Introduction
Year One was the second book that was recommended to me by the IMT leadership when I confessed to having doubts about the organisation’s doctrine. It is a mendacious work of propaganda by one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century left, Victor Serge. Serge was the son of Russian revolutionary exiles who had taken refuge in Belgium, and as a young man he inherited his family’s politics, becoming a passionate anarchist and putting his fantastic skills as a prose stylist in the services of the anarchist movement in France, where he moved in 1909. His involvement in anarchist activity saw him imprisoned in 1913, and upon his release in 1917 he briefly went to Spain. Hearing of the events in the land of his ancestors, he decided to witness the Russian Revolution for himself, arriving in Petrograd months after the Bolshevik seizure of power, in January 1919. Disillusioned with anarchism, he threw in his lot with the Bolsheviks. Serge’s political journey reminds me of my own burgeoning interest in Marxism. Like Serge, I had a transition from elitist individualism to revolutionary socialism, transferring my elitism from the individual to the Leninist concept of the vanguard party. Serge became convinced that anarchism was useless from the point of view of political transformation, and convinced many of his fellow anarchists to support the Bolsheviks.
As the revolution ‘degenerated’, Serge joined the ranks of the Left Opposition, with Leon Trotsky as its figurehead. By 1928 he had been expelled, with the rest of the Left Opposition, from the Communist Party, and briefly imprisoned. Upon his release, he began working on Year One, which he completed in 1930. The book was banned in the USSR, but published abroad. In 1933 he was arrested and imprisoned again, accused of a conspiracy against Stalin. By 1936, an international campaign by sympathetic writers and artists in Europe pressured Stalin to release him. Eleven years of lonely exile for Serge began, during which he wrote and published more books. Despite his involvement with Trotsky’s movement, Trotsky was soon decrying him as a ‘petty-bourgeois intellectual’ for his criticisms of Bolshevism. Serge applied the critical thought that had weaned him off of anarchism to his Marxist faith. He never gave up his socialist convictions, but came to reject Trotsky’s assertion that Bolshevism was entirely innocent of the sins of Stalinism. The result was his ‘disfellowshipping’ by Trotsky, who slandered him to the rest of the Fourth International. Like Trotsky, Serge ended up emigrating to Mexico, where he would spend his final years until his premature death in 1947.
It is Serge’s criticisms of the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 that fuelled my questioning of Trotskyist dogma in the days and weeks leading up to my leaving the IMT. It is deeply ironic that the ‘Centre’ of the IMT chose to recommend to me a work Serge wrote when he was still in the full flushes of Bolshevist delusion, rather than his more critical, more insightful works from when he became a ‘renegade’. What I can say for Serge’s 1930 book is that Serge’s writing is magnificent, even if he is careless with historical accuracy and uncritically repeats the party line. I am grateful that he was able to see the light in the years that followed. Throughout the account, he contradicts himself, blatantly falsifies history, and makes some startlingly honest claims about the relationship between the ‘vanguard’ and the proletariat that show, in graphic form, just how elitist Bolshevism is at its heart.
Revolution and Civil War
The mendacity in Serge’s account begins on the very first pages, where Serge discusses the beginnings of Bolshevism. Serge falsely asserts on p.33 that the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks became definitive at the 1903 Congress. The consensus of historians is that only at the 1912 Prague Conference did the Bolsheviks formally split. (Lars Lih has suggested that the split didn’t actually become final until 1917.) Serge’s account of the 1905 revolution is also completely misleading. The Bolshevik Party is portrayed as always being in the vanguard of the class, with the most militant workers instinctively turning towards it for leadership. In fact the Bolsheviks played a mediocre role in the affair and the Mensheviks dominated the soviets.
Serge claims that the Bolsheviks had been marching towards power ever since they first became a party! (p.55) This sounds like the Stalinist ‘triumphal march of soviet power’ hagiography of pre-1917 Bolshevism. The Bolshevik Party never made mistakes apparently. It always took the ‘correct’ position all the time and its victory was supposedly inevitable. Serge’s description of the role of the party as the ‘brain’ of the class (pp.59-60) is interesting. His argument is that the leaders, by virtue of their years of training and education, are better-equipped than the rank-and-file to see the class struggle in its entirety and make the correct call at every stage, whereas the masses can only appreciate their local struggles. This is not an original thought, it is borrowed from Lenin’s What is to be Done? It is also flat-out wrong, and was proven so by the spontaneous upsurge of the masses in both 1905 and 1917, which caught the Bolshevik leadership off-guard and which they tried in vain to hold back and even suppress until Lenin corrected their (and his) errors. Serge makes the sensational claim that the party suffered no ‘bureaucratic deformation’ at this time despite the ‘efficiency of its organisational apparatus’. Both of these are false claims. The ‘committee-men’ constituted a bureaucratic deformation which constantly acted as a break on the movement. Moreover, the party bureaucracy was anything but efficient and was ignored by the influx of new members that joined the party in 1917.
Discussing the events of 1917, leading up to the October insurrection, Serge speaks of the incredible initiative shown by the workers who began to arm themselves (p.62). The Red Guards were given rotas, paid for their time on duty, tried by their colleagues for infractions of discipline, etc. This seems to contradict Serge’s earlier suggestions that the workers were hopeless without the vanguard. Serge repeats Trotsky’s infamous dictum, ‘My party right or wrong.’ (pp.98-99) ‘There is no greater revolutionary wisdom than this.’, he says. Utter nonsense, and an example of the extent to which Serge had been brainwashed by Bolshevik propaganda. A good thing he shook this off in later years.
Throughout these initial pages, Serge criticises the ‘leniency’ of the Bolsheviks in these early months, citing examples of future leaders of the counter-revolution being released by the inexperienced and undisciplined Bolshevik troops. ‘Foolish clemency!’ he proclaims. (pp.75-77) I am not sure that those inhabitants of St. Petersburg that endured rape, theft and mindless drunkenness on the part of the Bolshevik troops rampaging through the city would agree with this estimation of Bolshevik ‘leniency’. Ted Grant and Alan Woods, in their book Russia: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution, repeat Serge’s claims about ‘Bolshevik leniency’, which they blame for the eventual civil war, which was ‘forced upon’ the peace-loving Bolshevik regime, and quote the relevant pages of Serge’s book. This of course is nonsense. All the evidence suggests that Lenin knew that revolution meant civil war, and actively encouraged it! Here is what Orlando Figes, in his book, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (London: Pimlico, 1997), says about it:
Trotsky himself told the meeting on 4 June: ‘Our Party is for civil war! Civil war has to be waged for grain. We the Soviets are going into battle!’ At this point a delegate had shouted: ‘Long live civil war!’ No doubt he had meant it as a joke. But Trotsky turned on him and replied with deadly seriousness: ‘Yes, long live civil war! Civil war for the sake of the children, the elderly, the workers and the Red Army, civil war in the name of direct and ruthless struggle against counter-revolution.’
For Lenin and most of his followers, civil war was a vital phase in any social revolution. ‘Civil war is the same as class war,’ declared one of the Bolshevik leaders in Baku. ‘We are supporters of civil war, not because we thirst for blood, but because without a struggle the oppressors will not give up their privileges to the people.’ As the Bolsheviks saw it, a civil war was no more than a violent form of class struggle. There was no real distinction in their view between the military conflict and the social conflict in every town and village.
As such, in Lenin’s view, the civil war was to be welcomed as a necessary phase of the revolution. He had always argued that the civil war had been started by the forces of the Right during the summer of 1917, and that the Bolshevik seizure of power should be seen as the joining of the armed struggle by the proletarian side; the class conflicts of the revolution were unresolvable by political means. Russia was split into two hostile camps – the ‘military dictatorship’ and the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ – and it was a question of which side would prevail. All Lenin’s policies, from the closure of the Constituent Assembly and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, could be seen (and were seen by the opposition) as a deliberate incitement to civil war. Lenin himself was doubtless convinced that his party’s best hope of building up its own tiny power base was to fight a civil war. Indeed, he often stressed that the reason why the Paris Commune had been defeated was that it had failed to launch a civil war. The effects of such a conflict were predictable – the polarization of the country into ‘revolutionary’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ forces, the extension of the state’s military and political power, and the use of terror to suppress dissent – and were all deemed by Lenin to be necessary for the consolidation of the dictatorship. Of course Lenin could not have foreseen the full extent of the civil war that would unfold from the following autumn – in April 1918 he had even declared that the civil war was already won – and, if he had, he might have thought again about using civil war to build up his regime. But even so, it is surely true that the Bolsheviks were psychologically prepared for a civil war in a way that could not be said of their opponents. One might compare it to the Spanish civil war: Franco’s side was ready – and eager – for a civil war; the same could hardly be said of the Republicans.-pp.615-616
Serge provides us with yet more evidence that, for all its flaws, the Bolshevik Party was far more democratic than today’s ‘Bolshevik’ sects. He cites the debate over making peace with the Germans in the winter and spring of 1918. On that occasion, Lenin publicly argued for peace with the Germans in several articles in Pravda. An article was published on 21st February, another the following day, another on 23rd February and finally one on 25th February. (pp.167-168) Even in the midst of this hardship the Bolsheviks debated out their differences before the entire working-class. Serge describes the disciplined way in which the Bolsheviks carried out political discussion, without ‘gossip nor intrigue nor personalities’, ‘without trying to wound or discredit the comrades on the opposing side’. Lenin does not boast when he triumphs in votes, he is tolerant and conciliatory. The Bolshevik Party is a collective leadership. If Lenin had been more authoritarian or his opponents less disciplined, the party would have split, either through some comrades leaving voluntarily or being expelled. How unlike Trotskyist organisations today! (pp.173-174)
Serge describes with disgust the actions of the Georgian Mensheviks. He recounts that the Baku Soviet voted to call in British troops on 25th July 1918. Hundreds of British troops landed in Georgia, helping to kill and persecute Bolshevik militants. The Turks and Tartars invaded Baku and massacred Bolsheviks and other undesirables whilst the Georgian Mensheviks looked on. (pp.194-195) We are supposed to be appalled that these evil Mensheviks would ally with foreign reactionary powers to overthrow Soviet power. Of course, it was ok for Lenin to make deals with imperialist powers like Germany.
War Communism
Serge defends the disastrous policies of war communism. He defends the abolition of free trade in grain on the grounds that it would have led to the enrichment of the peasantry whilst the towns starved. (pp.211-212) Yet all the abolition of free trade in grain did was to encourage illegal trade which made the problem of speculation even worse. He repeats his false claims about how free trade in grain would have been a disaster on p.238. Yet most of the supplies to the towns were sourced from the black market! Serge notes that illegal trade took place openly in the town squares where markets were held, whilst thousands left the towns to seek grain. Meanwhile the wealthy were able to acquire money via the black market and leave the country. (p.285) Figes confirms this is in his book, with stories of the Cheka shutting down open-air markets, only for them to reopen moments later. Serge notes that the price of illegal grain went up sevenfold throughout 1918. (p.353) If only Serge had drawn the logical conclusion – that banning free trade in grain was a stupid idea. Serge notes that conditions of life in the countryside were better than in the towns and that agriculture showed an impressive resilience compared to industry. 80 per cent of production was now from agriculture. This supports the view that Russia’s ‘backwardness’ actually saved it during the civil war and helped shore up Bolshevik rule. A more advanced, industrial country, precisely because it was more developed economically, may well have suffered even more. (p.354) Serge notes that the famine was less acute in Ukraine as the rural areas became self-sufficient. (p.368) Some of the fiercest fighting was in Ukraine, and Ukraine’s agriculture had been one of the most advanced in the entire empire. The extent to which Ukraine’s towns and cities were subjected to ruin is the degree to which agriculture had to decouple itself and made efforts to stand on its own two feet. ‘Backwardness’ helping yet again?
Serge defends the grain monopoly and the suppression of free trade in grain even as he admits that it was a failure. His own figures show that two-thirds of the cities’ sources of food were found in the illegal market! The Bolshevik government found itself making some concessions to private trade and had to allow people to go to the countryside to get food. In February 1919 the Communist Party’s Seventh Congress was forced to acknowledge the failure of collectivisation and that small peasant production would continue for a long time and should be supported and restored. The Sixth Congress had wound up the Committees of Poor Peasants. (p.357) Serge confesses that war communism is a misnomer and that it was not a temporary measure to cope with the war but a means of building socialism. The war simply forced them to speed up measures already being planned. Serge makes the ridiculous claim that with the trade unions assuming greater control over production, the workers were now enjoying direct control over production. In fact the trade unions by this point were Communist Party organs with little autonomy. Serge argues that the rapid recovery of the economy after the war proves that war communism was not to blame for economic breakdown, yet the recovery came after the abandoning of the most egregious aspects of war communism, so he is being disingenuous. (pp.359-361)
Bolshevik Authoritarianism
Serge’s disingenuous apologia for Bolshevik tyranny applies to politics as well as economics. Serge furiously denies that the Soviet state was a dictatorship. He writes that it was ‘not the dictatorship of a party, or of a central committee, or of certain individuals.’ (p.244-245) He protests too much. Unfortunately it clearly was a dictatorship of a party. He blindly defends Trotsky’s idiotic order to the Czech Legion of May 1918 that set off the legionnaires’ revolt. (p.247) This lost the Bolsheviks a swathe of territory that cost more time and blood and treasure to recapture. In response to accusations of Bonapartism, Serge quotes Trotsky’s riposte that ‘they might have remembered that in the era of large-scale mechanised industry, of finance-capital and the proletariat, Bonapartism can no longer assume such crude forms as it did at the end of the eighteenth century.’ He uncritically repeats these words as Stalin was massacring millions, and even as he himself was threatened with death for being an active Trotskyist living in the Soviet Union. He also disgracefully defends the show-trial of Admiral Schastny, whom Trotsky had shot on trumped-up charges. (p.249) It is a credit to Serge that he later repudiated this obviously false position, and became one of the loudest voices condemning Stalin’s totalitarian regime.
There is no word from Serge of the rigging of the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets (pp.260-261), despite his discussion of its explosive proceedings, which saw the Left-SRs denounce the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Alexander Rabinowitch has shown, in his own work, that the election results were manipulated in order to bring about a Bolshevik majority. Martov and the Left SRs bitterly criticised the Committees of Poor Peasants, rightly pointing out that it was foolish to distinguish between the poor and middle peasantry and that the middle peasantry were the most reliable allies of the socialist revolution. Serge uncritically defends Lenin’s poor sociological assumptions about the countryside (which the Bolsheviks were largely ignorant of), all in the name of an imaginary ‘rural proletariat’ fighting equally imaginary ‘kulaks’. Serge also notes that the peasantry has by now become largely hostile to the Bolsheviks. (pp.263-264) Serge confesses that by this point the soviets had ceased to be democratic and were now a communist rubber-stamp, yet just a few pages ago he denied the existence of a dictatorship! (p.266)
Serge summarises the new constitution pushed through by the Bolshevik Congress. It stipulates that congresses will be held at least twice a year, whilst in between these times the Soviet Executive will govern with Sovnarkom. It does not take a genius to realise that this is hardly democratic. Serge provides no evidence of any consternation at this on the part of the leadership. (pp.272-273) Serge asserts that the constitution was democratic on paper (it was not even that) but that it could not be implemented due to the difficult objective conditions. (p.274)
Serge makes the interesting claim that the working-class is more dependent than the bourgeoisie on individual leaders. (pp.287-288) Surely this should not be the case? If a genuine socialist revolution is to be made, surely it should be made by a collective leadership, with the whole of the working-class being directly involved? Clearly, if what Serge is saying is correct, the argument that socialism is more democratic than capitalism cannot be maintained. He uncritically repeats Latsis’ nauseating paeans to collective punishment, which Lenin himself denounced as nonsense. (p.308) Serge also quotes one of the Cheka’s officials who was concerned about excessive terror. (p.309) Yet he somehow fails to take this to its logical conclusion.
Serge discusses that ‘singularly lifeless congress’ that was the Sixth Congress of Soviets of November 1918, another congress that had been shamefully rigged. (p.339) Remember, just a few pages before, he was insisting that the new regime was not a dictatorship. Shortly after condemning the ‘reactionary’ middle peasants of the Ukraine he confesses that the Reds were only able to seize Ukraine back from the nationalists by rallying the middle peasants to their side. (pp.342-343) Serge notes the levelling among the peasantry (suggesting that talk of imaginary kulaks was nonsense) and that agriculture became less commercial as peasants began producing solely for themselves. Any surplus was sold on the illegal market where it fetched four times the price. (p.355)
The German Revolution of 1918 could have prevailed, says Serge, if only there had been a Bolshevik-style party. (p.345) What he really means to say is that the German Revolution did not have a Lenin. Serge recounts the hesitation of the central committee of the Spartacists, which proved fatal to the revolution. He compares it unfavourably to the disciplined way in which the Bolsheviks tried to hold back the mass movement. Yet on the same page he contradicts himself by noting that the leaders of the Spartacists, just like the leaders of the Bolshevik Party in Russia, found themselves lagging behind the masses and failing to prepare for an insurrection when they had the chance. (p.347) The Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 came only after many months of wrangling and indecision, including the aborted uprising of the July Days. Even now, historians cannot agree whether the Bolsheviks seriously sought to seize power in July, or sought to hold the masses back from a premature uprising. It seems even Lenin was unclear about what to do. Just thirteen years after October, the Bolsheviks, Serge included, were rewriting history.
Serge confesses that the German workers were paralysed by the traditions of Social-Democratic discipline and unable to break with their leaders to bring about a revolution. He therefore confesses that a centralised, disciplined revolutionary party is not in fact a guarantee of the victory of a revolution, but is usually the opposite. (p.348)
Serge confesses that careerists entered into the party. He claims that workers were influenced by Menshevik agitators to strike, but they were cowed by the threat of the White generals into supporting the Bolsheviks. (In fact, as a paper by Vladimir Brovkin shows, the Mensheviks often discouraged strike action.) It is truly ironic that when I was in the IMT, we would always dismiss the idea that strikes were caused by ‘outside agitators’ as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘idealist’. This reactionary idea dismissed the experiences of the workers, who, through their own confrontation with their exploitative bosses, developed class consciousness and a desire to strike. Yet when workers strike against the Bolshevik regime, this ‘bourgeois’ argument is repurposed and the strike proclaimed the work of outside disruptives. By saying that the threat of the Whites is what pushed the workers to support the Bolsheviks, Serge effectively admits that the workers supported the Bolsheviks for negative rather than positive reasons. Serge describes the party as ‘a brain’ and ‘nervous system’ for the working-class, who apparently could not think for themselves. ‘It saw, it felt, it knew, it thought, it willed for and through the masses’. (pp.369-371) It is a truly Orwellian passage, and a very revealing one, demonstrating Serge’s deep-seated contempt for the working-class, who are apparently incapable of attaining socialism by their own efforts. Only now does he admit that it was the party, not the workers themselves, that were running the show. Serge argues that the Communist Party had to impose authoritarian centralisation to protect itself from the careerists that had entered its ranks and had not been ‘trained’ in Marxism. (p.370) Ironically the party had only come to power by throwing open its ranks to the ‘untrained’ masses who had not read a word of Marx, who proved more militant than the hardened cadres leading the organisation.
Conclusion
Serge’s book is a great work of propaganda. As a credible historical account, it does not need to be taken seriously. Why ‘the Centre’ of the IMT thought I would be impressionable enough to fall for all the nonsense contained in this text, I do not know. It shows what little respect they have for their ‘cadres’. Anyone who is unconvinced by my review can read Serge’s book for themselves, and see all the moments where he contradicts what he wrote a few pages before, or makes assertions which are refuted by the available evidence. It is clear from this work that he was still strongly influenced by the elitist individualism of his anarchist days, which he then transferred to Leninism. It was precisely Lenin’s elitism that attracted him to the Bolshevik camp. He does a poor job of defending it in his ‘history’, but unwittingly exposes the true nature of Leninism. Later on, Serge would have doubts about what he had defended, and would be more vocal in his criticism of Bolshevism, unlike Trotsky, who insisted that Stalinism and Bolshevism could not be related to one another.