Bolshevik Revolutionaries Treated the Have-Nots Like Dirt

Millions of people today fear any talk of "revolution to abolish inequality" because of what the Bolsheviks did in the name of that goal

The following excerpt is from my book, The People As Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda In World War II, online here (PDF), with the sources for the footnotes (#111 #163) that are in this excerpt.

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The October 1917 Bolshevik (Communist) revolution faced extremely challenging problems, especially providing city dwellers with food during a time of scarcity, and defending the revolution against real enemies including big capitalists, Tsarist military officers and foreign military forces aiming to overthrow working class power. But, as events would demonstrate, the Bolsheviks—in accordance with the Marxist view of working people—did not trust ordinary people to solve these problems democratically. Instead, the Communists feared that democracy would be the undoing of the revolution, whose goal, as they saw it, was to secure the rule of the party and to increase economic production. Democracy and equality were the goals of ordinary workers and peasants, but these were not the goals of the Communists. Instead of relying on truly representative bodies of workers and peasants to come up with solutions to problems like providing people in the cities with food—solutions that may very well have involved sacrifices, but which would have been democratically self-imposed sacrifices for agreed upon goals—Lenin assumed that only the Communists truly cared about solving such problems, that only they knew how, and that whoever didn’t do exactly as the Communists ordered were counterrevolutionary enemies of the people who had to be shot or imprisoned. The Communists used every problem as an excuse for strengthening the party’s power over working people and attacking all of their efforts to create more democratic and equal social relations.

Communists were able to exercise power way out of proportion to their relatively small numbers for two key reasons: 1) They had enormous self-confidence which derived from possessing a very coherent “science” in Marxism which purported to explain everything including most importantly how to change the world. Based on this confidence they, unlike ordinary people or even other revolutionaries, were able to act and command others with supreme authority, and in the name of revolutionary aspirations that huge numbers of people shared. 2) They did not hesitate to use violence ruthlessly to intimidate or even eliminate their working class and peasant opponents, most of whom were not prepared psychologically, organizationally or materially to defend themselves.

On April 29, 1918 Lenin essentially declared war on the peasants in the name of the proletariat. Speaking before the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets on April 29, 1918 he said, “The smallholders, the people who owned only a parcel of land, fought side by side with the proletariat when the time came to overthrow the capitalists and the major landowners. But now our paths have diverged. Smallholders have always been afraid of discipline and organization. The time has come for us to have no mercy, and to turn against them.” A few days later the people’s commissar of food told the same group, “I say it quite openly; we are now at war, and it is only with guns that we will get the grain we need.”109 By July the Communists had recruited 12,000 people to a “food army” that went into the countryside to forcibly requisition food.110 Ninety-six percent of Russia’s peasants, including most of the so-called kulaks—peasants who owned more land than most and were typically respected for their farming skills—belonged to peasant communes that exercised self government and decided how to distribute the land taken from the large landowners. Even before the October revolution, many of the kulaks had already been required by their communes to return most of their livestock, machinery and land to the commune for redistribution according to the ancient principle based on the number of mouths to be fed in a family.111 Peasants wanted to ar- range life without outside interference. The Communists on the contrary, wanted to nationalize the land and turn the peasants into rural workers in large state-controlled farm collectives.

The Communists confiscated so much grain that “peasant households were often left starving.”112 Antonov-Ovseenko, a Bolshevik leader who led the repressions of peasants in Tambov, later admitted “that the requisitioning plans of 1920 and 1921, if carried out as instructed, would have meant the certain death of the peasants. On average, they were left with 1 pud (35 pounds) of grain and 1.5 pudy (about 55 pounds) of potatoes per person each year—approximately one-tenth of the minimum requirements for life."113 One historian writes of the peasants’ reaction to the Bolsheviks at this time, “All the trust that the Bolsheviks had gained by not opposing the seizure of land in 1917 evaporated in a matter of weeks, and for more than three years the policy of requisitioning food was to provoke thousands of riots and uprisings, which were to degenerate into real peasant wars that were quelled with terrible violence."114 In the first twenty days of 1919 alone, the Cheka reported, “210 revolts, involving more than 100,000 armed combatants and several hundred thousand peasants.”115 These peasant armies fought not only the Communists, but the “White” counter-revolutionary armies as well.116 The most famous such peasant army was led by Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist (who, contrary to the common stereotype of peasants, was extremely opposed to any form of anti-Semitism.)117 Lenin decreed the establishment of ‘committees of the village poor’ to report hoarding by the wealthier peasant families—the so called kulaks—but the peasants resented the entire scheme. The atmosphere is captured by Lenin’s confidential telegram sent on August 10, 1918, to the Central Executive Committee of the Penza soviet: “Hang no fewer than a hundred well-known kulaks, rich-bags and blood-suckers (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of people)...Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so.”118 (After failing to turn the poorer peasants against the wealthier ones, Lenin stopped slandering the kulaks and in December 1920, at the Eighth Congress of Soviets, he even “urged...that richer peasant households should be materially rewarded for any additional gains in agricultural productivity rather than be persecuted as kulaks.”119) The Marxist view of people that led the Communists to wage war against the peasants was expressed quite succinctly by the head of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, when he said of the peasants, “They are so ignorant, that they have no idea what is really in their own interest.”120

The Communists even turned against workers in the cities. They dissolved soviets and workers’ committees that did not have Bolshevik majorities on June 14, 1918.121 There were protests and strikes in working class towns. In one day the Cheka opened fire on a hunger march organized by workers in Kolpino, near Petrograd, and a detachment of Red Guards killed fifteen people in a factory in Ekaterinburg who protested the corruption of some Bolshevik commissars.122 In May and June 1918 there were more working class demonstrations that were put down violently,123 and the Bolsheviks responded to strikes in state-owned factories by locking the workers out.124 During this period the “Cheka recorded seventy ‘incidents’—strikes, anti-Bolshevik meetings, demonstrations—led principally by metalworkers from labor strongholds, who had been the most ardent supporters of the Bolsheviks in the period leading up to the events of 1917.”125 In Petrograd the Bolsheviks dissolved the Assembly of Workers’ Representatives and arrested more than 800 of its leaders after a Bolshevik leader was assassinated. In response, workers called a general strike on July 21,1918. On March 10, 1919, a meeting of more than 10,000 workers in the Putilov factories in Petrograd adopted a resolution that read: “This government is nothing less than the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, kept in place thanks to the Cheka and the revolutionary courts."126 The resolution also called for power to be handed over to the soviets, free elections for the soviets and factory committees, an end to the limitations on the quantity of food workers could bring into the city from the countryside, and the release of political prisoners from “authentic revolutionary parties.” Lenin came to Petrograd from Moscow (the new capital) to personally address the workers who were striking in the factories but was booed off the stage.127 On March 16, Cheka detachments stormed the Putilov factory which was defended by armed workers; they arrested 900 workers and executed 200 strikers without a trial. The remaining workers had to sign a declaration that they had been “led into crime” by counterrevolutionary leaders before they were rehired.128 Events such as this occurred in the spring of 1919 in many of the largest working class centers in Russia including Tula, Sormovo, Orel, Bryansk, Tver, Ivanovo Voznesensk, and Astrakhan, always with the same grievances: “the elimination of special privileges for Communists, the release of political prisoners, free elections for soviets and factory committees, the end of conscription into the Red Army, freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of the press."129

In March 1919 in the city of Astrakhan, workers went on strike for better food rations and against the arrest of non-Bolshevik activists. On March 10 “the 45th Infantry Regiment refused [Communist orders] to open fire on workers marching through the city. Joining forces with the strikers, the soldiers stormed the Bolshevik Party headquarters and killed several members of the staff."130 Soldiers who remained loyal to the Bolsheviks captured the town and from March 12 to 14 they shot or drowned between 2,000 and 4,000 striking workers.131

Late in 1919 the Communists implemented the “militarization” of work in more than 2000 businesses. Leon Trotsky led this effort, arguing that workers were naturally lazy and that, in the absence of a capitalist market that fired people if they didn’t work, the state had to subject workers to military style discipline so they would obey orders as soldiers obey orders in the army. Workers, of course, hated being militarized at work, especially when they were punished for leaving work to search for food. Communist militarization led to even more work stoppages, strikes, and riots, all of which the Cheka attacked ruthlessly. The Communist Party paper, Pravda, wrote February 12, 1920, “The best place for strikers, those noxious yellow parasites, is the concentration camp!”132 In the Tula arms factory on Sunday June 6, 1920, metallurgy workers refused to work new mandatory extra hours; then women workers refused to work on that Sunday or any others, explaining that was the only day they had to go out looking for food. The Cheka came and arrested the strikers and the Communists declared martial law, announcing that there was a “counterrevolutionary conspiracy fomented by Polish spies.” The strike spread and more “leaders” were arrested, and then thousands of women workers and housewives presented themselves to the Cheka and asked to be arrested too. Then men did the same thing, en masse. In four days, more than 10,000 people were detained in an open-air space guarded by the Cheka. Finally, the Communists realized they needed these skilled armaments workers back on the job and so they freed workers who would sign a confession that they were "a filthy criminal dog."133

By 1921 Communists faced full scale revolts by the working class in both Moscow and Petrograd. A Cheka report from January 16 stated, “The workers are predicting the imminent demise of the regime. No one works any more because they are all too hungry. Strikes on a huge scale are bound to start any day now. The garrisons in Moscow are less and less trustworthy and could become uncontrollable at any moment. Preventive measures are required.”134 On February 26, Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist Party in Petrograd sent a telegram to Lenin which read, “The workers have joined up with the soldiers in the barracks...We are still waiting for the reinforcements we demanded from Novgorod. If they don’t arrive in the next few hours, we are going to be overrun.”135

Two days later sailors on two warships in the Kronstadt base near Petrograd mutinied, and issued a 24 hour ultimatum to the Communist government, demanding “free and secret elections, freedom of speech and freedom of the press—at least for ‘workers, peasants, anarchists, and left-wing socialist parties,’... equal rations for all, the freeing of political prisoners, the convocation of a special commission to reexamine the cases of those imprisoned in concentration camps, an end to [food] requisitioning, the abolition of the special Cheka detachments, and freedom for the peasants ‘to do whatever they want with their land, and to raise their own livestock, provided they do it using their own resources.’ ”136 On March 1 a huge meeting of more than 15,000 people—a quarter of the entire civil and military population of the naval base—gathered in Kronstadt. The local high ranking Communist, Mikhail Kalinin, tried to address the crowd but was booed off. Two thousand rank and file Communists joined the rebels and formed a provisional revolutionary committee that tried to link up with the strikers and soldiers from Petrograd. On March 7, the Cheka attacked the Petrograd workers, and arrested more than 2,000 of them. From March 8-18, General Mikhail Tukhachevsky used special Cheka detachments and young soldiers fresh out of military school with little revolutionary tradition to re-capture Kronstadt. Between April and June 1921 2,103 Kronstadt workers were sentenced to death and 6,459 were sent to prison or concentration camps.137 

From 1921 to 1928 the Party had implemented a New Economic Policy (NEP) as an attempt to calm down the extreme opposition to the government’s forced requisition of food from starving peasants. Kulaks were no longer demonized and peasants were allowed to have their own land and sell to whomever they wished within limits. Also, foreign investors were encouraged to invest in the Soviet Union in “concessions."138 By 1928 Stalin felt that it was again possible to be more aggressive against peasants and workers and to increase production faster than had occurred under the NEP. He implemented a Five-Year Plan (1928-32) which called once again for requisitioning stocks of grain from the peasants and forcing them into large state-owned collective farms, and imposing increased production quotas on the workers in state-owned industries.135 As before, the government acted tyrannically and people resisted as best they could. Every act of resistance, no matter how minor, was condemned by the Communist leaders and especially by Stalin as a counter-revolutionary act of deliberate sabotage, requiring harsh repression: 'kulaks were repressed, managers were persecuted, and wages were lowered”140 in addition to wage differentials being sharply widened.141 The repression led to more resistance, either openly or by subterfuge, and thus a vicious cycle was created which ended up with the government using punitive food requisitioning that produced the worst famine in Russia’s history in 1932-3, followed by repression on a scale never before seen—the “Great Terror" of 1937-8—four years before Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

During the renewed effort to collectivize the peasants’ farms against their will in 1930, the Communists identified three categories of kulaks in terms of their attitudes towards the regime, and gave local authorities quotas for the numbers in each category to punish by 1) either arrest and transfer to GPU (the new name for the Cheka) work camps or executed, with their families deported and all property confiscated, 2) arrest and deportation to distant regions of the country, or 3) (for those “loyal to the regime") transfer to peripheral regions of the districts in which they lived on land requiring improvement.142 Because of the quotas, peasants with relatively little wealth were often labeled kulaks. A GPU report from Smolensk read, “the brigades took from the wealthy peasants their winter clothes, their warm underclothes, and above all their shoes. They left the kulaks standing in their underwear and took everything, even old rubber socks, women’s clothes, tea worth no more than fifty kopeks, water pitchers, and pokers...The brigades confiscated everything, even the pillows from under the heads of babies, and stew from the family pot, which they smeared on the icons they had smashed.”143 Peasants were arrested for crimes such as having killed a pig “with the intention of consuming it themselves and thus keeping it from socialist appropriation” and for “taking part in commerce” when they sold something of their own making. Peasants were deported for “excessive visits to the church” or having an uncle who was an officer under the Tsar.144 In 1930 “nearly 2.5 million peasants took part in approximately 14,000 revolts, riots, and mass demonstrations against the regime.”145 Circulars were sent to local authorities calling for a slowdown in collectivization because there was a genuine danger of “a veritable tidal wave of peasant wars” and of “the death of at least half of all local Soviet civil servants.”146 In March, 1930, more than 1500 civil servants already had been killed, wounded or badly beaten by peasants armed with axes and pitchforks.147 The number of people officially deported in 1930 and 1931 was 1,803,392, many of whom, without clothes and other necessities, died of cold and hunger.148

Forced collectivization of the peasants was intended to deliver pre-determined quantities of agricultural products to the state, which took increasingly larger shares of the collective harvest. The requisitioning grew to such a large proportion of the harvest that the peasants’ very survival was threatened. Under the NEP peasants sold between 15 and 20 percent of the produce, and required the rest for the next year’s sowing, feeding cattle, and their own consumption. In 1931 the state took between 40 and 47% of the harvest, depending on the region.14’ Removing produce on this scale required mass arrests, searches for hidden grain and the use of torture to make peasants say where they hid grain in their homes. Prisons were filled to overflowing with peasants in the fall harvest season. Many peasants realized they would starve on the collectives and requested that they be deported to the north.150 One famous decree promulgated August 7, 1932 provided for execution or sentencing for ten years for “any theft or damage of socialist property." People called it the “ear law" because many of those condemned under it had only taken an ear of corn from the fields of the collective. From August 1932 to December 1933 more than 125,000 people were sentenced under this law and 5,400 received death sentences.151 In November 1932 the Politburo of the Communist Party sent local authorities a letter ordering new raids on collective farms that had not met their quotas, and also ordering that the reserves kept back for sowing the next year's crop be confiscated as well.152 This order came after a report by Molotov to the Politburo in August, stating that there was “a real risk of famine even in areas where the harvest has been exceptionally good.”153

Famine did occur in 1932-33. Peasants without any means of obtaining food tried to leave the farms and migrate to the cities. But the government on December 27, 1932 introduced identity papers and obligatory registration for all citizens in order to prevent this internal migration. Stalin ordered the GPU to ban “by all means necessary the large-scale departure of peasants from Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus for the towns.”154 Stalin, of course, called the desperate peasants “counter-revolutionaries” and ordered that they be arrested. In March 1933 the GPU reported that in one month alone 219,460 people had been intercepted. Many peasants brought their children to cities hoping they would be cared for, and then they returned to the farms to die. Italian diplomatic bulletins from Kharkiv reported that, “Every night the bodies of more than 250 people who have died from hunger or typhus are collected.”155 The government denied there was a famine and turned down foreign offers of assistance, and even shipped 1.8 million tons of grain abroad “in the interests of industrialization.”156 In 1933 for the whole country, there were 6 million deaths attributable to the famine157 which in turn was caused by the forced requisitions of grain from the collective farms. In addition there were nearly one million people in forced-labor camps and colonies operated by the OGPU (another successor of the Cheka).158 An historian writes of Stalin and his associates at this time, “They knew that resentment of their rule in the rest of society was deep and wide."159

On July 2,1937 the Politburo sent a telegram to local authorities ordering that “all kulaks and criminals must be immediately arrested...and after a trial before a troika the most hostile are to be shot, and the less active but still hostile elements deported.”160 This order resulted in 259,450 people being arrested and 72,950 shot, according to official records.161 Local authorities were given quotas, and often they asked for the quotas to be raised in order to prove their zeal and loyalty and thereby avoid punishment to themselves. The arrests and executions continued for over a year. “Spies and subversives"162 were added to criminals and kulaks as categories of people to round up and execute, and many such “spies" turned out to be Stalin’s enemies in top levels of the Communist Party and in the military leadership, some of whom were given elaborate show trials in which they were made to confess to diabolical schemes. In what came be known as the Great Terror, 1,575,000 people were arrested between 1937-8, of whom 85.4% were sentenced, of whom 51%—681,692 people—were executed.163​

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​​Bolshevik distrust of ordinary people led to anti-democratic class inequality

During the rule of the Bolshevik (Communist) Party in the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks strictly enforced what I call the invalid authoritarian principle (which says one must obey the highest level of government). The result was that the creative and intelligent initiative from below by the only people who had direct knowledge of the relevant facts--the workers in the various enterprises--was stifled because they were prohibited from doing anything that was not ordered by the Communist Party. This in turn prevented the economic enterprises from functioning at all efficiently and reasonably to provide the products and services that people needed or desired. An excellent first hand account of this is provided by the author known as Voline, in Chapter 5 of his book The Unknown Revolution:1917-1921.

​In order that somebody could do what ordinary workers were prevented from doing by the invalid authoritarian principle, a new category of person was required, known as functionaries. The functionaries acted as intermediaries between the workers in the different kinds of economic enterprises and as decision-makers for these enterprises, from manufacturing to farming. Functionaries were people who did exactly what the Communist Party leaders told them to do. They were motivated to rise to a higher rank of functionary by being absolutely obedient to the Communist Party elite because if they made it to the top ranks they enjoyed special privileges--materially and otherwise. Eventually there were about two million high level "functionaries" bossing about eight million low-ranking functionaries.​

A new kind of class inequality

Top-ranking functionaries versus rank-and-file workers and low-ranking functionaries: this was the form of the re-emergence of class inequality in the Soviet Union, all made possible, in fact made inevitable, by the enforcement of the invalid authoritarian principle.​

Contrary to the egalitarian practice of the anarchists during the Spanish Revolution of 1936-9, the Bolsheviks during those same years instituted extreme wage inequality. A former Bolshevik, Victor Serge, provides the following information for wages at this time (the following paragraph is partially exact quotes and partially my edited quotes from Serge's book Russia Twenty Years After, pg. 4-5, reporting on the Soviet Union in 1937:​

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women workers get between 70 and 90 rubles a month (all figures are monthly here), a poverty wage entirely inadequate to feed the one who gets it. Laborers (males) get 100 to 120 rubles. Skilled workers get 250 to 400 rubles. Stakhanovist workers (i.e., those who work supposedly--it's all propaganda--absurdly hard) get 500 rubles and over. A scientific collaborator of a large establishment gets 300 to 400 rubles; a stenographer knowing foreign languages, about 200 rubles; a newspaper editor 230 rubles; miscellaneous employees, 90 to 120 rubles. A director of an enterprise or head of an office gets 400 to 800 rubles; high functionaries (communists) and big specialists get from 1,000 to 5,000 rubles. In the capitals, renowned specialists get as high as between 5,000 and 10,000 rubles per month. Writers get the same income. The great official dramatists, the official painters who do the portraits of the important leaders over and over again, the poets and novelists approved by the Central Committee, may get a million a year and more.​

The Bolsheviks attacked the real revolutionaries

​After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and Ukraine, there were major uprisings against their power by workers and peasants who wanted a real revolution. The sailors and workers in Kronstadt, in 1921, declared:​

"A fundamental change in the policy of the government is required. In the first place, the workers and peasants need liberty. They do not want to live according to the regulations of the Bolsheviks; they want to decide their own destinies for themselves."

Two headlines of Kronstadt newspapers were:

​ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS AND NOT TO THE PARTIES

and

​THE POWER OF THE SOVIETS WILL LIBERATE THE WORKERS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE FROM THE COMMUNIST YOKE

​These sailors and workers wanted their local elected soviet to be free from domination by the Bolshevik Party; they rejected the invalid authoritarian principle. "Lev Trotsky was sent to Petrograd to organize the armed response. He assembled as many loyal troops as he could under the command of Mikhail Tukhachevskii, and on March 7 began the bombardment of the island by the great guns of Petrograd." Tragically the Bolshevik Party--led by Lenin, not yet Stalin!-- succeeded in defeating the good people of Kronstadt.

​In Ukraine, a large peasant army led by the anarchist, Nestor Makhno, fought against the Bolsheviks for the same liberty of the workers and peasants that the sailors and workers of Kronstadt fought for. Unfortunately, the idea that the invalid authoritarian principle needs to be rejected was not sufficiently widespread and understood in Russia/Ukraine at this time and the Bolsheviks, claiming to be the legitimate central government, were able to use lies to martial enough troops to be loyal to the central government to defeat these genuinely revolutionary workers and peasants. Read more about this in The Unknown Revolution:1917-1921.

Please read “Egalitarianism is anti-Marxism”