2017 marks the centennial
of one of the biggest events in human history.
One hundred years ago,
a huge chunk of the planet
became ruled by workers and peasants with a socialist economy
with the success of the Russian Revolution.
Fourteen other nations joined Russia
in what became the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics,
shifting the balance of power in a world
that had long been dominated by lords and
barons.
Critics and supporters can agree,
the Soviet Union shook the world,
ushering in a period of social revolution,
breaking up old colonial bonds,
and a challenge to the reigning system of
capitalism.
All of that started on November 7th, 1917.
To learn more about this event,
I sat down with Brian Becker,
long-time socialist organizer and co-author
of the new book,
"Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution
Changed the World."
Can you set the stage for the revolution in
Russia in 1917
and what was happening both locally and globally
that sparked it?
The big context, the big picture for the Russian
Revolution
was a country that spanned all the way from
Poland to Pacific Ocean,
in other words,
the largest land mass of any country in the
world,
a country that had been ruled by an emperor,
the tsar.
For 300 years, the Romanov family dominated.
In 1917, 75% of the country were peasants,
96% of the peasants were illiterate.
There had been tempestuous industrial growth
in the last years before the Russian Revolution
as a consequence of foreign direct investment,
mainly from France.
In general, this was a society that had remained
static for three centuries.
The monarchy had become decrepit,
it had a bad leadership under the tsar,
the last tsar, Tsar Nicholas II.
Most importantly, the Russian Empire had suffered
major military defeats
in 1905 in the war with Japan, a humiliating
defeat.
Then in World War I, three million-plus Russians
died.
There was no end to the war
and the consequence of that was that the people
in Russia could not eat.
The peasants were at the front,
they wanted to go home to the farms.
Economic misery and discontent was growing.
The Russian Revolution--well, there were really
two revolutions:
the February Revolution started on International
Women's Day
when women went out on strike, protesting
their immiseration.
Suddenly, surprisingly, within three or four
days, the tsar was vanquished.
That wasn't carried out by the Bolsheviks
or the Mensheviks
or the social revolutionaries or any political
party.
It was an entirely spontaneous mass movement
that the tsar himself,
the day before the revolution,
where he loses leadership, is writing in his
diary,
"I took a walk today.
I had tea today."
In other words, a leadership that was completely
removed
from the realities of his own country and
his own people.
What sectors of Russian society
comprised the revolution and what role did
they play?
There were two basic classes.
Of course, we know from the flag of the Soviet
Union,
it was the hammer representing the workers
and the sickle representing the tool of the
peasants.
Those were the two classes.
You had the urban workers in St. Petersburg,
in Moscow,
a few other industrial cities but again,
as I said, 75% of the country were
peasants.
There was a peasant uprising as a consequence
of the extreme suffering caused by World War
I.
The Bolshevik Party, which was an urban-based,
proletarian-based party, a minority party,
a small party, relatively, in St. Petersburg
and in Moscow.
It threw its lot in with the peasants.
It said, during this period of tempestuous
peasant uprising,
"Land to the tiller.
We, the workers, support the peasants
in seizing the landed estates from the big
landowners."
The workers and peasants began marching, step
by step,
shoulder and shoulder with each other against
a common enemy.
First the tsar, and later, nine months later,
against the bourgeoisie that had taken the
place of the tsar.
The bourgeois government became the next to
fall.
That was the October Revolution.
It was a worker and peasant revolution led
by a worker and peasant soviet.
Everybody knows the name "Soviet Union," but
who were the Soviets?
The soviet is the Russian word for council.
The soviets were a little bit like what occupy
encampments were
but they were independent councils of people's
power from the grassroots.
The workers' districts voted for delegates
to come to the workers' council.
The council is the soviet in Russian.
Same with the peasants.
They had peasant councils.
The soldiers got in on the act, too,
and they formed soviets of soldiers.
These were elected bodies from the grassroots,
grassroots resisters, who said,
we have more legitimacy than the existing
government.
They became a dual power, a secondary power,
a competing power with governmental power.
What made the Russian Revolution different
than, let's say,
the U.S. Revolution from its monarchy,
the French Revolution from its monarchy?
It ousted a tsarist monarchy.
Right.
Revolutions aren't very common in history
but they do happen.
You mentioned the American Revolution,
a revolution against the monarchy,
the French Revolution that came a decade later
against a monarchy.
The real difference in the Russian Revolution
is that it was the very first time in history
where the revolution was led by classes
that did not have private property at all.
The working class did not have private property.
They didn't own factories.
They didn't own estates.
If you look at the American Revolution,
it was led by big plantation owners
and big bankers in the northern cities.
Here, you had poor people, working class people,
seize the power of society and say, guess
what?
We are going to really have a government of,
by and for the people
which was not protecting any private property
interests but,
in fact, attacking private property,
meaning the control of capital.
That's what made it really unique:
the first time the working class,
or working classes, took power and held power.
There had been other worker insurrections,
other peasant insurrections,
but they took the power and they were able
to hold it.
Of course, Winston Churchill and all the Western
leaders,
never thought the Russian Revolution
would last more than a few months.
Winston Churchill said,
"Let's strangle that baby while it's still
in the crib."
Of course, that led to many, multiple imperialist
invasions.
They never thought the Bolsheviks could hold
it.
They thought "Oh, these are poor people.
These are workers. They're peasants.
How could they be the ruling class of society?"
Shockingly, the Bolsheviks, for the first
time,
showed that the working class, the poor,
could actually take and hold power.
It seems very crazy to people living here,
to confront the powers that be as a peasant
force
and not have just have complete massacres.
How bloody was the revolution, and how did
it actually take place?
How did these peasants actually take power
and hold it?
The February Revolution,
the leadership was inherited by bourgeois
liberals.
They were called the Cadet Party and some
Socialists,
Kerensky in particular.
The problem that that revolutionary government,
that came from the February Revolution, had
was it could not escape its alliance with
Britain, France and the United States
which insisted that the new revolutionary
government
stay in World War I as allies.
The U.S. and Britain and France didn't want
them to end the war
because then Germany could focus all of its
attentions on the western front.
They demanded that Kerensky and the Russian
revolutionaries stay in the war.
But that's what the revolution was about:
getting out of the war, stopping the killing,
letting the soldiers go back and work the
farms.
The Bolshevik Revolution came about because
the Bolsheviks,
and the Bolsheviks alone, said,
"We must have a second revolution if we are to end the war."
It was an anti-war revolution.
When the Bolsheviks took power,
they immediately said, "We're done fighting."
They sent a message to all of the combatants,
allies and axis powers alike,
saying, "We're done and you should be done, too."
Of course, that's why the message of the Russian
Revolution spread to Hungary,
spread to Germany because the workers there
wanted to stop fighting.
Millions, tens of millions had been killed.
Everybody wanted the war to end,
except the bourgeois classes that were hoping
that,
out of the war, they'd have new colonies.
The workers don't have colonies.
They just wanted to stop the bleeding.
That was the real reason the Russian Revolution
happened.
You mentioned that it was bloodless before.
So many people in Russia and so many sectors
of society
were so insistent that this war come to an
end,
that when the Bolsheviks finally staged the insurrection,
the planned uprising on November 7th,
the old government fell.
It wasn't bloodless, but nearly bloodless,
one of, perhaps, the most bloodless revolutions
in world history.
It was, in fact, like a celebration.
People just started drinking.
They emptied the wineries.
The soldiers let all the prisoners go.
The soldiers even captured the counter revolutionaries.
Then they said, "Let them go, too."
They said, "Finally, we the workers and peasants have taken charge,
like a big party."
It only became really bloody and really violent
in the months later.
Let's talk about what happened after the fact,
Brian.
Several countries invaded.
How did the new-found,
the revolutionaries who took power,
how did they fend off the assault
and use the military to do so?
That is what we call the civil war that followed
the Russian Revolution.
The German government, the imperialist government
in Germany,
demanded that Russia make huge concessions
of western territories to Germany.
When the Bolsheviks, under Lenin's leadership,
said, "Yes,
we must make these concessions to Germany,"
they gave up a big part of Russian territory,
which meant the territory where Russian peasants
were living.
Many on the left became disaffected with Lenin and the Bolsheviks and said,
"You're capitulating to German imperialism.
We didn't make a revolution in order to give
away our country."
Lenin said, "We have no army.
How can we fight?
We must make a concession."
The relationship of forces was such.
The coalition government between the social
revolutionaries,
who were a peasant-led party
or a party that tried to lead the peasants,
and the Bolsheviks--that alliance broke apart.
Different parts of the left,
along with counter revolutionaries from the
old landed estates,
tsarist generals, in league with imperialist
invading countries,
formed a common cause called White Russia.
They were the Whites versus the Reds.
A civil war ensued and another three million
Russians died.
You had 14 imperialist armies invading, including
the United States.
You had the Germans taking up a big part of
Russia.
Under those pressures,
it looked like the Bolsheviks would lose control.
The White Russians began a campaign of terror
and assassination.
Thousands of communists were assassinated
when they went to the countryside or went
to the factories.
This previously bloodless revolution
was suddenly engulfed in the worst kind of
civil war.
All of the basic democratic premises of the
revolution
that had been signaled immediately starting
November 7th, 1917
were replaced by conditions of civil war.
When you're in conflict, when you're in military
battle,
hierarchies and command posts are established,
and all things are done to win because you
don't want to die.
As a consequence, the soviet democracy,
the flourishing of socialist democracy was,
in many ways,
engulfed by the military exigencies or emergencies
confronting the revolution as a consequence
of imperialist armies invading,
tsarist generals forming counter- revolutionary
armies,
and even left forces like SR or social revolutionaries
and some Mensheviks taking up arms against
the new Bolshevik government.
Brian, we hear a ton about Lenin.
He was the principal leader of the revolution,
of course.
Talk about who he was, what he brought to
that revolution,
also how did the character of the revolution
change
six years later when he died?
Many people say that without Lenin there wouldn't
be a Russian Revolution.
I agree with that.
The Bolshevik Party was a collective party,
but only Lenin had the stature within that
party,
where all of the different sectors of the
party,
the different factions, the different leaders,
ultimately looked to Lenin above all others.
Lenin had this brilliant tactical acuity.
Some said, "We must always go forward,"
and some said, "We should never go forward."
Lenin had the capacity as a theoretician of
Marxism,
as a philosopher, as a strategist,
but also a brilliant tactician.
He was guided by tactical or organizational
principles
that we would now call Leninism,
although that's a badly misunderstood term.
I would say that Lenin was the one who understood
after the February Revolution,
and he alone understood this,
that there had to be a second revolution.
Most of the Bolsheviks were ready, really,
to stop with the February Revolution and to
be a left-wing lobby
in the new bourgeois liberal democratic revolutionary
government.
Lenin came back from exile and said, "No,
we must have a second revolution because this
revolutionary government
will not break its alliance with imperialism.
It will not do that which the people most
need,
which is to end their participation in World
War I."
Lenin was bold enough and audacious enough
to actually conceive of the idea that a second
revolution could happen.
When he came back, Lenin said,
"We can't have a revolution now
because the masses of people don't agree with
us.
They're euphoric.
They think the new government is something
wonderful.
It's not the tsar.
Give it a chance."
In other words, he said,
"We can't make a revolution through a conspiracy.
We have to premise our tactics, our strategy,
on the popular will."
He said you don't have to have all the people
with you,
but you have to have a big part of the population
with you or sympathetic to you.
He suggested to the Bolsheviks,
"Let's stay steadfast in our principles to
end our participation in the war,
but go and explain persistently and patiently
why that must be."
As a consequence of that six-month process,
Lenin's strategy of winning over the population
happened.
The soviet, again, those councils of peasants
and soldiers and workers--
their composition changed by September.
Instead of it being the middle class, educated
parts of the population--
and, you know, those are the people who always
get to the microphone first.
They speak first.
They have the privileges to be able to do
that.
By September, end of September,
the composition of the soviet had changed.
It was poor people coming barefoot to the
meetings of the soviet,
the poorest workers, the ones who were most
ready to fight,
those who had the most to gain and the least
to lose by going for it,
by actually having a revolution.
They had become the new leaders within those
six months.
That was Lenin's strategic genius.
What happened when he died?
He died and, if you read Lenin's writings
in the last year of his life--
he had several strokes that paralyzed him
and incapacitated him--
you can see that Lenin has become consumed
with the problems facing this new Russian
Revolution.
The country is too poor.
The state can't provide for the peasants yet.
It doesn't have enough material resources.
The Bolsheviks are not equipped to really
fully run the machinery,
the administrative machinery of the state,
so they're relying on the old civil servants
of the tsarist government.
He's preoccupied with those problems.
He maybe could have guided the country as
Fidel or Mao did.
They lived longer.
They were able to guide their revolutions
through various processes.
Lenin, the premier, indispensable leader of
the revolution,
is gone six years after the revolution.
The country is in crisis.
It's facing internal foes.
Of course, after his death, the party cleaved
into different factions,
those following Stalin,
those following Trotsky,
those following Bukharin--
three big, broad factions.
Lenin was able to manage a party where there
was free-wheeling debate.
There was not censorship.
People could have differences and argument.
Lenin frequently lost the vote in the politburo.
He was not a dictator at all.
He had no dictatorial or megalomaniacal feature.
He made sure that the organization was a collective,
even though it had decisive leadership.
Afterwards, a lot of that spirit of leadership
and the way leadership was conducted profoundly
shifted,
especially as the factions sort of started
to fight it out following Lenin's death.
Why did so many former prison nations of the
Russian Empire end up joining the USSR?
That, too, was a battle between 1917 and 1922,
when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
was actually proclaimed,
during that five-year period.
In every one of the former Russian republics,
Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan in the Caucuses,
or Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Baltics,
or in the southern places, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan,
all of these places became the point in which
communists and revolutionaries
were fighting it out with landlords and political
elites
who were aligned with one or another of the
invading imperialist armies.
By the end of the day,
by the end of that civil war which the Bolsheviks
won--
shockingly, because of their limited resources--
wherever the working class party had the upper
hand,
they said, "We want to be with the Soviet
Union,
but on the basis of mutual equality,
not the old days when Russia was known
as the Prison House of Nations under tsarism."
Thus, language rights were developed,
social rights for those other non-Russian
republics.
In fact, the way the Soviet government was
structured--
and people don't know this--
is that there were two Soviets, two supreme
Soviets.
One was the Supreme Soviet of the Union,
that was of the USSR,
but then there was the Soviet of the Nationalities,
meaning each of the nationalities had an equal
vote
within the Soviet of Nationalities.
No law could become the law of the Soviet
Union
unless it was also agreed to by the Soviet
of Nationalities,
which meant smaller, non-Russian republics
were given,
essentially, a veto power over laws.
That meant there could not be racist laws
passed against them
or laws that were detrimental to their own
ethnic or national development.
Nothing like that had ever been done by a
modern government
where oppressed nationalities and minority
peoples
had been given such a formal equality in the
law.
You mentioned the state of Russia before the
revolution.
Of course, there was widespread famine and
devastation.
What happened after the revolution?
How did Russia change, and not just Russia,
but non-Russian republics?
There's two phases here.
Between 1917, at the time of the Russian Revolution,
November 7th, 1917 and 1920,
everything got worse.
During the years of civil war, a famine broke
out.
Millions had died.
There was nothing left economically.
Many of the Communists had died
because they were the ones who rushed to the
front
to fight the imperialist invading armies.
The factories were no longer working by 1920.
There was an absence of energy.
In 1921, Lenin adopted a policy called the
New Economic Policy or NEP.
That policy was largely successful
and the economy started to grow and grow and
grow.
If you fast-forward to the question of how
Russia was impacted
over the decades of socialist economic planning,
that's an important question
because the conditions of life so improved
for the people in Russia
and in the other, what were formerly Russian
Empire republics
that had re-affiliated with Russia.
We see the most dynamic social, economic,
educational
and cultural advances of almost any time period.
These were kind of the social gains of a revolution
that did not have a capitalist class.
In other words, instead of the capitalist
class devouring or hoarding
so much of the society's wealth,
that wealth was able to be used for social
insurance programs,
social welfare programs and for people who
in the past had nothing.
You talk about the extreme and consistent
economic growth, but at what cost?
We don't want to try to pretend the Soviet
Union was heaven on earth.
It was a poor country.
You also asked the question, at what cost?
When you go from a country that's 75% peasant
in 1917
and becomes an urban industrial country within
20 years,
a process that took 150 years in Germany,
France,
Britain and the United States,
and you compress that into 20 years,
when you have that kind of social reorganization
of society,
there's going to be a lot of social tension,
a lot of pressures on families and on individuals.
It was, in some ways, as a consequence of
its dynamism,
also a fairly brutal process.
When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote
the Communist Manifesto,
they did not think the Socialist Revolution
would happen
in poor, underdeveloped countries.
Nor did Lenin.
Lenin always thought it would happen in Germany
or France.
He never expected the Russian Revolution
to become the vanguard of the worldwide Socialist
Revolution.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks were mainly fighting
to end the monarchy in 1905 or 1910 or 1915.
It was a consequence of World War I.
As Lenin explained, the revolution happened
not where the social conditions for socialism
were really ripe,
but where imperialism was weak.
In other words, he said,
"We weren't ready for socialism,
but we were the weakest link in the imperialist
chain."
It broke there.
The revolution broke it because of the war,
so Russia had its revolution.
When Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, all of the
leaders,
looked out and saw the world in 1917 after
the revolution,
they said, "We can win,
but only if Germany has a socialist revolution
so that they come to our aid."
Lenin said, "As soon as the advanced capitalist
countries have their revolutions,
we won't be the vanguard.
We'll be looking to them for assistance, culturally,
economically."
The other revolutions didn't come.
There was a revolution in Germany and in Hungary.
It all happened in 1918, but the capitalists
overcame it.
They didn't have a Bolshevik-type party capable
of
taking advantage of the revolution and seizing
and holding power.
The Soviet Union became isolated, so isolated,
the most sanctioned,
embargoed, blockaded country in the world.
We know about the blockade in Cuba.
The Soviet Union was completely blockaded.
This poor, illiterate country that had a war
and then a civil war
and famine had come back by 1920--
nobody would trade with it.
The worldwide capitalist powers said, "We're
going to destroy it.
We're going to snuff it out.
We're going to strangle it."
As a consequence, the Soviet Union had to
develop
on a basis of complete self-reliance on its
own indigenous industry,
rather than having the benefits of worldwide
trade.
After the fall of the Soviet Union,
it was declared the end of history, right?
Socialism was tried and it failed.
Capitalism would rule to the end of time.
As a socialist, what's your response?
It's a very important question because the
hubris and arrogance of the apologists
of imperialists and capitalism was at such
a high point in 1991 and 1992,
where they thought, or told the world, "You
see, socialism was tried."
They conflated socialism with a government,
the Soviet Union.
It was tried in the Soviet Union and that
government failed.
That means socialism failed.
Thus, history has stopped because we went
from early primitive society,
as they would call it,
to feudal society to capitalist society, but
this is it.
Now we can live under the rule of billionaires,
our crowning achievement as a species.
We've made it.
Billionaires will rule.
History has shown that the other way isn't
going to happen.
Is that how people will remember the Soviet
Union?
I don't think so.
The Soviet Union will be looked at in history
not as the end of communism,
but as its first valiant experiment,
that the flaws and defects that existed in
the Soviet Union,
and yes, there were many,
were not the cause of a planned socialist
economy or public property.
They were caused by a torturous history,
an environment domestically poor, an underdeveloped,
illiterate society,
ravaged by civil war,
invaded by fourteen imperialist armies,
embargoed and deprived of technology,
invaded by the Nazis, taking 27 million lives
and destroying the economy.
Those were the conditions under which this
socialist experiment was conducted.
It will be remembered as the first time the
red flag was waved,
where the working class, the poor, the oppressed,
the people who were written off by all previous
ruling classes--
said they could remold society.
They made a huge historic achievement to the
20th century.
It will be--because we will learn its lessons--
the sort of petri dish communists and socialists
will learn from, not reject.
In other words, the Soviet experiment must
be embraced and respected
as a huge monumental achievement,
in spite of its defects and flaws.
