Bolshevism: The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy

by John Spargo

Like Alexinsky, Lenine awaits the agrarian movement ... and hopes that a railway strike with the destruction of the lines of communication and the support of the peasantry may some day put the government of Russia into the people's hands. However, I was shocked to find that this important leader also, though he expects a full co-operation with the peasants on equal terms, during the Revolution, feels toward them a very deep distrust, thinking them to a large extent bigoted and blindly patriotic, and fearing that they may some day shoot down the working-men as the French peasants did during the Paris Commune.

The chief basis for this distrust is, of course, the prejudiced feeling that the peasants are not likely to become good Socialists. It is on this account that Lenine and all the Social Democratic leaders place their hopes on a future development of large agricultural estates in Russia and the increase of the landless agricultural working class, which alone they believe would prove truly Socialist.[80]

The Russian Social Democratic Labor party, to which Lenine belonged, and of which he was an influential leader, adopted in 1906 the following program with regard to land ownership:

1. Confiscation of Church, Monastery, Appanage, Cabinet,[81] and private estate lands, except small holdings, and turning them over, together with the state lands, to the great organs of local administration, which have been democratically elected. Land, however, which is necessary as a basis for future colonization, together with the forests and bodies of water, which are of national importance, are to pass into the control of the democratic state.

2. Wherever conditions are unfavorable for this transformation, the party declares itself in favor of a division among the peasants of such of the private estates as already have the petty farming conditions, or which may be necessary to round out a reasonable holding.

This program was at the time regarded as a compromise. It did not wholly suit anybody. The peasant leaders feared the amount of state ownership and management involved. On the other hand, the extreme left wing of the Social Democrats—Lenine and his friends—wanted the party to proclaim itself in favor of the complete nationalization of all privately owned land, even that of the small peasant owners, but were willing, provided the principle were this stated, to accept, as a temporary expedient, division of the land in certain exceptional instances. On the other hand, the Socialist-Revolutionists wanted, not the distribution of lands among a multitude of private owners, as is very generally supposed, but its socialization. Their program provided for "the socialization of all privately owned lands—that is, the taking of them out of the private ownership of persons into the public ownership and their management by democratically organized leagues of communities with the purpose of an equitable utilization." They wanted to avoid the creation of a great army of what they described as "wage-slaves of the state" and, on the other hand, they wanted to build upon the basis of Russian communism and, as far as possible, prevent the extension of capitalist methods—and therefore of the class struggle—into the agrarian life of Russia.

When the Bolsheviki came into power they sought first of all to split the peasant Socialist movement and gain the support of its extreme left wing. For this reason they agreed to adopt the program of the Revolutionary Socialist party. It was Marie Spiridonova who made that arrangement possible. It was, in fact, a political deal. Lenine and Trotzky, on behalf of the Bolshevik government, agreed to accept the land policy of the Socialist-Revolutionists, and in return Spiridonova and her friends agreed to support the Bolsheviki. There is abundant evidence of the truth of the following account of Professor Ross:

Among the first acts of the Bolsheviki in power was to square their debt to the left wing of the Social Revolutionists, their ally in the coup d'état. The latter would accept only one kind of currency—the expropriation of the private landowners without compensation and the transfer of all land into the hands of the peasant communes. The Bolsheviki themselves, as good Marxists, took no stock in the peasants' commune. As such, pending the introduction of Socialism, they should, perhaps, have nationalized the land and rented it to the highest bidder, regardless of whether it was to be tilled in small parcels without hired labor or in large blocks on the capitalistic plan. The land edict of November does, indeed, decree land nationalism; however, the vital proviso is added that "the use of the land must be equalized—that is, according to local conditions and according to the ability to work and the needs of each individual," and further that "the hiring of labor is not permitted." The administrative machinery is thus described: "All the confiscated land becomes the land capital of the nation. Its distribution among the working-people is to be in charge of the local and central authorities, beginning with the organized rural and urban communities and ending with the provincial central organs." Such is the irony of fate. Those who had charged the rural land commune with being the most serious brake upon Russia's progress, and who had stigmatized the People-ists as reactionaries and Utopians, now came to enact into law most of their tenets—the equalization of the use of land, the prohibition of the hiring of labor, and everything else![82]

The much-praised land policy of the Bolsheviki is, in fact, not a Bolshevik policy at all, but one which they have accepted as a compromise for temporary political advantage. "Claim everything in sight," said a noted American politician on one occasion to his followers. Our followers of the Bolsheviki, taught by a very clever propaganda, seem to be acting upon that maxim. They claim for the Bolsheviki everything which can in the slightest manner win favor with the American public, notwithstanding that it involves claiming for the Bolsheviki credit to which they are not entitled. As early as May 18, 1917, it was announced by the Provisional Government that the "question of the transfer of the land to the toilers" was to be left to the Constituent Assembly, and there was never a doubt in the mind of any Russian Socialist how that body would settle it; never a moment when it was doubted that the Constituent Assembly would be controlled by the Socialist-Revolutionary party. When Kerensky became Prime Minister one of the first acts of his Cabinet was to create a special committee for the purpose of preparing the law for the socialization of the land and the necessary machinery for carrying the law into effect. The All-Russian Peasants' Congress had, as early as May, five months before the Bolshevik counter-revolution, adopted the land policy for which the Bolsheviki now are being praised by their admirers in this country. That policy had been crystallized into a carefully prepared law which had been approved by the Council of Ministers. The Bolsheviki did no more than to issue a crudely conceived "decree" which they have never at any time had the power to enforce in more than about a fourth of Russia—in place of a law which would have embraced all Russia and have been secure and permanent.