WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY RUSSIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, FDCA, Il Cantiere #20: The revolution and counter-revolution in Russia* (Part I) (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Over a century after the October Revolution, we bring to the attention

of readers, in this and the next issue of the magazine, a text
elaborated collectively in 1950 by the comrades of the Initiative Group
«For an oriented and federated movement», which in 1951 they gave life
to the Anarchist Proletarian Action Groups (GAAP). This is the chapter
dedicated to the Russian Revolution in the booklet «Half a century of
struggle of the world working class (1900-1950)», published in the
«Little Anarchist Encyclopedia» with the aim of providing a training
tool for the militants of that political organisation, then in the midst
of its establishment phase.
The intent of this work was to synthetically trace the profile of a
crucial historical phase, which from the end of the 19th century reaches
up to 1950, in order to establish the fixed points for the construction
of an anti-capitalist political opposition, which would identify in
class anarchism its fundamental theoretical premise.
The effort of the drafting comrades was in reality much more ambitious:
they intended to create a historical-critical work, not only on a
crucial phase such as the first fifty years of the twentieth century,
but also to investigate some fundamental events of that capitalist cycle
, such as the First World War of the imperialist era, internationalism
and the Russian Revolution, the Spanish war, the fascist phenomenon and
the Resistance, together with the analysis of the new world balances
following the end of the Second imperialist World War.
The attempt was evidently to lay solid historical and theoretical
foundations on which to begin to systematize anarchism, to promote its
evolution from a movement of opinion to the theory and practice of
social revolution.
There is a propagandistic approach to the problems of the Russian
revolution and there is a critical approach to these same problems.
According to the propaganda approach, the Russian revolution would have
completely eradicated its internal enemies and today it would only have
to defeat its external enemies, the terms internal and external having
to be understood in reference to the Russian state. According to this
approach, the problem of the Russian revolution, as it was initially
that of the defense and conservation of the Russian state, today is that
of its expansion and its hegemony in the world. According to the
critical approach, however, everything is seen not as a function of the
Russian state but as a function of the world workers' revolution. In
this light the terms of the question are reversed: the Russian
revolution initially won over its external enemies, the class
antagonists such as the landed nobility, the capitalist bourgeoisie, the
old privileged groups, the court, the armies of the restoration, but it
was defeated at a later time by its internal enemies, by the enemies it
had raised within itself.
 From this approach two questions arise: why was the Russian revolution
the first victorious revolution over its external enemies? Why was the
Russian Revolution, victorious over its external enemies, finally
defeated by its internal enemies?
In these two questions and in the answers that await them, are contained
the precious lessons of the greatest event of this half century of
working class struggle.
The year 1917 saw the proletariat victorious over its centuries-old
enemy for the first time. The great imperialist war had not yet ended
when this war was already turning into a civil war on one of the most
important fronts, within one of the most powerful belligerent states.
And this certainly did not happen by miracle: it only happened because
three fundamental premises of revolutionary victory finally coincided:
the initiative of a minority, the participation of the great masses of
workers and peasants in the cities and countryside, the catastrophe of
the old regime.
The Russian revolutionary minority had been forged over a century of
struggle and persecution. It had had its prophets and its precursors,
its apostles and its martyrs: and then increasingly better tempered
agitators, increasingly fierce and expert militants. Through meetings
and clashes of experiences it had built up a vast scientific heritage,
its own method, its own criticism, its own revolutionary theory.

It had particularly had the opportunity to test itself, especially in
its most advanced aspects (anarchists, Bolsheviks, revolutionary
socialists) during the days of 1905. Unlike the workers' movements of
Western Europe, it had not been corrupted into parliamentarism. During
the world war it had established the immediate polemical and
organizational conditions for its subsequent intervention in the crisis
of the decaying Russian state. In fact, it is his appearance, his almost
legendary return among the revolting people that puts to flight all the
men and all the groups representing the falling Czarist autocracy.
With the revolutionary minority, the great masses also come into
movement: fifty million peasants hungry for land, ten million soldiers
hungry for peace, five million workers hungry for justice. There are
millions of farmers, already humiliated and offended, already mocked by
the "emancipation of the serfs", who begin to no longer pay the fees, to
illegally invade the pastures, to take wood from the parks of the lords,
and then they tear down the borders, suppress the agrarian agents
expropriate the large estates of the nobles and priests, and finally get
rid of the masters, set fire to their clubs, attack and sack their
villas, raze the sacred temple of landed property to the ground. There
are millions of soldiers who, after years spent in the trenches between
the fire of the enemy and the fire no less deadly than the decimations,
turn on the revolt, respond to the calls of revolutionary defeatism,
lynch the officers, blow up the commands, fraternize with the enemy
soldiers , deserted the front en masse, rushing with weapons into the
cities to lend a hand to the insurrection.
There are millions of workers - the metal workers of Moscow, the steel
workers of Petrograd, the miners of Donetz, the textile workers of
Ivanovo, the railway workers and the dock workers - who had prepared and
educated themselves for years and years for the class struggle: here
they are now intervening they too formed themselves into a soviet,
advanced economic demands and leveraged them for broader political
agitations, organized armed units, transformed the factories into moral
and material construction sites of the revolution in progress. Who could
resist this push that united the mutineers of the fleet and the
deserters of the army, the gray and ragged crowds of the cities with the
plebs descending from the countryside?
Certainly not the old state apparatus, an immobile monster exposed in
his prestige, hit hard in his brain and heart.
The court petrified by the vision of its imminent ruin, the councilors
silent and uncertain, the public administration inert and corrupt, the
military hierarchies nervous but indecisive, the nobility already
prostrate at the warning of the storm: the entire old ruling class had
lost its mind.
The imperialist war was having an effect that perhaps its leaders,
accustomed as they were to getting away with the loss of a province or a
handful of gold, had not exactly foreseen this time.
This time it was one of the most ancient, venerated and invulnerable
crowns of Europe which fell to pieces at the first serious shock,
overwhelming in its ruin an entire world which had been seated for
centuries on its economic and legal, civil and religious foundations.
The revolution had won.
But how had he won, or rather, to what extent had he won?
Here, formulated in various ways, the second question that we prefaced
at the beginning of this paragraph returns: why was the Russian
revolution victorious over its external enemies thanks to the fortunate
presence of the three revolutionary coefficients, finally defeated by
its internal enemies, that is, by its own counter-revolution?
The reason, it seems to us, lies in the weakness of those same three
revolutionary coefficients: weakness of the minority-agent particularly
in its organizational and ideological equipment, weakness of the great
masses particularly in their revolutionary direction in the socialist
sense, weakness of the crisis of society bourgeois both on a Russian
national level and on an international level. This does not mean that in
Russia itself, in relation to other countries, these coefficients were
not so weak as to cause a victorious revolution, but this does not
prevent the fact that they were not even strong enough to guarantee the
complete success of the revolutionary act.
It is on these elements that we must concentrate the focus of criticism
in search of the whys and not the hows of the defeat.

It is not with the fictional investigations into the betrayals generally
attributed to a man or a group of men (whose personal power is
overestimated in such a way as to even make them the despots of
history), it is not with the psychoanalytic chatter about Caesarism or
the innate or acquired Bonapartism, which can be a serious explanation
for the defeat of the Russian revolution. Such an investigation would
still be vulgarly propagandistic, albeit in an anti-Bolshevik sense.
In fact, the entire chain of subjective elements that mark the
progressive decadence of the Russian revolution can be reduced to just
two objective elements - one of time and one of space - which had to
find their interpreters in history: 1)  the Russian revolution having
broken out in a phase in which imperialism as a whole remained in a
dispersed and relatively unconcentrated state, was affected by the
interference of the era preceding it, and developed in an uneven and
disconnected way in the various countries of the world; 2) that the
Russian revolution broke out in a relatively limited region, where
capitalism had barely progressed and where large swathes of
pre-capitalist feudal economies remained alongside the capitalist economy.
These conditions, which were closely intertwined, could not help but
mature and produce in Russia a hybrid type of revolution, which if at a
given moment attempts to translate itself into purely socialist terms,
is crushed against a reality that denies it any cover both at its
internally and externally.
In this sense we can speak of an intimate weakness of the revolutionary
event in Russia.
Thus if we have a revolutionary minority in the generic sense, we do not
have a well organized and well oriented homogeneous minority, but a
variety of minorities (anarchists, Bolsheviks, revolutionary socialists)
corresponding to the same heterogeneity of the social forces in
movement, a series of differently oriented minorities among which, the
most consistent, the Bolshevik one, lacked a perfected and complete
theory on the central problem of the destruction of the State (unless
one wants to call the sophism about the "provisional State" a "theory").
Evidently the insufficient experience of the proletariat had not been
able to mature the formation of such a theory just as the objective
conditions prevented its coherent application.
Thus, if we have the participation of the large masses of workers and
peasants, this participation, especially in the agricultural sector,
does not take place in a socialist-expropriator sense but in a
populist-appropriator sense. The masses are poorly imbued with
revolutionary ideals and there is no organic relationship between them
and the active minority.
So finally, if we have the crisis of the current regime, this crisis
resulting from the war does not affect the entire capitalist
organization but grips and paralyzes only one limb, the most fragile,
and remains localized to it; it breaks only one link, the least
resistant of the imperialist chain, and does not affect the others. In
other words, both the prematurity and the localization of the crisis,
excluding the world revolution and therefore a unitary affirmation of
the proletariat, also exclude the possibility that the revolution
partially and hybridly affirmed in a capitalistically less advanced
country could expand into more capitalistically advanced countries: it
favors indeed the opposite process, of the pressure of these countries
on the first, not so much to occupy it but to modify its internal
structure in a restorative and counter-revolutionary sense.
In this way the revolution imprisoned within state borders, blocked in
its pre-socialist phase, threatened by external forces, undermined by
internal ones, is dying. All he has to choose is a tomb and
gravediggers. It finds its tomb in a steel armor that it pretends to
build for its defense but in which it asphyxiates its last yearnings for
redemption. He meets his gravediggers in a new class of bureaucrats and
officials returning to power who, in ten years of dictatorship,
definitively bury his corpse.

*Initiative Group «For an oriented and federated movement» (ed.), Half a
century of struggle of the world working class (1900-1950), Small
Anarchist Encyclopedia, Handout No. 1, Stab. Typ. La Tribuna, Rome,
1950; new edition Quaderni di Alternativa Libertaria/FdCA, October 2018.
It is possible to request the brochure from ilcantiere@autistici.org or
download it from:
http://www.comunismolibertario.it/piccola%20Enciclopedia.pdf.
Photographic documents: 1. Soldiers' demonstration in Petrograd,
February 1917; 2. The assault on the Winter Palace in the reconstruction
of the film «October» (1927). (Public domain images).

Il Cantiere n. 20 ottobre 2023 ilcantiere@autistici.org

http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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