A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Within the party too Trotsky's policies were meeting with growing opposition from the rank and file. His high- handed efforts to break up the railway union, which he blamed for the chaos on the railways, and to replace it with a general transport union (Tsektran) subordinated to the state apparatus, enraged Bolshevik trade-union leaders, who saw it as part of a broader campaign to end all independent union rights. The controversy over the role of the unions had been building up since the start of 1919. The party programme of that year had set out the ideal that the trade unions should directly manage the industrial economy — but only when the working class had been educated for this task. Until then, the role of the unions was to be limited to the fields of workers' education and discipline at work. As the trend towards one-man management continued, a growing number of union leaders became concerned that the promise of direct union management was being put off to the distant future. They managed to defeat the efforts of party leaders to impose the principle of one-man management at the Third Trade Union Congress in January 1920. At the Ninth Party Congress in April they forced the leadership to compromise and offer them a share of the managerial appointments in exchange for their acceptance of the principle.

This delicate balance — between the trade unions and the party-state — was upset by Trotsky's plans, put forward in the summer of 1920, to transform the transport unions into a branch of the state bureaucracy. The whole principle of union autonomy was now seen to be at stake. Nor were the union leaders alone in opposing Trotsky; much of the party leadership itself backed them. Zinoviev, a personal rival of Trotsky, denounced his 'police methods of dragooning workers'. Shliapnikov — joined in January by Kollontai — established the so-called Workers' Opposition to defend the rights of the trade unions and, more generally, to resist the spread of 'bureaucratism' which they said was stifling the 'spontaneous self-creativity' of the working class. The Workers' Opposition enjoyed widespread union support, especially from the metalworkers, among whom the sentiments of class solidarity — expressed both in the ideal of workers' control and in the hatred of the 'bourgeois specialists' — were most firmly rooted. It gave voice to widespread class hatred of factory managers and bureaucrats, whom the workers denounced as the 'new ruling class' and the 'new bourgeoisie'. Many of these sentiments were also expressed by the other major opposition faction in the party, the Democratic Centralists. This group of mostly intellectual Bolsheviks was opposed to the bureaucratic

centralism of the party and to the demise of the Soviets as organs of direct worker-rule. Some of their more radical comrades in Moscow, where their base was strongest, even opened the doors of the district party executives to the Bolshevik rank and file in an effort to promote glasnost, or openness, in local government. They were the first to use the term.

These two controversies — over the unions and the party-state — merged and developed into a general crisis during the autumn of 1920. At a Special Party Conference in September the two opposition factions combined to force through a series of resolutions whose aim was to promote democracy and glasnost in the party: all party meetings were to be opened up to the rank and file; the lower party organs were to have more say in the appointment of higher officials; and the higher organs were to be made more accountable to the rank and file. Strengthened by this victory, the opposition factions prepared for battle over the trade unions. At the Fifth Trade Union Congress in November Trotsky threw down the gauntlet by proposing that all union officials should be appointed by the state. This sparked a bitter conflict within the party, with Trotsky pushing for the immediate and, if necessary, forcible merger of the unions with the state apparatus and the opposition factions fighting tooth and nail for the independence of the unions. Lenin supported Trotsky's goal but advocated a less high-handed approach towards its implementation in order to avoid a damaging split within the regime. 'If the party quarrels with the trade unions,' Lenin warned, 'then this will certainly be the end of Soviet power.' The Central Committee was hopelessly divided on the issue, and for the next three months the conflict raged in the party press as each faction tried to mobilize support for the decisive battle which would surely come at the Tenth Party Congress the following March.¹³ With the government so patently in crisis, and the whole of the country engulfed by revolts and strikes, Russia was on the verge of a new revolution.

ii Engineers of the Human Soul

In October 1919, according to legend, Lenin paid a secret visit to the laboratory of the great physiologist I. P. Pavlov to find out if his work on the conditional reflexes of the brain might help the Bolsheviks control human behaviour. 'I want the masses of Russia to follow a Communistic pattern of thinking and reacting,' Lenin explained. 'There was too much individualism in the Russia of the past. Communism does not tolerate individualistic tendencies. They are harmful. They interfere with our plans. We must abolish individualism.' Pavlov was astounded. It seemed that Lenin wanted him to do for humans what he had already done for dogs. 'Do you mean that you would like to standardize the population of

Russia? Make them all behave in the same way?' he asked. 'Exactly', replied Lenin. 'Man can be corrected. Man can be made what we want him to be'.¹⁴

Whether it happened or not, the story illustrates a general truth: the ultimate aim of the Communist system was the transformation of human nature. It was an aim shared by the other so-called totalitarian regimes of the inter-war period. This, after all, was an age of Utopian optimism in the potential of science to change human life and, paradoxically at the same time, an age of profound doubt and uncertainty about the value of human life itself in the wake of the destruction of the First World War. As one of the pioneers of the eugenics movement in Nazi Germany put it in 1920, 'it could almost seem as if we have witnessed a change in the concept of humanity .. . We were forced by the terrible exigencies of war to ascribe a different value to the life of the individual than was the case before.'¹⁵ But there was also a vital difference between the Communist man-building programme and the human engineering of the Third Reich. The Bolshevik programme was based on the ideals of the Enlightenment — it stemmed from Kant as much as from Marx — which makes Western liberals, even in this age of post-modernism, sympathize with it, or at least obliges us to try and understand it, even if we do not share its political goals; whereas the Nazi efforts to 'improve mankind', whether through eugenics or genocide, spat in the face of the Enlightenment and can only fill us with revulsion. The notion of creating a new type of man through the enlightenment of the masses had always been the messianic mission of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, from whom the Bolsheviks emerged. Marxist philosophy likewise taught that human nature was a product of historical development and could thus be transformed by a revolution. The scientific materialism of Darwin and Huxley, which had the status of a religion among the Russian intelligentsia during Lenin's youth, equally lent itself to the view that man was determined by the world in which he lived. Thus the Bolsheviks were led to conclude that their revolution, with the help of science, could create a new type of man.

Lenin and Pavlov both paid homage to the influence of Ivan Sechenov (1829—1905), the physiologist who maintained that the brain was an electromechanical device responding to external stimuli. His book, The Reflexes of the Brain (1863), was a major influence on Chernyshevsky, and thus on Lenin, as well as the starting point for Pavlov's theory on conditioned reflexes. This was where science and socialism met. Although Pavlov was an outspoken critic of the revolution and had often threatened to emigrate, he was patronized by the Bolsheviks.* After two years of growing his own carrots, Pavlov was awarded a

* It is tempting to conclude that Pavlov was the target of Bulgakov's satire, The Heart of a Dog (1925), in which a world-famous experimental scientist, who despises the Bolsheviks but accepts their patronage, transplants the brain and sexual organs of a dog into a human being.

handsome ration and a spacious Moscow apartment. Despite the chronic shortage of paper, his lectures were published in 1921. Lenin spoke of Pavlov's work as 'hugely significant' for the revolution. Bukharin called it 'a weapon from the iron arsenal of materialism'. Even Trotsky, who generally stayed clear of cultural policy but took a great interest in psychiatry, waxed lyrical on the possibility of reconstructing man:

What is man? He is by no means a finished or harmonious being. No, he is still a highly awkward creature. Man, as an animal, has not evolved by plan but spontaneously, and has accumulated many contradictions. The question of how to educate and regulate, of how to improve and complete the physical and spiritual construction of man, is a