The Meaning of “Moderate Bolshevism”: A Book Review Essay

By: Samuel FarberNovember 28, 2023Facebook

Tomsky in the 1920s as head of the trade union movement in Soviet Russia.

Charters Wynn, The Moderate Bolshevik. Mikhail Tomsky from the Factory to the Kremlin, 1880-1936. Chicago, IL.: Haymarket Books, 2023, 457 pages.

Mikhail Tomsky is far from a household name among left-wing activists except for those who have studied the history of the Russian Revolution in some depth. In a very thorough account of the life of Tomsky, the American historian Charters Wynn goes an appreciable distance in reversing that unfortunate situation. As Wynn shows, Tomsky was an important Bolshevik leader as the long-time head of the trade unions and for many years a member of the Political Bureau of the ruling Communist (Bolshevik) party. Wynn does well to emphasize that Tomsky was a working-class Bolshevik. A highly skilled worker who never had a formal higher education, he became an autodidact worker intellectual with a very self-confident presence, oratorical skills, and administrative abilities. (53) Generally considered as a hard-working, modest, and honest leader, party comrades such as Lenin himself appreciated his character and temper. (118)

What was the meaning of Tomsky’s “Moderate” Bolshevism”?

Charters Wynn makes a reasonable case in portraying Tomsky as a “moderate” Bolshevik referring most of all to Tomsky’s cautious political perspective on what the party could and should do as a revolutionary party. Accordingly, Tomsky was not among the Bolshevik leaders who supported Lenin’s revolutionary line vis a vis the provisional government as expressed in his “April Theses.” Similarly, Tomsky, like most Bolshevik leaders including Lenin, tried to avoid and restrain the premature insurrection of workers, soldiers, and sailors in July of 1917. The failure of that rebellion unleashed a great wave of repression that inflicted a very serious blow on the Bolsheviks. Tomsky, who was among the Bolshevik leaders arrested by the Provisional Government, wrote at the time that the success of the counter revolution was, in his opinion, “the direct result of the conciliations, vacillation, and indecision” towards the premature insurrectionists of Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. But possibly contradicting himself, he nevertheless considered the July uprising a praiseworthy attempt “to expand and deepen the revolution.” (52) Moreover, on the eve of the revolutionary seizure of power in October 1917, Tomsky and other moderates feared that an attempt to seize power could either end in failure, like the July days, or if successful, could provoke a civil war. Like other moderate Bolsheviks, Left Mensheviks and Left SRs, Tomsky favored instead a broad socialist government including all these political parties. But unlike Kamenev and Zinoviev who went public with their criticisms of the planned insurrection, Tomsky only voiced his criticism at party gatherings, and followed Lenin’s lead in the preparations for the seizure of power in Moscow, although without much enthusiasm. (54-55)

In this context, the author tends to downplay the revolutionary possibilities unleashed in several European countries by the imperialist war.  Charters Wynn leaves us in the dark as to whether Tomsky had seriously considered it in weighing the possibility of a continent-wide socialist revolution like the wave of democratic revolutions that took place in Europe in 1848. If we follow the author’s account, it seems that Tomsky did not think about the issue very much, other than to state without any further elaboration that he did not think the masses in the developed west European countries were interested in a socialist revolution.

How shall we then evaluate, in overall terms, Tomsky’s “Bolshevik moderation” before the October revolution, which marked the seizure of power by a mass movement led by the Bolsheviks and Left SRs parties that had massively grown since they took the lead in defeating the right-wing coup led by General Kornilov in August? We can see, with the benefit of hindsight, that Tomsky and his political allies were correct in their fear that the revolution that took place in October might lead to a civil war. But we need to pose the question of whether that danger would have been significantly lower if the kind of all-socialist government advocated by Tomsky and others had come to power. General Kornilov’s failed Coup in August was after all directed against the non-revolutionary government led by Kerensky as well as to groups and political parties to its left.

The Bolsheviks lost the necessary revolutionary gamble that they took in October of 1917, in great part determined by the objective nature and effects of the Civil War (1918-1920) and in great part, by the non-inevitable policy choices that the Bolsheviks made while in power. In that context, Tomsky’s moderation sometimes acquired a different meaning based on the simple notion that a moderate version, let alone the opposition, to a bad revolutionary government policy, is preferable to an unmoderated application of the same. This was certainly the case with Tomsky’s opposition, as a Bolshevik trade union leader, to Trotsky’s advocacy of the militarization of labor during the Civil War, as well as to Stalin’s brutal policies involved in the collectivization of agriculture. In other words, in these instances, Tomsky’s “moderation” helped to oppose anti-socialist and anti-democratic policies.

However, there were several major questions where Tomsky’s “moderation” had the opposite effect of helping to reduce rather than increase the prospects of working-class socialism and democracy. I am referring for example to his successful foreign policy effort, as the chair of the USSR’s trade unions, to develop ties with the European unions, most of which, were under non-communist and anti-communist leadership, and particularly to his important contribution to the creation and development of the Anglo-Russian Committee bringing together the Russian and British unions. Tomsky’s dedication to this task was clearly reinforced by Moscow’s adoption of the United Front policy to organize joint action with working class forces to the right of the Communist parties. The defeat of the German revolution in 1923 had left no doubt that this was the right political course to follow.

The big problem was that the British TUC (Trade Union Council) was not predominantly militant or leftist, let alone Communist in composition, a reality that could only add tremendous strains to Tomsky’s agenda. This became most evident in the 1926 general strike in Great Britain that as Charters Wynn points out “would bring to the breaking point, not only the possibility of achieving international trade-union unity, but the continuation of the Anglo-Russian Committee as well.” (195) Basing itself on totally false claims about the supposed decline of the strike, the TUC called it off after nine days, without even consulting the miners who were at the center of the strike dispute. This turned out to be a disaster with the TUC unions losing more than half a million members. Failing to take proper stock of the situation, Tomsky’s initial reaction was to claim that the aborted strike constituted “the partial moral victory of the proletariat” and it would contribute “toward the ultimate success of the proletarian struggle” in conditions “more favorable than the current ones,” (199-200)  When the Russian leadership quickly changed course and even compelled Tomsky to denounce the actions of the TUC, this, as might have been expected,  clearly outraged the Council. Upset by the hardening attitudes of the Soviet leadership towards the TUC, Tomsky sent the British union leaders a conciliatory letter hoping that the Anglo-Russian Committee would not let differences of opinion with the Soviet government “disturb our co-operative work.” (204) Although Tomsky later denounced the General Council in September 1926, accusing them of “going over to the enemy” with its “bend the knee attitude towards the government,” (207) he would later change his political posture once again at a meeting with the British delegation  in Berlin in the spring of 1927 by accepting all the British demands including the stipulation that both sides refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs in order to ensure the survival of the Anglo-Russian Committee. (208)  Leon Trotsky denounced the “Berlin capitulation” arguing that it was wrong for Tomsky to talk of “unanimity” and “cordial relations” with those who had betrayed, and would again betray, the working class. (209)

Charters Wynn argues that “the evidence indicates that Tomsky acted in good faith. He genuinely sought a working alliance with the Western non-communist left.” (212) But Wynn clearly shows Tomsky’s apparent lack of a long-term vision and his wavering responses to pressures as he was pushed “to and from” by the Russian leadership as well as by the British trade union bureaucracy. Thus, the least that can be said about the net effect of Tomsky’s efforts as a leader of the Soviet cooperation with the British trade unions is that these did not contribute to the development of the militancy and class consciousness of the British labor movement and to the adoption of a cogent internationalist policy by the Soviet Union.

In the end, what is missing from Wynn’s picture is the question of whether Tomsky had, as an important Russian Communist leader in his own right, a thought-out point of view on how his “moderate” political work, whether in terms of the alliance with Western trade union leaders or any other issues, fitted into his overall Communist politics. Tomsky was after all a worker-intellectual who had been an “insider” in the Bolshevik party for a long time and must have been thoroughly familiar with its leading politicians and their often divergent and conflicting politics. It is on this issue that I find the biggest weakness of this otherwise informative and often persuasive book by Charters Wynn. If Tomsky was indeed a “moderate” this surely did not refer only to tactical and even strategic issues but also to the more fundamental politics of the Bolshevik Party. The question then becomes as to how Tomsky concretely differed from and was similar to other Bolshevik tendencies. That is why Wynn repeatedly referring to Trotsky’s “arrogance” and only substantively discussing Trotsky’s advocacy of the militarization of labor during the Civil War – arguably the worst position Trotsky took on any important issue – will not do without at least a brief discussion of Trotsky’s views on permanent revolution, internationalism, and NEP, in relation to which Tomsky may have been a “moderate.” The same applies to Nikolai Bukharin. In spite of Tomsky’s “moderation” and its similarity to Bukharin’s “right-Bolshevik” politics, Wynn does not tell us about the policies Bukharin advocated, for example, towards the peasantry and what Tomsky’s thought about them.

A more sociological class-based approach to Tomsky’s politics is suggested by Wynn’s brief citation of Leon Trotsky to the effect that as a trade-union leader Tomsky “had to deal not only with the vanguard of the working class [namely party members] but with the larger backward strata as well.” (381) Even if brief, Trotsky’s allusion to Tomsky’s politics raises momentous issues regarding the prospects for working class revolution and working-class democratic rule. It assumes that while in opposition, the job of the conscious political minority organized in the revolutionary party is to push for a revolutionary program, and accordingly, conduct propaganda, agitation, and concrete actions to win over the largest possible number of oppressed and exploited people. In her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution written in prison in September 1918, Rosa Luxemburg sharply criticized the parliamentary cretinism of German Social Democracy that claimed that to carry out anything, you must first have a majority. But against that “principle,” Luxemburg argued that “the true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority through revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority – that is the way the road runs.”

One thing the revolutionary party does not have to do at this stage brilliantly analyzed by Rosa Luxemburg, is to govern a society composed of the advanced as well as the “backward” strata of the working class, let alone other social classes and strata supporting, opposing as well as vacillating on its support for the new order. Moreover, if this new order is to be democratic, the vanguard cannot simply act as a sovereign body, disregarding the wishes of other popular forces.

Tomsky and Socialist Democracy

Although generally sympathetic to Tomsky, Charters Wynn points out that the Bolshevik leader was “hardly a voice for pluralism and tolerance” in the power struggles within the party. Amid periods of extreme party infighting, Tomsky not only suggested that his party opponents should be expelled from the organization but also that they deserved to be arrested for such crimes as demoralizing non-party workers or spreading ideas that encouraged them to conspire against the party. Although Wynn tells us that Tomsky would later come to deeply regret such statements, they did undermine his ability, and that of his allies Bukharin and Rykov, to effectively oppose Stalin when the later violently brought the conciliatory policies of NEP to an end. (385) As Wynn explains, Tomsky’s excesses were not limited to the inner party struggles since he also played an important role in the baseless attacks against the so-called bourgeois specialists that reached their peak in the infamous 1928 Shakhty trial conducted against them. (385-86)

Like other leaders of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party, Tomsky feared, in the twenties, that the opposition tendencies within the party ran the risk of splitting the party and even possibly provoking another civil war. Undoubtedly, this contributed to Tomsky caving in and repudiating his politics, particularly at the Sixteenth Party Congress that took place in the summer of 1930. At that Congress, Tomsky distanced himself from the open oppositionists like Trotsky and Zinoviev and denied that he had ever conspired to set up his own faction within the party since any long-term opposition inside the organization would inevitably lead to a struggle against the party itself by its enemies. Nevertheless, the Yugoslav anti-Stalinist Ante Ciliga who was present at the congress, noted that Tomsky’s speech “contained a note of human dignity.” For his part, Leon Trotsky pointed out that “the ruling clique was not mistaken when in the notes of Tomsky’s repentance, it heard a discreet amount of hatred.” (315-318). In the end, recognizing the grim future facing the Soviet Union and himself, Tomsky committed suicide in August of 1936, just as Stalin’s famous “show trials” (1936-38) were beginning, leading to the execution of dozens of the “Old Bolsheviks.” The show trials formed part of the Great Purge of the same years which scholars estimate to have killed 700,000 people.

It is important to note the similar actions of Nikolai Bukharin, a more prominent “moderate” who was the leader of the “Right Opposition” to Stalin. For example, at a Central Committee plenum in January of 1933, Bukharin demanded that Party opposition factions “must be hacked off without the slightest mercy, without [our] being in the slightest troubled by any sentimental considerations concerning the past, personal friendships, relationships, respect for a person, and so forth.” (350) It would be tempting to establish a causal connection between Tomsky’s (and Bukharin’s) “moderation” and their surrender to the calls for “party unity.”  However, few Bolshevik leaders seemed to have been immune to that tendency. Even Leon Trotsky, a much earlier and forthright opponent of the party bureaucracy in general and of Stalin in particular did also fall victim to similar party pressures for “unity.” Thus, at the thirteenth Communist party congress in May 1924, Trotsky accepted the right of the party to discipline him, whether he was mistaken or not, and declared, “Comrades, none of us wants to be or can be right against the party. In the last analysis, the party is always right.” (236)

Cold war scholarship maintained that none of this was surprising considering the supposedly totalitarian nature of Bolshevism both before and after it took power. But, until the early twenties, the Bolshevik party was faction ridden and hardly monolithic and Lenin, far from being the all-powerful and unchallenged chieftain, was only “primus inter pares” within the Bolshevik leadership and was defeated in inner party conflicts on many occasions, a phenomenon that any careful reading of this volume will clearly show.

I would argue that among the main causes for the very tragic developments in Bolshevik politics was the change that took place from the on the one a hand growing Bolshevik party at the head of a rising mass movement in the late summer and early fall of 1917 that encouraged the party to give free democratic rein to the working class and popular movements, particularly in the factories and among the peasant rank and file of the Tsarist army. But, on the other hand, and in contrast to that democratic openness, the Bolshevik leadership became something substantially different during the Civil War (1918-1920.) When faced with its enormous objective difficulties, the Civil War played a central role in in the abandonment and fall of soviet democracy as I showed in ample detail in the first chapter of my book Before Stalinism. The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (19-61). We must also consider the disastrous policies of War Communism with its vast confiscations of peasant produce that went beyond a mere response to the necessity of feeding the working class and urban population and became what many Communist Party leaders and members saw as an opportunity to implement maximalist Communist goals. One clear effect of War Communism was the opposition of a large part of the same peasantry that had previously supported the October revolution less than a year earlier. It is important to note that the Bolsheviks, like their Menshevik rivals, never had a significant organizational presence among the peasant masses that accounted for approximately 80 percent of the population. At the same time, the working-class industrial base of the country and of the Bolshevik party was sharply reduced by the Civil War destruction and carnage. All these Civil War developments powerfully contributed to the isolation of the party from the great majority of the people of what became the USSR in 1922, and thus to the creation of a state of siege mentality that fatally led to the mainstream Bolshevik conversion of anti-democratic political necessity into virtue. Finally, by 1923, just a few years after the end of the devastating Civil War, the European revolutionary cycle clearly came to an end with the defeat of the German Revolution in 1923, thereby exacerbating the state of siege mentality in party circles.

In that context, Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), established in 1921, and the substantial rise in strikes and industrial conflict that occurred under these new conditions, resulted in a relative improvement in the working-class and peasant standard of living. Although the NEP opened an important degree of economic and cultural liberalization, it was accompanied by a hardening of the political dictatorship with an important number of repressive actions such as the permanent illegalization of parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and even the suppression of permanent factions inside the ruling Communist party itself.

Moreover, Lenin’s implementation of the NEP shows that there is a qualitative difference between a revolutionary line insofar as it relates to the consciousness and politics of the working class and its allies, that it is in principle changeable through political education, agitation, and the transformative effects of revolutionary political action; but it is quite a different matter to argue that the same applies to objective circumstances such as the lack of economic development and material scarcity. By itself, revolutionary consciousness cannot create wealth and material well-being for most of the population except in the mind of hyper voluntarists such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Ernesto (Che) Guevara. Looking back, Guevara even disregarded the reality of the economic crisis in Russia in the early twenties with the astonishing claim that at the time “there was nothing economically impossible.” The only issue to be considered, Guevara added, is whether “something is compatible with the development of socialist consciousness.” (Samuel Farber, The Politics of Che Guevara. Theory and Practice, Haymarket Books, 2016, 91-92)

Thanks are due to Haymarket Books that has performed an important service in publishing another volume of the Historical Materialism Book Series. This volume is considerably enriched by the beautiful cover art and design by David Mabb and includes a substantial number of photographs of the period, many of them new to this reviewer.

Posted Left Politics, Russia

About Author
Samuel Farber was born and raised in Cuba and has written numerous articles and books about that country. He has also written about the Russian Revolution and American politics. He is a retired professor of Political Science at the City University of New York (CUNY) and resides in that city.

 

Early Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution

Shubham Sharma | 07 Nov 2022

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A look at how the new Soviet State dealt with issues that the West is still unable to resolve.

Representational use only.Image Courtesy: Flickr

In October 1917, when the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin captured power in Russia the message was simple: that the meek can inherit the world. Unlike the French and English revolutions, the Bolshevik Revolution was a planned and conscious attempt to take power by the organised working class with the support of the poor peasantry.

It was the biggest political event in the 20th century, primarily because it shook all integuments of exploitation. Be it class, race, gender, or capitalist imperialism. No other event in history had such a long-ranging impact than the Bolshevik Revolution.

The French Revolution, for example, spoke of the Rights of Man but failed to give voting rights to women. It spoke of the equality of all men yet Napoleonic France continued to have slave colonies in the Caribbean. The tenacity of the French to hold on to slavery was reflected in the gruesome murder of Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the slave revolt in Haiti.

The Bolshevik Revolution, on the other hand, remained steadfast to its promises. In the absence of slavery, the worst sufferers of the Tsarist regime were Jews. The Tsars had for long pandered and promoted anti-Jewish sentiments to channelise the anger of the poor in pogroms. Lenin and the Bolsheviks understood this well.

In a lecture on the 1905 Revolution in Zurich, Lenin said: ‘‘Tsarism knew perfectly well how to play up to the most despicable prejudices of the most ignorant strata of the population against the Jews, in order to organise, if not to lead directly, the pogroms—those atrocious massacres of peaceful Jews, their wives and children, which have roused such disgust throughout the whole civilised world’’.

Every socialist and communist must remember with great pride, especially when fake anti-semitism has become a renewed weapon to attack the Left in the world, that in 1914, the Bolshevik party in the Tsarist Duma proposed a Bill that aimed to ‘‘to remove all limitations of rights placed upon the Jews, and all limitations whatsoever connected with descent from or membership of any particular nationality’’.

It was the radical progressivism of the Bolsheviks that led to a Jew becoming the second in command of the revolutionary state. Shaken and concerned by that Marxist Jew, the American Raymond Robins, depicted him as ‘‘a son of a bitch, but the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ’’. He was Leon Trotsky who went on to plan the revolutionary takeover in October 1917 and became the Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army.

Apart from Trotsky, Jews constituted a good number of senior Bolshevik party members such as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yakov Sverdlov, Maxim Litvinov, and Moisei Uritsky.  Compare this to the United States of America wherein it took 232 years for a Black American to become President of the United States.

The Gender Question

On the question of gender, the Bolshevik party’s programme written in 1903 included the demand for ‘complete equality of rights for men and women. Nadia Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and a long-time member of the Bolshevik Party, wrote a pamphlet in 1902 titled The Woman Worker. It recorded the abject miseries of women in the face of famines and the extremely low wages that amounted to roughly four-fifth of the male wage despite working for eleven and a half hours a day.

The pamphlet linked the emancipation of the working class as a whole to the emancipation of women. During the famous 1907 international socialist conference of the Second International, Lenin condemned the opportunist actions of the Austrian Social-Democrats who, while conducting a campaign for electoral rights for men, put off the struggle for electoral rights for women to ‘a later date’.

On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Alexandra Kollontai led a march of 15,000 women, mainly the wives of the Russian soldiers fighting the First World War. Whilst the men were fighting on the front, the womenfolk joined factories in huge numbers.

Lenin officially committed the Bolshevik party to free education for girls, and their economic demands, such as workplace creches, time off for breastfeeding and paid maternity leave. Judy Cox in her essay, Out of the shadows: Female Leninists and Russian Socialism, writes that ‘‘the Bolsheviks were becoming the political home of working women who increasingly understood that opposition to the war entailed opposition to capitalism itself’’.

Within a few weeks of the revolution, medical services were made free to all women, doctors were given a state wage and all childcare institutions were brought under government control. For the first time, the right to equal pay for women along with an eight-hour workday were duly passed as legislations. The Bolshevik pledges of paid maternity leave and time off for breastfeeding were also implemented. A law of December 1917 removed all obstacles to divorce. The new Family Law of October 1918 made declared all marriages to be secular. Thus, making marriages no more an intensely sacral affair mediated by the Orthodox Church. It also provided for the economic independence and equality of women in marriage, and imposed paternal responsibility for all children, whether born in wedlock or not.

Bolshevik Russia was also the first state to decriminalise homosexuality as early as in 1917.

Abortion was legalised in November 1920 making the Soviet Union the first state to do so. Ironically, in the same year, capitalist-imperialist France enacted a law that forbade all forms of contraception. The Land Law of 1922 gave women ownership of their family's farm and allowed them to receive their share of the property even upon divorce.

All this was happening when European imperial powers, such as Britain and France, did not have universal suffrage rights for women. In the former, it came only in 1928 and the latter delayed it till 1944. Switzerland gave women the right to vote in 1971-1972, and ironically the Swiss canton of Appenzell gave voting rights to women as late as 1991—the year the Soviet Union collapsed!

Nadia Krupskaya noted that the number of women members in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union went up from 40,000 in 1922 as many as 5,00,000 by October 1932. And at the time when the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution was observed, 20-25% of the deputies of the village Soviets, district executive committees, and city Soviets were women.

Opressed Nationalities

On the question of oppressed nationalities, the legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution remains unmatched. Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ steadfastness against colonialism could be traced to the 1907 international socialist conference. Anti-communist scholarship has tried to explain Lenin’s radical position on the political emancipation of the colonies in two ways.

First, the final defeat of Alexander Kolchak and Anton Denikin, two internationally recognised leaders of the white counter-revolution allowed Lenin and the Bolsheviks to bring under control the eastern borderlands which had declared independence right after 1917. The argument goes that this allowed the Soviet Union for a much-needed contiguity with Asia thereby easing the way to draw in the agitating masses into the vortex of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Second, the rising tide of anti-colonial nationalism in the colonised nations of Asia pushed Lenin toward espousing the cause of the colonies wholesale. Both arguments could be dislodged from their perches of academic acceptance if one looks a little deep into history.

During the 1907 international socialist conference at Stuttgart, Germany, the question of the colonies was on the table. It was at this very conference that an Indian nationalist, Bhikaji Cama, hoisted the ‘Flag of Indian Independence’ with Vande Mataram emblazoned on it. Yet, the question of the colonies received lukewarm attention at best and opportunistic vacillation, at worst.

Henri Hubert Van Kol, a prominent socialist member of the Dutch Parliament, who in the past argued that ‘the moral requirement of the (imperial) government was first to care for the needs of the indigenous people, and only secondly to promote capitalist exploitation’, dominated the Colonial Commission of the congress. He framed a Draft Resolution to the effect that the Stuttgart Congress did not in principle oppose colonialism as such ‘for even under socialism, colonialism would have had a civilizing role to play.’ It was Lenin, who, along with Rosa Luxembourg and other German Left Social Democrats, defeated Van Kol’s opportunist and unprincipled Draft Resolution. 

In the very next year, Lenin wrote a pamphlet titled Inflammable Material in World Politics wherein he argued that ‘‘there can be no doubt that the age-old plunder of India by the British, and the contemporary struggle of all these ‘advanced’ Europeans against Persian and Indian democracy, will steal millions, tens of millions of proletarians in Asia to wage a struggle against their oppressors’’.

After the revolution, the Bolsheviks were the first and the only government to demand the unconditional emancipation of all colonies from the clutches of capitalist-imperialist powers. The establishment of the Communist International (COMINTERN) in 1919 was exactly to serve this purpose. In world history hitherto, no other such international organisation was ever made, either in scope, aims, vision, and radical internationalism.

Another important aspect that is often not discussed is that of the Muslim ethnic nationalities of Central Asia. Constituting about 13% population of Soviet Russia, the central Asian republics were one of the most backward regions of the world. With a legacy of the dual oppression of parasitic Khans and the Tsars, the Muslim population had suffered horrendous ordeals. The last of which was the violent repression of the 1916 rebellion against forceful conscription for the First World War wherein almost 83,000 Muslims lost their lives. This radicalised and brought the jadedi Muslims into the fold of the Bolsheviks. A declaration: To all the Muslim workers of Russia and the East, issued by the Soviet government on November 24, 1917, stated: ‘‘Muslims of Russia ... all you whose mosques and prayer houses have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been trampled upon by the tsars and oppressors of Russia: your beliefs and practices, your national and cultural institutions are forever free and inviolate. Know that your rights, like those of all the peoples of Russia, are under the mighty protection of the revolution…’’.

David Crouch in his brilliant essay, The Bolsheviks and Islam, has given a glimpse into the attitudes of the time could be found in a Professor in Japan and later an advisor to the King of Afghanistan, Mohammed Barkatullah’s pamphlet Bolshevism and the Islamic Body Politic which he was distributing in Turkestan. A copy fell into the hands of the British secret service in India, who translated it from Persian.

It is worth quoting at some length: ‘‘following on the dark long nights of tsarist autocracy, the dawn of human freedom has appeared on the Russian horizon, with Lenin as the shining sun giving light and splendour to this day of human happiness...the administration of the extensive territories of Russia and Turkestan has been placed in the hands of labourers, cultivators, and soldiers. The distinction of race, religion, and class has disappeared ... But the enemy of this pure, unique republic is British imperialism, which hopes to keep Asiatic nations in a state of eternal thraldom… time has come for Muhammedans of the world and Asiatic nations to understand the noble principles of Russian socialism and to embrace it seriously and enthusiastically… They should, without loss of time, send their children to Russian schools to learn modern sciences, noble arts, practical physics, chemistry, mechanics, etc. Oh, Muhammedans! Listen to this divine cry. Respond to this call of liberty, equality, and brothership which brother Lenin and the Soviet government of Russia are offering you.’’

Trotsky in his 1923 book, Problems of Everyday Life: Creating the Foundations for a New Society in Revolutionary Russia, noted that in Turkestan and in certain other national republics, a notable percentage of communist party members, roughly 15%, were believers in Islam.

Summing up the attitudes of the Bolshevik leadership to religion he wrote: ‘‘Of course, it would be better if we had a proletariat there (in Central Asia) that had already had experience in strikes and bouts with the church, that had rejected the old prejudices and only then come to communism. That's how it is in Europe, and, to a certain degree, it has been and continues to be that way in the centre of our country. But the East is lacking all this previous schooling. There, our party is the elementary school, and it must fulfill its responsibility accordingly. We will admit into our ranks those comrades who have yet to break with religion not in order to reconcile Marxism with Islam, but rather tactfully but persistently to free the backward members' consciousnesses of superstition, which in its very essence is the mortal enemy of communism.’’

Soon, a massive programme of what would now be called affirmative action was introduced, known as ‘korenizatsiia’ or ‘indigenisation’. It started with kicking out the Russian and Cossack colonists and their ideologues in the Russian Orthodox church. The Russian language ceased to dominate, and native languages returned to schools, government, and publishing. Indigenous people were promoted to leading positions in the state and communist parties and given preference over Russians in employment. Both, primary education institutions and universities sprang up soon after the civil war ended.

Let us take the example of Tajikistan. Ruled by the Emir of Bokhara, Tajikistan became an autonomous republic in 1925 and in 1929 it entered the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as an independent federated republic. In colonial India, in 1911, as many as 6% of the people were reported to have been literate. In Tajikistan, before the Revolution, only one-half of 1% of the population could read and write. In 1931, the Indian figure of literacy rose by just 2% touching the 8% mark. Whereas by 1933, a good 63% of the population was literate in Tajikistan. There were only a hundred Tajik students at school in 1914. The figure in 1939 was 328,000. By 1936, the Republic had one school per 500 of the population, five higher educational institutions, and over 30 technical schools. 

The progress in public health was also phenomenal. In 1914, there were just 13 doctors in Tajikistan who would be called upon to cater only to the needs of the feudal aristocracy. In 1939, there were 440 doctors, ready for service in every home. In 1914, there were no maternity beds in the abysmally ill-equipped hospitals. In 1937, there were 240. In 1914, there was no such thing as a maternity and infant welfare centre. Twenty-three years later there were 36 such centres.

A mention must also be made of the work done by the Central Commission for Agitation and Propaganda Among Working Women (Zhenotdel). After the civil war ended Zhenotdel workers travelled to Central Asia, organising “red yurts” and “red boats” to reach out to Muslim women. In the autumn of 1918, over 1,000 women gathered for the first All-Russian Women’s Congress. After prolonged debates, congress voted for an eight-hour working day, the abolition of private landed property, confiscation without indemnity of large properties, equality of political rights for women, and an end to polygamy and purdah. The congress meant that Russia’s Muslims were the first in the world to free women from the restrictions typical of Islamic societies of that period.

To conclude, the essay has attempted to show only some emancipatory facets of the Bolshevik Revolution. A lot more can be said, and reams could be written about the glorious legacy of the Revolution. However, in the absence of time and space, the best way to celebrate the Revolution would be to plan one in India!

The writer is a research ccholar in the Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, USA. The views are personal.

https://www.newsclick.in/

The Reintegration of the Russian Empire and the Bolshevik Views of "Russia": 
The Case of the Moscow Party Organization


Author(s) Ikeda, Yoshiro

After the years of the civil war much of the former imperial territory appeared to be reintegrated by the Bolsheviks. The process of reintegration itself took the form of the conquest of the peripheries.6 But the notion of “Russia” remained ambiguous for the Bolshevik regime. In connection with this we cannot avoid Agurskii’s study on so-called national Bolshevism. According to him, in the years of the NEP, an emigrant ideology of national Bolshevism, which considered the Bolshevik regime as the only real political power able to reintegrate and develop the “one, indivisible Russia” and called on technocrats to support it, found resonance within the party. By tolerating and even promoting currents of Russian nationalism in culture and politics, the leaders of the party, and especially Stalin, caught up and introduced this ideology into the party policy for the consolidation of the legitimacy of the regime. Thus, Agurskii explained the intensive emergence of Russian nationalism in the USSR of the NEP era. The study of Agurskii is pioneering in making clear many aspects of the underground dialogue between the emigrant statist movement of the Change of Landmarks and the Bolshevik regime. However, if he assumes that the Bolshevik government tolerating the Russian nationalist currents in Soviet society, had been seeking reinforcement of the cultural and political hegemony of the Russian ethnicity (and judging from his attention to the writers whose main theme was the Russian peasantry, he seems to do so), then he is not correct. It seems that in 1920s and afterwards the Bolshevik regime had aimed not so much for the hegemony of ethnic Russians, as for the consolidation of a supra-ethnic entity. To make this matter clear, I will turn to the recent studies of the Bolshevik nationality policy in the 1920s and later. These studies had made clear that the 4 Here I depend on the argument of Anthony Smith that “the nation has come to blend two sets of dimensions, the one civic and territorial, the other ethnic and genealogical.” Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno, 1991), p. 15. Especially on the “civic nation,” see, ibid., p. 116. 5 Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, pp. 21-38; David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 1. 

Conspiracy Theory or Ruling Class Studies

WALL STREET AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION By Antony C. Sutton
Found on the web the full book by Anthony Sutton a rational conspiracy researcher, he studies machinations of 20th Century business decisionsof the Wall Street movers and shakers that have had important political impacts. His focus is on the masks of capitalism, the movers and shakers of the corporate world and their political allies.

His dedication is interesting as well:

To
those unknown Russian libertarians, also
known as Greens, who in 1919 fought both
the Reds and the Whites in their attempt to
gain a free and voluntary Russia

Suttons book is an excellent supplement to Maurice Britons outstanding libertarian history of the Russian Revolution; The Bolsheviks and Workers Control. The libertarians in the Russian Revolution were centred around the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno.

Sutton debunks the Jewish Conspiracy theory in his appendix to this book, which is printed below.

"Capitalism and Bolshevism are the two sides of the same international Jewish coin." - Adolf Hitler

This is the core conspiracy theory behind the American/English/European/Christian and Islamic belief that the Jews rule the world. One could just as well make the case for the Anglo American Alliance conspiracy theory which sees the the US and England in a long battle with the Vatican. Or that it is all an attempt by the Freemasons to enlighten the world. Or the attempt by Cecil Rhodes to revive the power of the declining English Empire with his round table group, Rhodes himself being a notorious racist and anti-semite. All these conspiracy mythos come to a single conspiracy conclusion that there is one mysterious body of leaders behind all this and it is always the same metatheory whether it is the Illuminati or the New World Order it ends up as the Jews are behind it. Since conspiracy theorists are single minded in their 'faith' that there is a single power at the top of their pyramid their metatheory always ends up as anti-semitic. Being a monolithic view that there is a conspiracy to monopolize power, the conspiracy faithful build intricate patterns of roots and branches eventually all leading to Zion. Or is it Sion? Ah well it's B.S. as Sutton correctly points out. Conspiracy theorists enamoured upon their discovery that "the history of the world is the history of secret societies"(as Ishmael Reed said in his novel Mumbo Jumbo) forget that other dictum; the ruling classes compete for power. Regardless of whether that power is to maintain the antiquated aristocracy of the various European royal families, or the Arabic clans and families, or the Indian Brahamin class, or the Japanese Samuria culture now embedded in their Corporatist State, or the American power struggle between Yankees and Cowboys ( Carl Oglesby ), it is all the same struggle. The capitalist system of politics makes each national bourgoise , the executive arm of their particular national capital and its political economy, regardless if it is a mixed economy, a private market or state capitalism. And within this national executive the Power Elite, (C. Wright Mills,) form political camps and vie for power and global hegemony. The Trilateral Commission, the Davos World Economic Forum and the Bilderburger group, are excellent examples of this ruling class conspiracy (conspiracy in the sense that these are private meetings which do not have public oversight and involve all the superstructures of the capitalist state) to maintain its power. The decisions and policies of these institutions of the ruling class elite, think tanks really, set the wheels of globalization, the WTO, and the new corporate state in motion; American Imperialism through free trade and privatization, while right wing think tanks, like the Cato institute, act as the cheerleaders for these policies . Like the story of the Wizard of Oz the conspiracy theorist needs to believe in the metatheory that the Wizard is behind it all, when in reality it is like the machinery of the Wizard; being the machinery of capitalism, the interlocking families, businesses, corporations, and the state compete to maintain their hegemony of power, and to become a monolithic hegemony (imperialism). The conspiracy theorists do us all a favour in revealing exactly the magnitude of what Chomsky calls the institutional structure of the ruling class. But rather than dismissing the conspiracy culture as Chomsky does, we should look at the facts they raise, not for their racist xenophobic conclusions, but rather as a way of assessing the machinations of the global ruling classes in all their internal conflicts to maintain their power and hegemony. This is what makes Suttons books such a damn good read. They clearly show that rather than being a monolithic conspiracy that goes back thousands of years to lost Atlantis, the corporate hegemony of the elites over the state in the twentieth century is really politics as usual under a still ascendant capitalism. In this way Sutton is not so much a conspiracy researcher, though many of his fans are, as he is a student of Ruling Class Studies. As were Caroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, another source for the conspiracy cult, Ferdinand Lundberg The Rich and the Super-Rich and William Domhoff', Who Rules America? Another excellent sociological study of an actual ruling class secret society is the doctoral dissertation by Peter Martin Phillips, A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club. This struggle of the power elites goes back to the origins of modern capitalism between 1400 and 1700 as it evolved out of fuedalism to finally challenge it with a new method of production in the 18th and 19th centuries, and a new State, certainly needs no Atlantean connection to make it worthy of study and understanding. As the power of the elites under capitalism expanded so did their riches. Which is what intriques the conspiracy faithful, they expose the inheritance of power and wealth of the elite. The fortunes of the capitalist ruling class are not made by production, sales, work, creation of factories, or jobs but by inheritence the very source as, Marx points out, of the origin of capital. The right wing in America, so enamoured of conspiracy theories, justifies this inheritance of power and wealth by the elites and the ruling classes which is ironically, the very source of their conspiracy theories.

"In a capitalist society, the institution of inheritance is more than a moral institution, it is part of the process whereby wealth is transferred to those who can best use it to serve the wishes of consumers." The Super-Rich Tax Themselves by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

And who better to know what we want, then our rulers whose only claim to power is the wealth they did not earn but inherited from their families who have been exploiting us for centuries. How this wealth came to be, theft, murder, etc., in the hands of a small elite is not anwsered by the right wing apologists for the power elite. And when the ruling class fears things aren't going their way they create their own counter revolution; Fascism.

As Domhoff points out:

Most sectors of the American economy are dominated by a relative handful of large corporations. These corporations, in turn, are linked in a variety of ways to create a corporate community. At an economic level, the ties within the corporate community are manifested in ownership of common stock on the part of both families and other corporations, as well as in joint ventures among corporations and in the common sources of bank loans that most corporations share. At a more sociological level, the corporate community is joined together by the use of the same legal, accounting, and consulting firms and by the similar experiences of executives working in the bureaucratic structure of a large organization. Then too, the large corporations come together as a business community because they share the same values and goals-in particular, the profit motive. Finally, and not least, the common goals of the corporations lead them to have common enemies in the labor movement and middle-class reformers, which gives them a further sense of a shared identity.

hundreds of very large corporations ... are privately owned by a family or group of families. The size and extent of such corporations is often overlooked in discussions of the modern corporation.

The fact that the upper class is also intertwined with the corporate community adds a second dimension to the nature of its cohesiveness. The cohesion is not only social, based on school and club affiliations, but economic, rooted in common stock ownership and most visibly manifested in the complex pattern of interlocking directorships that unites the corporate community and creates a dense and flexible communication network.

And this is exactly what Anthony Sutton's books document is the American Power Elite and their influence in the 20th Century. In Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, he says;

"This politically active Wall Street group is more or less the same elitist circle known generally among Conservatives as the "Liberal Establishment," by liberals (for instance G. William Domhoff) as "the ruling class," and by conspiratorial theorists Gary Allen and Dan Smoot as the "Insiders." But whatever we call this self-perpetuating elitist group, it is apparently fundamentally significant in the determination of world affairs, at a level far behind and above that of the elected politicians."

Sutton is also the author of "America's Secret Establishment. An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones." His work on the Skull and Bones has seen renewed popularity as both George W and John Kerry were members of this Anglo American establishment institution, as is William Buckely Jr. Scratch a right winger, even a so called libertarian right winger, in the United States and you will find a conspiracy theorist. A simple review of conspiracy web sites will reveal the fact that all of them lead to evangelical protestant sects in America and their websites, bible study courses and mass media broadcasts about the coming end days. And of course these sects are notorious anti-semites, cause they know who killed Jesus. So now you know who is really behind the conspiracy.

Appendix II

THE JEWISH-CONSPIRACY THEORY OF THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

There is an extensive literature in English, French, and German reflecting the argument that the Bolshevik Revolution was the result of a "Jewish conspiracy"; more specifically, a conspiracy by Jewish world bankers. Generally, world control is seen as the ultimate objective; the Bolshevik Revolution was but one phase of a wider program that supposedly reflects an age-old religious struggle between Christianity and the "forces of darkness."

The argument and its variants can be found in the most surprising places and from quite surprising persons. In February 1920 Winston Churchill wrote an article — rarely cited today — for the London Illustrated Sunday Herald entitled "Zionism Versus Bolshevism." In this' article Churchill concluded that it was "particularly important... that the National Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption should come forward on every occasion . . . and take a prominent part in every measure for combatting the Bolshevik conspiracy." Churchill draws a line between "national Jews" and what he calls "international Jews." He argues that the "international and for the most atheistical Jews" certainly had a "very great" role in the creation of Bolshevism and bringing about the Russian Revolution. He asserts (contrary to fact) that with the exception of Lenin, "the majority" of the leading figures in the revolution were Jewish, and adds (also contrary to fact) that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship were excepted by the Bolsheviks from their policies of seizure. Churchill calls the international Jews a "sinister confederacy" emergent from the persecuted populations of countries where Jews have been persecuted on account of their race. Winston Churchill traces this movement back to Spartacus-Weishaupt, throws his literary net around Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman, and charges: "This world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing."

Churchill then argues that this conspiratorial Spartacus-Weishaupt group has been the mainspring of every subversive movement in the nineteenth century. While pointing out that Zionism and Bolshevism are competing for the soul of the Jewish people, Churchill (in 1920) was preoccupied with the role of the Jew in the Bolshevik Revolution and the existence of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

Another well-known author in the 1920s, Henry Wickham Steed describes in the second volume of his Through 30 Years 1892-1922 (p. 302) how he attempted to bring the Jewish-conspiracy concept to the attention of Colonel Edward M. House and President Woodrow Wilson. One day in March 1919 Wickham Steed called Colonel House and found him disturbed over Steed's recent criticism of U.S. recognition of the Bolsheviks. Steed pointed out to House that Wilson would be discredited among the many peoples and nations of Europe and "insisted that, unknown to him, the prime movers were Jacob Schiff, Warburg and other international financiers, who wished above all to bolster up the Jewish Bolshevists in order to secure a field for German and Jewish exploitation of Russia."1 According to Steed, Colonel House argued for the establishment of economic relations with the Soviet Union.

Probably the most superficially damning collection of documents on the Jewish conspiracy is in the State Department Decimal File (861.00/5339). The central document is one entitled "Bolshevism and Judaism," dated November 13, 1918. The text is in the form of a report, which states that the revolution in Russia was engineered "in February 1916" and "it was found that the following persons and firms were engaged in this destructive work":

(1) Jacob Schiff Jew (2) Kuhn, Loeb & Company Jewish Firm Management: Jacob Schiff Jew
Felix Warburg Jew
Otto H. Kahn Jew
Mortimer L. Schiff Jew
Jerome J. Hanauer Jew (3) Guggenheim Jew (4) Max Breitung Jew (5) Isaac Seligman Jew

The report goes on to assert that there can be no doubt that the Russian Revolution was started and engineered by this group and that in April 1917

Jacob Schiff in fact made a public announcement and it was due to his financial influence that the Russian revolution was successfully accomplished and in the Spring 1917 Jacob Schitf started to finance Trotsky, a Jew, for the purpose of accomplishing a social revolution in Russia.

The report contains other miscellaneous information about Max Warburg's financing of Trotsky, the role of the Rheinish-Westphalian syndicate and Olof Aschberg of the Nya Banken (Stockholm) together with Jivotovsky. The anonymous author (actually employed by the U.S. War Trade Board)states that the links between these organizations and their financing of the Bolshevik Revolution show how "the link between Jewish multi-millionaires and Jewish proletarians was forged." The report goes on to list a large number of Bolsheviks who were also Jews and then describes the actions of Paul Warburg, Judus Magnes, Kuhn, Loeb & Company, and Speyer & Company.

The report ends with a barb at "International Jewry" and places the argument into the context of a Christian-Jewish conflict backed up by quotations from the Protocols of Zion. Accompanying this report is a series of cables between the State Department in Washington and the American embassy in London concerning the steps to be taken with these documents:

5399 Great Britain, TEL. 3253 i pm

October 16, 1919 In Confidential File
Secret for Winslow from Wright. Financial aid to Bolshevism & Bolshevik Revolution in Russia from prominent Am. Jews: Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, Otto Kahn, Mendell Schiff, Jerome Hanauer, Max Breitung & one of the Guggenheims. Document re- in possession of Brit. police authorities from French sources. Asks for any facts re-.

* * * * *

Oct. 17 Great Britain TEL. 6084, noon r c-h 5399 Very secret. Wright from Winslow. Financial aid to Bolshevik revolution in Russia from prominent Am. Jews. No proof re- but investigating. Asks to urge Brit. authorities to suspend publication at least until receipt of document by Dept.

* * * * *

Nov. 28 Great Britain TEL. 6223 R 5 pro. 5399
FOR WRIGHT. Document re financial aid to Bolsheviki by prominent American jews. Reports — identified as French translation of a statement originally prepared in English by Russian citizen in Am. etc. Seem most unwise to give — the distinction of publicity.

It was agreed to suppress this material and the files conclude, "I think we have the whole thing in cold storage."

Another document marked "Most Secret" is included with this batch of material. The provenance of the document is unknown; it is perhaps FBI or military intelligence. It reviews a translation of the Protocols of the Meetings of the Wise Men of Zion, and concludes:

In this connection a letter was sent to Mr. W. enclosing a memorandum from us with regard to certain information from the American Military Attache to the effect that the British authorities had letters intercepted from various groups of international Jews setting out a scheme for world dominion. Copies of this material will be very useful to us.

This information was apparently developed and a later British intelligence report makes the flat accusation:

SUMMARY: There is now definite evidence that Bolshevism is an international movement controlled by Jews; communications are passing between the leaders in America, France, Russia and England with a view to concerted action....4

However, none of the above statements can be supported with hard empirical evidence. The most significant information is contained in the paragraph to the effect that the British authorities possessed "letters intercepted from various groups of international Jews setting out a scheme for world dominion." If indeed such letters exist, then they would provide support (or nonsupport) for a presently unsubstantiated hypothesis: to wit, that the Bolshevik Revolution and other revolutions are the work of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

Moveover, when statements and assertions are not supported by hard evidence and where attempts to unearth hard evidence lead in a circle back to the starting point — particularly when everyone is quoting everyone else — then we must reject the story as spurious. There is no concrete evidence that Jews were involved in the Bolshevik Revolution because they were Jewish. There may indeed have been a higher proportion of Jews involved, but given tsarist treatment of Jews, what else would we expect? There were probably many Englishmen or persons of English origin in the American Revolution fighting the redcoats. So what? Does that make the American Revolution an English conspiracy? Winston Churchill's statement that Jews had a "very great role" in the Bolshevik Revolution is supported only by distorted evidence. The list of Jews involved in the Bolshevik Revolution must be weighed against lists of non-Jews involved in the revolution. When this scientific procedure is adopted, the proportion of foreign Jewish Bolsheviks involved falls to less than twenty percent of the total number of revolutionaries — and these Jews were mostly deported, murdered, or sent to Siberia in the following years. Modern Russia has in fact maintained tsarist anti-Semitism.

It is significant that documents in the State Department files confirm that the investment banker Jacob Schiff, often cited as a source of funds for the Bolshevik Revolution, was in fact against support of the Bolshevik regime. This position, as we shall see, was in direct contrast to the Morgan-Rockefeller promotion of the Bolsheviks.

The persistence with which the Jewish-conspiracy myth has been pushed suggests that it may well be a deliberate device to divert attention from the real issues and the real causes. The evidence provided in this book suggests that the New York bankers who were also Jewish had relatively minor roles in supporting the Bolsheviks, while the New York bankers who were also Gentiles (Morgan, Rockefeller, Thompson) had major roles.

What better way to divert attention from the real operators than by the medieval bogeyman of anti-Semitism?

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