by HELENE RICHARD
‘Lenin Proclaims Soviet Rule to Second All Russia Congress of Soviets, 25 October 1917’, Vladimir Alexandrovich Serov (1910-68) PHOTO/Sovfoto/UIG/Getty
‘Ours is a workers’ state with a bureaucratic twist,’ Lenin said in 1921, aware the revolution was already off course. But there was nothing he, nor the best of the Bolsheviks, could do about it.
Conservative historians, keen to discredit the very idea of revolution, believe the October Revolution was inherently flawed; according to Dominique Colas, ‘mass repression was not an accident or a response to a difficult situation, but an integral part of Lenin’s plan’. Their leftwing colleagues emphasise the circumstances that drove the Bolsheviks to use coercive measures — adopted in haste, without a proper plan and intended as temporary — to defend the revolution against the White armies, foreign forces and peasant uprisings. They believe the dark Stalinist era that followed had little to do with the communist project itself, and everything to do with civil war.
Lenin’s choices were widely discussed during his lifetime, even before they began to trouble historians in their libraries. Inside and outside the Communist Party, some justified them as dictated by the political and military emergencies of the time; others were quick to denounce them as a slide into authoritarianism. There were three crossroads moments during the revolution, at which a choice had to be made between the use of force, democracy or state authority to further the revolutionary process: the seizure of power by armed insurrection in October 1917, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, and the repression of the sailors’ uprising at Kronstadt in 1921.
Only a few months after the overthrow of the tsarist regime, in the middle of a global conflict and after the establishment of a provisional government, the idea that the Bolsheviks should take power by armed force was gaining support. The worker grassroots of the Communist Party, and army conscripts outraged by the pursuit of the war, were pushing for it. Lenin, initially taken by surprise,began to defend this option in the Central Committee. The radicalisation of the Bolsheviks, in tune with the political atmosphere, scared other socialist forces — the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Left SRs) and (…)
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