There are a great many things that can be said about Lenin, but it would take up several posts. In this particular post, I will instead offer a couple of quotes that give us an insight into Lenin’s lack of ‘dialectical foresight’ – foresight which even people at the time had!
Before and after the Bolshevik Revolution, there were those who warned that Lenin’s intransigent attitude would lead to a bloody civil war. Lenin dismissed this as ‘fearmongering’, and was positively sanguine about the prospect of civil war. Here is what he said in September 1917:
No “rivers of blood” in an internal civil war can even approximately equal those seas of blood which the Russian imperialists have shed since June 19 (in spite of the very great chances they had of avoiding this by handing over power to the Soviets).
For Lenin, not only was the threat of civil war being used disingenuously by the enemies of the revolution, but if a civil war did happen, it would be no worse than the war that had just ended. If only Lenin had known just how destructive the resulting war would be. The Russian Civil War killed about 12 million people, both military and civilian. Russian losses in WWI were about 2-3 million, including military and civilian casualties. The Russian Civil War was objectively more destructive than the war that went on before it, not just in military terms but in terms of the damage done to Russia’s fragile economy – the reversal of industrialisation, the devastation of the countryside as a result of the hare-brained political programme known misleadingly as ‘War Communism’, and the decimation of the working-class, which made up the Bolsheviks’ own political base. The misery and mayhem caused by WWI was compounded by the brutal civil war which followed.
Lenin went on to say the following:
If there is an absolutely undisputed lesson of the revolution, one fully proved by facts, it is that only an alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, only an immediate transfer of all power to the Soviets would make civil war in Russia impossible, for a civil war begun by the bourgeoisie against such an alliance, against the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, is inconceivable; such a “war~~ would not last even until the first battle; the bourgeoisie, for the second time since the Kornilov revolt, would not be able to move even the Savage Division, or the former number of Cossack units against the Soviet Government!
The peaceful development of any revolution is, generally speaking, extremely rare and difficult, because revolution is the maximum exacerbation of the sharpest class contradictions; but in a peasant country, at a time when a union of the proletariat with the peasantry can give peace to people worn out by a most unjust and criminal war, when that union can give the peasantry all the land, in that country, at that exceptional moment in history, a peaceful development of the revolution is possible and probable if all power is transferred to the Soviets. The struggle of parties for power within the Soviets may proceed peacefully, if the Soviets are made fully democratic, and “petty thefts” and violations of democratic principles, such as giving the soldiers one representative to every five hundred, while the workers have one representative to every thousand voters, are eliminated. In a democratic republic such petty thefts will have to disappear.
Here, Lenin states that if the revolutionary parties united against the bourgeoisie, a civil war would be unthinkable. One might say this was wishful thinking, but there was logic to it. Of course, when the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, they did not actually do this. Instead, Lenin and Trotsky refused to join in a coalition with the Mensheviks and SRs, preferring to govern alone. Thus, having proposed an inter-socialist coalition to avoid civil war, Lenin went on to toss aside any notion of a coalition, encouraging the very civil war that he had complacently dismissed as a possibility. There would likely have been a civil war even if an inter-socialist coalition was created, but the Bolsheviks’ overweening arrogance did not help matters. The Left SRs were brought into coalition government with the Bolsheviks in January 1918, whilst the Russian Mensheviks under Martov refused to support the Whites and agreed to give critical support to the Red Army and the Bolshevik-SR administration against the counter-revolution. (This did not save the Mensheviks and Left-SRs from being liquidated later on.) As we all know, this temporary truce between the revolutionary factions did not prevent a formidable force of White reactionaries from coming into being throughout the territories of the former Russian Empire. Lenin was therefore guilty of utter naivety if he believed that a revolution would not lead to civil war. But he cannot have genuinely believed this, because in several places he equates revolution with civil war and even lauds it as glorious. So it is clear that when he dismissed the prospect of civil war, he was being disingenuous, downplaying the prospect of massive death and destruction so as to reassure his wavering comrades that revolution was well worth it. What he probably did not know in advance was just how destructive the civil war would be – he seems to have genuinely believed that it would be a breeze. This is in spite of the warnings he was given from fellow Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Left-SRs about the horrific risks he was running. It is also perfectly possible that even if he had known how destructive the civil war would be, he would have thought it a risk worth taking. After all, what is 12 million dead and the self-immolation of one eighth of the world’s surface compared to the prospect of liberating millions more from the clutches of capitalism? In other words, Lenin gambled with the lives of millions of people in the name of achieving utopia. Did he have the right to do this? Do we not have the right to condemn him for making such an absurd and evil calculation, when even his contemporaries could see how preposterous and delusional his ambitions were?
When I was a member of the IMT, we were indoctrinated to believe that the civil war was entirely the fault of the counter-revolution – that the Bolshevik seizure of power, peaceful as it initially was, could have seamlessly led to a socialist future if it had not been for those pesky Whites and imperialists ruining everything. This is utter naivety. As Lenin himself acknowledged elsewhere, revolution by definition involves a civil war, in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense. Lenin welcomed the prospect of civil war and celebrated it. Here is what he said on 11 January 1918, at the Third Congress of Soviets:
In answer to all reproaches and accusations of terror, dictatorship and civil war, we say: yes, we have openly proclaimed what no other government would ever proclaim: we are the first government in the world which openly speaks of civil war; yes, we started and continue to wage war against the exploiters.
Israel Getzler quotes Lenin a couple of years later continuing with this position:
We brought the Civil War upon ourselves: we have never concealed from the people that we were taking that risk.
So Trotskyists cannot argue that the Bolsheviks did not expect civil war, because this is precisely what Lenin and others did anticipate. The difference between Lenin and some of his more moderate colleagues, like Zinoviev and Kamenev, is that he positively embraced it, seeing it as the perfect opportunity to kill off all of the potential and actual counter-revolutionaries throughout the Russias. Any idiot knows that revolutions invariably lead to civil wars, that they lead to massive amounts of death and destruction and that the regime that takes over is usually more authoritarian than its predecessor. This was the case for the English Revolution of the 1640s (in which more people died as a proportion of the population than WWI), the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Lenin appears to have genuinely believed that all this frightful violence would lead to a freer, more democratic and more emancipated society. Instead it let to the imposition of a brutal totalitarian state, and he realised only at the last minute where the revolution was heading under Stalin and his crew.
Trotskyists are fond of blaming the ‘degeneration’ of the Russian Revolution on the difficult ‘objective conditions’ of civil war, economic and cultural backwardness, counter-revolution and imperialist encirclement. Yet every revolution is likely to see civil war, counter-revolution and imperialist encirclement – none of these things is unique to the Bolshevik experience or the specific conditions of Russia. The moronic idea that if the revolution had spread to the ‘advanced’ West, it would all have been different, deserves to be ridiculed. Karl Kautsky pointed this out in his criticisms of Bolshevism in Terrorism and Communism. Here is Lenin’s indignant response in September 1919:
To what absurd lengths he has gone can be seen from the following. There is no hope of a world revolution, Kautsky asserts—and what do you think he used as an argument? A revolution in Europe an the Russian pattern would mean “unleashing (Entfessellung) civil war throughout the world for a whole generation ”, and moreover not simply unleashing a veritable class war, but a “fratricidal war among the proletarians ”. The italicised words belong to Kautsky and are—admiringly of course—quoted by Stampfer.
Yes, Scheidemann’s scoundrels and hangmen have good reason to admire them! Here is a “socialist leader” scaring people with the spectre of revolution and scaring them away from revolution! But, curiously enough, there is one thing Kautsky overlooks; for nearly two years the all powerful Entente has been fighting against Russia and thereby stirring up revolution in the Entente countries. If the revolution were even to begin now, even if only in its compromising stage and in only one or two of the Entente Great Powers this would immediately put an end to the civil war in Russia, would immediately liberate hundreds of millions in the colonies, where resentment is at boiling-point and is kept in check only by the violence of the European powers.
Kautsky now obviously has another motive for his actions in addition to the foulness of his servile soul that he demonstrated throughout the imperialist war—he is afraid of protracted civil war in Russia. And fear prevents him from seeing that the bourgeoisie of the whole world is fighting Russia. A revolution in one or two of the European Great Powers would completely undermine the rule of the world bourgeoisie, destroy the very foundations of its domination and leave it no safe haven anywhere.
The two-year war of the world bourgeoisie against Russia’s revolutionary proletariat actually encourages revolutionaries everywhere, for it proves that victory on a world scale is very near and easy.
Of course, anyone can see that Kautsky is correct. If the Bolsheviks’ wishes had been granted, and the rest of Europe had also erupted in revolution (which some countries did during the inter-war period – Germany in 1918-1919, Hungary 1919, Spain in 1936), then they too would have seen brutal civil wars between the revolutionaries and the counter-revolutionaries on the model of Russia’s own. In the case of Spain, this did happen, and the results were not pretty. In that instance, the counter-revolution won, whilst the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 collapsed within months at the hands of counter-revolutionary imperialist forces. If the German Revolution had gone any further than it did, it too would have provoked civil war (and parts of Germany were in a de facto state of civil war throughout the inter-war period). This, too, would not have been won by the revolutionaries, but by a counter-revolutionary German army led by reactionary, aristocratic officers and backed up by the the Allies. This would have left Russia even more isolated than she was during the interwar period. Moreover, the death and destruction would have been such that, even if the revolutionaries had won, they would have been little or no help to ‘backward’ Russia. Consider the fact that Germany was hardest hit of all the belligerents in WWI in economic terms, and consider just how much worse its economic woes would have been if a bloody civil war had erupted within its borders. Nor will it do to look to the bourgeois revolutions of the past as a model, for there is a historiographical consensus French Revolution set France back economically, whilst the revolutionary regime that took power in England in 1649 presided over a sluggish economy, complete with an expensive standing army without which it was impossible to rule a discontented, royalist-sympathising population – something which also engendered massive debt not settled until the Restoration. Similarly, the Bolsheviks were only able to rule over a disaffected nation of peasants covering an eighth of the world’s surface with an expensive, expansive and extensive state apparatus composed of a sophisticated secret police, political commissars and the world’s largest army. How could it have been otherwise? The unique conditions within Russia simply accentuated trends which can be found in all revolutions.
Lenin makes the preposterous claim that the experience of the Russian Revolution and civil war, far from demonstrating the damage and senseless waste brought about by his destructive ideology, actually proves that victory on a ‘world-scale’ is ‘near and easy’. If the Russian Revolution proves that world socialist revolution is ‘near and easy’, I wonder what a revolution that proves the opposite would look like.
Trotskyists will try and argue, as Trotsky himself did, that if there had been a ‘revolutionary party’, modelled on the Bolsheviks, ready and waiting in the rest of Europe, they would have been able to lead the working-class just as Lenin and Trotsky did to a peaceful seizure of power. Besides being an unprovable counter-factual (not in itself worthless as an intellectual exercise), it ignores the fact that the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia largely due to luck – luck that their enemies were incompetent, luck that they had Lenin and Trotsky at their helm and not Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. None of the other European Marxists had a Lenin or a Trotsky at their helm. Their enemies were better-prepared, with leaders more wily and more competent than Kerensky. In Russia, the peasantry were overwhelmingly pro-revolution, but more ambivalent elsewhere, if not on the side of reaction. And the rest of Europe had an system of party politics more established than Russia’s, which meant a relatively strong liberal and social-democratic element existed where it was lacking in Russia, which had known only authoritarian rule. The very ‘objective conditions’ Trotskyists use to explain the failure of the Russian Revolution were what helped the Bolsheviks come to power in the first place – a paradox that it is well worth reflecting on. The idea that a Leninist party could have taken power anywhere without a period of extreme violence and civil war is, let’s face it, wishful thinking, especially when all of their best and most independent-minded leaders were purged by Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and other leading members of the Comintern, and replaced with yes-men like Fischer and Thälmann.
Trotskyists will no doubt argue that the quick recovery of Russia after the ravages of WWI and civil war prove the virtues of the planned economy. What they don’t mention is that Russia was already rapidly industrialising prior to WWI, and would have continued along that path but for the war and revolution. Indeed, German officers told the Kaiser that unless they fought Russia sooner rather than later, it would become too powerful to invade. Additionally, the NEP introduced by Lenin in 1921 was responsible for much of Russia’s post-war recovery, progress sabotaged by Stalin with his programme of forced collectivisation – which, for all its achievements, came at a terrible cost. Industrialisation was perfectly possible on a capitalist basis, but this was incompatible with Bolshevik ideology. The sheer amount of resources Russia had would have made it possible for Russia to industrialise regardless of whether the means of production were privately-owned or state-owned. Countries like South Korea, Japan, China, Brazil, Iran and India had no trouble industrialising on the basis of state-directed capitalist enterprise, and the USSR could have done something similar, instead of expropriating and murdering its most productive members. I leave it up to the reader to decide whether a USSR led by Bukharin would have been an improvement over what we actually got. Also, imagine how much more successful any industrialisation programme would have been had the 12 million people killed in the entirely unnecessary civil war (itself the result of an entirely unnecessary revolution) not been thrown away in Lenin’s ridiculous gamble. 12 million extra hands to work the fields and factories. 12 million extra people, some of whom could have been trained as engineers and technicians. What a difference they would have made.
Here is my own counterfactual, to counter the Trotskyists’ own counterfactuals. If there had been no revolution, there would have been no civil war. If there had been no civil war, there would have been no Bolshevik victory and the resulting totalitarian regime would not have emerged. According to this counter-factual, Russia would have somehow reformed itself (though still retaining an authoritarian government, as I think the emergence of liberal democracy was extremely unlikely) and some Peter the Great figure (likely a White general) would have emerged in place of a Lenin or a Stalin to preside over Russia’s industrialisation on capitalist lines, with generous foreign support since a non-Communist Russia would have been less isolated on the world stage. The idea that there was anything ‘necessary’ about Bolshevism in terms of Russia’s industrial and socio-economic development is an utter fantasy, taken seriously only by Marxist ignoramuses. Is my thesis unprovable? Yes. Is it defensible as a portrait of what would likely have been the case in an alternative set of circumstances? I think so.