> On Jan 9, 2025, at 8:42 PM, Charlie via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Mark, your argument is that you cannot believe that participants in the
> revolution against tsarism could come to hate the first socialist regime. You
> don't look at the evidence, you don't compare the facts that Furr presents
> with the evasions that Greene writes. No, you just can't believe it could
> happen. And if you can't believe it, then it must not be true. Sorry, that
> cuts no ice.
Charlie,
That's one theory: The "participants in the revolution against tsarism
...[came] to hate the first socialist regime." Those participants, of course,
happened to include central leaders of the Bolshevik Party, who participated in
and shaped the system that ultimately prosecuted them.
Here's another theory: The Great Purges and Show Trials of the mid 1930s are
extension and the many little purges and show trials of fifteen years earlier
by the Bolshevik Party as a means of governance.
"The Bolshevik party soon turned its back on the principle of collective
working-class democracy that had been practiced in 1917. Where the soviets
survived, their decisions were usually subordinated to edicts by party or
military bodies. Non-Bolshevik socialist parties were subject to repression.
The death penalty was partly reimposed and the special security commissions
(the Cheka) became stronger." S. Pirani, "The Russian Revolution in Retreat
1920-1924."
(https://files.libcom.org/files/[Simon_Pirani]_The_Russian_Revolution_in_Retreat,_(b-ok.org).pdf)
<https://files.libcom.org/files/%5BSimon_Pirani%5D_The_Russian_Revolution_in_Retreat,_(b-ok.org).pdf)>.
Pirani writes that "The Bolsheviks’ chosen path was to conduct the economic
revival under the leadership of the party and the state; the working class was
consigned to the area of production and kept out of the process of political
decision-making."
In the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik leadership came to
view the state as the engine of the revolution. Many Bolshevik cadre in the
workplaces were transformed into government "sluzhashchie" or "white collar,"
administrative, or office workers. And as the Bolsheviks relinquished the
leadership of the factory floors to activists outside the party, the Cheka were
brought in to deal with those who questioned or challenged party policies.
Party policy was to snuff out any independent organization. Noncompliants were
purged or worse.
In Pirani's telling, the "ideas in Lenin’s The State and Revolution, which was
written under the influence of the surge of soviet activity in 1917 and
extolled popular participation in government, were dumped. By 1921, as the Red
army invaded Georgia to help depose the local Mensheviks, the principle of
self-determination of small nations – which had in December 1917 been cited as
a justification for granting independence to Finland – was set aside. In the
post-civil-war years, the most conservative aspects of Bolshevik ideology – the
vanguardism, authoritarianism and statism that had been shaken up in 1917 –
were reinforced by the revolution’s retreat."
Little purges preceded the great ones just as a little show trial presaged much
bigger ones in the following decade: "The Central Committee (CC) of the
Bolshevik party first decided to try the SR party leaders in December 1921 and
announced this intention publicly in February 1922. The propaganda campaign
began with a public dispute with the leaders of the Socialist International,
during which Lenin initiated the call for the death penalty. In Moscow the MC
supervised a campaign of resolutions at workplace meetings during May and June.
This activity was coordinated with a ‘technical troika’ of GPU officers, headed
by the anarchist-turned-Bolshevik Timofei Samsonov39 who in April oversaw a
crackdown on the Mensheviks’ Moscow organization, and in late May moved on to
arrest all known SR activists."
I don't think Russian history repeated itself, first as a tragedy and then as
an absurdity. I think that the persecution and purging of workplace activists
in the earliest years of the "revolution in retreat" eventually raached the top
leaders of the revolution - except for one of them.
Mark
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#34525): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34525
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/109913252/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
