Russian Revolution and Anarchy

Best known for the overthrowing the Tsarist monarchy and installing the Soviet Union, the 1917 Russian Revolution encompassed libertarian and authoritarian strands that repeatedly clashed with each other over contrasting strategies and visions. Voline, an Anarchist participant in the revolution, summarizes in his book The Unknown Revolution:

The Bolshevik idea was to build on the ruins of the bourgeois state, a new “Workers' State”...The Anarchist idea is to transform the economic and social bases of society without having recourse to a political state, to a government, or to a dictatorship of any sort.”

The Russian Revolution provides important examples of anti-authoritarian organization, including Petrograd's factory committees, the uprising in Kronstadt, and, most dramatically, the massive Anarchist revolution that predominated among many villages in the Ukraine. Yet, the Bolsheviks' violent repression of these initiatives under party leader Vladimir Lenin cleared the way for the totalitarian rule of Lenin's predecessor Joseph Stalin.

February Revolution and Workers' Control

On February 23 1917, working women went on strike in Petrograd, sparking a general strike in the city. Across Russia, masses of people decided to side with the strikers rather than the Tsarist regime which was already in severe crisis due to its disastrous decision to join the first World War and fight against much more well-equipped armies. Within a week, troops mutinied and the tsar abdicated power. The striking workers in Petrograd formed a soviet, meaning council in Russian.

Soviets quickly formed across Russia, at a pace with which the Bolshevik leadership could barely keep up. Russian workers and peasants had established perhaps six hundred soviets by May, eight hundred by August, and nine hundred by October. By October, workers self-managed the vast majority of Russia's factories. Lenin commented that workers and peasants were “a hundred times further to the left” than his Bolshevik party.

With the tsar gone, the police disbanded and many bosses ran away. Consequently, a situation of dual power arose between February and October, in which a new bourgeois provisional government shared power with a network of workers' organizations that ran much of the day-to-day workings of society. Murray Bookchin summarizes:

“Following the overthrow of the monarchy, a vast array of popular organizations—factory, neighborhood, military, and village committees, unions, and cooperatives—appeared in which workers, soldiers, sailors and peasants created a dazzling new social and economic reality that remade the institutional structure of Russian society. Russia's komitetchina, as this growth was called, which convened politically in local, regional, and all-Russian congresses and conferences, was comparable in degree of self-management only to that of the French revolutionary sections of 1793.”

To some extent, soviets were an important mechanism for workers to exert control over the economy. Workers elected their delegates and had the ability to immediately recall them. Still, the workers' interests were filtered through the interests of a new class of representatives. Tom Wetzel writes, “the soviet assemblies were not where the real decisions were made. The executive made the real decisions in the backrooms. Some decisions were submitted to the assembled delegates for ratification, some were not.”

The other main instrument of worker control was the factory committee, which Wetzel asserts was much directly democratic than the soviets: “The most important decisions were made in general assemblies of the rank and file.” The factory committees' powers varied over time, but according to S. A. Smith, some of them around July or August had begun “to monitor all aspects of production, including orders and finances.”

In Petrograd, factory committees, worker cooperatives, soviets, and trade unions coordinated to purchase and distribute food. The committee at an explosives shop organized 2,500 cheap meals a day, and another committee organized 1,200 dinners a day. Factory committees produced theaterical performances, lectures, and classes. The city's workers established workers' militias that protected neighborhoods and existed uneasily alongside bourgeois “civil militias,” until the provisional government disbanded the workers' militias in July. Workers also established Red Guards to focus specifically on protecting revolutionary gains.

Sometimes Anarchists complained about the authority of the soviets and other vehicles of “worker's control.” In March, when a soviet threatened to fire undisciplined workers, a group of Anarchists responded:

The soviet of workers' deputies of the Pipe works, instead of making concrete proposals and raising questions for discussion by the general meeting, issues orders and threatens us with punishment, including the sack, if we do not carry them out...Formerly, we were slaves of the government and of the bosses, but now there is a new despotic government in the shape of our elected representatives, who, in a touching display of unity with the management, are executing the police task of supervising the conduct and work of the workforce.

October Revolution

On 25 October 1917, the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government. The next day, at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Bolshevik spokesmen asked for the public to “put an end to all strikes on economic and political issues, to resume work and carry it out in a perfectly orderly manner.” Despite their slogan “all power to the soviets,” the Bolsheviks (who renamed themselves the Communists after taking power) aggressively transferred power from the soviets to the state bureaucracy.

Partisans of Lenin often blame the leader's centralizations of power on the urgency of the civil war that began in May 1918. However, the moves toward centralization and repression began well before then. On 1 October 1917, Lenin published Can the Bolsheviks retain State power? which reduced “workers' control” to a mere “accounting of the production and distribution of goods” with actual managerial responsibilities held by “a proletarian state.” On 5 December 1917, the new Communist government established the Supreme Economic Council or Vesenka, which centrally planned the economy and further weakened the soviets and factory committees. Lenin summarized a few weeks later: “we passed from workers' control to the creation of the Supreme Council of National Economy.” Lenin's State and Revolution, published in December, defended authoritarian rule: “We want the socialist revolution with human nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control and managers.”

The Cheka, the Communists' secret police, attacked Anarchist centers in Moscow on 12 April 1918 and then attacked Anarchist centers in other cities. An Anarchist FAQ summarizes:

Democratic soviets, free speech, opposition political parties and groups, self-management in the workplace and on the land -- all were destroyed in the name of "socialism." All this happened, we must stress, before the start of the Civil War in late May, 1918, which most supporters of Leninism blame for the Bolsheviks' authoritarianism. During the civil war, this process accelerated, with the Bolsheviks' systematically repressing opposition from all quarters -- including the strikes and protests of the very class who they claimed was exercising its "dictatorship" while they were in power!

Maurice Brinton concludes in his study of the Bolshevik's attacks on worker self-management, “The events described in this pamphlet show that in relation to industrial policy there is a clear-cut and incontrovertible link between what happened under Lenin and Trotsky and the later practices of Stalinism.”

Kronstadt

In 1921, the sailors, soldiers and workers of Russia's Kronstadt naval fortress proclaimed a libertarian-leaning "third revolution", following the February 1917 revolution that overthrew the Tsar and the October 1917 revolution installed the Soviet Union. After Kronstadt's residents declared support for striking workers in Petrograd and issued a list of revolutionary demands, they suffered a brutal invasion and bombing campaign under the direction of Leon Trotsky, which crushed the grassroots rebellion.

According to Trotsky, the Kronstadt sailors had been "the pride and glory of the Russian Revolution" of 1917. In May 1917, the Kronstadt soviet (workers' council) declared itself the only legitimate government of the fortress, and decisions were made at general assemblies, held almost daily.

By the end of 1917, Kronstadt's residents had become disillusioned by the authoritarianism of the Bolshevik government. Voline summarizes in The Unknown Revolution:

Indeed, the Bolshevik government evidently understood the slogan 'power to the Soviets' in a peculiar way. It applied it in reverse. Instead of giving assistance to the working masses and permitting them to conquer and enlarge their own autonomous activity, it began by taking all 'power' from them and treating them like subjects. It bent the factories to its will and liberated the workers from the right to make their own decisions; it took arbitrary and coercive measures, without even asking the advice of the workers concerned; it ignored the demands emanating from the workers' organisations.

Defying the Bolsheviks' instructions, the people of Kronstadt socialized their dwellings. Each residential building established a House Committee, and these committees confederated into a District Committee. The District Committees confederated into a Borough Committee. In February 1921, Kronstadt secretly sent delegates to Petrograd with the message that "if the workers rise up in a third, genuinely proletarian revolution for the real slogans of October, then Kronstadt will support them with all its strength, unanimously and with the will to conquer or die."

On 24 Februrary 1921, Petrograd's workers went on strike. Four days later, as the military violently repressed the strike, sailors of one of Kronstadt's battleships, Petropavlovsk, passed a resolution supporting the Petrograd workers. On 1 March, some 16,000 of Kronstadt's sailors, soldiers and workers met and unanimously passed Petropavlovsk's resolution. The resolution demanded new elections for the soviets, freedom of speech, freedom for peasants, the release of political prisoners, and other reforms.

“Resolution of the General Meeting of the 1st and 2nd Squadrons of the Baltic Fleet, held on March 1st, 1921.

“After having heard the reports of the delegates sent to Petrograd by the general meeting of the crews to examine the situation, the assembly decided that, since it has been established that the present Soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants, it is necessary:

1. to proceed immediately to the re-election of the Soviets by secret ballot, the electoral campaign among the workers and peasants to be carried on with full freedom of speech and action;

2. to establish freedom of speech and press for all workers and peasants, for the Anarchists and the Left Socialist parties;

3. to accord freedom of assembly to the workers’ and peasants’ organisations;

4. to convoke, outside of the political parties, a Conference of the workers, Red soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd province for March 10th, 1921, at the latest;

5. to liberate all Socialist political prisoners and also all workers, peasants, Red soldiers and sailors, imprisoned as a result of the workers’ and peasants’ movements;

6. to elect a commission for the purpose of examining the cases of those who are in prisons or concentration camps;

7. to abolish the ‘political offices’, since no political party should have privileges for propagating its ideas or receive money from the State for this purpose, and to replace them with educational and cultural commissions elected in each locality and financed by the government;

8. to abolish immediately all barriers;

9. to make uniform the rations of all workers, except for those who are engaged in occupations dangerous to their health;

10. to abolish the Communist shock-troops in all units of the army and the Communist guards in the factories; in case of need, guard detachments could be supplied in the army by the companies and in the factories by the workers;

11. to give the peasants full freedom of action in regard to their land and also the right to possess cattle, on condition that they do their own work, that is to say, without hiring help;

12. to establish a travelling control commission;

13. to permit the free exercise of handicrafts, provided no hired help is used;

14. we ask all units of the army and the kursanti cadets to join our resolution;

15. we demand that all our resolutions be widely publicised in the press.

This resolution was adopted unanimously by the meeting of the crews of the Squadrons. Two persons abstained.

Signed: Petrichenko, president of the meeting: Perepelkin, secretary.”

On 2 March, 300 delegates met and established the Provisional Revolutionary Committee to prepare new elections for Kronstadt's soviet and to defend against inevitable repression from the State. The Bolsheviks responded by securing control of strategic points around Krokstadt, maintaining their repressive siege on Petrograd, making certain concessions to workers to calm them, organizing a special army corps to attack Kronstadt, and launching a campaign of slander against Kronstadt.

Bolsheviks claimed the rebellion was led by the Tsarist ex-general Kozlovsky and other White Guards. Although Kozlovksy did not play any role in the rebellion, it was true that he served as a military specialist in Kronstadt; Trotsky himself had installed Kozlovsky there! Moreover, Trotsky appointed the Tsarist ex-officer Tuchachevsky at the command of the forces preparing to repress the Kronstadt revolt! Kronstadt's Provisional Revolutionary Committee did not include any White Guards.

On 5 March, Trotsky sent Kronstadt an ultimatum, warning that Kronstadt must “submit immediately to the authority of the Soviet Republic...Only those who surrender unconditionally can expect mercy from the Soviet Republic.” For ten days, from 7 March to 17 March, the Soviet military bombed and shelled Kronstadt.

Emma Goldman and other Anarchists unsuccessfully tried to get the Communists to agree to a peace deal with Kronstadt. Goldman explains that "Kronstadt had never had any thought of "mutiny" or resisting the soviet government. Right up to the last, it was determined to spill no blood. Continually it called for a compromise and amicable settlement. But, forced to defend itself against military provocation, it fought like a lion." Following the bombing of Kronstadt, the Communists implemented the New Economic Policy, which expanded private commerce in Russia.

Ukraine

Approximate anarchist territory in Ukraine. Transferred from en.wikipedia; transfer was stated to be made by User:P.o.l.o..

More details Nestor Makhno with members of the anarchist Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine

From 1918 to 1921, Ukranians established an autonomous region with seven million residents. Surrounding the city of Gulai-Polya, residents ran several anarcho-communist communes and held regional Congresses. The Insurrectionary Army, with democratic rule-making procedures and elected officers, defended the region against Austrian and German invaders, the right-wing White Army and ultimately against the Bolsheviks' Red Army. The movement's participants are often called “Makhnovists,” after the region's prominent organizer and military commander Nestor Makhno. By the end of 1921, the Red Army had wiped out the Makhnovist movement.

Culture

While opposing nationalism, the Makhnovists sought “to encourage local culture and language.” In October of 1919, the Insurrectionary Army encouraged school teachers to teach their classes in whatever language the local population preferred.

Voline, an anarchist supporter of Makhno and author of The Unknown Revolution, observed widespread sexism in the movement: “The second fault of Makhno and of many of his intimates — both commanders and others — was their behaviour towards women. Especially when drunk, these men let themselves indulge in shameful and even odious activities, going as far as orgies in which certain women were forced to participate.”

Decisions

When the Insurrectionary Army liberated a town from state control, it would post a notice clarifying they would not impose any authority on the town:

Workers, your city is for the present occupied by the Revolutionary Insurrectionary (Makhnovist) Army. This army does not serve any political party, any power, any dictatorship. On the contrary, it seeks to free the region of all political power, of all dictatorship. It strives to protect the freedom of action, the free life of the workers, against all exploitation and domination.

The Makhnovist Army does not therefore represent any authority. It will not subject anyone to any obligation whatsoever. Its role is confined to defending the freedom of the workers. The freedom of the peasants and the workers belongs to themselves, and should not suffer any restriction.

The territory's workers and peasants governed themselves without a state, but the most systematic direct democracy took place in the towns that organized themselves as free communes. The first commune, “based on the non-authoritarian principle”, was located near Gulai-Polya and had over 300 residents.

The Makhovists organized periodic Regional Congresses, where delegates from many communities gathered. Voline describes the Regional Congress of October 1919, where over 200 delegates showed up, made their own agenda, and made decisions on issues like how to provide medical care to soldiers in the Insurrectionary Army.

Economy

Voline writes that the communes near Gulai-Polya were “experiments in free communism.” Workplaces federated into districts, and districts federated into regions. The Makhnovists established a Commission of Initiative, made of delegates from labor unions. The Commission advised workers, helping them restart factories and railroads. The Makhnovists continued using paper currency but planned “more fundamental reforms” toward anarcho-communism. In Gulai-Polya, people organized classes and schools based on the anti-authoritarian pedagogy of the Spanish educator Fransisco Ferrer. In Gulya-Polya, anarchists set up three secondary schools, and literacy increased throughout the area.

Crime

The Makhnovists “demolished prisons wherever they went. In Berdyansk the prison was dynamited in the presence of an enormous crowd, which took an active part in its destruction. At Aleksandrovsk, Krivoi-Rog, Ekaterinoslav and elsewhere, prisons were demolished or burned by the Makhnovists. Everywhere the workers cheered this act.” In a 7 Jaunary 1920 declaration, the Makhnovists called for police to be replaced by grassroots self-defense groups.

An episode at a regional congress on 12 October 1919 shows how militants held their own Commanders accountable to rules they had set. Delegates called Commander Klein to explain why he had gotten very drunk at a party after Klein had himself posted notices against excessive public drinking. A delegate asked him, “Tell me, Commander Klein, as a citizen of our city, and its military commander, do you consider yourself morally obliged to obey your own recommendations or do you believe yourself outside or above this notice?” Having been publicly called out for his hypocrisy, Klein apologized, complained of boredom at a civilian post, and asked to be sent back to the battlefront.

Revolution

In 1918, the Communist government signed the 1918 Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which without the consent of the Ukranians, ceded the Ukraine to the control of the German and Austrian empires. As these empires prepared to return expropriated land to Ukranian landlords, peasants organized under the auspices of the all-volunteer Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (RIAU), guided by Anarchist organizer and ex-prisoner Nestor Makhno. This army elected officers and decided on all its rules at general assemblies. "The army was organized on a specifically libertarian, voluntary basis," writes Daniel Guerin.

By December of 1918, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army "was just over 110,000 strong, divided into four Corps, consisting of 83,000 infantry, 20,000 cavalry, assault groups, artillery, reconnaissance, medical, and other detachments, including armoured cars and seven armoured trains."

The Makhnovists had to fight not only against the German and Austrian invaders, but also against Ukranian nationalists, White Army counter-revolutionaries, and ultimately against Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky's Red Army. In 1919, Trotsky declared his preference for a White Army victory against the Makhnovists: "It would be better to yield the whole Ukraine to Denikin, a frank counter-revolutionary, who could be easily compromised later by means of class propaganda, while the Makhnovichina developed in the depths of the masses and aroused the masses against themselves.” The Communists stopped supplying the Insurgent Army and even tried to assassinate Makhno in May 1919 according to Voline. After a pro-Makhnovist council in Gulai-Polya called for a Fourth Regional Congress to take place that June, the Red Army, following Trotsky's orders, attacked the village, destroying the communes and seizing and executing Insurgent Army militants. On 4 June, Trotsky issued Order No. 1824, which declared the Fourth Congress “forbidden," with all its promoters and delegates subject to be “arrested immediately.” In response, the Congress was cancelled. Makhno temporarily fled in order to avoid being arrested by the Red Army.

The Makhnovists' impressive military accomplishments included a victory against Denikin's White Army in the fall of 1919 and a joint victory with the Bolsheviks against Wrangel's reconstituted White Army in 1921. Peter Gelderloos summarizes some of these battles:

They went on to hold the southern front against the armies of the White Russians — the aristocratic, pro-capitalist army funded and armed largely by the French and Americans — while their supposed allies, the Bolsheviks, withheld guns and ammunition and began purging anarchists to stop the spread of anarchism emanating from the Makhnovist territory. The White Russians eventually broke through the starved southern front, and reconquered Gulyai-Polye. Makhno retreated to the West, drawing off a large portion of the White armies, the remainder of which beat back the Red Army and advanced steadily towards Moscow. At the battle of Peregenovka, in western Ukraine, the anarchists obliterated the White army pursuing them. Although they were outnumbered and outgunned, they carried the day by effectively executing a series of brilliant maneuvers developed by Makhno, who had no military education or expertise. The volunteer anarchist army raced back to Gulyai-Polye, liberating the countryside and several major cities from the Whites. This sudden reversal cut off the supply lines of the armies that had almost reached Moscow, forcing them to retreat and saving the Russian Revolution.

For another year, an anarchist society again flourished in and around Gulyai-Polye, despite the efforts of Lenin and Trotsky to repress the anarchists there the way they had repressed them throughout Russia and the rest of Ukraine. When another White incursion under General Wrangel threatened the revolution, the Makhnovists again agreed to join the Communists against the imperialists, despite the earlier betrayal. The anarchist contingent accepted a suicide mission to take out enemy gun positions on the Perekop isthmus of Crimea; they succeeded in this and went on to capture the strategic city of Simferopol, again playing a crucial role in defeating the Whites. After the victory, the Bolsheviks surrounded and massacred most of the anarchist contingent, and occupied Gulyai-Polye and executed many influential anarchist organizers and fighters. Makhno and a few others escaped and confounded the massive Red Army with an effective campaign of guerrilla warfare for many months, even causing several major defections; in the end, however, the survivors decided to escape to the West.

Neighboring Societies

Contrary to a myth that the Makhnovists tolerated anti-Semitism, Makhno organized meetings to confront anti-semitism and sent guns and ammunition to rural Jewish communities. Working class Jews participated in the Makhnovists' assemblies and even volunteered for their army. After a 12 May 1919 pogrom killed 20 Jews near Aleksandrovsk, the Makhnovist army established a commission to investigate the incident and then shot the perpetrators.

Peter Ashinov describes the Makhnovists' outreach to the city workers: “The Makhnovshchina . . . understands that the victory and consolidation of the revolution . . . cannot be realised without a close alliance between the working classes of the cities and those of the countryside. The peasants understand that without urban workers and powerful industrial enterprises they will be deprived of most of the benefits which the social revolution makes possible. Furthermore, they consider the urban workers to be their brothers, members of the same family of workers.”

Anarchists in the cities did not always lend concrete support to the Makhovists, a situation Arshinov attributed to Anarchists' preoccupation with theory rather than practice and organizational weakness. Arshinov laments, " We are obliged to state that Russian anarchists remained in their circles and slept through a mass movement of paramount importance, a movement which is unique in the present revolution for having undertaken to realize the historic tasks of oppressed humanity." Murray Bookchin Bookchin recounts, "A number of urban anarchists, most notably Voline, Arshinov and Aron Baron, found their way to the Ukraine, where they functioned on Makhno's propaganda and educational committees; but other urban anarchists inflexibly denigrated the mahhnovshchina as an elemental peasant movement with the traits of a military command-no less!"