As the Russian Revolution marks its 77th anniversary, Charles Mullett casts a critical eye over its historical significance. "A REVOLUTIONARY class must crush the propertied classes. We shall suppress the resistance of the propertied classes with the same means by which the propertied classes suppressed the proletariat. No other means have been invented."
These are Lenin's words, with shocking implications. However, most critics who denounce them have none of the same qualms when it comes to violence employed in pursuit of goals they support - witness in recent years the Gulf War.
Clearly, it is not only 'marxist' cynics who believe ends justify means, whatever the pieties. What, then, were the ends, the aims and results, of the Bolshevik revolution?
Locally, the revolution brought about the transfer of the country's property to its workers and, especially, peasants. As Lenin announced to the Second Congress of Soviets his party's proposal to transfer the land to those who worked it, his companion Natalya Krupskaya observed an elderly peasant "gripped by deep emotion. His eyes glistened with a certain special light."
The belief among the majority of peasants that only the Soviet regime would honour land reform was essential to the Bolshevik victory in the civil war.
Equality of the sexes - divorce, equality in marriage, abortion rights and nursery facilities - and freedom of sexual expression were legally established.
Pioneering
In the midst of the violence and chaos the new regime found time to take a series of pioneering social initiatives, including, for example, the formation of the Commissariat of Public Health which for the first time in the world offered a system for free health care and prevention.
The Tsarist Empire, the prison-house of peoples was dismantled, with a series of nations gaining independence and cultural and linguistic rights given very broad scope. The "ethnic diversity" of the former Soviet Union and today's Russia is a direct outcome of Bolshevik policy.
The Bolsheviks came to power because they were committed to an immediate end to Russian involvement in the first world war.
They made good that pledge. Once at the helm, they tried to win world-wide support for their programme of a peace without indemnities or annexations, but were finally forced to make a separate peace with the Germans which entailed major losses of territory.
However, the propaganda offensive was not in vain. The rising revolutionary tide in Germany, itself given a new impetus by the Russian revolution, hastened the end of the conflict.
The revolutionary explosion in Russia was part and parcel of a wider revolt against imperialism and capitalism brought on by the world war.
The seizure of power, however, allowed the Bolsheviks to give an enormous additional impetus to that revolt. In Germany and Austria ancient monarchic empires fell and were replaced with republics. New nation states appeared throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Budding anti-colonialism found a powerful new ally.
In China, for example, the Soviet govemment renounced Russia's claims and privileges and instead allied itself with the nationalists seeking to rid their country of the imperial system within, and imperialist depredations without.
The revolutionary regime thus launched the progressive politics of the 20th century. We have come to take further advances on this agenda for granted, but this is at least partly due to the Russian Revolution and its impact; for example, American President Woodrow Wilson espoused the right of national self-determination after, and under the pressure of, the Russian example.
Popular support
Another common line of attack is to claim that the revolution was the result of Lenin's demonic genius. However, it is impossible to explain how, without widespread popular support, the Soviet regime could have prevailed over their better armed and better educated opponents enjoying the material support of the world's most powerful countries.
An American academic study of Saratov Province in the revolutionary years -one of many detailed accounts to be found on university library shelves - concludes "By the fall of 1917 wide strata of workers, soldiers and peasants had concluded that only an all-soviet government could solve the country's problems" (Donald J. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga; 1917 in Saratov, Cornell University Press 1986, p.331):
"Take power, you sonofabitch, when they give it to you", railed a demonstrator at moderate socialist leader Victor Chernov in July 1917. The Bolsheviks took what they were offered.
However, searching for a true account of the course and meaning of the Revolution is not the same as placing that event and its leaders above history. The Stalinist tradition and even many in the would-be revolutionary left have simply produced a mirror image of the anti-October discourse.
Down the decades, groups of comrades have descended on the world's trouble spots, a copy of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution in their anorak pockets, eager to "spot the Kerensky" and give advice on defeating the local Kornilov.
Specific tactics
In fact, the Bolshevik tactics, however brilliant, and their strength of will, however impressive, were only the concrete and historically specific form of their real achievement.
Crucially, they gave expression to the aspirations of the revolutionary masses by formulating adequate demands and creating suitable governmental forms and fighting consistently for the implementation of the former and the victory of the latter.
Nor should the inevitability of vio lence imposed by the counter-revolution be used to justify making a virtue of necessity or taking a cavalier attitude towards democracy, "formal" or otherwise.
While ends justify means, means determine ends, and violence, especially when it is applied internally to firm up the revolutionary ranks, runs counter to building a society of freely associated producers.
Violence is, for socialists, a terrible problem, which cannot be solved either by pretending that it can be absolutely avoided or, on the other hand, that it is desirable and without long-term consequences.
There can be no doubt that the horrors of the Russian civil war laid the basis for the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its cult of power, terror and centralism.
Mystical
Furthermore, a mystical approach to the Russian Revolution means overlooking the real historical circumstances and therefore missing the real lessons.
The revolutionary victory was preceded and conditioned by a terrible defeat - the death of the Socialist International in 1914 due to the failure of the mass social democratic parties of Western Europe to resist the war plans of "their own" ruling classes.
Lenin and Trotsky's Communist International, despite great organisational successes, was reduced by the Stalinists to a simple arm of Soviet foreign policy, and ceased to be a force working to check COMMENT the descent into the hell of the Second World War.
The war danger is not a thing of the past; in Rwanda, Haiti, Bosnia and Iraq. we can see the poisonous fruits of the imperialist world system flourishing on a rich bed of arms sales.
More and worse is being prepared. The urgent need to build internationalist parties with mass influence remains.
It is only as part of a renewed effort to meet this need that the full lessons of our predecessors on this path, among them the Russian revolutionaries, can be understood.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 73-74, December 1994, Page 18 Socialist Outlook welcomes readers letters up to 400 words in length. Longer letters may be cut. Write to PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU ployed Workers and Claimants Union in one of only a handful of independent unemployed workers organisations left.
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