This is a useful little pamphlet, giving as it does a short introduction to various rebellions against Bolshevik dictatorship by the proclaimed “ruling class” of that regime, workers and peasants.
Peasant revolts in Siberian, the Don, Kuban, Ukraine and elsewhere are discussed, most of which took place in 1920-1. Interestingly, the leaders of these revolts were usually former Red Army officers. None, though, were as politically sophisticated as the Makhnovists although most raised the demand for soviet democracy rather than the Constituent Assembly (the Antonovschina in Tambov being the exception). Unsurprisingly, those revolts that remained were sympathetic to the demands of the Kronstadt rebels. The pamphlet, fittingly, ends with a short biography of Anatoli Lamanov editor of Kronstadt’s Izvestia and populariser of the term “third revolution” in its pages during the 1921 rebellion.
It is fair to say, however, that the pamphlet is far more on peasant rather than worker resistance. The section “Workers Revolts against the Bolshevik regime” is short, less than a page, and concentrates on the 1921 strike wave in Petrograd which inspired the Kronstadt rebellion. While there is information on workers struggles under the Bolsheviks, it is scattered through many books. Jonathan Aves’ excellent Workers Against Lenin is the most focused on this important subject but that concentrates on the 1920-2 period. Suffice to say, as section H.6.3 of An Anarchist FAQ documents worker resistance to the Bolsheviks started in the spring of 1918 and continued throughout the civil war period.
This makes modern-day Bolshevik apologists claims that the working class had disappeared or become atomised (so necessitating party dictatorship) hard to take seriously. Similarly, Bolshevik authoritarianism started before the civil war broke out in late May 1918 (for example, the Bolshevik attacks on the anarchists started in April 1918, not June as the pamphlet states). This, again, makes modern-day Leninist rationalisations for the Bolsheviks even weaker than they already were. Simply put, Leninist ideology as well as difficult objective circumstances played its part in the degeneration of the revolution – particularly when the impact of that ideology made these circumstances far worse.
This can be seen from Bolshevik policies against the peasantry. As Heath notes in his excellent introduction, the peasant revolts were driven by the (usually brutal) seizure of crops by the state. A key problem with Bolshevism was its notion (like Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy) that individual exchange equals capitalism. If there were something the Bolsheviks hated more than the bourgeoisie, it was the petit-bourgeois. This can be seen from Lenin’s praise for big business and willingness to place ex-owners/managers into positions of power in the new “socialist” industrial hierarchy while, at the same time, crushing any attempts by the peasants to come to the towns and cities to sell their crops.
Given that the state food procurement agencies were incompetent (as Heath notes, seized crops often rotted in train sidings as the centralised structure did not know where they were) this was particularly harmful as workers did not get enough food to survive from official sources. It alienated the peasants, harmed food production and diverted resources to stopping attempts at trade. Luckily for the Bolsheviks, the Whites made no attempt to hide their desire to restore the landlords and so made them slightly more appealing to the bulk of the peasantry.
Ideology played its part. Marxism has two somewhat contradictory definitions of capitalism. The first is in volume 1 of Capital and stresses that capitalism is marked by wage-labour, not exchange. This implies that exploitation happens in production. The second can be found in The Poverty of Philosophy (and elsewhere) and this stresses that the market itself is the problem (hence oxymorons like “self-managed capitalism”). This implies that exploitation happens in exchange. Like most Marxists, the Bolsheviks subscribed to the se