RUSSIANthe COUNTERREVOLUTION ALL POWER TO SOVIETS, AND NOT PARTIES SOVIETS, AND NOT A CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY, ARE THE LABORER’S STRONGHOLD DOWN WITH THE COUNTERREVOLUTION OF THE LEFT AND THE RIGHT! Lenin said, “Communism is Soviet power plus electrifcation,” but the people have become convinced that Bolshevist Communism is commissarocracy plus executions. -Slogans printed in Kronstadt Izvestia, the daily newspaper of the Kronstadt uprising, in March 1921. Soviets were originally grassroots popular assemblies before every word came to signify its own opposite in the so-called Soviet Union. N©! 2018 CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective CrimethInc. is a think tank producing anarchist analysis—a banner for anonymous collective action— This book is dedicated to all who gave an international network of aspiring revolutionaries. their lives fghting against capitalism and This text is informed by decades of participation in social struggles as well as historical research about the state for a truly free society. our predecessors. Printed and distributed by Active Distribution activedistribution.org ISBN: 978-1-909798-54-0 The Russian Counterrevolution Introduction 9 Fanya Baron 109 Aron Baron 111 The Bolshevik Counterrevolution 23 The Kronstadt Rebels 114 Alexander Berkman 124 A Predictable Disaster 23 Emma Goldman 126 Lenin: Butcher of the Working Class 28 Errico Malatesta 128 Timeline: A Revolution Derailed 33 Mollie Steimer 130 The USSR: Force for Global 60 Victor Serge 136 Counterrevolution, Accomplice of Fascism Peter Arshinov 139 The Relevance of the Communist 74 Fedor Mochanovsky 141 Counterrevolution Voline 144 Restless Specters of the Anarchist Max Nettlau 148 Dead 82 Luigi Camillo Berneri 153 In Conclusion 157 Mikhail Bakunin 83 Leon Trotsky 87 Bibliography 158 Anatoli Zhelezniakov 89 Colophon 164 Golos Truda, The Voice of Labor 93 Peter Kropotkin 97 Nestor Makhno 100 Lev Chernyi 107 INTRODUCTION Since the mid-19th century, anarchists have maintained that the key to liberation is not to seize the state but to abolish it. From Paris to St. Petersburg, from Barcelona to Beijing, one generation of revolutionaries after another has had to learn this lesson the hard way. Shuffing politicians in and out of power changes noth- ing. What matters are the instruments of rule— the police, the military, the courts, the prison system, the bureaucracy. Whether it is a king, a dictator, or a Congress that directs these instruments, the experience on the receiving end remains roughly the same. This explains why the outcome of the Egyptian revolution of 2011-2013 was not all that different from the outcome of the Russian Revolution of 1917-1921 or the French Rev- olution of 1848-1851. In each case, as soon as the people who made the revolution stopped attempting to carry out social change directly and shifted to investing their hopes in politi- cal representatives, power consolidated in the 10 11 hands of a new autocracy. Whether the new used brutal force to push through a revolu- tyrants hailed from the military, the aristoc- tionary agenda, but that it used brutal force racy, or the underclass, whether they prom- to crush it. ised to restore order or to incarnate the power It’s not particularly popular to acknowl- of the proletariat, the end result was roughly edge any of this today, when the fag of the the same. Soviet Union has become a dim, receding Government itself is a class relation. You screen onto which people can project what- can’t abolish class society without abolishing ever they wish. A generation that grew up the asymmetry between ruler and ruled. The after the fall of the Soviet Union has renewed frst condition for any government is that it the pipe dream that the state could solve all our must achieve a monopoly on coercive force. problems if the right people were in charge. In struggling to achieve this monopoly, fascist Apologists for Lenin and Stalin make exactly despotisms, communist dictatorships, and lib- the same excuses for them that we hear from eral democracies come to resemble each other. the proponents of capitalism, pointing to the And in order to achieve it, even the most ways consumers beneftted under their reign ostensibly radical party must ultimately col- or arguing that the millions they exploited, lude with other power players. This explains imprisoned, and killed had it coming. why the Bolsheviks employed tsarist offcers In any case, a return to 20th century state and counterinsurgency methods, why they socialism is impossible. As the old Eastern repeatedly took the side of the petite bour- Bloc joke goes, socialism is the painful transi- geoisie against anarchists, frst in Russia and tion between capitalism and capitalism. From later in Spain and elsewhere. History gives this vantage point, we can see that the tempo- the lie to the old alibi that Bolshevik repres- rary ascendancy of socialism in the 20th cen- sion was necessary to abolish capitalism. The tury was not the culmination of world history problem with Bolshevism was not that it foretold by Marx, but a stage in the spread 12 13 It’s not a question free-market capitalism is about to swallow up of replacing one the last islands of social-democratic stability, head of state with like Sweden and France. another, one party The future may hold neoliberal immiser- with another, one ation, nationalist enclaves, totalitarian com- government with another. mand economies, or the anarchist abolition of property itself—or all of those—but it will be increasingly diffcult to preserve the illusion that any government could solve the problems of capitalism for any but a privileged few. Fas- cists and other nationalists are eager to capi- talize on this disillusionment to advance their own brands of exclusive socialism; we should not smooth the way for them by legitimizing the idea that the state could serve working people if only it were properly administered. and development of capitalism. “Real existing Some have argued that we should suspend socialism” served to industrialize post-feudal conficts with proponents of authoritarian economies for the world market; it stabilized communism in order to focus on more imme- restless workforces through this transition diate threats, such as fascism. Yet widespread the same way that the Fordist compromise fear of left totalitarianism has given fascist did in the West. State socialism and Fordism recruiters their chief talking points. In the were both expressions of a temporary truce contest for the hearts and minds of those who between labor and capital that neoliberal glo- have not yet chosen a side, it could only help balization has rendered impossible. Unfettered to distinguish our proposals for social change 14 15 from the ones advanced by Stalinists and side and Stalin on the other. From Chiapas other authoritarians. and Kabylia to Athens and Rojava, all of the Within popular struggles against capital- inspiring movements and uprisings of the past ism, state oppression, and fascism, we should three decades have incorporated elements of grant equal weight to the struggle between the anarchist model. different visions of the future. Not doing so As the crises of our era intensify, more rev- means assuming defeat in advance. Anar- olutions are bound to break out. Anarchism is chists, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, the only proposition for revolutionary change and others learned this the hard way after that has not sullied itself in a sea of blood. It’s 1917. up to us to update it for the new millennium, The good news is that revolutionary move- lest we be condemned to repeat the past. ments don’t have to end the way the Russian Revolution did. There is another way. Rather * * * than seeking state power, we can open up spaces of autonomy, stripping legitimacy from the state and building the capacity to meet our This book brings together two texts pub- needs directly. Instead of dictatorships and lished on the 100-year anniversary of the armies, we can create grassroots networks to October Revolution. defend ourselves against anyone who wants The frst part, “The Bolshevik Counterrev- to wield power over us. Rather than looking olution,” originally appeared in Catalunya,1 to new representatives, we can create hori- where outrage about the Stalinist betrayal zontal networks of cooperation and mutual of the 1936 revolution still simmers. An aid. This is the anarchist alternative, which would have succeeded in Spain in the 1930s 1 It was published at segadores.alscarrers.org as “A cent anys de la contrarevolució Bolxevic: memòria històrica a prop had it not been stomped out by Franco on one de la destrucció de les nostres lluites.” 16 admittedly partisan and cursory overview, it has the virtue of summarizing a vast subject.2 The second part, “Restless Specters of the Anarchist Dead,” is our own collection, though we owe the scholarship to our prede- cessors. We kneel, as the saying goes, on the shoulders of giants. Together, they offer a brief survey of a cen- tury-old catastrophe that is still impacting our struggles today. 2 It leaves off at the opening of the Second World War, when most of the anarchists had been exter- minated. For the rest of the story, we are forced to Revolutionary sailors in Finland. rely on conservatives like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn— himself a twice-decorated war veteran and adherent of Marxism before his stint in the gulags embittered him. To those who celebrate Stalin for his part in defeating Hitler, we answer that the struggle against fascism would surely have gone better if all the an- archists and other anti-fascists Stalin and his cronies killed, incarcerated, or undermined had been able to participate. The fact that fascism was defeated by superpowers rather than by grassroots social move- ments took revolutionary social change off the table for several decades.