The standard Trotskyist account points to the soviets (workers’ and soldiers’ councils) as the ultimate proof of the democratic legitimacy of the Russian Revolution of 1917. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky tells us that the Second Congress of Soviets was ‘the most democratic of all parliaments in the world’s history’. The system of soviets, which sprang up in the wake of the Russian Revolution, was, we are informed by Ted Grant, ‘the most democratic and flexible form of popular representation yet devised’. Just how democratic was the soviet system? This is something that deserves to be investigated. It is surprising just how little attention is paid to this much-celebrated historical artefact, for, despite all the trumpeting by Trotskyists of its democratic credentials, very little serious analysis is given by the apologists of Bolshevism of the precise electoral procedures behind this supposedly marvellous democratic invention. Moreover, in orthodox Leninist accounts, the soviets disappear very quickly from the narrative once the October coup takes place and the Bolsheviks are firmly ensconced in power. What happened to these much-vaunted institutions of workers’ democracy? Could it be that if we investigate further, we will find things not quite to our liking?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Here we are being told that the Russian revolutionaries discovered an unprecedented form of direct democracy, far exceeding any bourgeois parliament. It would be a good idea to test this against reality.
The Second Congress of Soviets
By October 1917, the Bolsheviks had gained a large amount of popular support. It is generally agreed that they had most of the workers in the big cities on their side, as well as most of the soldiery. It was in that spirit that the Bolsheviks began planning their takeover, under the cover of an All-Russian Congress of Soviets. They knew that a simple coup against the Provisional Government, on their own authority, would gain no public support. They had to appear to be acting in the name of the soviets. Their real aim? The establishment of a Bolshevik one-party state, which went directly against the desires of most workers and soldiers for an all-socialist coalition of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The phrase ‘All power to the soviets’ was always understood in this light. Lenin and his acolytes intended to manipulate this for their benefit.
The first All-Russian Congress of Soviets had already taken place, so the next one would be the second. The point of these congresses was, in theory, to gather the delegates from all of the different regional and army soviets, representing all of the major parties (Mensheviks, SRs, Bolsheviks) in one place to discuss the country’s future. There was just one problem. No one, besides the Bolsheviks, was keen on a Second Congress.
The SRs and Mensheviks were none too enthusiastic about another Congress, in part because they feared it would have a sizable Bolshevik contingent, and in part because it would interfere with the Constituent Assembly. At the end of September, the Ispolkom sent out questionnaires to 169 soviets and army committees, requesting their opinion on whether to convene a Second Congress of Soviets: of the sixty-three soviets that responded, only eight favoured the idea. The sentiment among the troops was even more negative: on October 1, the Soldiers’ Section of the Petrograd Soviet voted against holding a national Congress of Soviets, and a report presented to it in mid-October indicated that the representatives of army committees had agreed unanimously that such a congress would be “premature” and would subvert the Constituent Assembly.
-Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 (London: Fontana Press, 1992), p.474
Eventually, the Bolsheviks got the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee (Ispolkom) to agree to the convening of a Second Congress. To ensure that they won a majority on it, the Bolsheviks proceeded to hijack the preparations for the convening of said congress.
Although their position in the country’s soviets was much stronger than it had been in June, it was unlikely that they would gain at the Second Congress an absolute majority. This they could secure only by taking the convocation of the Second Congress into their own hands and inviting to it only those soviets, which they had assured majorities. This they now proceeded to do.
…On September 29, the Bolshevik Central Committee discussed and on October 5 resolved to hold in Petrograd a Northern Regional Congress of Soviets. …[the] Regional Committee proceeded to invite some thirty soviets in which the Bolsheviks had majorities to send representatives; among them were soviets of the Moscow province, which did not even belong to the Northern Region.…The Bolshevik Party, of course, had no more authority than any other group to convene congresses of osviets, whether regional or national…They regarded their body as the immediate forerunner of the Second Congress of Soviets, which they determined to convene on October 20–according to Trotsky, by legal means if possible and by “revolutionary” ones if not. The most important result of the Regional Congress was the formation of a “Northern Regional Committee,” composed of eleven Bolsheviks and six Left SRs, whose task it was to “ensure” the convocation of a Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. On October 16 this body sent telegrams to the soviets, as well as to military committees at the regimental, divisional, and corps level, informing them that the Second Congress would meet in Petrograd on October 20 and requesting them to send delegates. The congress was to obtain an armistice, distribute land to peasants, and ensure that the Constituent Assembly met as scheduled. The telegrams instructed all soviets and army committees opposed to the convocation of the Second Congress–and these, as is known from the Ispolkom’s survey, were the large majority–to be at once “reelected”, which was a Bolshevik code word for dissolved.
–Ibid, p.476
In an act which showed the Bolsheviks’ strong commitment to soviet democracy, they…violated democratic norms and procedures to get their way! They held an entirely partisan regional Congress of Soviets over the heads of the incumbent executive of the Petrograd Soviet, and the multi-party representatives which sat on said executive. They ensured that the regional Congress was handpicked with representatives from pro-Bolshevik soviets, and began the work of rigging the All-Russian Congress of Soviets to ensure that it would return only Bolsheviks and Left-SRs. As part of the process, soviets which didn’t want to cooperate, e.g. most of them, would simply be treated as if they didn’t exist. Notice how this is absent from both Trotsky’s and Ted Grant’s account of the soviets.
The equivalent of this would be for, say, the Reform Party in the UK Parliament to hold a regional congress in Essex, just made up of Reform UK MPs and assorted supporters, in which they arrogate to themselves the right to dissolve parliament and call new elections, entirely on their own authority, in the hope of getting a majority. Constituencies that are unwilling to participate in a new election would be excluded from the contest.
The Mensheviks and SRs on Ispolkom condemned the Bolsheviks’ actions, asserting that only their Bureau had the right to call a national Congress of Soviets.
The Bureau went on to say that the Bolshevik invitation to regimental, divisional, and corps committees violated established procedures for military representation, which called for delegates to be chosen by army assemblies and, when these could not be convened, by army committees on the basis of one delegate for 25,000 soldiers. The Bolshevik organizers obviously bypassed the army committees because of their known opposition to the Second Congress. Three days later Izvestiia pointed out that the Bolsheviks not only convened an illegal Congress, but flagrantly violated accepted norms of representation. While the electoral rules called for soviets representing fewer than 25,000 persons to send no delegates to the All-Russian Congress, and those representing between 25,000 and 50,000 to send two, the Bolsheviks invited one soviet with 500 members to send two delegates and another with 1,500 to send five, which was more than was allocated to Kiev.
–Ibid.
Still, the Mensheviks and SRs allowed the Bolsheviks to go ahead with their illegal Congress. After all, they were erring comrades, not counter-revolutionaries. Lenin would never seriously use this as an opportunity to launch a coup and impose a totalitarian one-party state, right?
Richard Pipes goes into great detail about just how undemocratic the composition of the Congress was:
The composition of the congress bore little relationship to the country’s political alignment. Peasant organizations refused to participate, declaring the congress unauthorised and urging the nation’s soviets to boycott it. On the same grounds, the army committees refused to send delegates. Trotsky must have known better than to describe the Second Congress as “the most democratic of all parliaments in the history of the world.” It was, in fact, a gathering of Bolshevik dominated urban soviets and military councils especially created for the purpose.
…The exact number of participants in this rump congress cannot be determined: the most reliable estimate indicates about 650 delegates, among them 338 Bolsheviks and 98 Left SRs. The two allied parties thus controlled two-thirds of the seats–a representation more than double what they were entitled to, judging by the elections to the Constituent Assembly three weeks later. Leaving nothing to chance, for they could not be entirely certain of the Left SRs, the Bolsheviks allocated to themselves 54 percent of the seats. How skewed the representation was is illustrated by the fact that, according to information made available seventy years later, Latvians, who had a strong Bolshevik movement, accounted for over 10 percent of the delegates.
–Ibid., p.498
So much for the ‘most democratic parliament in the history of the world’. Even if we grant that the soviets themselves, in their original conception, were truly authentic organs of workers’ democracy, the composite of soviet delegates that made up the All-Russian Congress of Soviets were part of a thoroughly anti-democratic farce that historians have now been able to fully uncover. From this moment onwards, future Congresses of Soviets would be rigged in precisely this manner. From the moment the soviets appeared, the Bolsheviks did all they could to pervert them and turn them into organs of Bolshevik despotism.
The Menshevik Comeback and Bolshevik Repression
By the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power. By this time, Russia was a de-facto one-party state. The Left-SRs had been reduced to the status of useful idiots, and were one false step away from complete elimination. The careful detective work of Alexander Rabinowitch (a historian sympathetic to the Bolsheviks) has been able to uncover just how much effort went into rigging the elections to the Petrograd Soviet that took place in June 1918:
New regulations governing the election were confirmed at a plenary meeting of the Petrograd Soviet on 15 June. Perhaps the most significant change in the makeup of the new soviet was that numerically decisive representation was given to agencies in which the Bolsheviks had overwhelming strength, among them the Petrograd Trade Union Council, individual trade unions, factory committees in closed enterprises, district soviets, and district nonparty workers’ conferences. The Left SRs requested that representation from trade unions be reduced and that representatives of district nonparty workers’ conferences be eliminated, to no avail.
The revised system’s advantage for the Bolsheviks is illustrated by the representation accorded the nonparty workers’ conference in the First City district. The conference was reconvened for one short session, on 22 June, and by majority vote, with the Bolsheviks and Left SRs joining forces, the conference agreed on a “winner take all” rather than a proportional representation system for election of soviet deputies. As a result, all twenty-eight individuals elected to the Petrograd Soviet by the conference were either Bolsheviks or Left SRs. The sizable Menshevik/SR minority in the conference (27 percent) received no representation at all. An analogous procedure produced the same result in the Narva district. Relevant archival documents suggest that the same scenario emerged in elections at most district worker conferences and in most district soviets. Winning seats in district soviets were either two Bolsheviks and a Left SR or three Bolsheviks. Finally, Red Army forces, which essentially excluded Mensheviks and SRs, were given representation equal to workers (i.e., one deputy per five hundred soldiers).
Only about 260 of roughly 700 deputies in the new soviet were to be elected in factories, which guaranteed a large Bolshevik majority in advance.
…One is still left, however, with the nagging question of how many Bolshevik deputies from factories were elected instead of the opposition because of press restrictions, voter intimidation, vote fraud, or the short duration of the campaign. In individual districts, factory elections were administered by election commissions that were selected by local soviets and excluded the opposition. Elections at the factories were implemented by Bolshevik-dominated factory committees, many of which had not been reelected since 1917. Factory committees from closed factories could and did elect soviet deputies (the so-called dead souls), one deputy for each factory with more than one thousand workers at the time of their shutdown. Even unemployed workers were accorded representation roughly equal to employed workers. Their electoral assemblies were organized through Bolshevik-dominated trade union election commissions. On 15 June, Volodarskii had “magnanimously” authorized the reopening of some opposition newspapers, among them the SRs’ Delo naroda and the Mensheviks’ Luch. However, this was only a couple of days before the start of voting. Before then, most of the moderate socialsit press remained muzzled.On the eve of the decisive split between Bolsheviks and Left SRs in early July, Left SRs candidly acknowledged Bolshevik abuses in the elections. At the third Left SR national congress in Moscow (28 June to 1 July), Spiridonova claimed that three hundred of the four hundred Bolshevik deputies in the newly elected soviet had illegitimate credentials. “We did not speak or resist this [fraud] because the counterrevolution [and] defensist party is so strong in Petrograd that the defeat of the Bolsheviks would have meant…the destruction of Soviet power and put Peterograd into the hands of the black reaction. We had to be silent about it despite the fact that the indignation of workers…was enormous.” Where, then, does this leave us? Perhaps the least that can now be said is that the Bolshevik “victory” in the June 1918 elections to the Petrograd Soviet, elections that would have significant political consequences, was highly suspect, even on the shop floor.
-Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp.248, 251, 252
Once elected, the Bolshevik representatives in the Petrograd Soviet were not going to be left free to vote with their consciences, oh no. There was to be none of that bourgeois nonsense. They would vote how their party told them to:
On 25 June, the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee took steps to organize and assert control over the party’s fraction in the new soviet, which was scheduled to hold its first meeting two days later. Although this attempt to implement the principle that soviet fractions were subordinate to party committees failed, it was a noteworthy, potentially precedent-setting initiative.
Ibid., p.252
This took place in the context of the Bolsheviks losing support among the organised working-class of Petrograd. By this time, in response to Bolshevik misrule, they had formed the Menshevik-influenced group known as the Extraordinary Assembly of Delegates from Petrograd Factories and Plants (EAD) to challenge Bolshevik rule. The Bolsheviks knew they would lose truly democratic elections to the soviets, which is why they went to such effort to limit representation from the factories and give disproportionate representation to peasant soldiers. The Bolsheviks’ creative accounting and manipulation of electoral rules (which they applied arbitrarily in different districts, entirely based on what would maximise their representation) became a fixed part of electoral life during the pre-Stalinist stage of Leninism, what Trotskyists still refer to as the relatively ‘healthy’ years of the workers’ state. ‘Bourgeois’ niceties like an independent electoral commission were not things the Bolsheviks were interested in bothering with. What this meant for the integrity of Russia’s ‘soviet democracy’ was not a concern which preoccupied them.
Across Bolshevik-controlled Russia, there was disillusionment among the workers with Bolshevik rule, so much so that the Mensheviks were able to make a comeback in the soviet elections that happened in the spring and summer of 1918. This was met with vicious Bolshevik repression and forced re-elections that returned Bolshevik-dominated soviets. This is confirmed by Pipes:
Aware that the urban workers were turning against them, the Bolsheviks delayed holding soviet elections. When some independent soviets did so anyway, producing non-Bolshevik majorities, they disbanded them by force. The inability to use the soviets compounded the workers’ frustration. In early May, many concluded that they had to take matters into their own hands.
-Pipes, The Russian Revolution, p.559
Pipes also gives more information on the lengths the Bolsheviks went to crush the electoral revolt against the Bolsheviks in Petrograd and elsewhere in the counry:
Since they planned to hold the Fifth Congress of Soviets early in July [1918] (the Fourth Congress having been held in March to ratify the peace treaty with Germany), the Bolsheviks had to hold elections to the soviets. These took place in May and June. The outcome exceeded their worst expectations: had they any respect for the wishes of the working class, they would have given up power. In town after town, Bolshevik candidates were routed by Mensheviks and SRs: “In all provincial capitals of European Russia where elections were held on which there are data, the Mensheviks and SRs won the majorities in the city soviets in the spring of 1918.” In the voting for the Moscow Soviet the Bolsheviks emerged with a pseudo-majority only by means of outright manipulation of the franchise and other forms of electoral fraud. Observers predicted that in the forthcoming elections to the Petrograd Soviet the Bolsheviks would find themselves in a minority as well and Zinoviev would lose its chairmanship. The Bolsheviks must have shared this pessimistic assessment, for they postponed the elections to the Petrograd Soviet to the last possible moment, the end of June.
…The Bolsheviks now had an opportunity to practice the principle of “recall”, which Lenin had not long before described as “an essential condition of democracy”, by withdrawing their deputies from the soviets and replacing them with Mensheviks and SRs. But they chose to manipulate the results by using the Mandate Commissions, to declare the elections unlawful.…On June 16, they [the Bolsheviks] announced the convocation in two weeks of the Fifth Congress of Soviets, and in this connection instructed all soviets to hold new elections once again. Since such elections would certainly have again yielded Menshevik and SR majorities and placed the government in the position of an embattled minority at the Congress, Moscow moved to disqualify its rivals by ordering the expulsion of SRs and Mensheviks from all the soviets as well as from the CEC [All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which sat in between Congresses of Soviets]. At the caucus of the Bolshevik faction of the CEC, L.S. Sosnovskii justified the decree with the argument that the Mensheviks and SRs would overthrow the Bolsheviks just as the Bolsheviks had toppled the Provisional Government. The only choice offered the voters, therefore, was among official Bolshevik candidates, Left SRs, and a broad category of candidates without party affiliation known as “Bolshevik sympathizers”.
…It was in this highly charged atmosphere that elections to the Soviet took place in Petrograd. During the electoral campaign, Zinoviev was booed and prevented from speaking at Putilov and Obukhov. In factory after factory, workers, ignoring the decree prohibiting the two parties from participating in the soviets, gave majorities to Mensheviks and SRs. Obukhov chose 5 SRs, 3 partyless, and 1 Bolshevik. At Semiannikov, the SRs won 64 percent of the vote, the Mensheviks 10 percent, and the Bolshevik-Left SR bloc 26 percent. Similar results were obtained in other establishments.
The Bolsheviks refused to be bound by these results. They wanted majorities and obtained them, usually by tampering with the franchise: some Bolsheviks were given as many as five votes. On July 2, the results of the “elections” were announced. Of the 650 newly chosen deputies to the Petrograd Soviet, 610 were to be Bolsheviks and Left SRs; 40 seats were allotted to the SRs and Mensheviks, whom the official organs denounced as “Judases”. This rump Petrograd Soviet voted to dissolve the Council of Workers’ Plenipotentiaries: a delegate from the council who sought to address the gathering was prevented from speaking and physically assaulted.
…Thus ended the autonomy of the soviets…These measures, enacted in June and early July 1918, completed the formation in Russia of a one-party dictatorship.
–Ibid., pp.560, 563, 564, 565
In July 1918, the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets would sit – the last congress before the Left SRs broke with the Bolsheviks. Rabinowitch, again, is unsparing in his conclusions:
There is, in fact, substantial circumstantial evidence that the huge Bolshevik majority in the congress was fabricated, and that the number of legitimately elected Left SR delegates was roughly equal to that of the Bolsheviks. Sharp increases in support for the Left SRs in peasant soviets on the eve of the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets had given Left SR leaders confidence that they would have a majority at the national congress. At the end of June, Left SR delegates at the Third Left SR Party Congress in Moscow had also been encouraged by reports on voting results in district and province soviet congresses at which delegates to the national congress were elected. Prelimininary tallies of arriving delegates published by Znamia truda during the week preceding the opening of the congress indicated that the Left SRs would have near parity with the Bolsheviks. On the eve of the congress, the independent Moscow dailies Novosti dnia, Nashe slovo, and Zhizn’ conveyed the same impression.
Unfortunately for the Left SRs, these tallies did not include roughly 399 Bolshevik delegates whose right to be seated was challenged by the Left SR minority in the congress’s credentials commission. Around 25 June, at the same time that Sverdlov had postponed the opening of the congress from 28 June to 3 July (further delayed until the fourth), urgent calls had gone out to the party’s leaders in soviets around the country to immediately send additional Bolshevik delegates to Moscow. The legitimacy of these delegates was challenged by the Left SR minority in the credentials commission and by Left SRs in the institutions from which they came. At the start of the congress, Left SRs insisted on parity with the Bolsheviks on the credential commission to expose these manipulations, but these demands were rejected in a straight party-line vote, strongly suggesting a cover-up. Archival documents, for Mogilev Province, much of which was occupied by the Germans, clearly illustrate this fraud.
Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, p.288
This should suffice to give the lie to those assertions, so often made, that the Russian Revolution, and the soviet bodies that were thrown up by it, constitute a revolutionary form of democracy that was more democratic than any form of democracy established on earth. That is complete rubbish. The soviets lost what democratic character they had as soon as the Bolsheviks thought they had a chance to turn them into instruments of power. From the Second Congress on, the soviet elections were routinely rigged, with the acquiescence of the Left SRs, up until July 1918. The one-party state was perfected by the summer of 1918. The emancipatory promises of the revolution lasted for less than a year. Mere months after the October coup, the Russian workers were bitterly resenting the Bolshevik dictatorship, rising against it, and being crushed by those same Trotskyists who romanticise the heroic role of the workers from February-October. From that moment on, the working-class as an active force in the events of post-revolutionary Russia disappears from view. Why is that, may I ask? Is it because there is just a smidgen of embarrassment at what actually happened to the working-class and their precious soviet democracy once the Bolsheviks were in power?
Excuses
It will be said that the Bolsheviks, being Marxists and not liberals, could not play around with the niceties of bourgeois democracy given the ’emergency’ situation. After all, the country was in a perilous state, with counter-revolutionary forces lurking everywhere. It was hardly the time to be indulging in parliamentarism. No, the Bolsheviks had to put in place emergency measures and do away with pure democracy, even if it meant crushing those very workers who had helped bring them to power.
Fair enough. One might argue that the direct result of this was the horror that was Stalinism. It might be said in response that Stalinism, for all its horrors, was still preferable to a White reaction. I would say that no White Russian ruler could have been as murderous or as destructive as Stalin, and that world history, and the Russian people, would be better off if Stalinism had never happened. Nor do I share the view that the nationalisation of the means of production and the establishment of a planned economy are a priori progressive. We will leave aside the fact that free-market capitalism has proven everywhere superior to such a monstrous and inhumane system. It is precisely that dogmatic, Marxist attachment to state control of the economy that resulted in Stalinism. It will be said that if the Mensheviks had been allowed to take over, the result would have been the restoration of capitalism. I say that would have been a wonderful outcome, no worse than what the Bolsheviks did when they introduced the NEP. It will be said that if the Bolsheviks had given up power, they would have been the victims of retribution from counterrevolutionaries. I say that Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik mass murderers would have richly deserved to be put on trial and shot by the wrathful working-class for their crimes. I am sure the other Bolsheviks could have been spared, though. It cannot at all be said that the Mensheviks were mindless slaughterers in the way that Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky were. They would have been far more lenient towards the Bolsheviks than their comrade Stalin was to many of them when he came to power in the 1930s and consigned them all to gulags and shallow graves.
Of course, the Mensheviks had no serious desire to take over power, which is why they repeatedly dissuaded the workers from striking against the Bolsheviks and naively tried to push for a more moderate course, without offering to assume state power themselves. Their political psychology in the face of Bolshevik tyranny was no different to what it had been vis-a-vis the Provisional Government. They were mostly passive critics. They would protest and they would chastise, but they were never going to seek the violent overthrow of the regime. In hindsight, this was a world-historical mistake. It is never mentioned by these people that Martov and his Russian Menshevik colleagues consistently gave critical support to the Bolshevik government against the Whites and sought to do all they could to save it from itself. This did not make them counter-revolutionaries. It did make them fools. Their reward was exile and gulags. Here is what the Russian historian Vladimir Brovkin, who wrote a brilliant paper on the Menshevik comeback in the spring of 1918 (and is more sympathetic than I am to their campaign of loyal opposition to Bolshevism) has to say about it:
For the center-left Mensheviks of Martov’s persuasion, the victory of the Whites signified the destruction, together with Bolshevism, of all that they thought had been achieved in February 1917. For this reason, the Bolsheviks were perceived as a lesser evil. They were a dictatorial party, but nevertheless one that recruited its supporters from the masses. These Social Democrats believed that after a period of turmoil and brief popularity of radicalist and maximalist parties, the Social Democrats would prevail. These leaders, who valued their well- established ties with the workers, argued that the aim of the party should rather be to organize its sizable workers’ constituency for peaceful pressure on the Bolshevik regime to restore democracy. Many local Menshevik leaders, especially in large industrial cities, felt that Menshevik endorsement of armed struggle would only encourage the Bolsheviks to use military force to crush the party; that it would transform the political struggle into a military one, which would clearly work to the Bolsheviks’ advantage, since they held state power and were more than willing to settle matters by armed force. After a protracted dispute in the CC, Martov and Dan’s leadership explicitly banned armed struggle against the Bolsheviks. This decision, as we have seen, precipitated a split between the center-left Mensheviks and the right Mensheviks and SRs and paved the way for Martov’s doctrine of a loyal, legal opposition to Bolshevism.
-Vladimir Brovkin, ‘The Mensheviks’ Political Comeback: The Elections to the Provincial City Soviets in Spring 1918’, Russian Review, Volume 42, Issue 1 (Jan., 1983), pp.49-50
Additionally, it is worth observing that once the ’emergency’ situation was over, the Bolsheviks did not restore democracy. Instead they exiled the Mensheviks from Russia, banned all factions within the party and curtailed intra-party discussion. The soviets never went back to being the lively, animated, democratic bodies they had been prior to October and the Bolshevik takeover. They were integrated with the one-party state and became sterile rubber-stamps for whatever the Council of People’s Commissars and the Bolshevik Central Committee decided to do – and in some cases, what Lenin alone decided to do, without consulting anyone else. This sinister part of the revolutionary story is one that Leninist chroniclers always fall silent on. Again, I ask why is this?
The Bolsheviks did not do all this because of ‘difficult objective conditions’. They did it because Marxist ideology preached that the existence of separate parties competing in a democratic system did not make sense in a socialist society. Since Russia was on the path to socialism, it followed that there could be no need for competing parties, since class antagonisms were rapidly being eliminated. The workers only needed one party, the Bolshevik Party, and had only one, homogeneous class-interest, represented best by the wise thinkers and intellectuals who led the Bolshevik Party. The aim was always to impose one-party rule and stay in power at all costs, regardless of whether the masses continued to support the Bolsheviks or not. The soviets were always a means to an end, and nothing more. The same Trotskyists who wax lyrical about the soviets when they were useful to Lenin are quick to defend Bolshevik tyranny later on down the line by railing against the ‘fetishism’ of ‘formal democracy’. They will even slander the same workers that brought the Bolsheviks to power as being ‘corrupted’ by ‘reactionary’ and ‘petty-bourgeois’ influences for the crime of disagreeing with Lenin. The workers only play a progressive role when they happen to agree with Lenin and Trotsky.
The resulting demoralisation of the working-class made Stalinism inevitable. The Bolsheviks had already shown that they would do as they pleased regardless of what the workers thought. Trotsky could therefore hardly complain when, many years later, the workers failed to rally in favour of the Left Opposition, or oppose the tyranny of Stalin. By supporting Lenin every step of the way as soviet democracy was destroyed, he forged, bit by bit, the ice-axe that slew him.