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The Russian revolution of 1917 was a defining event of the twentieth century, and its achievements and failures remain controversial in the twenty-first. This book focuses on the retreat from the revolution’s aims in 1920–24, after the civil war and at the start of the New Economic Policy – and specifically, on the turbulent relationship between the working class and the Communist Party in those years. It is based on extensive original research of the actions and reactions of the party leadership and ranks, of dissidents and members of other parties, and of trade union activists and ordinary factory workers. It discusses working-class collective action before, during and after the crisis of 1921, when the Bolsheviks were confronted by the revolt at the Kronshtadt naval base and other protest movements.
This book argues that the working class was politically expropriated by the Bolshevik party, as democratic bodies such as soviets and factory committees were deprived of decision-making power; it examines how the new Soviet ruling class began to take shape. It shows how some worker activists concluded that the principles of 1917 had been betrayed, while others accepted a social contract, under which workers were assured of improvements in living standards in exchange for increased labour discipline and productivity, and a surrender of political power to the party.
- Sales Rank: #4467323 in Books
- Published on: 2008-03-28
- Released on: 2009-05-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.21" h x .70" w x 6.14" l, .96 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 312 pages
Review
"This powerful book takes a close look at the relationship between the Bolshevik party and the democratic aspirations of rank-and-file workers in Moscow in the crucial early years of the Russian revolution. Simon Pirani’s prodigious utilization of local party and secret police archives allows him to show how the Bolshevik party leadership systematically destroyed democratic voices on the shop floor: the party offered a "social contract" that promised improving standards of living in exchange for the loss of a political voice. Paying close attention to the material reality of the post-revolutionary period and to moments of intense shop floor dissent, this book goes beyond Robert Daniels’s classic The Conscience of the Revolution in emphasizing the importance of independent and non-party socialist worker activists. He instructs careful readers about the complex, fragile thing called democracy, exploring its origin and demise in economically and politically fraught conditions of revolutionary change."
Diane P. Koenker
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Why did the Russian revolution, a mass uprising for justice and democracy, end in a single Party dictatorship? This gripping tale of workers in revolution and retreat is essential reading for anyone interested in an answer. Pirani follows Russian workers as they seize power, fight for a democratic revolution, and lose to a Bolshevik Party bureaucracy intent on consolidating control. Using exciting new sources, Pirani takes us into the factories of Moscow to understand relations among activists, workers, bureaucrats, and a multiplicity of revolutionary parties."
Wendy Goldman
Carnegie Mellon University
About the Author
Simon Pirani studied Russian at the University of London and wrote a doctoral dissertation at the University of Essex. He writes about the economy and politics of the former Soviet Union as a journalist. He is currently a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, and is working on book projects on the post-Soviet period.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Workers and commissars
By Ashtar Command
Simon Pirani's "The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24" is a super-scholarly book in which every sentence seem to contain at least a dozen facts. Unless you are a near-scholarly expert on the course of the Bolshevik revolution, you will find this a difficult read! Even I, who fancy myself to be some kind of lay expert on these matters, was frequently bewildered...
While Pirani's book is nominally about all-Russian developments, he concentrates mostly on the relationship between workers and Bolsheviks in Moscow. I admit that he is very thorough, and almost breaks down the events on a plant-by-plant basis. One of his main sources are reports from the secret police (the Cheka or the GPU), which apparently had informers pretty much everywhere! Pirani details the situation in the Soviet capital from the end of the Civil War (1920) to the so-called Lenin enrolment (1924), when the future Stalinist apparatus was more or less in place.
The author is a revolutionary democratic socialist who believes that the degeneration and bureaucratization of the Soviet state started already under Lenin and Trotsky. This is (of course) a contentious position among those Marxists who regard Lenin's and Trotsky's tenure as substantially better than the later reign of Stalin. Pirani's book is therefore to a large extent an "in house" polemic with competing Marxists or fellow travellers. As a slightly jaded Menshevik, I admit that I tend to sympathize with the author's agenda, as far as it goes...
Thus, Pirani rejects the (absurd) claim that the working class had more or less disappeared during the Civil War. In reality, it was alive and kicking, and often took strike action against the Bolshevik regime. Nor is it true that the resistance was purely economic in character. Strikes and other protests with clearly political objectives also took place, including a march in Moscow in solidarity with the Kronstadt rebellion. In elections to the soviets, factory committees and labour union committees, Bolshevik candidates were often defeated by non-Bolsheviks of various stripes. There were several "workerist" opposition groups within the Moscow Bolshevik Party itself.
Opposition to the Bolshevik regime came from many different quarters, and the dissidents often had widely divergent objectives. Should food rations be equalized, or should some workers receive more than others? Should workers enjoy privileges at the expense of the peasants? What was the solution to the bureaucratization of the Party and its increasing monopoly on power: more soviet democracy, a constituent assembly, or what? Pirani is particularly interested in the "workerist" currents, who often demanded more economic equality and/or more working-class privileges at the expense of both peasants and white collars, while simultaneously also calling for extensive soviet democracy. This could be seen as an attempt to turn the clock back to the initial, more idealist phase of the Russian revolution. Within the Bolshevik party, the Democratic Centralists, the Workers Opposition and various local groups voiced this "workerist" criticism. Outside the party, there was a "non-party" current expressing the same doubts about the course of the revolution. I think it's obvious that the author's sympathies lay with these groups. Of course, the usual opposition parties (Mensheviks, SRs and anarchists) were also active - frankly, I was surprised to learn that some of these managed to hold on until 1923.
Trotsky's opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy left a lot to be desired. After all, Trotsky had initially supported the ban on factions decided upon at the tenth party congress in 1921. He did make his move in 1923, but this first version of the Left Opposition soon made its peace with the ruling Triumvirate of Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin. Trotsky even demanded a GPU clamp down on dissident Bolsheviks who had left the party (the Workers Group and Workers Truth)!
Pirani argues that the Bolsheviks eventually managed to create a kind of "social contract" with the working class: in return for a higher standard of living, the working class was expected to become quiescent, and simply carry out orders from above. Instead of participatory democracy, the Communist Party carried out compulsory "mass mobilizations", during which workers were supposed to rubber stamp model resolutions at mass meetings. One such mass mobilization took place during the trial of the SRs in 1922, when 200,000 workers marched through the streets of Moscow, demanding the death penalty for the defendants (!). Another aspect of the social contract was the Lenin enrolment (or Lenin levy), a mass recruitment campaign to the Bolshevik party in 1924. Anti-Stalinist Marxists usually claim that the levy swamped the party with "petty bourgeois" or middle class elements, but according to Pirani, most who joined during the levy were workers. Of course, these stout sons of the proletariat were quickly promoted to the party bureaucracy, and were expected to carry out the increasingly "Stalinist" line. It seems most did.
Since Pirani is still some kind of Marxist, and still supports the October revolution as such, he doesn't want to put all the blame for the retreat of the revolution on Lenin, Trotsky or the Bolshevik party. In fact, he attacks Richard Pipes and other "Cold War" historians for their claim that the Bolshevik dictatorship was an inevitable product of Lenin's ideology, an ideology delineated long before the revolution. Rather, Pirani believes that the Bolsheviks changed their ideological colours at several points, and that the degeneration was a consequence of the adverse situation the revolution found itself in. Pirani regards Lenin's most "democratic" work, "State and revolution", as a genuine expression of Bolshevik politics at the time. (I don't. I think it's obvious that Vladimir Illich was lying through his teeth!) Interestingly, Pirani doesn't seem to think that the degeneration could have been stopped. However, he never draws any political conclusions from this. If the Russian revolution was doomed to degenerate from, say, 1920, what's the point of opposing the Triumvirate, the Lenin enrolment or Stalin? Why not join in and make the best of a bad job? The only other alternative would be to emigrate, as some opposition leaders indeed did, or perhaps hibernate...
As already indicated, "The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24" is a rather specialized scholarly work, which demands a lot of prior knowledge from the reader. I don't recommend it to causal or general readers. However, the few remaining intellectual Trotskyists who still extol the virtues of the Bolshevik leadership until 1924, should perhaps read this work.
And yes, I'm familiar with the colourful background of the author... ;-)
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
An Academic's Pleasure
By Shaun May
Fully researched to the necessary and somewhat 'bookwormish' degree of conformity to the standards of the contemplative and rationalistic, libertarian university academic. We must hope that the disturbed dust of the archive has not affected Mr Pirani's respiratory health. In fact, a veritable goldmine for data and 'the empirical' on the Russian Revolution. However, the discourse lacks a unifying and cohesive theoretical depth and integrity. What did Hegel say about the need to "firmly hold onto the universal whilst sinking into the detail of the particular"? Mr Pirani has obviously got carried away and drowned himself in an endless ocean of particularity by actually "letting go of the anchoring universal". An academic's pleasure but absolutely useless for the 'practical-critical' tasks we are facing today as the structural crisis of the global capitalist system deepens and intensifies. I am sure that a more 'revolutionary-critical' study by another would send this text into a well-earned retirement onto the unfrequented dusty back shelves of the university library. Are not Marx's 'Theses on Feuerbach' all about not being 'casual with history' and not locating the world "in the form of the object" but rather as "sensuous human activity, as subject"? Unfortunately - for Mr Pirani's most diligent and persevering readership - this most essential and vital 'element' of Marx has obviously eluded him in his method of approach to the history of the Russian Revolution. Rather like 'ein zeitweiliger Nachdenken (Sinnen) in der Nacht'. If we study the way Marx approached the historical events of his time - the revolutions of 1848-50, the coup d'etat of Louis Bonaparte and the Paris Commune 20 years later - this 'revolutionary critical approach' (theoretically distilled and presented in outline in the incredibly concrete and rich 'Theses on Feuerbach') never leaves him. Mr Pirani's 'heroic' yet empiricistic 'encapsulated account' arising out of his archival research stands as the complete opposite of Marx's approach to the events of his time.
Mr Pirani was, at one time, the appointed section head of Gerry Healy's 'Young Socialists' which was the youth section of probably the most sectarian, paranoid, celebrity-frequented, left-wing grouplet in the 1970s and 80s, the Workers Revolutionary Party. Many readers will know that this group 'self-destructed' - under the impact of events in the course of the Miners' strike in 1984-85 - as a result of its endemic and endogenous corruption. Its dissolution was sparked by the revelation that the late, "great" leader of this "Trotskyist" version of a 'masonic lodge', Gerry Healy, was a serial sexual abuser of young female members. Over 20 in number were discovered to have been subjected to this repulsive, loathsome and thoroughly dehumanising and anti-socialist aspect of the 'party regime'. However, long before this discovery, Healy's physically and emotionally abusive nature was widely known by those in leadership inside and outside this outfit. Some have written that others "knew all about this (sexual abuse) anyway, for years and years and years" but these others remained 'stumm' in order to guard their own sectarian political ambitions. It took the Miners' strike to really brings matters to a head. The approach of this leadership was that of a highly-distorted, self-important "subjectivism" which kept all concerned endlessly and manically running around because the "revolution was just around the corner"; sometimes up to 18 hours per day on a continuous basis. Mr Pirani has moved from this now discredited role to a salaried position in academia. His method of approach to historical and political questions has also migrated from the aforesaid subjectivism which is common in the sect politics of the left to that which is an unsurprising, occupational necessity for all academics which is to locate the world "in the form of the object". All academics proceed in their endeavours in this way, largely for professional reasons. To do otherwise would risk the possibility of unemployment. In going from the pseudo-psychotic mania of the WRP to the sedate and contemplative environment of academia, it seems that Mr Pirani has not stopped to ponder Marx's early works in the 1840s ( Theses on Feuerbach, Holy Family, German Ideology). His method of approach has moved from being characterised by the bizarrely self-important towards a lifeless, dry, lessonless archivalism which people may admire for effort but which holds no fundamental lessons as to how we organise today to put an end to the rule of capital, national state powers and global agencies. This new method of approach is undoubtedly reflected in, and animates, Mr Pirani's book on the Russian Revolution. Mr Pirani's manuscript was published by Routledge. The fact that he presented his text to - and that it was subsequently published by - this somewhat reputable dealer in profusely-manufactured academic material (rather than being presented for consideration to one of the many independent, radical publishers available) speaks louder than any voluminous revolutionary critique could possibly do.
In summary, Mr Pirani's "objective" account locates the events of the Russian Revolution "in the form of the object". This, of course, contrasts with Marx's revolutionary-critical approach to the events of his day. Unless a writer is producing solely for academic consumption, then he needs to bear this in mind. Otherwise he does nobody (except the publisher if the sale of the book serves to "augment") any favours as to the future direction of the class movement of the proletariat.
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