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

institutionalized a new pugachevshchina, a merciless rebellion against the state and its civilization which Gorky, like Pushkin a hundred years before, looked upon with horror as an expression of Russian barbarism. The Bolshevik Terror came up from the depths. It started as part of the social revolution, a means for the lower classes to exact their own bloody revenge on their former masters and class enemies. As Denikin noted, there was an almost 'boundless hatred' of ideas and of people higher than the crowd, of anything which bore the slightest trace of abundance, and this feeling expressed an envy and a hatred that had been accumulated by the lower classes not only over the past three years of war but also over the previous centuries. The Bolsheviks encouraged (but did not create) this hatred of the rich through their slogan 'Loot the looters!' They used it to destroy the old social system, to mobilize the lower classes against the Whites and the imperialists, and to build up their terror-based dictatorship. It in turn provided them with a powerful source of emotional support among all those downtrodden and war-brutalized people who gained satisfaction from the knowledge that the wealthy classes of the old regime were being destroyed and made to suffer, as they themselves had suffered, regardless of whether it brought any improvement in their own lot.

As a form of absolutist rule the Bolshevik regime was distinctly Russian. It was a mirror-image of the tsarist state. Lenin (later Stalin) occupied the place of the Tsar-God; his commissars and Cheka henchmen played the same roles as the provincial governors, the oprichniki, and the Tsar's other plenipotentiaries; while his party's comrades had the same power and privileged position as the aristocracy under the old regime. But there was a crucial difference between the two systems: whereas the elite of the tsarist regime was socially alien to the common people (and in the non-Russian borderlands was ethnically alien as well), the Soviet elite was made up for the most part of ordinary Russians (and by the natives in the non-Russian lands) who spoke, dressed and acted much like everybody else. This gave the Soviet system a decisive advantage over the Whites in the civil war: it enabled it to hold on to the emotive symbols of 'the Revolution', the Red Flag above all else, and thus to present itself as the champion of the people's cause. The 'old regime' image of the Whites, which was largely merited by their old regime mentality, and their obstinate refusal to endorse the peasant revolution on the land or to recognize the break-up of the Tsarist Empire, strengthened the Bolsheviks' propaganda claim. The emphatic rejection of the Whites by the peasantry and the non-Russians determined the outcome of the civil war.

During the first five years of the Soviet regime over one million ordinary Russians joined the Bolshevik Party. Most of these were peasant sons, literate young men like Kanatchikov and Os'kin, who had left the village to work in industry or to join the army before 1917, and who in the process came to reject the 'dark' and 'backward' ways of the old peasant Russia. Some of them returned to their native villages and were recruited by the Bolsheviks as part of the emerging rural bureaucracy. For the most part, they were committed to a cultural revolution that would bring the village closer to the towns: peasant agriculture would be modernized; the trappings of modern civilization, such as schools, hospitals and electric light, would be brought to the countryside; and the Church's influence would be reduced. The albeit very gradual spread of Bolshevism in the countryside during the 1920s was based on this revolt by the younger peasants against the old — and still largely dominant — patriarchal village; and it was in many ways a continuation of the type of reforms which peasants like Semenov had been pioneering for the past thirty years. But the majority of these peasant sons, including Os'kin and Kanatchikov, were drawn into Bolshevism from outside the village — either through the army or through industry — and it was not so much the reform of the old peasant Russia as its abolition which attracted them to the party's cause. Their allegiance to Bolshevism was intimately linked with their own self-identity as 'proletarians', which in their eyes (and in the rhetoric of the party) meant first and foremost that they were not peasants. They saw Bolshevism as a force of progress, both for Russia and for themselves,

as a means of wiping out the brutal village world from which they had come and of replacing it with the urban culture of school and industry through which they themselves had risen to become a part of the official elite. Virtually the whole of the party's self-identity and ideology was to become based on the militant rhetoric of industrial progress, of overcoming drunkenness and superstition, and of getting Russia to catch up with the West.

This drive to overcome backwardness was the kernel of Stalin's 'revolution from above', the forcible drive towards industrialization during the first of the Five Year Plans (1928—32). As Stalin himself put it in an impassioned speech of 1931, Russia had been beaten throughout its history because it was backward, it had been beaten by the Mongol khans, the Swedish feudal lords, the Polish-Lithuanian pans, the Anglo-French capitalists, the Japanese and German imperialists: 'We are fifty to one hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do this, or they will crush us.' This great leap forward had a powerful appeal for all those lower-class Bolsheviks who as young men had run away from the backwardness of the Russian peasant world and who saw the revolution as a national revolt against this inheritance of poverty. By the 1920s the party rank and file had become dominated by these semi-educated types. Most of them had joined the party in the civil war and, in one form or another, owed their allegiance to Stalin's apparatus. They had little understanding of Marxist theory, and the arguments of Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin, the three great intellectuals of the party, about the NEP's finer strategies left most of them cold. The NEP in general seemed a retreat to them after the great advances of the civil war — and in this sense the failure of the NEP was rooted in the party's own political culture. One of Stalin's shock-workers recalls how the party's youth was frustrated with the NEP:

The Komsomols of my generation — those who met the October Revolution at the age of ten or younger — harboured a grudge against our fate. When we became politically conscious and joined the Komsomol, when we went to work in the factories, we lamented that there was nothing left for us to do because the spirit of the revolution had gone, because the harsh but romantic years of the civil war would not return, and because the older generation had left to us a boring mundane life without struggle or excitement.³

Stalin's revolution against the NEP promised a return to the 'heroic period' of the civil war when the Bolsheviks had conquered every fortress and pressed ahead on the road towards socialism without fear or compromise. It promised a resumption of the class war against the 'kulaks' and the 'bourgeois specialists', before whom the NEP had been in retreat, combined with a mili-

tant (if mendacious) rhetoric of proletarian hegemony.

Stalin always portrayed his revolution as a continuation of the Leninist tradition, the belief that the party vanguard's subjective will and energy could overcome all adverse objective contingencies, as Lenin himself had argued during the October seizure of power. And in a way Stalin was correct. His drive towards industrialization, sweeping aside the market and the peasantry, was in essence no different from Lenin's own drive towards Soviet power which had swept aside democracy. One could argue that the command system was itself an inevitable outcome of the contradiction of October — a proletarian dictatorship in a peasant country — a contradiction with which Lenin himself came to grapple in his final tragic years. Soviet Russia's international isolation, which stemmed directly from October, and which as a result of Allied intervention in the civil war gave rise to xenophobic paranoia about Russia's 'capitalist encirclement', reinforced the argument of the Stalinists that the 'peasant-cart-horse pace' of industrialization favoured by Bukharin under the NEP would be much too slow for Russia to catch up with — and defend itself against — the West. The social isolation of the civil war regime, which stemmed equally from October, forced it to adopt the command system, which, although relaxed briefly in the 1920s, was almost bound to be taken up again in view of the party's problems with the peasantry and the growing reluctance of its rank and file to sacrifice the ideal of rapid industrialization to the market relationship with it. Finally, there was the problem of the party's culture which haunted Lenin in his final years. Having taken power in a backward country, its lower-class recruits were bound to lack the technical expertise to take over the running of the state and industry; and yet its rhetoric of equality which had attracted them to it in the first place was also bound to set them up in opposition to the 'bourgeois specialists' upon whom the party-state was forced to depend. The NEP in this sense was a precarious and perhaps impossible balance between the revolution's need to preserve the old culture and to learn from it — what Lenin called its 'school of capitalism' — and the proletarian initiative to destroy it which, more than anything else, lay at the heart of Stalin's cultural revolution.

* * * 'Russia has changed completely in the past few years,' wrote Prince Lvov to Bakhmetev in November 1923.