Magazine "Golden Lion" No. 149-150 - publication of Russian conservative thought
Yu.V. Zhytorchuk
Candidate of Physics and Mathematics Sciences
"National Pride" Great Russian Ulyanov
during World War I
“No one is to blame if he was born a slave; but a slave who not only eschews aspirations for his freedom, but justifies and embellishes his slavery (for example, calls the strangulation of Poland, Ukraine, etc., the “defense of the fatherland” of the Great Russians), such a slave is a lackey that evokes a legitimate feeling of indignation, contempt and disgust and boor "(Lenin, -" On the national pride of the Great Russians ").
The development of the imperialist war into a civil war.
For Lenin, the revolution is the main, all-consuming goal of his whole life. And the war that broke out in 1914 gave a real chance for its implementation, a chance that the future leader of the world proletariat did not want to lose under any circumstances.
“The transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan, indicated by the experience of the Commune, outlined by the Basel (1912) resolution, and flowing from all the conditions of an imperialist war between highly developed bourgeois countries. No matter how great the difficulties of such a transformation may seem at one moment or another, the socialists will never give up systematic, persistent, unswerving preparatory work in this direction, once the war has become a fact.
However, the imperialist war will not escalate into a civil war on its own. For this to happen, the soldiers need to turn their bayonets against their own government. But this can only be achieved if the war causes significant difficulties for the life of the working people, and these difficulties could be multiplied precisely in the event of the defeat of the country in the war. Therefore, the socialists must do everything to achieve the defeat of their government:
“A revolution in time of war is a civil war, and the transformation of the war of governments into a civil war, on the one hand, is facilitated by military failures (defeat) of governments, and on the other hand, it is impossible in practice to strive for such a transformation without thereby contributing to the defeat ...
The revolutionary class in a reactionary war cannot but desire the defeat of its government...”.
Of course, in principle, Lenin proclaimed the slogan of the defeat not only of the tsarist, but also of all other governments participating in the First World War (WWI). However, at the same time, he cared little whether the socialists of Germany, England and France would support his call with their practical actions. In addition, only one of the belligerents can suffer defeat in a war. Therefore, the defeat of Russia, and hence the Entente, in practice means a military victory for Germany and the strengthening of the Kaiser's government. But Lenin is in no way embarrassed by this circumstance, and he insists that the initiative of defeatism must come precisely from the Russian Social Democrats:
“... The last consideration is especially important for Russia, because it is the most backward country in which a socialist revolution is directly impossible. That is why the Russian Social Democrats were to be the first to come up with the theory and practice of the slogan of defeat” (Lenin, “On the Defeat of Their Government in the Imperialist War”).
Of course, Lenin, for all the odiousness of his position, could not publicly proclaim that Russia's defeat in the war was Russia's good. And therefore he talked about the fact that such a defeat for her would be the lesser evil:
“The victory of Russia entails an intensification of world reaction, an intensification of reaction within the country and is accompanied by the complete enslavement of the peoples in the already occupied regions. Because of this, the defeat of Russia under all conditions seems to be the lesser evil ”(Lenin,“ Conference of Foreign Sections of the R.S.-D.R.P. ”).
Moreover, Lenin repeats this idea of his many times, accompanying it with the most categorical incantations:
“For us Russians, from the point of view of the interests of the working masses and the working class of Russia, there cannot be the slightest, absolutely no doubt that the least evil would now and immediately be the defeat of tsarism in this war. For tsarism is a hundred times worse than Kaiserism" (Lenin, "Letter to Shlyapnikov 10/17/14".
So Lenin, behind a very elegant and somewhat intricate verbal formula, hides his idea about the desirability of the defeat of Russia and, accordingly, the victory of a more progressive Kaiserism.
Lenin and Plekhanov are two socialist tactics during the First World War.
1. Lenin's position.
Lenin, of course, was never a pacifist, on principle protesting against any war and its cruelties. On the contrary, he directly stated the necessity and progressiveness of civil wars, despite the blood, atrocities and horrors that usually accompany such wars:
“We fully recognize the legitimacy, progressivity and necessity of civil wars, that is, wars of the oppressed class against the oppressor, the slaves against the slave owners, the serfs against the landlords, the wage-workers against the bourgeoisie...
There have been many wars in history that, despite all the horrors, atrocities, disasters and torments that are inevitably associated with any war, were progressive, that is, they benefited the development of mankind, helping to destroy especially harmful and reactionary institutions (for example, autocracy or serfdom ), the most barbaric despotisms in Europe (Turkish and Russian)" (Lenin, "Socialism and War").
But besides civil wars and revolutions, Lenin also recognized the legitimacy and progressiveness of defensive wars. And in this case, it was completely indifferent to him who attacked whom first. According to his ideas, in any case, the oppressed side was right:
“The socialists have recognized and still recognize the legitimacy, progressiveness, and justice of “defence of the fatherland” or “defensive” war. For example, if tomorrow Morocco declared war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, etc., these would be “just”, “defensive” wars, regardless of who attacked first, and every socialist would sympathize the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressive, slave-owning, predatory “great” powers” (Lenin, “Socialism and War”).
It was here that another break between the Bolsheviks and most other social democratic movements took place. Since Lenin declared the war to be reactionary and predatory on the part of all its participants, while Plekhanov declared its defensive, and therefore just and progressive character on the part of Russia. But from the recognition of the war as predatory, one tactic of the working-class movement followed, and from its recognition as a defensive one, a completely different one. However, Plekhanov's point of view automatically postponed the possible beginning of a revolution in Russia for an indefinite period, which for Lenin, regardless of the degree of correctness of his theses, was absolutely unacceptable:
“In Russia, not only bloody tsarism, not only capitalists, but also a part of the so-called or former socialists say that Russia is waging a “defensive war”, that Russia is fighting only against the German invasion. Meanwhile, in reality, the whole world knows that tsarism has been oppressing more than a hundred million people of other nationalities in Russia for decades, that Russia has been pursuing a predatory policy against China, Persia, Armenia, Galicia for decades ... ".
There is clearly something wrong with Lenin's logic here. After all, even if Russia really oppressed hundreds of millions of people and previously waged aggressive wars, then it does not follow from this fact that another stronger predator cannot attack Russia itself and try to enslave it:
“…Neither Russia, nor Germany, nor any other great power has the right to speak of a “defensive war”: all the great powers are waging an imperialist, capitalist war, a predatory war, a war to oppress small and foreign peoples, a war in the interests of the profits of the capitalists, who from the horrendous suffering of the masses, they beat the pure gold of their billions of dollars of income out of the proletarian blood” (Lenin, “Speech at an international meeting in Bern”).
In polemical fervor, the future leader of the world proletariat did not stop from direct insults to the most prominent theoretician of Marxism, the founder of the first Russian Marxist organization - Plekhanov, hanging political labels on him:
“Let Messrs. Plekhanov, Chkhenkeli, Potresov and Co. now play the role Marxist-like lackeys or jesters under Purishkevich and Milyukov, go out of their way, proving the guilt of Germany and the defensive nature of the war on the part of Russia - the class-conscious workers did not listen to these jesters and do not listen" (Lenin, "On a Separate Peace").
In the dispute that broke out between the Russian socialists, Lenin's main argument was the thesis according to which all the key participants in the war are essentially bandits and robbers:
“The main, basic content of this imperialist war is the division of booty between the three main imperialist rivals, the three robbers, Russia, Germany and England” (Lenin, “Bourgeois Pacifism and Socialist Pacifism”).
The only exception was made only for Serbia:
“The national element in the present war is represented only by the war of Serbia against Austria. Only in Serbia and among the Serbs do we have many years and millions of national masses embracing the national liberation movement, the continuation of which is the war of Serbia against Austria ...
Whether this war be isolated, that is, not connected with a general European war, with the mercenary and predatory goals of England, Russia, etc., then all socialists would be obliged to wish the success of the Serbian bourgeoisie" (Lenin, "The Collapse of the Second International").
But the main robber and villain in the imperialist war, according to Lenin, was precisely Russia.
“The reactionary, predatory, slaveholding character of the war on the part of tsarism is even incomparably more evident than on the part of other governments” (Lenin, “Socialism and War”).
What was the robbery and robbery, which, according to Lenin, during the WWI was carried out by the tsarist government? It turns out that the robber plans of Nicholas II extended to Galicia, Armenia and Constantinople:
“Russia is fighting for Galicia, which she needs to own, especially in order to strangle the Ukrainian people (except for Galicia, this people does not and cannot have a corner of freedom, comparative of course), for Armenia and for Constantinople, then also for the subjugation of the Balkan countries” (Lenin, "On a Separate Peace").
Here the question arises, did tsarist Russia have a desire to seize Constantinople and the Straits? Yes, the Russian tsars periodically had such a desire. Only this desire arose not at all because they wanted to expand the limits of the empire, including new peoples and countries in its composition. By and large, Russia did not always know what to do with its own land. Won Alexander II actually sold Alaska to the Americans for next to nothing. And having liberated Bulgaria from the power of the Turks, Russia did not even try to annex it, although it could well have done this in 1878. By themselves, the Straits of Russia, in general, were not needed. She needed the freedom of navigation of Russian ships from the Black to the Mediterranean Sea and a guarantee that the English and French military squadrons would not enter the Black Sea again, as was the case during the Anglo-French aggression of 1854.
However, despite the desire of the Russian tsars to get the Straits, it would be the height of stupidity to say that it was because of them that Russia got involved in the war with Germany. These Straits just weren't worth it. After all, Nicholas II, and Stolypin, and Sazonov did everything to ensure the peaceful development of the empire as long as possible. Russia, unlike Germany, did not prepare for a serious war, and that is why it did not stock up in advance the number of cartridges, shells, cannons and even guns necessary for its conduct. Another thing is that already during the war in 1916, the tsar concluded a secret agreement with the allies on the transfer of the Straits to Russia after the victory over Germany. The meaning of this treaty was that gaining control over the Straits, at least to some extent, was supposed to compensate the empire for those enormous losses that the Russian people suffered to curb the German aggressors, but it does not at all follow that it was the Straits that at least to some extent least were the reason for Russia's entry into the war.
The next "robber" goal of the tsarist government, Lenin calls the desire of St. Petersburg to rob Turkey, seize Armenia from it and enslave the freedom-loving Armenian people. One might think that Vladimir Ilyich did not know that for decades a genocide of the Armenian civilian population had been systematically carried out in Turkey, that in 1909 the Turkish authorities organized a new massacre of Armenians, that during the years of the WWI, more than a million Armenians were killed and tortured by the Turks. So why couldn't Nicholas II take fellow believers under his protection, who are being severely persecuted for their religious beliefs?
Here is how the well-known Armenian public figure and writer Ter-Markarian described the events of those years in his book “How it was”:
“For the sake of historical justice and the honor of the last Russian tsar, it cannot be silent that at the beginning of the disasters described in 1915, by the personal order of the tsar, the Russian-Turkish border was ajar and the huge crowds of exhausted Armenian refugees who had accumulated on it were let into Russian land.”
Following Lenin's logic, the Russian "despot", opening the border for exhausted refugees, dragged free Armenians who trusted him into the prison of the peoples. After all, how could then still not quite bloody Lenin believe in the nobility of the "bloody" Nicholas?
The next in this series of Lenin's accusations is Galicia, which tsarism tried to get its hands on, allegedly for the final strangulation of the freedom of Ukrainians. Here the Bosnian Serbs sought to get out of the rule of the Austrians and unite with Serbia, as a result of which the Austro-Serbian war arose, which Lenin, by the way, classified as just. But the Rusyns and Hutsuls, who by the will of fate were torn away by the conquerors from their homeland and were subjected to national oppression in Austria-Hungary, could not in any way wish to unite with the Little Russians. The logic turns out strange.
And, finally, finishing the accusatory tirade, Lenin finally gets confused in his own arguments:
“Tsarism sees the war as a means to divert attention from the growth of discontent within the country and to suppress the growing revolutionary movement” (Lenin, “Socialism and War”).
But after all, Lenin himself repeatedly wrote that the difficulties of the war cause discontent among the working people and a surge of revolutionary sentiment. What Nicholas II was already convinced of from the experience of the Russo-Japanese war, which developed into the revolution of 1905. So how could the tsar start a war in order to suppress the growing revolutionary movement, if the war threatened to turn into a new, even more formidable revolution? In addition, the years preceding the WWI, the so-called reaction, tsarism drove the Russian revolutionary movements deep into the underground, from which it emerged precisely due to the outbreak of the war. So obviously do not meet the ends in the arguments of Vladimir Ilyich.
2. Plekhanov's position.
Plekhanov countered Lenin's thesis about the need to achieve the defeat of the tsarist government in the war with Germany and the escalation of the imperialist war into a civil war with the logic of a Russian social patriot:
“First, the defense of the country, then the fight against the internal enemy, first victory, then the revolution” (Plekhanov, “On War”).
At the same time, Georgy Valentinovich called for the unity of all Russian patriotic forces for the defense of the country, offering:
“Reject as unreasonable, more like insane, any outbreak and any strike capable of weakening the strength of Russia's resistance to an enemy invasion” (Plekhanov, “Internationalism and the Defense of the Fatherland”).
For Plekhanov, the war declared by Germany is a real threat to the national security of Russia, and, therefore, from his point of view, the WWI is a domestic, deeply people's war:
“From the very beginning of the war, I maintained that it was the business of peoples, and not of governments. The Russian people were in danger of falling under the economic yoke of the German imperialists, who, unfortunately, were supported by the vast majority of the working population of Germany. Therefore, in waging war, he was defending his own vital interest” (Plekhanov, “The War of Nations and Scientific Socialism,” Unity No. 5, 1917).
In this regard, the leader of the Mensheviks clearly formulates the goal of the Russian proletariat in the war with Germany:
“I have never said that the Russian proletariat is interested in the victory of Russian imperialism and never thought so. And I am convinced that he is interested in only one thing: that the Russian land does not become an object of exploitation in the hands of the German imperialists. Ah, this is something completely different ”(Plekhanov,“ More about the war ”).
During the years of WWI, the slogan of defending the fatherland was extremely popular in Russia, and this circumstance greatly worried Lenin, forcing him to scoff at the concept that is sacred for every Russian person:
“What is the defense of the fatherland generally speaking? Is it some scientific concept from the field of economics or politics, etc.? No. This is simply the most current, common, sometimes just a philistine expression denoting the justification of war. Nothing more, absolutely nothing!” (Lenin, "On the Caricature of Marxism")
To this Plekhanov replies:
Fatherland is that vast land inhabited by the working masses of the Russian people. If we love this working mass, we love our fatherland. And if we love our fatherland, we must defend it" (Plekhanov, "Speech in the Petrosoviet on May 14, 1917).
“We do not want Russia to defeat Germany, but that Germany does not defeat Russia. Let Rabochaya Gazeta tell us directly: "It doesn't matter if the German yoke falls on the Russian neck." This will be a thought worthy of the most resolute censure from the point of view of the International ... But this thought, and this thought alone, will give us a logical key to the reasoning of the author of the article, only it will explain to us his fears ”(Plekhanov,“ Anxious Fears of a Clever Newspaper ” ).
Nevertheless, Lenin, even in his thoughts, cannot admit that civilized Germans are capable of enslaving Russia, even if they capture Petrograd:
“Let's say the Germans take even Paris and St. Petersburg. Will this change the nature of this war? Not at all. The goal of the Germans, and this is even more important: the feasible policy with the victory of the Germans will be the seizure of the colonies, dominance in Turkey, the seizure of foreign regions, for example, Poland, etc., but not at all the establishment foreign oppression over the French or Russians. The real essence of this war is not national, but imperialist. In other words: the war is not going on because one side overthrows national oppression, the other defends it. The war is going on between two groups of oppressors, between two robbers over how to divide the booty, who should rob Turkey and the colonies ”(Lenin,“ On the Caricature of Marxism ”).
From the heights of history, it is funny and sad to read such Leninist opuses. And it remains completely incomprehensible why Vladimir Ilyich was so sure that the Germans could not turn part of Russia into their colony, but would be content only with the enslavement of Turkey, Serbia or Poland? Most likely, Lenin hated tsarism so much that, without any regret, he would have replaced it with the complete subordination of Russia to the will of the Kaiser. Just like now our homegrown democrats hate everything truly Russian and want to subordinate Russia to the will of their overseas masters.
In any case, all subsequent events in world history refuted Lenin's point of view that Germany had no aggressive intentions towards Russia. After all, German Nazism began to emerge at the end of the 19th century, long before Hitler's Mein Kampf. At the same time, the ideas of the Drang nach Osten campaign, which were shared by both the Kaiser and his generals, were resurrected again. Therefore, the territorial claims of Germany, presented to the Soviet government in Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, did not arise on their own from scratch, but were the natural result of the plans of conquest conceived in Berlin long before August 1914. So life itself proved that Plekhanov was right in his dispute with Lenin. And if modern communists declare that they are patriots of Russia, then they are obliged to recognize the justice of the position on this issue of the first Russian Marxist - Plekhanov and condemn antinational character of Leninist doctrinairism.
About the national pride of the Great Russian Ulyanov.
“Nowhere in the world is there such oppression of the majority of the population of the country as in Russia: Great Russians make up only 43% of the population, that is, less than half, and all the rest are deprived of rights, like foreigners. (Lenin, "The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination").
In order to make sure that Lenin is clearly cunning here, trying to denigrate Russia, it is enough to turn to his work “Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism”, from which it follows that in England the inhabitants of the metropolitan countries accounted for only 11%, and in France - 42% of the total number of inhabitants of these countries, including the natives of the colonies. So Russia did not hold the palm of the world championship in the matter of enslaving foreigners.
However, it is categorically impossible to agree with the figure cited by Lenin, according to which 57% of the population of Russia were foreigners. The fact is that at the beginning of the 20th century, RUSSIAN was understood as all the peoples of the Eastern European Slavs: Great Russians, Little Russians, and Belarusians. Accordingly, in the encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron it was written:
"The Russian language is divided into three main DIFFERENCES: a) Great Russian, b) Little Russian and c) Belarusian."
The same encyclopedia states that the percentage of the Russian population according to the 1897 census was 72.5%. That is, before Lenin's opuses, it was Russians who were considered a nation, and not Great Russians, Little Russians or Belarusians, who were listed only subnational groups. However, in this situation, it was very difficult for Lenin to substantiate one of his cornerstone theses:
“Russia is a prison of peoples” and call for self-determination of Ukrainians and Belarusians.
In this regard, Lenin absolutely unfoundedly and without evidence stated that by the beginning of WWI, Ukrainians and Belarusians had allegedly reached such a stage of national community that they were already formed nations oppressed by the nation of Great Russians:
“For Ukrainians and Belarusians, for example, only a man who lives in his dreams on Mars could deny that there is still no completion of the national movement here, that the awakening of the masses to the possession of their native language and its literature is (and this is a necessary condition and companion for the full development of capitalism, complete penetration of exchange down to the last peasant family) – here it is still being accomplished” (Lenin, “On the Caricature of Marxism”).
In fact, it was a direct call for the withdrawal of Ukraine and Belarus from Russia. At the same time, Ulyanov completely ignored the fact that the ancestors of the Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians before the Tatar-Mongol invasion were a single people with a single language and a single culture. And then, for four hundred years, the once united people were artificially divided and subjected to national enslavement by foreign conquerors.
Moscow Russia was the first to throw off the foreign yoke, and in 1648 Little Russia also rebelled against the Polish invaders. However, in June 1651, the rebels suffered a severe defeat near Berestechko. Being in a critical situation, Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky turned to the Russian Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich with a request to be accepted into Russian citizenship. In the autumn of 1653, the Zemsky Sobor, which was held in Moscow, decided to include Little Russia into the Moscow State, and on October 23, 1653, the Moscow government declared war on the Commonwealth, which lasted for 13 years, during which Russia defended the independence of Left-bank Ukraine.
On January 8, 1654, a council of elders took place in Pereyaslav. During a public ceremony, the hetman and the Cossack foreman swore on the cross that "to be with the land and cities under the king's great hand relentlessly". Despite this oath, the Ukrainian hetmans repeatedly violated it and betrayed their king. In connection with the regular perjury of the hetmans to Catherine II in 1764, she abolished both the hetmanship and the autonomy of the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks.
In order to be convinced of the fallacy of Lenin's ideas about the three formed nations of Eastern European Slavs, it is enough to answer the question, when were the differences between Great Russians and Little Russians greater: at the time of their reunification, or at the beginning of the 20th century? Have these groups been moving closer together or moving away from each other over the course of two and a half centuries? After all, during this entire period of time, there was a process of linguistic and cultural convergence of parts of the ancient Russian people that were once forcibly separated from each other. Suffice it to recall the number of so-called mixed marriages between representatives of the three Russian nationalities. Or that the greatest Ukrainian writer Gogol was also an outstanding Russian writer.
However, among the Ukrainian elite there have always been and still are a sufficient number of adventurers who wanted to seize power and independently steer the independent, whether it be: Vyhovsky, Mazepa, Skoropadsky, Petlyura, Kravchuk or Yushchenko. Much more significant is the question of whether there really was national oppression of the Little Russians by the Great Russians in tsarist Russia, and if it existed, in what way was this oppression expressed? Lenin answered this question as follows:
“The dispute is about one of the forms of political oppression, namely: about the forcible retention of one nation within the state of another nation” (Lenin, “Results of the Discussion on Self-Determination”).
“The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this means fighting for the right of self-determination. The proletariat must demand the freedom of political secession of the colonies and nations oppressed by "its" nation...
Neither trust nor class solidarity between the workers of an oppressed and oppressing nation is possible" (Lenin, "The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination").
But with the same success one could speak about the forcible retention of, say, Novgorodians or Pskovians. After all, the independent Novgorod Republic, with its traditions of veche democracy and a peculiar culture, existed for more than 300 years from 1136 to 1478, when Ivan III forcibly subordinated it to Moscow. And in 1570, Ivan the Terrible again went on a campaign to Novgorod and perpetrated a bloody pogrom there, executing more than one and a half thousand noble residents of the city and finally enslaved the Novgorodians. Yes, and the dialects of northern Russia are quite different, for example, from the dialects of the Kuban or Don Cossacks. So why not, on this basis, declare the Novgorodians a nation forcibly oppressed by the Muscovites?
After all, if you consistently follow the path proposed by Lenin, then Russia will very quickly be pulled apart into many small and unviable pseudo-national formations. However, this is precisely what the liberals were striving for in the 1990s. Remember Yeltsin's words: "Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow."
***
The obvious bias of Lenin's Russophobic approach to the national question is especially clearly visible when comparing his assessments in relation to Russia, on the one hand, and in relation to Germany, on the other:
“The war of 1870-1 was a continuation of the bourgeois-progressive (decades-long) policy of the liberation and unification of Germany” (Lenin, “On the Peace Program”).
It is worth recalling that during this war, Germany captured and annexed the two largest French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. But, let's say, the Alsatians are a people that arose on the basis of the Germanized Celtic tribes, speaking the Alemannic dialect of the German language, which differs from East German dialects much more than the Ukrainian language from Great Russian. In addition, during the period of the German annexation of Alsace (1871-1918), the Alsatians regularly opposed the Kaiser's policy of their forcible Germanization.
The German chauvinist Lench cited one interesting quotation from Engels's work: Po and the Rhine. Engels says there, among other things, that the boundaries of the large and viable European nations in the course of historical development, which have swallowed up a number of small and unviable nations, have been more and more determined by the language and sympathies of the population. These boundaries Engels calls "natural". So it was in the era of progressive capitalism, in Europe, around 1848-1871. Now the reactionary, imperialist is increasingly breaking these democratically defined boundaries” (Lenin, “Results of the Discussion on Self-Determination”)
But for Ulyanov, the forcible seizure of Alsace by Germany is a progressive and quite natural phenomenon, and the result of the voluntary entry of Ukraine into Russia is an unnatural reactionary event that led to the oppression of Ukrainians by the Great Russians!
Of course, Lenin died long ago, and one could have already forgotten about him, but his deeds still live on. And one of the saddest consequences of the creations of the leader of the world revolution is the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he himself created, to a large extent, predetermined by his adventurous, Russophobic national policy. And Lenin still got his way. The Great Russians no longer oppress the Ukrainians, the united Russian nation is split into three parts, and the contours that define their mutual confrontation are already visible. And not far off, the time when the followers of Ulyanov's ideas, obeying the instinct of self-determination, will drag Ukraine into NATO.
Lenin and the problem of peace.
There is a persistent myth that Lenin allegedly tried in every possible way to stop the world slaughter and achieve the establishment of an early peace. However, the facts say otherwise. Here, for example, is how Vladimir Ilyich treated the idea of ending the war at its initial stage:
"Down with priestly sentimental and stupid sighs about the world at all costs! Let's Raise the Banner of Civil War" (Lenin, The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International);
“The slogan of peace, in my opinion, is wrong at the moment. This is a philistine, priestly slogan. The proletarian slogan should be: civil war” (Lenin, “Letter to Shlyapnikov 10/17/14”);
“The slogan of peace can be raised either in connection with certain conditions of peace or without any conditions, as a struggle not for a specific peace, but for peace in general...
In general, everyone stands for peace in general, up to Kitchener, Joffre, Hindenburg and Nicholas the Bloody, because each of them wants to end the war: - the question is precisely that everyone puts imperialist (i.e. predatory, oppressing foreign peoples) peace conditions in favor of their own nation" (Lenin, "The Question of Peace").
In the slogan of “peace in general”, Lenin was absolutely not satisfied with the possibility of ending the world massacre before it escalated into an even more bloody civil war and world revolution. He categorically insists that the war must end only after the victory of the revolution, when the proletariat of the belligerent countries has overthrown the bourgeois governments. And until then, any attempts by individual socialists to stop the senseless bloody slaughter and make peace between the warring countries caused fits of rage and indignation in Lenin:
“We are talking about an article by one of the most prominent (and vile) Social-Democratic opportunists. Party of Germany, Quark, who, among other things, said: “We German Social-Democrats and our Austrian comrades declare incessantly that we are fully prepared to enter into relations (with English and French Social-Democrats) in order to start negotiations about the world. The German Imperial Government is aware of this and does not put up the slightest obstacle…”
Whoever does not understand this even now, when the slogan of peace (not accompanied by a call for revolutionary action by the masses) has been prostituted by the Vienna Conference ..., he is simply an unconscious participant in the social-chauvinist swindle of the people ”(Lenin, “On the Assessment of the Slogan“ Peace ””).
However, after the February Revolution, Lenin's statements on the question of peace somewhat change their tone. At this time, Vladimir Ilyich no longer dared to publicly proclaim that the desire for peace was sentimental priesthood. This swearing was replaced by calls for a fight against the imperialist war, which, however, did not in the least change the essence of Lenin's position that real peace is not possible without a socialist revolution:
“The fight against the imperialist war is impossible otherwise than the struggle of the revolutionary classes against the ruling classes on a world scale” (Lenin, “Speech about the war 22.07.17”).
In order to prove that a stable peace under the rule of the capitalists is impossible, Lenin puts forward the thesis according to which the war allegedly, in principle, cannot be ended without annexations being abandoned. At the same time, he began to interpret the very concept of annexation in an extremely broad and extremely vague way: not only as the seizure of foreign territory carried out during the WWI, but also as all seizures in all previous wars. In addition, Lenin significantly expanded the interpretation of the principle of the nation's right to self-determination, extending it not only to the nation, but also to the nationality and the people:
“The main condition for a democratic peace is the renunciation of annexations (captures) - not in the sense that all powers return what they have lost, but in the sense that all powers return what they have lost, but in the only correct sense that each NATIONALITY, without a single exception, both in Europe and in the colonies, gets freedom and the opportunity to decide for itself whether it forms a separate state or is part of any other state ”(Lenin,“ Tasks of the Revolution ”).
“The theoretical definition of annexation includes the concept of “foreign people”, i.e. A PEOPLE that has retained the peculiarity and will of a separate existence ”(Lenin,“ Porridge in the Heads ”).
At the same time, the leader of the world revolution probably understood that the difference between the Little Russian and Great Russian languages is at the level of differences between dialects of the same language, and therefore he generally abandoned the criterion of linguistic differences as a condition necessary for self-determination:
“Annexation is the annexation of any country that is distinguished by national characteristics, any annexation of a nation - it doesn’t matter if it differs in language, if it feels like a different people, against its desire” (Lenin, “Speech at a meeting of the Bolsheviks 04/17/17”).
Thus, on the one hand, the Bolsheviks took every possible care of the right of self-determination of all peoples, nationalities or nations, believing that no one should resort to violence in determining the boundaries between states:
“We say that the borders are determined by the will of the population. Russia, don't you dare fight over Courland! Germany, down with the troops from Courland! This is how we solve the issue of secession. The proletariat cannot resort to violence, for it must not interfere with the freedom of the peoples" (Lenin, Speech on the National Question).
On the other hand, the Bolsheviks were not going to observe any legality or observance of the will of the majority within their own country long before they came to power:
“We all agree that power should be in the hands of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies ... It will be precisely a state like the Paris Commune. Such power is a dictatorship, i.e. is based not on the law, not on the formal will of the majority, but directly directly on violence. Violence is an instrument of force” (Lenin, “Report on the Current Situation 07.05.17”).
However, the need for violence for Lenin's supporters is understandable, because the vast majority of the population in Russia were peasants, whose support it was difficult for the Bolsheviks to count on, which is why dictatorship was the only way for them to stay in power. That is why, already in the first Soviet Constitutions, the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat was spelled out, which, in particular, was carried out by providing the workers with a norm of representation in government bodies elected by the people five times greater than that of the peasants:
"The Congress of Soviets of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is composed of representatives of the city Soviets and Soviets of urban settlements, at the rate of 1 deputy per 25,000 voters and representatives of the provincial congresses of Soviets, at the rate of 1 deputy per 125,000 inhabitants."
So why, then, was Lenin so worried about the issue of a free, democratic solution to the problem of self-determination of all oppressed nations, if he himself elevated inequality and violence to the principle of his internal policy towards the majority of the Russian people?
The fact is that before the October Revolution, Lenin deliberately put forward provocative and obviously impracticable slogans in order to undermine the foundations of the then existing world order as much as possible. And it was hard to think of a better way to blow up the capitalist world than playing on nationalist strings and inciting ethnic hatred. After all, the implementation of the principle of self-determination, especially in areas with a mixed population, has always been a detonator, leading to explosions of popular discontent.
But, having gained a foothold in power, Lenin immediately forgot that the “oppressed” Great Russians were, say, the Central Asian peoples, who were still deprived of the right to free exit from the RSFSR, although they had their own languages and, with weapons in their hands, proved their desire to self-determination. Lenin did not remember about his own principles on the right to self-determination and when deciding on the fate of the Cossacks.
Ulyanov was well aware that the peace conditions he put forward, under which it would be necessary to revise the borders of the vast majority of countries, was absolutely unacceptable for all the main participants in the war, which means that these conditions, in principle, could not contribute to its end:
“Not a single socialist, while remaining a socialist, can raise the question of annexations (seizures) differently, cannot deny the right of self-determination, the freedom of secession to every people.
But let us not be deceived: such a demand means a revolution against the capitalists. First of all, in the first place, such a demand (without a revolution) will not be accepted by the British capitalists, who have more annexations (captures) than any nation in the world” (Lenin, “A deal with the capitalists or the overthrow of the capitalists?).
Therefore, the leader of the world proletariat was forced to admit that his calls for peace without annexations are only a tactical slogan, subordinated to the main goal - the struggle for world revolution:
“When we say: “without annexations”, we say that for us this slogan is only a subordinate part of the struggle against world imperialism” (Lenin, “Speech about the war 07/22/17”).
“And most importantly, it is necessary to overthrow the bourgeois governments and start with Russia, because otherwise it is impossible to get peace” (Lenin, “Letter to Ganetsky”).
long awaited world.
As we approached the point in time when the Bolsheviks could really seize power into their own hands, the slogan "peace" became one of the main theses in Lenin's speeches and articles, since he perfectly understood that only in this way could the coming revolution be protected from suppression by her army:
“For troops will not go against the government of the world” (Lenin, “The crisis is ripe”).
Although in order to achieve Lenin's main goal - the victory of the world revolution, it was not at all necessary to establish peace, but to continue the world slaughter, and, most importantly, its development into a civil war, not only in Russia, but also in Germany and France.
“We will tell the truth: that a democratic peace is impossible unless the revolutionary proletariat of England, France, Germany, Russia overthrows the bourgeois governments” (Lenin, The Turn in World Politics)
Therefore, along with calls for peace, Ulyanov still continued to insist on the principles of establishing peace without annexation, in his own invented, absurd and unrecognized interpretation.
And everything would be fine, but the trouble is, the Russian soldiers from the constant Bolshevik calls for fraternization took it and began to fraternize seriously, but what kind of war could there be with the Germans if they suddenly became our brothers? It is worthless to fight with brothers, which means that the Russian peasant had nothing more to do at the front. So the soldiers began to go home, hurrying to take part in the division of the land promised to them. As a result, the remnants of the completely demoralized Russian army were literally melting by leaps and bounds. But the German troops, as they stood, continued to stand, and all sorts of fraternization there acted extremely weakly on them. It was then, realizing the sad result of his deeds aimed at disintegrating the army, Lenin suddenly remembered:
“The soldiers are just running. Reports from the front speak of this. You can’t wait without risking helping Rodzyanka’s conspiracy with Wilhelm (such a conspiracy did not exist in nature, and the rumors about him were only the fruit of Ulyanov’s sick fantasy - Yu. Zh.) and complete devastation during the wholesale flight of soldiers if they (already close to despair ) will reach complete despair (and then who will fight for the ideals of the revolution? - Yu.Zh.) and leave everything to the mercy of fate ”(Lenin, “Letter to Comrades”).
At the beginning of the war, Lenin wrote that even if the Germans take Peter, this will not change the nature of the war in any way. Now, however, it finally dawned on him that the fall of Petrograd threatens a real catastrophe. There could be only one way out - the speedy seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. And at the same time, Lenin wanted to spit on the freedom of expression of the will of the Great Russians, since the results of such an expression of will were obvious to him in advance, they could only bring the Bolsheviks a final defeat:
“It is pointless to wait until the Constituent Assembly, which will obviously not be with us” (Lenin, “Report at the meeting of the Central Committee on October 23, 1917”).
Yes, that there is a Constituent Assembly, Ulyanov was not even sure of the results of voting at the Congress of Soviets, where his supporters had the majority of votes:
“It would be death or a formality to wait for the wavering vote on October 25, the people have the right and the obligation to resolve such issues (however, only Lenin knew this secret desire of the PEOPLE, - Yu.Zh.) not by voting, but by force” (Lenin, “Letter to members Central Committee")
Nevertheless, without calls for peace, the Bolsheviks could not come to power and could not stay at its peak, but Lenin needed peace only after the seizure of power by his party:
“We must end this criminal war as soon as possible, and not with a separate (separate) peace with Germany, but with a general peace, and not with the peace of the capitalists, with the amir of the working masses against the capitalists. There is only one way to this: the transfer of all state power entirely into the hands of the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies both in Russia and in other countries" (Lenin, "Letter to the delegates of the Congress of Peasants' Deputies).
Finally, on the night of October 24-25, the Bolsheviks arrested the provisional government and seized power in Petrograd. After that, the first decrees of the new government were adopted at the Congress of Soviets. And, above all, the decree on peace. Now Lenin acted as head of the Russian government. However, despite this, he continues to talk about the completely absurd conditions for ending the war, which would have to redraw the borders of almost all states in the world.
According to Vladimir Ilyich, to start the self-determination procedure, it was enough for someone to simply declare such a desire in the press, or for independence to be supported by any of the parties. After that, it was necessary to withdraw all the troops from the region, the desire for self-determination of which was announced in the press, and to conduct a democratic procedure for a popular vote, which was supposed to finally determine its fate:
“If any nation is held within the borders of a given state by violence, if it does not matter to it, contrary to its expressed desire - whether this desire is expressed in the press, in popular meetings, in the decisions of parties or in revolts and uprisings against national oppression - is not granted the right by free voting, with the complete withdrawal of the troops of the annexing or generally stronger nation, to decide without the slightest coercion the question of the forms of state existence of this nation, then its accession is an annexation, i.e. seizure and violence” (“Decree on Peace”, adopted by the Congress of Soviets on October 26 (November 8), 1917)
However, at this the diplomatic fantasies of the leader of the revolution were suddenly interrupted, and a semblance of common sense suddenly woke up in him:
“At the same time, the Government declares that it by no means considers the above conditions of peace as an ultimatum; agrees to consider all other terms of peace, insisting only on the fastest possible proposal by any belligerent country and on complete clarity, on the unconditional exclusion of all ambiguity and all secrecy in the proposal of peace conditions ”(“ Decree on Peace ”, adopted by the Congress of Soviets on October 26 (November 8, 1917).
Russia's former allies in the Entente naturally disowned Lenin's peace proposals. So, Lenin's calls did not lead to any universal peace, and could not lead to. However, if earlier Ilyich categorically rejected even the very possibility of concluding a separate peace:
“There can be no separate peace for us, and according to the resolution of our party there is not even a shadow of a doubt that we reject it ... We do not recognize any separate peace with the German capitalists and we will not enter into any negotiations” (Lenin, “Speech about War”) ,
then, spitting on their own principles, the Soviet government signs a truce with the Germans, and on December 22 begins to conduct separate negotiations with Germany and its allies.
And here the Kaiser, like a cat and a mouse, starts a game with the Bolshevik amateurs in diplomacy. To begin with, Berlin declares its adherence to the main provisions of the Soviet declaration on peace without annexations and indemnities, subject to the acceptance of these proposals by the governments of the Entente countries. After that, Petrograd again turns to its former allies with an invitation to take part in peace negotiations. Of course, without getting any response from them.
Meanwhile, Berlin, in the territories it occupied, carried out purposeful activities to form puppet governments fully accountable to it in the former national outskirts of Russia, seeking separation from Russia. In Ukraine, not without the influence of Lenin's cries about the so-called national oppression by the Great Russians, the Little Russians came to power Shivinistic The Rada, which instantly began to seek protection from the Germans for its independence.
On January 9, the German side stated that since the Entente did not join the peace negotiations, Germany considers itself free from the Soviet peace formula, and a few days later demanded that over 150,000 square kilometers of its territory be torn away from Russia. Moreover, all this was done by Berlin in full accordance with the German interpretation of the principle of peace without annexations. Germany was simply forced to keep its troops in Poland and the Baltic states at the request of the national governments of these new states.
On February 9, Germany and Austria signed a separate peace with the Ukrainian Rada. Although at this point in time the Rada no longer represented anyone, since power in Ukraine almost completely passed to the Soviets.
On February 18, the Austro-German troops launched an offensive along the entire front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Two days later the Germans entered Minsk. These days, General Hoffmann wrote in his diary:
“Yesterday, one lieutenant with six soldiers captured six hundred Cossacks ... The most comical war I have ever seen, a small group of infantrymen with a machine gun and a cannon on the front car follows from station to station, captures another group of Bolsheviks and follows on.”
On February 21, Lenin announced "socialist fatherland in danger". Since then, the holiday "Day of the Soviet Army" has appeared in Soviet mythology. In accordance with this historical myth, on February 23, near Narva and Pskov, the newly created regiments of the Red Army allegedly stopped the German offensive.
However, there was no German attack on Petrograd at that time, since the fall of the Russian capital could lead to the fall of the Lenin government and the restoration of the Entente, which the Germans feared most of all. Nevertheless, since the Russian army was actually destroyed through the efforts of the Bolsheviks, at the categorical demand of Lenin, who instantly forgot about his assurances not to sign a separate peace with Germany under any circumstances, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided on complete surrender. Under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, which was signed on March 3, Russia renounced sovereignty over Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and also pledged to completely demobilize the army, including the military units newly formed by the Bolsheviks.
However, Lenin did not grieve too much about the Russian territories given to the Germans, although he called the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk obscene, his much greater indignation was caused by the Entente’s rejection of the territories from Germany:
"Brest-Litovsk peace, dictated by monarchist Germany, and then MUCH MORE BEAST AND VILLAIN Versailles peace, dictated by the "democratic" republics, America and France, as well as "free" England" (Lenin, - "Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism") .
That is why now, when interest in the patriotic activities of the Georgian Stalin has increased unusually in Russian society, almost no one remembers with a kind word the deeds of the “Great Russian” Russophobe Ulyanov. Nowadays, only words of anathema and curses fly to Lenin's address more often.
And the October Revolution. But her lessons are no less relevant. Moreover, their relevance is increasing.
The reason is simple: firstly, the contradictions that the world communist revolution tried to resolve, started by the Russian October, but strangled by world capitalism, its three main forces, fascism, Stalinism and bourgeois democracy, have not been resolved; secondly, a new period of the rise of capitalism has come to an end, when the features of its new general crisis are being formed, when the question of "who will win" again arises. No matter how distant the experience of this first worldwide attempt to overthrow capital, it remains, if not the only one, then, in any case, the main one. And a return to it is a necessary condition for a new attempt to succeed. And therefore, on the eve of future revolutionary storms, celebrating the next anniversary of the leader of the October Revolution, we will pay attention to the main feature of Leninism, to its internationalism.
Internationalism, of course, was understood by the Bolsheviks not in the philistine sense of the type "there are no bad peoples", "all people are brothers", etc. Like all Marxists, the Russian revolutionary social democrats of the early 20th century understood it in the sense that the overthrow of the world capitalist system is the common cause of the entire world working class.
Already in the program adopted at the Second Congress of the RSDLP, from which Bolshevism originates, it was said:
“The development of exchange has established such a close connection between all the peoples of the civilized world that the great liberation movement of the proletariat had to become, and has long since become, international.
Considering itself one of the detachments of the world army of the proletariat, the Russian Social Democracy is pursuing the same ultimate goal that the Social Democrats of all other countries are striving for.(“The CPSU in resolutions and decisions of congresses, conferences and plenums of the Central Committee”, 8th ed., political literature publishing house, M. 1970, vol. 1, p. 60).
That is, as can be seen from the first sentence of the above quotation, it was not at all about loyalty to a beautiful, but abstract idea, but about a completely practical understanding of the fact that the overthrow of capitalism, which has become a world system, is just as impossible within national boundaries as it is impossible in a separate city block. The situation with the understanding of this fact was extremely confused by the efforts of the Stalinist agitprop, who, for the sake of preserving the power of the Stalinist bureaucracy and for the sake of giving it (with the indicated purpose) a “socialist” image, pulled out quotes from Lenin taken out of the international context in order to attribute to him the non-existent theory of “socialism in one country."
At the same time, the statements of the same Lenin in the same articles, or in works of the same time, were completely ignored, where the impossibility of national socialism was directly affirmed. It is on these elementary Marxist truths for that era, presented in the works of Lenin, that we will stop.
The Russian revolution turned out to be the intersection of two historical processes, national and global, which is reflected in all disputes about the nature of both the revolution itself and the society that emerged from it. Russian society by 1917 had long matured and overripe for the bourgeois revolution. At the same time, the general crisis of capitalism, which found its expression in the world war, raised the historical question of the exhaustion of the capitalist stage in the life of mankind, while creating objective conditions for the proletarian revolution with the aim of overthrowing capitalism and beginning the transition to communism. This intersection was superimposed by the fact that, frightened by the scope of the labor movement, the Russian bourgeoisie did not want to carry out its own revolution. And this task was also to be assumed by the working class. But, given the world crisis of the entire capitalist system, the working class of Russia naturally had reason to hope that the workers of the advanced countries, in turn, would make their own revolution and help the workers of the more backward countries, incl. and Russia, to start building socialism without delaying the long stage of capitalist development.
Based on this Lenin and sets the following tasks in the autumn of 1915: “The task of the Russian proletariat is to carry through to the end the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia in order to ignite the socialist revolution in Europe. This second task is now extremely close to the first, but it still remains a special and second task, because we are talking about different classes collaborating with the proletariat of Russia, for the first task the collaborator is the petty-bourgeois peasantry of Russia, for the second - the proletariat of other countries.(V.I. Lenin, PSS, v.27, pp. 49-50).
Already here is the turn that came as a surprise to the "old Bolsheviks", who, after the February Revolution, were still thinking in terms of 1905 and were going to establish a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" to carry out the bourgeois revolution. Lenin, like Trotsky, saw in the worldwide crisis associated with the war an opportunity to combine, thanks to the help of the international proletariat, the tasks of the national bourgeois and international socialist revolution. Before leaving for Russia in early April 1917, Lenin writes "Farewell Letter to the Swiss Workers". He notes:
“Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backward European countries. Socialism cannot win immediately in it directly. But the peasant character of the country, with the vast remaining land fund of the noble landlords, on the basis of the experience of 1905, can give an enormous scope to the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia and make our revolution a prologue to the world socialist revolution, a step towards it.(V.I. Lenin, PSS, vol. 31, pp. 91-92).
In his brief speech at the opening of the April Conference, Lenin declared: “The Russian proletariat has the great honor of starting, but it must not forget that its movement and revolution are only a part of the world revolutionary proletarian movement, which, for example, in Germany is growing stronger and stronger day by day. It is only from this point of view that we can define our tasks.”(ibid., p. 341). On the same day, in the Current Status Report, he justifies his "addiction" to the global scale: “... we are now connected with all other countries, and it is impossible to break out of this tangle: either the proletariat will break out as a whole, or it will be strangled”(ibid., p. 354). Concluding his report, which is mainly devoted to the necessary steps of the revolution, he emphasizes: “The complete success of these steps is possible only with a world revolution, if the revolution stifles the war, and if the workers in all countries support it, therefore the seizure of power is the only concrete measure, this is the only way out”(ibid., p. 358).
Understanding the impossibility of winning even a socialist revolution, not to mention building a socialist society in a single country, especially such a backward one as Russia, runs through all of Lenin's works, right down to the very last - "Less is better". Not sure if he can still return to active work, he writes about what worries him: “Thus, at the present moment we are confronted with the question: will we be able to hold out with our petty and minute peasant production, with our ruin, until the Western European capitalist countries complete their development towards socialism?”(ibid., vol. 45, p. 402).
No illusions! And the same anxiety sounds in his "Letter to the Congress", where he is concerned about one issue: the stability of the party leadership, the need to avoid its split during the period of painful expectation of a revolution in developed countries. And the fact that if the revolution is delayed, a split is inevitable due to the internal development of the country, Lenin understands perfectly:
“Our party rests on two classes, and therefore its instability is possible and its fall is inevitable, if an agreement could not be reached between these two classes. In this case, it is useless to take certain measures, in general, to talk about the stability of our Central Committee. No measures in this case will be able to prevent a split » (ibid., p. 344).
Only impenetrable dogmatism and unwillingness to give up illusions make the current Stalinists again and again pull out Lenin's words about the "building of socialism" into the light of day, completely ignoring those quotations of his where he directly speaks of the victory of the international revolution, as necessary condition of this "construction".
But this condition was reflected not just in his speeches, but directly in the program of the RCP (b), adopted in the spring of 1919. Those. in the main official party document, where every word is carefully weighed. This is not a speech at a rally where, for the sake of inspiring the listeners, one can shout about the "building of socialism" without specifying when and under what conditions it is possible. The program speaks of the social revolution as “forthcoming,” and Lenin defended this characterization against the attacks of Podbelsky, pointing out that “in our program we are talking about a social revolution on a world scale” (ibid., v. 38, p.175). In a programme Russian communists, i.e. Bolsheviks, speech about the national social revolution is not even going on!
In the Political Report of the Central Committee to the 7th Congress of the RCP (b), Lenin said: “International imperialism, with all the might of its capital, with its highly organized military equipment, which represents a real strength, a real fortress of international capital, in no case, under no circumstances could get along side by side with the Soviet Republic, both in its objective position and in the economic interests of that the capitalist class, which was embodied in it, could not, due to trade relations, international financial relations. Here conflict is inevitable. Here is the greatest difficulty of the Russian revolution, its greatest historical problem: the need to solve international problems, the need to provoke an international revolution, to make this transition from our revolution, as a narrowly national, to a world one.(ibid., v. 36, p.8). And a little further: “If you look at the world-historical scale, then there is no doubt that the final victory of the revolution, if it remained alone, if there were no revolutionary movement in other countries, would be hopeless ... Our salvation from all these difficulties - I repeat - in the pan-European revolution"(ibid., vol. 36 p. 11)”.
The "salvation ... of the all-European revolution" did not come, a split occurred, which Lenin feared, and the party of the proletariat was destroyed. Only one thing was wrong. The gravedigger party of the proletarian power turned out to be not the party of peasants, but the party of the bureaucracy, whose bourgeois nature inevitably followed from the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution, which failed to fulfill the task of growing into a world socialist one.
The ability to face the truth, not to build up the illusion that the revolution can be won without something fundamentally important, is an absolutely necessary thing for a Marxist if he wants to achieve a result. And we still have a long way to go to learn this skill from Lenin.
The October Revolution took place at the height of the World War, when the internationalism of most of the parties of the Second International was cast aside for the sake of "defending the fatherland." Therefore, along with the concept of the impossibility of national socialism in the internationalist approach Lenin The most important place is occupied by the question of revolutionary defeatism, which is a particular but extremely important example of the preservation of the class independence of the proletariat in relation to the bourgeoisie.
The tactics of revolutionary defeatism, the tactics of turning the imperialist war into a civil war, were directly deduced both from the general necessary condition for the class independence of the proletariat and from the specific decisions of the congresses of the Second International:
“The opportunists frustrated the decisions of the Stuttgart, Copenhagen and Basel congresses, which obligated the socialists of all countries to fight against chauvinism under any and all conditions, obliging the socialists to respond to any war begun by the bourgeoisie and governments with an intensified preaching of civil war and social revolution”(ibid., vol. 26, p. 20), - proclaims the Manifesto of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) written by Lenin "War and Russian Social Democracy".
And further: “The transformation of the modern imperialist war into a civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan, indicated by the experience of the Commune, outlined by the Basel (1912) resolution and arising from all the conditions of an imperialist war between highly developed bourgeois countries”(ibid., p. 22).
This is the meaning of revolutionary defeatism: to use the defeat of one's own government in order to turn the massive mutual massacre of each other by the working people on the fronts of the imperialist war, into a war of these working people against their bourgeois governments, for their overthrow and the establishment of the power of the working people themselves, which will put an end to all wars and capitalist exploitation.
Of course, we are not talking, and never have been, about helping the military enemy in some way for the sake of defeatism. And bourgeois propaganda often interprets this question in precisely this way, presenting the Bolsheviks as "German spies." Just as in Germany "Russian spies" were listed Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. Such an accusation is absurd, since the principle of revolutionary defeatism proceeds from the reactionary nature of all the belligerents and, therefore, it makes no sense to help another imperialist state in return for "one's own".
And, by the way, just such a parody of revolutionary defeatism, shortly before the German attack on the USSR, the Stalinist regime imposed on the French Communist Party. The communist deputies were forced, under the conditions of fascist occupation, to move to a legal position and begin to receive voters. They were all shot after June 22, 1941! As well as party activists who communicated with them. There was also a request for permission to legally publish “Humanite”. Fortunately for the PCF, the Nazis did not agree to this. But it is precisely the followers of Stalin who will be ready to tear me to pieces for the position of defeatism in World War II, which will be discussed below.
In fact, the point is to expose in every possible way the jingoistic propaganda that justified the war on its part as "fair".
It is about continuing and intensifying the struggle of the workers for their rights and, ultimately, for their power, despite the accusations of the patriots that by doing so they "weaken the front" and "contribute" to military defeat. Yes, they contribute, but precisely this struggle, and nothing else! Lenin explains these points quite clearly: “The revolutionary class in a reactionary war cannot but desire the defeat of its government. ... "Revolutionary struggle against war" is an empty and meaningless exclamation, to which such masters are heroes of the Second International, if by it one does not understand revolutionary actions against their government and during the war. It only takes a little thought to understand this. And revolutionary actions during the war against one's own government, undoubtedly, undeniably, mean not only the desire to defeat it, but in fact also the promotion of such a defeat. (For the “astute reader”: this does not mean at all that it is necessary to “blow up bridges”, organize unsuccessful military strikes and generally help the government defeat the revolutionaries) ”(ibid., p. 286). With these words, Lenin, in his article "On the Defeat of His Government in the Imperialist War", pounces on the originally half position Trotsky.
The point is to corrupt the army of “one’s own” imperialist power with one’s propaganda (and this is a condition for revolutionaries of all (!) countries), proving the senselessness and criminality of this war from all sides. The most complete result of such propaganda was the fraternization of the soldiers of the warring armies.
“The proletarian cannot deal a class blow to his government, nor can he stretch out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of a “foreign” country that is at war with “us”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, without helping the disintegration of “his own” imperialist "great" power"(ibid., p. 290).
The most striking example of the effectiveness of the latter was the Bolshevik propaganda in relation to the German army. In Russia the German army seemed to be victorious, but it was here that the revolutionary example of the Russian workers and soldiers had its greatest effect. The units transferred from Russia to the western front turned out to be completely unfit for combat, accelerating the defeat of Germany in the war and the revolution in it.
Revolutionary defeatism is not just a revolutionary phrase. This is a practical position, without which it is impossible (impossible!) to tear the working class away from the ideological and political influence of “its own” bourgeoisie: The supporters of the slogan "no victory, no defeat" actually stand on the side of the bourgeoisie and opportunists, "not believing" in the possibility of international revolutionary actions of the working class against their governments, unwilling to help the development of such actions - a task, no doubt, not an easy one, but the only one worthy of the proletarian , the only socialist task. It was precisely the proletariat of the most backward of the belligerent great powers, especially in the face of the shameful betrayal of the German and French Social Democrats, who, in the face of their party, had to come up with revolutionary tactics that are absolutely impossible without "facilitating the defeat" of their government, but which alone leads to a European revolution, to a lasting peace of socialism, to the deliverance of mankind from the horrors, disasters, savagery, bestiality that reign now.(ibid., p. 291).
It was the transition "in practice" to the policy of defeatism, "contributing" to it, that led to revolutions in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary. But the absence of a political force to defend it turned out to be a disaster for the world proletariat during the Second World War. Chauvinistic, jingoistic frenzy contributed to the beginning of both the first and second world wars. It is very difficult to break it, all the more so for the revolutionary minority operating underground. However, when the workers, both in the rear and at the front, taught by the bitter experience of the war, themselves eventually begin to intuitively realize the correctness of this approach, then without a revolutionary avant-garde they can fall into the hands of completely different ideologists and practitioners. 2 million citizens of the USSR, a state-capitalist imperialist power, during the Second World War, if they did not fight on the side of Nazi Germany, then, in any case, were listed in collaborationist military units. And far (very far!) not everyone was anti-communist and enemy of socialism. Many bought into the "socialist" phraseology of General Vlasov. The same thing happened in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. And how many soldiers, workers and peasants of the USSR were there who would have been glad to oppose the Stalinist regime, but who had enough understanding that it was pointless to do this under the flag of fascism ?!
The potential for the tactics of revolutionary defeatism was very great in our country, but there was no political force - the Bolshevik Party was mowed down almost without exception. Worse, few among them understood the capitalist nature of the USSR. Indicative, in this regard, is the example of the Trotskyists, the only, at least relatively numerous, anti-Stalinist political force in the labor movement. Operating in Europe, it also had the human potential for revolutionary propaganda to turn the imperialist war into a civil one. Particularly in France and Italy. Here, even many ordinary Stalinists, even participating in a completely patriotic resistance movement, hoped that after the end of the war they would be able to use their organization and authority for the socialist revolution. It wasn't there! Thorez, Tolyatti and Co., who arrived from Moscow, quickly put everything “in place”, imposing the continuation of the policy of the anti-fascist Popular Fronts even after the defeat of fascism.
And if some part of the working class still retained revolutionary sentiments, then the Trotskyists helped to overcome them with their slogan of "unconditional defense of the USSR." If the USSR is a workers' state, then it is necessary to protect both it and its allies in the anti-Hitler coalition. This logic finally finished off the hopes for a new revolutionary wave as a response to the second world imperialist war. The world working class found itself subordinate to the tasks of its national detachments of capital. Only a few representatives of the Trotskyist Fourth International, as well as representatives of the Italian communist Left, took up revolutionary positions, but remained practically isolated. Without revolutionary defeatism, as well as without the defeat of Stalinism, the continuation of the world revolution, begun in October 1917, was impossible.
“The “unconditional defense of the USSR” turns out to be incompatible with the defense of the world revolution. The defense of Russia must be abandoned as a matter of special urgency, since it binds our entire movement, puts pressure on our theoretical development and gives us a Stalinized physiognomy in the eyes of the masses. It is impossible to defend the world revolution and Russia at the same time. Or one or the other. We stand for the world revolution, against the defense of Russia, and we call on you to speak in the same direction [...] in order to remain true to the revolutionary tradition of the Fourth International, we must abandon the Trotskyist theory of the defense of the USSR; we are thus carrying out in the International the ideological revolution necessary for the success of the world revolution. These are quotations from the June 1947 Open Letter of the Internationalist Communist Party. The party operated in France, joined the Fourth Trotskyist International, and included both those who shared the Trotskyist theory of the "deformed workers' state" and those who already understood the capitalist nature of the USSR. Among the latter were the authors of this letter - Grandiso Muniz, Benjamin Pere and Natalia Sedova-Trotskaya, widow Leon Trotsky.
However, it was already too late. Taking advantage of its victory in the Second World War, capitalism completed the redistribution of the world, united most of the world market under the auspices of the United States, and a smaller part of the USSR, thus ensuring the conditions for the collapse of the world colonial system and the inclusion of its countries in the system of the world capitalist market. In short, capitalism created the conditions for its transition to a higher stage of its development, which lasted 60 years, and which again begins to burst at the seams, preparing new large and small wars. It was a period of prolonged counter-revolution on all fronts. But the growing crisis, economic, military, political, ideological, again requires revolutionary leadership. And this leadership must be formed fully armed with all the revolutionary experience of the past, and the experience of Bolshevism in the first place. And the center of this experience has been and will be the bet on the world socialist revolution and the political class independence of the proletariat, the most integral part of which is the categorical rejection of any form of patriotism and revolutionary defeatism. 10.08.2019
Lenin on the Civil War
Anyone who claims it's a civil war
in Russia there is no conscious cause of the Bolsheviks
either cunning, or does not know his history
V. I. LENIN, VOLUME 26, July 1914 ~ August 1915, PUBLISHING HOUSE OF POLITICAL LITERATURE MOSCOW. 1969
ON THE DEFEAT OF HIS GOVERNMENT IN THE IMPERIALIST WAR
The revolutionary class in a reactionary war cannot but desire the defeat of its government.
This is an axiom.
A revolution during a war is a civil war, and the transformation of the war of governments into a civil war, on the one hand, is facilitated by military failures (“defeat”) of governments, and on the other hand, it is impossible in practice to strive for such a transformation without thereby contributing to the defeat.
ON THE SLOGAN OF TURNING THE IMPERIALIST WAR INTO A CIVIL WAR
The only correct proletarian slogan is the transformation of the modern imperialist war into a civil war. Precisely such a transformation results from all the objective conditions of the present military catastrophe, and only by systematically propagating and agitating in this direction can the workers' parties fulfill the obligations they assumed at Basel.
Only such tactics will be truly revolutionary tactics of the working class, corresponding to the conditions of the new historical epoch.
VOLUME 26, FOREWORD.
Proceeding from the imperialist nature of the war, Lenin determined the position of the party in relation to it. He put forward the slogan: turn the imperialist war into a civil war.“A revolution during a war is a civil war,” Lenin pointed out. Therefore, the Bolsheviks fought for the revolution in the conditions of the world imperialist war under the slogan of turning it into a civil war. This slogan flowed from all the conditions of the war, from the fact that it had created a revolutionary situation in most of the countries of Europe.
Of course, Lenin wrote, it is impossible to know in advance whether this revolutionary situation will lead to revolution, when exactly the revolution will occur. But it is certainly the duty of all socialists to work systematically and unswervingly in this direction, to reveal to the masses the reality of the revolutionary situation, to awaken the revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary determination of the proletariat, and to help it pass over to revolutionary action. The slogan summarizing and guiding this work was the slogan of turning the imperialist war into a civil war.
The civil war that the revolutionary social democracy called for at that time, meant, as Lenin pointed out, the struggle of the proletariat with arms in hand for the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie in the developed capitalist countries, for the democratic revolution in Russia, for the republic in backward monarchical countries, etc. As the first steps towards turning the imperialist war into a war Lenin outlined the following civil measures: an unconditional refusal to vote military credits and withdrawal from bourgeois ministries, a complete break with the policy of "national peace"; creation of an illegal organization; support for the fraternization of soldiers of warring countries; support for all kinds of revolutionary mass actions of the proletariat.
Along with the slogan of civil war, Lenin, in opposition to the bourgeois and social-chauvinist policy of supporting "his" government and "defending the fatherland," put forward the slogan of defeating "his" government in an imperialist war. “In every country,” wrote Lenin, “the struggle against its own government, which is waging an imperialist war, must not stop at the possibility of the defeat of that country as a result of revolutionary agitation. The defeat of the government army weakens the given government, contributes to the liberation of the peoples enslaved by it, and facilitates the civil war against the ruling classes” (p. 166). Lenin's article "On the defeat of one's own government in the imperialist war" is devoted to explaining the meaning of this slogan. In it, Lenin put forward the important fundamental proposition that "The revolutionary class in a reactionary war cannot but desire the defeat of its government." He stressed that in the conditions of the world imperialist war in all imperialist countries the proletariat must desire the defeat of "their" government and contribute to such a defeat without this it is impossible to turn the imperialist war into a civil war.
The revolutionary class in a reactionary war cannot but desire the defeat of its government.
This is an axiom. And it is challenged only by conscious supporters or helpless servants of the social-chauvinists. Among the first is, for example, Semkovsky from OK (No. 2 of his Izvestia). Among the latter are Trotsky and Bukvoed, and in Germany Kautsky. The desire to defeat Russia, writes Trotsky, “is “an unprovoked and unjustified concession to the political methodology of social patriotism, which replaces the revolutionary struggle against war and the conditions that gave rise to it, with an orientation along the line of the least evil, which is extremely arbitrary in the given conditions” (No. 105 of Our Word).
Here is an example of the inflated phrases with which Trotsky always justifies opportunism. “Revolutionary struggle against war” is an empty and meaningless exclamation, to which such masters, heroes of the Second International, if it does not mean revolutionary actions against his government and during the war. It only takes a little thought to understand this. And revolutionary actions during the war against one's own government, undoubtedly, undeniably, mean not only the desire to defeat it, but in fact also the promotion of such a defeat. (For the "astute reader": this does not mean at all that one should "blow up bridges", organize unsuccessful military strikes and generally help the government defeat the revolutionaries.)
Getting off with phrases, Trotsky got entangled in three pines. It seems to him that he wants the defeat of Russia means to wish for the victory of Germany (Bukvoed and Semkovsky more directly express this “thought” they have in common with Trotsky, or rather, thoughtlessness). And in this Trotsky sees the “methodology of social patriotism”! To help people who can't think. The Berne Resolution (No. 40 of the Social-Democrat) explained: in all In the imperialist countries, the proletariat must now desire the defeat of its government. Bukvoed and Trotsky preferred to circumvent this truth, while Semkovsky (an opportunist who benefits the working class most of all by his frankly naive repetition of bourgeois wisdom), Semkovsky “bluntly blurted out”: this is nonsense, because either Germany or Russia can win (Izvestia No. 2) ).
Take the example of the Commune. Germany defeated France, and Bismarck and Thiers defeated the workers!! If Bukvoed and Trotsky had thought, they would have seen that they stand on the point of view of war governments and the bourgeoisie, i.e., they grovel before the “political methodology of social patriotism,” to use Trotsky’s pretentious language.
A revolution during a war is a civil war, and transformation war of governments into a civil war, on the one hand, is facilitated by military failures (“defeat”) of governments, and on the other hand, impossible actually strive for such a transformation, without thereby contributing to the defeat.
The chauvinists (with the OK, with the Chkheidze faction) deny the “slogan” of defeat because this slogan alone signifies a consistent call for revolutionary action against one's government in time of war. And without such actions, millions of the most revolutionary phrases about the war against “war and conditions, etc.” are not worth a penny.
Anyone who would seriously want to refute the "slogan" of the defeat of his government in the imperialist war would have to prove one of three things: either 1) that the war of 1914-1915. not reactionary; or 2) that a revolution in connection with it is impossible, or 3) that it is impossible for revolutionary movements to correspond and cooperate with each other in all warring countries. The last consideration is especially important for Russia, for it is the most backward country in which a socialist revolution is directly impossible. That is why the Russian Social-Democrats had to be the first to come up with the "theory and practice" of the "slogan" of defeat. And the tsarist government was quite right that the agitation of the RSDRF faction - the only one a model in the International not of one parliamentary opposition, but of truly revolutionary agitation among the masses against their own government - that this agitation weakened the "military power" of Russia, contributed to its defeat. It is a fact. It's stupid to hide from him.
The opponents of the slogan of defeat are simply afraid of themselves, not wanting to look directly at the most obvious fact of the inseparable connection between revolutionary agitation against the government and the promotion of its defeat.
Is it possible for a revolutionary, in the bourgeois-democratic sense, movement in Russia to correspond with and promote a socialist movement in the West? Not a single socialist who spoke out publicly during the last 10 years has doubted this, and the movement in the Austrian proletariat after October 17, 1905. 1 actually proved this possibility.
Ask any Social-Democrat who calls himself an internationalist: does he sympathize with the agreement of the Social-Democrats of the various belligerent countries on joint revolutionary action against all belligerent governments? Many will answer that it is impossible, as Kautsky answered (Neue Zeit, October 2, 1914), by this fully proving their social chauvinism. For, on the one hand, this is a deliberate, blatant lie, striking in the face of well-known facts and the Basel Manifesto. On the other hand, if it were true, then the opportunists would be right in many respects!
Many will answer that they sympathize. And then we will say: if this sympathy is not hypocritical, then it is ridiculous to think that an agreement “in form” is required in war and war: the choice of representatives, a meeting, the signing of a treaty, the appointment of a day and an hour! Only the Semkovskys are capable of thinking this way. Agreement on revolutionary action even in one country, not to mention a number of countries, is feasible only force example major revolutionary action attack to them, development them. And such an attack, again, is impossible without the desire for defeat and without the assistance of defeat. The transformation of an imperialist war into a civil war cannot be “done,” just as revolution cannot be “done”—it grows up from a whole series of diverse phenomena, aspects, features, properties, and consequences of the imperialist war. And such growth impossible without a series of military failures and defeats of those governments that are being hit them own oppressed classes.
To abandon the slogan of defeat means to turn one's revolutionary spirit into empty phrases or mere hypocrisy.
And what are they suggesting that we replace the “slogan” of defeat with? The slogan "no victories, no defeats" (Semkovsky in No. 2 of Izvestia. The same the whole OK in #1). But this is nothing more than a paraphrase of the slogan "defence of the fatherland"! This is precisely the transfer of the issue to the plane of the war of governments (which, according to the content of the slogan, should stay in the old position, “keep your positions”), not fight oppressed classes against their government! This is justification for chauvinism all imperialist nations, whose bourgeoisie is always ready to say, and tell the people that they are "only" fighting "against defeat". “The meaning of our vote on August 4th: not for the war, but against defeat I,” writes the leader of the opportunists E. David in his book. "Okists", together with Bukvoed and Trotsky, quite stand on the soil of David, defending the slogan: no victory, no defeat!
This slogan, if you think about it, means “civil peace,” the renunciation of the class struggle of the oppressed class in all belligerent countries, for class struggle is impossible without striking at “one’s own” bourgeoisie and “one’s own” government, and striking at one’s own government in time of war there is high treason (to the attention of Bukvoed!), there is contributing to the defeat of their country. Whoever recognizes the slogan "no victories, no defeats" can only hypocritically stand for the class struggle, for "severing the civil world", he in practice renounces independent, proletarian politics, subordinating the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the task of quite bourgeois. to protect these imperialist governments from defeat. The only policy of a real, non-verbal, rupture of the "civil peace", of recognition of the class struggle, is the policy of use the proletariat difficulties his government and his bourgeoisie for their overthrow. And this cannot be achieved, to this can't strive not wanting the defeat of his government, not contributing to such a defeat.
When the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike before the war, the bourgeoisie replied that everything was absolutely correct. e point of view: this will be high treason, and you will be treated as traitors. This is true, just as it is true that fraternization in the trenches is treason. Whoever writes against “high treason,” like Bookvoed, against the “disintegration of Russia,” like Semkovsky, stands on a bourgeois, and not on a proletarian point of view. Proletarian can not neither deliver a class blow to your government, nor stretch out (in fact) a hand to your brother, the proletarian of a “foreign” country that is at war with “us”, without committing"high treason" without contributing defeat without helping decay"their" imperialist "great" power.
Whoever stands for the slogan "no victories, no defeats" is a conscious or unconscious chauvinist, at best a conciliatory petty bourgeois, but in any case enemy proletarian policy, a supporter of the present governments, the present ruling classes.
Let's look at the question from another angle. The war cannot but evoke the most violent feelings among the masses, violating the usual state of the sleepy psyche. And without matching these new, stormy feelings impossible revolutionary tactics.
What are the main currents of these violent feelings? 1) Horror and despair. Hence the rise of religion. The churches have begun to fill up again, the reactionaries rejoice. “Where there is suffering, there is religion,” says the arch-reactionary Barres. And he's right. 2) Hatred for the “enemy” is a feeling specially kindled by the bourgeoisie (not so much priests) and beneficial only to her economically and politically. 3) Hatred for his government and to his bourgeoisie - the feeling of all class-conscious workers who, on the one hand, understand that war is the "continuation of the policy" of imperialism, and respond to it with the "continuation" of their hatred for their class enemy, and on the other hand, understand that "war is war" there is a vulgar phrase without a revolution against his government. One cannot incite hatred towards one's own government and towards one's own bourgeoisie without wishing them defeat - and one cannot be an unhypocritical opponent of "civil (=class) peace" without inciting hatred towards one's own government and towards one's own bourgeoisie!!
The adherents of the slogan "no victory, no defeat" actually stand on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, "not believing" in the possibility of international revolutionary actions of the working class against their governments, unwilling to help develop such actions - a task, no doubt, not an easy one, but the only one worthy of the proletarian, the only socialist task. It was precisely the proletariat of the most backward of the belligerent great powers, especially in the face of the shameful betrayal of the German and French Social Democrats, who, in the face of their party, had to come up with revolutionary tactics that are absolutely impossible without "facilitating the defeat" of their government, but which alone leads to a European revolution, to a lasting peace of socialism, to the deliverance of mankind from the horrors, disasters, savagery, bestiality that reign now.
“Social-Democrat” No. 43
Published according to the text of the newspaper "Social-Democrat"
________________________
1 This refers to the tsar's manifesto published on October 17 (30), 1905, which contained promises to grant "civil liberties" and convene a "legislative Duma". The manifesto was a concession wrested from tsarism by the revolutionary struggle, but this concession by no means decided the fate of the revolution, as the liberals and Mensheviks claimed. The Bolsheviks exposed the whole falsity of the tsar's manifesto and called for the continuation of the struggle, for the overthrow of the autocracy.
The first Russian revolution had a great revolutionary influence on the labor movement in other countries, in particular in Austria-Hungary. The news that the Russian tsar was forced to make a concession and issue a manifesto promising “freedoms” played, as Lenin pointed out, “a decisive role in the final victory of universal suffrage in Austria” (Works, 4th ed., vol. 23, p. 244). Powerful demonstrations took place in Vienna and other industrial cities of Austria-Hungary. There were barricades in Prague. As a result, universal suffrage was introduced in Austria.
Who would have thought in the summer of 1916 that in a little over a year the Bolsheviks would establish themselves in power in Russia and soon a real civil war would break out in the country?! Meanwhile, the leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, declared long before that "the transformation of the modern imperialist war into a civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan"...
31 months after the outbreak of World War I, in February 1917, the Russian monarchy fell. Eight months later, in October of the same year, the Vladimir Lenin, who has since been considered the main creator of "the greatest event in Russian history of the 20th century." True, during all this time (from the beginning of April to the end of October 1917) Lenin was in the revolutionary capital for only four months, but this fact does not seem to bother anyone. The revolution must have a leader, and it is desirable not to question the fact that all the threads of its management were in the hands of Lenin. However, according to contemporaries, Lenin in the full sense of the word “lived by revolution” ...
Internal factors
Whatever the apologists of the monarchy may say, the autocratic system caused one or another degree of protest - conscious or unconscious - in all sections of the population. Hence not only the emergence of a liberal opposition, but also the "success" of Russian socialism in its two main variants: Marxist (proletarian) and populist (peasant). It could not be otherwise: if a layer of educated people does not find a natural use for their abilities for leadership and management, then an anti-systemic community begins to take shape from its representatives, guided by postulates that are initially opposite to the existing statehood.
IN AND. Lenin: "If there were no war, Russia could live for years and even decades without a revolution against the capitalists." Photo from 1914
Is it any wonder that this community of intelligentsia adopted the "most advanced" social theories and began to look for not only legal, but also illegal ways to put them into practice. In such a situation, there was no guarantee that in critical circumstances the intelligentsia's doctrines would not begin to resonate with popular utopias and prejudices.
Of course, Russian Marxism was initially imitative. But it happens that students "in their youth" are much more impatient than their teachers. These were the Russian Bolsheviks. They were looking for the shortest ways to translate their ideas into reality, thinking little about the means of their implementation. It was assumed that the Russian proletariat, in alliance with the peasantry, would launch a struggle against the autocracy, and after its overthrow, with the support of the poorest part of the rural workers, would oppose the bourgeoisie in the struggle for socialism. But history has significantly corrected these plans.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Lenin turned to factors of a global order. He began to associate the war with the coming collapse of capitalism in its highest, "imperialist" stage. Now Lenin was inspired not so much by "Capital" Karl Marx how much book John Hobson"Imperialism" (1902). According to the English author, capitalism has acquired a global character, the redistribution of the world between the leading imperialist powers was on the agenda. Impressed by the picture painted by Hobson, "confirmed" by the First World War that broke out in 1914, Lenin believed in the imminence of a world revolution, in this "universal" means of defeating the autocracy, the Russian bourgeoisie, and international imperialism. Later, the leader of the Bolsheviks frankly admitted:
"If there were no war, Russia could live for years and even decades without a revolution against the capitalists."
Lenin's installation was simple:
"The transformation of the modern imperialist war into a civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan." At the same time, Lenin was not embarrassed by the fact that Russia remained the “most backward” of the capitalist countries. Moreover, he, unlike other socialists, relied on the "revolutionary creativity of the masses."
Lenin believed that Russia, allegedly breaking ahead in terms of the concentration of financial capital, but at the same time entangled in the remnants of the pre-capitalist era, due to the sharpest social and political contradictions accumulated in it, is capable of playing the role of a skirmisher in the European movement towards socialism. The horrors of the war were opposed by a grandiose utopia, presented in a pseudo-scientific shell. But this could be prevented by right-wing socialists, who, contrary to Marxist teaching, were inclined to defend "their" bourgeois government.
In 1917, fraternization on the Russian-German front took on a massive character.
Back in November 1912, the Basel Socialist Congress adopted a manifesto on the threat of impending war. It said that at any moment the armies of the great European powers could be thrown against each other. The proletariat, as emphasized in the manifesto, considers this a crime against humanity, and therefore intends to oppose imperialism with all the might of its international solidarity. The manifesto recommended that the socialists use the economic and political crisis inevitable in the event of war to fight for the socialist revolution.
"Ignite the proletarian revolution in the West"
However, with the outbreak of the war, having forgotten the principles of "proletarian internationalism", the leading socialists of all the belligerent countries took the side of "their" imperialist governments. Sluggish reaction to murder in France Jean Jaurès- the main and most striking opponent of the war - fully confirmed this. However, Lenin, perhaps the only one of the European socialist leaders, did not stop the outbreak of "revolutionary chauvinism".
Since, in his opinion, only an international proletarian revolution could prevent the world imperialist slaughter, it was necessary in one way or another to provoke a chain reaction of revolutionary upheavals. From this point of view, it was immaterial in which country the first revolutionary explosion took place. That is why the socialists of the various belligerent countries were obliged to come out against "their" imperialist governments. Under these circumstances, according to Lenin, it was necessary "to carry through the bourgeois revolution in Russia in order to ignite the proletarian revolution in the West." Moreover, in the conditions of war, the second half of this task was allegedly solved simultaneously with the first.
Meanwhile, subtle, but very significant factors of a different order were already operating in Europe. The world has become too crowded and aggressive for the diplomats of the old formation to have time to agree on maintaining the usual stability. The factor of socialization of science also played its role: for the first time, scientists tried to apply their practices to social and political life.
The phenomenon of the “scientific myth” arose, which gave the utopias as old as the world additional persuasiveness. This provoked the temptation of a rapid leap forward, including through the "liberation" war. The world has become "revolutionary" from within. But at the same time, he became aggressive on the outside. In Europe, the second trend won, in Russia the situation was more complicated.
The reasons that gave rise to such a situation were distinguishable: the demographic boom led to the "rejuvenation" of the European population, industrial progress convinced of the "omnipotence" of man, the information revolution strengthened the illusory nature of mass consciousness. Accordingly, the "recklessness" of ordinary people increased. For the first time, the excited psyche of the “little man” intervened in the very course of world history. Against this background, the rulers, who thought in categories of past centuries, began - wittingly or unwittingly - to provoke wars and revolutions. The mass media played along with them, bringing the unconscious discontent of the masses to chauvinistic hysteria.
Globalization was pushing together previously alienated worlds, and it was hard to hope that they would soon come to an understanding. In a certain sense, the Bolsheviks proposed their own "universal" project for eliminating the aggravated contradictions. Of course, he was utopian, but he won over with his external humanistic component. Thus was born a grandiose revolutionary deception and self-deception.
On September 5–8, 1915, the International Socialist Conference was held in Zimmerwald (Switzerland). There were 38 delegates from a number of European countries. Since Lenin could not count on a majority, he tried to create the so-called "Zimmerwald Left" group - a small group of his supporters.
Subsequently, he continued his criticism of the right-wing socialists at the Kienthal Socialist Conference (April 1916), which, with its manifesto, addressed to the "ruined and slaughtered peoples," declared the need for the conquest of power by the proletariat. However, Lenin's slogan "turning the imperialist war into a civil war" did not meet with support here either. Nevertheless, Lenin stubbornly tried to attract supporters. He found them not exactly where he expected.
The impatient populace
During the war years, a striking phenomenon was discovered: if in Western countries they took seriously the idea of "sacred unity" of all strata of society against a common enemy, then in Russia all educated people spoke - some with fear, some with hope - about the inevitable revolution.
It is believed that the speeches of the leader of the liberals played a significant role in whipping up revolutionary sentiments. Pavel Milyukov and well-known right-wing figure Vladimir Purishkevich, who at the end of 1916 began to denounce the vices of the existing government from the rostrum of the State Duma. However, at the end of February 1917, popular indignation erupted independently of them.
IN AND. Lenin proclaims Soviet power. Hood. V.A. Serov
Under the slogans "Bread!" and "Down with the war!" the revolution seemed to have swept past all the then opposition political leaders, and to a certain extent even the socialists. Women on strike, hysterical, who had nothing to feed their children, were able to captivate men, people took to numerous demonstrations. Under the influence of socialist agitators, to the slogans proclaimed by the masses, a political one was added - "Down with the autocracy!". The situation was determined by the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison: they did not want to go to the hated war, and therefore they readily joined the indignant workers. The impatient masses began to impose their course of action on the politicians.
The Provisional Government formed after the February Revolution was headed by the Duma leaders, who hoped that getting rid of tsarism would make it possible to end the war victoriously. The Russian socialists (Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries), who became the head of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, took a shaky position, formally supporting the slogan "A world without annexations and indemnities." But the masses, tired of the hardships of the war, did not agree to wait. Anarchists also insisted on Russia's immediate withdrawal from the war. Strange as it may seem, individual rightists also started talking about a separate peace, believing that with the fall of the autocracy, the goals of war had lost their force in the eyes of the people. Lenin, who returned from emigration in early April 1917, took advantage of this.
In essence, Lenin's calculation in his famous "April Theses" was based on the growing popular indignation at the ongoing war. His proposals were simple: no concessions to "revolutionary defencism," that is, to those "bad" socialists who support the bourgeoisie and imperialists; accordingly, the Provisional Government must leave the stage.
Lenin also expressed dissatisfaction with the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet - they should have been replaced by "real" revolutionaries. Also, there was no place in the new Russia for "bourgeois" parliamentarism - it was to be replaced by a "higher" form of democracy in the person of the "Republic of Soviets of Workers', Laborers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies". In addition, Lenin spoke of the need for centralization of banking and a gradual transition to "public" control over the production and distribution of products. That is how he understood "steps towards socialism."
Needless to say, Lenin's plan was unrealistic. But there are times when the troubled masses see utopia as the only acceptable reality. The British historian Robert Service compared Lenin's 10 theses with the 95 theses of Martin Luther, which the great preacher pinned to the doors of the cathedral in Wittenberg almost 400 years ago. In both cases, the bet was made on the frenzy of the people, embraced by the new faith. True, Lenin specifically emphasized:
"We must base ourselves only on the consciousness of the masses." But "consciousness", apparently, he understood in a peculiar way, being sure that sooner or later the masses would move along the path indicated by the Bolshevik party. In fact, he himself, to a certain extent, became a hostage to the growing desire among the people for peace "at any cost."
Path to power
Be that as it may, even Lenin's associates considered that his proposals were "nonsense of a madman." The Bolshevik leadership did not accept the April Theses, considering them too abstract and useless in practice. However, they were still published in Pravda, although their “corrupting influence” was opposed by Lev Kamenev. It was not until mid-April that the Petrograd City Conference of the Bolsheviks reluctantly approved Lenin's theses, and then they were supported by the All-Russian (April) Conference of the Bolsheviks, which took place from April 24 to 29.
Lenin was helped by the April government crisis. The events that broke out were a characteristic combination of provocation and anarchy, utopia and psychosis. On April 18, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government, the already mentioned leader of the Cadets, Pavel Milyukov, who had a reputation as a "genius of tactlessness", assured the doubting ambassadors of the Allied Powers that Russia would continue the war until victory.
This was not to the taste of the members of the Petrograd Soviet, who still adhered, albeit formally, to the slogan "A world without annexations and indemnities." On April 21, about 100,000 workers and soldiers took to the streets of the capital demanding peace. The soldiers started talking about how the Milyukov note was rendering a "friendly service" to the imperialists of all countries, helping them to stifle the struggle of the proletariat for world peace. Anti-Milyukov soldiers' and workers' demonstrations began, they were met by counter-demonstrations of the "pure public". Provocative shots were fired, dead and wounded appeared.
The "Decree on Peace" - the first decree of the Soviet government - was, in essence, a call for world revolution
Milyukov had to resign. A coalition government was formed, seemingly declaring its desire to end the war, but seeing the achievement of peace in the old fashioned way only "in agreement with the allies." In this situation, in private conversations, even the Cadets admitted that soon control of the government would probably pass to Alexander Kerensky, and then power might even fall to the Bolsheviks. And so it happened. It can be said that in April 1917 Lenin won a decisive victory. The Bolsheviks only had to finish off those politicians who did not agree to immediate peace negotiations.
In June 1917, the Bolsheviks offered the masses the following set of slogans: "Down with the Tsarist Duma!", "Down with 10 capitalist ministers!", "All power to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies!" Cancel orders against soldiers and sailors!”, “Down with the war!”. Curiously, slogans that hinted at the forces of reaction lurking (the non-existent "tsarist" Duma, the mythical "capitalist ministers") were combined with calls for the abolition of restrictions on the rights of soldiers. All this was summarized by the traditional anti-war slogan, the implementation of which was conceived through the transfer of power to the Soviets. On June 18, Bolshevik slogans were picked up by a 500,000-strong demonstration of workers.
The offensive of the Russian troops, which began on the same day, was thwarted. A new crisis broke out, further compromising the supporters of the "war to a victorious end." In early July, an anti-government demonstration by the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison, who did not want to go to the front, almost led to the fall of the Provisional Government. In a sense, the impatient masses outstripped the Bolsheviks.
The unwillingness to fight was associated with the agrarian issue: the soldiers, most of them former peasants, feared that being at the front would prevent them from being in time for the “fair” division of land, which was promised by representatives of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, moreover, on behalf of the Provisional Government. Meanwhile, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, having promised a just solution to the agrarian question, hesitated with it and with the question of peace. It turned out that they unwittingly played along with the Bolsheviks. The latter had only to overtake their socialist opponents in terms of promises. And they succeeded in this despite accusations that the Bolsheviks were acting “on orders from the German General Staff.”
There is no doubt that the victory of the Bolsheviks was ensured by two slogans: "Peace!" and "Earth!" Nothing more was needed: the masses demanded both at any cost. Under the cover of these appeals, adopted on October 25-26, 1917 by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks, with the help of soldiers from the Petrograd garrison, easily seized power in the country from the gaping Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries.
However, Lenin's "Decree on Peace" was, in essence, a call for world revolution. True, neither the participants in the Second Congress, nor the broad masses of soldiers wanted to notice this. As a result, Russia fell into an internal civil war - much more ruinous than the cursed "imperialist war." Such was the terrible cost of the grandiose deceit and self-deception of the socialist doctrinaires and the gullible masses.
Vladimir Buldakov, Doctor of Historical Sciences