I've been wanting to read an in-depth account of the Leninist phase of the USSR and where it may have all gone wrong. On another note, are there any sources about the premiership of Rykov?
Posted Feb 9, 2018, 3:58 PM UTC
Would suggest that anyone who hasn't read actual historians on this take a look at these and maybe others before getting in too deep with the primary sources:
From Tsar to Soviets - Christopher Read (comprehensive social history including background and 1905, deliberately focuses on players beyond the Bolsheviks and the rest in Petersburg, particularly the activity of peasants and soldiers who had no connection to any party, and also of the tiny proletariat itself beyond the usual party framework)
The Bolsheviks Come to Power +prequel and sequel - Alexander Rabinowitch (runs the finest comb possible over the events in Petersburg, social history again, 1000 pages over three books to cover a year and a half)
These proved, to me anyway, that the Bolsheviks were a party in the name of the proletariat, not one of it. Their sudden surge in membership over 1917 is what's usually feebly cited here. Really it was just effective politics, the result of their persistent opposition to the provisional gov after the rest of the parties were discredited by their involvement in government. Usually people who know that much seem to imagine that because they gained this support it was theirs forever, as the party itself did, though really it was as conditional as the support previously given to the SRs, Mensheviks, etc. Conditions that weren't met, though by then it was too late.
They also suggest the garrisons and villages were the key sites in 1917, which isn't exactly a surprise given the tiny urban proletariat of the time . . . half of which had been drafted in from communal villages anyway, maintaining their links and generally turning out more radical than the 'pure' workers who were allegedly going to take centre stage. Peasants and workers both were antagonised by the new bosses, running more or less the same state apparatus, within months of takeover, the so-called alliance with the peasants degenerated into open assault and 'kill the kulaks' banners, a teaser of what was to come under similarly convenient excuses.
Convenient excuses were a running theme. This may have crippled any chance of even identifying what was wrong, internally. Brest-Litovsk and the eradication of the Left SRs and communist left are the obvious moment where the 'revolution', turned into a state building project. Failure of any and all follow-up events in Europe sealed it. But that suggests things were on track before that, which after reading these seems laughable.
Strangely enough what Marx suggested would make a social revolution in Russia possible, the continued survival (and revival, linkage to cities, etc) of communal social forms in the countryside, actually happened. Read's book is best on that. But if there was a chance there the Bolshies blew it, and after another decade committed one of the century's worst atrocities just to finalise the deal.
There's Tom Clark's "The State and Counter-Revolution: A Critical History of the Marxist Theory of the State":
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1a/tom-clark/index.htm
There's also stuff like Paul Mattick's "Anti-Bolshevik Communism":
https://libcom.org/library/anti-bolshevik-communism-paul-mattick
You could find plenty of other stuff on libcom.org:
Try Bolshevik revolutionary and novelist Victor Serge's From Lenin to Stalin for the Lenin-Stalin transition (and where Serge thought it all went wrong).
Zizek (!) wrote a good foreword to the Verso selected works of Lenin's text during the Russian Revolution https://www.versobooks.com/books/978-revolution-at-the-gates
Basically he shows that in all these texts Lenin changes his position according to the situation. There is no clear-cut analysis that runs through Lenin which both Anarchists (who think he is evil) and Leninists (who think he is good) think there is. Basically Lenin's thinking follows the mass struggle and the development of the Bolsheviks, from an insistence on insurrection, attacking the state, trusting the class to a focus on state power, organized militants and repressing the state enemy (who, as we know, also became the working class). For me it was a pretty nice read and broke a lot of the assumptions that leftists have with Lenin.
this text posits the importance of roadblocks that eventually forced the revolution to remain national and then die out: https://libcom.org/history/1918-treaty-brest-litovsk-curbing-revolution-guy-sabatier/.