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The Dead Russians Society
Anyone want to buy a dozen statues of Lenin? The recent recession in the Lenin-statue works is
terminal. Now that Sir Nikolai Ceauceascu and his mates have bitten the dust or headed off to their
holiday homes in North Korea, only a few fossilised Chinese and Cuban academics are still paid to
sing the praises of dead Russians.
In the 1920s Lenin-worship was all the rage. Naive leftists from Tottenham to Turin would dutifully
repeat the Bolshevik liturgy to whoever could be persuaded to listen. Russia, it was said, had had the
first ever socialist revolution. It was led by Lenin who had translated Marx's theories into practice. If
you wanted to see socialism in all its living glory, look no further than the centralised hell-holes of
the Kremlin-ruled state dictatorships. That was "the line"". Here was the leading Labour politician,
George Lansbury, returning from Moscow as a born-again Bolshevik:
" In my judgement, no set of men and women responsible for a revolution ever made fewer mistakes
or carried their revolution through with less interference with the rights of individuals, or with less
terrorism and destruction, than the men in control in Russia."(What I Saw In Russia, p. xii, 1920).
Lenin, wrote Lansbury, exhibited "devotion to the cause of humanity" and Trotsky, whom he never
even met, was said to be "one of the greatest leaders of men ever." This elevation of demagogic
Russian history-makers was one of the most sickening characteristics of the ecstasies with which the
deluded praised their gods. Of course, you had to be up with the fashions. One year Trotsky was your
main man and Bukharin on historical materialism was second to none; a little later Trotsky was a
viper and Stalin repaid Bukharin's servility by liquidating him.
In the 1970s the present writer went to a "Marxist Conference" where sects prepared to become
vanguards while the world outside listened to Gary Glitter and wore flowery ties. It was a day-long
event and a conveyor belt of gesticulating gurus were taking turns explaining how the storming of
the Winter Palace by the war-weary Russian peasants (known in leftist circles as the brave
proletarian masses) could be reproduced in Manchester if only the Trots could fiddle enough votes at
the forthcoming regional NALGO conference. One speaker accused another of being a Stalinist. A
woman selling papers at the door told a rival paper-seller that he was clearly unfamiliar with
Preobrazhensky, at which he retaliated devilishly with the wounding observation that she had clearly
more in common with Zinoviev and Kamenev than Lenin. I pointed out that she had a voice not
unlike Cilla Black's and was instantly dismissed as a Menshevik stooge. Half a century after the
Bolshevik coup and even the vocabulary of abuse was stale Russian.
Sterile dogma
As long as the Leninist Empire remained, the blood-flow into this queer movement of dead-Russian
worshippers did not cease. Cheap editions of Lenin’s anti-socialist speeches and writings rolled off
Moscow printing presses like Bibles from the Catholic Truth Society. Now that it has become
apparent that the victims of state capitalism were the first to want to cast off religious Leninism, only
the most entrenched believers can carry on the faith. The present writer paid his annual visit to the
Hampstead Morning Star bazaar at the end of last summer. It is always a good place to pick up some
cheap editions of long-wanted volumes. But last year, with the Berlin Wall gone, the August coup
failed and "Communist" economists busy planning the free market, there was something unusually
bizarre about the bazaar.
Old women sitting behind stalls muttered about how Gorbachev would see them through and a man
of eighty boasted that he was a hundred years before his time and looked forward to the when
starving East Germans would turn to Lenin and repent for their disaffection. An old Stalinist
addressed a young Morning Star reader (perhaps the young Morning Star reader) about how he had
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visited collective farms in Bulgaria and never seen such happiness in his life. Looking around the
bazaar, the cemetery of lost dreams, it was easy to see that even ignorance is not always bliss. Their
god had died. A bust of Lenin was on sale for fifty pence; I bought it to put next to the burglar alarm
and the flick-knife that are being carefully preserved for the Museum of Capitalist Madness that
needs to be set up once we have a socialist world.
The bizarre, fetishised attachments of geriatric Bolshevik dogmatists need not detain us. They will
die. and with them their illusions. Nobody will be selling Soviet Weekly in the year 2000: in fact, the
paper no longer exists and never will again. But what of young Leninists? Why young Leninists? What
can it be that makes any one with genuine hatred for capitalism and a desire for social
transformation still adhere to these sterile dogmas?
Part of the answer lies in the development of a mythology about the Russian revolution: wishful
belief has replaced verifiable history and the end result is a statement like this one, in a leaflet
handed out by the International Communist Current: "October was a revolution in the real sense of
the term: the overthrow of one class by another". Of which class by which? In the Russia of 1917 the
vast majority of the population were illiterate peasants who wanted peace, land and bread. They
wanted property society, not socialism. The Bolsheviks pandered to these non-socialist millions, and
they won acquiescence from the politically unconscious workers. Especially after the Kornilov coup of
August 1917. But when the Constituent Assembly elections came in 1918 a majority of Russian
workers and peasants did not vote for the Bolsheviks who, regardless of the majority will, took
dictatorial state power.
Undemocratic arrogance
In a remarkably absurd eighty-page article in the SWP's International Socialism (Autumn 1991), John
Rees attempts to defend the tactics of the Leninist dictators over the proletariat. Rees and the SWP
realise that everything they stand for depends upon the validity of the strategy adopted by the Dead
Russians of 1917. Rees, following Lenin, argues that the problem facing the Bolshevik revolution was
the failure of the workers in the rest of Europe to follow the Bolshevik lead. This failure is explained
thus:
"What was lacking in these revolutionary upheavals was not the objective European-wide crisis.
Neither was it the willingness of workers to struggle for power. What was lacking was a leadership of
sufficient clarity and an organisation with a core of sufficiently experienced members to successfully
lead these movements to power."(p. 9. Our emphasis).
So, all across Europe in 1917 the workers were ready for socialist revolution, but what they needed,
says this SWP leader, were a gang of good leaders - like Lenin and Trotsky, like Rees and the SWP. If
only they were there at the time. In the course of this defence Rees justifies the Red Terror of the
Cheka and the GPU, supports the massacre of the sailors at Kronstadt who wanted an end to
Bolshevik totalitarianism within the soviets ("Had the Kronstadters demands for soviets without
parties been realised they would have expressed the ferocious, elemental hostility of the peasants to
the Bolsheviks" (p. 63)) and argues the case for the 1921 ban on parties dissenting from the
leadership on the grounds that "the Workers Opposition's plans could only have led to a
disintegration of the regime" (p. 67). Such explicit support for such disgustingly undemocratic
politics should he enough to dismiss the SWP from the minds of anyone whose conception of
socialism is not perverted by deeply authoritarian beliefs.
Rees defends most of the Bolshevik actions against the workers (his article is entitled "In Defence of
October", after all - even though the revolution was in November), but even he will not openly
defend the Bolshevik closure of the Constituent Assembly because they lost the election. Instead,
historical myth is invoked and we are told that the Bolsheviks really won the 1918 election, but the
results did not reflect this. Other Leninists are rather less coy about the crushing of the elected
Assembly by the Bolsheviks: the ICC's World Revolution (November 1991) argues that the soviets,
not the Bolsheviks, closed down the Assembly and were right to do so because the parties elected to
sit in it would not represent the working class. Apart from the historical fact that the Bolsheviks were
the ones who smashed the Assembly by order of their own Central Committee, the ICC must be
congratulated for their honesty: if you don’t trust the views of the workers at the ballot box you tell
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the workers to take a running jump. This is classical Leninist undemocratic arrogance.
What future can there be for this subworld of 1917-set Russian fantasies? For how much longer will
gurus like Tony Cliff draw in bewildered young workers, attracted to the notion of socialist politics by
real experiences under real capitalism, to listen to obsolete orations about the ten days which shook
the world and put world socialism back for a century? How much longer can Lenin and Trotsky
exercise a sort of mystical influence upon people searching for a way into the creation of a new
social system and not a tour of the ruins of failed ideologies?
The most unsuccessful merchant in the modern world must surely be the jerk standing in Red Square
selling copies of What Is to Be Done?, the handbook for professional authoritarian revolutionwreckers. The most foolish political thinkers around now must be those who imagine for one moment
that they can build a revolution upon the rotting corpses and stale rhetoric of long-dead Russian
leaders. The Socialist Party is hostile to all defenders of capitalism, but none more than those who
preserve capitalism in the name of fighting for socialism. They are not only crazy, they are
dangerous.
Wednesday, 1 July 1992
Source URL: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialiststandard/1990s/1992/no-1055-july-1992/dead-russians-society
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