|
Was Russia Socialist?
by Adam Ritscher
When most folks hear the word socialism, the first
thing that comes to mind is Russia.
Now for different folks, that means very different things. This is true
even of the left, within which there is much disagreement on whether or
not Russia was
socialist.
To answer the question of whether or not Russia was
socialist I intend to take a look at the Russian Revolution of 1917, see
how it unfolded and what came out of it, and then determine what its
character was.
Prior to 1917 Russia was
a developing country, semi-feudal really. The vast majority of its
population lived in abject poverty, peasants whose lot was above that of
serfs by only a small degree. Within the country though were pockets of
modern industry, which contained some of the largest and most up to date
factories in the world.
Leon Trotsky developed a theory called “combined and uneven development”
to describe Russia and
countries like it. It basically states that developing countries, while
being far behind industrial countries, and often even semi-feudal, were
often home to super-modern factories and mines as a result of capitalists
from the industrialized countries seeking cheap labor and raw materials.
The result was small but advanced working classes existing in very
‘backwards’ countries.
The Russia
left of the time hotly debated what the consequences of
this was. The majority held that because of the small size of Russia’s
working class, and the relative backwardness of its economy, it would
have to go through a long phase of capitalist development before
socialism could be put on the agenda. Trotsky though developed his famous
theory of “permanent revolution” in response, stating that the inter-conectedness of Russia’s
emerging capitalist class with the country’s feudal aristocracy precluded
any kind of capitalist revolution that would break from feudalism.
Because of the warped evolution of developing countries like Russia,
they wouldn’t follow the model of industrialized countries. He also
argued that despite the small size of Russia’s
working class, the fact that it was concentrated in huge modern factories
gave it the social weight, and the potential consciousness to lead a
socialist revolution.
The year 1917 was to solve the debate in real life however. Russia’s
involvement in World War I had led to the death of hundreds of thousands
of young men at the front, and intense economic hardships for the people
at home. Peaceful protests before the palace of the czar asking for bread
were met with machine gun fire. This proved to be a spark that initiated
a mass uprising that forced the czar to flee in February. Provisional
government led by a liberal reformer named Kerensky
took his place. Kerensky though, representing Russia’s
small capitalist class, was unable and unwilling to carry out any
meaningful reforms that were being demanded by the people, such as the
redistribution of the land to the peasants, and an end to Russia’s
involvement in the war. At the same time workers’ councils, or Soviets,
were springing up throughout Russia as
revolutionary enthusiasm and dissatisfaction with Kerensky
grew.
The existence of these soviets amounted to a situation of dual power,
where the workers and their institutions existed alongside the capitalist
government of Kerensky. Within these soviets,
different left groups put forward their perspectives. The Bolsheviks, led
by Lenin, and which Trotsky had joined, put forth the call for “all power
to the soviets” and went on a campaign to convince the workers to finish
the revolution by making it a socialist revolution. Trotsky was elected
president of the Petrograd Soviet, and the Bolsheviks won a majority of
the delegates to the soviets. The soviets then simply voted to replace
the Kerensky government and a delegation was
sent to inform him of the fact.
This was the October Revolution. It was certainly a genuine workers’
revolution, and not a coup, and it would be pretty hard to imagine a much
more democratic scenario. What followed after the revolution was an
inspiring blossoming of revolutionary sentiment and enthusiasm. Soviets
spread to hundreds of factories, towns and rural regions like prairie
fire. Housewives formed soviets, as did passengers on trains while en
route!
Once in power the Bolsheviks redistributed the land to the peasants,
granted self-determination to all oppressed nationalities within Russia,
legalized abortion and divorce, eliminated all anti-gay legislation,
established a government monopoly of foreign trade and set up public day
care center, laundries and cafeterias to free women from the home. They
also got Russia out
of the war, much to the horror of their former allies.
The capitalist world’s reaction to the Russian workers was swift and
decisive. 21 capitalist countries invaded, and massive aid was pumped
into the White armies being formed by the recently deposed Russian
feudalists and capitalists. The Bolsheviks responded by organizing the
Red Army, which under Trotsky’s leadership successfully defeated the
counter-revolution. The price though was staggering. Many of the workers
who made the revolution died in the fighting, the countries industry was
in ruins and the countryside was on the verge of starvation (there were
reports of cannibalism in some regions).
Lenin and the Bolsheviks had expected the revolution to spread, and while
indeed there were numerous workers’ uprisings and revolutions in Europe
after the Russian revolution, all were repressed leaving the Bolsheviks
alone in a hostile world. It was under the immense pressure of this
situation that a bureaucracy began to develop in Russia.
Opportunists began joining the Bolshevik party in droves, and czarist
engineers and technicians agreed to help rebuild the country at a price.
To make matters worse, Lenin suffered a series of debilitating strokes at
this time, and by early 1924 was dead. Stalin, whose social base was the
emerging state and party bureaucracy, made a bid for power and
successfully usurped political power from the workers. Trotsky, who
resisted Stalin by organizing the Left Opposition, was defeated and
expelled from the party, and then forced into exile (he was eventually
murdered by a Stalinist agent who drove an ice pick into his skull).
Stalin’s seizure of power had devastating consequences. Any hope of a
revival of soviet power was squelched, and as a result of his theory of
“socialism in one country,” international revolution was sold down the
river to secure a peaceful coexistence with capitalism. Much of the
international communist movement soon became pawns parroting the
Kremlin’s foreign policy, whatever it may be.
Trotsky, while in exile, analyzed the degeneration in his book “The
Revolution Betrayed.” In it he developed his theory of the degenerated
workers state. In essence his theory holds that the Russian revolution
resulted in a post-capitalist society on the road to socialism, but its
development was arrested by the development of the parasitic Stalinist
bureaucracy. Trotsky predicted this very unstable and contradictory state
of affairs would have to be solved by the workers overthrowing the
bureaucracy and putting the country back on the road to socialism, or
else the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy would in time attempt to
restore capitalism (as they are openly trying to do today). He pointed
however, that despite the degeneration of the revolution there were still
gains of the revolution that remained such as social ownership of the
means of production, a planned economy and a monopoly of foreign trade,
and as a result workers and socialists are duty bound to defend it
against capitalism. It should be treated in the same way as a corrupt
union, it’s still a union, and any housecleaning can only be done by the
workers themselves.
In summary then, to the answer to the question of was Russia socialist,
we’d have to say no, Russia did indeed have a real working class
revolution, and was on the road to socialism, but it was prevented from
getting there. It is a task of the future for the revolution to be
completed in Russia,
and beyond that, to expand the revolution to the whole world. It is only
then that all of us will finally be able to live in a world that is based
on solidarity, and that is free of exploitation, oppression and
alienation.
|