A Decade of Bolshevism by Alexander Berkman

The communist dictatorship in Russia has completed its first decade. It may therefore be interesting and instructive to sum up the achievements of the Bolsheviki during that time, to visualize the results of their rule.

But “results” are a relative matter. One can form an estimate of them only by comparing them with the things that were to be achieved, with the objects sought.

What were the objects of the Russian Revolution? What have the Bolsheviki achieved?

The Romanov regime was an absolutism; Russia under the czars was the most enslaved country in Europe. The people hungered for liberty.

The February-March Revolution, 1917, abolished that absolutism. The people became free.

But that freedom was only negative. The people were free from the chains that had held them bound for centuries. Now their liberated arms and spirit longed to apply themselves, sought the opportunity to do, to act. But that freedom had not yet been achieved. The people were free from some things, but not to do the things they wanted.

They wanted positive freedom. The workers wanted the opportunity to use the tools and machinery they had themselves made; they wanted to use them to create more wealth and to enjoy that wealth. The peasant wanted free access to the land and a chance to cultivate it without being robbed of the products of his hard toil. The people at large wanted to apply their new-won freedom to the pursuit of life and happiness.

The negative liberty of the February-March Revolution was therefore quite unsatisfactory, unconvincing, and inadequate. That is why the people soon began to continue the revolution, to deepen it into a social transformation. To make the revolution, in short. The soldiers dropped their guns and left the fronts en masse. They knew they had nothing to fight for in foreign countries. They returned to their fathers and brothers, the peasants, and together they drove the landlords away and went to work on their own mother-land. The industrial proletariat at the same time expropriated the lords of industry and possessed themselves of the mills, mines, and factories. Thus the laboring masses of Russia came into their own, for the first time in the history of the world.

As always during the revolution, this activity of the Russian masses proceeded outside the sphere of governmental influence. The struggle against oppression— whether political, economic, or social—against the exploitation of man by man, is always at the same time also a struggle against government itself, against government as such.

The Russian Revolution, like every revolution, faced this alternative: to build freely, independent of government and even despite it; or to choose government with all the limitation and stagnation that it involves. The path of the Russian Revolution lay in the constructive self-reliance of the masses, in the direction of no-government, of Anarchism.

Between February and October of 1917, the Revolution instinctively followed that path. It destroyed the old State mechanism and proclaimed the principle of the federation of Soviets. It used the method of direct expropriation to abolish private capitalistic ownership. In the field of economic reconstruction it employed the principle of the federation of shop and factory committees for the management of production. Proletarian and peasant organizations attended to distribution and exchange. House committees looked after the proper assignment of living quarters. Street and district committees secured public safety.

This was the course of the October-November revolution. In that spirit it kept growing and developing.

But this development of the Revolution was not in consonance with the philosophy of Marx and the purpose of the Communist Party. The latter sought to gain control of the movement of the masses, and gradually succeeding, it gave an entirely different turn to the work of social reconstruction.

Under cover of the motto, “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” it began to build a centralized, bureaucratic State. In the name of the “defense of the Revolution,” it abolished popular liberties and instituted a system of new oppression and terror.

The Bolshevik idea was, in effect, that the Social Revolution must be directed by a special staff, vested with dictatorial powers. The fundamental characteristics of that idea was a deep distrust of the masses. According to the Bolsheviki, the masses must be made free by force. “Proletarian compulsion in all its forms,” wrote Bukharin, the foremost Communist theoretician, “beginning with summary execution and ending with compulsory labor, is a method of reworking the human material of the capitalist epoch into Communist humanity.”

The Communist Party proceeded “reworking” the human material. Compulsion and terrorism became the main means toward it. Freedom of thought, freedom of the press, of public assembly, self-determination of the worker and his unions, the initiative and freedom of labor—all this was declared old rubbish, “bourgeois prejudices.” The “dictatorship of the proletariat” became the absolutism of a handful of Bolsheviki in the Kremlin.

Practically the Communist dictatorship worked out as follows: free exchange of opinion was suppressed; the initiative of the individual as well as of the collectivity, so vital in life, and particularly in revolutionary times, was eliminated; voluntary cooperation and organized free efforts were wiped out; every revolutionary element, not Bolshevik, was exterminated or imprisoned.

The people’s Soviets were transformed into sections of the ruling political party; the labor organizations found themselves deprived of all power and activity, serving only as the official mouthpieces of the Party orders. Each and every citizen became the servant of the Bolshevik State, its obedient functionary, unquestioningly executing the will of his master, the all-powerful Kremlin dictators.

The inevitable results did not fail soon to manifest themselves. The Bolshevik policies corrupted and disintegrated the Revolution, slayed its soul and destroyed its moral and spiritual significance. By its bloody despotism, by its tyrannous paternalism, both petty and stupid, by the perfidy which replaced its former revolutionary idealism, by its deadening formalism and criminal indifference to the interests and aspirations of the laboring masses, by its cowardly suspicion and distrust of the people and by its mania of persecution, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” hopelessly cut itself off from the masses.

Thrust back from direct participation in the constructive work of the Revolution, harassed at every step, the victim of constant control and supervision by the Party, the proletariat got to feel that the Revolution and its further fortunes were the private, personal affair of the Bolsheviki. Constructive energy and active interest on the part of the people were paralised. The factories were deserted, the peasant refused to feed his new oppressors.

Lenin was compelled to introduce the “new economic policy.” It meant the return of capitalism, “for long and in earnest,” as Lenin himself put it. The return of capitalism in 1921, which the social revolutionary work of the laboring masses of Russia had abolished in 1917! The return of capitalism, as the direct result of Bolshevik methods; of capitalism partly State and partly private.

And today, after ten years of Bolshevik rule? Growing and inevitable disintegration of the Party itself, with the threat of a Napoleonic shadow in the background. While the country at large is groaning under the heel of a Czarist Socialism.

Social antagonisms, the exploitation of labor, the enslavement of the worker and peasant, the cancellation of the citizen as a free human being and his transformation into a microscopic part of the economic mechanism owned by the government; the creation of privileged groups favored by the State; a multitudinous and corrupt bureaucracy; a system of labor service with its degrading and brutalizing rewards and punishments—these are the characteristic features of Russia of today.

Only blind fanaticism or unpardonable hypocrisy can see in this, the most grievous form of slavery, the emancipation of labor or even the least approach to it.

The so-called “proletarian dictatorship” in Russia today is the worst betrayal of all that the Russian Revolution stood for. It is black reaction and counterrevolution.

There is no hope for Russia except in the speedy return of the principles and purposes of October. The first step toward it is the termination of the dictatorship, the reestablishment of real, free Soviets, of freedom of speech, press, and assembly, the absolute abolition of persecution for opinion’s sake, and the immediate and unconditional liberation of all labor and political prisoners.

A.B.