Spies and Commissars

‘betrayal’ on the party leadership. They refused to believe that Germany’s workers would tolerate this situation for ever. The Spartacists, when they obtained their opportunity, would surely prove able to pull them back to the line of revolution — and the great potential of the German proletariat would be fulfilled.

What is more, Bolsheviks were impressed by the steps taken in Germany towards centralized state regulation. Capitalists had never been more closely integrated into planning mechanisms. Trotsky in particular was intrigued by the government’s measures for bringing official order and purpose to the economy. He proposed to use this approach in order to further his revolutionary aims: ‘For the introduction of control over production and distribution the proletariat has had extremely valuable models in the West, above all in the form of Germany’s so- called “war socialism”.’ In Russia this would require the carrying out of ‘an agrarian revolution’. If state economic coordination was going to be introduced it would have to be done in a steady fashion.⁹

Yuri Larin, a left-wing Marxist who joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, was equally inspired by what he read about the German situation. He noted how the state had taken food supplies into its hands and compelled agricultural producers to form unions so as to make them easier to control. Each German region and district was strictly supervised. Transport of goods beyond local borders was forbidden except with official permission. Prices were set for basic products. The entire economy was operated according to a central plan. According to Larin, Germany’s government found itself unable to avoid conceding to demands by urban and rural workers.¹⁰ Even so, the war had disrupted and lowered output. Most German people were worse off than before the fighting had started, and the effect of this was registered on socialist leaders who began to demand the forcible expropriation of agricultural land for the benefit of consumption in the cities. It was Larin’s belief that the drift of thinking towards the needs of urban residents would soon be seen in Russia too.¹¹ As he pointed out, Germany’s workers had called for a universal compulsory system of food rationing at the outset of war. Fairness had fallen by the wayside as the propertied classes secured greater supplies than the average. The way forward in Russia as in Germany was to introduce a regime corresponding to the requirements of the people as a whole.¹²

Larin argued that the best outcome for the workers and everybody else would be the ‘urbanization’ of agriculture. Farms should be set up on the outskirts of cities. The principle should be adopted that ‘agricultural enterprises must be subordinated to direct supervision and administration by the consumers of grain’. The industrial proletariat ought to have a dominant influence.¹³ Larin pointed out that no warring country was without its economic problems. He predicted high cereal prices for a long period after the war. He could not see how Europe could cope with its problems unless power was being exercised by the workers to ensure a swift expansion of farm output.¹⁴ Nikolai Bukharin spelled out how this could be done. Rather than allow peasants to grab and divide up the landed estates he recommended the establishment of large collective farms.¹⁵ The peasantry should not be left to decide how to plough, sow and reap — and the same prescription should be applied in every European country. The entire property order in Russia was going to be toppled and Bolsheviks wanted to ensure that the precedent would be followed elsewhere. The purpose was to persuade everybody that material possessions were always withheld from the poor in the most unfair fashion. A Bolshevik called Kii argued that the mystique of private ownership had to be exposed as the deceit that it was. Revolutions were not as difficult to undertake as ‘bourgeois’ social science contended.¹⁶

The fundamental ideas of the Bolsheviks were never less than grandiose. They loved cities, industry, the proletariat and central state planning. They believed in the imposition of expertise. They praised order and control. Their priority was to provide what they thought were the basic requirements of civilization: work, health care, social insurance, food, shelter and education. They thought they knew better than the people they intended to serve. In the end — and they thought that the end would come soon — the people would understand and accept their wisdom.

They rejected all counter-ideals as reactionary, pernicious nonsense. They disliked agriculture, handicrafts, the ‘chaos’ of markets, religion, private income and individual freedom. They detested banks — when Ivy Litvinov went into the Hampstead branch of Lloyds to cash a cheque she was treated by Maxim’s comrades as if she had done something immoral. She was not well off. She could not understand why revolutionary militants should be so grim towards her when they themselves aspired to a bourgeois lifestyle.¹⁷ But Bolsheviks liked to think they saw through the hypocrisies of middle-class prejudices. They thought marriage to be one of these. When Lenin wed Nadezhda Krupskaya it was only so that the police would allow them to stay together in Siberian exile. Trotsky and Alexandra Sokolovskaya went through a marriage ceremony for the same reason. Bolsheviks dropped and acquired partners with more than average frequency at that time. Their loyalty was to the Revolution. Family took second place to the Revolution in the lives of the militants. The cause was everything.

It was all very well to study the history of Russia and to appreciate the difficulties ahead; but ‘science’ could take the movement for liberation only so far (although it was true that some Bolsheviks had written extensively on the Russian past). The party had to show daring and take risks. An exemplary opportunity was being offered to the political far left in Petrograd. Where Russians went, others would soon follow. There was no time for intellectual doubt.

One big distinction of the Bolshevik leadership lay in their readiness to use massive force to achieve their ends. Ivan Maiski offered a shrewd estimate of Lenin. His leader reminded him of a sentence in the Book of Revelation: ‘So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.’¹⁸ Lenin had always been notorious for his fondness for dictatorship and terror. Trotsky had been rather enigmatic. While proposing extreme schemes such as a ‘workers’ government’, he had kept comradely relations with the Mensheviks and criticized the Bolsheviks. In 1917 he revealed that he accepted that a government of workers would indeed need to use severe methods. For once he called on Marx as an authority. It was Marx who had lauded the Jacobin terror with its frequent use of the guillotine in the French Revolution and called it ‘the plebeian method’ of crushing resistance. Trotsky admired the Jacobins for their ‘iron repression’.¹⁹ Not all Bolshevik leaders were yet of the same ferocity. Kamenev and Bukharin often questioned the need for severe repressive measures and occasionally did something to moderate them. But they in no way forswore such methods in principle. As time went on, the entire leadership came over to the idea that there could be no revolutionary consolidation without harsh dictatorship and widespread state terror.

Communists cared little for detailed prognostication. They dealt in visions and slogans, in promises and threats and commitments. They talked about ‘class struggle’, ‘class war’ and even ‘civil war’. They paid no attention to details of governance. Adolf Ioffe, one of Trotsky’s close associates, was unusual in writing a booklet about local administration.²⁰ Action took precedence over forethought. Lenin used to quote Goethe to the effect that theory is grey whereas the tree of life is green. (Not that this stopped him being doctrinaire and bookish when explaining his own theoretical vision.) He and others stated endlessly that they were encouraging a ‘revolution from below’. They saw themselves as liberators of the working class. Soon there would be proletarian self- administration. But how this would be combined with the party’s objective of a highly centralized state was never elaborated — there was no serious attempt to ask the question. The Bolsheviks cheerfully smashed institutions to smithereens at the same time as insisting on internal organizational discipline as a permanent requirement. They had no concern about the disruption they were bound to cause. Their refrain was that revolutions were messy. They detested what they called politicking. They were repelled by compromise; they preferred open decisions to a public life of fudges and corruption.

They felt that they were the true Reds of revolutionary Russia. Conservatives and liberals called every Menshevik and Socialist- Revolutionary a Red. But the Bolsheviks were undeniably more radical than their rivals, and so they monopolized political ownership of the colour. But although they displayed an expansive confidence, their doctrines were far from being comprehensive: there were not just marginal gaps in these doctrines but huge, hazardous holes. Like utopians of earlier centuries, they scoffed when this was pointed out to them. They called on their followers to show belief and confidence. They took pride in their willingness to experiment. They regarded themselves as open-minded scientists and humanitarians. When others predicted disaster they shrugged and claimed that advanced capitalism had already brought the world to catastrophe. Something entirely different was due to be tested. It was the dawn of a new epoch.

Bolsheviks liked to think that they were unique in the Russia of 1917. This was not wholly true. In every modern profession there were many practitioners who partook of all or some of the Bolshevik ideals and had the same negative prejudices. Among the other revolutionary parties too there were leaders and militants whose mental world shared territory with Bolshevism. Indeed the communists borrowed much of their thinking from