The Lost Promise of the Soviets

or: How the Russian Revolution Was Lost to the Bolsheviks

The Lost Promise of the Soviets

For the first fifteen years or so of my political life, authoritarian socialists were a joke in the US. We didn’t even bother to deride them as “tankies” because they weren’t influential enough to denigrate. The International Socialist Organization and its like were just the people with identical signs who showed up to protests to try and fail to take them over, who stood on the street corner trying and failing to sell newspapers for a dollar while all the rest of us distributed our literature for free. 

The protest movement in the US in the first decade of the 21st century was not dominated by a single ideological force. Of course my perspective is skewed by my own position, but in general I saw two primary positions: there were the catch-all “radicals,” who were progressives and Leftists without a specific commitment to an ideological label; and there were anarchists. A sort of spectrum existed between the two, and anarchism was the pole which people would locate themselves in relation to.

This made a certain amount of sense—anarchistic organizational structures are inherently pluralistic. When a large number of people from a large number of political and cultural backgrounds gather to try to accomplish something together (such as shutting down neoliberal trade summits, or taking mass direct action to interfere with the US war machine), they need to organize in ways in which no group is dominant and in which no group can tell the others what to do. Groups need to coordinate together, figuring out how their individual strategies and goals can support and be supported by other groups. 

This is where anarchist and anarchistic organizing models shine: respecting political pluralism and a diversity of tactical, strategic, ideological, and moral frameworks.

This is, best as I can tell, the reason we formed the sort of ideological pole of the movement. It didn’t hurt that we did an awful lot of the behind-the-scenes organizing, though we rarely took credit for that.

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In 1905, some folks in Russia threw a revolution. They didn’t know they were throwing a revolution, most of them. Most of them thought they were, well, revolting. General strikes swept across the Russian Empire. People were tired of starving in dirt-floored houses in the countryside or living four families to an apartment in the cities. They were tired of having no say in their lives, at home, at work, or at war. They were tired of decades of “Russification,” apartheid policies that sought to destroy ethnic diversity in what was undoubtedly the largest and was possibly the most ethnically (and religiously) diverse country on the planet. 

There was a part of the country called “the Pale of Settlement,” the only area where Jews were allowed to live, where they still faced incredible ethnic and religious oppression. “Pale” is an archaic term for a fenced area. Interestingly, and besides the point, the phrase “beyond the pale” doesn’t come from “outside the Pale of Settlement like in Russia.” There was another “the Pale” much closer to England and therefore the English language, an area around Dublin in the early days of the British colonization of Ireland. This “Pale” was the area that was reasonably safe from the barbaric Irish hordes in the hills. “Beyond the Pale” meant outside this safe, colonized area. Something to think about next time someone describes radical politics as beyond the pale.

But Russia.

The Pale of Settlement was one of the most revolutionary areas of the country. It ran through what’s now Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and some other places. Jewish folks got together into an endless series of Leftist organizations at the end of the 19th century and started seriously confronting the power of the Tsar. They didn’t do this alone, of course, but their contributions are worth highlighting.

Of note to this story, Jewish Leftists formed a core part of the anarchist movement in Russia. Because anarchism is and has always been an international project, the way anarchism reached these particular peasants and workers is interesting: a great deal of anarchist ideas were developed by Russian theorists in the 19th century, who’d often studied and worked with indigenous Siberian groups to see how cultures of mutual aid and solidarity can function without state authority. Those ideas spread to Western Europe to mingle with the anarchism being developed there, especially finding root among ethnic immigrant enclaves. Yiddish-speaking anarchists in London, for example, put out a lot of radical newspapers, which were then smuggled back to… the Pale of Settlement, where they found fertile soil among the working class and the peasantry.

A group called Black Banner rose up in Bialystok, a city in what’s now Poland. They offered a really simple solution to the problem of oppression, the kind of simple solution that Russia was likely famous for: oppressors have a particularly hard time oppressing you if they are dead. Anarchists formed into “combat organizations,” each autonomous, but each responsible to its community and each participating in a larger coordinating structure.

Those combat organizations went out and did what they consciously referred to as terrorism: they robbed the rich, they killed strike-breaking bosses. They built bombs and gathered guns. They also held endless meetings, often in graveyards. They discussed strategy and goals at these meetings, sure, but also theory and culture. They believed that the working class themselves would lead the revolution, rather than a middle-class vanguard. They were “anti-intellectual,” but that word didn’t mean to them what it might mean to us now: they prioritized action over theory, and they were opposed to the siloing off of knowledge by aristocratic institutions like the academy, so they discussed and taught amongst themselves. Spreading political education seemed to have taken up as much of their time as anything else.

Black Banner didn’t start the 1905 revolution. That revolution was fundamentally spontaneous, growing out of general resentment of poverty and autocracy. None of the various Leftist ideologies started (or successfully took charge) of the revolution. Not the SRs, (the “Socialist Revolutionaries”) who were a homegrown Russian Leftist ideology that focused on improving the conditions of the rural peasantry. Not the Social Democrats, who were the Marxists. And not the anarchists.

Black Banner and its combat organizations did, however, enthusiastically participate. Striking workers could come to one of the combat organizations and say “our boss is repressing our strike violently” and suddenly that boss might have a few extra holes in his body. As the group spread, “like mushrooms after the rain” as one participant later put it, it created a horizontal organizational and coordinating structure.

During the 1905 revolution, an awful lot of the right wing decided to blame the whole uprising on “the Jews” as a ethnic group, and pogroms spread. According to one participant in Black Banner, there was one place at least that was safe from the pogroms: the anarchist neighborhood in Bialystock. Right wing thugs, the police, and even the army was afraid to go there. Those anarchists (many but not all of them Jewish) had entire bomb-making factories and it wasn’t a good place for antisemites.

Meanwhile during the revolution, across Russia, a new idea spread, an idea whose name has been utterly mangled by history. The soviet. A soviet is a coordinating body organized from the bottom up. The first one was in the city of Ivanovna: a strike committee at a textile strike turned into an elected body of all the workers in town. Soon enough, soviets formed in 60 different cities and towns. These councils were attended by delegates elected from various factories and workplaces, and those delegates were subject to immediate recall if they didn’t do what they’d been mandated to do.

This, people realized, was the structure of a new society, a better society. Horizontal decisionmaking bodies that made people more free, allowed people more control over their lives both at home and at work. These soviets could coordinate. They could form, you know, a union of soviets. If only they had the power. This model was not, as I understand it, developed by this or that of the revolutionary ideologies at the time, but instead grew out of the grassroots worker’s movement itself. It doesn’t, however, contradict in any meaningful way with anarchism. It’s a stateless socialism.

The revolution of 1905 failed, by and large. The Tsar promised he’d switch to a constitutional monarchy and the strikes receded. Only the hardened revolutionaries kept going–the SRs, the Marxists, and the anarchists all kept trying for awhile, stepping up their “expropriations” (robbing the rich) and assassinations. Repression rose in response, and soon most of the Leftists were dead, in prison, or in exile.

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Western democracy, famously, stops at the door to your workplace. Almost every place of business is a little fiefdom, where all you can hope for is a “good boss,” like a medieval peasant hoping for a “good king.” 

For most of the twentieth century in the west, communism has been seen as practically synonymous with tyranny. Considering what winds up happening to the Russian revolution (spoiler: the Bolsheviks seize power from the rest of the Leftists and Lenin fulfills his explicitly stated promise to use the soviets to centralize authority and then dissolve any semblance of worker control), it's understandable that the word “communism” leaves such a bad taste in so many mouths.

The irony is that the soviet project, the actual soviet project, came incredibly close to offering people more liberty, more dignity, more agency, and more beauty than anything capitalism has ever considered. The soviets offered people control over their own lives, they offered people a say in larger society. They offered to break chains. Instead, famously, they were used to forge new ones.

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Between 1905 and 1917, Russia didn’t get much more stable and it certainly didn’t become any better of a place to live for most people. The Tsar threw Russia headlong into World War One. They had the largest army in the world, five million people, mostly conscripted from the peasant class. They had more men than they had rifles. Russian military strategy has seemingly never changed: throw peasants into the meat grinder, poorly equipped and poorly trained, and hope for the best.

Then one cold morning, March 8, 1917 (They used a different calendar at the time, so this to them is the “February Revolution”), women led a strike. It was international women’s day, a new holiday formed by socialist feminists. This strike snowballed and in eight days, the Russian people ended a 300 year dynasty. Only 1300 people died. Which is too many people to die, most of the time, but it’s really just not very many people to die when you’re talking about a revolution in the largest country on the planet.

There was suddenly a power vacuum, and an uneasy alliance between the provisional government and the soviets formed to fill it. The provisional government was the remnants of the Duma, which was the representative electoral body that didn’t really have any power under the Tsar. The provisional government was, at first, mostly filled with liberals—people who wanted a republic but primarily represented the interests of the middle class and capitalism. The soviets, meanwhile, were filled with socialists of all stripes.

The provisional government wanted to stay in World War One while the soviets generally wanted to get out. The provisional government controlled more of the institutions and symbols of power, while the soviets had the practical power, since they represented the workers, the peasants, and the soldiers. The provisional government quickly realized it was in trouble so it recruited socialists as fast as it could, and did so successfully. Soon, this new government was putting down Leftist uprisings itself.

Meanwhile, this guy named Vladimir Lenin, he was in exile in Switzerland. He was a leader of the Bolsheviks, the more radical Marxists (but a relatively minor party overall. Not tiny, but not nearly so large or as influential as the SRs). The German Empire desperately wanted Russia to pull out of World War One, so they cut a deal with Lenin: they’d send him back to Russia with a bunch of money if he could overthrow the provisional government and get Russia out of the war.

Which is more less exactly what happened.

The February revolution was a spontaneous uprising by the working class and the peasantry, but it left an uneasy alliance in charge, trying to share power. The more radical folks, including anarchists and bolsheviks and some SRs, wanted what was best summed up in the simple slogan: “all power to the soviets.”

The various groups wanted this for different reasons, of course. Lenin had written back in 1907 that the Bolsheviks could use the soviets for “the purpose of developing the Social-Democratic movement” but that they’d soon be “superfluous.” Lenin was willing to use any lever that might offer him power.

The rest of the socialists, including probably most of the Bolshevik rank-and-file, wanted all power to the soviets because they wanted, well, communism. They wanted a horizontal, stateless society in which people controlled their own workplaces and lives but coordinated together to meet the needs of the larger society.

It’s an understandable thing to want.

It’s what I want.

In November, 1917 (the October Revolution, again because of calendar differences), the various Leftist factions worked together to dissolve the Provisional Government through force of arms. This was and wasn’t a coup. This was the first step towards investing all power into the soviets. 

But everyone had been promised elections for a “constituent assembly,” basically a version of the provisional government that would be actually elected, in comparison to the provisional government. At first, the Bolsheviks were all about this. They had no specific moral investment in the soviets, only in power. Whatever gave them access to power was worthwhile. 60% of the eligible voters went out and voted, 40 million ballots. The SRs swept the election, with the Bolsheviks winning scarcely a quarter of the seats.

The constituent assembly was, of course, a fundamentally less-democratic form of government than the soviets: it was representational democracy of the sort we know in the west. (Well, it wasn’t a two-party system like we have in the US, but it was comparable to the republics in Europe). The soviets, in comparison, were composed of direct, recallable delegates that were each given a specific mandate by the people they represented.

The constituent assembly only met for a total of 13 hours before the pro-soviet forces (most notably Bolsheviks and anarchists) forcibly disbanded it. The Bolsheviks did it because they weren’t in charge of it. The anarchists did it because they supported the already-existing socialistic decisionmaking bodies: the soviets.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks took control of the soviets, investing new power into the executive council and turning the whole thing into a top-down organization and a single-party system. Within months, they turned on their anarchist allies and started raiding anarchist spaces, killing hundreds in the process. Anarchists and Bolsheviks soon fought alongside one another against the reactionary White Armies, but as soon as those armies were defeated, the anarchists were killed.

By January 1919, Lenin was openly opposed to workers control, which he derided as “petit-bourgeois” and an “anarcho-syndicalist deviation.” He said that the revolution required “precisely in the interests of socialism that the masses unquestionably obey the single will of the leaders of the labor process.”

There was never any meaningful soviet power in what became the Soviet Union. Nor was there anything that can be reasonably understood as socialism or communism. The early soviets, for example, wanted to “socialize” land: take it out of the hand of rich landowners and disperse it to peasant collectives. Bolshevism instead nationalized land, and the peasants worked as wage laborers with the state as their boss. This system is generally referred to as “state capitalism.” That’s what Lenin called it, and who am I to disagree with the author of the USSR.

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Ever since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, I’ve seen a rise in authoritarian communist organizing on the Left in the US. I used to say that this was happening because people wanted easy answers. When you become an anarchist, no one tells you what to do. There’s no specific blueprint for how to have a revolution. It’s a project we are all collectively determining together. If you join an authoritarian organization, you can just follow your leaders and trust they’ll do what’s right. They’ll set you up on a corner with some newspapers to sell and they’ll explain the precise means by which socialism will inevitably triumph. All you have to do is believe them.

In terms of “what we should do,” easy answers are an illusion. Marx promised that his socialist method was scientific. If that’s the case, then the hypothesis put forward by Lenin—that seizing state power and creating a state capitalist system will eventually lead to worker’s control—has been disproven time and time again throughout the 20th century. It’s time for new hypotheses.

Except… I’m not sure those hypotheses really need to be new. There’s a different hypothesis that emerged during the Russian revolution, coming up organically from the workers themselves. It’s also, interestingly, an easier answer than those put forward by Marxist revolutionaries. The answer to how to form a society of equality and freedom, a society built on worker’s control over their own lives and workplaces, might just be that we cut right to the chase and, you know, build a society based on worker’s control over their own lives and workplaces. Like what the soviets were designed to do.

To be clear, I honestly doubt that the word “soviet” is worth holding onto, and I have no personal interest in bringing back the slogan “all power to the soviets” or trying to reclaim the hammer and sickle. The idea behind the soviets, however, is direct and clear.

The largest anarchist formation during the Russian revolution and civil war was found in anarchist Ukraine, where seven million people lived for years in a bottom-up structure, with various assemblies coordinating with one another but maintaining their own regional autonomy. This structure was designed explicitly by anarchists and along anarchist lines, but the system itself didn’t call itself anarchist. It remained politically pluralistic–even the Bolsheviks, who were trying to seize power, were allowed freedom of speech in anarchist Ukraine. 

The Ukrainian anarchists referred to their goals like this:

The toilers [a word used to mean both the rural peasants and the industrial workers]  themselves must freely choose their soviets, which will carry out the will and desires of the toilers–that is, administrative soviets, not state soviets. The land, factories, mills, mines, railways and other popular riches must belong to the toilers who work in them, that is, they must be socialized. 

As for how they’d do it:

An uncompromising revolution and a direct struggle against all arbitrariness, lies, and oppression, whatever their source; a struggle to the death, a struggle for free speech and for the righteous cause, a struggle with weapons in hand. Only through the abolition of all rulers, through the destruction of the whole foundation of their lies, in state as well as political and economic affairs, only through the destruction of the state by means of a social revolution can we attain a genuine worker-peasant soviet order and arrive at socialism.

This project successfully repelled every attempt to shut it down for years, stopping the White Army in its tracks. It came to an end only when its former allies, the Red Army, invaded and forcibly annexed the area.

There are modern examples of people working on projects that look something like the promise of the soviets, and the largest of those in scale don’t call themselves anarchist. The democratic confederalists of northeastern Syria are experimenting with bottom-up democracy and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico are doing something similar.

It’s probable that we have far more to learn from them, our living peers, than we do from anarchists who died before our grandparents were born. But I don’t see it as an either-or, and the more I read history, the more I see its echoes today, and the more clear and valuable its lessons appear.

The one lesson I see over and over again is that those who seek power ought not have it. We must harden ourselves and our systems against those who want authoritarian control, whatever excuses they offer for why they should be trusted with power.

The goal, ever and always, is that we control ourselves, that we work with one another as equals. I’ll call that project anarchism and fly a black banner.

As for what you call your version of it, that’s not my business.