As we discussed in the last section, anarchists have good reason to reject the Leninist argument that the failure of Bolshevism in the Russian Revolution can be blamed purely on the difficult objective circumstances they faces. As Noam Chomsky summarises:

"In the stages leading up to the Bolshevik coup in October 1917, there were incipient socialist institutions developing in Russia — workers' councils, collectives, things like that. And they survived to an extent once the Bolsheviks took over — but not for very long; Lenin and Trotsky pretty much eliminated them as they consolidated their power. I mean, you can argue about the justification for eliminating them, but the fact is that the socialist initiatives were pretty quickly eliminated.

"Now, people who want to justify it say, 'The Bolsheviks had to do it' — that's the standard justification: Lenin and Trotsky had to do it, because of the contingencies of the civil war, for survival, there wouldn't have been food otherwise, this and that. Well, obviously the question is, was that true. To answer that, you've got to look at the historical facts: I don't think it was true. In fact, I think the incipient socialist structures in Russia were dismantles before the really dire conditions arose . . . But reading their own writings, my feeling is that Lenin and Trotsky knew what they were doing, it was conscious and understandable." [Understanding Power, p. 226]

Chomsky is right on both counts. The attack on the basic building blocks of genuine socialism started before the civil war. Moreover, it did not happen by accident. The attacks were rooted in the Bolshevik vision of socialism. As Maurice Brinton notes:

"there is a clear-cut and incontrovertible link between what happened under Lenin and Trotsky and the later practices of Stalinism . . . The more one unearths about this period the more difficult it becomes to define — or even to see — the 'gulf' allegedly separating what happened in Lenin's time from what happened later. Real knowledge of the facts also makes it impossible to accept . . . that the whole course of events was 'historically inevitable' and 'objectively determined'. Bolshevik ideology and practice were themselves important and sometimes decisive factors in the equation, at every critical stage of this critical period." [The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, p. 84]

A key issue is the Bolsheviks support for centralisation. Long before the revolution, Lenin had argued that within the party it was a case of "the transformation of the power of ideas into the power of authority, the subordination of lower Party bodies to higher ones." [Collected Works, vol. 7, p. 367] Such visions of centralised organisation were the model for the revolutionary state and, once in power, they did not disappoint.

However, by its very nature centralism places power into a few hands and effectively eliminates the popular participation required for any successful revolution to develop. The power placed into the hands of the nineteen members of the Bolshevik party's central committee was automatically no longer in the hands of the working class. As such, when Leninists argue that "objective" circumstances forced the Bolsheviks to substitute their power for that of the masses, anarchists reply that this substitution had occurred the movement the Bolsheviks centralised power and placed it into their own hands. As a result, popular participation and institutions became to wither and die. Moreover, once in power, the Bolsheviks were shaped by their new position and the social relationships it created and, consequently, implemented policies influenced and constrained by the hierarchical and centralised structures they had created.

This was not the only negative impact of Bolshevik centralism. It also spawned a bureaucracy. The rise of a state bureaucracy started immediately with the seizure of power. Instead of the state starting to wither away "a new bureaucratic and centralised system emerged with extraordinary rapidity . . . As the functions of the state expanded so did the bureaucracy." [Richard Sakwa, "The Commune State in Moscow in 1918," pp. 429-449, Slavic Review, vol. 46, no. 3/4, pp. 437-8] This was a striking confirmation of the anarchist analysis which argued that a new bureaucratic class develops around the centralised bodies created by the governing party. This body would soon become riddled with personal influences and favours, so ensuring that members could be sheltered from popular control while, at the same time, exploiting its power to feather its own nest.

Another problem was the Bolshevik vision of (centralised) democracy looked like. Trotsky is typical. In April 1918 he argued that the key factor in democracy was that the central power was elected by the masses, meaning that functional democracy from below could be replaced by appointments from above. Once elected the government was to be given total power to make decisions and appoint people as required as it is "better able to judge in the matter than" the masses. The sovereign people were expected to simply obey their public servants until such time as they "dismiss that government and appoint another." Trotsky raised the question of whether it was possible for the government to act "against the interests of the labouring and peasant masses?" And answered no! Yet it is obvious that Trotsky's claim that "there can be no antagonism between the government and the mass of the workers, just as there is no antagonism between the administration of the union and the general assembly of its members" is just nonsense. [Leon Trotsky Speaks, p. 113] The history of trade unionism is full of examples of committees betraying their membership. Needless to say, the subsequent history Lenin's government shows that there can be "antagonism" between rulers and ruled and that appointments are always a key way to further elite interests.

This vision of top-down "democracy" can, of course, be traced back to Marx's arguments of 1850 and Lenin's comments that the "organisational principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy" was "to proceed from the top downward." (see sections H.3.2 and H.3.3). By equating centralised, top-down decision making by an elected government with "democracy," the Bolsheviks had the ideological justification to eliminate the functional democracy associated with the soviets, factory committees and soldiers committees. The Bolshevik vision of democracy became the means by which real democracy was eliminated in area after area of Russian working class life. Needless to say, a state which eliminates functional democracy in the grassroots will not stay democratic in any meaningful sense for long.

Nor does it come as too great a surprise to discover that a government which considers itself as "better able to judge" things than the people finally decides to annul any election results it dislikes. As we discuss in section H.5, this perspective is at the heart of vanguardism, for in Bolshevik ideology the party, not the class, is in the final analysis the repository of class consciousness. This means that once in power it has a built-in tendency to override the decisions of the masses it claimed to represent and justify this in terms of the advanced position of the party. Combine this with a vision of "democracy" which is highly centralised and which undermines local participation then we have the necessary foundations for the turning of party power into party dictatorship.

Which brings us to the next issue, namely the Bolshevik idea that the party should seize power, not the working class as a whole (see section H.3.11). Lenin in 1917 continually repeating the basic idea that the Bolsheviks "can and must take state power into their own hands." [Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 329] He equated party power with popular power and argued that Russia would be governed by the Bolshevik party. The question instantly arises of what happens if the masses turn against the party? The destruction of soviet democracy in the spring and summer of 1918 answers that question (see last section). It is not a great step to party dictatorship over the proletariat from the premises of Bolshevism. In a clash between soviet democracy and party power, the Bolsheviks consistently favoured the latter — as would be expected given their ideology.

Then there is the Bolshevik vision of socialism. As we discussed in section H.3.12, the Bolsheviks saw the socialist economy as being built upon the centralised organisations created by capitalism. They confused state capitalism with socialism. "State capitalism," Lenin wrote in May 1917, "is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism" and so socialism "is nothing but the next step forward from state capitalist monopoly." It is "merely state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people; by this token it ceases to be capitalist monopoly." [The Threatening Catastrophe and how to avoid it, p. 38 and p. 37] A few months later, he was talking about how the institutions of state capitalism could be taken over and used to create socialism. Unsurprisingly, when defending the need for state capitalism in the spring of 1918 against the "Left Communists," Lenin stressed that he gave his "'high' appreciation of state capitalism" "before the Bolsheviks seized power." [Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 636] And, as Lenin noted, his praise for state capitalism can be found in his State and Revolution.

Given this perspective, it is unsurprising that workers' control was not given a high priority once the Bolsheviks seized power. While in order to gain support the Bolsheviks had paid lip-service to the idea of workers' control, as we noted in section H.3.14 the party had always given that slogan a radically different interpretation than the factory committees had. While the factory committees had seen workers' control as being exercised directly by the workers and their class organisations, the Bolshevik leadership saw it in terms of state control in which the factory committees would play, at best, a minor role. It is unsurprising to discover which vision of socialism was actually introduced:

"On three occasions in the first months of Soviet power, the [factory] committee leaders sought to bring their model into being. At each point the party leadership overruled them. The result was to vest both managerial and control powers in organs of the state which were subordinate to the central authorities, and formed by them." [Thomas F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia, p. 38]

Given his vision of socialism, Lenin's rejection of the factory committee's model comes as no surprise. The Bolsheviks, as Lenin had promised, built from the top-down their system of unified administration based on the Tsarist system of central bodies which governed and regulated certain industries during the war (and, moreover, systematically stopped the factory committee organising together). [Brinton, Op. Cit., p. 36 and pp. 18-9] This was very centralised and very inefficient:

"it seems apparent that many workers themselves . . . had now come to believe . . . that confusion and anarchy [sic!] at the top were the major causes of their difficulties, and with some justification. The fact was that Bolshevik administration was chaotic . . . Scores of competitive and conflicting Bolshevik and Soviet authorities issued contradictory orders, often brought to factories by armed Chekists. The Supreme Economic Council. . . issu[ed] dozens of orders and pass[ed] countless directives with virtually no real knowledge of affairs." [William G. Rosenberg, Russian Labour and Bolshevik Power, p. 116]

Faced with the chaos that their own politics, in part, had created, the Bolsheviks turned to one-management in April, 1918. This was applied first on the railway workers. Like all bosses, the Bolsheviks blamed the workers for the failings of their own policies. The abolishing the workers' committees resulted in "a terrifying proliferation of competitive and contradictory Bolshevik authorities, each with a claim of life or death importance . . . Railroad journals argued plaintively about the correlation between failing labour productivity and the proliferation of competing Bolshevik authorities." Rather than improving things, Lenin's one-man management did the opposite, "leading in many places . . . to a greater degree of confusion and indecision" and "this problem of contradictory authorities clearly intensified, rather than lessened." Indeed, the "result of replacing workers' committees with one man rule . . . on the railways . . . was not directiveness, but distance, and increasing inability to make decisions appropriate to local conditions. Despite coercion, orders on the railroads were often ignored as unworkable." It got so bad that "a number of local Bolshevik officials . . . began in the fall of 1918 to call for the restoration of workers' control, not for ideological reasons, but because workers themselves knew best how to run the line efficiently, and might obey their own central committee's directives if they were not being constantly countermanded." [William G. Rosenberg, Workers' Control on the Railroads, p. D1208, p. D1207, p. D1213 and pp. D1208-9]

That it was Bolshevik policies and not workers' control which was to blame for the state of the railways can be seen from what happened after Lenin's one-man management was imposed. The centralised Bolshevik economic system quickly demonstrated how to really mismanage an economy. The Bolshevik onslaught against workers' control in favour of a centralised, top-down economic regime ensured that the economy was handicapped by an unresponsive system which wasted the local knowledge in the grassroots in favour of orders from above which were issued in ignorance of local conditions. This lead to unused stock coexisting with acute scarcity and the centre unable to determine the correct proportions required at the base. Unfinished products were transferred to other regions while local factories were shut down, wasted both time and resources (and given the state of the transport network, this was a doubly inefficient). The inefficiency of central financing seriously jeopardised local activity and the centre had displayed a great deal of conservatism and routine thinking. In spite of the complaints from below, the Communist leadership continued on its policy of centralisation (in fact, the ideology of centralisation was reinforced). [Silvana Malle, The Economic Organisation of War Communism 1918-1921, p. 232-3 and pp. 269-75]

A clearer example of the impact of Bolshevik ideology on the fate of the revolution would be hard to find. Simply put, while the situation was pretty chaotic in early 1918, this does not prove that the factory committee's socialism was not the most efficient way of running things under the (difficult) circumstances. After all, rates of "output and productivity began to climb steadily after" January 1918 and "[i]n some factories, production doubled or tripled in the early months of 1918 . . . Many of the reports explicitly credited the factory committees for these increases." [Carmen Sirianni, Workers' Control and Socialist Democracy, p. 109] Unless of course, like the Bolsheviks, you have a dogmatic belief that centralism is always more efficient. Needless to say, Lenin never wavered in his support for one-man management nor in his belief in the efficiency of centralism to solve all problems, particularly the problems it itself created in abundance. Nor did his explicit call to reproduce capitalist social relations in production cause him any concern for, in Lenin's eyes, if the primary issue was property and not who manages the means of production, then factory committees are irrelevant in determining the socialist nature of the economy.

Post-October Bolshevik policy is a striking confirmation of the anarchist argument that a centralised structure would stifle the initiative of the masses and their own organs of self-management. Not only was it disastrous from a revolutionary perspective, it was hopelessly inefficient. The constructive self-activity of the people was replaced by the bureaucratic machinery of the state. The Bolshevik onslaught on workers' control, like their attacks on soviet democracy and workers' protest, undoubtedly engendered apathy and cynicism in the workforce, alienating even more the positive participation required for building socialism which the Bolshevik mania for centralism had already marginalised.

The pre-revolution Bolshevik vision of a socialist system was fundamentally centralised and, consequently, top-down. This was what was implemented post-October, with disastrous results. At each turning point, the Bolsheviks tended to implement policies which reflected their prejudices in favour of centralism, nationalisation and party power. Unsurprisingly, this also undermined the genuine socialist tendencies which existed at the time. Simply put, the Bolshevik vision of socialism and democracy played a key role in the failure of the revolution. Therefore, the Leninist idea that politics of the Bolsheviks had no influence on the outcome of the revolution, that their policies during the revolution were a product purely of objective forces, is unconvincing.

For further discussion of these and other issues, see the appendices on "How did Bolshevik ideology contribute to the failure of the Revolution?" and "What happened during the Russian Revolution?"