One of the many idiotic claims made by Trotskyists is that if only the revolution had spread to Germany, and the other ‘advanced’ countries of Europe, the USSR would not have been ‘isolated’ and it would have received aid from these countries that would have enabled it to avoid Stalinism. No detailed explanation was given of how this would work. It was one of the many dogmas which we took from Trotsky and repeatedly uncritically. I remember debating this point with one of the full-timers of Socialist Appeal, Ben Curry, just before I left the organisation. When I pointed out that Germany was too economically devastated to support ‘backward’ Russia after WWI, he replied, with complete conviction, ‘I’m sure they could have built back up, got a planned economy going…’. With what resources? With what workers, after the best and brightest of them had either fled, died or become part of the bureaucratic apparatus of state repression? We are supposed to believe that these countries, after having their own revolutions and (likely) civil wars, with all the death and destruction and economic devastation that this would entail, would have had enough means of production left over for the workers to inherit, and enough resources left to help the USSR. The idea that ‘Russian backwardness’ sabotaged the Soviet experiment is beloved of Trotskyists, and was a line Trotsky hammered consistently to his followers in exile. If only Germany, with all its industry and its educated working-class, had turned red, this would have brought all of Europe in line with the communist cause and enabled Russia to escape its backwardness, which led directly to the rise of Stalin. When I was a member of Socialist Appeal I actually spent time reading Rob Sewell’s book on the German Revolution, in which he hammers home this line. It is an uncritical repetition of Trotsky’s own arguments about the German Revolution, and contains no new information or meaningful insight.
The European labour movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries had a mystical reverence for Germany. It was the birthplace of Marx and Engels and the home of the most powerful labour movement in Europe, with the largest socialist party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), at its head. Its leaders, like Kautsky and Bebel, were household names within the global labour movement. Germany was the most industrialised country in Europe, and assumed to be the ripest for socialism. Marxist dogma held that the most developed nations, with the most developed working-class, would be the ideal starting-point for socialism, and would be the ones that led the revolution. As it happens, the first successful socialist revolution actually began in Russia, at capitalism’s ‘weakest link’, where the working-class had actually been able to seize power before any other country. Reality had, yet again, exposed the hollowness and the poverty of orthodox Marxist doctrine.
This reverence for Germany was based more on illusion than reality, as was demonstrated when the leaders of the SPD broke ranks with their comrades around the world and supported Germany in WWI. The other members of the Second International did likewise, leaving the Russian socialists almost alone in opposing the war. Lenin could not believe it when he first heard the news of the SPD’s betrayal, and assumed it was capitalist propaganda meant to spread disunity and confusion in the ranks of the International. When he heard the news, he turned furiously on his former heroes and mentors, denouncing them as traitors to the working-class. Instead of the workers of the world uniting as Marxist dogma argued they would, they chose their nation over class.
As we know, WWI ended with the collapse of Germany in the German Revolution of 1918, and the rising hope within Russia that they would be joined in their revolution by their European brothers. It was not to be. The revolution was bloodily ended within a year, culminating in the butchering of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919, and the solidifying of a moderate, Social Democratic government which abandoned Marxism in practice, and chose the path of liberal democracy – albeit a rather tenuous one, supported by far-right elements, on whom they had to lean to save themselves from German Bolshevism. (If only their Russian counterparts, the SRs and Mensheviks, had accepted the need to lean on the Kornilovs and Denikins in their country in order to crush Bolshevism before the October coup. Much of the twentieth century’s bloodshed could have been avoided.)
The insistence that only a German Revolution could have saved Russia from its backwardness, and thereby prevented Stalinism as well as Nazism, is utterly preposterous. Anyone who actually looks at what happened in Germany from 1918-1919 will see that it is just as well that the revolution failed, for if it had succeeded, the country may never have recovered. Moreover, it will also refute claims that Bolshevik despotism was entirely a product of ‘objective conditions’ of civil war and ‘Russian backwardness’, because the Marxist revolutionaries in Germany were just as tyrannical, bloodthirsty and violent as the Bolsheviks were in Russia, and were no more respectful of democracy. Nor does the claim that socialism was more feasible in a wealthier, more advanced country stand up to scrutiny when one looks at the mess that the socialist revolutionaries made of the economy. Let us use, as a case study, the one area in Germany where socialist revolutionaries were able to seize and hold onto power for a decent amount of time – the People’s State of Bavaria of Kurt Eisner, and its successor, the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
‘Unrest also spread in Munich, where the initially bloodless revolution of November 1918 radicalized in the spring of 1919. Over the previous months, Eisner had proved himself to be firmly committed to furthering revolutionary change but also unable to provide adequate food supplies and jobs. The Bavarian peasantry were withholding foodstuffs and the Allies had requisitioned most of the railway locomotives. Workers began to heckle Eisner and shout him down at meetings. In cabinet, Eisner was angrily told by one of its members: “You are an anarchist…You are no statesman, you are a fool…We are being ruled by bad management.”‘-Robert Gerwarth, November 1918: The German Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp.174-175
Socialist efficiency at work! To be fair, the Bavarian republic was dealing with some serious ‘objective conditions’, but then, so would any revolution. When Trotskyists talk about the glories of revolution, what do they expect it to be, a walk in the park? This is what revolution is – turmoil and disruption and chaos, invariably taking place in the middle of a warzone. This is the immediate aftermath of WWI we’re talking about. And yes, in fairness, Bavaria was one of the most conservative and rural parts of Germany, hardly ideal from a Marxist point of view due to the lack of industrial development. But Bavaria still had a modest industrial working-class, and anyway, Russia was an outlier in Europe for having a revolutionary peasantry which nominally supported the Bolsheviks (even though their favoured party was actually the Socialist Revolutionary Party) because they were promised they could keep their land. (They turned into ‘bourgeois saboteurs’ when the Communist regime in Russia started seizing their foodstuffs and forced them into collective farms.) Germany had had its bourgeois revolution, the peasantry were integrated into society and they had little interest in revolutionary socialism. (We claimed in the IMT that since the European peasantry has been non-existent since the end of WWII, the chances for socialism’s success are actually higher today. Complete bollocks, but we believed it.) And it’s not as if the Marxist revolutionaries in Germany were more successful outside of Bavaria. Bavaria was arguably their most successful experiment in revolution, and they still blew it. The more industrialised parts of Germany were not exactly more receptive to the far-left – the workers there remained, by and large, loyal SPD supporters and faithful to liberal democracy.
Remember, this is Germany, the most advanced country in Europe. Even the most backward part of Germany was surely more advanced than anywhere in Russia. And yet socialism enjoyed no more success there than it did anywhere else. Unlike in Russia, the socialists could not even claim majority support:
‘Although a firm believer in radical reform, Eisner was not opposed to the principles of democracy and called for general elections for the Bavarian parliament on 12 January 1919, during which the Independent Social Democrats suffered a crushing defeat, winning no more than 2.5 per cent of the popular vote, or 3 out of a total of 180 seats.’-Ibid., p.174
After Eisner’s assassination on 21st February, chaos gripped Munich. The far-left refused to accept the legitimacy of the new coalition government formed after Eisner’s death, despite its democratic mandate. They overthrew the government and imposed a reign of terror, with the support of the radicalised soldiery. Gerwarth provides the gory (and hilarious) details:
‘Under the leadership of a former schoolteacher, Ernst Niekisch, the Central Council of the Bavarian Republic announced that the elected government under Johannes Hoffmann had come to an end and instead proclaimed the state a soviet republic. From the start, however, the Munich Soviet Republic could build on little support in the largely agrarian, conservative, and Catholic state of Bavaria…Their revolutionary agenda was as ambitious as it was unrealistic: it could only have been imposed in a far more dislocated and broken state than Bavaria. Banks and large industrial concerns were to be nationalized; “free money” would be issued to abolish capitalism; universities were to be run by the students and professors stripped of their titles. The press was to be subjected to censorship by Landauer’s Office of Enlightenment and Public Instruction. The subject of history was abolished at Munich University as it was deemed hostile to civilization. Franz Lipp, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, telegraphed to Moscow to complain that the “fugitive Hoffmann has taken with him the keys to my ministry toilet”, and declared war on the neighbouring state of Wurttemberg and on Switzerland because “these dogs have not at once loaned me sixty locomotives. I am certain”, he added, “that we will be victorious.”-Ibid., pp.176-177
If a bunch of bohemian left-wing intellectuals high on weed were given control of a country, this is probably the sort of thing that would happen. Even the Bolsheviks didn’t go so far as to abolish history as an academic discipline. I have not found out what Lenin thought of the whole charade – indeed, it is unlikely he was paying much attention as the Bolsheviks had enough of their own problems to deal with – but no doubt even he would have balked at much of this nonsense, and considered it to be dangerous ultra-leftism. One is reminded of the sort of utopian lunacy engaged in by Bela Kun when he and his comrades seized power in Hungary around a month later – which was criticised staunchly by Lenin. Remember, we are told that the German left was so much more mature and the conditions so much better for socialism in that country. If only they had seized power, they would have done socialism right. Instead they managed to stuff the country’s government with people who were clinically insane (like Franz Lipp), run the economy into the ground, alienate everybody within weeks of seizing power, and declare war on their neighbours. What a great advertisement for Marxist revolution!
Hoffmann’s attempt to violently reinstate the legitimate Bavarian government had an immediate radicalizing effect. In Munich, the Bavarian Councils’ Republic moved significantly to the left, as Max Levien and Eugen Levine, two Russian-born revolutionary activists who had long toiled for radical political change, pushed the “coffee house anarchists” aside and took over the leadership of what became known as the Second Munich Soviet Republic.
‘Without waiting for the approval of the German Communist Party, they established a Bolshevik regime in Munich and opened communications with Lenin, who enquired whether they had managed to nationalize the banks yet. Levien…began arresting members of the aristocracy and the upper middle classes as hostages. While the main church in Munich was turned into a revolutionary temple presided over by the “Goddess Reason”, the communists set about expanding and training a Red Army, which soon numbered 20,000 well-armed and well-paid men. A series of proclamations announced that Bavaria was going to spearhead the Bolshevization of Europe; workers had to receive military training, and all weapons in private possession had to be surrendered on pain of death.’-Ibid., pp.179-180
It all came to a bloody end when government troops arrived in Munich to restore order in May 1919, restoring the rightful government and setting off a counter-revolution that would lay the basis for Nazism. This is a classic example of how the rise of communism in Germany created a far-right backlash that would lead directly to Hitler coming to power. Gerwarth talks extensively in the book about how Bavaria went from being a region that was vaguely sympathetic to moderate liberal democracy to a haven of far-right nationalism overnight, as a result of the far-left hijacking of the Bavarian government that scandalised and traumatised this conservative state for years to come.
We always argued in the sect that if only the revolution had been successful in Germany, Nazism could have been avoided. This ignores the fact that German communism fed into the rise of Nazism and the far-right. Even if, by some miracle, the communists had seized power in Germany, how long would any such regime have lasted, especially in a country with the regional variation that Germany has? In which Bavarians, Prussians and Rhinelanders all had different identities and different aspirations? In which the spirit of right-wing nationalism was still strong, in which the officer corps remained stubbornly reactionary, in which the educated classes remained bitterly hostile to revolutionary socialism? Which would have had to deal with an international trade blockade? If there had been a communist seizure of power, the result would have been a bloody civil war, like the one that occurred in Russia from 1917-1921. There was already low-level civil war in parts of Germany for some time after 1918. As late as 1923, parts of Germany, encouraged by communist agitation, were defying the authority of the Weimar government. Imagine a full-blown civil war, and the death and destruction that would have resulted. There would almost certainly have been Allied intervention to overthrow any communist regime, with the result being a reactionary German government, imposed by foreigners and reactionary Germans, upon the country. There would have been an exodus of the best and brightest members of the population, assuming they were not all executed in a Red Terror. The economy would have been left in shambles. Even if a communist regime had somehow held on, against all the odds, how would such a ruined, starving nation, isolated from the rest of Europe, been of any assistance whatsoever to communist Russia? If anything, the Russian Communists would have had to help their brethren in Germany, not the other way round.
Maybe, had the USSR succeeded in its invasion of Poland in 1920, it would have been able to help the German Communists. This was one of the hopes behind the invasion, and Stalin was one of its cheerleaders. But the Red Army was still very raw and untested, and was still recovering from having won a bloody civil war, a pyrrhic victory for the Bolsheviks that saw them win control over the broken, shattered remnants of one-sixth of the earth’s surface. It would take them years to recover, even with all the resources they had at their disposal. Things would have been no different for Germany. Even if the Red Army had made it across Poland and invaded Germany, it would have been resisted by the patriotic German population and by Allied troops, and would have had to deal with insurrection by angry Polish peasants in its rear. The rudimentary supply-lines of this ramshackle army would not have handled this well. Supply line issues were in fact a central reason why the invasion of Poland did ultimately fail. The idea that the exhausted Red Army would have held up against more experienced British and French commanders, in territory that it was utterly unfamiliar with, is utterly laughable.
The ‘objective conditions’ which are supposedly responsible for the degeneration of the USSR and the rise of Stalinism also existed in Germany. Germany, too, faced imperialist isolation, economic collapse, a reactionary peasantry etc. Using Leninist logic, we would expect that a communist regime in Germany would have been just as murderous and authoritarian as the Bolsheviks were in Russia. This is confirmed by the barbarous example of the Bavarian Socialist Republic, and all the atrocities and hooliganisms to which it subjected its innocent people. Here is a wonderful extract from An Anarchist FAQ which sets the record straight:
Now, if economic collapse was responsible for Bolshevik authoritarianism and the subsequent failure of the revolution, it seems hard to understand why an expansion of the revolution into similarly crisis ridden countries would have had a major impact in the development of the revolution. Since most Leninists agree that a successful German Revolution would have made the difference, we will discuss this in more detail before going onto other revolutions and revolutionary situations.
By 1918, Germany was in a bad state. Victor Serge noted “the famine and economic collapse which caused the final ruin of the Central Powers.” [Op. Cit., p. 361] The semi-blockade of Germany during the war badly effected the economy, the “dynamic growth” of which before the war “had been largely dependent on the country’s involvement in the world market”. The war “proved catastrophic to those who had depended on the world market and had been involved in the production of consumer goods . . . Slowly but surely the country slithered into austerity and ultimately economic collapse” and “overall food production declined further after poor harvests in 1916 and 1917. Thus grain production, already well below its prewar levels, slumped from 21.8 million to 14.9 million tons in those two years.” [V. R. Berghahn, Modern Germany, p. 47, pp. 47-8, p. 50]
The parallels with pre-revolution Russia are striking and it is hardly surprising that revolution did break out in Germany in November 1918. Workers’ councils sprang up all across the country, inspired in part by the example of the Russian soviets (and what people thought was going on in Russia under the Bolsheviks). A Social-Democratic government was founded, which used the Free Corps (right-wing volunteer troops) to crush the revolution from January 1919 onwards. This meant that Germany in 1919 was marked by extensive civil war and in January 1920 a state of siege was re-introduced across half the country.
This social turmoil was matched by economic turmoil. As in Russia, Germany faced massive economic problems, problems which the revolution inherited. Taking 1928 as the base year, the index of industrial production in Germany was slightly lower in 1913, namely 98 in 1913 to 100 in 1928 and so Germany effectively lost 15 years of economic activity. In 1917, the index was 63 and by 1918 (the year of the revolution), it was 61 (i.e. industrial production had dropped by nearly 40%). In 1919, it fell again to 37, rising to 54 in 1920 and 65 in 1921. Thus, in 1919, the “industrial production reached an all-time low” and it “took until the late 1920s for [food] production to recover its 1912 level . . . In 1921 grain production was still . . . some 30 per cent below the 1912 figure.” Coal production was 69.1% of its 1913 level in 1920, falling to 32.8% in 1923. Iron production was 33.1% in 1920 and 25.6% in 1923. Steel production likewise fell to 48.5% in 1920 and fell again to 36% in 1923. [V. R. Berghahn, Op. Cit., p. 258, pp. 67-8, p. 71 and p. 259]
Significantly, one of the first acts of the Bolshevik government towards the new German Social-Democratic government was “the offer by the Soviet authorities of two trainloads of grain for the hungry German population. It was a symbolical gesture and, in view of desperate shortages in Russia itself, a generous one.” The offer, perhaps unsurprisingly, was rejected in favour of grain from America. [E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 3, p. 106]
The similarities between Germany and Russia are clear. As noted above, in Russia, the index for large scale industry fell to 77 in 1917 from 100 in 1913, falling again to 35 in 1918, 26 in 1919 and 18 in 1920. [Tony Cliff, Lenin, vol. 3, p. 86] In other words, a fall of 23% between 1913 and 1917, 54.5% between 1917 and 1918, 25.7% in 1918 and 30.8% in 1919. A similar process occurred in Germany, where the fall in production was 37.7% between 1913 and 1917, 8.2% between 1917 and 1918 and 33.9% between 1918 and 1919 (the year of revolution). While production did rise in 1920 by 45.9%, it was still around 45% less than before the war.
Thus, comparing the two countries we discover a similar picture of economic collapse. In the year the revolution started, production had fallen by 23% in Russia (from 1913 to 1917) and by 43% in Germany (from 1913 to 1918). Once revolution had effectively started, production fell even more. In Russia, it fell to 65% of its pre-war level in 1918, in Germany it fell to 62% of its pre-war level in 1919. Of course, in Germany revolution did not go as far as in Russia, and so production did rise somewhat in 1920 and afterwards. What is significant is that in 1923, production fell dramatically by 34% (from around 70% of its pre-war level to around 45% of that level). This economic collapse did not deter the Communists from trying to provoke a revolution in Germany that year, so suggesting that economic disruption played no role in their evaluation of the success of a revolution.
This economic chaos in Germany is never mentioned by Leninists when they discuss the “objective factors” facing the Russian Revolution. However, once these facts are taken into account, the superficiality of the typical Leninist explanation for the degeneration of the revolution becomes obvious. The very problems which, it is claimed, forced the Bolsheviks to act as they did were also rampant in Germany. If economic collapse made socialism impossible in Russia, it would surely have had the same effect in Germany? This means, given that the economic collapse in both 1918/19 and 1923 was as bad as that facing Russia in 1918 and that the Bolsheviks had started to undermine soviet and military democracy along with workers’ control by spring and summer of that year (see section 3), to blame Bolshevik actions on economic collapse would mean that any German revolution would have been subject to the same authoritarianism if the roots of Bolshevik authoritarianism were forced by economic events rather than a product of applying a specific political ideology via state power. Few Leninists draw this obvious conclusion from their own arguments although there is no reason for them not to.
I am reminded of an absurd analogy that Thomas, the secretary of my branch when I was a member of the organisation, gave for the USSR’s failure. ‘Imagine’, he said, ‘that a scientist is performing an experiment, but someone comes into his lab and smashes all his equipment.’ This was what happened to Russia when it faced ‘imperialist sabotage’ in the process of building socialism. That is why the revolution degenerated. This analogy is of course complete bullshit. In an actual scientific experiment the variables can be consciously controlled and anticipated, so as not to distort the eventual outcome. This is not possible when carrying out a political experiment, especially one as absolutist as the Communist experiment in Russia, involving a wide-ranging transformation of society and of man himself. There are all sorts of unpredictable events and outcomes that are involved that serve to push a political regime off its initial course, but how politicians and statesmen react to these events is always based on certain deeply-held ideas and prejudices, not simply a functional response to ‘objective conditions’. As Harold Macmillan said, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ This is the nature of politics. As Stephen Kotkin points out in his biography of Stalin:
‘A mass participatory revolutionary process not only can, but frequently does, culminate in a narrow regime, and not because the revolution has “degenerated”, or because good intentions and a good beginning are ruined by malefactors or unlucky circumstances, but because the international situation impinges at every turn, institutions are formed out of the shards of the old as well as the maw of the new, and ideas matter. Dictatorship can be seen by revolutionaries as criminal or as an invaluable tool; human beings can be seen as citizens or chattel, convertible foes or congenital enemies; private property can be seen as the cornerstone of freedom or of enslavement. A profound, genuine upsurge for social justice can depending on the overarching ideas and accompanying practices–institutionalize the gravest injustices. A successful revolution can be a tragedy. But tragedies can still be grand geopolitical projects. Russia’s revolution became inseparable from long-standing dilemmas and new visions of the country as a great power in the world. That, too, would bring out Stalin’s qualities.’-p.138
It is actually a blessing in disguise for the USSR that the German Revolution failed when it did. Germany and Russia were the two great losers of WWI, and both of them were shut out from the post-war order constructed at Weimar. A communist Germany would have isolated itself further from Europe, and, in its poverty and helplessness, been of little aid to Russia. Instead, a succession of moderate, liberal German governments learned to cooperate with the Allies, and ended up fixing the country’s economic problems and presiding over a period of recovery which ended with the Great Depression of 1929. This ended up being far more beneficial to the USSR, as during the interwar period, the two countries would enter into close relations. The Rapallo Treaty of 1922 saw the two sides agree to cooperate on military affairs, and was as close to an alliance as either of them got, a secret pact to undermine the post-Weimar settlement. Moreover, German capitalists gave generous financial support to the USSR. Stalin’s forced collectivisation project would not have been possible without German and American aid. Trotsky was right that the USSR could not exploit of its economic potential in isolation. However, he was wrong to assume that the spread of socialist revolution was necessary to unlock it. It was never necessary. The irony is that the USSR got more out of a capitalist Germany than it could have out of a communist one. If a communist regime had been temporarily established in Germany, only to give way to a reactionary dictatorship imposed by Allied troops in alliance with German counter-revolutionaries, the USSR would have been even more internationally isolated than it was. As it happens, when the USSR did succeed in turning the eastern half of Germany communist after WWII, and stripping it of much of its industry as war reparations, there is little evidence this made much difference to the Soviet economy.
The USSR’s ‘isolation’, as Stephen Kotkin and other historians have noted, was entirely self-inflicted. Lenin, and later Stalin, deliberately sabotaged any attempt at normalising relations with the West. Halfway through the civil war, the Allies gave up on trying to overthrow the Communist government, and sought to repair relations, thinking they could get more benefit from a friendly Russia which was reintegrated into the global diplomatic system than a hostile one. The will and the resources did not exist to try to invade and overthrow the Bolshevik regime. We overlooked this in all of our propaganda about ‘imperialist isolation’ preventing the Soviet experiment from succeeding. The USSR could have been even more successful if it had been more willing to work with the hated bourgeois governments of the West. If the path of cooperation had been chosen over confrontation, who knows – the USSR might still exist as a model of an alternative to liberal-democratic capitalism which can also be at peace with its neighbours. If there is anything we have learned from history, it is that hidebound dictatorships at war with the world never become flourishing societies. We should ask why it is that every communist regime chooses to back itself into this corner, instead of putting Marxist dogma aside.
If it had not been for the disastrous October coup of 1917 that saw the Bolsheviks establish brutal communist dictatorship over Russia, the communists of other countries would not have been so inspired to try and emulate this, and the horrors of Nazism and fascism (which emerged as a backlash against communism) could have been avoided. A communist Germany was never a realistic prospect, and even if there had been a communist seizure of power, the USSR would have derived no benefit from it whatsoever. It is never explained how, even if this seizure of power had happened, the internal politics of the USSR would have changed in Trotsky’s favour. The fact is that the USSR was one-sixth of the earth’s surface, and that all of the resources of the West combined would not have made it any easier to industrialise every square mile of its countryside, or to collectivise its peasantry, without using brutal, murderous force, of the kind that only Stalin was willing to use. The problem was more political than economic. The USSR had ample resources in its own right, but lacked the means to turn this economic potential into something like socialism. Stalin improvised the means, turning the methods of grain acquisition pioneered by his commissars in the Urals as a means of wholesale economic transformation of the entire surface of the USSR. This was always going to require force. To quote Margaret Thatcher, there was no alternative. Either Stalinism, or the restoration of capitalism. Even those Communists who deeply despised Stalin could not (at least openly) stomach the latter, so they reluctantly chose Stalinism. No doubt many in the party secretly hoped he would fail and their doubts be vindicated. Unfortunately for history, he didn’t. Millions died as a result.
One thing is for sure – a successful German Revolution would, at best, have made no difference to the power dynamics within the USSR or the ruling Communist Party. At worst, it might even have strengthened Stalin’s hand, since he could claim credit for any communist success abroad, and any regime would likely have been a puppet of its ‘big brother’, Russia. Just as East Germany after WWII was modelled on Stalin’s Russia, so a Communist Germany of the 1920s would have modelled itself on the increasingly Stalinist regime then in power in Russia. Of course, more ominously, it could be that any new communist regime would have become a rival of Russia’s, spelling disaster for the cause of world socialism and creating massive disunity within the revolutionary camp. If the the bitter rivalries between the different communist regimes of the twentieth century is anything to go by, this would not have been a surprising outcome, and is another reason to seriously doubt that a successful German Revolution would have made any difference to the USSR’s fortunes or prevented the rise of Stalin. This, too, may well have strengthened Stalin’s hand, since he could simply play upon Russian nationalism in his war with his communist rivals, just as he had done so internally against Trotsky with his thesis of ‘Socialism in One Country’. The degeneration of the Russian Revolution may well have accelerated, and spread to other Communist Parties even more quickly than it did. Trotsky himself was to blame for his political failures, and to blame it on ‘Russian backwardness’, or incompetent German communists failing to seize power, will simply not wash.
The ‘missed opportunity’ of 1923
An enduring Trotskyist myth about the German Revolution is that October 1923 represented a ‘missed opportunity’ on the part of the German Communist Party to seize power. Trotsky’s ‘Lessons of October’, written in 1924, was a reflection on the Russian Revolution which drew parallels between it and the German situation. Trotsky recalled that in 1917, Zinoviev and Kamenev had opposed Lenin’s call to overthrow the Provisional Government, and that likewise, in 1923, their dithering had caused the German Communist Party to miss an opportunity to seize power. That year, massive hyperinflation had led to massive disenchantment with the German government. Germany had had to suspend its reparations payments to France, causing French troops to invade and occupy the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. The workers in the area formed armed brigades to resist these incursions. The country was in turmoil. It seemed as if there would be another revolution, even civil war.
At this crucial moment, Brandler, the leader of the German Communists, had a meeting in Moscow with the other Comintern leaders, including Trotsky, who egged him on to take the chance to seize power. Brandler returned to Germany and arranged for a meeting of the trade unions, hoping to persuade them to join the Communist Party (KPD) in seizing power. However, the trade unions remained loyal to the SPD, and refused to join forces with the discredited Communists. Convinced that he did not have enough support, Brandler and his colleagues called off the planned uprising, but miscommunication meant that at least some cells of KPD militants rose up in Hamburg. The uprising was brutally crushed. At the time, Trotsky and other Comintern leaders accepted the position that it had been a premature attempt at power. Months later, in ‘Lessons of October’, Trotsky changed his tune, alleging a ‘missed opportunity’ that was bungled thanks to the incompetence of Brandler, and the failure of leadership on the part of Zinoviev, technically in charge of the Comintern. This was all part of the jostling for position after Lenin’s death in January 1924. Trotsky sought to discredit both Zinoviev and Kamenev, leading members of the triumvirate set up to run the USSR after Lenin’s death (the other member being Stalin), and elevate himself to the position of Lenin’s ‘chosen heir’. After all, had Trotsky not taken up Lenin’s calls for revolution back in 1917 when his fellow Bolsheviks had refused to support him? Had Zinoviev and Kamenev not tried to sabotage the October coup by condemning it in the press days before the event? Had Lenin not condemned them as ‘deserters’? Trotsky linked all this to the role they played in the failed German uprising, and put their revolutionary credentials into question.
This was typically provocative and factually incorrect windbaggery and arrogance on Trotsky’s part. The fact is that there was no way the KPD could have seized power in 1923. The real missed opportunity was from 1918-1919. Even 1920, the year when the Kapp Putsch was foiled by the combined action of the still militant German working-class, was a much bigger missed opportunity than 1923. The disastrous March Action of 1921, in which the KPD tried to launch a premature insurrection, had so discredited the party that it had increasingly become the party of unemployed and lumpen elements rather than the organised working-class, which remained loyal to the SPD. The idea that with French troops inside the country, the time was optimal for a communist revolution, is complete and utter idiocy. With every year that passed, the chances of a communist revolution receded. Had Brandler not sensibly called off the insurrection (having always had his doubts), the KPD would have been crushed and almost certainly made illegal. Rather than admit he was wrong to pressure Brandler into a premature uprising, Trotsky chose to save his own skin by slandering Brandler, Zinoviev, Kamenev and by extension, almost all his party colleagues, since they too had doubted the wisdom of Lenin’s calls for insurrection back in 1917.
Trotsky was set upon with savage criticism from the rest of the party, with even Lenin’s wife Krupskaya joining in the condemnation. His chances of succeeding Lenin, which were much weaker than commonly believed in any case, were dead in the water as a result of his own foolish actions. Among the many poignant criticisms made was of his absurd claim that if only someone of the same stature as Lenin, or himself, had been in charge of the KPD, things would have gone differently. After all, had it not been the presence of Lenin that secured victory in 1917? Of course, Trotsky’s critics could point out that according to Marxism, it was not the individual that was of primary importance, but the objective conditions. The objective conditions were not right for revolution, and even a political genius of Lenin’s stature could not have saved the KPD from disaster. Trotsky thought that October 1923 could have been the German October Revolution, but it was closer to being the German July Days – except the aftermath would be several years of a Kerensky-type government, followed by a Kornilov-type government in the form of Hindenburg and then Hitler.
As vulgar as Marxism can be about these things, Trotsky’s critics were right in this case. Trotsky’s voluntaristic belief that a revolution is simply a matter of will and having the correct leadership is simply nonsense. Even if all the leaders of the Comintern parties had been as brilliant as Lenin, they would not have been able to seize power, because Russia in 1917 was an outlier. Even in that case, the Bolsheviks had seized power as a result of blind luck as much as good leadership. In any case, the Comintern was so structured that Lenin and his associates had removed anyone who was too independent-minded and too keen to challenge the Comintern’s authority, including Paul Levi, who bitterly complained of Comintern interference in the affairs of the German Communist Party. How could such a corrupt regime allow for a rival Lenin to appear in its midst? It is clear that, despite Trotsky’s claims to the contrary, the degeneration of the Comintern predates Lenin’s death.
Conclusion
Kautsky, in his scathing 1919 criticisms of the Bolshevik regime, argued against Lenin’s calls for the workers of the rest of Europe to imitate the Bolsheviks, pointing out that the death and destruction that would result from a Russia-style revolution would leave the workers divided among themselves and with nothing left worth inheriting to begin building socialism. Lenin dismissed this as mere prattling from a renegade who feared revolution. And yet the Russian Civil War, and the disasters this wrought upon the country, prove that Kautsky was right, and that Lenin was a vulgar and careless braggart and gambler who played with human life in his never-ending quest to bring about world revolution. Once upon a time, at the height of WWI, even Trotsky had rejected Lenin’s attitude on this issue, preferring the slogan of ‘peace without annexation or indemnities’, the position of the ‘centrists’ in the Second International, as opposed to Lenin’s ultra-left position of ‘turning the imperialist war into a civil war’. Kautsky’s criticisms are also borne out when we look at what happened in Germany. The German Revolution had a very similar pattern to the Russian one, and could have had a very similar outcome. We should be thankful it failed, but never forget that the murderous rampages of the German Communists terminally weakened the Weimar Republic, and laid the basis for Nazism. It is clear that not only was a Communist takeover of Germany always unlikely to succeed but even if it had succeeded, it would have not done anything to make the USSR’s existence easier, or prevent Stalinism. Moreover, any regime would likely have replicated the brutality and authoritarianism of the Russian one, as opposed to being less so. The absurd counterfactual from Trotskyists that if only the revolution had spread to Germany, things would have been different, is utterly ludicrous, and one of the many means they employ to get Trotsky off the hook for the ‘degeneration’ of the revolution and the horrors of Stalinism. It is also an example of rank hypocrisy. Trotsky rebutted all criticism of the Bolsheviks’ actions after 1917 by arguing that the ‘objective conditions’ constrained them such that they could not do otherwise than use repressive measures like War Communism to win the war. Stalinism could not be laid at his door or blamed on Bolshevik actions, but entirely on unfortunate circumstances that left Russia isolated and allowed Stalin to rise to power with the support of the ‘backward’ elements in Russian society – demoralised workers, wealthy peasants, former Tsarists, etc. Yet he believes that the German Communists, despite having to deal with arguably worse objective conditions, should have been able to seize power, and that this would have happened if only they had had wise men like Lenin and Trotsky at the helm. Moreover, he is convinced that somehow, German socialism would not have degenerated on the same lines as the Russian experiment did. If only this were true.
Lastly, I will leave you with some observations from the respected Sovietologist, Martin Malia, on this whole subject of ‘Russian backwardness’ being the cause of the USSR’s failure:
‘And the contribution of Russia to this drama? Her role was hardly to pervert the experiment, as a convenient scapegoat theory of history, would have it. Rather, Russia’s role was to provide to the experiment, with a social tabula rasa in the form of a civil society pulverized by modern war, thereby creating a void of countervailing power that permitted the Party to realize its fantasy. This contribution, however, was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Communist adventure. Russian chaos alone could have produced a national authoritarianism of purely regional significance; but it was ideological socialism that proved to be the sufficient condition for precipitating the world-historical Soviet tragedy. Nothing as lethal as the Leninist Oresteia could have occurred anywhere outside the House of Marx.’-Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p.504