The Russian Revolution Read Free Page B

a special role to the industrial working class. In power, the Bolsheviks assumed that proletarians and poor peasants were their natural allies. They also made the complementary assumption that members of the `bourgeoisie'-a broad group encompassing former capitalists, former noble landowners and officials, small shopkeepers, kulaks (prosperous peasants), and even in some contexts the Russian intelligentsia-were their natural antagonists. They termed such people `class enemies', and it was against them that the early revolutionary terror was primarily directed.
    The aspect of the class issue that has been most hotly debated over the years is whether the Bolsheviks' claim to represent the working class was justified. This is perhaps a simple enough question if we look only at the summer and autumn of 1917, when the working class of Petrograd and Moscow were radicalized and clearly preferred the Bolsheviks to any other political party. After that, however, it is not so simple. The fact that the Bolsheviks took power with working-class support did not mean that they kept that support forever-or, for that matter, that they regarded their party, either before or after the seizure of power, as a mere mouthpiece of industrial workers.
    The accusation that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the working class, first heard by the outside world in connection with the Kronstadt revolt of 1921, was one that was bound to come and likely to be true. But what kind of betrayal-how soon, with whom, with what consequences? In the NEP period, the Bolsheviks patched up the marriage with the working class that had seemed close to dissolution at the end of the Civil War. During the First Five-Year Plan, relations soured again because of falling real wages and urban living standards and the regime's insistent demands for higher productivity. An effective separation from the working class, if not a formal divorce, occurred in the 1930s.
    But this is not the whole story. The situation of workers qua workers under Soviet power was one thing; the opportunities available to workers to better themselves (become something other than workers) was another. By recruiting party members primarily from the working class for fifteen years after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks did a good deal to substantiate their claim to be a workers' party. They also created a broad channel for workingclass upward mobility, since the recruitment of workers to party membership went hand in hand with the promotion of workingclass Communists to white-collar administrative and managerial positions. During the Cultural Revolution at the end of the 1920s, the regime cut open another channel for upward mobility by sending large numbers of young workers and workers' children to higher education. While the policy of high-pressure `proletarian promotion' was dropped in the early 1930s, its consequences remained. It was not workers that mattered in Stalin's regime but former workers-the newly promoted `proletarian core' in the managerial and professional elites. From the strict Marxist standpoint, such working-class upward mobility was perhaps of little interest. For the beneficiaries, however, their new elite status was likely to seem irrefutable proof that the Revolution had fulfilled its promises to the working class.
    The last theme that runs through this book is the theme of revolutionary violence and terror. Popular violence is inherent in revolution; revolutionaries are likely to regard it very favourably in the early stages of revolution but with increasing reservations thereafter. Terror, meaning organized violence by revolutionary groups or regimes that intimidates and terrifies the general population, has also been characteristic of modern revolutions, with the French Revolution setting the pattern. The main purpose of terror, in the revolutionaries' eyes, is to destroy the enemies of the revolution and the impediments to change; but there is often a secondary purpose of