Contents

• Part I. Socio-economic Collapse
• Theoretical and Historical Prerequisites for the Retreat
• Socio-economic Catastrophe and the Petty-bourgeois Environment

Lessons of Defeat: Objective Causes of Isolation and Counter-Revolution

Part I. Socio-economic Collapse

Theoretical and Historical Prerequisites for the Retreat

By refusing to acknowledge the objective prerequisites of the October Revolution, bourgeois historiography reduces the historical process to a series of coincidences or conspiracies. But people’s subjective actions have their own objective logic. After the February Revolution of 1917, Russia found itself at an impasse: the empire’s resources had been exhausted, the army was disintegrating, and the liberal Provisional Government was incapable of unravelling the knot of contradictions – above all, the land question and the question of withdrawing from the imperialist war. The Bolsheviks’ seizure of power was inevitable precisely because all the other political forces – from the Cadets to the Mensheviks – offered the proletarian and peasant masses nothing but death in the trenches.

The objective conditions for the final victory of the proletariat had not yet matured – and not only in isolated peasant Russia, but on a world scale as well. If this had not been the case, we would be writing a completely different history today and living in a world free from the chains of capitalist exploitation and the catastrophes of imperialist wars.

In seeking to draw lessons from this defeat, revolutionary Marxism must clearly recognise the dual character of October. On the one hand, the Russian Revolution was proletarian, since the working class assumed leadership of the uprising and established its own organs of power. On the other hand, its initial tasks remained purely bourgeois: the destruction of the remnants of feudalism, the distribution of land, the development of large-scale industry, and the integration of the national market. Under conditions of isolation from the advanced Western industry, the economic base was inevitably bound to dictate its terms to the political superstructure, increasingly turning the proletarian dictatorship into an administrator of capitalist development.

But this does not at all mean that there was no need to fight for the revolution. This was not a matter of subjective choice at all.

As L. Trotsky acknowledged:

«People do not make revolution eagerly any more than they do war. There is this difference, however, that in war compulsion plays the decisive role, in revolution there is no compulsion except that of circumstances. A revolution takes place only when there is no other way out».¹

It is precisely the coercive force of dire circumstances, rather than steady progress, that drives people towards revolution. The proletarian masses were driven to revolt by the utter hopelessness of their situation. October was not the smooth movement of the locomotive of history along the pre-laid tracks of maturing productive forces, but a grandiose cataclysm in which the proletariat attempted to break the chains of commodity production, even though the objective prerequisites for this did not yet exist in Russia, left without socialist assistance from the West. This was the central tragedy: the Bolsheviks found themselves hostage to Russia’s economic backwardness.

The key events of 1921 in Russia – the transition to the NEP and the ban on intra-party struggle at the 10th Congress of the RCP(b) – coincided with the collapse of the revolutionary wave in Europe. The NEP was a forced strategic retreat, an attempt to place capitalism under the control of the proletarian state, but the decline of the revolutionary movement in Western Europe made 1921 a turning point on the road to the defeat of both the Russian and world revolutions.

Today, it is easy to blame the Bolsheviks themselves for this tragic outcome, attributing the counter-revolution to their theoretical errors, organisational principles, or ill will. But such a superficial approach is clearly insufficient for a genuine understanding of the essence of the problem. Our task is to draw harsh materialist lessons from this heroic and greatest attempt in world history by the proletariat to storm the heavens.

The history of intra-party struggle in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s is not a chronicle of clashes between personal ambitions or abstract ideas, as bourgeois historians try to portray it. It is a chronicle of the tragic, desperate resistance of the proletarian vanguard to the counter-revolutionary process and, consequently, an expression of the struggle of classes and their factions in Russia and throughout the world.

As shown in the article “The Illusion of Socialism and the Reality of Capital in the USSR”, published in the same issue, the legal “abolition” of private property does not mean the destruction of capital as a social relation. It is precisely an understanding of this fact that requires us to study carefully the harsh material reality that made socialist transformations impossible.

Socio-economic Catastrophe and the Petty-bourgeois Environment

The contradictions between the base and the superstructure unfolded not in an abstract vacuum, but against the backdrop of an unprecedented collapse of the entire country.

To understand why the state apparatus was able to break away from the proletariat and usurp power, Marxism requires us to look at the objective material conditions in Russia after October. The dictatorship of the proletariat found itself trapped not only within the ring of the world capitalist blockade, but also submerged in a gigantic ocean of the petty-bourgeois peasant milieu.

Devastation, Famine, and the Archaization of Cities

Throughout world history, the catastrophic disruption of complex economic ties between the city and the countryside has invariably led to profound socio-economic archaization and de-urbanisation. Similar processes unfolded during the collapse of the Bronze Age, when the destruction of Mediterranean trade routes wiped entire states off the face of the earth. The same occurred during the fall of the Western Roman Empire: the collapse of centralised logistics turned once-million-strong Rome into a provincial backwater, forcing the urban plebeians to flee en masse to the countryside, where they came under the protection of large landowners in order to survive. Germany experienced a similar regression, accompanied by the abandonment of cities, the cessation of manufacturing, and a return to primitive agriculture, in the crucible of the Thirty Years’ War. In all these cases, the collapse of supply systems set humanity back by centuries, towards more primitive forms of survival.

However, the processes that engulfed Russia after October 1917 were entirely unprecedented. In previous historical eras, systemic collapse meant a spontaneous regression within the framework of pre-capitalist production relations. In Russia, by contrast, a monstrous process of archaization and industrial paralysis struck a society that was already integrated into the global capitalist market and possessed centres of large-scale modern industry.

But the main historical distinction lay in the political factor: for the first time in human history, the physical destruction of the material base coincided with an attempt by a conscious revolutionary vanguard to build a higher, classless society. A tragic dialectical contradiction emerged. The dictatorship of the proletariat was forced to carry out the transition to socialism under conditions in which urban industrial civilisation itself – the only possible foundation for this transition – was literally crumbling to dust, while the working class itself was dissolving into the petty-bourgeois peasant milieu.

The scale of this collapse had no analogue in modern history. As the British historian Edward Acton notes, in the period after October the country experienced an economic collapse on the scale of the medieval “Black Death”. In the first six months after the armed uprising, the capital lost at least a million inhabitants: workers fled the city en masse in search of bread.

The 1917 harvest turned out to be the poorest in a century, and in the winter of 1917–1918 most regions of Russia received only 12–13 % of the normal grain supply. By February 1918, a worker’s daily ration in Moscow amounted to a meagre 306 calories – less than 10 % of the required amount. In Petrograd, by the end of January 1918, the ration had been reduced to 150 grams of bread, and by the end of February – to 50 grams. Under the dual threat of a German offensive and famine, 40 % of the working class had left the city by April, and of those who remained, 60 % were unemployed.²

Even those proletarians who had work had to spend all their free time searching for food. Demoralisation was exacerbated by mass absenteeism. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the situation became catastrophic.

On a nationwide scale, gross industrial output in 1920 amounted to only 13.9 % of the pre-war level of 1913, while the production of consumer goods had collapsed to 12.3 %. The country’s industry had contracted more than sevenfold. The degradation of the economy was accompanied by a mass exodus of the population from the cities: in Central Russia and the Volga region alone, hundreds of thousands of people fled to the countryside, turning once-thriving industrial centres into deserted ghost towns.

By 1920, the population of Petrograd, which had stood at nearly 2 million before the war, had fallen to one-third of that figure; Moscow had also lost a third of its population. Provincial cities, which were more closely connected with the agricultural economy and local markets, suffered less: it was easier to find sources of food there. The large cities were suffocating: by 1920, they were receiving only 10–20 % of the volume of food that had reached them in 1913.

In September 1917, the 36-year-old officer Jacques Sadoul was appointed attaché to the French military mission in Petrograd. The city, engulfed in the flames of revolution, drew him into the ranks of the RSDLP(b). This is precisely why his observations are of even greater value. On 25 April 1918, in a letter to Albert Thomas, he describes the working-class suburbs of the capital:

«[…] frightful poverty prevails. There are epidemics of typhus, smallpox, children’s diseases. Babies are dying en-masse. Those one sees are weak, fleshless, pitiful creatures. In the working-class quarters one too often passes poor, pale, thin mothers, sadly bearing in their arms, in a little coffin of silver-painted wood, looking like a cradle, the tiny lifeless body that a small quantity of bread or milk would have kept alive».³

Diseases claimed more lives than military operations. The mortality curve is striking: before 1918, the figure in Petrograd was close to the pre-war level (22 per thousand); in 1918 it doubled, and in 1919 it almost doubled again, reaching 80 per thousand, mainly as a result of typhus. Life expectancy in the country plummeted to an unprecedented 19.5 years for men and 21.5 years for women. Against this backdrop, the Petrograd Bolshevik organisation also shrank – the very organisation that had constituted the shock detachment of the October Revolution: of the 43,000 members recorded in October 1917, only 13,472 remained by June 1918.

The Bolsheviks found themselves facing a real, life-and-death contradiction: in order to defeat capitalism and «uphold the power of the exploited»⁴, they needed, at the very least, to restore capitalist production, and with it exploitation. Without this, all attempts to lay the foundations for a socialist economy risked remaining nothing more than a «set of decrees»⁵. The emphasis was placed on increasing labour productivity, but this required raising the technological level, which was virtually impossible under conditions of war and isolation. Moreover, the most advanced workers were at the front rather than at the machines, which weakened the apparatus for managing the economy and physically depleted the cadre proletariat.

The tragedy of the situation was vividly revealed in 1918 by the example of the Baku Commune. Cut off from Russia’s food supply bases, S. Shahumyan’s government did not dare to send food requisition detachments into the Azerbaijani countryside for fear of provoking peasant uprisings in the rear. This condemned the workers of Baku to the most severe famine and forced the Bolsheviks to enter into a bloc with Armenian nationalists from the Dashnaktsutyun party against the advancing Turkish troops. This forced compromise led to the suppression of the counter-revolution acquiring, as Shahumyan himself acknowledged, the character of a national massacre between Armenians and Turks. Famine, ethnic cleansing, and isolation undermined the class basis of the Soviets, allowing the right-wing Socialists to overthrow the Bolsheviks and hand the city over to the British imperialists. Baku became a bloody lesson in how objective material necessity can break the proletarian line.

The Agrarian Impasse and Peasant Uprisings

The devastation caused by the Civil War and the grain requisitioning system led to a colossal polarisation of the rural population. There could be no question of any voluntary transition to collective labour. For example, in Vyatka Province, by 1925 the provincial commission was able to identify only 11 functioning communes and 39 artels among 4.2 million desyatinas⁶ of communal land.

The small proprietor was instinctively hostile to communism. A report by the Yaransk Cheka from May 1919 stated: «The peasants look upon the Communist Party as something big and dangerous».⁷ «A communist must be shunned… In the eyes of the peasantry, he has no authority; he is a man who has forgotten God».⁸ In Kadam Volost, hostility towards the Soviets was overt, owing to the conduct of the representatives of the authorities themselves: «rough treatment of the population, “shooting at citizens with rifles”, arbitrary confiscations».⁹

Archival data from typically agrarian provinces expose the appalling backwardness confronting the proletarian vanguard. In Vyatka Province, for example, by the beginning of the 1920s the countryside remained in the grip of centuries-old survivals. The archaic peasant commune played the leading role here. According to the 1916 census, peasants without horses and with one horse accounted for 76.7 %, while households with no land under crops or with up to 10 desyatinas under crops accounted for 80.6 %.

Having received the land, the peasantry sought only one thing – to become independent commodity producers. Any attempts at socialisation met with a brick wall. The instructor-organiser Georgy Ilyichev reported from the Vyatka countryside that the peasants listened attentively to accounts of communism and «agreed to everything», but when it came to abolishing private property, they protested resolutely. They «defended private property, although they had nothing…».¹⁰ The horizon of the peasant dream was expressed by A. Yarantsev, chairman of the Yaransk district committee: «The peasant’s main ideal is an economic holding that enables him to live and feel independent…».¹¹

The social explosion in the countryside was provoked not only by the grain requisitioning system, but also by the state’s attempts to artificially split the peasant commune through the Committees of Poor Peasants (“kombedy”), established in June 1918. The overwhelming majority of peasants perceived them simply as hostile state interference imposed from outside. They often consisted of military personnel, outsiders, or party members. In Tambov Province, one-third of the members of the Committees of Poor Peasants had never engaged in agriculture at all. The peasantry resisted desperately. In 1918 alone, 7,309 members of food requisition detachments were killed, and the Cheka recorded more than 100 peasant uprisings by the end of the year.

As events in the national borderlands show, the social instinct of the peasantry invariably prevailed over the nation-building projects of the big bourgeoisie, but only as long as the issue was the seizure of land and the defence of their small holdings. In Ukraine, the collapse of the bourgeois-nationalist Central Rada in early 1918 was predetermined by its delay in resolving the land question: the peasantry massively went over to the side of the Bolsheviks, who proposed radical agrarian reform. However, as soon as the Soviet government attempted to requisition grain by the methods of War Communism, this triggered a colossal wave of peasant uprisings in 1919, which disorganised the rear. The small proprietor resisted the proletarian dictatorship with equal force, regardless of the language in which the food requisition detachments addressed him.

The hostile ocean of millions of small proprietors dictated its terms to the isolated proletarian government. It was from this same environment, disintegrating under the pressure of the economic crisis, that the state machine drew its grassroots cadres.

The state apparatus, pursuing a policy of food dictatorship, ruthlessly suppressed the petty-bourgeois element. At the same time, the seizure of agricultural produce was accompanied by the wholesale decomposition of the very structures of power. In Tambov Province, many local communists were starving alongside the peasants and condemned the grain requisitioning system, often abandoning party work in order to provide their families with basic food. At the same time, the emerging nomenklatura was becoming detached from the masses. As historians note, «part of the party leadership embarked on a path of abuses and open theft, which, under conditions of the “transparency” of rural life, could not go unnoticed or fail to arouse resentment among ordinary peasants».¹² It was precisely this open arbitrariness and plunder on the part of the “proletarian authorities” that became one of the detonators of the “Antonovshchina” – a gigantic peasant revolt, drowned in blood with the help of the regular army. In late 1920 and early 1921, armed uprisings swept across Western Siberia, Tambov and Voronezh Provinces, the Middle Volga region, the Don, the Kuban, Ukraine, and Central Asia. By the spring of 1921, they were raging across virtually the entire country. The total number of victims of these peasant wars ran into the hundreds of thousands.

On a nationwide scale, the conflict between the city and the countryside became total. By 1921–1922, the number of so-called “dependants” – the army, officials, and various sections of the urban population supported by the state through the seizure of grain from the countryside – had reached the fantastic figure of 35 million people, placing an exorbitant burden on agriculture.

The situation in the cities was becoming increasingly explosive. Food was in short supply, many factories and plants were closing due to shortages of fuel and raw materials, and workers were being thrown out onto the streets.

The situation was particularly grave in the major industrial centres at the beginning of 1921, above all in Moscow and Petrograd. Bread rations were reduced, some food allowances were abolished, and the threat of famine emerged. The fuel crisis intensified. On 11 February 1921, it was announced that 93 Petrograd enterprises would be closed until 1 March. Among them were such industrial giants as the Putilov Works, the Sestroretsk Works, the “Treugolnik” factory, and others.

As early as November 1920, summing up the first three years of the revolution, Lenin was forced to acknowledge openly:

«We knew at that time that our victory would be a lasting one only when our cause had triumphed the world over, and so when we began working for our cause we counted exclusively on the world revolution».¹³

But the decline of the revolutionary wave in Europe placed the Bolsheviks in an impasse. They inherited from capitalism «not only a ruined culture, not only wrecked factories, not only a despairing intelligentsia», but also «a disunited and backward mass of individual proprietors, […] an absence of the team spirit and of all understanding that the past must be buried»¹⁴.

It was precisely this cultural and economic impoverishment of an isolated, devastated country that laid the foundations for the coming tragedy. Against the backdrop of the total destruction of the material base, a process of political retreat was inevitably bound to begin.

June 2026

Footnotes

1. - L. Trotsky. The History of the Russian Revolution // Marxists Internet Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch43.htm ↩

2. - J. Dominie, Russia. Revolution and Counter-Revolution 1905–1924. A View from the Communist Left, Prometheus Publications, 2021. This data, together with some other information given in this article, is taken from this volume. ↩

3. - Quoted by Marcel Liebman. Leninism Under Lenin (Merlin Press, 1975). P. 224. ↩

4. - V. Lenin. Our Foreign and Domestic Position and Party Tasks. Speech delivered to the Moscow Gubernia Conference of the RCP(b) // Militant Archives. URL: https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Our\_Foreign\_and\_Domestic\_Position\_and\_Party\_Tasks.\_Speech\_delivered\_to\_the\_Moscow\_Gubernia\_Conference\_of\_the\_RCP(b) ↩

5. - Ibid. ↩

6. - 1 desyatina is equal to 1.09 ha ↩

7. - Timkin Yu. “Khozhdenie krestyanina v kompartiyu i obratno”: volostnye krestyanskie organizatsii RKP(b) v 1918–1920 godakh (po arkhivnym materialam Vyatskoi gubernii) [“A Peasant’s Journey into the Communist Party and Back”: Volost Peasant Organisations of the RCP(b) in 1918–1920 (Based on Archival Materials from Vyatka Governorate)]. Krestyanovedenie, 2022, Vol. 7, No. 2. P. 52. (in Rus.) ↩

8. - Ibid. P. 52–53. ↩

9. - Ibid. P. 57–58. ↩

10. - Ibid. P. 56. ↩

11. - Ibid. P. 53. ↩

12. - Muravieva I. Fondy volostnykh komitetov VKP(b) kak istochnik po istorii Tambovskogo krestyanskogo vosstaniya 1920–1921 godov [The Fonds of the Volost Committees of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) as a Source for the History of the Tambov Peasant Uprising of 1920–1921]. Gramota, 2017, No. 6 (80), Part 2. P. 76. (in Rus.) ↩

13. - V. Lenin. Speech At A Joint Plenum Of The Moscow Soviet Of Workers’, Peasants’ And Red Army Deputies, The Moscow Committee Of The R.C.P.(B.) And The Moscow City Trade Union Council, Dedicated To The Third Anniversary Of The October Revolution // Marxists Internet Archive. URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/06.htm ↩

14. - Ibid. ↩