Why April 1918 matters : Melbourne Indymedia

April 1918 was when marxists began stabbing fellow revolutionists in the back on a wide scale and for real. They never really stoppped since either.
In the interests of knowing the enemy I want to post the
Introduction to ' The Guillotine at work' by Gregory Petrovich Maximoff. Volume one The Leninist counter-revolution. Cienfuegos press.

The guillotine at work offers us two very important lessons.
First of all, Maximoff describes the terror under Lenin. His book stands as one of the most comprehensive documentations of the terror of the early soviet state that began under Lenin and was not just a Stalinist development. The principal lesson Maximoff wished to communicate, though was a theory, that, despite it's revolutionary style, was in essence counter-revolutionary.
This line of argument is a difficult one for many people to accept.
While all but the most dogmatic Stalinists recognise and recoil at the brutality of the Stalin era, it is believed almost equally widely that this was due to a political deformation characteristic of Stalin, the man, and not an endemic feature of marxist/leninism itself.
Lenin is permitted to retain an aura of sacrosanctity.
Whoever might broadly condemn marxist/leninism rather than focus their critique on the Stalin personality cult is immediately suspect as an unregenerate reactionary. To avoid this charge, Maximoff has confined the material he presents to that which emanates from socialist, anarchist and official bolshevic sources.
The idea that the great Russian revolution was ultimately perverted and channelled into an authoritarian and repressive regime is not a new idea. Most feel this occured after Lenin's death. Even as honest and sincere a work as Roy Medvedev's,' Let History judge,' a masterful and devastating dissection of Stalinist Russia, lets Lenin off scot free.
It is only to ' the typical bourgeois historian,' suggests Medvedev, that ' Stalin's activity is seen as the logical continuation of Lenin's...'(1)
Medvedev is, legitimately, fearful that a wholesale rejection of proletarian socialism might result from attributing to marxism and leninism itself the origins of the terror and crimes of the Stalin era;
however, there do exist other forms of proletarian socialism than marxism and leninism and the dedicated revolutionary must hold each and every one up to the most penetrating criticism.
Clarity of understanding is essential to the development of authentic revolutionary consciousness. If we are to learn from the mistakes of the past, we cannot exempt any tendency or any revolutionary figure from dispassionate consideration of their contributions and their shortcomings.
Lenin, according to Maximoff,' followed in the footsteps of the French Jacobin's,' (2)
He believed in the necessity and even desirability of terror to implement his programme, in himself and the legitimacy of his authority. Maximoff presents scores of quotations from Lenin's published works in which Lenin urged shooting of political opponents, urged against sentimentality in the waging of political struggle and urged his fellow bolshevics to adopt unashamedly a policy of red terror. Maximoff charges that lenin deliberately chose to provoke civil war in the countryside to terrorize the peasantry and force their compliance with the forced grain requisitions, to subject them to state regimentation:
' That we bought civil war to the village is something we hold up as a MERIT,' wrote lenin.(3)
The use of the death penalty was very rare in Tsarist Russia. When the bolshevics came to power one of the first things they did ( in Lenin's absence ) was to abolish the death penalty. Lenin reacted furiously,' beside himself with indignation,' in Trotsky's description.
' How', he demanded to know,' can a revolution be made without executions?' (4)
Maximoff compliles, from official bolshevic sources, statistical summaries of the number of executions in each year of lenin's rule.
Estimates based on these figures range from 200,000 to over 1,500,000 shootings during lenin's period of leadership. Maximoff is willing to settle for the most conservative of all figures.
There is no question but that the Russian revolution was a bloody affair. It would be unfair for anyone to attribute all of the deaths to lenin's policies, all 10,000,000 to 12,000,000 lives. Any revolution takes lives. The white guardist counter revolutions were certainly responsible for many deaths. The point is that many, if not most, of these millions of lives were shed not just because of the inevitable cost of revolutionary struggle but because lenin insisted on implementing his own view of how that struggle should develop.
Rather than allow the people themselves to establish autonomist and federated revolutionary regimes in the various areas of the tsarist empire - in the Ukraine, in Georgia, in Siberia and so forth - lenin insisted that a single regime should rule over all nationalities.
This despite the fact he had earlier promised full freedom to all nationalities. The tsarist empire was kept intact with a single party asserting its political dominance - at tremendous cost.
The crushing of the revolutionary peasants of the Ukraine is the best known example. By the treaty of Brest- Litovsk, lenin ceded the Ukraine to Germany as part of the deal to gain peace. The Ukrainian people though, organized spontaneously to resist German occupation and they were sucessful. They drove the Germans out of the Ukraine.
They also fought off counter-revolutionary forces who tried to take over the Ukraine. Rather than allow the heroic peoples of this region to govern themselves and regulate their own lives lenin and trotsky sent in the red army to crush the independent revolutionary movement of the Ukraine.
Nestor Makhno is remembered today as one of the more courageous leaders in the fight against the Germans and counter-revolutionaries and, of tragic necessity against bolshevic invasion as well. ( 5 )
Makhno was but one of many, and the Ukraine is simply the best known of many regions that fell under the rule of Moscow and lenin.
Lenin insisted upon the supremacy of his own revolutionary programme.
Revolutionists of any other persuasion were forced out of their positions, jailed exiled and executed.
Lenin had been in Zurich when the revolution broke out, trotsky in New York. The bolshevics were a minority party with little real following, even among the workers.
The other revolutionary groups represented a threat to lenins domination. The left social-revolutionists had the support of by far the overwhelming mass of the peasantry. The anarchists had the most popular slogans. Lenin moved swiftly to crush both.
As mentioned above, most of Maximoff's data covers the leninist terror as directed against socialists and revolutionaries of non bolshevik persuasions. Here the most prominent instance was the assault against the revolutionary people of Krondstadt.
The sailors of Kronstadt had an unblemished record as being at the forefront of any revolutionary struggle.
When they called on the bolshevics to respect the rights of sincere revolutionaries to speak and to publish, and to permit the organization of free soviets, the response was a military assault in which thousands ( up to 18,000 ) of the most dedicated revolutionists in all of Russia were slaughtered because they dared to challenge the uniformity of bolshevik rule. This despite the fact the supreme military council of the bolshevik regime itself admitted, in a secret internal document, that Maximoff presents, that ' The political department of the Baltic fleet found itself isolated, not only from the masses, but also from the local party workers, having become a bureaucratic organ lacking any prestige and standing...destroyed all local initiative and bought the work down to the level of clerical routine...from July to November, 1920, twenty percent of the members left the party.'
Admitting they had failed here, the bolshevik leaders were afraid their supremacy would be challenged. Already strikes were spreading in Petrograd itself. So they told their troops that these were being engineered by counter-revolutionary white gaurdists in Krondstadt and sent them in to eliminate those who might show up the bolsheviks from a revolutionary point of view.
The Guillotine at work documents dozens of other instances in which the bolsheviks imprisoned and executed authentic revolutionaries who , they feared, might threaten their exclusive control.
Miasnikov a worker and leader of the bolshevik organization of Motovilikha, protested against the suppression of free discussion even within the bolshevik party itself.
' Those who fear to let the working class and peasantry speak out, always fear counter-revolution and see it evereywhere,' wrote Miasnikov in a pamphlet for internal party use only. ( 8 )
A man who spent seven and a half of his eleven years of party membership in tsarist prisons, a worker who escaped from exile not to flee abroad but for party work in Russia.
Miasnikov complained that it was primarily peasants and workers who were being arrested on charges of counter revolution because they disagreed with the strict interpretation of the bolshevik line.
' Dont you know that thousands of proletarians are kept in prison because they talked the way I am talking now, and that bourgeois people are not arrested on this score for the simple reason that they are never concerned with these questions?'
Miasnikov was expelled from the party, imprisoned and then sent into exile.
When Lenin felt forced by events to retreat a few steps with his new economic policy ( NEP ) he could not simply admit that other revolutionists had been correct on this one point. ( In fact Lenin reversed himself against the bitter opposition of many members of his party ) That admission would weaken the exclusivity of bolshevic leadership, the one thing that was never to be questioned. Accordingly Lenin developed a rationale for shooting these potential opponents. Of the ' menshevics and social-revolutionists who advocated such views,' Lenin wrote that they, ' wonder when we tell them that we are going to shoot them for saying such things. They are amazed at it, but the question is clear: when an army is in retreat, it stands in need of a discipline a hundred times more severe than when it advances because in the latter case everyone is eager to rush ahead. But if now everyone is just as eager to rush back, the result will be a catastrophe.
" And when a menshevic says: ' you are now retreating but I always favouring a retreat together,' we tell them in reply: an avowal of menshevic views should be punished by our revolutionary courts with shooting, otherwise the latter are not courts but god knows what."
Lenin desire was to see the revolution through, but only in a way he thought correct. Let us grant that he was sincere; we still have to question his self-assured single mindedness that brooked no opposition and permitted no other approach. Looking at some of the attributes of his programme today makes you think twice about how revolutionary Lenin really was.
Maximoff had no doubt on that score. He saw Lenin as a ' representative of a degenerating gentry' ( p.113 ) and even went so far as to call him ' the first theoretician of fascism.' ( p.60)
While this extreme language probably tends to alienate the unconvinced rather than to provoke thought, a good case can be made that leninist policies were essentially counter-revolutionary, that the net impact of Lenin's rule was to frustrate and stall out the authentic revolutionary momentum of the Russian people. It is an argument I have developed somewhat more fully elsewhere ( see my introduction to Alexander Berkman's ' The Russian tragedy ' also published by Cienfuegos press )
Berkman's writings, Emma Goldman's works on Russia, Maximoff's ' The Guillotine at work,' and Maurice Brinton's, ' The Bolshevics and Workers control 1917-1921: ' The State and Counter-revolution are among the books that led me to focus on this theme, one that I think is vital to our time, that would at first glance permit us the alternative only of international cartel capitalism and marxist/leninist authoritarian bureaucratic rule.
Lenin did not stress socialism per se. He pushed for nationalization, state ownership and control of the means of production. Where the workers and peasants had taken over the land and factories for themselves and begun to institute true socialism, Lenin took a step backward by asserting state supremacy. Much of the struggle in the civil war was due to Lenin's efforts to subordinate the spontaneously created workers councils, trade unions and peasants organizations.
Maximoff quotes Lenin: " We leave to ourselves the state power, ONLY TO OURSELVES...It is necessary that everything should be subjected to the Soviet power and all the illusions about some kind of ' independence,' on the part of detached layers of population or workers co-operatives should be lived down as soon as possible..."
" ...there can be no question of independence on the part of seperate groups...'
Lenin made a principle of re-instituting one man management rather than the new collective management that the workers and peasants had developed in the interests of responsibility to state supervision. He re-instituted higher pay and privileges for specialists and managers, as against the equality of pay in the industrial democracy that the workers themselves had promulgated. He also re-introduced piecework, the Taylor system ( more precisely elements thereof ) and others of the most hated elements of capitalism. Because, to his way of thinking, the party represented the real interests of the workers, it was also acceptable to outlaw strikes. Only counter-revolutionaries, he believed , would ever want to strike against a workers state.
Capitalism was, to both Lenin and Marx, an inevitable stage of historical evolution. It was not possible to move from a fundamentally fuedal system to a socialism of abundance without an intervening period of capital accumulation and centralization. Lenin's understanding of history and economic development convinced him that a transitional stage of state capitalism, ( he did allow that the period of private capitalism could be omitted )
was an historical necessity.
Lenin recommended we ' learn about state capitalism from Germans, to assimilate their methods, not to spare any dictatorial methods in order to accelerate the westernization of barbarous Russia, not to recoil from using barbarous methods of struggle against barbarism...govern with with greater firmness than the capitalists did. Otherwise you will not win. You must remember: your administration must be more stringent and firm than the old administration...this discipline included harsh stringent measures , going as far as shootings, methods, which even the old government did not visualize."
It is not surprising that revolutionary workers revolted against Lenin's programme which appeared to to combine many of the worst abuses of capitalism with an ' iron discipline' only justifying the regime to which the workers had to bend by proclaiming that it was issuing these orders and decrees in the name of the workers as a government of workers.
Lenin's programme of replacing factory management by the workers themselves with party committee management and the subversion of the trade unions, robbed the workers of most of the gains they felt they had earned through struggle. The peasants felt no less betrayed. Maximoff angrily assigns to Lenin's account the millions of deaths caused by famines that his policies of terror entailed: " ...by his policy of terror, by the destruction of the peasant economy, by exiling thousands of peasants from their native places, by the policy of grain requisitions, etc.,Lenin prepared one of the ghastliest famines in the history of Russia.
The famine of 1921 that carried away millions of lives and crippled, physically and morally, tens of millions.
Maximoff follows in the footsteps of Bakunin in tracing back the Leninist policies to ' political marxism' itself. Russian socialism had always been distinguished by its libertarian and progressive character,' writes Maximoff in opening his book. ' Political marxism is an anachronism, a vestige of the dying past and is altogether reactionary in its essence. The communist manifesto of Marx and Engels is a reactionary manifesto and is in striking contradiction to science, to progress in general and humanism in particular. The demands of dictatorship, of absolute centralization of political and economic life in the hands of the state, of forming industrial armies, especially for agriculture, of a regimented agriculture in accordance with a single plan, of raising the state to the position of an absolute and the remaining stulification of the individual, their rights and interests - all that is nothing but the programme of reaction that is incompatible with human progress, with freedom, equality and humanism.
The realization of these demands carries with it state slavery."
Lenin was only able to introduce ' political marxism' onto the Russian scene by proclaiming other ideas ( bait and switch ed )
" If he had come out in 1917 with the ideas of the communist manifesto,' Maximoff argues,' he would never have attained success and like Tkachev, the Jacobin, he would have remained a rather inconspicuous figure throughout the revolution.'
Lenin adopted the anarchist slogans in 1917 for tactical purposes proclaiming the libertarian positions that were clearly the most popular among the Russian masses.
Lenin was a brilliant politician and he pulled off this total about face, when it was necessary to do so, even though it meant turning his back on virtually everything his party had stood for. Indeed the other bolshevic leaders thought Lenin had lost his head. The deception worked though. It was in some cases, a number of years before it hit home with other revolutionists that Lenin had never meant the things he wrote in, for instance, ' The state and revolution ' that had convinced many that he was honestly in support of the movement of the people.
In fact though, Lenin had not changed for any other than temporary and tactical considerations ( reasons of state - ed )
Maximoff makes abundantly clear that Lenin never intended to change and that he employed machievellian political tactics to consolidate himself and his party in power. Once established in power he moved firmly and unhesitatingly against the only real threat that was likely - a threat from the left. He not have even feared such a threat had he not so doggedly and dogmatically held that only his own programmes should be applied. In time, political opposition certainly would have manifested itself but had Lenin been willing to work with other tendencies this opposition could have been comradely. Instead as Miasnikov's insight indicates, Lenin feared the airing of views other than his own.
Lenin was a most dynamic figure and the bolshevics had won the support of many veteran anarchists who had long opposed what he had always stood for.
ming from a tradition that posed itself against Marx himself, one can read with sympathy the trajic hopes of a prominent anarchist such as Alexander Berkman who tried as long as he could to mantain revolutionary solidarity with the bolshevics. After all it was a time of crisis: a world war, economic disruption in the extreme, counter-revolutionary plots, capitalist hostility.
It was not a simple matter of toleration. After all the left SR's assassinated Mirbach, the German ambassador. Dora ( or Fanya? ed) Kaplan shot and wounded Lenin. A group said to include members of the ' underground anarchists' and the left SR's exploded a bomb during a meeting of the Moscow Committee of the Communist party. These and similar acts across the country reflect determined efforts by the revolutionary opposition to challenge the direction of Bolshevic policy.
Lenin seemed constitutionally unable to tolerate opposition however and one suspects that these incidents did not so much provoke the terroristic supression of the revolutionary opposition as provide helpful excuses for its implementation. ( Maximoffs timeline shows anarchists and SR's were attacked first and responded in self defence. ed )
Well before the revolution itself, Lenin's intolerance is easily demonstrated. He had a driving need to see his views prevail. He was absolutely and unshakably certain of their correctness and yet at the same time he seemed to fear an open airing of other views.
Maximoff presnts us here with a great deal of material for thought. The original work over 600 pages long also included a second section documenting extensively the persecution of the anarchists under Lenins regime. Although copies of the original are rather rare ( it was issued in 1940 not by a commercial publishing house but by the Chicago section of the Alexander Berkman fund ) it was decided to omit this section for this edition) Maximoffs message is is contained in the first half of the book here issued in an unabridged form. The second section of the book was in the form of an appendix, a documentation that focused on the particular case of the anarchists as victims. The reader interested to explore further can now find a reasonably good selection of works offering an alternative view of the Russian revolution, a view different from the standard one in which both the capitalists and the communists concur. We hope the republication of the ' Guillotine at work' can inspire new and creative thought guided by a better understanding of the lessons of the past.

Bill Nowlin

Introduction to ' The Guillotine at work' by Gregory Petrovich Maximoff. Volume one The Leninist counter-revolution. Cienfuegos press.

Damn I need a scanner - I could get RS fuckin' I from this. All donations to the RAT institute are tax deductable. Please give generously. TIA pr
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Hasta Luego los Solidarios.