Read Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism Online
Authors: Peter Marshall
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A few anarchists from the beginning opposed the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ because they were against the concept of power as such. Most of them however threw themselves behind the call since they hoped to transform the Soviets into genuine organs of direct democracy for the workers and peasants, and to develop them in a libertarian direction. A whole ‘unknown revolution’ did in fact get underway with the decentralization of authority, the creation of autonomous communes and councils, and the development of self-management in factory and farm.
3
Apart from the worker and peasant movements throughout Russia, anarchist women played an important role on the barricades as well as in creating free schools, day-care centres, and a libertarian atmosphere in the family.
The initial euphoria soon evaporated. Volin wrote prophetically at the end of 1917 in
Golos Truda
:
Once their power has been consolidated and legalized, the Bolsheviks, as state socialists, that is as men who believe in centralized and authoritarian leadership — will start running the life of the country and the people from the top. Your soviets … will gradually become simple tools of central government … You will soon see the inauguration of an authoritarian political and state apparatus that will crush all opposition with an iron fist … ‘All power to the Soviets’ will become ‘All power to the leaders of the party’.
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Leninist ideology, with its concept of a vanguard party leading the masses and its commitment to the dictatorship of the proletariat, was directly opposed to the syndicalist principle established by the inaugural declaration of the IWMA that ‘The emancipation of the workers must be brought about by the workers themselves’. The Bolsheviks moreover had no appreciation of the anarchist idea that socialism must be free or it will not be at all. Lenin however was sufficiently astute to realize that in order to achieve power, he would have to rely at first on the masses and to develop their aspirations. On the eve of the October Revolution, he therefore wrote the libertarian-sounding
State and Revolution
, and advocated workers’ management. He even praised the anarchists for criticizing parliamentarism and
for describing the opportunist character of most socialist parties in their attitude to the State. At this stage, he sought to forge an alliance with the anarchists by arguing that Marx and Proudhon both stood ‘for the “smashing” of the present state machine’ and that the opportunists were unwilling to accept the similarity between Marxism and anarchism (of both Proudhon and Bakunin). He even went so far as to castigate Plekhanov for his clumsy depiction of anarchists as ‘bandits’.
5
As a result, the Marxists and anarchists between March and October 1917 were able to struggle side by side in their call for the distribution of the land to the peasants and the occupation of factories by the workers.
The Bolsheviks seemed at first prepared to subordinate their Marxist theory to anarchist practice by calling for the redistribution of land and dismantling of the bourgeois State. Although their organizations numbered only twelve thousand active members, the anarchists wielded considerable influence from 1917 to 1918 through their press and their work in the Soviets. There were two weeklies in Petrograd and a daily in Moscow, each appearing in twenty-five thousand copies. According to one visitor, they represented the ‘most active party, the most combative, and probably the most popular of the opposition groups’.
6
Many anarchists took an active part in the October Revolution and four anarchists actually sat on the Military-Revolutionary Committee. Some like Anatolii Zhelezniakov remained anarchists to the end; others like Victor Serge became converted to the Bolshevik cause. At the beginning of 1918, Lenin told the Third Congress of Soviets that ‘Anarchist ideas have now taken on living form’. At the Trade Union Congress in the spring of 1918, he even borrowed anarchist terminology to describe the factories as the ‘self-governing communes of producers and consumers’.
But the delicate alliance between the Bolsheviks and the anarchists was only temporary. It soon became clear that Lenin and the Bolsheviks wanted to centralize power for themselves and to gain control over the people. They were happy to use libertarian language only if it suited their own ends. Despite its libertarian tone, Lenin had made clear in
State and Revolution
that it was necessary in a transitional period to establish the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in a ‘proletarian’ State in order to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie. By March, the Bolshevik Party had become the sole party in Russia. It used the Civil War and the threat of foreign invasion as its excuse for the clamp-down; it started to confiscate grain from the peasants and to suppress its opponents. Lenin did not balk at using mass terror to consolidate his power.
In the following month, a detachment of the Red Guards and of the Cheka, the newly formed political police force, raided anarchist circles in Moscow, arresting several hundred people. They were denounced as
common criminals and bandits, ‘the armed detachments of counterrevolutionary burglars and robbers which had taken refuge under the black flag of anarchy’.
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It marked the turning-point: from the spring of 1918 the anarchists stopped being reluctant allies of the Bolsheviks and became their bitter enemies. Within three years, the Bolsheviks had succeeded in wiping out by military means the anarchist movement completely. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who had returned in 1920 after being deported from America and had swallowed their initial reservations for the cause of the social revolution, left in 1921 deeply disillusioned by their experience.
Only in the Ukraine, under the inspiration of Nestor Makhno, did the anarchist cause make any further head way. After the October Revolution, he took the initiative in organizing an area of some four hundred square miles with a rough population of seven million into an autonomous region. The factories were occupied and the collectives had to co-ordinate their production; Makhno even managed to negotiate a direct exchange of grain for textiles produced by anarchist workers in Moscow. For more than a year, anarchists were in charge of a large territory, one of the few examples of anarchy in action on a large scale in modern history.
The great libertarian experiment was under threat from the beginning. Makhno was obliged to fight Reds and Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, and the Germans and Austrians who had been given control of the Ukraine under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918 by the Bolshevik government.
When he visited Moscow in June 1918, Lenin received him at the Kremlin. The Bolshevik leader complained of the ‘empty fanaticism’ of most anarchists, and he declared to Makhno ‘if only one-third of the anarchists-communists were like you, we Communists would be ready, under certain conditions, to join with them in working towards a free organization of producers.’
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After denying that the anarchists were utopian dreamers, Makhno returned to the Ukraine.
By September his partisan army had captured the regional capital Gulyai-Polye from the Austrians. Even under war conditions, the social revolution was continued. In the areas under Makhno’s sway, ‘communes’ or ‘free-work Soviets’ were set up. When they passed through a district, his partisans would put up posters announcing:
The freedom of the workers and the peasants is their own, and not subject to any restriction. It is up to the workers and peasants themselves to act, to organize themselves, to agree among themselves in all aspects of their lives, as they themselves see fit and desire … The Makhnovists can do no more than give aid and counsel … In no circumstances can they, nor do they wish to, govern.
9
The land was tilled in common and affairs managed by temporary delegates elected by the commune. Each commune had as much land as it could cultivate without hired labour. The commune was merely the executive of the decisions of the peasants in a locality. Groups of producers were federated into districts, and districts into regions. Free assembly, free speech and a free press were declared. It was planned to develop a form of libertarian education and in place of traditional courts it was proposed that ‘Law and order must be upheld by the living force of the local community and must not be left to police specialists.’
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From November 1918 to June 1919 Makhno and his supporters thus helped set up a society based on communes which went far in achieving the anarchist vision of a free society in the region east of the Dnieper.
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In January, February and April of 1919, they held a series of Regional Congresses of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents to discuss economic and military matters, and elected a Regional Military Revolutionary Council. In practice, they formed the beginning of a loose-knit government, and authority emanated from Makhno and his staff, accountable though they were in theory.
However sincere his anarchist beliefs, Makhno was no theorist and his movement lacked intellectuals, even though it was joined by Peter Arshinov (who had been Makhno’s anarchist mentor in jail) and Volin. Makhno himself was primarily a military leader, and the
bat’ko
, as his comrades called him, sometimes succumbed to the dictatorial antics of a warrior chief. But he was more than a primitive rebel, or libertarian Robin Hood, for while the roots of his anarchism lay in the rough-and-ready democracy of the Cossack peasants, he consciously tried to put anarchist theory into practice.
At first, the army was organized on a libertarian and voluntary basis, with the rules of discipline drawn up by elected commissions and then voted on by general assemblies of the partisans. In the end, however, Makhno resorted to a voluntary mobilization which amounted to conscription to swell his Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army to some fifteen thousand troops.
Alarmed by the growing influence of the Makhnovist movement, the Bolshevik government tried to reach an agreement with Makhno in 1920. He insisted that in the area in which the Makhnovist army was operating ‘the worker and peasant populations shall create its own free institutions for economic and self-administration; these institutions shall be autonomous and linked federally by agreements with the governing organs of the Soviet Republics’. In April 1919, the Third Regional Council met despite being banned by the Soviet authorities, and invited delegates from the Red Army. This was clearly too much for the Bolshevik government. After
Makhno’s army had defeated the White Army under General Wrangel in October 1920, the Bolsheviks finally ordered his units to be absorbed into the Red Army under the supreme command of Trotsky. Makhno resisted. The officers of the Crimean Makhnovist army were then arrested while attending a joint military council and shot in November 1920. Makhno managed to fight on for another nine months against hopeless odds until August 1921. He went into exile — slandered as a bandit and a pogromist by the Bolsheviks — and died of poverty and drink in Paris.
Although the anarchist experiment in the Ukraine was unable to last in the exceptional conditions of civil war and repression, it proved to be the first major historical example of constructive anarchy in action. Wherever they went, Makhno’s partisans carried the black flag of anarchy at their head, embroidered with ‘Liberty or Death’ and ‘The Land to the Peasants, the Factories to the Workers’.
As for the workers’ and peasants’ soviets in the rest of Russia, they were taken over, centralized and organized from the top down by the Bolsheviks. In December 1917 a Supreme Economic Council was set up to direct industry and in the following May industry as a whole was collectivized and nationalized by decree. At the Congress of Factory Councils in June 1918, Lenin declared; ‘You must become basic cells of the State’. The councils rapidly became subject to the directives of the government and the Bolshevik party, and the unions were turned mainly into tame organs for disciplining the work-force. The German anarcho-syndicalist Augustin Souchy observed after his visit in 1920 that the Soviets were already being elected on a partisan basis, and that in the villages the administrative delegates were behaving like the former landowners.
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The All-Russian Congress of Anarchists which was planned to take place at he end of 1920 never materialized; the Cheka rounded up members of the Nabat Confederation, including Volin, in Kharkov.
Even the communist Alexandra Kollantai complained of the loss of initiative which followed the economic centralization and the dismantling of the collectives. She was a member of the group within the Bolshevik Party called the ‘Workers’ Opposition’ which called for a return to the democracy of the original Soviets. At the Tenth Party Congress in November 1920, Lenin accused the ‘Workers’ Opposition’ of ‘petty-bourgeois and anarchist deviations’ and declared that their ‘syndicalism’ and ‘semi-anarchism’ were a direct danger to the Revolution. Henceforth there was to be ‘unquestioning obedience to the orders of individual representatives of the Soviet government during work time’, as well as ‘iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader’.
13
As Lenin told Alexander Berkman in no uncertain words: ‘Liberty is a luxury not to be permitted at the present stage of
development.’
14
There was to be no opposition to his one-party State and centralized economy.
In his
Message to the Workers of the West
, Kropotkin pointed out in 1920 that Russia had shown the way in which Socialism cannot be realized:
so long as the country is dominated by the dictatorship of a party, the workers’ and peasants’ councils naturally lose their significance. They are thereby degraded to the same passive role which the representatives of the estates used to play at the time of the absolute monarchies.