70th anniversary Lessons of the Russian Revolution

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Seventy years ago, on Nov. 7, 1917, the workers of Russia, supported by the peasantry and led by the Bolshevik Party, succeeded in overthrowing the state of the capitalists and landlords. In so doing, the Russian workers opened up a new historical epoch, the epoch of the socialist revolution.

The Soviet Union today is a far cry from the Soviet Russia of 1917. Soviet democracy, which is described in Ann Robertson's article below, withered under the concentrated fire of invasion and civil war. The blockade of Russia shut down the factories at the same time that thousands of In this environment, the workers' councils ceased to be the representative bodies they once were. The defeat of the German revolution of 1918 ended the possibility of any short-term succor to the beleaguered revolution.

And the result of the prolonged isolation of this predominantly peasant country was the rise of a bureaucratic ruling caste, intent on preserving its own material privileges, not only from capitalism, but from the workers Self-preservation of the bureaucracy became more important than the liberation of the workers and peasants of the world. "Workers' democracy" disappeared from the lexicon of the official "communist" movement.

Yet the privileged status of the bureaucracy is rooted in the continued existence of state property in the economy, a planned economy which does not follow the dictates of private profit. State property remains the legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, a legacy which still poses the possibility of the This possibility remains shackled by the bureaucratic caste, and only a new revolution, overthrowing the bureaucracy, can release the potential of the collectivized economy. But only the workers themselves can overthrow 16 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1987 workers fell at the front defending their revolution. themselves. transition to socialism.

the parasites and re-establish democratic self rule.

By February 1917, the people of Russia were starving due to food shortages, freezing due to coal shortages and exhausted from the war effort. The czar had led the country into another war of aggression where workers and peasants fought on the battlefield only to help realize the imperialist dreams nursed by the Russian bourgeoisie.

Turning despair into hope, the workers in Petrograd translated their protests from general individual strikes into one individual general strike and brought the government to its knees.

Soviets soon sprang up all over the country, nourished by the revolutionary fever, and linked up into a single, powerful "All-Russian Congress of Soviets." Spontaneously created by the Russian workers and peasants during the 1905 revolution, the soviets again consisted of elected representatives from factories and work places.

But while the February revolution, which drove the czar from power, was executed by the Russian working class, the conviction that this was a bourgeois revolution persuaded them to transfer power to the capitalists who in turn formed Provisional Government.

But great expectations were met with cruel disappointments. The Provișional Government failed to decree an eight-hour day despite demands by the nationally organized Soviet.

The Provisional Government did nothing to redistribute the land and condemned those peasants who nevertheless seized it. And it kept postponing elections for the promised Constituent Assembly. But perhaps worst of all the Provisional Government could not declare a peace: capitalists simply had too much at stake in the imperialist war effort.

Led by the Bolsheviks, the October Revolution, eight months later, swept aside the capitalists' Provisional Government and ushered in a new era: the workers took control of the bourgeois state, smashed it and erected an entirely new structure in its place, a workers' state. The Soviets, which had supreme authority, constituted the essence of this new state.

"Vanguard of working people"

Lenin's description underlines the workers' state's revolutionary departure from any capitalist variety:

...Soviet power is a new type of state without a bureaucracy, without police, without a regular army, a state in which bourgeois democracy has been replaced with a new democracy, a democracy which brings to the fore the vanguard of the working people, gives them legislative and executive authority, makes them responsible for military defense and creates state machinery that can reeducate the masses."

Soviet representatives could be recalled at any time, and the ministers of the new government, called "commissars" to signal a new type of governmental official, were paid the equivalent of a skilled worker's salary with small additional increments for each of their children.

Immediately this new government abolished all private ownership of the land without compensation. Landowners' estates and those of the Crown and Church were transferred to the local Soviets for equal distribution among the peasants.

The Bolsheviks ideally would have favored the formation of large agricultural collectives in order to increase productivity but realized that such a proposal would have directly collided with the aspirations of millions of poor peasants.

Thus Lenin argued: "We as a democratic government, cannot evade the decision of the rank and file of the people, even if we do not agree with it. In the fire of life, by applying it in practice, by carrying it out on the spot, the peasants themselves will come to understand what is right...."

Hence, of the confiscated land 86 percent went to the peasants and only 3 percent to agricultural collectives.

Workers' control was immediately implemented. Here workers had access to all accounting books. No decisions could be made by the owners without the approval of the workers. This implied that while workers neither owned nor managed a business (management frequently required an expertise that workers had yet to master), they nevertheless had control in the form of veto power over all decisions, ranging from the hiring and firing of workers to an owner's attempt to decapitalize.

All-embracing control During the first few months, only a few hundred businesses were nationalized— often in response to provocations by an owner who was determined to decapitalize. Or sometimes, in spite of a more cautious Bolshevik policy, workers simply took over a factory or business so that it too was added to the list of nationalizations.

Some have consequently argued that the Soviet Union dia not become a workers' state until June 1918, when nationalizations occurred on a systematic and extensive basis.

But Lenin insisted that "the important thing will not be even the confiscation of the capitalists' property, but the countrywide, all embracing workers' control over the capitalists and their supporters. Confiscation alone leads nowhere, as it does not contain the element of organization, of accounting for proper distribution."

Four days after the revolution, the eight-hour day was decreed and no children under 14 were allowed to work. Soon afterwards social insurance against unemployment and sickness was established and the equality of women was decreed. Divorce was simplified and civil marriages were legalized The old court system, which survived the February revolution, was immediately discarded and replaced by workers' and peasants' courts. Later Lenin commented: "Here our task was easier; we did not have to create a new apparatus, because anybody can act as a judge basing himself on the revolutionary sense of justice of the working classes."

The October Revolution dissolved the czar's entire army at once and the Red Army marched in to replace it with the following objective stipulated at its inception:

"With the transfer of power to the toiling and exploited classes, there has risen the necessity to create a new army which shall be the bulwark of Soviet power...and will serve as a support for the coming socialist revolutions in Europe."

This was a revolutionary army built on a revolutionary structure: officer ranks were abolished and replaced simply by a commanding staff elected by the soldiers themselves.

Socialism-the country's goal The banks were nationalized and all debts contracted by the czar were annulled, except those to small bond-holders.

Church and state were officially separated so that religion, for example, could no longer be taught in public schools.

Finland was given independence, and all national minorities were granted self-determination along with the right to secede from the nation.

Finally, socialism was officially proclaimed the country's goal.

And all of the above happened only within the first few months of the revolution.

In short, the country was turned upside down: those who had been on the bottom now ruled. And the people were intoxicated with this new freedom.

During the first weeks of the revolution, they organized themselves incessantly into committees. There were workers' committees, peasant committees, housewife committees, all intensely debating the decisions of the day.

One witness testifies to a train ride from Petrograd to Moscow where the people organized themselves into a traveling committee before reaching their destination.

Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, mentions a daytime encounter with a woman worker who, when asked what shift she worked, responded: "None of us are working today. We had a meeting yesterday evening, everyone was behind with her domestic work at home, so we voted to knock off today. We're the bosses now you know." •

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Lenin had to theoretically re-arm the Bolshevik Party. When Leni