Compromisers’ support weakens

In May, Lenin stated his opinion that “the ‘country’ of workers and poorer peasants is a thousand times farther to the left than the Chernovs and Tseretellis, and a hundred times farther than we.” [Chapter Twenty-One of Trotsky’s ‘History of the Russian Revolution’ ⁴⁰ ] He understood that the masses’ support for the Compromisers was just a temporary stage on the road to revolution and that growing in the depths of the oppressed classes was a deep radicalism that even most Bolsheviks had not yet imagined.

The Compromisers had gained their position in part due to the unusually dominant influence of the peasant army during wartime and in part due to the weakening of the proletariat and its party through the mobilisation of workers to the front. But now the growth of the war industries had led to an even greater concentration of workers in large factories, with 335,000 of Petrograd’s 400,000 workers being found in just 140 giant plants by 1917. This fresh and initially cautious workforce was now learning through experience of exploitation, strikes and revolution, and, as Trotsky has already pointed out in Lesson Twelve, “in a revolutionary epoch they learn fast. In that lies the power of a revolution.”

The soldiers were learning too through the experience of the offensive and their struggle with the Tsarist command. The peasantry was also being driven into struggle by economic ruin and the lack of action to solve the agrarian problem. Under the surface, ‘molecular processes’ were shifting the consciousness of the masses to the left.

The soldiers in words still hated the Bolsheviks and yet more and more often were taking up Bolshevik slogans, perhaps without even realising it. Trotsky relates how a clerk reported that after reading the bourgeois press “the soldiers would abuse some sort of unknown creatures called Bolsheviks, and then immediately take up the necessity of stopping the war, seizing the land from the landlords, etc.” … “Every soldier who expressed a little more boldly than the rest what they were all feeling, was so persistently shouted at from above as a Bolshevik that he was obliged in the long run to believe it. From peace and land the soldiers’ thoughts began to pass over to the question of power. Responsiveness to the scattered slogans of Bolshevism changed into a conscious sympathy for the Bolshevik Party.” (130). [ Chapter Twenty-One ⁴⁰ ]

The Volynsky regiment, who had initiated the mutiny on February 27^th, had resolved in April to arrest Lenin as a German stooge, but, by June, they supported the Bolsheviks. After the collapse of the offensive, Kerensky became utterly hated in the army, while the Bolsheviks, who alone had spoken out in advance against the offensive, gained enormously in popularity. At the other extreme, the officers and bourgeoisie began to organise right-wing groupings that started to build for a military plot, putting forward Admiral Kolchak as their candidate for dictator.

The Bolsheviks' papers were very hard to come by, and most soldiers were only able to read the lying bourgeois press. “But it was just these patriotic papers which gave the Bolsheviks an incomparable popularity. Every case of protest from the oppressed, of land seizure, of accounts squared with officers, these papers attributed to the Bolsheviks. The soldiers concluded that the Bolsheviks are a righteous folk.”  [Chapter Twenty-One ⁴⁰]

The coming storm was revealed by the crisis provoked when the soviet on Kronstadt, the island fortress guarding Petrograd, resolved on May 13^th that ‘the sole power in Kronstadt is the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’. Its soviet contained not even a third of declared Bolshevik delegates, yet, Trotsky explains, these revolutionary sailors had already seen through the phantom nature of the government power.

The sailors organised a regime of workers’ control with brothels closed, and drunkenness in the streets banned under threat of ‘confiscation of property and banishment to the front’. These sailors were determined to show that they were worthy of the revolution and dragged people to Kronstadt to see the new life they were building.

Of course, this was not the kind of revolution that the government and its deposed commissar in Kronstadt were hoping for! The press launched a vicious campaign against the Kronstadters who, in return, refused to back down. The Petrograd Soviet denounced the sailors, despite a speech by Trotsky where he warned Tseretelli that “when a counter-revolutionary general tries to throw a noose around the neck of the revolution, the Kadets will soap the rope, and the Kronstadt sailors will come to fight and die with us.” [Chapter Twenty-One ⁴⁰]

Telephone links were then cut with the island and a food blockade threatened. The bourgeoisie were clearly after a bloody solution to the crisis, but Trotsky managed to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Kronstadt soviet that left their forces intact for the real battles ahead. After this event, Kronstadt sent agitators all over Russia where, attentively listened to by the sympathetic masses, they helped to spread the ideas of revolution and Bolshevism. In that way, Trotsky points out, the Kronstadt sailors gained a significant revenge for their temporary retreat.

The agrarian struggle mounts

Trotsky opens the chapter of his History entitled ‘The Peasantry’ with the following lines: “The subsoil of the revolution was the agrarian problem. In the first weeks after the February revolution, the village remained almost inert. Those of the most active age were at the front. The elderly generation left at home too well remembered how revolutions end in punitive expeditions. The village was silent, and therefore the city was silent about the village. But the spectre of a peasant war hung over the nests of the landlords from the first March days.” [Chapter Twenty of Trotsky’s ‘History of the Russian Revolution’ ²⁹ ]

Initially after the February Revolution, the landlords tried to manoeuvre in advance of any coming land reform by selling off land to rich kulaks or by artificially dividing their property into small allotments with dummy owners. The small plots were assumed to be below the size that would be set for expropriation, while the kulaks felt that, as peasants, they would avoid any legislation against their land. The peasants saw through this trickery and began to demand a decree stopping all land sales.

The peasants channelled their anger into the land committees that had been set up by the Kadet Minister of Agriculture Shingarev, which, to the alarm of the government, began to become instruments of the peasant movement. As already discussed in Lesson Fifteen, “the land committees ... became the instruments of the whole peasantry, who with their heavy-handed pressure converted them from chambers of conciliation into weapons of agrarian revolution.” [Chapter Twenty ²⁹ ]

Towards the end of March, the first reports of direct peasants’ action against the landlords began to be heard, often at the initiative of soldiers returning from the front. Different areas adopted different tactics, some arresting landlords, some persecuting the separate farmers and kulaks that were seen as a point of weakness for the whole commune. In some areas the peasants began to prevent surveys of the land in order to stop sales, and in many provinces confiscation of the landlords’ weapons became widespread. In Siberia, where there were no landlords, the peasants took possession of the church and monastery lands.

Trotsky reports how “in March the agrarian movement had arisen with more or less strength in only 34 counties. In April it had seized 174 counties; in May, 236; in June, 280; in July, 325. These figures, however, do not give a complete picture ... because in each county the struggle assumed from month to month a more and more stubborn and broad mass character.” [Chapter Twenty ²⁹ ]

To start with, most peasants tried to act in a semi-legal way, avoiding open seizures of the land, feeling out the ground, measuring the resistance of the enemy. They would instead, for example, force the landlord to rent or sell the land - but at a price fixed by the peasants. “The attempt to disguise its first steps with legality, both sacred and secular, has from time immemorial characterised the struggle of every revolutionary class, before it has gathered sufficient strength and confidence to break the umbilical cord which bound it to the old society.” He adds, “The peasants gave the February revolution approximately three months’ grace on the promissory notes of the Social Revolutionaries, after which they began to collect in their own way.” [Chapter Twenty ²⁹ ]

The direct pressure of the peasants began to force a split in the Social Revolutionaries between its genuinely revolutionary elements and the careerists. The peasants, taking to heart the SR slogan of ‘land to the people’, began to wonder why the provincial commissars, also Social Revolutionaries, complained about their land seizures! Of course, when the richer kulaks had voted at the Peasant Congress in May for ‘Conversion of all land into national property for equal working use’, they had been thinking of equal rights to own land with the landlord, not equality with the poor peasants and labourers. Trotsky notes wryly that “The Peasant Congress had not had time to disperse, when complaints began to arrive that its resolutions were being taken seriously in the localities and that peasants were going about the business of appropriating the land and equipment of the landlords. It was simply impossible to hammer into these stubborn peasant skulls the difference between words and deeds.”! [Chapter Twenty ²⁹ ]

The Social Revolutionaries’ leaders tried to call a retreat, calling at their Moscow congress in June for an end to land seizures until the Constituent Assembly made a decision. The new SR Minister of Agriculture, Chernov, was after all busy gathering endless data and statistics in order supposedly to introduce reform once his exercises were finished. As an elderly worker had pertinently said to a liberal lawyer standing in front of the burning District Court building in Petrograd during the February revolution itself: ''We will be able to divide the houses and lands ourselves, and without your archives.” [Chapter Eight ¹⁷]

The SR leadership's resolution did not hold back the agrarian movement, particularly since many of the rank-and-file Left SRs were themselves helping the struggle. In some areas the land was transferred to the land committees, in others the rents were lowered and then ordered to be paid not to the landlords but the committees. Trotsky notes that “This was not a lawyer's but a muzhik’s [peasant’s] way - that is, a serious way, of postponing the question about land reforms until the Constituent Assembly” [Chapter Twenty ²⁹ ]

When Lenin had spoken on May 20^th at the Peasant Congress, most of the deputies were hostile to the Bolsheviks, yet they listened with some sympathy to the Bolshevik program. Trotsky quotes the words of Lenin in a speech made some weeks earlier: “We favour an immediate transfer of land to the peasants, with the highest degree of organisation possible. We are absolutely against anarchist seizures. Why, then, are we unwilling to wait for the Constituent Assembly? For this reason: The important thing for us is revolutionary initiative; the laws should be the result of it. If you wait until the law is written, and do not develop revolutionary energy, you will get neither law nor land.” [Chapter Twenty ²⁹ ]

As Trotsky points out: ''The weakness of the Bolsheviks in relation to the peasantry was temporary, and due to the fact that the Bolsheviks did not share the peasant illusions. The village could come to Bolshevism only through experience and disappointment. The strength of the Bolsheviks lay in the fact that on the agrarian question, as on others, they were free of divergence between word and deed.” [Chapter Twenty ²⁹ ]

The tangle of land ownership in the village, combined with the demands of a capitalist economy, meant that the peasant’s only real means of escape was via a thoroughgoing agrarian revolution with no half-measures. Of course, the hope that each toiler could have their ‘right to land’ at the same time as retaining a capitalist market economy was totally utopian, typical of the confused beliefs of the Narodniks. Lenin, on the other hand, was striving to build on the progressive tendency within the peasant movement, now united in action through the land committees, to show them that their only real hope of freedom was to unite with the workers in the struggle against capitalism.

Crisis in the Cities

Conditions in the cities were getting rapidly worse. The agrarian movement had added to the food crisis, particularly since many of the frightened landlords had not bothered to sow their fields in the spring. What food that existed rarely got to the towns due to the breakdown of transport, particularly the railways, so that Moscow, Petrograd and other industrial centres were receiving only 10% of what they needed. The transport problems contributed to higher prices and a lack of raw materials and supplies for industry.

The factories were geared to the war, but without any strong central regulation and with the future of the war uncertain. “Profits were falling off, dangers growing, the bosses losing their taste for production under the conditions created by revolution. The bourgeoisie as a whole was entering upon a policy of economic defeatism. Temporary losses and deficits due to economic paralysis were in their eyes the overhead expenses of a struggle with the revolution.” [Chapter Twenty-One ⁴⁰]

The bosses remembered that in 1905 a well-organised lockout had helped to break the workers’ strike movement. Now, in 1917, without any strong state support and with the workers and soldiers now being armed, the bosses could not risk a clear lockout, which could also have been seen as a treacherous attack on the supplies for the front. Instead, they embarked on a gradual ‘creeping lockout’, blaming the closures on the revolution which, of course, they wanted stopped.

Trotsky gives figures showing that in March and April 129 small plants involving 9,000 workers were shut down, but by June it was 125 plants with 38,000 workers. By July, it was 206 plants with 48,000 workers thrown onto the streets. The banks similarly threatened the government with a ‘financial lockout’ of stopping loans and transferring capital abroad if any radical financial reforms were attempted.

In some cases, the sabotage was so obvious, with there being so transparently no reason to close the factories, that the industrialists were forced by the agitation of the workers’ committees to reopen the plants. The E.C. also came under pressure to take steps against the bosses and to introduce state regulation of industry. The Soviet advisers were forced by the crisis to recommend a program of state control of the trusts, banks, trade and food supply. In other words, the revolution was revealing that there was no way forward except by taking on a socialist program of public ownership.

Of course, the socialists did not even dare to seriously suggest this program to their bourgeois Coalition colleagues. Nevertheless, Konovalov seemed to get the message because he quickly resigned as Minister of Trade and Industry, only to be replaced by another capitalist. Lenin wrote: “‘The programme is excellent. It is necessary to recognise the programme of ‘frightful’ Bolshevism, for no other programme and no other way out of the actually threatening terrible collapse can be found’. However, the whole question was: Who was to carry out this excellent programme?” [Chapter Twenty-One ⁴⁰]

The government for its part countered with a program of transferring Petrograd factories into the country, partly to keep them safe from the Germans, partly to bring them nearer to the raw material resources, but above all to break up the workers’ movement. However, the plan failed in the face of the workers’ opposition. Demands increased for the state to take control of factories facing closure, but the Compromisers opposed it. The workers, therefore, began to change their allegiance. For example, the giant Putilov factory, stronghold of the Social Revolutionaries in February, was by June supporting the Bolsheviks.

The crisis continued to get worse. The food shortages bordering on starvation, coupled with the lack of any prospect of improved conditions, gave rise to a stormy strike movement. Throughout June the less traditionally militant layers like the unskilled workers, clerks and laundry workers were striking. However, the more advanced layers like the metalworkers, having gained the eight-hour day, were now pausing in the struggle. They realised that in the given economic conditions, individual economic strikes could yield little lasting improvement. Instead, they began to think of more radical socialist solutions to the crisis.

Bolshevism gains support

As Trotsky writes “The growth of strikes, and of the class struggle in general, almost automatically raised the influence of the Bolsheviks. In all cases where it was a question of life-interests the workers became convinced that the Bolsheviks had no ulterior motives, they were concealing nothing, and that you could rely on them.” [Chapter Twenty-One ⁴⁰]

It was the active workers that moved towards the Bolsheviks first. So, for example, in June, a conference of factory and shop committees in Petrograd overwhelmingly supported the Bolshevik resolution, by 335 out of 421 votes, although the Soviet itself was still then dominated by the Compromisers. The trade unions had grown enormously with at least 250,000 unionised workers in Petrograd by June, and within them the Bolsheviks had grown even more rapidly.

“All the by-elections to the soviets showed a victory for the Bolsheviks. By the 1^st of June in the Moscow Soviet there were already 206 Bolsheviks against 176 Mensheviks and 110 S-R’s. The same shifts occurred in the provinces, only more slowly. The membership of the party was growing steadily. At the end of April, the Petrograd organisation had 15,000 members. By the end of June, over 32,000. The workers’ section of the Petrograd Soviet had at that time already a Bolshevik majority. But at a joint session of both sections the soldier delegates overweighed the Bolsheviks. Pravda was more and more insistently demanding general elections: ‘The 500,000 Petrograd workers have four times fewer delegates in the Soviet than the 150,000 soldiers of the Petrograd garrison’ ” [Chapter Twenty-One ⁴⁰]

The armed workers were now acting more and more often as the ‘armed bodies of men’ of the state, arresting bosses and forcing them to appear before the local soviet to negotiate. At the June congress of the Soviets, Lenin had demanded that the biggest millionaires be arrested for as long as it took for them to reveal their hidden profits and secret lockout plans. The workers in many factories had succeeded in forming a militia, controlled by the factory committees - and hence by the Bolsheviks.

Trotsky adds that the growing impatience of the angriest layers of the masses tested even the Bolsheviks: “Only the Bolsheviks enjoyed sufficient authority to make it possible for them to restrain the workers and soldiers from scattered action. But the impatience of the masses was already sometimes directed even against the Bolsheviks. Anarchists appeared in the factories and in the fleet. They revealed their bankruptcy for the most part by encouraging petty flare-ups. The economic blind alley and the growing embitterment of the Petrograd workers gave certain points of support to the anarchists … ready to regard every little impulse from below as the last stroke of salvation, they sometimes accused the Bolsheviks of irresolution and even of compromism. But beyond grumbling they usually did not go. The response of the masses to the action of the anarchists sometimes served the Bolsheviks as a gauge of the steam pressure of the revolution.” [Chapter Twenty-One ⁴⁰]