Ronald Kowalski, The Russian Revolution 1917-1921 (London: Routledge, 1997).
The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was the greatest event in human history. It was the first time that workers took and held power in their own right. The Bolsheviks legalised divorce and abortion, while oppressed nations within the Russian empire were given the right to secede. The landowners' estates were broken up. There was a flowering of popular culture. Control of the economy was taken by workers' councils, the soviets. Within twelve years, however, the revolution was lost. The Bolsheviks were isolated. The capitalist countries first blockaded the new regime, and then financed a devastating civil war. The most class conscious workers were forced to leave the cities and fight. Production fell and there were bitter famines. Within the Communist Party, a new bureaucracy emerged, desperate for stability. After Lenin's death, Stalin redirected the economy towards military production. One by one the old Bolsheviks were purged. In the place of socialism, a new state capitalist regime was created, controlled by the bureaucracy.
Since October, historians have fought over how best to understand the revolution and its later degeneration. In the 1950s and 1960s, during the darkest years of the Cold War, most Western historians subscribed to the comforting idea that there was an "inner totalitarian logic" to Russian history. Lenin was a power-hungry despot. Stalin was just another Russian Tsar. In the 1970s a new generation of social historians began to write about the real agents of the October revolution: the workers, the soldiers and the peasants. The social historians stressed the popular radicalisation of 1917. They stressed the popular and democratic nature of the revolution: the workers who joined the Bolshevik party in their hundreds of thousands, did so because they did want to see a socialist revolution. More recently, however, Russian history has reverted to the platitudes of the 1950s and 1960s. Many former Soviet historians now describe Lenin and the Bolsheviks as the architects of Russia's suffering. In the West, the best known Soviet historians are Orlando Figes and Richard Pipes. They insist that Lenin led to Stalin. Their argument is that all revolutions must lead to tyranny.
This book, by Ronald Kowalski, is a text book for university students. It is made up of a series of documents, diaries, articles and memoirs, mostly written during the revolution. To be fair to Kowalski, the documents have been selected with an honourable intent. Kowalski clearly despises Pipes and the reactionaries. He sees himself as standing broadly within the "social history" tradition. He wants to defend the events of October. Yet although Kowalski supports the Bolshevik revolution, he also shrinks from it. Like many of the social historians, Kowalski hedges when he needs conviction. And the end result is a very inadequate defence of the revolution.
When Kowalski chooses his documents, he focuses on the Tsars, the capitalist politicians, the Mensheviks, and later the White generals. They do come over as a rotten and corrupt gang. But Kowalski hardly includes anything written by Bolsheviks, which makes it harder to understand why Lenin was unwilling to compromise with the right-wing "socialists" in the Provisional Government; or why it was that the Bolsheviks felt that a second revolution was needed. Similarly, Kowalski doesn't begin to use his "social" documents until after 1917. So the ordinary workers, who led the revolution, only get a voice after the revolution is achieved.
Kowalski applauds the "democratic and libertarian vision of 1917". But he believes that the revolution almost immediately went into decline, and was entirely lost by 1921. Kowalski does quote workers and peasants after 1918, but he links their grievances to "left" criticisms of the Bolsheviks. He quotes the Left Communists, including Bukharin, of 1918, Alexandra Kollontai and the anarchist Berkman in 1921, Victor Serge, and Leon Trotsky. But in order to stress their criticisms, Kowalski is forced to drop important parts of their own arguments. Kowalski quotes Trotsky's criticisms of Lenin in 1905, without acknowledging that Trotsky was later the fiercest champion of the October revolution. He quotes Serge in 1921, but selectively, so that it is impossible to know that Serge sided with the Bolsheviks until the mid-1920s, and later joined Trotsky's Left Opposition.
What's really missing from this book, is a sense of the international perspective of the revolutionaries. Trotsky and Lenin both knew that a workers' state could not be built in backward, peasant Russia, alone. Lenin insisted again and again that "either the revolution will spread or we will be crushed". The October uprising was quickly followed by revolutions in Germany and Hungary, and mass strikes in France, Britain, Italy and across Europe. In 1921-3, events in Germany demonstrated that a European revolution was still possible. If the German Communists had seized power in 1923, then the degeneration of the Russian revolution could still have been reversed. For a more convincing account of what actually happened in and after 1917-1921, read two book which Kowalski doesn't quote, and doesn't even bother to include in his bibliography, Tony Cliff's State Capitalism in Russia, and especially Trotsky's superb History of the Russian Revolution.
