Heinrich Contra Teleology: A Commentary on Heinrich’s Materialist Reconstruction of Marx’s Early Life
Darren Roso
Independent Researcher, Melbourne, Australia
darrenroso@gmail.com
Michael Heinrich, (2018) Karl Marx und die Geburt der modernen Gesellschaft. Band 1: Biographie und Werkentwicklung: 1818–1841, Stuttgart: Schmetterling Verlag.
Abstract
Michael Heinrich has written the most important biography of Karl Marx’s early life to appear in the English-speaking world to date. The work is historically and philosophically rich and thoughtful; he has produced a non-teleological reading of Marx that will shape any new debate about Marx’s critique of political economy, critique of politics, and materialism.
Keywords
Michael Heinrich – Karl Marx – Hegel – biography – Germany
Of course, we now know that the Young Marx did become Marx, but we should not want to live faster than he did, we should not want to live in his place, reject for him or discover for him. We shall not be waiting for him at the end of the course to throw round him as round a runner the mantle of repose, for at last it is over, he has arrived. Rousseau remarked that with children and adolescents the whole art of education consists of knowing how to lose time. The art of historical criticism also consists of knowing how to lose time so that young authors can grow up. This lost time is simply the time we give them to live. We scan the necessity of their lives in our understanding of its nodal points, its reversals and mutations. In this area there is perhaps no greater joy than to be able to witness in an emerging life, once the Gods of Origins and Goals have been dethroned, the birth of necessity.
— Louis Althusser, On the Young Marx
Althusser 2005, pp. 70–1.
A Review of Revising the Revolution
: The Unmaking of Russia’s Official History of 1917 by Larry E. Holmes
Barbara C. Allen
Associate Professor, History Department, La Salle University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
allenb@lasalle.edu
Larry E. Holmes, (2021) Revising the Revolution: The Unmaking of Russia’s Official History of 1917, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Larry E. Holmes’s scholarship has largely revolved around histories of Soviet education and centre–periphery relations.
The focus of Revising the Revolution is how Istpart (the Commission for the Collection, Study, and Publication of Materials on the October Revolution and History of the Communist Party) wrote and presented the history of Bolshevik Party activity in 1917 in the political centre of Russia and in one province, Viatka, from 1920 until about 1929 to 1931. The primary tension in Istpart’s work was between writing scholarly source-based history and advancing the Communist Party’s political goals. Its personnel initially saw these goals as complementary, but it was not long before personal rivalries and disagreements about sources’ reliability created conflict among Istpart’s personnel over its mission. Holmes adds a dimension to our understanding of Istpart’s irreconcilable tasks by studying relations between the central Istpart in Moscow and the local branch in Viatka. The local branches of Istpart in the provinces exhibited a range of activity and relations with the centre. Holmes finds that the Viatka Istpart local often ‘sharply disagreed [with the central Istpart body] over how best to write a historically factual yet politically useful history of 1917’ (p. 3). Istpart historians in the centre and in the provinces initially believed they could do both, but increasingly found they could not. Created in 1920, Istpart was dissolved in 1929, although its influence lingered on into 1931.
Personal rivalries were baked into Istpart’s formation. Vladimir Ilich Lenin in summer 1920 charged Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovsky with the responsibility for leading the creation of an official history of 1917 and told him to work together with Mikhail Stepanovich Olminsky, whom Lenin had appointed to lead a Gosizdat (State Publishing House) commission on the party’s history.
A critical point was reached when Gosizdat published the third volume of Leon Trotsky’s collected works in 1924; this concerned 1917 and came out on the seventh anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power. According to Holmes, ‘Trotsky’s rambling and egregiously self-serving preface [“Lessons of October”] created an immediate sensation’ (p. 18). Written quickly, it omitted mention of Stalin and heightened the differences between Trotsky on the one hand and Zinoviev and Kamenev on the other. The ‘literary discussion’ followed.
Olminsky and his supporters drove much of the personal conflicts within Istpart, by Holmes’s account. Although partially paralysed and mute from a stroke he suffered in 1922, Olminsky very actively instigated and escalated conflicts with others. Vladimir Ivanovich Nevsky, who had worked in the Petrograd branch of Istpart since its beginning, was a primary target, because Olminsky regarded the Petrograd Istpart as a potential usurper of the role of the central body in Moscow. The Petrograd branch had its own journal, Krasnaia letopis, founded by Nevsky, which elevated above memoirs the publication of archival documents and scholarly articles based on archival research. Adding fuel to the flames,Krasnaia letopis published extensive source criticism of memoirs that had been published inProletarskaia revoliutsiia. Olminsky objected that documents such as those from tsarist police archives did not reveal the full extent of the party’s work and reach.
Nevsky was particularly critical of work being done by regional Istparts, which often did not employ trained historians and archivists or people who knew other languages. Nevsky’s position won out at the April 1923 Istpart conference, but he was reined in by the Petrograd party organisation which put so many restrictions on Istpart’s work in the city that Krasnaia letopis could publish little other than memoirs. Nevsky left Petrograd to work in the Moscow Istpart organisation, but continued to write archive-based history with the apparent approval of Istpart, having circumvented Olminsky, who published inProletarskaia revoliutsiia ‘an ill-tempered review’ of Nevsky’s work (p. 24). Nevsky was compelled to leave Istpart to become director of the Lenin Library in Moscow, where he regained some favour by publishing a biography of Lenin.
Istpart suffered from lack of personnel and resources and insufficient expertise among its staff, even after it was placed under the CC’s authority. When the Lenin Institute was founded in 1923, it competed effectively against Istpart for CC resources. Moreover, Istpart had to surrender over 25,000 documents to the Lenin Institute from 1923 to 1928. Finally, the Institute gained control of Istpart in 1928.
Regional Istparts came into and went out of existence depending on the availability of funds from regional party committees to which they were subordinated, and from the CC. By the end of 1921, there were 21 regional Istparts; by mid-1922 there were 72. There were 39 in 1923, 56 in 1924, 72 in 1925, and 86 in early 1927. The number fell to 38 in October 1928. Many never carried out any work, or else passed through long periods of inactivity. Often only one person staffed a regional Istpart and that person usually had additional responsibilities in agitation and propaganda (agitprop), so could only devote part of their time to Istpart. Because they received funds not from the central Istpart in Moscow but from regional party committees, they did not necessarily feel an imperative to follow the central Istpart agenda. Unfortunately for Istpart, agitation and propaganda were higher priority missions for regional party committees, which directed few resources to historical work because many local officials and members found Istpart’s work ‘boring’ (p. 39). Local Istparts often were unable to collect and preserve documents. By 1924, the central Istpart demanded only central coordination of important revolutionary anniversaries, but otherwise endorsed ‘localization [raionirovanie] of Istpart’s work’ (p. 37).
Viatka’s Istpart numbered among those created in 1921 but it only began carrying out significant work early in 1924, when Aleksandr Abramovich Novoselov (born in 1902, and a party member since 1920) became its head. With only seven years of formal schooling, he was a party activist rather than a professional historian or archivist, yet he prioritised the collection of documents for the local archive, the erection of commemorative markers and statues, and the writing of history that reflected the actual course of revolutionary events in Viatka rather than a narrative imposed from the centre. Novoselov faced challenges including few resources, other demands on his time, and the inability to mobilise work in rural areas. Party personnel discarded records rather than follow instructions to select and preserve important ones, because they did not care about historical documentation. Nevertheless, according to Holmes, ‘from 1924 to 1927 Viatka’s Istpart played a major role in the observance of the 1905 revolution and the tenth anniversary of the 1917 revolution’ (p. 43). Novoselov’s role in these projects reflected his personal inability to reconcile the goal of historical scholarship with a narrative that served the party’s political goals, and his attention fluctuated between the two purposes. Holmes perceives Novoselov as torn between his training as a propagandist and his duty to Viatka Istpart’s ‘scholarly mission’ (p. 69).
In January 1925, Olminsky’s poor health forced a restructuring of the central Istpart, of which Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov became director. Kanatchikov sought to use Istpart as a weapon against Trotsky and his supporters, and sacrificed historical accuracy to wield the past as an ideological tool. He had an ally in Istpart secretariat member Feodosiia Drabkina in these efforts. He and Drabkina ordered local Istparts to accentuate the activity of the Bolshevik Party in 1905 and 1917, no matter how few Bolsheviks had operated in their locality in those years. Most Istparts gave lip service to their demands, although Ukraine notably objected to the instruction to ignore or downplay the influence of Taras Shevchenko, its national poet. Olminsky’s numerous allies appealed on his behalf to the CC, and Olminsky wrote directly to Stalin about Kanatchikov’s alleged leadership weaknesses. Moreover, Kanatchikov came under attack in summer 1926 for supporting the opposition led by Zinoviev and Kamenev. In August 1926, Sergei Ivanovich Gusev (Drabkina’s spouse) replaced Kanatchikov. A new directive followed to not overlook non-Bolshevik parties’ activity in the localities and to point out the role of spontaneity where it was a factor.
Holmes devotes two chapters to Istpart’s work on the anniversaries of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. Early plans assumed it possible for regional commemorations to conform to a template of how the revolution of 1917 developed in St Petersburg and Moscow. But regional Istparts, most notably that in Viatka, did not obey. In Viatka, Social-Democratic Bolsheviks had played minor roles, so its commemoration had to centre in its narrative the activities of other political parties to have content relevant to the local area. This emphasised the moderation of SD forces in Viatka. Moreover, peasants in the countryside around Viatka ‘did not seek land but rather political equality and lower taxes and did so using peaceful means’ (p. 53). The Viatka Istpart’s weak compliance with the centre’s instructions was typical. The central Istpart could not prevent local Istparts from issuing ‘a heterogeneous mix of accounts’ (p. 53).
In the mid-1920s, Communist Party historians, though partisan in favour of the Bolsheviks, recognised that many SD party organisations remained united in early to mid-1917, that Bolsheviks were surprised by the February Revolution, and that there was much ‘conditional support’ in spring 1917 among Bolsheviks for ‘the Provisional Government as long as it pursued socioeconomic and democratic reforms’ (p. 55). These historians elevated ‘spontaneity … as the major dynamic of 1917’ (p. 55).
Holmes cites Aleksandr Gavrilovich Shliapnikov as an example of a party historian who ‘produced most interesting work on 1917’ (p. 56), for he scrupulously wrote his narratives based on documents not only produced by the Bolshevik Party but also those of other parties, in addition to his own recollections and others’ memoirs.
Viatka Istpart had ambitious plans to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution with more than a dozen books about topics including the party, ‘unions, cooperatives, the Young Communist League, women, education, enlightenment, and the economy’ (p. 66). But few of these projects were realised. A complication in writing Viatka’s revolutionary history ten years later was that the few Bolsheviks active in the province in 1917 were concentrated in the city of Izhevsk with its munitions and steel factories. Izhevsk had been moved to a different province in 1920. Viatka was an ‘administrative center’ with ‘little industry’ (p. 70). Key bodies in the city of Viatka denounced the Bolshevik seizure of power. The Menshevik and SR-dominated provincial Soviet called for the Constituent Assembly to hold power. Bolsheviks could not establish firm control in 1918 over Viatka, part of which the White Admiral Aleksandr Vasilevich Kolchak took in early 1919. Only in spring 1919 did the Bolsheviks subdue Viatka.
In Viatka, tensions over the departure of the region’s revolutionary history from the template desired by the central Istpart were exacerbated by conflicts between Novoselov and two Bolsheviks who had been active in Viatka in 1917 but were in the mid-twenties working or studying in Moscow – Petr Kapustin and Andrei Kuchkin. To enhance their career prospects, the latter two found it in their interests to exaggerate what they had accomplished in Viatka during 1917. The Viatka Istpart’s anniversary edition of collected essays by historians about that year threatened to undermine their claims. As pre-publication reviewers, they subjected some of the essays to withering criticism. Yet Old Bolsheviks in Viatka’s Istpart rallied to Novoselov’s and the essay authors’ defence. With the conflict not yet resolved, and stricken with tuberculosis, Novoselov left Viatka for the North Caucasus in August 1927.
The Viatka Istpart’s ambitious plans for commemorating the 1917 anniversary were contingent on ample funding promised from the regional party committee, but this did not come through. Instead, cuts were made to a range of party and state bodies’ activities. Viatka Istpart in 1926 lost its publishing house, which was closed because it had lost money by publishing more than it could sell, and due to ‘sloppy business practices’ (p. 90). The central Istpart had similar difficulties selling all copies of its books printed by Gosizdat. Istpart accused Gosizdat of failing to market and advertise its books. But the Istpart in Moscow had delivered to the press more than it had initially planned for publication on the anniversary of 1905 revolution. The USSR suffered from insufficient paper in 1925–7. There was also a significant and ‘growing backlog of unsold books’ (p. 92).
Because of this experience, the CC Press Department ordered Istpart to drastically scale down its plans to publish on the 1917 anniversary. Despite protests from Pokrovsky and from local Istparts including Viatka, cuts had to be made. The major collection the Viatka Istpart had planned about the revolution and civil war in its province had to be reduced from 800 to 188 pages and from a print run of 5,000 to 1,500 copies. Entries over 100 pages were cut to 13–20 pages. Holmes notes that a 200-page handwritten manuscript about labour unions’ activity during the revolution in Viatka was never published but remains in the local archive. According to Holmes, a corollary reason for cutting the size of publications was so that they could be edited more effectively to create a narrative that coincided with political imperatives.
Meanwhile, the formation of the Society of Marxist Historians in 1925 strengthened the tendency for history to be treated as a political tool rather than as a scholarly discipline. By the time Istpart’s Fourth Conference was held in January 1927, few voices still defended history as an academic field, the majority calling instead for its outright politicisation. Delegates passed resolutions ‘making their agency’s work relevant to the party’s struggle against petty bourgeois and bourgeois influence and all forms of deviation’ (p. 109). Istpart had ambitious plans to control how central and regional museums depicted the 1917 revolution. Archival access, too, began to be politicised, with researchers needing to be party members in good standing. By order of Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, 25,000 tons of archival documents depicting unacceptable versions of history were destroyed from February 1927 to October 1929. Viatka’s Istpart oversaw the dispatch of 101 tons of archival documents for pulping. These were selected by staff who were not trained archivists or historians.
Depiction of oppositionist figures’ roles in 1917 were distorted to make them more vulnerable to attack in the late 1920s. While Trotsky replied in detail to an Istpart questionnaire about his 1917 activity, he also expressed certainty that it would not be written about accurately. He included criticism of Stalin in his answers. Memoirs by Shliapnikov and other Old Bolsheviks came under attack as reflecting a ‘wretched philosophy of history’ that was not ‘materialist’ (p. 113). Yet historians still extensively cited Shliapnikov’s memoirs regarding 1917. In March 1928, the Istpart collegium resolved not to endorse volume four of Shliapnikov’s memoir concerning 1917, but also not to block its publication. Holmes supposes this may have been because much of the memoir had already appeared in print as articles in Proletarskaia revoliutsiia. He asserts,
As in his earlier volumes, Shliapnikov relied on a wide range of documents, avoided caricatures, emphasized the material rather than political objectives of the Russian populace, and acknowledged the significance of spontaneity. He did not embellish Stalin’s role and treated Martov, Trotsky, and, after March, Kamenev and Zinoviev as influential antagonists of the Provisional Government and war. (p. 125, footnote 57.)
Ruth Fischer: The Ongoing Fascination of the Ultra-left
A Review of Ruth Fischer: Ein Leben mit und gegen Kommunisten (1895–1961) by Mario Keßler
Nathaniel Flakin
Independent Researcher, Berlin, Germany
Mario Keßler, (2013) Ruth Fischer: Ein Leben mit und gegen Kommunisten (1895–1961), Vienna: Böhlau Verlag.
On February 18, 2022, three Stolpersteine were placed at Andreasberger Straße 9 in Britz, in Berlin’s Neukölln district. The brass cobblestones commemorate anyone who was persecuted or killed under the Nazis. These three mark the former home of Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, and as well as Fischer’s son Friedrich Gerhart Friedländer, until they fled the country in March 1933.
When I announced that I was applying for these Stolpersteine, a comrade responded: ‘Ruth Fischer is a terrible human being. Don’t do it.’ And yes, more than 60 years after her death, Fischer remains one of the most controversial figures from communist history, in Germany or anywhere else. I certainly would not claim her legacy. But it is not as if we were putting up a statue – a Stolperstein merely draws attention to the crimes of the Nazis.
One sign of the ongoing interest in Ruth Fischer is the massive biography by Mario Keßler, published in German in 2013 and weighing in at over a kilogramme. Against the author’s friendly advice, I read it from cover to cover.
Fischer and Maslow are best remembered as the ultraleft leaders of the Communist Party of Germany for a brief period in the mid-1920s.
What makes Fischer so fascinating is her inconsistency. She gained international fame as both a communist and an anticommunist, without lasting success in either role, thus alienating absolutely everyone. As an obituary by the journalist Sebastian Haffner put it, ‘her fate was to unintentionally damage the side she was temporarily aligned with more than the side she was fighting’ (quoted on p. 614; all translations from the work are mine).
Born in Leipzig, Fischer grew up in Vienna as Elfriede Eisler. The Eislers, including her younger brothers Gerhart and Hanns, made up, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, ‘almost the quintessential Comintern family’ (quoted on pp. 8–9). Subject to myriad forms of antisemitism in the decaying Habsburg monarchy, the three siblings all dedicated themselves to revolutionary modernism, although in very different forms. Elfriede was a firebrand speaker who soon fell out with Stalinism; Gerhart was a party-apparatus man who remained loyal to ‘really existing socialism’; Hanns, a composer, became the most famous of the three.
While she cannot be called the founder of the Communist Party of German-Austria, Fischer did receive membership card #1 of this very small and putschist organisation. One of her earliest works was a pamphlet on the Sexual Ethics of Communism, published in 1920 in Vienna, in which she called for a radical break with the ‘monogamous forced union’: ‘the majority of people live polyamorously’, she wrote, and ‘homosexuality is natural’ (quoted on p. 53). It goes without saying that older and more prudish figures like Lenin and Zetkin were not impressed by this ‘young comrade from Vienna’.
Consistent with these views, Fischer subordinated her family responsibilities to her political duties, and set off for Berlin in 1919, which many saw as the centre of world revolution (‘the reddest of all cities on earth outside the Soviet Union’, in the words of Georg Glaser). While Fischer worked in the Comintern and KPD apparatuses, her son Friedrich Gerhart Friedländer remained in Vienna with both sets of grandparents, and only reunited with his mother a decade later. Berlin is where she met Arkadi Maslow (‘love at first sight’; p. 80), who would remain her personal and political companion until his death two decades later. Within two years, Fischer was the leader of the KPD’s Berlin-Brandenburg district, a bastion of the party’s ultraleft wing that openly defied the leadership. If Lenin described a revolutionary party as an orchestra, then Fischer’s specialty was a one-string banjo: her only theme was rejecting any kind of collaboration with the Social Democrats. Socialist revolution was to be achieved with permanent offensives and revolutionary purity.
Zetkin despised this upstart opposition, whereas Lenin could only shake his head. While many of the leading figures of the ultra-left came from middle-class Jewish families, Fischer was not wrong when she said her faction was ‘not only meshuga students’.
Fischer must have been a uniquely enthralling speaker, since her political profile was not impressive – a lifetime of communist activism left behind only a handful of books. In the words of one contemporary, Ernst Meyer, Fischer’s predecessor as KPD chair, was ‘sometimes quite put out by her political ignorance, claiming that she never even read the Communist Manifesto!’
When the German October collapsed in 1923, dashing hopes for a decisive leap in the world revolution, many rank-and-file KPD members wanted to rid themselves of a leadership that appeared overcautious. The fact that the ultraleft opposition, who had spent years calling for insurrections, had been totally passive during the revolutionary crisis, does not seem to have lessened their appeal. At the party congress of 1924, Fischer and Maslow were swept into the KPD leadership – even against the will of the Comintern Executive, who were aiming for a balance between the party’s different wings.
Thus, at just 28, Fischer became the first woman leader of a mass party anywhere in the world (p. 178; Keßler acknowledges that Luxemburg was also the leader of the KPD between its founding and her assassination two weeks later, but he says that this was not yet a mass party). Technically she was the ‘Chairperson of the Political Secretariat of the KPD’, called ‘Politleiter’ in Comintern-speak. Party chair was a separate, more symbolic post that was held at the time by the worker Ernst Thälmann. But Fischer was the de facto leader of the KPD from 1924 to 1925 – more so because Maslow spent much of this time in prison on trumped-up charges (after the police accused him of stealing a handbag in the park!).
As a party leader, Fischer was able to take her principled refusal to collaborate with Social Democrats to absurd lengths. KPD representatives in parliament were told to avoid shaking hands with their SPD counterparts – or if protocol required it, they were first to put on red gloves. As an ally of Comintern chair Grigory Zinoviev, Fischer led the ‘Bolshevisation’ campaign in Germany, quashing the KPD’s democratic traditions. Fischer argued for ideological monolithism, while Scholem cleared the apparatus of anyone suspected of disloyalty towards the new ultraleft leadership. In just over a year, however, the triumvirate themselves fell victim to the very regime they had created.
If one quote from Fischer is remembered today, it is surely from a speech she gave to far-right university students: ‘Those who call for a struggle against Jewish capital are already, gentlemen, class strugglers, even if they don’t know it. You are against Jewish capital and want to fight the speculators. Very good. Throw down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp-post, stamp on them. But, gentlemen, what about the big capitalists, the Stinnes and Klöckner?’ (quoted on p. 315).
This is an example of the idiotic attempts of certain Comintern leaders, such as Karl Radek, to appeal to Germany’s Far Right with their hatred of Versailles (the so-called ‘Schlageter Course’). Today, this is often quoted as an example of Communist antisemitism. That is a downright bizarre accusation against a party with a largely Jewish leadership. As Hoffrogge has shown, while there were certainly examples of antisemitic prejudice within the KPD, of all the parties in Weimar Germany the KPD was the most committed to the struggle against antisemitism. Under the Stalinist leadership of Ernst Thälmann, there were even more idiotic attempts to appeal to rank-and-file Nazis, especially with the so-called ‘red referendum’ in Prussia in 1932. Yet bourgeois talk of collaboration between the KPD and the NSDAP is wildly exaggerated.
By 1926, Fischer and Maslow were expelled from the KPD. They were active in a new organisation of the Left Opposition, the Leninbund (Lenin League). But when the KPD’s Central Committee offered an amnesty to anyone willing to renounce their views, the two jumped at the chance to get back into Stalin’s good graces. It did not work: Fischer and Maslow never did get back into the Comintern – but they also never seriously built up a competing organisation. Fischer got a job as a child social worker in the working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg. This is the time the couple lived in Britz, where they were joined in 1929 by Fischer’s son Friedrich Gerhart Friedländer, who attended the Karl Marx School in Neukölln.
In early March 1933, after the Reichstag fire and the Nazis’ rigged elections, Fischer and Maslow fled by motorbike to Czechoslovakia, and eventually made it to Paris. Friedländer was arrested by the SA and detained in an improvised concentration camp for two days before eventually making it to Vienna. (His unpublished autobiography is available in different archives, and contains numerous personal letters from Maslow.) In Paris, Fischer got a job as a social worker in St Denis. The pair met Leon Trotsky several times during his French exile. Trotsky recruited them to the nascent Fourth International, despite the objections of its German section in exile, and they were members for several years under the names Dubois and Parabellum.
After the fall of France, Fischer and Maslow escaped to Portugal. She was able to secure a visa for the US and sailed for New York City; he, with Soviet citizenship, could only make it to Cuba. After half a year, Fischer was able to secure a US visa for Maslow as well. When she called Havana to give him the news, she learned that he had been found dead on the street – likely the victim of a Stalinist assassination, but definitive proof has not been found to this day.
At this point, Fischer made a radical shift. After years as an unaffiliated communist, from one day to the next she transformed herself into a rabid anticommunist. The shock of Maslow’s death was certainly the cause – but equally important was Fischer’s new milieu, in which New York intellectuals were moving rapidly to the right. The former KPD chairwoman famously appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to denounce her brothers Gerhart and Hanns Eisler, who were both in US exile at that time. She accused them of helping to assassinate Maslow – which, besides going against family loyalty, was also totally preposterous. Gerhart was a communist agent at the time, but was far from the ‘key figure of the American Communist Party’ that his sister made him out to be (p. 424). She received a scholarship from Harvard University to write a book about Stalin and German Communism. Keßler agrees with most other commentators that it is an unreliable and self-serving portrayal of Fischer’s time at the top of the KPD, systematically avoiding any reflection on her role in ‘Bolshevisation’.
This is where the popular understanding of Fischer’s life ends. Yet Keßler shows that she went through another radical shift that opened up a final chapter. He explains this with a single shocking letter. After the war, Fischer was courted by both bourgeois media and secret services as an expert on Stalinism. She received a letter full of praise and an offer for collaboration from Eberhard Taubert, the leader of an anticommunist association in West Germany. She would not have forgotten that Taubert had been a leader of the Nazi stormtroopers (SA) in Berlin, who had detained her son in 1933. This seems to have been a wakeup call: by the early 1950s, Fischer scaled back her collaboration with the FBI and moved to Paris, where she worked as an independent journalist. She was cautiously optimistic about de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union, and reported favourably on the Bandung Conference to end colonialism. She re-established links with critical communists such as Heinrich Brandler and Isaac Deutscher. After years of wrangling, she was also able to receive a West German pension for her stolen career as a social worker. Fischer died of a heart attack in 1961. She was survived by her son, who had studied mathematics in England and went on to be a university professor.
After 2,000 words’ reviewing Fischer’s life, we must now ask about the political meaning of all this. No one, as far as I am aware, would consider themselves a Fischerite. As a Communist leader, she was feckless, even before becoming a turncoat.
Why, instead of being relegated to a footnote in communist history, have Fischer, Maslow, and Scholem each been the subject of biographies in the past decade? How do we explain the ongoing fascination of the ultra-left? Every history book is a contribution, even if unintentional, to debates about socialist strategy today. Keßler’s biography calls for a ‘democratic communism’ (p. 245) that would reject insurrections and remain on the parliamentary road. There is a kind of ‘Eurocommunism’ that exists among historians. This tendency is pronounced in Alexander Rabinowitch’s unparalleled scholarship concerning the October Revolution. Rabinowitch defends the Bolshevik Party’s right wing, wishing that the Bolsheviks had renounced the spoils of a victorious uprising in order to form a coalition government with all socialist parties.
In Keßler’s study of Fischer, we see this problem in his discussion of the tactics of the united front and especially the workers’ government. In a sense, Trotsky is too popular today. His passionate calls for a united front of communists and social democrats to stop the Nazis make him seem like a Marxist Cassandra. But praise for this tactical proposal is divorced from its strategic context. The antifascist united front is presented as a purely defensive measure – but in defence of what? Bourgeois democracy? For Trotsky, the united front was a tool for a communist party to gather forces for the proletarian revolution (‘an active defence, with the perspective of passing over to the offensive’, as heput it). It was not intended to save bourgeois democracy, but rather to destroy it. A purely defensive conception of the united front has more to do with Käthe Kollwitz, Albert Einstein, or perhaps the SAP than with the Bolshevik-Leninists. Yet this is precisely the vision advocated by many modern historians who are sympathetic to Trotsky.
The workers’ government, as discussed among the Communist International throughout the first half of the 1920s, can only be understood as the culminating moment of the united front. The discussions were contradictory – see Zinoviev’s confusing remarks about the ‘four kinds of workers’ government’ – yet the slogan was always conceived as some kind of step along the road to proletarian dictatorship. Clara Zetkin, for example, who was on the right wing of this debate, said that such a government could only be ‘formed as the crowning effect of a tremendous mass movement, backed by the political organs of proletarian power outside of parliament, by the workers’ councils and by their congress, and above all, by an armed working class.’
Keßler, in contrast, presents such a workers’ government as a parliamentary coalition in contradistinction to proletarian revolution. For him, ‘the only left-wing project that promised success at this time’ was an SPD–KPD government that could have ‘more thoroughly democratised’ Germany (p. 245). For this, the KPD would have needed to develop ‘in the direction of a democratic communism’ and break ‘with every kind of vanguard theory’. In this, he follows Sebastian Haffner in speculating that a democratic but not socialist revolution could have saved Germany from fascism. It is undeniable that the half-revolution of 1918, drowned in blood by the SPD, prepared the ground for Hitler. Yet Keßler and Haffner wonder about a three-quarters revolution which would have left capitalism in place while nonetheless seriously reforming the state apparatus. Rosa Luxemburg once posited that society faced a choice between ‘socialism and barbarism’ – but these historians claim to have found some kind of golden mean between the two.
In response, it is worth quoting Trotsky at some length, who summed up the binary choice posed by the class struggle in Germany in the early 1930s:
That is the situation approaching with every hour in Germany today. There are forces which would like the ball to roll down towards the right and break the back of the working class. There are forces which would like the ball to remain at the top. That is a utopia. The ball cannot remain at the top of the pyramid. The Communists want the ball to roll down toward the left and break the back of capitalism.
Trotsky 1932.
A Review of Call to Arms: Iran’s Marxist Revolutionaries
by Ali Rahnema
Peyman Vahabzadeh
Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, Canada
peymanv@uvic.ca
Ali Rahnema, (2021) Call to Arms: Iran’s Marxist Revolutionaries, London: OneWorld.
Call to Arms presents the latest addition to a trail of literature surrounding the People’s Fadai Guerrillas (PFG, in Persian: Cherikha-ye Fadai-ye Khalq, later the Organisation of Iranian People’s Fadai Guerrillas, OIPFG; ‘fadai’ in Persian means ‘self-sacrificing’) – a self-declared Marxist-Leninist urban-guerrilla group founded in 1971 that, despite its small size and limited operations against the dictatorship of the US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, captured the political imagination of Iranian dissidents in the 1970s and had an impact on the events that led to the 1979 Revolution. Previous studies on the PFG included a lengthy, two-volume work of ‘research’,
The PFG is not a ‘household’ name among those familiar with the guerrilla movements of the 1960s and ’70s – unlike, say, the RAF in Germany, Tupamaros (MLN-T) in Uruguay, MIR in Chile, or the Brigate Rosse in Italy. This is due to the neglect of the group, until the last decade or so, by Iranian activists and researchers alike. When discussing the PFG in the few existing short engagements (aside from this and the previously mentioned books), Iranian historians, having little interest in registering the PFG as an actor in a global movement, have mostly consigned study of the group to Orientalist ‘Iranian Studies’ frameworks, condemning it to a bygone past.
The PFG was founded in April 1971 as two underground militant groups, having reached the conclusion that only armed struggle could challenge the monarchical dictatorship, merged in the aftermath of security raids. Arising from radical tendencies within the student movement, the two groups emerged from different experiences and influences, with a half-generation age difference between them. The key founders were Massoud Ahmadzadeh, Amir Parviz Pouyan, Abbas Meftahi – from the so-called Group Two, the newer founding group, formed circa 1969–70 –, and Hamid Ashraf – a survivor of the so-called Group One, the older founding group, formed circa 1964 and raided in 1968. Its leaders and theoreticians Bizhan Jazani and Hassan Zia Zarifi were in prison at this time.
Prior to the PFG’s founding, having reorganised and recruited new members, survivors of Group One launched a daring attack on a gendarmerie post in the village of Siahkal in February 1971, declaring war on the regime. 13 members of the group were executed by March of that year. But their bold operation was celebrated by the Iranian opposition as the ‘Siahkal Resurgence’, thus bestowing it with historic importance, and the Siahkal event became a catalyst for more armed struggle. The PFG adopted Marxism-Leninism as its ideology but clearly leaned toward urban-guerrilla warfare, comparable to that of Latin American revolutionaries.
By 1972, of the founding members only Hamid Ashraf had survived: an elusive and capable militant, a meticulous organiser, and beloved leader, he led the group for the next five years, becoming Iran’s most wanted man. Receiving considerable support from student movements inside and outside of Iran, and revolutionary movements and states across the Middle East, between 1971 and 1976 the PFG carried out a number of carefully selected and delivered assassinations, as well as bombings of powerlines and security, military, and police installations. Although it sustained heavy casualties (237 PFG members were killed between 1971 and 1979, while thousands were imprisoned for their connections with the group), the PFG permeated Iranian collective consciousness. Armed struggle gradually polarised Iranian society, contributing to the creation of a collective psychology that contributed to the overthrow of the Shah through a popular revolutionary process in 1978–9. After the revolution, the refashioned OIPFG, now having abandoned armed struggle, emerged as the largest leftist political party, able to hold rallies with as many as 300,000 attending. However, numerous schisms and brutal repression and executions by the Islamic Republic eradicated the group, forcing the remnant cliques of the once formidable Fadai Guerrillas into exile.
There were other militant groups in the 1960s: several Maoist groups most drawn from the student movement abroad were quickly uncovered, and saw their activists jailed; in addition, a vast Kurdish insurgency was repressed in 1968. The PFG, however, must be credited as founder of sustained armed struggle in Iran. This was possible because of its organic relationship with the student movement. The PFG also emerged as a group that other (smaller) militant groups emulated. Appearances notwithstanding, the PFG was an internally diverse group. Under Ashraf’s astute but not ideologically-imposing leadership, it accommodated Marxist-Leninists and Maoists, activists with social-justice rather than ideological motivations, supporters of Ahmadzadeh’s theory, and advocates of Jazani’s theory. He encouraged intra-group discussions and inter-organisational debates, in which he also participated.
The dual origins of the PFG led to the continued presence of two ideological currents. Ahmadzadeh’s theory was the founding and dominant one until around 1974. Influenced by Latin American guerrillas, Ahmadzadeh asserted that armed struggle would create the objective conditions for revolution and soon lead to a popular uprising against the regime. Critical of this view, Jazani produced theoretical works in prison, arguing that armed struggle could not lead to a popular movement without the guerrillas also organising non-militant support networks in factories, workplaces, and universities. By 1974, when many guerrillas could no longer envisage a simmering mass movement, they began questioning the optimism of Ahmadzadeh’s theory, and Ashraf began creating non-militant cells, but this plan fell apart following his death in 1976. When the PFG regrouped afterwards, it lost a significant portion of the organisation – those who rejected armed struggle – in a split. The new PFG adopted Jazani’s theory in 1977, but the revolution left no space for the realisation of Jazani’s ideas and the post-revolutionary OIPFG abandoned the ideas of its founders altogether.
Ali Rahnema’s Call to Arms offers a 500-page history of the group’s formation, its internal debates and issues, and the group’s societal impact in rich detail. I believe that a historian has every right to choose their own approach, as I do not subscribe to ‘objectivist’ historiography and instead hold that history is open to interpretation. Thus, in this review-essay, I will speak of the merits ofCall to Arms, while pointing out critical methodological and theoretical issues and problems caused by Rahnema’s approach.
The book begins with this accurate snapshot:
The Iranian guerrilla movement, through its praxis established a frame of reference, an ethos and an archetype for Iranian political activists. It would be fair to say that its struggle and comportment established a code of conduct for the politicized youth. The battle conducted by the Iranian guerrilla movement captured the imagination of urban Iranians, especially its youth, and confronted them with important political questions on how to engage with authoritarian rule (p. 4).
Wherefore Art Thou Socialism?
A Review of Searching for Socialism: The Project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys
Matt McManus
Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
matthew.mcmanus@ucalgary.ca
Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, (2020) Searching for Socialism: The Project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn, London: Verso.
Introduction
What the [United States] was much more concerned about, even in the wake of the election that brought Mrs. Thatcher to office clearly representing a powerful neoliberal response to the crisis of the 1970s, was the apparent persistence on the Western European Left of radical socialist political alternatives. This was expressed in the strength of the Bennite call for economic democracy inside the Labour Party in the early 1980s…
Panitch and Gindin 2012, p. 196. — Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire
Socialist Internationalism and the Ukraine War
Socialist Internationalism and the Ukraine War
Rohini Hensman
How do the working people of the world transform themselves from a plethora of groups waging a multitude of scattered struggles for survival and dignity to a revolutionary force capable of ending capitalism, governing the earth, and taking over production? They have innumerable tasks before them, but one of the most important is to overcome divisions among themselves resulting from ethnic supremacism and nationalism. Marxists have been debating this issue from the beginning, but it still plagues us today. The war in Ukraine offers a good opportunity to examine it more closely.
The National and Colonial Question
Vladimir Putin’s address on 21 February 2022 was not by any means the first time he cursed V.I. Lenin, but it was perhaps his most extended attack on Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who, he claimed, had created the Ukrainian state
by separating, severing, what is historically Russian land… Lenin’s ideas of what amounted in essence to a confederative state arrangement and a slogan about the right of nations to self-determination, up to secession, were laid in the foundation of Soviet statehood. Initially they were confirmed in the Declaration on the Formation of the USSR in 1922, and later on, after Lenin’s death, were enshrined in the 1924 Soviet Constitution…
Going back to history, I would like to repeat that the Soviet Union was established in the place of the former Russian Empire in 1922. But practice showed immediately that it was impossible to preserve or govern such a vast and complex territory on the amorphous principles that amounted to confederation. They were far removed from reality and the historical tradition.
It is logical that the Red Terror and a rapid slide into Stalin’s dictatorship, the domination of the communist ideology and the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, nationalisation and the planned economy – all this transformed the formally declared but ineffective principles of government into a mere declaration. In reality, the union republics did not have any sovereign rights, none at all. The practical result was the creation of a tightly centralised and absolutely unitary state.
In fact, what Stalin fully implemented was not Lenin’s but his own principles of government. But he did not make the relevant amendments to the cornerstone documents, to the Constitution, and he did not formally revise Lenin’s principles underlying the Soviet Union. From the look of it, there seemed to be no need for that, because everything seemed to be working well in conditions of the totalitarian regime, and outwardly it looked wonderful, attractive and even super-democratic.
And yet, it is a great pity that the fundamental and formally legal foundations of our state were not promptly cleansed of the odious and utopian fantasies inspired by the revolution…1
Putin’s knowledge of the history of the Tsarist empire is not perfect: he seems not to know that the first stable state in Ukraine was Kievan Rus, established by the Scandinavian Varangians, who settled in Kiev in the late ninth century AD, the height of its prosperity occurring under Volodymyr the Great (980–1015 AD), who converted to Byzantine Christianity, and his son Iaroslav the Wise. Its existence as a state therefore predates the establishment of the Grand Principality of Moscow, which later developed into the Russian empire. But Kievan Rus was destroyed by the invasion of Genghis Khan’s Golden Hordes in the thirteenth century, and was subsequently fought over, divided and dominated by Lithuania, Poland, Austria and Russia, until most of it was colonised by Russia in 1654. Nonetheless, there was a revival of Ukrainian culture in the nineteenth century, in the latter part of which both nationalist and socialist parties grew as Ukraine was integrated more closely into the Tsarist empire as a provider of wheat and raw materials such as coal and iron, and as a market for Russian manufactured goods.2 Crimea was incorporated into the empire even later, in 1783, at which time the indigenous Crimean Tatars constituted the overwhelming majority of the population.
However, his recapitulation of post-revolutionary history is relatively accurate: the Soviet Union was indeed established on the territory of the Russian Empire; after the civil war, Lenin wanted it to be a voluntary union between equal Soviet socialist republics; Stalin staged a counter-revolution which Putin approves of, but he failed to cleanse the legal foundations of the state of the ‘odious and utopian fantasies inspired by the revolution’. Perhaps the reason Stalin failed to do so was, partly, as Putin comments, because ‘everything seemed to be working well in conditions of the totalitarian regime’; but another reason is that he was projecting himself as Lenin’s closest comrade and legitimate successor, and therefore could not afford to contradict Lenin openly.
Putin has done us a service by raising the issue of the national and colonial question in this uncompromising fashion, and it is worth going back to examine it again. But, before we do that, a word of caution. The Marxist debate on the national question is confused and confusing, and there are two main reasons:
- Whereas the colonies of the West European imperialist powers were mainly overseas, the Mongol, East European and Ottoman empires colonised adjacent countries, so it was easy to slip into the error of blurring the distinction between the empire and the state. For example, no one would think of India as being part of the British state, but, when Putin sees Ukraine as part of the Russian state, he is by no means alone, nor is this the first time he has done so. As far back as April 2005, he deplored the demise of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century because it left tens of millions of Russians ‘beyond the fringes of Russian territory’.3
- The terms ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ were used to refer both to a whole country colonised by an imperial power and to what we would today call an ethnic group, and the latter in turn could be based on religious community – for example Jews, whether they were believers or not – or language and national origin, as in the case of Czechs, Hungarians and so on. Even today, terms like ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic minority’ are used in a confusing manner because people who belong to the same ethnic group on one count (say religion) may belong to different ethnic groups on another (say language or national origin). To cut through this confusion, I propose to use ‘ethnicity’ to refer to all these differences: physical characteristics like skin colour, national origin, linguistic community, religious community/sect (whether believers or not), caste and tribe. I will refer to discrimination and violence against people on the grounds of any of these characteristics as ‘ethnic supremacism,’ of which racism is a sub-category. It should be obvious that imperialism presupposes ethnic supremacism: the belief that the people of the country that is subordinated are in some way inferior to the people of the foreign state that dominates them.
There were three main positions in the debate. The first was articulated by those whom Eric Blanc designates as ‘borderland socialists’ from the empire’s periphery: notably Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, the Caucasus and Ukraine, as well as the firmly anti-Zionist Jewish Bund, all of whom sought to tie national liberation and the struggle against ethnic supremacism to a class struggle orientation. For example, in an environment where many socialists took an ambivalent attitude to antisemitism, the Bund called for a joint struggle of Jewish and Christian workers against antisemitic pogroms and opposed Zionist efforts to use the pogroms as a pretext to divide them. In 1900, Lenin denounced Plekhanov’s racist comments about Jews, yet, after a pogrom in 1902, Lenin himself denounced the Bund’s claim that antisemitism had penetrated the working class, despite the fact that the Social Democrats in Odessa had banned Jews from membership in order to avoid alienating antisemitic Russian workers. Only in 1903 did the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) pass a resolution calling for a resolute struggle against antisemitic pogroms. Borderland socialists also objected to the assumption that after the revolution, the state would remain centralised and Russian would continue to be the state language, as in the Tsarist empire.4
Jews were not the only ethnic group facing racism before and after the revolution. In his monograph on Engels and the ‘non-historic’ peoples, Roman Rosdolsky – chief theoretician of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine and survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was incarcerated for aiding Jews5 – develops a critique of the way this category was used by Engels during the revolutions of 1848–49 to designate certain East European peoples as counter-revolutionary by nature and doomed to extinction. In it, Rosdolsky cites a similar example from the Russian revolution, when in the cities of Ukraine in 1918–1919, it was not a rare occurrence for Red Guards to shoot inhabitants who spoke Ukrainian in public or admitted to being Ukrainian, because the Russian or Russified rank-and-file party members considered Ukrainian a ‘counter-revolutionary’ language. It was only the strenuous opposition of party leaders Lenin and Leon Trotsky to such conduct that made it possible for the Ukrainian left to form an alliance with the Bolsheviks.6 Marko Bojcun too describes complex interactions of class and ethnicity in his book The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine 1897–1918.7
The opposite position was taken by Rosa Luxemburg, who belonged to a minority faction of Polish socialists which opposed Polish independence. She tore apart the ninth point of the RSDWP programme, which said that the party demands a democratic republic whose constitution would ensure, among other things, “that all nationalities forming the state have the right to self-determination,” as being ‘foreign to the position of Marxist socialism’. She agreed with the third clause of the programme, demanding wide self-government at the local and provincial level in areas where minority ethnic communities are concentrated; the seventh clause, demanding equality before the law of all citizens regardless of sex, religion, race or nationality; and the eighth clause, saying that minority ethnic groups would be entitled to schooling in their own languages at state expense and the right to use their languages on an equal level with the state language at assemblies and all state and public functions. But after a long historical exegesis, she came to her main point:
In a class society, “the nation” as a homogeneous socio-political entity does not exist. Rather, there exist within each nation, classes with antagonistic interests and “rights”… There can be no talk of a collective and uniform will, of the self-determination of the “nation” in a society formed in such a manner. If we find in the history of modern societies “national” movements, and struggles for “national interests,” these are usually class movements of the ruling strata of the bourgeoisie, which can in any given case represent the interest of the other strata of the population only insofar as under the form of “national interests” it defends progressive forms of historical development, and insofar as the working class has not yet distinguished itself from the mass of the “nation” (led by the bourgeoisie) into an independent, enlightened political class… Social Democracy is the class party of the proletariat. Its historical task is to express the class interests of the proletariat and also the revolutionary interests of the development of capitalist society toward realizing socialism. Thus, Social Democracy is called upon to realize not the right of nations to self-determination but only the right of the working class, which is exploited and oppressed, … to self-determination.8
In other words, Luxemburg did not see national self-determination as contributing in any way to the self-determination of the proletariat or realising socialism. This is not because she supported imperialist oppression or underestimated the importance of democracy for the working class; on the contrary, already in 1900, in her pamphlet Reform or Revolution, she had said that:
If democracy has become superfluous or annoying to the bourgeoisie, it is on the contrary necessary and indispensable to the working class. It is necessary to the working class because it creates the political forms (autonomous administration, electoral rights, etc.) which will serve the proletariat as fulcrums in its task of transforming bourgeois society. Democracy is indispensable to the working class because only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task.9
Lenin started out with a very similar position to that of Luxemburg, but, after 1905, started moving closer to the position of the borderland socialists. In his reply to Luxemburg’s objection to clause 9 of the programme, published in April–June 1914, he clarified that support for national self-determination would be only in those cases where bourgeois-democratic national movements existed, and pointed out that
In Eastern Europe and Asia the period of bourgeois-democratic revolutions did not begin until 1905. The revolutions in Russia, Persia, Turkey and China, the Balkan wars – such is the chain of world events of our period in our “Orient”. And only a blind man could fail to see in this chain of events the awakening of a whole series of bourgeois-democratic national movements which strive to create nationally independent and nationally uniform states. It is precisely and solely because Russia and the neighbouring countries are passing through this period that we must have a clause in our programme on the right of nations to self-determination.10
In October 1914, in a speech delivered in Zurich, he said, ‘What Ireland was for England, Ukraine has become for Russia: exploited in the extreme, and getting nothing in return. Thus the interests of the world proletariat in general and the Russian proletariat in particular require that the Ukraine regains its state independence, since only this will permit the development of the cultural level that the proletariat needs.’ However, the Bolsheviks did not develop these insights into a coherent strategy for the oppressed peoples of the Russian empire, leading to avoidable problems during the civil war, but Lenin and Trotsky learned from their mistakes, and, by the end of 1919, were committed to a free and independent Soviet Ukraine.11 Lenin was also influenced by the young Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, who argued that the revolution in the Western imperialist countries could not succeed unless it was linked to revolutions in their colonies in the East.12
By contrast with the complete centralisation of power in the Tsarist empire and Russification of its colonies, a series of treaties in 1920–21 recognised Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland and Poland as independent states. Byelorussia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent Soviet Socialist Republics. In smaller minority ethnic enclaves, local and regional self-government and linguistic and cultural development were encouraged. On 30 December 1922, the First Congress of Soviets of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics approved the Treaty on the Formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which included the right to self-determination up to the right to secede.13
Before evaluating the positions in this debate, another clarification is necessary. In Part Two on ‘Imperialism’ in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, she laments that:
Whether in the form of a new republic or of a reformed constitutional monarchy, the state inherited as its supreme function the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality, and was supposed to act as a supreme legal institution. The tragedy of the nation-state was that the people’s rising national consciousness interfered with these functions. In the name of the will of the people, the state was forced to recognise only ‘nationals’ as citizens, to grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the national community by right of origin and fact of birth. This meant that the state was partly transformed from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation.14
‘Nation’ and ‘nationality’ here means ‘ethnic group’ and ‘ethnicity,’ and the distinction Arendt draws is between the state as guarantor of equality before the law and the state as an instrument of the dominant ethnic group, which can refuse full civil and political rights to other groups. This is indeed inevitable if the state is linked to any particular ethnic community. At best, people from subordinate ethnicities become second-class citizens suffering discrimination and exclusion, at worst, they could be subjected to ethnic cleansing or genocide. This would, by definition, be a state without equal rights for all, and therefore not a democratic republic. Uniting workers in anticapitalist struggles would face the kind of problems faced in South Africa under apartheid. Of course, ethnic supremacism can be rampant even in a democratic republic, but enshrining it in the state makes it exponentially harder to fight.
Coming back to the debate, it is important to start with the positions that all the participants share. They are all Marxist internationalists, who know that capitalism is global and can only be defeated by the working people of the world. They also agree that the working class needs democracy in order to develop the ability to carry out a socialist transformation of society, a position shared by Marx and Engels if we carry out a careful analysis of their writings on the subject.15 It is abundantly clear that Luxemburg opposes linkage of the state in the oppressed nations with any ethnic group, but, if we read carefully, it is clear that the borderland socialists and Lenin too are arguing that ‘national self-determination’ makes sense only where the people of a whole country, in all their diversity, are fighting for freedom from oppression by an imperialist state; today, the term ‘national liberation movement’ or ‘independence movement’ captures this struggle better than the old term ‘national self-determination’. They all agree that where there are enclaves of minority communities, they should have full legal equality with the majority community, linguistic and cultural rights, and rights to local and regional self-government in accordance with the other points in the social-democratic programme. So, there is a large area of overlap between the three parties.
Of course, Luxemburg is right to see nationalism as a bourgeois ideology, affirming as it does that all members of the nation have common interests – defined by the bourgeoisie – which override the common interests of workers of the nation with workers of other countries. What distinguishes her position from the other two is her assumption that the working classes of imperialist states and colonised states can unite in the struggle against capitalism without uprooting imperialism and establishing the independence of the colonies. She fails to realise that ethnic supremacism in the imperialist countries is too often shared not only by sections of the working class but even by self-professed socialists or communists, and can be replaced by respect for the agency and revolutionary potential of colonial peoples only when they have won their freedom. Paradoxical though it may seem, national independence is therefore a necessary step on the road to socialist internationalism.
What this debate reveals is that overcoming nationalism and ethnic supremacism in the working class in order to achieve socialist internationalism is by no means a simple process. Opposition to all imperialisms and support for national liberation struggles is an essential part of it. Combating ethnic supremacism in all imperialist countries is an obvious corollary of this. But what about the nationalism of oppressed peoples? Here, there is a line to be drawn between struggles to establish inclusive democracies in former colonies, which socialists should support because they provide the conditions in which working people can develop the ability to carry out a socialist transformation of society, and attempts by certain colonial elites to monopolise the state on behalf of their own ethnic groups after independence, which socialists should not support because they create enormous obstacles to working-class solidarity, not only with workers in other countries but even with workers from other ethnic groups in their own country. What makes this even more complicated is the fact that inclusive and ethnic nationalism are often intertwined.16 Rosdolsky is surely right when he writes that ‘Just as the working class cannot be socialist or revolutionary a priori, neither is it internationalist a priori … Far from being “by nature without national prejudice,” the proletariat of every land must first acquirethrough arduous effort the internationalist attitude that its general, historical interests demand from it.’17 What made this particularly important for Rosdolsky, and remains equally important for us today, is the potential for ethnic supremacism, when combined with authoritarianism, to become fascism.
From Stalin to Putin
There has been extensive Marxist debate on the characterisation of the state and relations of production in the USSR under Stalin, but much less on imperialism and racism. Yet this was one of Lenin’s greatest concerns when he wrote ‘The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomisation”’, which was part of what came to be called his ‘Last Testament’. After expressing anguish that Orjonikidze, one of Stalin’s close associates, had struck a Georgian communist who disagreed with plans to terminate Georgia’s independent status, he continued,
It is quite natural that in such circumstances the ‘freedom to secede from the union’ by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant.
[…] I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious ‘nationalist-socialism’, played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles…
Here we have an important question of principle: how is internationalism
to be understood?
In my writings on the national question I have already said that an abstract presentation of the question of nationalism in general is of no use at all. A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation and that of a small nation. In respect of the second kind of nationalism we, nationals of a big nation, have nearly always been guilty, in historic practice, of an infinite number of cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult an infinite number of times without noticing it. [He goes on to quote the racist epithets by which Ukrainians, Georgians and non-Russians in general are insulted.] …
I think that in the present instance, as far as the Georgian nation is concerned, we have a typical case in which a genuinely proletarian attitude makes profound caution, thoughtfulness and a readiness to compromise a matter of necessity for us. The Georgian [Stalin] who is neglectful of this aspect of the question, or who carelessly flings about accusations of ‘nationalist-socialism’ (whereas he himself is a real and true ‘nationalist-socialist’, and even a vulgar Great-Russian bully), violates, in substance, the interests of proletarian class solidarity, for nothing holds up the development and strengthening of proletarian class solidarity so much as national injustice…
The need to rally against the imperialists of the West, who are defending the capitalist world, is one thing. There can be no doubt about that and it would be superfluous for me to speak about my unconditional approval of it. It is another thing when we ourselves lapse… into imperialist attitudes towards oppressed nationalities, thus undermining all our principled sincerity, all our principled defence of the struggle against imperialism. But the morrow of world history will be a day when the awakening peoples oppressed by imperialism are finally aroused and the decisive long and hard struggle for their liberation begins.18
Lenin’s last testament, dictated while he was suffering from the aftermath of two strokes, was suppressed by Stalin, which is not surprising since, among other things, it recommends the removal of Stalin as General Secretary. What comes across is (a) Lenin’s concern that there should be no basis for allegations of double standards in the Soviet Union’s domination of its own colonies while advocating the liberation of Western colonies, and (b) his genuine horror at the imperialist, racist behaviour of Russians and Russified colonials like Stalin and Orjonikidze towards non-Russians. He uses a memorable term – ‘Great-Russian chauvinism,’ which, from the context, sounds like the Russian version of White supremacism – and throws back at Stalin the label he uses to persecute borderland socialists – ‘nationalist socialist,’ i.e., a nationalist pretending to be a socialist – and accuses him of being a racist (Great-Russian) bully.
Lenin’s apprehensions were well-founded. After his death in January 1924 and a brief interregnum, Stalin concentrated absolute power in his own hands, exterminated the rest of the Bolshevik leadership, crushed all dissidence, and launched genocidal assaults on the colonial peoples of the Russian empire, once more Russifying their countries and bringing them under the rule of Moscow. The secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin Pact signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov on 23 August 1939 effectively made Stalin a Nazi collaborator supplying the Nazis with food and raw materials in return for the go-ahead to recolonise Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and part of Poland. It ended only when Hitler abrogated it by invading the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. The post-war Yalta Agreement allowed him to set up Moscow-dominated regimes in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and later East Germany. Stalin’s totalitarian state ruling Russia and its colonies was distinguished not only by its extreme brutality but also by a systematic war on the truth, analogous to the Nazi use of the big lie repeated over and over again.19
There is an unmistakeable convergence with fascism in all this, as Hannah Arendt points out in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Indeed, Stalin started collaborating with the Nazis even before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, sending hundreds of communists to be incarcerated and killed by the Nazis while killing thousands of them himself.20 Snyder describes how Stalin covered up his collaboration with Hitler with the fiction that the ‘Great Patriotic War,’ as he called it, started in 1941, and concealed the fact that Jewish civilians – less than 2 percent of the Soviet population while Russians were more than half – were killed in greater numbers than Russian civilians, thereby creating the impression that Russians were the main victims of the Nazis. Beginning in 1948, Soviet Jews were denounced as ‘Jewish nationalists’ and ‘rootless cosmopolitans,’ demoted, arrested, sent to the Gulag, tortured and executed.21 In fact, the Nazis referred to Ukrainians too in racist terms, as ‘Afrikaner’ and ‘Neger’; during their occupation, ‘roughly 3.5 million Ukrainian civilians, mostly women and children, were killed, and again, roughly 3 million Ukrainians died in the Red Army fighting against the Wehrmacht.’22 These numbers do not include Ukrainians – including Ukrainian Jews like Volodymyr Zelensky’s grandfather – who fought against the Nazis and survived the war. In other words, Soviet Ukrainians were targeted by the Nazis for extermination, and also played a disproportionately large role in fighting against the Nazis, but these facts were concealed by the assumption that ‘Soviet’ meant ‘Russian’.
However, the ideology Stalin espoused in public was Leninism. It was a twisted version – for example, he declared the Soviet Union to be a socialist state, whereas Lenin believed socialism could only be established internationally – but, as Putin complained, he retained elements of Leninist policy, like the right to self-determination, in the constitution. This was necessary to establish his claim to being Lenin’s rightful heir. Moreover, while Stalin and his successors retained a vice-like grip over Russia’s colonies and even invaded and occupied Afghanistan in 1979, they were able to pose as anti-imperialists by supporting liberation struggles in countries colonised by Western imperialism, thus gaining influence in these countries. It would, therefore, not be accurate to call the Stalinist regime fascist, despite the fact that it shared many characteristics with fascism.
Khrushchev and Brezhnev too used Lenin to bolster their claims to leadership, but unlike them, Mikhail Gorbachev was a genuine Lenin scholar, attempting to align his own policies of democratisation through glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) of Soviet society with the revolutionary Lenin, the Lenin who pursued the truth, the internationalist who encouraged development of the languages and cultures of Soviet peoples, and the Lenin who was willing to learn from past mistakes and correct them.23 Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan and did not intervene when the Berlin wall came down. He crafted a treaty for a more equal and democratic Soviet Union, but two days before it was due to be signed, hardliners staged a coup against him, put him under house arrest and cut off his communications. There was massive popular opposition to the coup and Boris Yeltsin put himself at the head of it. The coup collapsed and Gorbachev was freed, but he was side-lined by Yeltsin, who presided over the disintegration of the Soviet Union into fifteen independent republics, including the Russian Federation.24
Yeltsin chose Putin to be his successor in 1999, at a time when Yeltsin’s own popularity was in single digits and Putin was the powerful but unknown FSB director. Putin’s way of gaining popularity remains relevant. The Russian Federation still included colonies within it; one of them was Chechnya, which had declared independence in November 1991. Russian troops invaded in 1994, and in an operation directed by the FSB carpet-bombed the capital Grozny and killed the elected president, but guerrilla resistance continued. The new elected president signed a peace deal with Yeltsin, postponing determination of Chechnya’s status. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings in Moscow were blamed on Chechen terrorists but later were found to have been orchestrated by the FSB; they formed the pretext for a ruthless ‘war on terror’ against Chechen civilians including torture, systematic rape and mass murder, murder of its second elected president, and installation of a brutal puppet dictatorship allied to Putin. This was accompanied by a crackdown on human rights defenders and investigative journalists in Russia itself, while witnesses to and investigators of the apartment bombings were assassinated one by one.25 Putin moved rapidly to rebuild an authoritarian state, appointing former KGB and army allies to the security services and expanding their remit, rewriting the rules to give himself the power to appoint and dismiss judges, and gaining new powers to remove and appoint governors and dissolve regional legislatures, until ‘the security services answered solely to the Kremlin. And at the top of the new vertical power sat Vladimir Putin.’26
The Chechen playbook was repeated in Syria after Putin joined the war there in September 2015, the only difference being that Putin’s brutal ally – Bashar al-Assad – was already in power but facing imminent overthrow by a democratic uprising.27 And it gives us a clue what Putin was referring to when he quoted the lyrics from a punk-rock song, ‘Sleeping Beauty in a coffin,’ to tell Ukrainians, ‘Whether you like or not, put up with it, my beauty’:28the fate of Chechnya is what he intended for Ukraine when his armed forces invaded and headed straight to Kyiv in 2022. Apart from Assad, Putin also supports right-wing dictator Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, in return for his regime hosting a satellite monitoring system for intelligence gathering, as well as free use of its ports.29 His Wagner paramilitary has worked for and committed war crimes alongside would-be dictator Khalifa Hafter in Libya,30 and has moved into Sub-Saharan Africa in a big way, backing authoritarian dictators and military coups and committing horrific human rights abuses in return for gold and diamond mining concessions to a related Russian company.31 The left has rightly characterised such practices, when carried out by the West, as imperialism.
Unlike Stalin, who concealed his counter-revolution behind the rhetoric of Leninism, Putin wants to dispense with the whole legacy of the Russian revolution and the ‘odious and utopian fantasies it inspired’. Stalin saw himself in Ivan the Terrible, the tsar who expanded the Russian empire and concentrated absolute power in his hands, and ordered Sergei Eisenstein to make a film about him; but he was angry that Eisenstein portrayed Ivan’s oprichniks – whom Stalin saw as the equivalent of his own secret police – as resembling the Ku Klux Klan, the epitome of American fascism.32 By contrast Putin, who also sees himself in Ivan the Terrible and built a statue of him,33 has no problem linking up with the Ku Klux Klan and other neo-fascists in the US;34 indeed, as Anton Shekhovtsov documents, he has links with neo-fascists throughout Europe.35 Shekhovtsov describes this as a ‘marriage of convenience,’ but there is a much deeper alignment here. Rafia Zakaria points out that ‘Putin’s Russian, or “russkii,” nation is… centered on White, Slavic ethnic Russian superiority’ and endorses discrimination, hate-speech and violence against ethnic minorities and immigrants. She concludes that ‘There are direct parallels here between Putin’s decades-long efforts to elevate white Russians as the leaders of his world order and Hitler’s pursuit of similar ideas of racial purity to realize his own “great nation.”’36 The difference is that Putin seeks to exterminate ethnic minorities only if they resist being subordinated.
The resemblance to Hitler’s ideology is not accidental: Putin is an admirer of the Russian anti-Bolshevik fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who described the ‘spiritual quality’ of Russians as lying in their love for ‘God, motherland and the national vozhd’ [supreme leader], and in 1933 wrote that the ‘spirit’ of ‘German national-socialism’ aligns it ‘with Italian fascism’ and with ‘the spirit of the Russian White movement as well.’37 Putin’s advisor Aleksandr Dugin strategised Ilyin’s orientation for the post-Soviet Russian state in his 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics, which became required reading in the General Staff Academy and other educational institutions. In it he advocates the recreation of a vast Eurasian empire [the Tsarist Empire/USSR] in which Orthodox Christian ethnic Russians would occupy a privileged position, and outlines a scheme for overcoming ‘Atlanticism’ and establishing global dominance, parts of which have been surprisingly successful. They include destabilising the US by supporting ‘extremist, racist, and sectarian groups’ within it and simultaneously supporting ‘isolationist tendencies’ [Trump]; Eurasian expansion into Latin America; absorbing the Balkans, especially Serbia and ‘Serbian Bosnia’; cutting Britain off from the rest of Europe [Brexit] and ‘Finlandising’ the rest with a strategic use of Russia’s raw material resources [oil, gas]; forming a ‘Grand Alliance’ with Armenia, the ‘Empire of Iran’ and Libya to counter Saudi Arabia and especially Turkey, which should be destabilized by encouraging minorities like the Kurds (whom he characterises as ‘Aryan’ like the Armenians and Iranians) to rebel [links with the PKK]. India and Japan are seen as allies in Russia’s efforts to contain China: the least successful of Dugin’s recommendations.38
In his pursuit of ‘God’, Putin has embraced the fundamentalist Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, passing misogynist and anti-LGBT+ legislation in accordance with his views. It is obvious why such ideas have made Putin an icon for White supremacists and Christian fundamentalists in the US and Europe: he shares their extreme right-wing rejection of democracy, socialism and feminism.39 In an online presentation, Russian socialist Ilya Budraitskis argued that 20th-century fascists needed a mass movement to smash a strong labour movement and popular social-democratic parties before they could capture state power, and could therefore be characterised as ‘fascism from below’. By contrast, Putin was able to come to power through elections and then transform the state by undermining democratic institutions (for example free and fair elections) and taking away democratic rights (like freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly) – a process that has more or less been completed after the invasion of Ukraine – which could be characterised as ‘fascism from above’.40 Like 20th-century fascism, it makes use of the military, police, secret police and neo-Nazi stormtroopers (whom Putin strategically unleashes and then reins in, instead of allowing them to get too powerful and then slaughtering them like Hitler) and paramilitaries both in Russia and abroad; it uses censorship and state-controlled mass media to propagate the ‘big lie’ (e.g., ‘there is no war in Ukraine, only a special military operation to de-Nazify it’) but also uses methods that were not available to Hitler and Mussolini, such as pro-Kremlin websites, cyberwarfare and troll factories.41 If we identify the core characteristics of fascism as ethnic supremacism, extreme authoritarianism (rejection of democracy), hostility to socialism and communism, social conservatism (hostility to feminism and LGBT+ rights), the cult of the leader and constant propagation of lies, Putin ticks all the boxes.
What this means is that the situation in 2022 is not a throwback to the Cold War as so many commentators have assumed, but more resembles World War II. Perhaps we should recognise it as World War III, a war between ethnic supremacist authoritarianism and democracy, which has engulfed every country in the world, not least the US, the UK and countries of the EU. Ukrainians, who started out fighting for national independence as a democratic republic, have had the misfortune to be thrust to the front lines of a war against genocidal fascism for the second time in living memory. It is true there are Ukrainian fascists, but they are tiny minority compared to the population as a whole waging a people’s war, whereas fascists dominate the Russian side. For socialist internationalists, it is therefore imperative to support a Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat, without which there will be no peace. This includes calling for arms for Ukrainians to defend themselves and sanctions to force Russia to end its aggression, because a victory for national liberation and democracy would create conditions for the advance of the working-class struggle, whereas the victory of imperialist expansionism and fascism would constitute an enormous setback for the working people of the world. Given this context, no one who fails to support the heroic struggle of the Ukrainian people against Putin’s neo-fascism can claim to be a socialist or on the left, because they support imperialism against national liberation, authoritarianism against democracy, barbarism against socialism.
Reactions to the war in Ukraine
While the Russian and Belarussian military forces were massed around Ukraine, a slew of Western commentators blamed NATO’s induction of East European countries, thereby encroaching on Russia’s ‘sphere of influence’, for the crisis. In their worldview, only imperialist powers matter. As Lithuanian socialists explained, the drive for NATO membership actually came from small countries afraid of being re-colonised by Russia,42but such commentators do not care if these countries are swallowed up by imperialism. Their suggestions for a roll-back of NATO to its pre-1997 position is echoed by pseudo-anti-imperialists who support their favourite imperialist and his brutal allies and come out with slogans like ‘Hands off Russia,’ some going so far as to call for blocking arms supplies to Ukraine.43 (By the same logic, the left should have called for Russian workers to block Soviet arms supplies to Vietnam!) Such demands, if implemented, would allow a fascist Putin regime to conquer and rule other East European countries after raping, torturing and killing thousands of civilians in Ukraine, wiping out democracy and setting back the class struggle by decades. They are therefore unambiguously counter-revolutionary and amount to collaboration with imperialism and fascism.
As for the argument that ‘we have to oppose only our own imperialism,’ this makes no sense for internationalists who understand that capitalism can only be defeated by the working people of the world. There may not be much we can do to support the anti-authoritarian struggles of peoples who are not oppressed by our own state, but, at the very least, we can seek and tell the truth about them, and avoid conceptual frameworks based on double standards. The indifference of these people to the bombing of Palestinians in Syria44 and now the bombing of Palestinians in Ukraine45 makes it doubtful that they really care even about Palestinian liberation, unlike Palestinian activists who have highlighted the similarities between the struggles of Palestinians, Syrians and Ukrainians.46 This stance is, above all, a betrayal of the incredibly courageous Russian anti-fascists, socialists, feminists, anti-imperialists and anti-war activists, one of whom said, ‘I now understand how the anti-fascists felt during the Third Reich’.47 Socialists have an obligation to oppose all oppression, regardless of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim.
Unfortunately, they are not the only ones to take retrograde positions on these two struggles (Syria, Ukraine). Artem Chapeye, a socialist who had translated Noam Chomsky’s work into Ukrainian, was aghast at Chomsky’s repetition of Kremlin lies to the effect that the Maidan uprising of 2014 ‘amounted to a coup with US support that… led Russia to annex Crimea, mainly to protect its sole warm-water port and naval base’.48 Syrian Marxist Yassin al-Haj Saleh, who had translated Chomsky’s work into Arabic, was equally critical of Chomsky’s statement that Putin’s intervention in Syria was not imperialist because ‘supporting a government is not imperialism’ – even if that ‘government’ is a dictatorship about to fall to a democratic uprising, and supporting it involves killing 23,000 civilians in six years and getting a port and military bases in return!49 (By that logic, the US intervention in Vietnam was not imperialism, because it was supporting the government of South Vietnam.) Not that Chomsky has any good words to say for Putin or Assad, but his endorsement of the Putin regime’s lies is also a form of support. And the shoddy scholarship of this eminent scholar when he relies on Kremlin propaganda and ill-informed Western commentators to come to his conclusions rather than the work of much more knowledgeable Syrians, Ukrainians and Russians is indeed disappointing, along with his inability to understand that Putin and Assad can manufacture consent for their monstrous crimes by pouring out a constant stream of lies on their captive media and social media while incarcerating and killing anyone who tells the truth. Most depressing of all is his Orientalist portrayal of non-Western peoples struggling against Putin and his allies as dupes of the West and devoid of all agency.
We now have some answers to the question we started with: how do we overcome divisions among working people resulting from ethnic supremacism and nationalism? First, oppose all imperialisms, because apart from their roots in ethnic supremacism they involve national oppression. Second, support struggles for national independence that are predominantly democratic; more authoritarian ones should receive only critical support provided they represent people of all ethnicities. Ethnic definitions of nationhood should never be supported. On the other hand, a socialist programme has to include the rights of ethnic minorities to full equality before the law and their right to have their own language and culture, as well as local and regional self-government, which is important in any democracy but even more so for enclaves where minorities predominate. If socialists are serious about the interests of working people everywhere, then they have to foreground struggles for democracy, which are also struggles against various forms of discrimination and persecution, and this not only in their own countries but in terms of solidarity with the class struggle of workers of all countries. Finally, in a world where hostility to refugees, immigrants and ‘foreigners’ is rampant, internationalists stand for open borders.
Image: "Free Palestine, free Ukraine, free Wi-Fi!" byin_ar23 is licensed underCC BY-SA 2.0.
- 1. Vladimir Putin, ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation,’ 21 February 2022. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dlRDC7WGq_4J:en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0
- 2. Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) pp. 25; 32–41; 75–77; 134–35; 227–35; 268–69.
- 3. NBC News, ‘Putin: Soviet collapse a “genuine tragedy”’, 26 April 2005. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7632057
- 4. Eric Blanc, ‘Anti-imperial Marxism: Borderland socialists and the evolution of Bolshevism on national liberation,’ International Socialist Review, Issue No.100, Spring 2016. https://isreview.org/issue/100/anti-imperial-marxism/index.html
- 5. ‘Auschwitz 75th Anniversary: A memoir by Roman Rosdolsky,’ (First published in Oberona in 1956), https://ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org/2020/01/27/auschwitz-70th-anniversary-a-memoir-by-roman-rosdolsky/
- 6. Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the “Nonhistoric Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848, translated and edited by John-Paul Himka, Special Issue of Critique 18–19, 1986, p.165.
- 7. Marko Bojkun, The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine 1897–1918, (Leiden: Brill Publishers) 2021. The introduction is available at https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/workers-movement-and-national-question-ukraine-1897-1918-introduction
- 8. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,’ Chapter 1 of The National Question, 1909. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1909/national-question/ch01.htm
- 9. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Reform or Revolution,’ Chapter 8, 1900. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch08.htm
- 10. V.I. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,’ Chapter 3, April-June 1914. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/ch03.htm
- 11. Zbigniew Kowalewski, ‘For the independence of Soviet Ukraine,’ https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/for-independence-soviet-ukraine
- 12. Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism, (Chicago: Haymarket Books), pp.59–61 (includes references).
- 13. Urs W. Saxer, ‘The Transformation of the Soviet Union: From a Socialist Federation to a Commonwealth of Independent States,’ Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review, Vol.14 No.3, 7.1.1992, pp.581–715.
- 14. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt Publishing Company) 1976, p.230.
- 15. Rohini Hensman, ‘Marx and Engels on Socialism and How to Achieve It: A Critical Evaluation,’ in Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson (eds.) An Inheritance for Our Times: Principles and Politics of Democratic Socialism, (New York: OR Books) 2020, pp.131–147.
- 16. Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, is an example of ethnic nationalism in a former colony, leading to a devastating civil war and the decimation of a once-strong labour movement; see Rohini Hensman, ‘Post-war Sri Lanka: Exploring the path not taken,’ Dialectical Anthropology 39, 2015, pp.273–293.
- 17. Rosdolsky 1986, pp.182–183, emphasis in original. The quotation which Rosdolsky is disagreeing with is from F. Engels, ‘Das Fest der Nationen in London,’ 1845.
- 18. V.I. Lenin, 1922, ‘The question of nationalities or “autonomisation”’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm
- 19. Rohini Hensman, Indefensible, pp.35–37, 63 (references included).
- 20. Alex de Jong, ‘Stalin handed hundreds of communists over to Hitler,’ Jacobin, 22 August 2021, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/08/hitler-stalin-pact-nazis-communist-deportation-soviet
- 21. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Penguin Random House) 2010, pp.339–351, 363–368.
- 22. Timothy Snyder, ‘Germans must remember the truth about Ukraine – for their own sake,’ Eurozine, July 7, 2017 https://www.eurozine.com/germans-must-remember-the-truth-about-ukraine-for-their-own-sake/
- 23. Christopher Smart, ‘Gorbachev’s Lenin: The myth in service to “Perestroika”’, Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol.23, No.1 (Spring 1990), pp.5–21.
- 24. Bridget Kendall, ‘New light shed on anti-Gorbachev coup,’ BBC News, 18 August 2011. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-14560280
- 25. Rohini Hensman, Indefensible, pp.66–71 (including references.)
- 26. Chris Miller, Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press) 2018, pp.26–27.
- 27. Jackson Diehl, ‘Putin is going by a familiar playbook in Syria,’ Business Insider, 12 October 2015. https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-is-going-by-a-familiar-playbook-in-syria-2015-10?IR=T
- 28. Michele A. Berdy, ‘A Russian Sleeping Beauty,’ The Moscow Times, 11 February 2022. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/02/11/a-russian-sleeping-beauty-a76338
- 29. Octavio Enrìquez, ‘Ortega, the “anti-imperialist”, surrenders to Russian interests,’ Confidencial, I March 2022. https://www.confidencial.com.ni/english/ortega-the-anti-imperialist-surrenders-to-russian-interests/
- 30. Al-Monitor Staff, ‘Intel: EU sanctions suspected head of Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group,’ Al-Monitor, October 15, 2020 https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2020/10/eu-sanction-russia-wagner-yevgeniy-prigozhin.html
- 31. Peter Fabricius, ‘Wagner’s dubious operatics in CAR and beyond,’ Institute for Security Studies, 21 January 2022. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/wagners-dubious-operatics-in-car-and-beyond
- 32. Alexey Timofeychev, ‘“Disgusting thing!” Why Stalin couldn’t accept Eisenstein’s sequel of “Ivan the Terrible”’, Russia Beyond, 9 January 2018. https://www.rbth.com/history/327217-ivan-terrible-stalin-eisenstein
- 33. Howard Amos, ‘Russia falls back in love with Ivan the Terrible, Politico, 31 October 2016. https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-falls-back-in-love-with-ivan-the-terrible-statue-monument-oryol/
- 34. Natasha Bertrand, ‘“A model for civilization”: Putin’s Russia has emerged as “a beacon for nationalists” and the American alt-right,’ Business Insider, December 10, 2016. https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/a-model-for-civilization-putins-russia-has-emerged-as-a-beacon-for-nationalists-and-the-american-alt-right/articleshow/55913352.cms
- 35. Anton Shekhovtsov, ‘The Kremlin’s marriage of convenience with the European far right,’ OpenDemocracy, 28 April 2014. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/kremlins-marriage-of-convenience-with-european-far-right/
- 36. Rafia Zakaria, ‘White Russian Empire: The racist myths behind Vladimir Putin’s power grabs,’ The Forum, 10 March 2022. https://www.aapf.org/theforum-white-russian-empire
- 37. Anton Barbashin, ‘Ivan Ilyin: A fashionable fascist,’ Riddle, 20 April 2018. https://ridl.io/en/ivan-ilyin-a-fashionable-fascist/
- 38. John B. Dunlop, ‘Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics,’ Stanfod: The Europe Center, 2004. https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics
- 39. Carl Davidson and Bill Fletcher Jr., ‘Putin is attempting to center Russia as a hub of the global right wing,’ Portside, 30 March 2022. https://portside.org/2022-03-30/putin-attempting-center-russia-hub-global-right-wing
- 40. Presentation at an event called ‘Inside the Aggressor,’ 27 March 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpyzmIg7v5g Budraitskis’s presentation starts at 38.00.
- 41. Alexander Zemlianichenko, ‘Putin’s fascists: the Kremlin’s long history of cultivating homegrown neo-Nazis,’ The Conversation, 21 March 2022.
- 42. Alexander Zemlianichenko, ‘Putin’s fascists: the Kremlin’s long history of cultivating homegrown neo-Nazis,’ The Conversation, 21 March 2022.
- 43. Arguments pour la lutte sociale, ‘A bas l’union sacrée pour désarmer les Ukrainiens! Des arme pour la resistance ukrainienne!’ 3 April 2022. https://aplutsoc.org/2022/04/03/a-bas-lunion-sacree-pour-desarmer-les-ukrainiens-des-armes-pour-la-resistance-ukrainienne/
- 44. Budour Hassan, ‘A late obituary for the capital of the Palestinian diaspora,’ OpenDemocracy, 22 June 2018. https://www.opendemocracy.net/north-africa-west-asia/budour-hassan/yarmouk-late-obituary-for-capital-of-palestinian-diaspora
- 45. Amany Mahmoud, ‘Palestinians in Ukraine fear another exodus,’ Al-Monitor, 5 March 2022. https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2022/03/palestinians-ukraine-fear-another-exodus#ixzz7NBHFAONf
- 46. Budour Hassan, ‘Palestine and the Syrian revolution,’ ZNet, 25 November 2013. https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/palestine-and-the-syrian-revolution-by-budour-hassan/ ; Ghufrane Mounir, ‘Gigi Hadid to donate fashion month earnings to aid people in Ukraine and Palestine,’ Middle East Eye, 7 March 2022. https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/ukraine-palestine-gigi-hadid-fashion-earnings-donated-aid
- 47. Andrew Roth and Pjotr Sauer, ‘“Our voices are louder if we stay”: Russian anti-war activists refuse to flee,’ The Guardian, 27 March 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/27/our-voices-are-louder-if-we-stay-russian-anti-war-activists-refuse-to-flee
- 48. Johnny Diamond, ‘A Ukrainian translator of Noam Chomsky responds to his recent comments on the Russian invasion,’ The Hub, 3 March 2022. https://lithub.com/a-ukrainian-translator-of-noam-chomsky-responds-to-his-recent-comments-on-the-russian-invasion/ Chapeye is quoting from Chomsky’s comments in this blogpost: https://chomsky.info/20211223/
- 49. Yassin al-Haj Saleh, ‘Chomsky is no friend of the Syrian revolution,’ New Lines Magazine, 15 March 2022. https://newlinesmag.com/review/chomsky-is-no-friend-of-the-syrian-revolution/ Saleh is quoting from an interview given by Chomsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VumemUMSIBM
Ukraine 1917: Socialism and Nationalism in a World Turned Upside Down
A Review of The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine, 1897–1918, by Marko Bojcun
Simon Pirani
Honorary Professor, University of Durham, UK
simon.pirani@durham.ac.uk
Marko Bojcun, (2021) The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine, 1897–1918, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
October 1917: the climax of the revolution we have always called ‘Russian’, but was so much more than that. In Petrograd, the old empire’s capital, the provisional government that had ruled since February collapsed and Bolshevik-led workers’ and soldiers’ soviets (councils) took control. In Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, power fell to the Tsentral’na Rada (central council) that had, since the summer, pressed for Ukrainian autonomy within the Russian state.
The Rada, like all the parliamentary institutions emerging in the empire’s ruins, sat atop a furious movement – in the army and the countryside as much as the towns – that was beyond its control. In Ukraine, this movement sought an autonomous national government, but in a soviet, not parliamentary form.
In the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, Marko Bojcun writes,
there grew a powerful tendency, cutting across party lines, to support the formation of a government of Ukraine as long as it was based on the councils locally and nationally, and on the condition it maintained solidarity with the Russian Soviet government. It was not a question of simply adapting the Russian experience, but of attempting to build with indigenous social forces on the basis of the institutions of popular representation that the revolution in Ukraine had so far created. (p. 206.)
A Review of Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882–1917) by Eric Blanc
Ronald Grigor Suny
William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan, USA
rgsuny@umich.edu
Eric Blanc, (2021) Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882–1917), Leiden: Brill.
In the decade after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the history of Russian and Soviet labour and Social Democracy, once a subject of prodigious academic research, fell into a memory hole, as historians turned toward other topics. An engaged scholar and activist, Eric Blanc has not only revived exploration of a neglected subject but has delved deeply into the history of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and widened his lens to include the too often overlooked revolutionary Marxists of the borderlands of the tsarist empire. Blanc writes simultaneously sympathetically to the aims and aspirations of the revolutionary socialists but critically as well, which, from a Marxist perspective, following in the tradition of the founder of that approach, ought to be the essential methodology of empirical and theoretical investigations. Revolutionary socialist movements were powerful, even dominant, emancipatory efforts in the non-Russian peripheries. In Georgia, Finland, Latvia, Poland, and elsewhere, they were, to all intents and purposes, the national-liberation movements of the first two decades of the twentieth century.
As a historical sociologist, Blanc uses the natural experiment provided by the diversity of the tsarist political structure – in which the autonomy of the Grand Duchy of Finland allowed a legal labour movement and elections, a situation starkly different from the repression of independent politics in the rest of the empire – to argue that ‘successful insurrectionary movements [like the Bolsheviks] generally only arise under conditions of authoritarianism’, while ‘anti-capitalist rupture under parliamentary conditions [as in Finland] requires the prior election of a workers’ party to the state’s democratic institutions’ (p. 7). He then contends that the usual view that parliamentarianism inevitably leads to socialist moderation is belied by the experience of the Finnish Social Democrats, who became more militant after the revolution of 1905. His book, thus, advances beyond the usual Russocentrism and credence in Bolshevik exceptionalism evident in much of earlier scholarship and uses the comparative cases of borderland socialists to explain strategic choices as well as victory and defeat in insurrectionary moments.
Superbly equipped with linguistic skills in eight languages, and dedicated to reading in archival and published sources, Blanc brings a passion and energy that enables him to mine diligently the documentary evidence for his exhaustive exploration of the pre-Revolutionary workers’ movements in Russia. In line with work by Lars Lih and Erik van Ree, he connects the politics of tsarist Russia’s Social Democrats to Karl Kautsky, who, he claims, has been caricatured in Western liberal, and even Marxist, accounts as a reformist rather than a revolutionary. Kautsky’s commentary on the Erfurt Programme was a foundational text, the window into Marxism for Latvian, Ukrainian, Jewish, and other young activists. In parliamentary regimes, socialists could exploit the opportunity to build a mass workers’ party and work through available institutions and, as occurred in Germany, win large representations, even a majority, in the legislature in order to be ready for the revolutionary rupture with capitalism. Such a road to power did not exist in Russia proper, but it did in Finland, where the Social Democrats implemented Kautsky’s strategy. As Blanc puts it, ‘Both Kautsky and his peers under Tsarism insisted that Marxism was a method, not a dogma; tactics and strategy, therefore, always had to be based on a hard-nosed appraisal of a concrete situation’ (p. 14). Until the German Social Democrat appeared to take an equivocal position on his country’s entry into the Great War, Vladimir Lenin considered Kautsky the epitome of Marxist orthodoxy, after which he referred to him as a ‘renegade’ who once had been a Marxist.
Basing his analysis in the social context of late tsarism rather than giving us a simple intellectual history, Blanc contends that it was not Kautsky’s moderation but the entrenched bureaucracy of the SPD that determined its accommodation to the imperial regime in Germany. In Russia, on the other hand, instead of the integrative pressures of bourgeois democracy to work with liberals and the middle classes, autocracy’s erasure of alternative political possibilities and the absence of political outlets and solidified labour organisations led socialist parties to adopt intransigent positions vis-à-vis the regime. There was no other game in town. ‘At the turn of the century, political nationalism was extremely weak, Russian populism [peasant-oriented socialism] had virtually collapsed, and strong liberal-democratic currents were absent’ (p. 37). While Bolsheviks maintained their antipathy to collaborating with the liberals, Mensheviks, Georgian and Ukrainian SDs, and more moderate Marxists after the failure of the 1905 revolution sought alliances with liberals and even, in some cases, with nationalists. This was the great strategic divide that would lead into the final fatal schism in 1917. The Finnish Social Democrats were in a unique position, given Finland’s autonomy within the empire and the relative freedom that they enjoyed. The Finnish Marxists had their share of conciliationists and intransigents but, generally, tended toward party unity rather than schism and often sought cooperation with other parties within Finland. Blanc maintains that, after 1905, the party grew more militant, and while that is certainly true of important elements within Finnish Social Democracy, most historians of the movement, and Blanc’s own evidence, demonstrate that relative moderation characterised the party well into 1917. This posture conforms with Blanc’s principal argument that where parliamentarianism was possible, socialist parties tended to be more moderate, while in states where such institutions and possibilities for open organisation did not exist, as in Russia proper, socialist parties were more militantly revolutionary. In my view, he overestimates the radicalism of the Finnish Social Democrats, who were deeply divided right up to their fateful, in fact fatal, decision in January 1918 to make an armed bid for power.
The first Marxist party in the empire, founded in 1882, was the Polish ‘Proletariat’ Party, about which Norman Naimark produced a ground-breaking and comprehensive monograph in 1979. Jewish parties organised before the Russian and most others, and by 1905 significant Marxist parties worked among Latvians, Finns, Georgians, Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, and others. Muslims were latecomers but joined other parties or set up committees and organisations like Hummet, founded by Caucasian Muslims. The non-Russian parties, like Rosa Luxemburg’s Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPIL) and the Jewish Bund, were critical of Lenin’s notion of a centralised political party, and most non-Russian socialists did not accept his idea of a post-revolutionary Russian state with only regional rather than national cultural autonomy. Except for the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) of Józef Piłsudski and a few small parties, they were not for separation from Russia but wanted a federal structure that recognised ethnic nationality. Only in January 1918, at a moment when Russia was splintering into separatist states, did Lenin come around and accept both territorial national cultural autonomy and federalism as the basis for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and, later, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Still, Bolsheviks were attractive to radical non-Russians given Lenin’s uncompromising support for national self-determination to the point of separation and his party’s stance in 1917 as ‘the empire-wide political current most supportive of the demands of dominated national groups’ (p. 65).
Blanc’s touchstone for understanding revolutionary Social Democracy in Russia is the evolving strategy of proletarian hegemony, that is, the original Plekhanovian synthesis which argued that, in the absence of a powerful liberal bourgeoisie in tsarist Russia, the working class would have to exercise leadership in the expected bourgeois-democratic revolution. This strategy was accepted by almost all Marxist leaders in Russia up to the winter of 1905, when the defeat of the December insurrection in Moscow led Mensheviks and others to contend that militance had led to the defection of the bourgeois liberals and that Social Democrats must moderate their tactics and seek an alliance with them. Blanc shows that not only the Russian but the Georgian Mensheviks, along with the Jewish Bund, the PPS-Revolutionary Faction, the Ukrainian USDRP, to an extent, and other peripheral parties adopted this more moderate stance to the chagrin of Lenin, who was appalled by class collaboration and banked on the peasantry instead of the bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks were joined in their stance by the Latvian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (LSDSP), the SDKPIL, the PPS-Left, and many of the Finnish Social Democrats.
A distinction between the practice of historical sociologists and that of some overly empirical historians appears to be that the former tends to see the forest while the latter often gets lost in the trees. But heeding Marx’s formulation of the agency-versus-structure problem – ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ – Blanc’s analyses combine both structural and actor-centred factors. ‘The divergent trajectories of socialist organisations across the empire after 1905’, he writes, ‘are hard to explain without taking into account the political choices made by party leaders, especially following the first Russian Revolution’s defeat’ (p. 198). Once those choices of strategy were made, however, they remained in place well into the next revolution and determined which side of the barricades a party would find itself during and after October 1917. As Blanc even more pointedly asserts, ‘the result of the revolutionary struggle was by no means preordained by the social structure. Deep social crisis, state collapse, and labour insurgency were necessary but insufficient conditions for anti-capitalist rupture in imperial Russia. At least one other factor was needed: socialist parties that were sufficiently influential, radical, and tactically flexible to help the working-class majority effectively unite to break with capitalist rule’ (p. 222). Bolsheviks in the two Russian capitals, Petrograd and Moscow, proved to be ‘sufficiently influential, radical, and tactically flexible’ to exploit the deep social divisions that widened through 1917 to gain vital support among urban workers and soldiers to take and hold power. I should note that Blanc’s focus is so sharply on the workers that he misses discussing at all the important role of the soldiers, men with guns, without which the Bolsheviks could never have taken power. Both the February and the October Revolution were worker and soldier revolutions, and it is regrettable that Blanc notes in his bibliography only Allan Wildman’s first book on the origins of Russian Social Democracy but neglects to mention his magisterial and indispensable two volumes on the soldiers in 1917.
Blanc is very critical of the existing scholarship on Russian Social Democracy, finding fault with many who have made significant contributions to the literature. His aim is to provide socialists in the present and future with possible strategies for making the needed rupture with capitalism. ‘The main reason’, he says, ‘why there has never been a socialist revolution in an industrial democracy is not that socialists have lacked resolve, patience, radical leaders, or grand strategies. Capitalism has survived primarily because the power of employers, combined with the intractable strategic dilemmas facing leftists under capitalist democracies, makes winning socialism very difficult…. Workers, above all, need to dramatically scale up their organised power’ (p. 315). While he shows that Marxists often differ on strategies, Blanc identifies the correct strategy with what he labels ‘orthodox Marxism’, that is, the position of Kautsky, which expounded flexibility while always keeping the need for revolution in mind. The Bolsheviks got it right by sticking to a strategy of working-class hegemony, that is, rejecting collaboration with the liberals and the bourgeoisie. Mensheviks and other ‘class collaborationists’ broke with the Social-Democratic strategy that rejected alliances with the liberal bourgeoisie after 1905. Moreover, moderate socialists generally turned inward and neglected the importance of the international and anti-colonial revolution that Kautsky emphasised.
Blanc holds up Finland as an example where parliamentarianism spawned a radical, not an accommodationist, socialist movement, a ‘long-overlooked example’ of ‘the potential viability of a non-insurrectionary strategy for building working-class power and moving toward anti-capitalist rupture’ (p. 407). But, in my research and reading, much of his story, as well as the research of others, indicates that moderation and a sincere commitment to parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage had such an extraordinarily powerful hold in a divided party that it prevented the radicals from instigating a revolution until January 1918, which turned out to be too late for success. The structuralist part of his argument, that is, ‘the causal importance of governmental regimes’, appears to be confirmed in Finland: authoritarian conditions lead to worker and socialist intransigence, as in Russia proper, but ‘the presence of democratic freedoms and parliamentary institutions’ encourages moderation, ‘union organising and electoral politics – i.e., “the democratic class struggle”’ (p. 406). What is murkier is how strong the militancy of the Finnish party was after 1905. Here, the historical sociologist may have lost his way in the forest, not noticing that there are many different trees in quite distinct groves that require more specific consideration of the variety of circumstances in which socialists operate.
Blanc minimises the role of Lenin in 1917 but forcefully demonstrates that the major concern of the Bolsheviks was for the party and the workers to carry out the democratic – not socialist – revolution as far as possible, something that was impossible in coalition with the bourgeoisie. As Lenin wrote in October 1915, and on other occasions, the ‘task confronting the proletariat of Russia is the consummation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia in order to kindle the socialist revolution in Europe.’ The fatal mistake of the moderate socialists in Petrograd was to maintain their ties to the liberals long after that alliance had become toxic. In addition to extracting Russia from the world war, the soviet seizure of power in October was meant to carry on the democratic revolution without the bourgeoisie, not to move to socialism immediately in Russia, but to stimulate revolution abroad that would make possible transition beyond capitalism. ‘And as the year dragged on,’ Blanc sums up, ‘establishing soviet power increasingly came to be seen as a necessary step to defend political freedom and the revolutionary process against the Right. In this sense, Russia’s revolution had more in common with Finland – and traditional Marxist orthodox strategy – than has usually been assumed’ (p. 386). For the workers, October was a defence of February.
Reading this dense, detailed, compelling analysis of Russian Social Democracy was a heady reintroduction to a subject with which I have spent much of my career. While I have some reservations about some of Blanc’s conclusions, I learned a great deal and was impressed by his erudition, his commitment to socialist possibilities, and his reassessment of some of the crustier readings of this history. He ends by lamenting the Bolsheviks’ post-October reassessment of 1917 as a socialist rather than democratic revolution, the Comintern’s rejection of parliamentarianism, and the ebbing of the revolutionary wave after the world war that led to ‘the revolution’s defeat abroad and its degeneration in Russia’ (p. 393). Turning his gaze back to the imperial borderlands of Russia, Blanc shows that international revolution stopped short when radical regimes in Baku, Latvia, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, and elsewhere lost to liberals and conservatives backed by foreign interventionists. In Poland and Ukraine, the most decisive regions for carrying the revolution westward, not only foreign forces but intransigence and precipitous actions by ultra-leftists undermined the export of Bolshevism. The Red Army secured Ukraine for the Soviets but was decisively defeated at the gates of Warsaw.
In an epilogue, he concludes that an opportunity for socialist victory existed in Europe after the war, but ‘At this critical historical juncture, while a majority of workers attempted to use parliaments to push through radical transformation, Marxist anti-electoralism and denunciatory approaches toward political rivals led to missed opportunities to winning over moderate workers, premature clashes with the state, and repeated political defeats’ (p. 399). Leninists and Communist parties mistakenly gave up on winning in parliamentary elections. As a Marxist would suppose, ‘Social structure sets the parameters for political conflicts, but it does not directly determine their results’ (p. 406). The agency of parties, collective and individual actors, and their strategic choices must also be accounted for. Costly mistakes can be made.
1919 – Ukrainian Social Democracy at the Crossroads of the Revolution
Christopher Ford
Published here is a series of rare texts of the debates of the Ukrainian Marxists of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party at the crucial turning point of the revolution in January 1919. Christopher Ford is author of UKAPISME - Une Gauche perdue, Le marxisme anti-colonial dans la révolution ukrainienne 1917 – 1925 (Ibidem verlag, 2021), and of a forthcoming study in English of this party during the revolutionary era.
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Within a few weeks of the ending of the First World War on 11 November 1918, a revolutionary wave arose surpassing even the climactic years of 1789 and 1848. This affected not only the metropolis but colonial countries of the European empires with mounting movements for national emancipation. This was the setting for the ‘Ukrainian November Revolution’ of 1918 against the conservative regime of Hetman Skoropadsky, who was placed in power by a coup d'état sponsored by Germany on 29 April 1918. This restored the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) founded in October 1917.
The primary organisational initiative to reconstitute the UNR came from a coalition headed by the Directory of the UNR, led by two opposing figures - Symon Petlyura and Volodymyr Vynnychenko.1 Both member of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. The “November Ukrainian Revolution” was conducted exclusively by local forces and, from the start, it was clear the subjective forces were radically to the left of the Directory. The “Sovietophile” majority of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (UPSR), the Borotbisty, already declared their opposition and large sections of the army - the red militias - supported soviet power. With the hoped-for socialist resurgence underway in Europe, the pro-Soviet left of the USDRP organised into a faction, the Organising Committee of the USDRP Nezalezhnyky, (Independents or Independentists) established in early December 1918.2 They made their first challenge at the State Conference convened by the Directory in Vynnytsia on 12-14 December where Myhailo Avdiyenko argued it was necessary:
1: to recognise that a profoundly socio-economic, as well as political, revolution is taking place in Ukraine; 2. to recognise that its engine is the proletariat and the toiling peasantry, and 3. in accordance with this, to declare the principle of the dictatorship of the toiling masses in the form of councils of workers' and peasants' deputies.3
The moderate and conservative leaders of the UNR, viewed the Nezalezhnyky faction with increasing suspicion.4 The Nezalezhnyky also differentiated themselves from the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (KP(b)U). Considering that it was not genuinely Ukrainian but a subordinate of the Russian Communist Party, RKP(B), they took issue with the Bolsheviks' view of the workers' and peasants' councils and the character of the dictatorship of the proletariat:
It is a party that aims not for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary peasantry, but for the dictatorship of a section of the proletariat and of its own party. It is, therefore, profoundly violent and it will replace proletarian dictatorial violence against the bourgeois order with the violence of a small group.5
It had proven itself “a hypocritical party which continually violates its own principles” and in view of this “cannot be trusted until it is transformed organisationally and merges with the interests of the Ukrainian toiling people”.6
The revival of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was also accompanied by an extreme regressive trend. Some of its administration and military were inherited directly from the previous Hetmanate regime. These conservative elements engaged in pogroms and indiscriminate repression of the labour and peasant movement.7 The middle class and moderate elements, though favouring a parliamentary democracy, found themselves political prisoners of this element on whom they were reliant.8
After the initial success of the November Revolution, there arose an intense dispute over what was to happen after, of the nature of the revolution and the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Centre stage in the debates was the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (USDRP) which had played a leading role in the revolution since 1917 and held leading posts in the new government, the Directory and its Council of Ministers.9
The debates took place at the Sixth Congress of the USDRP followed by the All-Ukrainian Labour Congress convened by the Directory to ratify the form of government and establish a solid foundation for the Republic. These debates are set out in the following texts translated here; they are still little known in the English speaking world and greatly neglected elsewhere.
Andriy Richytsky moved the Nezalezhnyky theses; the task it was stated was “the transformation of the sovereign and independent Ukrainian People's Republic into the sovereign and independent Ukrainian Socialist Republic”.10 Power would be organised on the “principle of the dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and the poorer toiling peasantry, organised in worker-peasant councils”.11
A majority of the Central Committee spoke in favour of the Nezalezhnyky position, the opposition was a combination of the centrists and the right wing “Katerynoslav group” of Issak Mazepa, Panas Fadenko and Ivan Romanchenko, joined surprisingly by Mykola Porsh.12 It is debatable how representative the conference was in a situation where members of the Central Committee could not sleep in their own beds for fear of arrest.13
After their resolution was defeated, the Nezalezhnyky walked out and launched Chervony Prapor [Red Banner] on 22 January.14 It included a Declaration written by Tkachenko and Richytsky stating it was now time to move from a “passive waiting state to an active and creative struggle for the reconstruction of the whole socio-political and economic order of Ukraine”. At the Sixth Congress, the question was sharply posed “either the old or the new - and the official party stood between them”.15 Responding to the fear of the dominance of the “non-Ukrainian urban element” they pointed out that the “proletariat was not entirely foreign” and emphasised that in “Ukraine can and must come to power together with the revolutionary peasantry”.16 In the course of the revolution, the non-Ukrainian workers would be drawn more and more into all forms of internal life in Ukraine and “rid themselves of the remnants of old Russia and will join the Ukrainian people and proletariat”.17
The left-wing leader of the Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionaries Pavlo Khrystiuk considers the Nezalezhnyky were bound for too long a time to the Directory.18 In practice, their approach during the period December 1918 to January 1920 involved a combination of tactics of reform and revolution. The Nezalezhnyky did not possess sufficient strength to overthrow the Directory on their own, nor was it necessarily desirable from the standpoint of their pluralist objective of a “provisional worker-peasant government composed of representatives of parties and groups that stand for the power of the soviets”.19 In an attempt to establish a more unified approach, a meeting of the Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian socialists was held in the middle of January attended by the Nezalezhnyky, the Bund, the United Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party and the Menshevik Internationalists.20 The meeting produced no concrete results beyond resolving to maintain in contact “in order to defend the worker-peasant revolution in Ukraine, to mollify the national struggle and to correct the political line and the tactical errors of the Russian Bolsheviks in Ukraine”.21
The Nezalezhnyky also attempted to utilise their posts within the UNR to broker peace with Soviet Russia.22 Yurko Mazurenko headed a diplomatic mission to Moscow on 15 January 1919:
I declared that I would go on the condition that decrees on the transfer of local power to the Soviets and a call for a congress of Soviets (and not a Labour Congress) to be published immediately, as well as on the condition that the communist party would be legalised. For this, of course, I was ostracised by the Directorate.23
The left claimed the mission was sabotaged by the right wing of the UNR which secured a declaration of war on Soviet Russia on 16 January 1919.24 By this time, Chekhivsky and Vynnychenko had resigned from the government over its pro-Entente turn.25 The Nezalezhnyky turned to the establishment of soviet power by force through the red militias.26 Its main centre of strength was in the Kyiv region; at a congress in Hryhoriv, the Dniprovska Division of the UNR army renamed itself the First Kyiv Soviet Division along with a Revolutionary Committee joined by the Nezalezhnyky.27
On 4 February 1919, the Directory of the UNR withdrew from Kyiv in the face of the advancing soviet forces, Chervony Prapor concluding “the Directory's positive role was finished”.28 Yurii Lapchynsky wrote that in 1919 the “communist movement and Soviet power in Ukraine were built in a political situation, which was totally different to the first period”.29 Peasant brigades defected en masse to parties adhering to a soviet platform; the situation could not have been more favourable for a convergence between the Ukrainian and the Russian revolutions and the creation of a republic based on the councils with a plurality of pro-soviet parties was more viable than at any other time.
The USDRP (Nezalezhnyky) would continue to play a significant role in the life of Ukraine during the tumultuous period of the second Soviet Government, under Khristian Rakovsky. Their struggle for truly self-governing Soviet Ukraine, with a coalition of the soviet parties gained international significance winning the support of Bela Kun’s Soviet Hungary. In 1919, commanding a section of the Red Army, the Nezalezhnyky led a pro-soviet rebellion larger and far more serious than the Kronstadt uprising. Following the catastrophe of the Rakovsky government and collapse of the Ukrainian SSR, the Nezalezhnyky would re-launch on 21 December 1919 as the Ukrainian Communist Party.30 The independent UKP, known as the Ukapisty would play an important role in Soviet Ukraine, holding government positions in 1920-21. They were one of the last legal-opposition parties until their disbandment under pressure in March 1925.31
The Texts
The texts outline the key positions of the two main currents which emerged in the USDRP. The first are of the Congress of the USDRP held in Kyiv in 10-12 January 1919. The Resolution on the Current Moment was supported by Isaak Mazepa, Panas Fedenko of the Katernynoslav current and subsequently adopted by the congress. This was published in a special supplement of the USDRP paperRobitnycha Hazeta and translated into German and circulated to parties of the Socialist International.32
The alternative position proposed by the Fraction of the Nezalezhnyky, the Independents or Independentists, was published in the first issue of their paperChervony Prapor on 22 January edited by Mykhaylo Adviyenko, previous editor ofRobitnycha Hazeta. The formalDeclaration the Fraction of Nezalezhnyky written by Mykhaylo Tkachenko and Andriy Pisotsky (Richystky) appeared in the same issue ofChervony Prapor and also inKharkivsʹky Proletar, paper of the Kharkiv committee of the Nezalezhnyky.
The Declaration of the USDRP was published in Robitnycha Hazeta and also submitted to the Socialist International. The Resolution adopted by the Labour Congress on 28 January 1919 was published inChervony Prapor, on 30 January, drawing upon the points made in the Declaration of the Fraction of the USDRP to the Labour Congress on 26 January.33 This was issued officially by the UNR as a proclamation of the Law passed by the Labour Congress Onthe Form of Government in Ukraine, signed by Congress Chairman Semen Vityk a leader of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party in Galicia and the Congress Secretary Serhey Bachinksy, of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, Central Current.34
The Declaration of the Fraction of the Nezalezhnyky was submitted to the Labour Congress on 26 January 1919. The declaration of the left-bloc of parties favouring a soviet platform was published by Chervony Prapor on 30 January. TheReport on the Activities of the USDRP was made to the International Socialist Bureau in Amsterdam in February 1919 in French. This was their last report to the International whilst USDRP was still organised in central Ukraine. The congress was attended by IvanRomanchenko. The report originally in French is published here in English translation.
RESOLUTIONS
Sixth Congress of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers Party
10-12 January 1919
Resolution on the Current Moment adopted by the VI Congress of the USDRP35
1. The VI Congress of the USDRP recognises that the capitalist world is already on the path of socialist revolution. This revolution is unavoidable in all countries, but distinct in each separate country, both in its tempo and in the forms and methods of socialist reconstruction of present society. It is distinct because of the differences in the degree of capitalist development, the class structure of society and the national composition of the states, and dependent on the extent of the destruction caused by the war on all aspects of the economic and political life of a country.
2. By its history and by the present state of its own revolution, as well as by the development of the revolution in the West, Ukraine comes under the powerful influence of the inevitable world revolution, which must be marked in the whole economic and socio-political life of the Ukrainian people. But Ukraine occupies a special position in the capitalist world both in terms of economics and national politics. Ukraine is a country of small peasants, which were its mighty foundation throughout the Ukrainian revolution, for whom the Ukrainian revolution meant, first of all and mainly, an agrarian revolution. The role of the industrial proletariat in the economy is very limited and its political influence on the revolution and its direction was and is extremely insignificant: the small development of industrial capitalism and therefore the small size of the proletariat.
The dominance in industry of mining and agriculture and therefore the low consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, the national conflict between town and village, and thus between the proletariat and the peasantry - such are the main reasons for this phenomenon. The current imperialist war, which has economically debilitated even the most developed countries, has brought agricultural countries, including Ukraine, to economic catastrophe. Final ruin of the feeble Ukrainian industry (lack of materials and machinery), the ruin of agriculture (livestock and property), billions of paper dollars, the unprecedented destruction of transport, frenzied inflation - such are the severe and catastrophic consequences of the world war in Ukraine. And, as a result of this, the severe competition between town and village, peculiar to the capitalist world, reached the most severe and threatening proportion for the fate of the revolution. The Ukrainian nation, broken into pieces among various countries (in Galicia, Bukovina, Hungary, Bessarabia, Kuban and the Don) advances amid the most difficult financial, economic and international circumstances, surrounded by imperialist and counter-revolutionary enemies (Polish, Romanian, Don, [Russian] Volunteer, Entente and Soviet attack Ukraine), advances toward union in the national-sovereign forms of political life.
3. On the basis of these internal and international circumstances, the Ukrainian proletariat cannot now and does not, without endangering the revolution, have the right to take the national economy in its hands in order to socialise it decisively and without principle by means of a workers' dictatorship. Its task at the present moment is - taking part in state power and building, supporting with all its strength the national-political union of the parts of the Ukrainian nation - to construct the road to the rule of labour democracy in the Ukrainian republic, to spread workers' organisations, to carry out a careful and solid socialisation of the mature branches of the national economy and to draw the peasantry into the process of socialising the whole economy.
Taking all of this into consideration, the VI Congress of the USDRP has resolved:
On the problem of power:
1. In view of the fact that socialist revolution is a long process, which can be realised only by the organised and conscious proletariat with the help of revolutionary democracy generally, the congress believes that in the given initial moment of the socialist revolution central and local power must be such as to guarantee completely the free development of the democratic forces. The present revolution in Ukraine is only the beginning preparatory stage of the socialist revolution, a stage of realizing first all general democratic reforms, a stage of the rule of genuine democracy, on the basis of which and through which the successful transition to socialism is possible. On this basis, the congress supports the convening in the near future of an organ of all-national representation, a parliament, elected on the basis of a general electoral law. Taking into account the important transitional moment through which Ukraine is now passing, and also considering the urgent need for the government to have for its activity an organi,ed base with representatives of revolutionary democracy, the congress supports the immediate convening of the All-Ukrainian Labour Congress, with the participation of the workers and peasants, as a provisional legislative organ.
Until the Labour Congress is convened, all power will belong to the Directory, whose work must be directed toward consolidating the gains of the revolution and toward the immediate implementation of a series of reforms directed to the initial stage of socialist transformation.
The congress supports holding immediately new elections to the organs of Zemstvo self-government. Until the re-election of local self-governments, local authority will belong to the commissars, who work in contact with and under the control of local labour councils as organs of the united revolutionary democracy, organised from proportional representation of workers and peasants. Commissars are elected by local labour councils and ratified by the central government. Power must be centralised and military power must be subordinate to civilian political power.
On the program of internal politics
The congress believes that, in the present transitional moment, it is more necessary that ever to have a strong organisation of workers to carry out such great tasks as those that face the proletariat of Ukraine, toward the preparation of socialist reforms. In order to accelerate the preparation for the transformation of the Ukrainian People's Republic into a socialist republic, the tasks of the proletarian party are:
1. the destruction of all vestiges of the autocratic landowner order in all its manifestations and above all a resolute purge of all counter-revolutionary and anti-state elements from the government apparatus, both locally and centrally, in all branches of administration;
2. the immediate implementation of all worker and peasant reforms in the direction of the party's programme, first of all the immediate introduction of the land reform in accordance with the party's programme adopted by the VI Congress of the USDRP;
3. the immediate nationalisation of the most advanced and prepared branches of industry, such as railroads, sugar refineries and others;
4. the immediate introduction of broad financial reforms toward transferring the burden to the owning classes and, as a first priority, the creation of our own currency; the immediate organisation of a strong popular army on the basis of firm discipline for the defence of the Ukrainian People's Republic from attack by external enemies.
On the programme of international policy
On the basis of recognising the sovereignty of the Ukrainian nation, the VI Congress of the USDRP defends the complete independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic.
On the basis of this, the congress resolves to support the aspirations of the Ukrainian people to complete self-determination and to fight any attempt on the independence of Ukraine, whether by the Soviet Russian Republic or by any other state.
The VI Congress of the USDRP recognises that the states of the Entente are pursuing only imperialist aims in Ukraine and that the occupation of Ukraine by the Entente would be the beginning of the restoration of the monarchy and reaction in Ukraine.
In relation to the Soviet Russian Republic and its policy toward Ukraine, the VI Congress of the USDRP must say a word of condemnation of the usurpation plans, so harmful for the party of the proletariat and socialist power that the Soviet government is making against the Ukrainian People's Republic. The Soviet government, unable to repair the rift it caused between the workers and peasants of Russia, in order to continue its rule even by openly plundering the Ukrainian peasantry to satisfy the needs of the unemployed Russian workers, and this explains the Soviet army's attack on Ukraine. Protesting against the attack of the Soviet army, the congress allows for peaceful relations and trade with the Soviet Republic only when the Russian army's attack on Ukraine is stopped and when foreign Soviet troops are withdrawn from Ukraine.
The VI Congress of the USDRP recognises as the desired goal for all states that have taken the path of revolution the closest economic union in the struggle against the imperialism of the states of the Entente. Therefore, the policy of the government of the Russian Soviet Republic, aimed at the conquest of Ukraine, breaks all agreements, destroys mutual understanding and undermines the hope of the international proletariat's success in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism.
Ukrainian workers have already once lived through the most fierce monarchist reaction (the Hetmanate) because of the aggressive policy of the Soviet government, and now, at an hour of danger for the existence of what the Ukrainian proletariat and revolutionary democracy have created - the Ukrainian People's Republic - the VI Congress of the USDRP declares that the organised Ukrainian workers will fight with all their strength hostile reactionary attacks, whether by the states of the Entente or by the Russian Soviet Republic.
The Ukrainian workers will spare no effort to save the foundation of their normal development - the Ukrainian People's Republic - from all imperialists, no matter what fine words they use to conceal their avaricious attempts on the independence of the Ukrainian people and of the Ukrainian proletariat.
***
Resolution of the Fraction of Nezalezhnyky, proposed at the VI Congress of the USDRP36
On the current moment
1. The IV Congress of the USDRP recognises that all Europe is today living through the epoch of socialist revolution, prepared by the whole preceding development of the capitalist economy and the world imperialist war.
2. The present Ukrainian revolution is one of the phases of the socialist revolution in national Ukrainian forms, and as such presents the proletariat of Ukraine with the following tasks:
a) the transformation of the sovereign and independent Ukrainian People's Republic into the sovereign and independent Ukrainian Socialist Republic;
b) the organisation of power on the principle of the of the dictatorship of the urban and rural proletariat and the poorer toiling peasantry, organised in worker-peasant councils, with the complete removal of the bourgeoisie, landowners and wealthy peasants from political power. The power of the councils must be planned and organised from the centre, constitutionally, without disorganised and anarchic seizures of power by separate local councils;
c) the organisation of Ukraine's entire national economy on a socialist basis, for which there must be a planned nationalisation of land, credit for all means of production and transport, subject to the general plan of the state economy.
On the matter of reorganisation of power
1. Since, in accordance with the course of the world revolution and its own internal development, Ukraine must be a socialist republic, where power belongs to the proletariat and the revolutionary peasantry, the Congress of the USDRP resolves that the present government must be reorganised on the basis of representation from revolutionary Ukrainian parties which stand for, a) the independence of the national Ukrainian Socialist Republic, and b) the power of the worker-peasant councils. This government is transitional until the organisation of the government by the All-Ukrainian Congress of Worker-Peasant Councils.
On the matter of international politics
1. On the basis of the independence of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic and the beginning of the world socialist revolution, the USDRP defends the independence of the Ukrainian Republic with all means and demands from the Ukrainian government:
a) a rapprochement with the Russian Soviet Republic, on the basis of mutual recognition of the sovereignty of both socialist republics, complete and mutual non-interference in the internal affairs of the neighbouring republic,
b) the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine (including the Crimea), their non-interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine and, in the case of refusal, an active defence of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic against imperialist attack.
Organizing Committee,
Fraction of Nezalezhnyky of the USDRP
***
Declaration the Fraction of Nezalezhnyky
Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party37
Comrades, workers of the towns and villages,
More than a year ago, the IV Congress of the USDRP indicated that the world war, having brought about the complete ruin of the capitalist economy, caused the total collapse of capitalism’s organising abilities and aspirations. As a result, capitalism and imperialism are bankrupt and the world imperialist war is being transformed into a world socialist revolution.
But, during the IV Congress, the moment for liquidating the war was not yet apparent. The ripening of the revolution in the highly developed capitalist countries was unclear and, therefore, at the IV Congress the USDRP did not clearly take the path of socialist revolution, but assumed a waiting position, setting itself the task of organising the Ukrainian republic internally as a necessary condition for the successful course of the socialist revolution in Ukraine.
The further internal development of Ukraine and a whole series of international circumstances more and more drew Ukraine into the vortex of the international struggle and placed its fate in close connection with the sharply defined transition of the world war to the process of social revolution, with the breakup of old states into national organisms. this breakup of the old, violently built multi-national states and the creation of new national republics is necessary beginning stage of the socialist revolution, which can take place only on an international scale and, from now on, only within the forms and boundaries of national political-economic organisms.
The beginning of the socialist revolution in Germany and all the signs of its possibility in other countries determined the further course of the Ukrainian revolution as a social revolution. The more so since during the rule of the Hetmanate the bourgeoisie showed its complete bankruptcy and its inability to manage the economic life of the country; it is now clear Ukraine, in spite of its agrarian character and economic backwardness, can come out of the state of economic ruin only by organizing the national economy on a fully socialist basis.
In the epoch of the world's division into two hostile camps - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which is already ending its rule, at a time when throughout the whole world new waves are growing and rolling, it is not possible to retain the old forms of economic and political life. From today, every attempt to reform them without destroying the basis of this economy - private ownership of the means of production - will inevitably bring with it the destruction of Ukraine and its subjugation by stronger states.
So, life itself has placed before the Ukrainian proletariat and the USDRP the task of going from a passive waiting state to an active and creative struggle for the reconstruction of the whole socio-political and economic order of Ukraine, according to a definite plan based of the aims, tasks and understanding of a process that embraces all of Europe.
These new tasks of the party have been felt most keenly by the group of Nezalezhnyky of the USDRP. Under its influence, the VI Congress of the party, which was held recently, had to stand for the socialist revolution. But, unfortunately, it went only half way, without drawing the necessary conclusions, without resolutely taking the path of the new creativity, of continually building the economy, but on a new, genuine socialist principle. The majority of the VI Congress stayed with the hopeless attempts to maintain the old bourgeois order, to patch it up somehow, failing to understand the unity of the state’s economy, at once trying, not to shake the old order, but to strengthen it. Such work leaves life at a dead end and neither allows the old order to strengthen itself nor the new to achieve its destined course. This introduces and will introduce disorder, anarchy and decay into economic life and leaves the new reformist patches hanging in the air without real implementation, without their organic inculcation into life itself. The party faced the question with all its sharpness: either the old or the new - and the official party stood between them. Therefore, its creative activity has been stopped and will continue to be stopped. Its influence on the workers and peasants is being undermined. They cannot be satisfied with the standstill that the USDRP offers.
We, the fraction of Nezalezhnyky of the USDRP, stand clearly and unequivocally on the new path in this our first tactical split with the rest of the party. We must take the new path if we want to save the economic and social life of Ukraine, that is, its national-political life, for the one is closely connected with the other. In principle, as it were, both the fraction ofNezalezhnyky and the official section of the party stand for socialist revolution, both sections of the party recognise that the socialist revolution in Ukraine can take place only in the form of an independent Ukrainian Republic. But the dead end reached by the IV Congress is a heavy blow, first of all to the independence of the Ukrainian Republic, because it does not allow Ukraine to stand firmly in the middle, that is, at a time when the world war is breaking up into a whole series of partial wars, on the basis of the necessity for the socialist revolution of being introduced in national-political forms.
Basing itself on a common understanding of Ukraine's autonomy and independence as an essential and necessary form for carrying out the socialist revolution, the fraction of Nezalezhnyky, however, sharply splits with the official party on the forms of power, capable of bringing about a socialist revolution. While the only form of power for the socialist revolution that the fraction ofNezalezhnyky recognises, at least in its present stage, is the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry in the form of workers' and peasants' councils, the official party admits complete confusion: The Labour Congress and a parliament with four tails, and locally - the organs of self-government, and the commissars, and the labour councils. By its tactic, the official party ruins the only organs it can rely on - the workers' and peasants' councils.
We, the fraction of Nezalezhnyky, cannot take responsibility for this. We believe that, if the USDRP cannot sharply change the direction of the government's course, then it must recall its representatives from the government and begin to fight for a genuine people's government, for a government of worker-peasant councils.
The official party thinks it can save the revolution by seizing on democratic formulas, afraid clearly to take the path that is unavoidable for a party of the proletariat at the present moment. Democracy does not and will not provide the strong centralised power that alone can carry out the revolution. Democracy in Ukraine will inevitably be transformed into the dictatorship of the middle classes, which, of course, cannot be the agents of a socialist revolution. In a parliamentary order the popular masses will be excluded from creative action. The socialist revolution demands a centralised government, both centrally and locally, but a government based on the active participation of the working masses. The form of such a government is the government of the councils.
Fear of a victory by non-Ukrainian urban element played no small role in the vague and ambiguous position taken by VI Congress. But a government of councils does not at all mean the dictatorship of the proletariat in its pure form, and the proletariat is not entirely foreign. It is possible to organise a government of councils without giving workers a majority in these organs, the more so in Ukraine where the working peasantry plays a basic role. Only as the class that is alone destined to bring socialism to full fruition must the proletariat be guaranteed a strong influence, appropriate to its strength, in future socialist action. But, for now, during the transitional epoch, until the struggle between socialism and capitalism is world-wide, the proletariat in Ukraine can and must come to power together with the revolutionary peasantry. True, a large section of the proletariat in Ukraine is still blinded by the chauvinism and imperialism of Russian Bolshevism, but, objectively, this proletariat must, in the course of the Ukrainian revolution's development, be drawn more and more into all forms of internal life in Ukraine. And we are certain that all non-Ukrainian workers will soon rid themselves of the remnants of old Russia and will join the Ukrainian people and proletariat. But for this a strong position is needed. We, the Ukrainian Social Democratic Nezalezhnyky, provide such a clear and firm proletarian position.
During the revolution in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks demonstrated all the inconsistency and worthlessness of their anti-Ukrainian tactic which brought the workers to utter defeat. By the very development of events the non-Ukrainian workers must be drawn into work of the social-political construction of the independent Ukrainian Republic. A repetition of the Bolsheviks' anti-Ukrainian experiments would be very quickly defeated by the course of the national movement itself. But the workers must not suffer a new defeat. We believe that the time has come for the non-Ukrainian workers to be drawn into the work of the social-political construction of the independent Ukrainian Republic, and that this can take place most quickly and best through a government of councils, in which the workers are guaranteed not less than one their representation in the appropriate organs of the councils.
Such are the differences between the fraction of Nezalezhnyky and the rest of the party. A different understanding of the socialist revolution and the methods of implementing it force us to create a fraction ofNezalezhnyky within the USDRP with an independent political line and tactics. We do not take responsibility for the policy adopted by the VI Congress of the USDRP and we consider it harmful for the Ukrainian revolution. The fraction ofNezalezhnyky of the USDRP will work among the masses on the basis of its resolution under the slogan of the struggle for a worker-peasant government of councils in an independent and autonomous Ukrainian Socialist Republic. But our fraction does not make a final break with the party because it believes that the entire party will be compelled to take our position in the course of the revolution. We are also convinced that the Ukrainian worker masses will be with us and not with the official leadership of the party that thinks it can save Ukraine by putting socialist patches on the bourgeois base.
Our attitude toward the Ukrainian government is determined by our general position. We do not support the present government of Ukraine - the Directory. By means of our clear criticism, we push it onto the path of liberation from bourgeois fetters, while at the same time we reveal to the masses it’s every error, its every betrayal of the people's interests.
Our understanding of the socialist revolution sharply distinguishes us from the Bolshevik-Communist party, whose work harms the workers of Ukraine, because it draws them toward Russia and does not seek its support in the centre of Ukraine. Therefore, the work of the party in Ukraine is imperialist and it leads to Ukraine's subjugation to Russia, which we, the Nezalezhnyky Ukrainian SDs, cannot permit because we are, first of all, that political group that sees the success of the revolution only in the Ukrainian worker-peasant masses and relies only on them. What differentiates us from the Bolsheviks is also the fact that we do not now recognise the possibility of a pure dictatorship of the proletariat, but we put forth, as a present necessity, the dictatorship of the proletariat together with the revolutionary peasantry - in the form of a government of worker-peasant councils.
We, the Nezalezhnyky Ukrainian SDs, going out to the worker-peasant masses, use every opportunity to influence the masses. Therefore, we do not refuse to take part in the Labour Congress, although we do not place great hopes in it. We cannot make use of this surrogate, because its days are short: it must yield power either to the right or to the left. We, theNezalezhnyky, do not accept assertions about the apolitical nature of the army. The army is the workers and peasants and they are fighting for their own worker-peasant interests.
We demand, therefore, that the army be represented in political organs, including the Labour Congress and the councils. But we do not distinguish the political role of the army from its strategic and operative roles. There must be strict discipline here and complete submission to the military authorities, established by the worker-peasant government.
So, having indicated its political line, the fraction of Nezalezhnyky calls on all comrade workers, revolutionary peasants and soldiers of Ukraine to organise and fight for socialism and the international under our red banner.
Long live the Ukrainian autonomous and independent socialist Republic!
Long live the power of the workers' and peasants' councils!
Long live harmony among socialist republics!
All to the struggle against reaction and imperialism!
Organising Committee,
Fraction of Nezalezhnyky of the USDRP
***
The All-Ukraine Labour Congress
23-28 January 1919
Statement of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation at the Congress of Working People of Ukraine.
26 January 1919
The delegation from the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, which, together with all other Ukrainian socialist parties, has successfully led to victory the national revolution against all enemies of the social and national liberation of the working masses of Ukraine, now makes the following statement on behalf of the organised and class-conscious body of Ukrainian workers:
As a result of the war and the unparalleled crisis of the capitalist economy, Ukraine, as an overwhelmingly agricultural country, became to a growing extent a country with an innumerable proletariat where work on the land and the processing of the agricultural goods produced by the peasant population play the greatest role. The results of the World War in the international context have led to the states of Europe entering the path of revolution which, in its further development, will unquestionably flow into a socialist revolution. While socialist transformation will be the task of the near future in the economically more-developed countries, Ukraine should not be left behind in relation to her future, basing her development exclusively on the capitalist order, which must collapse in the face of the forces it has called forth. The prerequisites for the development of agriculture, the basis on which economic policy must be structured, which differs from socialist reforms in relation to its tempo, the forms it takes and the manner in which it is carried out, are however different in different countries. The sharp economic contradiction between town and country and Ukraine’s territorial dismemberment at the hand of reactionary imperialist states oblige us to adopt a negative attitude towards the (illegible) of the immediate socialisation of the whole national economy and against the attempts of certain groups to seize power for the purpose of carrying out this socialisation by way of a proletarian dictatorship in the form of councils of workers’ and peasants’ deputies.
Only the socialist and democratic front is able to preserve and consolidate the achievements of the revolution in Ukraine. Entirely rejecting the organisation of power in the form of councils of workers’ and peasants’ deputies at the centre and in the provinces at this given moment, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation upholds only that principle of power based on universal, direct, equal and proportional suffrage in a secret ballot and conceives the power of the working masses of Ukraine in the form of the democratically-elected Parliament of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. In the countryside, too, power should belong to organs elected by universal suffrage.
In relation to the uncertain state of war the republic is currently experiencing, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation believes that it is possible and indeed essential that, until a Parliament is convened, supreme power in our republic should lie in the hands of the Directory of the Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic with the addition of a representative of Western Ukraine. Moreover, the Congress should establish standing commissions from its own ranks with supervisory powers etc: Commissions for agrarian, administrative, political, military, international, financial, educational, and labour matters.
The state of war which fully takes the attention all the forces of the leading centre makes necessary the greatest centralisation of power. Therefore, until local self-government organs can be re-elected, commissars with full powers from the government should exercise power in the provinces, who would have to work under the control of and in contact with local district and Guberniya councils elected proportionally by workers and peasants.
For the purpose of consolidating the revolutionary forces, the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic should tirelessly continue the annihilation of feudal and absolutist order. And undertake the most important of the reforms, i.e. land reform and the reform of labour in the interests of the workers and the peasantry of Ukraine as well as purging the official apparatus of counter-revolutionaries and elements hostile to the state. At the same tim,e the government has the duty to be vigilant in defence of the civil rights of all members of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and take energetic steps to foil a repetition of the pogroms against Jews organised by counter-revolutionaries.
In the economic sphere, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party delegation is in favour of the government taking steps towards the planned nationalisation of the most highly-developed businesses such as railways, sugar refineries, mines, etc.
While still committed to the organisation of the army as a people’s militia, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation nevertheless believes it necessary, for the purpose of the current defence of Ukrainian independence, for the government to take steps to organise a well-disciplined regular army, without which, at the present moment, our Republic cannot possibly exist.
The Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation salutes, as absolutely essential for the republic’s normal development, the unification of the two parts of the today indivisible, sole, independent and sovereign Ukraine and approves all decisions and mutual commitments of the united parts.
Standing for the Ukrainian people’s right to full self-determination, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation declares that all hostile attempts, from whatever source, to impose a foreign will, hostile to her independence, by force of arms, will encounter energetic resistance on the part of the Ukrainian proletariat and peasantry.
The Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation believes that a military alliance with and dependence on the part of Ukraine on the Entente Powers as arbiters of international politics is impermissible, and protests against foreigners intervening in Ukraine’s internal affairs in pursuit of their imperialist goals.
On the other hand, the Soviet Army’s campaign against Ukraine, the aggressive attack by the Don Cossacks and [Russian] volunteer hordes, the Polish offensive in Galicia and the Romanian invasion of the Bukovyna and the Ukrainian parts of Bessarabia make it necessary to put on the agenda the organisation of the defence of the nation against the incursions on all sides of counter-revolutionary foes.
Representing the organised proletariat of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party delegation calls on the Directory Government to act energetically to ensure that not a single drop of Ukrainian peoples’ blood is shed in vain. Notwithstanding its efforts to achieve good mutual relations with foreign powers, the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic should value its relations with the Ukrainian people greater. It should not allow itself to be moved from its democratic and socialist course either by threats or by tempting and treacherous promises. It should be guided purely and simply by the interests of the working masses of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
***
Declaration of the Fraction of Nezalezhnyky USDRP at the Labour Congress38
The mighty uprising of the Ukrainian toiling peasants and workers obliterated the Hetmanate-landowner reaction in Ukraine that was forcibly planted here by German imperialism. The popular working masses began to fight oppression, exploitation and slavery with unprecedented strength.
This great Ukrainian revolution, taking place in nationally Ukrainian forms and limits, is at the same time closely connected with the course of world events and with the West European revolution. The overthrow of German imperialism by the revolution in Germany and its weakened force in Ukraine provided favourable conditions for the success of the Ukrainian revolution.
Closely connected with the European socialist revolution that has seized a large part of the world, the Ukrainian revolution is taking on the aspects of a socialist revolution and is assuming the task of fundamentally transforming the economic and political relations on the socialist principle.
In its first stage, the socialist revolution leads to the disintegration of the old imperialist states and to the creation of new national-political organisms by the liberated peoples. The further process of transforming the national revolution into a social revolution and of reconstructing economic life takes place within the forms and limits of these organisms and, therefore, for its successful and even development the Ukrainian socialist revolution demands that its national-political Ukrainian forms be safeguarded.
Thus, in the present moment of the socialist revolution, the Ukrainian Republic, without excluding treaties and alliances for common aims with other socialist republics, must in the interests of revolution maintain its independence as a definite national and economic organism.
The Directory of the UNR had to choose correctly the moment for raising the slogans of the uprising among the Ukrainian popular masses; it provided the organisational cells of that nucleus whose circle produced the mighty popular force. The Directory played its own great organisational role in the Ukrainian revolution.
But it could not stay on the path by which the Ukrainian socialist revolution must develop, it could not appreciate the tasks and aims put forth by the world revolution, it could not stand firm on the social basis and caused the social foundation, which alone could strengthen the revolution, to loosen.
The reasons for this are both the very structure of the Directory's power and the circumstances in which it managed to carry on its activity. The character of the Directory's composition as a coalition of national revolutionary Ukrainian parties and the absence a clearly defined class character (only class power can carry out a socialist revolution) determined the vacillating and indecisive character of both its internal and external policy.
Having raised the slogan of the dictatorship of the working people, the Directory, at the same time, instead of relying on the organisation of this dictatorship, instead of giving the energies of working masses an organised input, to calling these bodies into power, began to persecute and destroy them.
Instead of becoming a ground for restructuring all life on a socialist basis, the Directory took the path of mending the bourgeois system with social patches, trying to hold up the bourgeois system, and even these patches hang in the air, because it does not have the force to translate them into life.
The Directory entered into conflict with the working masses, and it disorganised and ruined the revolutionary forces, it turned this conflict into a civil war engulfing almost the whole of Ukraine.
In the course of this conflict, the Directory turned more and more to the right, workers' organisations were persecuted, revolutionary parties and leaders were plagued with repression and terror, and the Directory’s authority became a military-bourgeois dictatorship.
To a great extent, this course of events was fostered by Ukraine's international position. Finding itself between two foreign powers - Soviet Russia on the one hand and the imperialist Entente on the other - the Directory did not take a decisive attitude toward the Entente out of fear. At the same time, the attack of the Soviet Russian army and the Pyatakov government's adventure caused government policy in Ukraine to go to the right rather than to the left as might have been expected. As a result, we have a war with Socialist Russia and the possibility of an alliance with the imperialist Entente.
We cannot allow this. The only way out of this situation that can maintain the revolution and prevent it from being strangled, that can provide the revolutionary masses with organising slogans and lead them to the struggle, is the quickest possible transfer of power to the worker-peasant councils.
The Labour Congress is the fruit of the Directory's vacillating and ambiguous policy. In convening the Labour Congress, the Directory intended to satisfy both the social and imperialist forces and satisfied neither.
We cannot consider the Labour Congress a genuine representative of the revolutionary masses of Ukraine either in its construction or in the way elections to it were carried out. The representation of workers does not correspond to their significance in the national economy; the revolutionary army was deprived of the right to participate in the Labour Congress. The Labour Congress was convened simultaneously with the destruction of the organs of the working people, or the prevention of their local existence; elections were held under government pressure, without freedom of agitation; the bunching up and speed of the elections in unfavourable military conditions - all this deprives the Labour Congress of true representation of the revolutionary masses and gives no force to its work, because it lacks the organs that might support it.
Therefore, if the Directory transfers all power to it, the Labour Congress lacks the right to keep it in its own hands and must transfer this power to the true representative of the revolutionary masses, the only one capable of carrying out the great tasks of the Ukrainian social revolution - the worker-peasant councils.
In view of all the above, the independent faction of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party at the Labour Congress demands the following:
1. Having received full power in the Ukrainian republic from the Directory, the Labour Congress does not keep it in its own hands, but transfers it to the only true representative of the force and will of the revolutionary peasants and workers - the councils of workers' and peasants' deputies.
2. The Labour Congress proclaims Ukraine an independent Socialist republic.
3. The Labour Congress proposes that the Soviet Russian government enter peace negotiations and agreements between the two socialist republics.
4. The Labour Congress demands the withdrawal of foreign imperialist troops from Ukraine and the non-interference of imperialist states in Ukrainian affairs.
5. The Labour Congress puts together a provisional worker-peasant government composed of representatives of parties and groups that stand for the power of the soviets. On specific instructions of the congress, this government will be charged with transferring power to the worker-peasant councils and convening a congress of worker-peasant councils in Ukraine, which is to create the normal order of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic of Councils and organise a permanent government.
6. After this, the Labour Congress must be dissolved.
Fraction of the Nezalezhnyky U.S.D.
***
Resolution adopted by the Congress of Working Peoples of Ukraine at the session of 28 January 191939
The Congress of the Working People of Ukraine, having heard the reports of the Directory and its ministries and bearing in mind the declaration of the Directory on its readiness to relinquish its authority, has resolved:
1. To express its full trust in and thanks to the Directory for its great work for the liberation of the Ukrainian people from landowner-Hetmanate power.
2. Considering the threatening internal and external position of our republic, to cease our meetings and create a commission from among ourselves, with legislative and control functions, which are to draft bills for the next session of the Labour Congress and help the government in curing the administrative apparatus of counter-revolutionary and anti-state elements. New commissions on the following must be created: 1. defence of the state, 2. land, 3. budget, 4. foreign affairs, 5. provisions, and 6. culture and education. The general composition of the commissions will be determined by elections on the basis of proportional representation from all factions of the congress:
1 representative for 15 members of the congress. The division among individual commissions and their agendas will be established in meeting of all deputies elected to the commissions.
3. In view of the dangerous military situation, to charge the Directory of the UNR, supplemented with representatives from Dnieper Ukraine, with the authority to defend the country until the next Labour Congress becomes the supreme power, and to pass laws necessary for the defence of the republic, which laws are to be ratified at the next meeting of the Labour Congress.
The executive power of the UNR belongs to the Council of Ministers, which is formed by the Directory and during the first session of the congress is responsible to the Directory.
4. To charge presidium of the Labour Congress to convene the next session of the Labour Congress, in agreement with the Directory, as soon as normal work is possible.
5. The Congress of the Working People of Ukraine stands against the organised dictatorship of the workers and for a democratic order in Ukraine. In order to strengthen the democratic order, the government of the UNR together with its commissions must prepare a law for elections to the all-national parliament of the Great Pan-Ukrainian Republic.
6. On the basis of all-national voting, new local organs of government are to be convened and, in the interests of national defence, local authority will belong to the confidants of the government of the UNR - the commissars, who must work in contact with and under the control of the local labour councils, elected proportionately from peasants and workers.
7. Regarding the seizure of Ukrainian territory by the states of the Entente, by the Soviet, Polish, Don, Volunteer and Romanian armies, the Congress of the Working People of Ukraine resolutely protests attempts on the unity, autonomy and independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic. The Ukrainian people want to be neutral and to have friendly relations with all other peoples, but it will not tolerate any state's imposing its will on the Ukrainian people by armed force.
8. The Congress of the Working People of Ukraine issues its Universal on its resolutions to the Ukrainian people and a memorandum to the peoples of the whole world.
Supported by the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (official) and part of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (central tendency).
***
Left Bloc statement leaving the Labour Congress40
Not recognising the competence of the congress from the very beginning, as we have noted in our declaration, we have seen it as our sole task to use the tribune of the congress to proclaim the demands of the toiling peasantry and proletariat, who are fighting for socialism and the power of the soviets. In the two days of the congress's work, this task has been accomplished. On the other hand, from the declaration of the factions that make up the majority of the congress it is evident that: 1. the congress completely approves of the policy of the Directory, which carries on a struggle against the revolutionary masses, 2. the congress approves of the war with Soviet Russia and the agreement with the imperialist governments of the Entente, hiding behind a mask of neutrality. The government, which convened this congress on uncertain grounds and under conditions of repressions against the revolutionary socialist parties, attained its aims and won an obedient majority. Once again, we declare that this government has no right to speak in the name of the toiling masses of Ukraine. Fulfilling the order of their electors, the above mentioned factions leave the congress and reject all responsibility for the resolutions of the congress and their consequences.
Ukrainian Social-Democrat Nezalezhnyky
Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (Left)
S.R.-Internationalists
General Jewish Labour Bund
***
Report on the Activities of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party to the International Socialist Bureau in Amsterdam
The Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party came into being in 1900. It was called the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party from 1900 to 1905. In 1905, the party’s second congress adopted a social-democratic programme and took the name of “Social-Democratic Workers’ Party”.
The party has already presented reports on its activities to various International Socialist congresses – in Amsterdam, in 1905; in Stuttgart, in 1907; in Copenhagen, in 1910 and at the International Socialist Conference in Holland in 1916. There is therefore little point in discussing the party’s activities from the time it changed until 1907. We shall only discuss the recent period, from the time of the Russian Revolution to date. In common with all other socialist organisations, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was terribly oppressed by the Tsarist regime and the war had increased the number of repressive acts. Newspapers were outlawed and the Ukrainian proletariat had no opportunity to get any information on events in their own language. From the very outbreak of hostilities, almost the entire territory of Ukraine was declared to be in a “State of Siege” and all the Ukrainian press offices were closed down by order of the military authorities. Moreover, the party was seriously weakened by the departure of a great number of its members for the front. Despite this, the organisations continued to function in the large cities of Ukraine where the largest numbers of the proletariat lived and also in Petrograd and Moscow and other Russian cities. For military reasons, the Petrograd garrison had been reinforced from within the regiments of the Imperial Guard who made up the largest part of the garrison. The Ukrainians, men of great presence, were still very numerous and the organisers of the party in Petrograd were able to disseminate their revolutionary work among the soldiers. It was the Ukrainians who, assisted by other socialist organisations, made the Volyn regiment and other regiments in the Guard rise up in rebellion. These uprisings made the Duma Committee stop their hesitating and resulted in the development of the events that are already well-known.
After the victory of the revolutionaries, the “underground” doors opened and work was done in the light of day.
The party conference which took place at the beginning of April 1917 already recorded the existence of five newspapers, in Kyiv; Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, Petrograd and Moscow. The conference decided to produce a Central Publication of the party, Robitnycha Hazeta. At the same time, books were beginning to be published, organisations, libraries and Community Centres were established in different areas of Ukraine. The party was heavily involved in the union and cooperative movements and also in the workers’ councils which were created in Ukraine in order to coordinate the activities of democracy.
The Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party has struggled from the very beginning of its existence for democracy in order to free the proletariat and all citizens from all kinds of oppression, including from national oppression. This is why the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party became very active in the national movement which spread throughout the entire territory of Ukraine during the first days of the revolution. Conferences, meetings and demonstrations supporting Ukrainian democracy all took place in order to complete national, territorial autonomy. The party took an active role in all the above. In order to crown the efforts of the party in its fight in favour of socialism and in order to give all the Ukrainian people forms of free and democratic life, an institution to represent the people had to be created – a Constituent Assembly elected by a universal, secret and direct vote which would be both equal and proportional. Since the Revolution and the war were not yet over, it was impossible to realise these aspirations. Before convening the Constituent Assembly, it was therefore of the utmost importance to create a temporary, representative institution which would bring together the different forces of Ukrainian democracy. Together with other political parties, the USDRP therefore took the initiative to create the Central Rada which was made up of representatives from all the political parties in the country, whatever their nationality. The party had 142 out of 800 representatives in the Central Rada. There were also several party members in the General Secretariat which was responsible to the Rada.
The party believed that the Russian Constituent Assembly should not limit the rights of the people in Russia, but should rather give them the freedom to decide their own fate, even going so far as to envisage complete separation; that the representatives of the largest nation should no longer decide on any matter concerning the fate of the smaller countries. The party thought that the only task of the Russian Constituent Assembly should be to establish the principal laws of the Russian Federation. All matters relating to establishing democratic regimes in the parties of the former Russian Empire should be decided by the local Constituent Assemblies. The party took part in the elections for the Pan-Russian Constituent Assembly, together with other Ukrainian parties, and won around 550,000 votes. The party also took part in the elections for the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly, this time with no alliance with the other parties, and obtained 700,000 votes. When it took part in the local elections, the party won 800,000 votes. It is necessary to point out that the party’s influence on political life in Ukraine has been more important than the figures would seem to indicate. This can be explained by the social-democratic method followed by the party in its activities and also by the large numbers of very popular politicians, such as Petlyura, Vynnychenko, Porsh, etc. As far as relations with the other political parties in Ukraine are concerned, we shall merely mention the social-democratic parties of other nationalities in Ukraine and also the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party.
The USDRP is divided from the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party over the national question. In a country made up of so many nationalities, the USDRP believed that it was essential to create proletarian organisations in respect of each nationality and to bind them together by means of federative links. The steps taken by the party in this regard never had any success because the Russian Social-Democratic party refused to recognize not only these principles but also the national, territorial autonomy of Ukraine. This independent position of the Ukrainian party did not stop it from contributing to the proletariat’s struggle on a practical level – political demonstrations, strikes, etc. Relations with the Polish and Jewish Social-Democratic parties were closer because the latter contributed to the proletariat’s national claims.
The Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party differs, not because of the national but rather the agricultural question. It should be remembered that Ukraine is an agricultural country and peasants make up 85% of the population. For the peasants, the revolution was simply an agricultural matter. In its programme, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party restricted individual property to a specific number of hectares (40 deciatines42). The party also demanded that large agricultural properties should be expropriated, that assets belonging to the Crown and the Church, etc. should be confiscated, that these assets should be nationalised and used by the communes and small landholders.
The Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries took the socialisation of the land as a slogan for its programme. This slogan which, for the peasants, meant sharing land, brought the Socialist Revolutionary Party a large number of followers.
As mentioned above, the Social-Democratic Party entered the 1917 revolution putting Ukrainian autonomy in its programme. When, at the second congress in 1905, the party put Ukrainian autonomy in its programme, it acted according to the following considerations:
- National oppression in contemporary bourgeois society is the cause of the cultural, economic and political decadence of the oppressed people. This impedes the development of proletarian consciousness
- National oppression causes the stirrings of nationalism and solidarity and confuses the interests of the proletariat with those of the bourgeoisie in different groups of the ruling nation and the oppressed nation.
- The process of economic centralisation is only one facet of economic development. The other facet is economic decentralisation which leads to political decentralisation.
- The democratisation of state control requires the decentralisation of legislation, of government and also of the law.
- The second congress of the USDRP included Ukrainian national territorial autonomy in its programme, with a legislative parliament. The congress considers Ukraine within its ethnographic borders.
In order to understand the evolution of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party which replaced Ukrainian autonomy with independence in its programme, we must take a look at the series of events which took place in Ukraine. The history of the party during this period is inextricably linked to all life in Ukraine and to the activities of her government which included, as it had previously, a number of party members. The aim of all the demonstrations, congress, meetings etc., which took place in Ukraine at the beginning of the 1917 Revolution, was Ukrainian autonomy. The Central Rada, born of the people and of all the democratic parties, including the USDRP, demanded that the Provisional Government should recognise Ukrainian autonomy and stated the same demand in the First Universal. Given the number of different nationalities in Russia, the Provisional Government, was unable to appreciate how important it was for it to resolve the national question out of everyone’s best interests, published the Order, dated 4th August 1917, in which it granted Ukraine limited autonomy and only in respect of fiveguberniya (Kyiv, Volhynia, Podolia, Poltava and Chernihiv, without including the districts of the North).
This autonomy was so limited that the appointment of the commissars/commissioners (who replaced the governors of the previous regime) was made without giving prior notice to the General Secretariat of the Central Rada and these commissars/commissioners received their instructions directly from the Provisional Government in Petrograd. It was the same centralising system, under a change of name. The Order of 4th August 1917, cutting a piece of Ukrainian territory and leaving the most industrial part of Ukraine outside the power of the General Secretariat (Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, steel factories and collieries) clearly revealed to the Ukrainian people the imperialism that fed Russian power did not wish to take into account the national claims made by other peoples. A general malaise among the masses was the result of such a policy. And, when the order came without any discussion in the Central Rada, the majority of these members demanded that the General Secretariat should refuse to obey the order, immediately break with the Provisional Government and declare the independence of Ukraine.
The USDRP believed this decision to be premature and, through its representatives at the Central Rada, demanded that the order be accepted in order to serve as the basis for the future development of the gains of the revolution. This opinion prevailed and the Central Rada adopted the motion of the USDRP.
Life is stronger than the piece of paper by which the Provisional Government intended meeting Ukrainian national claims. Indeed, events showed that only the USDRP had understood the steps to be taken since the Central Rada and the General Secretariat, while keeping to the 4th August Order, would become the government organs of power which would lead all Ukraine and would assume the responsibilities of Parliament and of the Ukrainian ministries.
The coup d’état in Petrograd on 25th October 1917 which brought the Bolsheviks to power, at the same time, made the organs with which the General Secretariat would have been able to lay down their conditions, disappear. In effect, the Central Rada accepted neither the tactics of the Bolsheviks nor their program of socialisation as they understood it. On 7th November 1917, it also declared the independence of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic. It should be emphasised that, while declaring the independence of Ukraine, this Universal also expressed the desire to forge federative links with the Greater Russian Republic at some later point. The USDRP agreed with the Central Rada and recognized that, in order to break this impasse, there was no other issue.
The Lenin government which, from the very beginning, wanted to do the exact opposite of the Kerensky government and to create a large number of partisans in the masses officially recognised the independent Ukrainian Republic on 4th December 1917. At the same time, the Bolsheviks and their official newspapers began spreading propaganda and stirring up unrest against the government and the Central Rada, accusing them of being bourgeois. A congress of workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ representatives, in the spirit of the leaders of Smolny, took place in Kyiv on 5th December, at the instigation of and on the initiative of Russian Bolshevik organisations to which the independent Ukrainian Republic had guaranteed free existence. This Congress was to overturn the Central Rada and its General Secretariat and give power to the Soviets. This Congress had assembled 2,000 representatives, who with fifty votes less than a unanimous vote, stated their confidence in the Central Rada and its activities. These 50 members of the congress left Kyiv for Kkarkiv and, appealing to Russian Bolshevik elements of the garrison and after having received several detachments from the centre of Russia, began an offensive against Ukraine. Until that time, the Ukrainian government had been unable to form a strong and well-disciplined army because of the obstacles put in its way by the Provisional Government in Petrograd. On the other hand, the general morale of the Ukrainian soldiers was not strong enough to resist the charms of the Bolshevik slogan “Everything for everyone” and, finally, there was a great feeling of weariness prevalent among all the military officers due to three hard years at the front. After bitter fighting, the forces of the Ukrainian army had to fall back when faced with the Bolshevik masses and ten days of fierce fighting having shown that all resistance was impossible, the Ukrainian Government and most of the members of the Rada abandoned Kyiv to the Bolsheviks and withdrew to Zhytomyr.
Members of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic party took part in the fighting, weapons in hand, and many of them died, massacred by the Bolsheviks both in Kyiv and in other villages of Ukraine, in the face of the International, we the Ukrainian Social-Democrats, must state that, in this struggle, the masses of Russian peasants and workers, dressed in their grey greatcoats have not marched against the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, but only against the Ukrainian proletariat which is also made up of workers and peasants. We must also point out that a large part of the Bolshevik troops was made up of elements which, with much assistance given by the Bolsheviks have entered the Red Guard as a stopgap. The regime established in Kyiv instigates terror and suppression against anyone suspected of having any sympathy with Central Rada. Some Ukrainian newspapers were suppressed and those that were able to be published were severely censored. Robitnycha Hazeta, our party paper, was only published five or six times under the Bolshevik regime and, even then, secretly.
The Bolsheviks, being unable to maintain their administrative apparatus and finding no support among the masses, in their turn, had to withdraw in the face of superior forces: Ukrainian regiments, trained in Volhynia and reinforced by German troops entered Ukraine by means of the Brest-Litovsk treaty.
On returning to Kyiv, the Central Rada and its General Secretariat were unable to remain in power for long. Thanks to the assistance given by German troops, the large Russian landholders, unhappy about agrarian reform which had taken away their land, gave support to the government under the name of the Hetman, General Skoropadsky, a great favourite of the imperial court. This was the beginning of the Ukrainian reaction.
The government called to power by General Skoropadsky was largely made up of the party of Cadets. The other Ukrainian political parties refused to participate and joined the opposition. The agrarian law voted in by the Central Rada was repealed and the rights of the large property owners were restored. An offensive against democracy began, with arrests, imprisonments, firing squads, denunciations; freedoms of speech and meetings, etc., were outlawed under the pretext of stopping Bolshevism.
The Ukrainian Social-Democratic Party returned to the underground, but with difficulty as the number of its supporters had increased, the revolutionary movement continued to evolve and the struggle continued. In Ukraine, as in the Don and Kuban, reactionary organised under the standard of the Volunteer Army.
On the other hand, the Skoropadsky government called for assistance of tsarist bureaucrats from Petrograd and from Moscow, who came very willingly to find shelter from the Bolshevik regime in Kyiv. When reactionary elements began to suppress the national and social gains of the Ukrainian people, the USDRP, shoulder to shoulder with the other Ukrainian parties, entered a decisive war against the Skoropadsky regime.
The specific insurrections continued throughout all of Ukraine. The German troops, who made up more than 500,000 men on Ukrainian territory, energetically defended the interests of the Hetman. The blood of Ukrainian peasants and workers flowed and the German artillery razed entire villages. At last, when the Skoropadsky government openly broke with the Ukrainians and appealed to the Russian monarchist circles, the Ukrainian National Union, made up of representatives of all the democratic parties, including the USDRP, organized a general uprising. A Directory of 5 members was elected and two of the Representatives of the USDRP, Vynnychenko and Petlyura joined.
Beginning on 14th November, this movement was followed by a mobilisation of the Ukrainian people who, within a few days, provided 800,000 recruits, of whom 200,000 were kept back through a lack of clothes and munitions, and in less than three weeks, a popular army was organised. The necessary weapons were obtained by disarming Skoropadsky’s detachments of voluntary officers and especially from the German troops. This movement concluded in the complete victory of the revolutionary people, village by village, town by town, all of Ukraine came into the hands of the Committee. Petlyura’s troops entered Kyiv on 14th December. The Hetman, together with several of his ministers, sought asylum in Germany. The officers from the voluntary detachments dispersed in all different directions and many were taken prisoner.
The Directory formed a democratic government and four members of the Ukrainian Social Democratic party joined it. Once again, many different activities were undertaken. The agrarian law that the Central Rada had voted in but not yet enforced was revived. The Directory signed the decree by which the Labour Congress, made up of peasants, workers and democratic intellectuals, was convened.
However, the government’s position and the position of the parties who had given it their support became serious. Ukraine had to withstand war on several fronts: in the Donets basis and the region of Odessa, against the Volunteer Army who had seized the Katerynoslav mines and put in place a regime of terror, also seizing nine hundred truckloads of coal which the Ukrainian railways desperately needed; in Galicia, against the Poles who had seized Lviv. Ukraine was forced to fight a difficult war in the north where Bolshevik detachments had already begun an offensive in the guberniya’s of Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Kursk.
Furthermore, there were many bands of brigands throughout all Ukraine, the most important of which was Makhno’s (the current general of the Bolsheviks in Crimea), who carried out his misdeeds in the region of Katerynoslav.
It had not been possible to organise an army with reliable foundations during the German occupation, under the Hetman regime. This popular army which had given back power to the Committee needed to consolidate the lack of coal resulting from the occupation of Donets stopped all traffic and did not allow the Committee to position its troops in the areas where they would have been necessary.
However, the Bolsheviks in the north massed their forces in the guberniya of Kharkiv and of Kursk and unleashed their offensive against the Ukrainian troops. The Ukrainian troops who, from the beginning, fought the Bolsheviks and who, for the reasons outlined, were not able to receive reinforcements, had to sustain attacks by superior Bolshevik forces, commanded by the tsarist general Glagolev, and others.
Some Ukrainian political groups, among them the extremist Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, believed that, given the impossibility of withstanding fighting on several fronts, it was necessary to come to terms with some elements of the enemy. Since a peace treaty with the Volunteer monarchists or with the imperialist Poles who wanted to seize eastern Galicia could not be signed, they said that a peace treaty could be entered into only with the Bolsheviks.
Negotiations began and Ukraine included an indispensable condition that Bolshevik troops should withdraw from Ukrainian territory following the negotiations. Lenin’s refusal led to Ukraine declaring war. On the other hand, the same Ukrainian groups began to disseminate propaganda about putting power back into the hands of the Ukrainian soviets, believing that this was the only way to safeguard the independent Ukrainian Republic. The 6th party Congress which met towards the middle of January, unanimously less 10 votes decided that it was premature to give power to the Soviets and that the Ukrainian proletariat, united with all the people, had to defend, weapons in hand, their territory against any invasion and against any kind of violence, from wherever these would come: imperialist, Bolshevik, etc.
The Labour congress convened by the Committee met in Kyiv towards the end of January 1919 and was made up of only representatives from the workers’ party; the bourgeois having no right to vote. Many representatives of Ukrainian Democracy were unable to attend, Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Poltava, being already in the hands of the Bolsheviks. The congress unanimously ratified recognition of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The congress made several amendments to the draft agrarian law and approved the rights of small landowners over land already in their possession. Unfortunately, the congress did not have the calm conditions required in order to give itself over to its work; the evacuation of Kyiv began. It moved to Vinnytsia, in Podolia where the Ukrainian government also came to be installed.
Today, Ukraine continues its bitter struggle against Bolshevik invasion and if the lack of weapons forces the army to withdraw to the western border, the workers’ party has confidence in the cause it is defending and is firmly resolved to achieve the triumph of the democratic Ukrainian Republic, whatever the cost, and will spare no effort nor no blood to ensure that democratic Ukraine has the right to create in her own territory whatever form of government it wishes for the victory of democracy, the basis of the triumph of socialism.
- 1. The Directory members were: Vynnychenko, as Chairman, Petliura, F. Shevets of the Peasant Union, P. Andriievsky, Independent Socialists, and A. Makarenko representing the rail workers trade union.
- 2. The Nezalezhnyky counted a number of prominent figures in its ranks: Mykhaylo Tkachenko, their main theorist, had been Minister of Internal Affairs of the Central Rada; Volodymyr Chekhivsky, the Head of the Council of Ministers of the revived UNR government. The other leading theorist was Andriy Richytsky; he was one of the editors of the USDRP central organ Robitnycha Gazeta in 1917. Mykhaylo Avdiyenko was the most active practical figure, originally from the strong Petrograd USDRP organisation where he was soldier; later in Kyiv he was close to Vynnychenko. Another prominent member was Antin Drahomyretsky, a Kyiv functionary and Yurko Mazurenko; he was in command of the USDRP Revolutionary Committee and in 1917 played a key role in blocking the passage to Petrograd of Kornilov.
- 3. Khrystiuk Pavlo Zamitky i materiialy do istori ukrains'koi revoliutsia 1917-1920, Vol. IV Chapter III 52.
- 4. When the Dniprovska Division entered Kyiv on the defeat of Skoropadsky it was under red banners and slogans of “All power to the Soviets!” and “All land to the peasants”. Fearing they would make an attempt to take power, Petlyura transferred them from the city. Petrichenko, KB — “Malovidomi Fakty z Zhyttya ta Diyalnosti Danylo Ilkovicha Terpylo (Otaman Zeleny)”. Unpublished paper, Institute of Ukrainian Studies Kyiv, December 2006
- 5. Ukrainian People's Socialist Republic December 1918 (Robitnycha Hazeta, 7 January 1919, Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom. IV, pp. 55-56).
- 6. Ukrainian People's Socialist Republic December 1918 (Robitnycha Hazeta, 7 January 1919, Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom. IV, pp. 55-56).
- 7. An illustration was Colonel Bolbochan, the former Hetmanate commander of the Zaporozhian Division, who was appointed the Directory's commander in chief in Left-Bank Ukraine. Bolbochan instituted a reign of terror against the resurgence of the agrarian revolution and the workers' councils (Baker “Peasants, Power and Revolution in the Village” 167-8).
- 8. Assessing what had arisen in the UNR, “Andr. Mykh” of the Nezalezhnyky wrote: “Whatever was alive and popular in it has passed to the masses where it works. But remnants of the nationalist bourgeoisie and intelligentsia cling to the blue and yellow banner, arrange buffoonery, meetings to the sound of church bells, prayer services and other attributes of national sentimentalism, which only serve to discredit the popular movement and its leaders. Our task and the task of the Directory at the present moment is to break completely with remnants of the national front” (Robitnycha Hazeta, December 1918, pp. 55-56).
- 9. The Council of National Ministers was re-established on 26 December 1918, members of the USDRP included: Prime Minister .V. Chekhivsky, Minister of Finance V. Mazurenko; Minister of Food Supplies B.Martos; Minister of Arts D. Antonovych; Minister of National Health B. Matiushenko; Minister of Labor L.Mykhailiv.
- 10. Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom IV, p. 69
- 11. Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom IV, p. 69
- 12. The discussions that Porsh held with Mazepa on their own do not explain such a volte-face by Porsh. One can only surmise that the experience of the Bolshevik rule in Ukraine had seriously disillusioned Porsh, as it had others. It was his last speech to a USDRP audience in Ukraine after which he was dispatched as UNR ambassador to Germany. In January 1921 he began to adopt a more sovietophile politics; he made a speech at a student meeting calling on the émigrés to recognise the Soviet Ukrainian government and return to the Ukraine. Porsh applied to return to the Ukraine himself in 1922 and in January 1923 the Ukrainian Politburo decided to allow him to return though he never took up the offer. He started to drift away from political activity and suffered a tragic death in Germany in 1944.
- 13. Vynnychenko Vidrodzhennia natsii, Kyiv-Vienna, 1920,Vol. 3 242.
- 14. Chervony Prapor 22 January 1919.
- 15. Chervony Prapor 22 January 1919.
- 16. Chervony Prapor 22 January 1919.
- 17. Deklaratsiya Fraktsii Nazalezhnykh USDRP, Chervony Prapor, 22 January 1919.
- 18. Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom IV p.13.
- 19. Chervony Prapor 22 January 1919.
- 20. Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom IV, pp. 49-54.
- 21. Khrystiuk. Zamitky i materiialy, Tom IV 12.
- 22. There is speculation that it was without Lenin's knowledge that the Red Army advanced into Ukraine in late December 1918 (Adams 82-5).
- 23. Mazurenko Dokymenti Trahichnoi Istorii Ukrayini 248-53.
- 24. An act complemented by Red Army commander Antonov also lobbying Moscow against an agreement stating there was “nobody in Ukraine with whom we should negotiate” (Stachiw 258).
- 25. Mazurenko's efforts are considered to have been sabotaged by the new head of the Directory of the UNR. (Vynnychenko Vidrodzhennia natsii Vol. 3 279-80).
- 26. Most successfully in Left-Bank Ukraine in Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Katerynoslav guberniya the Directory was overthrown. On the Right Bank attempted risings occurred in Volhynia, Zhytomyr and in the Obruch district where the Otamanshchyna responded with pogroms. In Vynnychenko's estimation in the territory under their control: “There was neither punishment, nor justice, nor trials, nor control over these criminals and enemies of the revolution and the national movement. The whole system of military authority was constructed and consciously based, by the chief otamany, on the principle that there would be no control” (Vynnychenko Vidrodzheniia natsii Vol. 3 188).
- 27. Petrichenko.
- 28. Chervony Prapor 6 February 1919.
- 29. Chervony Prapor Kharkiv 11 July 1920.
- 30. Chervony Prapor 21 December 1919.
- 31. Halahan, Mykola (1925) Likvidatsiya UKP. Nova Ukraine (Prague) 1 , pp. 26-38.
- 32. Resolutionen Des VI Kongresses Der Ukr.Sozialdemokr.Arbeiterpartei, Institute of Social History Amsterdam, 815/- 816, Robitnycha Hazeta, 5, 14, 16 January, 1919, Kyiv.
- 33. Deklaration der Fraktion der Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei der Ukraine auf dem Kongress der arbeitenden Völkes der Ukraine, Institute of Social History, 8116/12-15.
- 34. Zakon, ukhvalenyy Konhresom Trudovoho Narodu Ukrayiny na zasidanni, 28 January, 1919 , ‘Pro formu vlady na Ukrayini’, Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, SAI, 816/6
- 35. Rezolyutsiyi po suchasnomy momentu VI Kongresy USDRP, (Institute of Social History, 015/1)
- 36. Chervony Prapor , No.1, 22 January 1919
- 37. Chervony Prapor , No.1, 22 January 1919
- 38. Chervony Prapor, No.2, 1919
- 39. Chervony Prapor, No.3, 30 January, 1919. The Resolution was proposed by S Bachinsky of the UPSR (Central Current) and based on the Declaration of the USDRP (official) to the Congress.
- 40. Chervony Prapor No.3, 30 January, 1919
- 41. Rapport sur les activités du parti social-démocrate au Bureau socialiste international D’Amsterdam, (The International Institute of Social History - IISH/IISG), this report was submitted by to the Socialist and Labour Conference at Berne in February 1919. The conference was to make arrangements for the resumption of the previous socialist international which broke up during the war. This was organised by a revived International Socialist Commission based in Amsterdam. The initiative rivalled the Russian Bolshevik Communist International centred in Moscow.
- 42. 1 deciatine = 2.70 acres’; a measurement of land in the Russian Empire, equivalent to 1.09 hectares’.
Invasion and Resistance – Borotbism, Revolutionary Socialism in the Ukrainian Revolution 1917-1921
Christopher Ford
Ukraine has been the victim of invasion several times during the tragic history of that country. On each of those occasions invasion has been accompanied by movements of resistance and a radicalisation amongst the populace. One such movement was the Borotbists, who were the radical left of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries during the revolution of 1917-1921. They went on to form the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbists) and seek membership of the Third International and played a leading role during the national and cultural revival of Ukraine in the 1920s.
Published below are three rare texts of the Borotbists, the Platform of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (1918), Draft Decree on Encouraging the Development of Culture of the Ukrainian People (1920), and Memorandum of the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty) to the Executive Committee of the Third Communist International, (1920).
Introduction
With the overthrow of the autocracy in 1917 the Ukrainian Revolution soon differentiated itself from the wider Russian Revolution, setting as its task the achievement of national emancipation through the creation of a Ukrainian Republic.
This period was one of unprecedented self-organisation and mobilisation of the masses, the Ukrainian movement comprised a bloc of the middle class, peasantry, workers and the revolutionary-democratic intellectuals, centred in the Ukrainian Central Rada [Council]. The Rada was a mass assembly consisting of councils of peasants’, soldiers’ and workers’ deputies, it included all the socialist parties, Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish and Polish.1
This movement transformed the situation from one where officially within the Russian Empire Ukraine did not exist, to one in which, by July 1917, the Russian Provisional Government was forced to recognise the Rada as a ‘higher organ for conducting Ukrainian national affairs’.2 In historical terms, the Rada represented for Ukraine what the Easter Rising and First Dáil did for the Irish Republic.
The leaders and parties at the forefront of the Ukrainian movement were exclusively socialist, ranging from the moderate Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Federalists to the Marxist Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (USDRP), to the mass Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (UPSR). The autonomous government of Ukraine, the General Secretariat and ‘Mala Rada’, were not exclusively Ukrainian, but included Mensheviks, Bundists and Russian SRs.
The UPSR was the largest political party and central to repeated mobilisations of the peasantry in 1917 and during the civil war. It played a key role in the agrarian revolution, millions of rural workers and peasants enrolled in the Ukrainian Peasants’ Union (Spilka) organised by the UPSR.
The Rada faced burning questions of ending the war, the agrarian revolution and the drive to workers' control, encapsulated in the slogan ‘land for the peasants and factories for the workers’. By late 1917, leadership of the Rada began to lag behind the pace and aspirations of the popular movement from below.3 Relations strained between those moderate and centrist elements and the radicalised rank and file of the movement.
After the October Revolution, a new Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed with widespread support, the conjuncture also saw increasing support for a more radical turn. This was reflected in growth of the left currents in both the Ukrainian Social-Democrats and Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionaries – an aspect downplayed by both Stalinist and nationalist historiography.
But, whilst in Russia this radicalisation saw the different strands of the popular movement coalesce in the Bolshevik-Left SR leadership in the soviets, which caught up with the changed mood, in Ukraine the chief characteristic of the situation was one of fragmentation. The overwhelmingly Ukrainian peasantry did not automatically find allies and leaders in the urban working class which also contained a large Russian and Russified element.4
Those wishing to give the emerging socialist revolution a Ukrainian character and form were unsuccessful in the vortex of the winter of 1917-1918. The Bolshevik organisations in Ukraine were unprepared for the anti-colonial dimension of the revolution. In his later analysis of the Russian Constituent Assembly elections, Lenin emphasised that it was the Ukrainian socialists who had not only secured large votes in the army but that, in Ukraine as a whole, “the Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionaries and socialists polled a majority”, concluding that “to ignore the importance of the national question in Ukraine ... is a great and dangerous mistake.”5
The results illustrated the popular base of the Ukrainian movement, illustrating that frustration with the Rada did not automatically translate into a rejection of the Ukrainian cause itself. Whilst some historians point to the lower vote for the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, it is important to recognise just who was elected.
Of the 120 deputies elected from Ukraine, the UPSR formed a faction of 81 deputies in the Russian Constituent Assembly.6 In their ranks, it was the radical left-current, the “Internationalist” group which linked national emancipation to the world revolution who predominated. After the dissolution of the All-Russia Constituent Assembly, these Left UPSR deputies returned to Kyiv and sought to replace the General Secretariat with a new government with the left-wing of the USDRP, and seek peace with the Bolsheviks. Their plan was discovered and six UPSR leaders arrested and the UPSR Left excluded from the Rada.7
None of this this strengthened the position of the Rada, which was facing an existential crisis. Soviet power was established in one town after another. To see this solely as a Russian ‘invasion’ is an erroneous portrayal. Local Red Guards, workers’ militias and Ukrainian soldiers actively carried through uprisings of the local population.
In Kharkiv, the delegates from a third of the soviets in Ukraine ‘assumed full state power in the Ukrainian People's Republic’ and declared a rival government, the People's Secretariat. It was largely Bolsheviks allied with the USDRP (Left) who had split from their party.
The People’s Secretariat, having proclaimed itself the government of the Ukrainian republic, soon discovered this was not a view shared by Russia or its emissaries. The views harboured by some leading Bolsheviks towards Ukraine are revealed in a telegram sent by Stalin the Peoples Commissar for Nationalities: ‘Enough playing at a government and republic. It’s time to drop that game; enough is enough’.8
Russia deployed to Ukraine a ten thousand strong force under the command of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko. The commander of soviet forces that advanced on Kyiv was the Russian Chauvinist N.A. Muravyov, who refused to accept the authority of the Peoples Secretariat which he viewed as guilty of ‘narrow nationalism’. Antonov recorded that Muravyov adopted ‘the tone of a conqueror, and entered into a sharp conflict with the local soviet and roused all the Ukrainians against him.’9
As Kyiv was poised to fall, on 17 January a new government was formed there dominated by the centre-right of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries. Lured by the appeal of the Germans, the delegation representing the Rada signed a separate peace treaty at Brest Litovsk on 27 January 1918. There was a price for the 200,000 German and Austrian troops driving the Bolsheviks out of Ukraine, and it was measured in grain and raw materials.
The Germans soon deposed rival governments claiming authority of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, first the People’s Secretariat, then their hosts of the Rada, who they saw as unreliable ‘left opportunists’. The Germans installed the Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky an aristocratic landlord and former Tsarist officer who established an authoritarian ‘Ukrainian State’ – the Hetmanate.10
The Hetmanate set about reversing the gains of the revolution, with the occupying Austro-German forces granted “a free hand in trade and raw materials procurement,” they set about extracting all they could by force of arms from the countryside.11 The retrogression that gripped Ukraine in 1918 was soon met by a wave of resistance as insurgency spread across the countryside in May and a workers’ strike wave that broke out in July. During 1918, this popular resistance to the occupation would cost the German Imperial Army 20,000 dead.
The experience of the first year of the revolution in Ukraine saw significant developments in the main Ukrainian parties – it reflected the fact that, in the eyes of many workers and peasants, an alternative articulation of national emancipation was now necessary. A diverse current took shape within the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries and Social-Democrats, that that stood on a soviet platform and sought to realise it within an ‘independent Ukrainian socialist republic’.
In mid-May 1918, at the Fourth Congress of the UPSR, the Internationalists achieved a control over the entire party, which now split. Named after the party's paperBorotba [Struggle], the Internationalists, the left wing, adopted the name “Borotbisty.”
In the period of the second Soviet Government in Ukraine, (February – August 1919, led by Khristian Rakovsky, the Borotbists would also play a leading role, a number taking positions in the government of the new Ukrainian SSR. Following the fall of that government in in August 1919, they re-launched as the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty).
During the period of the White Russian Army’s occupation of Ukraine under Denikin, the Borotbists played a leading role in the resistance. Mykhailo Hrushevsky former leader of the Central Rada wrote in 1920 of the Borotbisty that when ‘they led an uprising under the slogan of a Ukrainian Republic that would be independent yet Soviet and friendly toward the Bolsheviks and Soviet Russia, the masses flocked to their banner….’12
The Ukrainian Communist Party (Borot’bisty), fought for an independent Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic allied through federation with the Russian Soviet Republic. It sought membership as an independent party in the Third (Communist) International.
In the spring of 1920, the Borotbisty merged, with the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine. Providing the latter with many outstanding leaders, figures such asOleksander Shumsky, they would play a prominent role during the period of Ukrainisation, the national and cultural renaissance of the 1920s in Soviet Ukraine. Their influence lasted until the onset of the Stalinist terror in in Ukraine.
These texts are republished with permission from the leading work in English language on the subject: Ivan Maistrenko, Borotbism: A Chapter in the History of the Ukrainian Revolution, Edited by Christopher Ford, 2019.
Platform of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries:
The Present State of Affairs and Party Tactics
(approved by Central Committee on June 3, 1918)13
I.In appraising the present state of affairs, the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries affirms the following:
1. The Revolution in the Ukraine is today deep in crisis and
Neoliberalism and the State
In this interview for textum's special series on neoliberalism, Kübra Altaytaş and Ozan Sisospoke with Pınar Bedirhanoğlu about "neoliberalism and the state", in a broad intellectual exchange, which touched on issues ranging from the capitalist state to the modern state form, from the political Islamist transformation of society in Turkey to corruption across the globe, from class relations transformed by financialisation to labour struggles. We hope that this in-depth discussion will serve to clear up confusion about the state-market-society triangle, on which there has been much debate but no consensus has yet been reached.
KÜBRA ALTAYTAŞ, OZAN SİSO and PINAR BEDİRHANOĞLU*
*Who is Pınar Bedirhanoğlu?
Having lately placed the neoliberal transformation of the state security apparatus at the centre of her scientific inquiries, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pınar Bedirhanoğlu stands out for her extensive research, spanning a wide spectrum from global political economy to Marxist theory of the state, from financialisation processes to neoliberal policies against corruption in the Global South. Bedirhanoğlu’s work, published in both English and Turkish, and also translated into other languages, involves profound analyses of such crucial phenomena as the transformation of the state, state-capital relations, and privatisation and financialisation, in particular, in Turkey. Bedirhanoğlu, who conducted research as a visiting professor in the Department of Politics at York University during the 2019-2020 academic year, continues her scholarly work in the Department of International Relations at the Middle East Technical University. She is the co-author of Turkey’s New State in the Making: Transformations in Legality, Economy and Coercion, published by ZED Books in August 2020.
**This interview, originally held in Turkish, was first published by textum on January 26, 2021. The interview was translated into English by Ozan Siso, and revised by Pınar Bedirhanoğlu.
Detail from the frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, designed by Abraham Bosse and dated 1651. The quote in Latin, at the top of the image, is taken from the Bible (Iob 41: 24) and reads: “There is no power upon earth to be compared to him”
In one of his speeches, in November 2020, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current President of Turkey, stated that the fate of his party has merged with that of the country. He emphasised that “Turkey will roll into a pit of uncertainty, instability, political and financial headlock” in the event of the defeat of the Justice and Development Party (Turkish: Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). Erdoğan argues that this merger is a result of the present conjuncture. Provided said conditions, is it really possible to identify the future of the country with that of the AKP?
Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: We observe that this kind of rhetoric has become part of Erdoğan’s discourse especially since 2014. From that year onwards, he started making statements about a rather ambiguous ‘finance lobby’ and its conspiracies against Turkey. Erdoğan gradually enriched this rhetoric with an emphasis on the unity of the country against the operations by Western actors aimed at weakening Turkey. On the one hand, Erdoğan’s discourse is a by-product of his efforts to hold the reins of power. On the other hand, his recourse to such a rhetoric after 2014 should also be duly considered. In order to apprehend his discursive break in 2014, it is pertinent to concisely recall the dynamics of financialisation that the AKP implemented until then. In the aftermath of the 2008 global capitalist crisis, the United States (US) gave a new impetus to monetary expansionist policies, which were already on the agenda after the 2001 dot.com crisis on a global scale. We see by 2013 that, for the first time, the US Federal Reserve System (also known as the Fed) made an effort to contain monetary expansion. In the world markets, this effort resulted in a tendency of hot money flowing back to developed capitalist countries from 2013-2014 onwards. This process naturally had a devastating effect on the Southern countries. Largely indebted countries such as Turkey, which were in fact locked into debt-cycling to manage their economy during the period of 2001-2013, have been directly affected by the monetary contraction experienced following 2013. As the Covid-19 pandemic shook the world in March 2020, the Fed has returned to monetary expansion once again. This time, however, the uncertainties of the pandemic conditions force finance capital to be cautious in steering for the Southern countries.
We witnessed monetary expansion in global markets systematically triggering private debt in Turkey during the post-2001 period. Since 2001, not only business groups but also households have rapidly become indebted or, to put it more precisely, encouraged by the state to borrow. During this time, government indebtedness also increased despite the decrease in its share in the general debt ratio. Just to remind the reader, the state we’re talking about here is the state that has been ruled by AKP governments since November 2002. In sum, the subordination of the state, enterprises and labour – in other words, social relations in general – to capital in Turkey gradually deepened through indebtedness during the AKP’s rule. We can say that Erdoğan’s rhetoric that the AKP is fighting a war of independence has been developed against the concrete implications of this subordination.
In the most general sense, the subordination to capital is reflected in the imposition of the capitalist market on the totality of social relations as an imperative. This imposition manifests itself by rendering the state, enterprises and labour unable to reproduce themselves outside of the market. Given the increasing pressure indebtedness creates on social relations, it can be said that financialisation processes have, furthermore, deepened the subordination to capital on a global scale. Therefore, financialisation cannot be reduced to such phenomena as increased debt of companies or the financial markets becoming more complex through derivatives and securitisation. At another level of abstraction, financialisation is the expression of the increased subordination of social relations, labour and the state to capital.
When evaluated from the perspective of labour, financialisation corresponds to being subject to a novel, generalised and deepened mechanism of market discipline which no longer allows labour to live without debt. Until the 1990s, labouring classes were trying to sell their labour power for a certain wage and live on it. That is to say, the subordination to capital or capitalist market discipline was experienced by labour as a pressure to find employment. The class discipline that has been engendered by financialisation since the 1990s began to take shape through indebtedness. The violence of the capitalist market on labour has since increased with financialisation. Perhaps a more nuanced discussion is needed for Western capitalism; however, if we are to interpret financialisation with reference to Lapavitsas’s work, we can say that the indebtedness of the labouring classes has emerged not only in the global Southern countries but throughout the world as a new phenomenon.
The financialisation of world capitalism has also changed the conditions of reproduction for the Turkish state. During the first twelve years of its rule, the AKP government rapidly and robustly integrated the country’s economy with that of global capitalism through financialisation. The AKP realised this integration quite recklessly for it sought not to give up the opportunities provided by financialisation at the time. The outcome of this policy has been a country where everyone is in debt and dependent on debt rollover, one that is directly affected by the direction of money flow in world markets. Erdoğan’s rhetoric against the “finance lobby” is aimed at concealing his responsibility in this matter. On the flipside, attracting money to the country is essential for the reproduction of all social sections; this discourse also creates the illusion that government and society share common ground through indebtedness, and it probably resonates with the debtors. However, we need to combine this analysis with a political one in order to understand why the AKP’s crisis has become Turkey’s crisis.
Even though you explain the outbreak of the current crisis as a consequence of processes of financialisation, you still underline the particular role the AKP played as well. Can you explain the reasons for this?
Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: I’ve already said that in an environment of monetary abundance that marked world markets in the 2000s, Turkish capitalism had articulated with world capitalism through financialisation. Throughout the process that began in 2002 and lasted until 2013-2014, the AKP had the opportunity to implement a range of policies to accelerate the neoliberal transformation of capitalism in Turkey on relatively comfortable grounds, with the funds received from both the EU and the wide monetary opportunities offered by the global markets. In other words, the AKP made the most out of the extraordinary expansion of international credit opportunities during these years in order to consolidate its power in Turkey. This was something that previous governments could not do. For example, it legislated the Labour Law, which was approved in 2003 and laid the legal basis for the flexibility of labour markets, and privatised large-scale and profitable state enterprises. Among the products of this period are also the neoliberal transformation of agriculture and the commercialisation of land. Following this agricultural transformation, large rural populations were relocated in urban zones and this process was economically managed in this global environment of abundant money and credit.
An important opportunity that monetary expansionism offered to AKP was an improvement in the quality of life of the subordinate classes. Here, it should be noted that tight monetary policies, which are subject to many seminal debates within Europe, have not been rigorously applied in Turkey. To the contrary, the 2000s were a decade of general enrichment, especially for the subordinate classes. One should definitely add to this the mechanisms of redistribution managed by the AKP. As a result, the poor got better off in the 2000s thanks to the AKP. Of course, this was a period of loss of rights for the relatively better off segments of labour, which until then had job security, benefited from the health services provided by the state and were able to make retirement plans. However, for those who could not even dream of employment with job security, or enter through the doors of a hospital until then, it was a time of real change for the good, even if through indebtedness. This is, in fact, the material basis of the AKP’s ability to continue getting the majority of the votes of the lower classes in the eighteenth year of its neoliberal rule.
In the period between 2002 and 2013, AKP strengthened its power by combining this material base with a vigorous political-ideological discourse. I think that the principal driving force of the AKP as a political party in this process has not been neoliberalism but Islamism. In my opinion, the political agenda applied and defined by the AKP is shaped by Islamism. Neoliberalism and especially financialisation gave AKP cadres enormous opportunities to implement its agenda. The political Islamist transformation of society was carried out in an environment of increased prosperity through indebtedness. It is also true that the leading figures among AKP cadres, Erdoğan first and foremost, share a mercantile mentality; nonetheless, I do not believe that this autogenously makes AKP cadres neoliberal. For AKP cadres, neoliberalism was a tool that was seamlessly adopted to attain the goal. However, along with the implementation of neoliberal policies, most notably those facilitating financialisation, the entirety of the state and society found itself under massive pressure of monetary discipline. It was in this way that the conditions for the present crisis of Turkish capitalism as well as that of the AKP were put in place.
To explain briefly, the subordinate classes, which were defined by the AKP as the “periphery” against the “Kemalist core,” were integrated into the party’s political line by means of both the expansion of their consumption capabilities through indebtedness, and this centre-periphery rhetoric, which together turned them into the loyal voting base of the AKP. In the eyes of these poor sectors, they have been saved by the AKP from many predicaments – predicaments which are also indispensable to the state of indebtedness – throughout the 2000s. In my judgement, it is not easy to shake this myth of the “saviour” constituted during the AKP’s protracted rule. Notwithstanding, it seems also unlikely that they will be able to readily reproduce this myth of salvation in the new crisis environment, which might easily lead to a crash, within the context of the clearance period in the making in financial markets. Capital demands high returns, and accordingly high interest rates, in order to settle in the country today. Capital’s demand for high interest rates, by directly complicating the conditions of debt rollover for the subordinate classes, implies also that the Ponzi scheme established so far has finally come to an end. Therefore, we have now entered a new era of financialisation, where the demands for profit of capital and the political concerns of the AKP stand in conflict.
Why does this conflict signify a crisis for Turkey as a whole? To answer this, it is necessary to emphasise the alterations made to the historical class equilibria of Turkish capitalism by the AKP, through financialisation. Social segments that the AKP is politically bound up with, through material means provided by financialisation, are also those who had been pacified in Turkey’s uneven modernisation process, through various political-cultural strategies until the AKP’s ascendance to power. The AKP has politicised these segments with its Islamist concerns to such an extent that no other conservative party would perhaps dare to. Put in other words, by turning them into politically active and demanding people, the AKP has constituted Turkey’s “dangerous classes.” In today’s market conditions, where the demands of these poor people can hardly be met and, therefore, serious decline in their living conditions are predicted, it seems that the question of how to control these AKP-revived “dangerous classes” is no longer solely the AKP’s concern. What is interesting is that the AKP, with its hitherto “saviour myth,” seems to be still the only political force capable of managing the social reactions of these classes. Therefore, today, the AKP has not only transformed its own crisis into the crisis of Turkish capitalism, but also made Turkey’s political establishment dependent on its rule.
On the other hand, it would not be appropriate to explain the post-2014 period through Islamism alone. The process we are going through is a state of complete crisis. In this crisis, the AKP tries to stay in power by trying all kinds of strategies. This very reflex itself demonstrates that the party we are faced with is in fact not an ordinary party of the establishment. As the AKP resorts to manifold strategies, ordinary political cycles of the parliamentary system do not function as they should do, preventing a stable change in government, as exemplified in the aftermath of the June 2015 general elections and, thereby, the political crisis deepens. Today, the economic crises in Turkey take mostly the form of currency crises. In addition to this, there is the ongoing debt crisis. This implies that the crisis we encounter today is at the same time a class crisis. Taking into account all of this, I think we are going through a political crisis that emerged as a result of the historical ruptures financialisation has engendered within capitalist relations of production. This crisis also became a state crisis when the government tried to overcome it through the transition to the Presidential System of Government (Turkish: Cumhurbaşkanlığı Hükümet Sistemi, CHS). Consequently, the AKP’s crisis has become Turkey’s crisis in every respect.
Nonetheless, let us not leave out that capitalism is also in crisis on a global scale. Compared to the previous periods of major crisis, US hegemony today is going through one of its most fragile phases ever. This is, as far as I am concerned, a rather unique phase in which US hegemony is both very strong and very weak. From one perspective, this crisis is an inherent product of capitalism, and part of this has to do with the very fact that world capitalism today is very strongly financialised. As a matter of fact, operations by all large conglomerates of capital today are financialised. It is crucial for these groups that the financial markets experience only predictable shocks. In this environment, the US stands out as the sole political force that can steer and direct the immense, self-multiplying and increasingly more and more complex financial markets. On the flip side, financialisation, as a process actually instigated by the US itself, has redefined the hegemonic power of the US. In this relationship of mutual dependence, global markets take sudden new directions just with a statement made by the Fed. We will watch and see how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect this process. To sum up, turning back to Turkey in the shadow of such hegemonic crises, we observe that modern bourgeois politics has attained its limits in coping with the current crises of the capitalist relations of production. To what extent are these limits a product of the developments that arose particularly in Turkey and as a result of the Islamist preferences of the AKP? To what extent do these limits point to the inability of the modern state form to handle the contradictions of financialised capitalism? We need time to answer these questions.
What do you mean by the concept of “modern state form”? If we are to speak from within the framework of Marxist state theory, does this concept offer an analysis that goes beyond those predominantly confined within the boundaries of liberal ontology? Moreover, what strategic importance can the concept of “modern state form” have for us in struggles over the state today?
Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: What I mean by the modern state form is the parliamentary form of the capitalist state that reproduces itself in a class-neutral institutionality and tries to fulfil its claim to popular sovereignty through periodic general elections. I do not think that Marxists have sufficiently discussed this state form, which historically emerged during the transition process of European feudal monarchies to capitalism, via complex and multi-layered class and interstate struggles. One notable exception to this is Heide Gerstenberger’s 2007 book, Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State.
Nevertheless, the universalised historical form of the capitalist state in today’s world, which was shaped by the long-term development of European capitalism, is the state model in which all citizens are considered equal before the law and stipulated to partake in its administration by the way of elections. Marxists have so far rightly deemed it a political goal to reveal the class content of the capitalist state, which reproduces itself thus in an apparently class-neutral way, and attempted to identify by which mediations the state and capital are interconnected. I think the fundamental flaw in this vital political effort has been leaving the analysis of the modern bourgeois state to Weberian theories by failing to address it within a class-based and historical analysis.
However, the “modern bourgeois” state form is not a form of state produced by the bourgeoisie alone. To the contrary, we see upon historical investigation that the modern bourgeois state is a necessary bourgeois class response to the social struggles of the 19th century, and it bears the hallmark of those struggles. This state form, which emerged for the first time with the French Revolution, is the product of a very specific historical process. Let us not forget that the essential intent of the Vienna agreement of 1815 was to bring the post-revolutionary political and class relations back under ruling-class control in Europe. This process, which was triggered by the French Revolution and not yet tamed through powerful market discipline, was shaped in response to the destructive anger of the lower classes, who took to the streets at every opportunity with anti-establishment demands. We speak of a terrifying destructiveness that openly threatened the ruling classes of that period. The modern form of the state was established in such a historical period when these angry masses struggled to death against capital trying to expropriate them. This state form was not a functional requirement of capitalism; it is rather a form of state that has been formed incidentally, in the course of history, through struggle. Otherwise, why would the ruling classes spontaneously offer equality, even if only before the law, to the classes they strived to dominate?
We trace the historical development of the modern bourgeois state form from the Jacobin period of the French Revolution to the present. It is difficult to properly discuss this whole process of political development here. Nevertheless, it should be emphasised that this process has been a lengthy one, determined by trial and error by inter-state relations as well as class and political struggles. Two important points should not be overlooked in this discussion. First, the modern bourgeois state emerged as a response to the robust social struggles that marked Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Second, the universalisation of this state form was made possible through its adoption as a model in the former colonies, which gained their political independence from European powers in the post-1945 period. This historical reading tells us that the modern state form has been established not only by the bourgeoisie but also by the struggles of the working masses and the exploited peoples of the world. Of course, this state form is also one that is intertwined with nationalism, which has been quite effective in absorbing and/or pacifying these struggles. However, I think that the critical space that the irresolvable tension between the class-neutral appearance and the class content of the modern bourgeois state form has opened up for emancipatory social struggles is not one that could be easily discarded today.
I think it is very important to remember this, especially today, when the processes of authoritarianism observed in many countries of the world target the political institutions that are identified with this state form. These authoritarian processes are the result of the neoliberal transformation of the state, to the advantage of capital, since the 1980s. Notwithstanding this, we need to also consider that the assault against modern parliamentary state practices, which are intensifying today, take place in a period in which labour has already been extraordinarily weakened against capital from a historical point of view. I think that these transformative tendencies are not limited to Turkey. The basic institutions of the modern bourgeois state, which have, over the years, been the main object of criticism for Marxists, are being simultaneously destroyed today in many countries of the world. In an era when labour has little power to preserve its historical gains provided by the modern state form, let alone its ability to radicalise the class contradictions engraved in the modern bourgeois state, the prospect for the development of a new pro-labour state seems extremely unlikely. If the form of the state is historically determined by class struggles, it is more likely that the form in the making today bears the stamp of capital rather than that of labour. Consequently, contemplating the modern bourgeois state in such a historical process of change can provide us with a new vision in identifying pro-labour strategies in political struggles over the state.
You define the modern state as a state form that has engraved class neutrality in its institutional form and has in due course become universal; so, how does its character change today? Can we say that the modern state form, which stands out with its class-neutral appearance, is under threat in today’s capitalism?
Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: To begin with, the class-neutral form of the state and class struggles are changed, transformed, and experienced in diverse ways across the globe, because of the tension between this class-neutral form of the state and the capitalist relations of production within which it exists. This process should be examined at different levels of abstraction. By definition, the capitalist state is a state that is defined by the separation of the political and economic spheres and reproduces itself within capitalist relations of production. In defining the capitalist state as such, Simon Clarke does not actually assert anything about the institutional content or the class neutrality of this state.
It is possible to better grasp the development of the modern bourgeois state in Turkey, as an institutional form determined by class struggle, by tracing the alterations within the legal field. For instance, it is often stressed today that the difficulties we face within the field of law are beyond those during the 1980 coup d’état period, infamously remembered for mass torture and executions. What is meant by this is that there existed even back then the possibility of getting a fair decision from the courts within the institutional set up of the modern bourgeois state, defined by its claim to class-neutrality, despite the dire conditions of the 1980 coup, such as torture. What is being rapidly lost in contemporary Turkey, where the law is privatised, is this possibility per se. The counter-argument to this, i.e. that the rule of law is a necessity for capital, is gradually losing its meaning today. Indeed, many of the problems that directly concern global capital, in particular, have long been resolved by international courts. That being the case, we are passing through a phase where equality before the law evidently ceases to exist for individual persons in Turkey. As we assume that this situation cannot be legalised, we want to believe that this is only a temporary period.
The public character of the state, which the state assumes in the context of its modern bourgeois historical form, and its reflections in the legal arena have been subjected to serious modifications, even transformations since the 1980s. I am speaking of a change beyond the much-discussed privatisations or public-private partnerships. For instance, state security apparatuses are getting rapidly privatised all over the world today. This dynamic does not only imply the opening of the security space to capital accumulation; it also illustrates that capital has begun to directly get involved in the safe reproduction of the capitalist relations of production. This question has been discussed extensively in the works of Funda Hülagü and Çağlar Dölek, with whom I have been working on the modern bourgeois state.
To give a direct answer to your question, the class-neutral appearance shaped within the public institutional set up of the state in such areas as security and law is a product of centuries-long processes. Moreover, this state form has also created its own politics throughout this process. Therefore, this form cannot be expected to disappear easily from one day to the next. In our scholarly studies, with Funda and Çağlar, we focus on the dimensions of class struggles today that revolve around the modern bourgeois form of the state, and draw attention to the class tensions and contradictions that arise within these struggles.
Can we say that the alliances of different power groups formed within capitalist relations, and the reflection in the state of social struggles against capitalism, serve to hide the class nature of the state?
Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: This is, on the one hand, true. The struggles of different power alliances, even those of labour fought through the state, serve to reproduce the class-neutral appearance of the modern bourgeois state. Nonetheless, the same struggles can also strain the conditions of its reproduction. After all, the modern bourgeois form of the capitalist state, historically determined by class struggle, may change and get transformed again through class struggles. The democratic possibilities in this form may be radicalised or the democratic claim of this form may be abandoned altogether. This situation reminds us that the positions obtained within the state should not be easily jettisoned. This is also a warning to those who take for granted the modern bourgeois parliamentary form of the capitalist state either in its liberal or authoritarian versions.
At this point one could justifiably ask this question: will not the disappearance of the modern bourgeois state form along with its claim to democracy, which has successfully concealed the class essence of the capitalist state up until now, open up more space for emancipatory social struggles? I don’t have an answer to this question, but let me draw attention to an important point that we should take into account while thinking over this question: capitalism marks only a very short period in human history marked by class inequalities. Before capitalism, there was a social order in which all class antagonisms were experienced face to face and with utmost harshness. The subject of exploitation was known, and violence was evident. It wasn’t until the 18th century that these oppositions evolved into a generalised demand for equality. Therefore, there is no guarantee that the manifestation of inequalities will have good results, that a liberating struggle will rise from the crises created by the deepening inequalities, and that a more egalitarian system will thereby be established. However, there are concrete historical examples of how naked class inequalities before the 18th century could be managed through overt violence and religious repression.
Nonetheless, we should also remember that in the short history of capitalism, the universalisation of the modern bourgeois state in the nation-state form is also a very recent development. I believe that we should understand the dissatisfaction expressed by neoliberal ideologues such as Hayek or Buchanan against democracy, as an extension of this form. To put it in the historical class context, Hayek’s concerns about the tyranny of the majority
In fact, it seems that financialisation processes have provided an effective pro-capital solution to such concerns raised by Hayek, Buchanan and German Ordoliberals in the neoliberal era. One of the most fundamental class dynamics that prevents states from threatening “individual freedoms,” which can be read as the freedom of capital, is financialisation. By advising, in its own language, regarding which freedoms should preferably be restricted, neglected, or even violated, financialisation prompts states to seek creative solutions in managing crises that arise in different conditions. It can be said that the search for an “authoritarian liberal state,” which capital has always longed for, has entered a new phase owing to neoliberal financialisation. Political experiments on how such a state is going to be institutionalised are carried out under the conditions determined by the global common pressure of financialisation processes in many countries of the world today. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the solid constitution, which Buchanan demanded, is no longer needed from the viewpoint of capital.
You assign a dominant role to financialisation in drawing the capitalist boundaries of the state. What are the terms through which you discuss the relationship of the state with different sections of capital?
Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: We need to reconsider the relations of different sections of capital to the state within the historical specificities of the global process of capital accumulation and take into account how the state in question reproduces itself in this process. Simon Clarke defines these relations as political class relations and assigns them a critical role in determining the political form of the state.
I find this formulation very important in terms of understanding AKP-capital relations in Turkey. In the face of the politically strained relations between the AKP and Istanbul-based large and internationalised capital, what I have found very problematic, from the very beginning, is to shift the debate to the relationship of the AKP with small and medium-sized “Anatolian” capital in order to demonstrate that the AKP is a party serving capital. I do not hesitate to define this latter relationship as one of mutual dependence in which the state dominates. These business groups need the support of the AKP government in order to survive fierce global competition, and to the extent that they receive this support, they support the AKP government politically. On the other hand, this relationship is of political significance for the AKP. These enterprises employ more than 70 percent of the working population in Turkey and control the (undissolving) electoral base of the AKP. This relationship does not prove to us that the AKP is either a pro-capital or a pro-labour party. This relationship basically describes how the AKP government manages its own class contradictions within the capitalist boundaries drawn by financialisation – which implies employing conservative strategies due to the conservative nature of both the AKP and this section of capital. The AKP strives to stay in power by managing the perpetual crises of financialised Turkish capitalism with Islamist conservative and repressive political strategies.
The AKP has ruled Turkey in the last eighteen years as an Islamist party with an anti-Western rhetoric. One of the most politically striking aspects of the AKP-led neoliberal transformation process of the state in Turkey, in my opinion, is that despite this anti-Western rhetoric, the AKP has further deepened the state’s dependence on the West in parallel with the increase of financial domination over the state. The AKP will probably – and ironically – go down in the history of Turkey as the government which attached the country the most to the West. This alone testifies to the limits of all political dreams, rigidly imposed by financialisation today.
International financial institutions, identified with the West, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), which play a driving role in the financialisation processes, repeatedly bring up the issue of corruption by emphasising the principles of “transparency” and “accountability”. Corruption also stands out as a fundamental object of political criticism in the internal debates of countries. What are the implications of these criticisms of corruption for the transformation process of the public institutional character of the state?
Pınar Bedirhanoğlu: It is inevitable that the transformation of the public character of the state will raise the issue of corruption, which is generally defined as the use of public power for private interests. At this point, however, rather than saying that there is a real debate on corruption, it is more suitable to state that the struggles over the transformation of the state’s public character are conducted via corruption. Let me broach the subject this way: on the one hand, corruption is inevitable due to the bourgeois class content of the capitalist state, given the relations of capitalist production, which reproduce themselves within the constantly changing conditions and struggles the define the process of capital accumulation, also require the constant redrawing of the boundaries between the public and private spheres. On the other hand, the preservation of the modern, class-neutral and public appearance of the state requires the legal fixation of the public-private divide, which is indeed constantly redefined in practice, and the definition of some acts as corruption. These tensions and contradictions, inherent in the modern bourgeois state, become easily visible, especially in times of critical changes in the processes of capital accumulation. In fact, it is during these times that states have to manage the new de facto borders imposed by such changes on the public-private divide, despite the existing laws. In relation to this, it would be appropriate to remind ourselves of Bonefeld’s remark that order is not established by law but instead establishes law.
Moreover, even stressing the inevitability of corruption in capitalism on the basis of the general definition of corruption based on the public-private divide is not sufficient to examine the relationship between corruption and capitalism. As anthropological studies have well demonstrated, corruption is what the system itself is for the broad masses of people, who constantly experience the direct results of class practices inherent in capitalism. Seeing corruption in this way is an indication that the people are aware of the reality they live in and do not take the modern state’s claim to class-neutrality seriously. In other words, the modern definition of corruption, which narrows down the term to the use of public office for private purposes, finds no echo in the popular masses. For them, a world without corruption is a world with justice – something that has never happened anyway. For this reason, it would be more accurate to see the current situation as the further unfolding of class relations, rather than as corruption caused by the erosion of the public domain.
If we return to the issue of corruption, as a strategy of struggle that marks critical periods of change and transformation, such as the one under neoliberalism, it is imperative to underline that there are indeed power relations within these struggles that determine what is going to be defined as corruption and at what point.
It is not surprising that the argument for “crony capitalism” was first put forward by the IMF in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. With this concept, the IMF tried to attribute the responsibility of the crisis to the once “miraculous” Asian tigers, and to the corrupt relations in these countries, which remained somehow unnoticed until then. Let us recall that this conception made its entrance onto the Turkish scene in 2001, when Kemal Derviş was running negotiations with the IMF. Going back to a more recent period, we should ask ourselves whether there was no problem of corruption in the first period of the AKP government. We see indeed an extremely corrupt government in the first period of the AKP’s rule as well, even though this period is renowned as one of great democratic achievements. However, nobody discussed the AKP’s malpractices of corruption during this time. In sum, we should perhaps interpret the rise of corruption in Turkish political debates today as a quest for a politics “without the AKP but still neoliberal.”
It is also possible to take a step further and say that corruption itself has sometimes been used as a carrot to enable neoliberal transformations. Today, liberals also admit that the capitalist transformation process in Russia was a process of neoliberalisation and that the shock therapy policies of the time were equivalent to neoliberal programs in other countries. In that period, we witnessed Yeltsin’s advisors clearly saying that opposition against privatisation had to be bought off somehow or the privatisation policies would be interrupted. This means that in the neoliberal era, corruption was also used, and is still being used, as an effective way to dissolve, or neutralise, political opposition groups and, thereby, weaken their opposition.
In conclusion, I believe there is merit in discussing corruption at a higher level of abstraction if we are to debate corruption. Questions regarding who bribed whom and how, or the level of corruption in politics and state-capital relations can, on the one hand, serve to delegitimise some existing governments, and may also very well be really important and on-point in overthrowing them. However, let us not forget that the inquiries into corruption at this level also reproduce the illusion that a non-corrupt state is possible within capitalist relations of production. Capitalist relations, which are intrinsically based on labour exploitation, are genuinely unjust, corrupt relations. It is a fact that the modern bourgeois state form serves to render this basic injustice invisible through its claims about a public-private divide. This is something I wished to especially underline because this debate on corruption has also allowed me to vocalise something I had emphasised earlier, namely the differentiation between the capitalist state and the modern bourgeois state. What I propose is not an unconditional defence of the modern bourgeois state but the need to reveal and radicalise the emancipatory possibilities, which social struggles have engraved within this state form.
Works Cited in the Interview
Bedirhanoğlu, P. (2007) “The Neoliberal Discourse on Corruption as a Means of Consent-building: Reflections from Post-crisis Turkey”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 28, No.7, October 2007, 1239-1254.
Bedirhanoğlu, P., Ç. Dölek and F. Hülagü (2016) “The Transformation of Internal Security and of the State in Turkey during the AKP Rule: A Class-Based Analysis”, JEP:Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, Vol.XXXII, Issue 1/2, Ilker Ataç and Joachim Becker (eds.), Turkey: The Politics of National Conservatism, 21-41.
Bedirhanoğlu, P., Ç. Dölek, F. Hülagü and Ö. Kaygusuz (eds.) (2020) Turkey’s New State in the Making: Transformations in Legality, Economy, and Coercion, London, ZED Books.
Bonefeld, W. (2006) “Democracy and Dictatorship: Means and Ends of the State”, Critique, Vol.34, No.3, 237-252.
Bonefeld, W. (2017) The Strong State and the Free Economy, London, Rowman and Littlefield.
Buchanan, J. M. (1985) “Chapter 23: Constitutional Democracy, Individual Liberty, and Political Equality” in J. M. Buchanan, Liberty, Market and State, Political Economy in the 1980s, New York, New York University Press, 248-260.
Clarke, S. (1991) “State, Class Struggle and the Reproduction of Capital” in S. Clarke (ed.) The State Debate, Macmillan: London, 183-203.
Clarke, S. (1992) “The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form” in W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis (eds.) Open Marxism, Vol.I, Dialectics and History, London, Pluto Press, 133-150.
Dölek, Ç. (2011) “Privatisation of Security and Transformation of the Modern Bourgeois State in the Neoliberal Era: The Case of Turkey”, Unpublished MSc Thesis, METU, Ankara.
Dölek, Ç. (2015) “Privatisation of Security as a State-Led and Class-Driven Process: The Case of Turkey”, Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis, 79(3): 414-441.
Gerstenberger, H. (2007) Impersonal Power, History and Theory of the Bourgeois State, Leiden and Boston, Brill.
Hayek, F. (1992/1979) “Majority Opinion and Contemporary Democracy” in A. Levine (ed.) The State and Its Critics, Vol.I, Aldershot, England, Edward Elgar, 231-249.
Hülagü, F. (2017) “Post–Cold War Police Reform and the Transformation of the Modern Political Field: Reflections from Turkey”, Science & Society, 81(1): 98-123.
Hülagü, F. (2021) Police Reform in Turkey: Human Security, Gender and State Violence Under Erdogan, IB Tauris/Bloomsbury Publishing.
Lapavitsas, C. (2009) “Financialised Capitalism: Crisis and Financial Expropriation”, Historical Materialism, Vol.17, No.2, 114-148.
Towards a History of the Trotskyist Tendencies after Trotsky
A Review of Memoirs of a Critical Communist: Towards a History of the Fourth International by Livio Maitan
Daniel Gaido
National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina
danielgaid@gmail.com
Abstract
This work, based on the premise that ‘Trotskyism’ in Trotsky’s lifetime was nothing but the name given to Marxism in its fight against the Stalinist bureaucracy, offers an overview of the history of Trotskyist tendencies after Trotsky’s assassination which highlights the need not only of addressing programmatic and strategic issues (above all, the long-standing and growing accommodation to bourgeois democracy of most of the Trotskyist tendencies) but also of taking an in-depth look at a series of organisational practices that the Trotskyist tendencies have inherited from Zinovievism and Stalinism and that have greatly contributed to their current weakness.
Keywords
Trotskyism – socialism – workers’ party – sectarianism – parliamentarism
Livio Maitan, (2020) Livio Maitan: Memoirs of a Critical Communist: Towards a History of the Fourth International, translated by Gregor Benton, London: The Merlin Press.
Introduction
The history of the Trotskyist tendencies after Trotsky still is, more than 80 years after Trotsky’s death, largely terra incognita, or rather a bazaar in which all kinds of sects peddle their myths. Only from time to time does a work emerge that takes the history of Trotskyism out of the realm of mythology and provide us with the elements we need to reconstruct the actual experience of the Trotskyist militants in a particular time and place, such as Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson’s two volumes on the history of British Trotskyism from 1924 to 1949,
This is regrettable because ‘Trotskyism’ in Trotsky's lifetime was nothing but the name given to Marxism in its struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy: the Transitional Programme adopted by the Fourth International in 1938 was merely the development of the programmatic debates that took place in the Communist International (particularly in its third and fourth congresses), which were interrupted by the rise of Stalinism.
The works available so far fall into two main categories: monographs such as those mentioned above, restricted to a country and often to a specific Trotskyist tendency for a limited period of time, or general reviews written from the point of view of one of those tendencies, generally of an apologetic character, even if such apology is not without self-criticism (for example, the books of Frank and Moreau, written from the point of view of the ‘United Secretariat of the Fourth International’).
Maitan’s book tells the Historia Calamitatum of the Fourth International from the point of view of its official leadership (to which Maitan belonged) until the split in 1953, then from the point of view of the International Secretariat led by Michel Pablo and, from its creation in 1963, from the point of view of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International until the death of the author. Given that the United Secretariat was, for better or worse, the dominant Trotskyist current for most of the period under consideration, and that it continues to exist to this day, a critical reading of Maitan’s book is a good introduction to the subject of the history of Trotskyist tendencies after Trotsky.
The Second World War and the Democratic Counterrevolution in Western Europe
The first chapter of Maitan’s book deals cursorily with the ‘Dramatic battles of the 1930s and the early 1940s’, without explaining why the European Trotskyist organisations emerged very weakened, both numerically and programmatically, from the Second World War. In the paradigmatic case of France, this was due to the policy of sectarian abstentionism in the face of resistance to the Nazi occupation adopted by the French Trotskyists after the arrest of their main leader, Marcel Hic, by the Gestapo in October 1943. This policy, which continued during the liberation process, was carried out with the support of the European Secretariat of the Fourth International led by Michel Pablo. The Stalinist parties, on the contrary, were transformed into mass organisations of the working class in countries like France and Italy primarily because of their role in the resistance, even though that participation had a chauvinist, popular-frontist and pro-imperialist character. Their sectarian policy turned the postwar Trotskyist organisations into groups of at most a few hundred people confronting Stalinist parties often comprising hundreds of thousands of workers, as in France and Italy.
A concomitant factor that turned the Trotskyist organisations in Europe, and particularly the French section, into sects in the immediate postwar period, while the Stalinist organisations became mass working-class parties, was their inability to foresee the coming of a democratic counterrevolution under the aegis of American imperialism. The outbreak of the Second World War found US Trotskyism divided into two organisations: the Socialist Workers Party led by James Cannon, and the Workers Party led by Max Shachtman. The downfall of Mussolini on 24 July 1943 resulted in the appearance of a third current: a minority within the SWP led by Felix Morrow, Jean van Heijenoort and Albert Goldman. Confronting the SWP leaders’ line, according to which US imperialism would operate in Europe through ‘Franco-type governments’, the minority argued that imperialism would use democratic regimes to stem the advance of the revolution, propping them up with economic aid, and that it would be helped in this task by the Socialist and Communist Parties, which would revive the policy of class collaboration known as the Popular Front. The task of the European Trotskyists was therefore to wrest control of the masses from those parties through democratic and transitional demands (a democratic republic, a constituent assembly, etc.) that would help the workers discover the anti-socialist agenda of their mass organisations through their own experience. The Morrow–Goldman–Heijenoort tendency's inglorious ending precluded any serious analysis of the consequences of the policies pursued by the SWP leadership, which were extended to Europe by the European Secretariat of the Fourth International now led by Michel Pablo.
Morrow’s swan song in the SWP was the ‘International Report’ submitted on behalf of the minority to the June 1946 plenary, which asserted:
What hair-raising nonsense the majority has defended in the name of the unchanging program! In the name of the unchanging program, Comrade Cannon, you taught the following things: That our proletarian military policy means that we should telescope together overthrow of capitalism and defence of the country against foreign fascism. That the Polish revolutionists should subordinate themselves to the Russian Army. That there is an objectively revolutionary logic brought about by the Russian victories. That naked military dictatorships are the only possible governments in Europe because it is impossible to set up a new series of Weimar republics in Europe. That American imperialism is at least as predatory as Nazi imperialism in its methods in Europe. That it is theoretically impossible for America to help rebuild or feed Europe. That there are no democratic illusions in Europe. That there are no illusions about American imperialism. That amid the revolutionary upsurge it is reformist to call for the republic in Greece, Italy and Belgium or the Constituent Assembly. That to speak of a Stalinist danger to the European revolution is only possible for a professional defeatist. That the fate of the Soviet Union would be decided by the war but only careless people think the war is over.
Morrow 1946, pp. 28–9.
