John Gray, reviewing Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary for The New Statesman, manages in a few paragraphs to answer all the millions of words written between 1917 and today in defense of Lenin, Trotsky and Bolshevik Revolution.
Lenin and Trotsky knew that revolution is by nature a ruthlessly violent and inherently undemocratic business. Without firing squads, mass imprisonment, the use of family members as hostages (a technique pioneered by Trotsky to secure the loyalty of the Red Army in the civil war) and the routine use of torture by the Cheka, the Soviet regime would have been overthrown soon after it came to power.
As Serge admits, the Kronstadt massacre was unavoidable if the revolution was to continue. In Memoirs of a Revolutionary, he tells us: “After many hesitations, and with unutterable anguish, my Communist friends and I finally declared ourselves on the side of the Party.” He goes on to record how the party newspapers celebrated the anniversary of the Paris Commune even as the repression of the workers continued. “Meanwhile the muffled thunder of the guns over Kronstadt kept shaking the windows.”
He says less about other and larger Soviet massacres. Though he acknowledges that they “knew that in European Russia alone there were at least fifty centres of peasant insurrection”, he hardly mentions the less well-known but far bloodier crushing of the Tambov peasant rebellion of 1920-21, which the Red Army suppressed by torching entire villages and using poison gas to kill off peasants who fled into the forests.
Serge’s anguish at Soviet repression was undoubtedly genuine but when he writes that shooting captured Kronstadt rebels months after the rising had been quashed was “a senseless and criminal agony”, he shows that he did not grasp the most important fact about the Bolshevik Revolution, which is that it was a version of total war.
There was very little popular support in Russia – then or later – for the Bolsheviks or their programme. Against a background of mounting insurrection, they could avoid defeat only by continuously increasing the scale of repression. That is why Felix Dzerzhinsky, who was the head of the Cheka at the time, had the rebels shot and Lenin later ordered that refractory peasants should be executed by public hanging.
Totalitarian repression was not a regrettable departure from the high ideals of socialist philosophy – an unfortunate error of judgement on the part of the Bolshevik leaders. They had no alternative. Mass terror was a condition of their survival. In many ways an admirable human being, Serge refused to face the inexorable logic of revolution, summarised so clearly by Lenin in his celebrated dictum, “Who/whom?”: kill or be killed.
As I wondered a few years ago when the Lukashenko regime in Belarus unveiled a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky:
[I]sn’t Dzerzhinsky linked indissolubly to Lenin’s success? He wasn’t a “rotten element” of the revolution; he was at its heart and soul, acting with the full approval of Lenin. By ruthlessly crushing all opposition– including that on the Left– didn’t he, as much as anyone, make possible the triumph of the Bolsheviks in the early years of the Soviet revolution?
And doesn’t he deserve some, er, credit for that?
Yet you will search the Socialist Workers Party archives in vain for a single word about Comrade Felix.
