshevism cannot be put down to purely objective factors like the civil war, the politics of Marxism played their part.

For more information on the Makhnovists, see the appendix "Why does the Makhnovist movement show there is an alternative to Bolshevism?"

Therefore, anarchists have good reason to argue that one of the greatest myths of state socialism is the idea that Bolshevik ideology played no role in the fate of the Russian Revolution. Obviously, if the "objective" factors do not explain Bolshevik authoritarianism we are left with the question of which aspects of Bolshevik ideology impacted negatively on the revolution. We turn to this in the next section.