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Did the Russian Revolution Go Wrong? Brian Pearce, with Commentary by Terry Brotherstone

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Did the Russian Revolution Go Wrong? Brian Pearce, with Commentary by Terry Brotherstone 12 | VARIANT 36 | WINTER 2009 When and why did the Russian Revolution go wrong? Brian Pearce, with commentary by Terry Brotherstone Stalin’s Russia was being run according to socialist when Lenin was still alive and active. He rightly The Russian Revolution in Retreat 1920-1924: principles. He had often, in what he wrote, hinted at claims that his book is “the first with a focus on the Soviet workers and the new Communist elite things that he knew sat ill with that picture, but had working-class politics and the dynamics of workers’ Simon Pirani, Routledge (London) 2008 submitted to Party censorship. relationship with the Party, in the aftermath of the ISBN: 978-0-415-43703-5 When the CPGB began, after initial expressions civil war”11 He has done an immense amount of no. 45 in Routledge’s series of concern, to put back in place its more or less research in trade-union records, minutes of factory of Russian and European studies. uncritical support for the Soviet Union and its committee meetings, and Party and Secret Police pragmatic rewritings of ‘Communist’ history, Pearce archives for Moscow, both city and region, resulting In November 2008, Brian Pearce died, aged 93, at decided that he had already, as he put it, “swallowed in a wealth of examples of how, in detail on the his north London home.1 This won’t mean much too many toads”. Not only would he swallow no more: ground, the great change proceeded. to most Variant readers. But Pearce’s life – largely as someone trained in historical method and honest It shows how, “between the civil war and unsung beyond a substantial circle of friends, dealing with evidence, he would confront the past as the mid-1920s the Party was transformed … to intellectual and political contacts, and aficionados an essential part of rethinking communist politics for an administrative machine for implementing 8 12 of the art of scholarly translation2 – deserves to be the future. decisions taken at the top.” This process was studied by everyone who thinks the lessons of the For many years it seemed a thankless task, accepted by the working class on the basis of a political tragedies of the 20th century must inform leading down several cul-de-sacs. Pearce was with ‘social contract’: better living standards for the the making of the 21st. One of Pearce’s last articles Gerry Healy’s Trotskyist group when it became the masses in exchange for increased labour discipline was a review for Variant of Simon Pirani’s heroically Socialist Labour League in 1959 but soon left, though and productivity and surrender of political researched The Russian Revolution in Retreat 1920- his essays on British Communist history remained power. To Pirani this was a disaster, a negation 1924. The subject was of close personal interest to of great value and he continued to do important of the revolution’s purpose: he argues that 9 the reviewer as he reflected on his own life and the translation work. Then, in 1985, amidst lurid sexual “the movement towards socialism must involve history he had lived through. The review follows, but scandal surrounding its leader and the exposure of participatory democratic forms that transcend the 13 first some context. political bankruptcy during the great miners’ strike, state.” Born in 1915, Pearce’s life coincided with, and came the shattering of what was by then Healy’s The degeneration process is here presented, outlasted the long working-out of, the Russian Workers Revolutionary Party. A few years later, the implicitly, as something that was not inevitable, Revolution of October 1917 – for many the defining world context changed with, in 1989-91, what is that could have been checked had the will existed political event of the 20th century. He joined the lazily and misleadingly described as the ‘collapse among those who benefited from it. But is that the Communist Party of Great Britain as a London of communism’ – more accurately the end of the whole story? Stimulated by Pirani’s splendid book, history student in the mid-1930s. He considered Stalinist and post-Stalin bureaucratic system. All this I want to offer some thoughts on what has to be fighting with the International Brigades in Spain allowed Pearce and others to renew relationships cut said to complement the account it gives. and later felt guilty about not having gone.3 After off by Healy’s determined sectarianism and inability The first point concerns the failure of the war service that took him to the working-class north to think (or allow thought) beyond the paradigm of Bolsheviks, before they came to power, to of England, Northern Ireland and the Far East,4 he 1917 and its aftermath. Pearce followed with interest appreciate what is involved in administration was for some years an important member of the now- and played some part in the rethinking that began. both in politics and in industry. Lenin’s treatment famous Communist Party Historians’ Group.5 After a This is the context of his review of Simon Pirani’s of the subject in his State and Revolution, shortly short post-war spell in the civil service, he became a pioneering book – the first fully to exploit the Russian before the 1917 revolutions, is shockingly casual. professional Communist – first on the Daily Worker, archives to access the mentality of workers in the (Even a short experience of responsibility for then with the Anglo-Soviet Friendship Society,6 then immediate aftermath of the Revolution. I asked Brian the economy taught him the hard truth of the as a teacher of English in the Soviet and Eastern to write it after a discussion about another book, by matter, as he showed, soon after October, in his European embassies in London. a comrade from the CPGB, the 1956 split and the The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, Pearce was one of those who left the CPGB in the early SLL; Cliff Slaughter. Pearce had appreciated with its emphasis on the necessity of one-man mid-1950s, thinking that the revelations in Soviet Slaughter’s Not Without a Storm: towards a management in the factories). ‘Bureaucracy’ is a Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret communist manifesto for the age of globalisation, disease of administration. Its appearance does not speech’ to the 1956 20th Communist Party of the particularly its last chapter – ‘The twentieth century: mean that administration itself should (or can) be 10 Soviet Union congress, lifting a corner of the veil a hypothesis’ – but had not discussed it directly with dispensed with. Such work is not within everyone’s over Stalin’s crimes, and the ruthless crushing of the author. I set up a meeting, one purpose of which competence. Such work is not within everyone’s the Hungarian Revolution by the Red Army in the was to prompt Pearce to expand the end of his review competence. Pirani quotes a worker’s request autumn, marked – at least so far as its contribution of Pirani’s book. Alas, he died too soon. The review not to be put in charge of an executive body to human progress was concerned – the end of the appears here as written. because “I, like many comrades, came directly road for official ‘Communism’. He had joined the from the factory. We have no education.” The state Party when the euphoria over the Soviet Union When the Soviet Union collapsed and was apparatus was “becoming more complex,” so that expressed in the 1920s by the American journalist, succeeded by a reign of ‘gangster capitalism’, “a definite level of knowledge is needed to work 14 Lincoln Steffens – “I have seen the future and many in the West looked back on it in sadness on it”. it works” – was still current; and many young and disappointment. But some had feared for it That the Communists who took on the task of intellectuals, appalled at the waste and human well before that downfall. A revolution, which had running the state and the economy exploited their misery which capitalism offered, saw Communism started out under slogans of freedom and equality, positions is clear and thoroughly documented as the only alternative to mass unemployment and promising a new and more just social order, had, as in The Russian Revolution in Retreat. But a fascist dictatorship. they saw it, already degenerated into a regime of certain degree of inequality, of privilege for Pearce’s particular political contribution after privilege and tyranny. those who bore those responsibilities was, surely, 1956 – and the main reason why reflection on his Why? When and how did things begin to ‘go inevitable. During the civil war that followed the life matters today – was to insist on the importance wrong’ in Bolshevik Russia? For answering that Revolution, Trotsky wrote an article headlined of coming to terms with the history of Communism. question there were two main schools of thought. ‘More Equality!’, in which he criticised excessive Many who left the CPGB (those who did not renounce One saw the fatal turning point as coming as late differences in conditions between officers and socialism altogether) made careers in the Labour as 1929, when Stalin, having crushed both Left and men in the Red Army. But, in that same article, Party or turned to the peace movement under the Right Oppositions, became the country’s master. he justified a limited measure of privilege for the banner of ‘socialist humanism’, even the historians The other placed the moment in 1924, when Lenin officers if they were to be able to do their jobs amongst them seeking to put their own immediate died; or shortly before when he fell ill.
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