Part 11 (2/2)

Miliukov wrote that for him, ”as a sociologist and investigator of Russian historic evolution”-that is, a man surveying the course of events from a height-”Lenin and Trot-sky are leading a movement far nearer to Pugatchev and Razin, to Bolotnikov-to the eigh-teenth and seventeenth centuries of our history-than to the last word in European anarcho-syndicalism.” That dole of truth which is contained in this a.s.sertion of the liberal sociologist-leaving aside his reference to ”anarcho-syndicalism” which was dragged in here for some unknown reason-militates not against the Bolsheviks, but rather against the Russian bour-geoisie, their belatedness and political insigni.cance. The Bolsheviks are not to blame that those colossal peasant movements of past ages did not lead to a democratisation of social relations in Russia-without cities to lead them it was unattainable!-nor are the Bolsheviks to blame that the so-called liberation of the peasants in 1861 was carried out in such a way as to involve stealing of the communal land, enslavement of the peasant to the state, and complete preservation of the caste system. One thing is true: the Bolsheviks were obliged to carry through in the .rst quarter of the twentieth century that which was not carried through-or not even undertaken at all-in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth cen-turies. Before taking up their own great task, they had to clear the ground of the historic rubbish of the old ruling cla.s.ses and the old ages. We may add that the Bolsheviks at least ful.lled this preliminary task most conscientiously. This Miliukov will now hardly venture to deny.

CHAPTER 21.

s.h.i.+FTS IN THE Ma.s.sES.

In the fourth month of its existence the February regime was already choking from its own contradictions. June had begun with the all-Russian congress of the soviets, whose task was to create a political cover for the advance on the front. The beginning of the advance coin-cided in Petrograd with a gigantic demonstration of workers and soldiers organised by the Compromisers against the Bolsheviks, but which turned out to be a Bolshevik demonstra-tion against the Compromisers. The growing indignation of the ma.s.ses led after two weeks to another demonstration, which broke out without any summons from above, led to b.l.o.o.d.y encounters, and has gone into history under the name of ”the July days.” Taking place ex-actly halfway between the February and the October revolutions, the July semi-insurrection closes the former and const.i.tutes a kind of dress rehearsal for the latter. We shall end this volume on the threshold of the July days, but before pa.s.sing over to those events whose arena in June was Petrograd, it is necessary to have a glance at certain processes which were taking place in the ma.s.ses.

To a certain liberal who had af.rmed at the beginning of May that the more the gov-ernment moves to the left, the more the country moves to the right-meaning by ”country,” of course, ”the possessing cla.s.ses”-Lenin replied: ”the country of workers and poorer and poorest peasants, I a.s.sure you, citizen, is a thousand times farther to the left than the Cher-novs and Tseretellis, and a hundred times farther than we. Live a little and you will see.” Lenin estimated that the workers and peasants were ”a hundred times” farther to the left than the Bolsheviks. This may seem a little unfounded: the workers and soldiers were still supporting the Compromisers, and the majority of them were on their guard against the Bolsheviks. But Lenin was delving deeper. The social interests of the ma.s.ses, their hatred and their hope, were still only seeking a mode of expression. The policy of the Compro-misers had been for then a .rst stage. The ma.s.ses were immeasurably to the left of the Chernovs and Tseretellis, but were themselves still unconscious of their radicalism. Lenin 292.

was right in a.s.serting that the ma.s.ses were to the left of the Bolsheviks, for the party in its immense majority had not yet realised the mightiness of the revolutionary pa.s.sions that were simmering in the depths of the awakening people. The indignation of the ma.s.ses was nourished by the dragging-out of the war, the economic ruin and the malicious inactivity of the government.

The measureless European-Asiatic plain had become a country only thanks to railroads. The war struck them most heavily of all. Transport was steadily breaking down; the num-ber of disabled locomotives on certain roads had reached 50 per cent. At headquarters learned engineers read reports to the effect that no later than in six months the railroad transport would be in a state of complete paralysis. In these calculations there was a certain amount of conscious spreading of panic. But the breakdown of transport had really reached threatening dimensions. It had created tie-ups on the roads, intensi.ed the disturbance of commodity exchange, and augmented the high cost of living.

The food situation in the cities was becoming worse and worse. The agrarian movement had established its centre in 43 provinces. The .ow of grain to the army and the towns was dangerously dwindling. In the more fertile regions, to be sure, there were still tens and hundreds of millions of poods of surplus grain, but the purchasing operations at a .xed price gave extremely unsatisfactory results: and moreover it was dif.cult to deliver the ready grain to the centres owing to the breakdown of transport. From the autumn of 1916 on, an average of about one half of the expected provision trains arrived at the front. Petrograd, Moscow and other industrial centres received no more than 10 per cent of what they needed. They had almost no reserves. The standard of living of the city ma.s.ses oscillated between under-nourishment and hunger. The arrival of the Coalition Government was signalised with a democratic order forbidding the baking of white bread. It will be several years after that before the ”French roll” will again. appear in the capital. There was not enough b.u.t.ter. In June the consumption of sugar was cut down by de.nite rationing for the whole country.

The mechanism of the market, broken by the war, had not been replaced by that state regulation to which the advanced capitalist governments had been compelled to resort, and which alone permitted Germany to hold on through four years of war.

Threatening symptoms of economic collapse appeared at every step. The fall in produc-tivity in the factories was caused, aside from the breakdown of transport, by the wearing out of equipment, the lack of raw materials and supplies, the .ux of personnel, bad .nancing the universal uncertainty.

The princ.i.p.al plants were still working for the war. Orders had been distributed for two or three years ahead. Meantime the workers were unwilling to believe that the war would continue. The newspapers were publis.h.i.+ng appalling .gures of war pro.ts. The cost of living was rising. The workers were awaiting a change. The technical and administrative personnel of the factories were uniting in unions and advancing their demands. In this sphere the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries dominated. The regime of the factories was disintegrating. All joints were weakening. The prospects of the war and of the national economy were becoming misty, and property rights unreliable. Pro.ts were falling off, dangers growing, the bosses losing their taste for production under the conditions created by the revolution. The bourgeoisie as a whole was entering upon a policy of economic defeatism. Temporary losses and de.cits due to economic paralysis were in their eyes the overhead expenses of a struggle with the revolution which threatened the foundations of ”culture.” At the same time the virtuous press was accusing the workers from day to day of maliciously sabotaging industry, stealing raw materials, unnecessarily burning up fuel in order to produce stoppages. The falsity of these accusations exceeded all bounds, and since this was the press of a party which actually stood at the head of the Coalition power, the indignation of the workers naturally transferred itself to the Provisional Government.

The industrialists had not forgotten the experience of 1905 when a correctly organised lockout actively supported by the government had not only broken up the struggle of the workers for an eight-hour day, but also had rendered the monarchy an invaluable service in the matter of wiping out the revolution. The question of a lockout was now again brought up for discussion at a Council of the Congresses of industry and Trade-thus innocently they named the .ghting organ of trusti.ed and syndicated capital. One of the leaders of industry, the engineer explained later in his memoirs why the idea of a lockout was rejected: ”This would have looked like a blow at the rear of the army . . . The consequences -of such a step, in the absence of governmental support, looked to the majority very dark.” The whole misfortune lay in the absence of a ”real” government. The Provisional Government was paralysed by the Soviet; the reasonable leaders of the Soviet were paralysed by the ma.s.ses; the workers in the factories were armed; moreover, almost every factory had in the neighbourhood a friendly regiment or battalion. In these circ.u.mstances these gentlemen industrialists considered a lockout ”odious in its national aspect.” But they did not by any means renounce the idea of an offensive, but merely adapted it to existing circ.u.mstances, giving it not a simultaneous, but a creeping character. According to the diplomatic expres-sion of Auerbach, the industrialists ”.nally came to the conclusion that an object lesson would be given by life itself, in the form of an inevitable gradual closing of the factories, so to speak, one at a time-a thing which soon did actually occur.” In other words, renounc-ing a demonstrative lockout as involving ”an enormous responsibility,” this Council of the United Industries recommended to its members to close up the enterprises one at a time, seeking out a respectable pretext.

This plan of a creeping lockout was carried out with remarkable system. Leaders of Capital like the Kadet Kutler, a former Minister in the cabinet of Witte, read signi.cant re-ports about the breakdown of industry, laying the blame, not on the three years of war, but on the three months of revolution. ”In the course of two or three weeks,” prophesied the im-patient newspaper Rech, ”the shops and factories will begin to shut down one after another,” A threat was here dressed up in the form of a prophecy. Engineers, professors, journalists started a campaign in both the general and the specialised press, in which a bridling of the workers was presented as the fundamental condition of salvation. The minister-industrialist Konovalov had declared on the 17 of May, just before his demonstrative withdrawal from government: ”If there does not soon come a sobering up of cloudy heads ... we will witness a stoppage of tens and hundreds of plants.”

In the middle of June a Congress of Trade and Industry demands of the Provisional Gov-ernment ”a radical break with the system of developing the revolution.” We have already heard this demand made by the generals: ”Stop the Revolution.” But the industrialists make it more concise: ”The source of all evil is not only the Bolsheviks, but also the socialist parties. Only a .rm iron hand can save Russia.”

Having prepared the political setting, the industrialists pa.s.sed from words to deeds. In the course of March and April, 129 small plants involving 9,000 workers were shut down; in May, 108 with a like number of workers; in June, 125 plants with 38,000 workers were shut down; in July, 206 plants threw out on the streets 48,000 workers. The lockout devel-oped in a geometric progression. But that was only a beginning. Textile Moscow got into motion after Petrograd, and the provinces after Moscow. The manufacturers would refer to an absence of fuel, raw materials, accessories, credits. The factory committees would interfere in the matter and in many cases indubitably establish the fact of a malicious dis-location of industry with the goal of bringing pressure on the workers, or holding up the government for subsidies. Especially impudent were the foreign capitalists acting through the mediation of their emba.s.sies. In several cases the sabotage was so obvious that as a re-sult of the exposures of the shop committees the industrialists found themselves compelled to re-open the factories, thus laying bare one contradiction after another. The revolution soon arrived at the chief of them all: that between the social character of industry and the private owners.h.i.+p of its tools and equipment. In the interests of victory over the workers, the entrepreneur closes the factory as though it were a question of a mere snuff box, and not an enterprise necessary to the life of the whole nation.

The banks, having successfully boycotted the Liberty Loan, took a militant att.i.tude against .scal encroachments on big capital. In a letter addressed to the Ministry of Finance the bankers ”prophesied” a .ow of capital abroad and a transfer of papers to the safes in case of radical .nancial reforms. In other words the banker-patriots threatened a .nancial lockout to complete the industrial one. The government hastened to accede: after all, the organisers of this sabotage were respected people who had been compelled as the result of the war and the revolution to risk their capital, and not any old Kronstadt sailors who risked nothing but their heads.

The Executive Committee could not fail to understand that the responsibility for the economic fate of the country, especially since the open a.s.sociation of the socialists in the government, would lie in the eyes of the ma.s.ses upon the ruling Soviet majority. The economic department of the Executive Committee had worked out a broad programme of state regulation of the economic life. Under pressure of the threatening situation, the proposals of very moderate economists had proved much more radical than their authors. ”For many branches of industry,” read this programme, ”the time is ripe for a state trade monopoly (bread, meat, salt. leather); for others, the conditions are ripe for the formation of regulating state trusts (coal, oil, metals, sugar, paper); and .nally, for almost all branches of industry contemporary conditions demand a regulative partic.i.p.ation of the state in the distribution of raw materials and .nished products, and also in the .xation of prices.... Simultaneously with this it is necessary to place under control ... all credit inst.i.tutions.”

On May 16, the Executive Committee with its bewildered political leaders.h.i.+p adopted the proposals of the economists almost without debate, and backed them up with a unique warning addressed to the government: It should take upon itself ”the task of a planned organisation of the national industry and labour,” calling to memory that in consequence of the non ful.lment of this task ”the old regime fell and it had been necessary to reorganise the Provisional Government.” In order to pump up their courage the Compromisers were scaring themselves.

”The programme is excellent,” wrote Lenin, ”both the control and the governmentalising of the trusts, also the struggle with speculation, and liability for labour. . . . It is necessary to recognise this 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? Would it be the Coalition? The answer was given immediately. The day after the adoption by the Executive Committee of the economic programme, the Minister of Trade and Industry, Konovalov, resigned and slammed the door behind him. He was temporarily replaced by the engineer Palchinsky, a no less loyal but more energetic representative of big capital. The minister-socialists did not even dare seriously propose the programme of the Executive Committee to their liberal colleagues. Chernov, you remember, was vainly trying to get the government to adopt a veto on land sales. In answer to its growing dif.culties, the government, on its side, brought forward a programme of unloading Petrograd, that is, transferring shops and factories into the depths of the country. This programme was motivated both by military considerations-the danger that the Germans might seize the capital-and by economic: Petrograd was too far from the sources of fuel and raw materials. This unloading would have meant the liquidation of the Petrograd industries for a series of months and years. The political aim was to scatter throughout the whole country the vanguard of the working cla.s.s. Parallel with this the military power brought forward one pretext after another for deporting from Petrograd the revolutionary military units.

Palchinsky tried with all his might to convince the workers' section of the Soviet of the advantages of an unloading. To accomplish this task against the will of the workers was impossible. But the workers would not agree. The unloading scheme got forward as little as the regulation of industry the break down was going deeper. Prices were rising. The silent lockout was broadening, and the therewith unemployment. The government was marking time. Miliukov wrote later: ”The ministry was simply swimming with the current, and the current was running in the Bolshevik channel.” Yes, the current was running in the Bolshevik channel.

The proletariat was the chief motive force of revolution. At the same time the revolution was giving shape to the proletariat. And the proletariat was badly in need of this.

We have observed the decisive role of the Petrograd workers in the February days. The most militant positions were occupied by the Bolsheviks. Immediately after the overturn, however, the Bolsheviks retired into the background. The Compromise parties advanced to the front of the political stage. They turned over the power to the liberal bourgeoisie. Patriotism was the countersign of this bloc. Its a.s.sault was so strong that at least one half of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party capitulated to it. With Lenin's arrival the course of the party changed abruptly, and thereafter its in.uence grew swiftly. In the armed April demonstration the front ranks of the workers and soldiers were already trying to break the chain of the Compromisers. But after a .rst effort they fell back. The Compromisers remained at the helm.

Later on, after the October revolution, a good deal was written to the effect that the Bolsheviks owed their victory to the peasant army, tired of the war. That is a very super.cial explanation. The opposite statement would be nearer to the truth: If the Compromisers got a dominant position in the February revolution, it is thanks most of all to the unusual place occupied in the life of the country by a peasant army. If the revolution had developed in peace time, the leading role of the proletariat would have had from the beginning a far more sharply expressed character. Without the war the revolutionary victory would have come later, and if you do not count the victims of the war, would have been paid for at a higher price. But it would not have left a place for an inundation of compromising patriotic moods. At any rate, the Russian Marxists who had prophesied long before these events a conquest of proletariat in the course of the bourgeois revolution did not take for their starting point the temporary moods army, but the cla.s.s structure of the Russian society. That prophecy was wholly con.rmed. But the fundamental correlation of cla.s.ses was refracted through the war and temporarily s.h.i.+fted by the pressure of the army-that is, by an organisation of decla.s.sed and armed peasants. It was just this arti.cial social formation which so extraordinarily strengthened the hold of the petty bourgeois compromise policy, and made possible an eight-months' period of experiments, weakening to the country and the revolution.

However, the question as to the roots of compromisism is not exhausted by reference to the peasant army. In the proletariat itself, in its make-up, its political level, we must seek supplementary causes for the temporary entrenchment of the Mensheviks and Social Rev-olutionaries. The war brought vast changes in the const.i.tution and mood of the working cla.s.s. If the preceding years had been a time of revolutionary af.ux, the war sharply broke off that process. The mobilisation was thought out and conducted not only from a military, but still more from a police viewpoint. The government made haste to clean out from the industrial districts the more active and restless groups of workers. We may consider it es-tablished that the mobilisation of the .rst months of war tore away from the industries as many as 40 per cent of the workers, chie.y the skilled workers. Their absence, having a very damaging effect on the course of production, called out hot protests from the industri-alists in proportion to their high pro.ts from the war industries. A further destruction of the workers' cadres was thus stopped. The workers indispensable to the industries remained in the capacity of men on military duty. The breaches effected by the mobilisation were made up by immigrants from the villages, small-town people, badly quali.ed workers, women, boys. The percentage of women in industry rose from 32 to 40 per cent.

The process of renewal and dilution of the proletariat reached its extreme dimensions in the capital. For the years of the war, 1914-17, the number of workers in large enterprises, those hiring more than 500, almost doubled in the Petrograd province. In consequence of the liquidation of plants and factories in Poland, and especially in the Baltic states, and still more in consequence of the general growth of the war industries, there were concentrated in Petrograd by 1917 about 400,000 workers in plants and factories. Out of these, 335,000 were in the one hundred and forty giant plants. The more militant elements of the Petro-grad proletariat played no small part at the front in giving form to the revolutionary moods of the army. But those yesterday's immigrants from the villages who replaced them, often well-to-do peasants and shopkeepers hiding from the front, women and boys, were far more submissive than the ranking workers. To this we must add that the quali.ed workers who found themselves in the position of men on military duty-and of these there were hundreds of thousands-observed an extraordinary caution through fear of being, thrown over to the front. Such was the social basis of the patriotic mood, which had prevailed with a part of the workers even under the czar. But there was no stability in this patriotism. The mer-ciless military and police repression, the redoubled exploitation, defeats at the front, and industrial breakdown, pushed the workers into the struggle. Strikes. during the war were predominantly economic in character, however, and distinguished by far more moderation than before the war. The weakening of the cla.s.s was increased by the weakening of its party. After the arrest and exile of the Bolshevik Duma deputies, there was carried out with the help of a previously prepared hierarchy of provocateurs a general smash-up of the Bol-shevik organisations, from which the party did not recover until the February revolution. During 1915 and 1916 the diluted working cla.s.s had to go through an elementary school of struggle before the partial economic strikes and demonstrations of hungry women could in February 1917 fuse in a general strike, and draw the army into an insurrection.

The Petrograd proletariat thus entered the February revolution not only in a hetero-geneous condition, not yet having amalgamated its const.i.tuent parts, but with a lowered political level even of its advanced layers. In the provinces it was still worse. It was this revival of political illiteracy and semi-illiteracy in the proletariat, caused by the war, which created the second condition necessary for the temporary dominance of the Compromise parties.

A revolution teaches and teaches fast. In that lies its strength. Every week brings some-thing new to the ma.s.ses. Every two months creates an epoch. At the end of February, the insurrection. At the end of April, a demonstration of the armed workers and soldiers in Petrograd. At the beginning of July, a new a.s.sault, far broader in scope and under more resolute slogans. At the end of August, Kornilov's attempt at an overthrow beaten off by the ma.s.ses. At the end of October, conquest of power by the Bolsheviks. Under these events, so striking in their rhythm, molecular processes were taking place, welding the het-erogeneous parts of the working cla.s.s into one political whole. In this again the chief role was played by the strike.

Frightened by the lightning of revolution striking in the midst of their baccha.n.a.lia of war pro.ts, the industrialists made concessions in the .rst weeks to the workers. The Petrograd factory owners even agreed, with quali.cations and exceptions, to the eight-hour day. But that did not quiet things, since the standard of living continually sank. In May the Executive Committee was obliged to concede that with the increasing cost of living the situation of the workers ”borders for many categories upon chronic starvation.” The mood in the worker districts was becoming more and more nervous and tense. What depressed them most of all was the absence of prospects. The ma.s.ses are capable of enduring the heaviest deprivations when they understand what for, but the new regime was more and more revealing itself to them as a mere camou.age of the old relations against which they had revolted in February. This they would not endure.

The strikes were especially stormy among the more backward and exploited groups of workers. Laundry workers, dyers, coopers, trade and industrial clerks, structural work-ers, bronze workers, unskilled workers, shoemakers, paper-box makers, sausage makers, furniture workers, were striking, layer after layer, throughout the month of June. The metal-workers were beginning, on the contrary, to play a restraining role. To the advanced workers it was becoming more and more clear that individual economic strikes in the con-ditions of war, breakdown and in.ation could not bring a serious improvement, that there must be some change in the very foundations. The lockout not only made the workers favourable to the demand for the control of industry, but even pushed them toward the thought of the necessity of taking the factories into the hands of the state. This inference seemed the more natural in that the majority of private factories were working for the wax, and that alongside them were state enterprises of the same type. Already in the summer of 1917 delegations began to arrive in the capital from the far ends of Russia, delegations of workers and clerks, with a plea that the factories should be taken over by the treasury, since the shareholders had stopped .nancing them. But the government would not hear of this; consequently it was necessary to change the government. The Compromisers opposed this. The workers began to s.h.i.+ft their front against the Compromisers. The Putilov factory with its 40,000 workers was a stronghold of the Social Revolutionaries during the .rst months of the revolution. But its garrison did not long defend it against Bolsheviks. At the head of the Bolshevik attack most often was to be seen Volodarsky, a tailor in the past. A Jew who had spent some years in America and spoke English well, Volodarsky was a magni.cent ma.s.s orator, logical, ingenious and bold. His American intonation gave a unique expressive-ness to his resonant voice, ringing out concisely at meetings of many thousands. ”From the moment of his arrival in the Narva district,” says the worker Minichev, ”the ground in the Putilov factory began to slip under the feet of the Social Revolutionary gentlemen, and in the course of something like two months the Putilov workers had gone over to the Bolsheviks.”

The growth of strikes, and of the cla.s.s struggle in general, almost automatically raised the in.uence 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, that they were concealing nothing, and that you could rely on them. In the hours of con.ict all the work-ers tended toward the Bolsheviks, the non-party workers, the Social Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks. This is explained by the fact that the factory and shop committees, waging a struggle for the lif

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