From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement
For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, it was clear that, without connection to a victorious revolution at the international level, starting with Germany, the revolution in Russia was doomed to isolation and therefore to failure.
The two halves of socialism
As confirmation of how false the later Stalinist lie of socialism in one country
would be, in the article On ‘Left-Wing’ Childishness and Petty-Bourgeois Spirit
, published in Pravda in 1918, Lenin wrote clearly:
Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. [...] And history [...] has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia have become the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, the productive, and the socio-economic conditions for socialism
. If Russia represented the weak link
of world imperialism, conquered in the October assault, in Germany we have the ‘last word’ in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation
. For this reason, Lenin continued, weighing up the historical significance of the task, a successful proletarian revolution in Germany would immediately and very easily smash any shell of imperialism (which unfortunately is made of the best steel, and hence cannot be broken by the efforts of any... chicken) and would bring about the victory of world socialism for certain, without any difficulty, or with slight difficulty – if, of course, by ‘difficulty’ we mean difficult on a world historical scale, and not in the parochial philistine sense
.
The Bolsheviks therefore tried to influence the German revolutionaries and bring them closer to their own positions, insisting in particular on the need to found a new party and a new International.
Bolshevik propaganda
In the April Theses, presented to the party upon his return to Russia, Lenin had called for the organisation of the most widespread campaign for this view [...] in the army
and “fraternisation” at the front
. A foundation for this influence was the presence in Russia of around two million prisoners of war, including 165,000 German soldiers and 2,000 officers. According to Pierre Broué, many of these prisoners were Social-democratic activists
on whom the Bolsheviks were conducting an effective campaign, one that neither the Mensheviks nor the Socialist Revolutionaries could carry out due to their policy of support for the war. Karl Radek was the main promoter of this propaganda among the prisoners, which from December 1917 was organised around the newspaper Die Fackel, published in German. Thus, a federation of internationalist prisoners of war was created, followed by a German group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)
. This recruitment effort among the prisoners came to an end with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but the soldiers returning to Germany helped spread Bolshevik propaganda in their own country.
In November 1917, Friedrich Ebert and Friedrich Stampfer celebrated the revolution because it promised to close the Eastern Front. But Michael Stürmer, in Das rubellose Reich: Deutschland 1866-1918 (The restless Empire: Germany 1866-1918) [1986], speaks instead of the trauma of the Bolshevik uprising
for the majority of the SPD, emphasising that from the perspective of opportunism the experiences of the Russian October would be paid for in the German November
: From the January strikes onwards, the social democratic establishment had been warned. A desperate and exhausting race began for peace and against the revolution
.
After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 3rd, 1918, diplomatic relations between Russia and Germany facilitated contacts with German revolutionaries. Ambassador Adolph Joffe, who initially led the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, was a long-standing Bolshevik militant and worked to convey information, advice, and money to the German revolutionaries. Also assigned to the embassy, where Bukharin himself resided for some time, was Mieczisław Broński, Lenin’s old comrade in Switzerland and a member of the Zimmerwald Left. The embassy, which had substantial funds and resources – writes Broué – ensured rapid contact with Petrograd under the cover of diplomatic immunity. All this facilitated conspiratorial work, and at the same time direct political contact between the secret or semi-secret Germans and the victorious Russian revolutionaries
.
The German left and the Bolsheviks
Among the texts that made their way into Germany, particularly from Switzerland and Stockholm, in addition to tens of thousands of propaganda leaflets, was the letter on The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution and the book The State and Revolution by Lenin. In these, Lenin insisted that the decisive battle in Germany had to be fought against the centrists, particularly against Karl Kautsky, whom he regarded as the most dangerous ideological opponent, because of his social-chauvinist
role. In 1918, therefore, primarily to guide the German militants, Lenin wrote The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. However, as the book was printed too slowly in relation to developments in Germany, Lenin published a summary of about ten pages, in which he reiterated: Europe’s greatest misfortune and danger is that it has no revolutionary party. It has parties of traitors like the Scheidemanns, [...] and of servile souls like Kautsky. But it has no revolutionary party
.
Both the Spartacists and the left radicals of Bremen enthusiastically greeted the October Revolution but, among the former, reservations persisted on the question of the party and the seizure of power. Johann Knief, a leader of the Bremen group, pointed to the Russian model to convince the Spartacists to abandon their centrism and break with the USPD. In the article An Urgent Necessity
, published on December 15th in Arbeiterpolitik, he wrote that the Bolshevik revolution had succeeded because there was an independent far-left party in Russia
.
Prominent figures of the Spartacus League such as Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring shared the same view. On June 3rd, 1918, Mehring, a leading figure on the left, addressed an open letter
to the Bolsheviks in which he described the USPD’s attempt to reconstruct the pre-war social democracy as a reactionary utopia
, hoped for the construction of a new International
, and acknowledged the mistake of having joined the USPD in the illusion of steering it towards revolutionary positions. In a series of articles titled The Bolsheviks and us
, published in the Leipziger Volkszeitung of June 10th, 1918, Mehring placed the October Revolution in the tradition of the Paris Commune and urged the realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Germany through workers’ councils, just as it had been accomplished in Russia through the power of the soviets.
However, these stances did not translate into concrete organisational action among the Spartacists.
Luxemburg’s dissent
Rosa Luxemburg had already expressed reservations about Bolshevik politics in her 1904 pamphlet Organisational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy, criticising it for its ultra-centralist tendency
, which she argued tried to revive, in the age of mass movements, the conception of the Jacobins and the adherents of Blanqui
. This was a conception from past phases of class struggle, when to assure the success of the revolutionary conspiracy, it was considered wiser to keep the mass at some distance from the conspirators
. Lenin responded with the article One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
– sent to Kautsky’s Neue Zeit, which refused to publish it – in which he drew attention to the ABC of dialectics
, according to which there is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete
.
After the victory of October, in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution, composed in Breslau prison and delivered to Paul Levi, Luxemburg, as an international party comrade, saluted the immortal historical service
of the Bolsheviks and acknowledged the concrete truth
that Lenin urged her to consider: Everything that happens in Russia is comprehensible and represents an inevitable chain of causes and effects, the starting point and end term of which are: the failure of the German proletariat and the occupation of Russia by German imperialism. It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy. [...] All of us are subject to the laws of history, and it is only internationally that the socialist order of society can be realised. The Bolsheviks have shown that they are capable of everything that a genuine revolutionary party can contribute within the limits of historical possibilities
. Nevertheless, her critique of the Bolshevik party model resurfaced: The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems [...] The whole mass of the people must take part in it. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals
. Luxemburg acknowledged that No one knows this better, describes it more penetratingly; repeats it more stubbornly than Lenin
. But he
– she insisted – is completely mistaken in the means he employs
.
The German revolutionary also criticised the agrarian policy of the Bolsheviks – by giving land to the peasants, she argued, The Leninist agrarian reform has created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism
– and in foreign policy, the acceptance of the Brest-Litovsk peace, which gave breathing space to Germany, ensured food supplies from Ukraine, and delayed the explosion of the German revolution.
There was a certain distrust regarding the fate of the October Revolution, which Luxemburg feared was premature and risked being isolated and ultimately crushed by imperialist reaction. In a letter to Mehring dated November 24th, she wrote: With an impatient hand, I grab every new newspaper to look for news from Petrograd, but it is still difficult to get one’s bearings. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible for the Leninists to retain power in this terrible chaos and amidst the indifference of the Western masses. Yet even their attempt marks an epoch
.
The strategic inadequacy and the spontaneous inclination of the Spartacists, always waiting for the masses, overlooked the crucial lesson of What Is To Be Done?: consciousness brought from without. This was the main difference between the Russian soviets and the German workers’ councils: in the former, the Bolshevik cadres intervened directly, whereas the latter were too often subjected to workers’ spontaneism or, inevitably, to the control of organisations that had historical roots in Germany, especially the SPD and the opportunist trade unions, and in some cases the ineffectual USPD.
The betrayal by German social democracy plunged the class organisation into a delay that was difficult to overcome in relation to the tasks of the revolution – but the Spartacists’ reservations about the Bolshevik model only aggravated that delay.