The Victory of the Bolsheviks and the Defeats of the Communist Party of Germany 1919-1921
Chapter 2 Section 3
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This below is Chapter 2 Section 3:
3. The Victory of the Bolsheviks and the Defeats of the Communist Party of Germany 1919-1921
Towards the end of December 1918, the external picture in Germany was still very similar to that in Russia during the months after the February Revolution: the discipline of the army was largely dissolving, soldiers’ councils had formed everywhere, the officers had lost the undisputed power of command and often had their epaulets torn off, demonstration marches moved through the streets, red flags were flying in many places, the garrison in the capital was unreliable, a workers’ and soldiers’ council headed by an executive council functioned alongside the government.
But unlike in Russia, there was no overwhelming desire for peace directed against the government, and the army at the front was returned home in an orderly manner under the leadership of the officers and with the cooperation of the soldiers’ councils. Here and there there were clashes with soldiers’ councils on the home routes, and the first complaints about an impending counter-revolution were heard. But nowhere were officers killed, nowhere were landowners expelled, and the administration continued to function smoothly despite all the difficulties. The headquarters under the unchanged Hindenburg-Groener army command had grounded itself in the facts, and consequently the officers, who always form a spearhead of democratization after a great war, remained a potentially significant force, provided that revolution were to be understood as something other than democracy in the sense of popular sovereignty and election of a national assembly.
Now, the National Assembly had been an undisputed slogan in Russia even after the October revolution. In Germany, on the other hand, it was fiercely opposed by the Spartacus League, but also by parts of the Revolutionary Stewards and the Independent Social Democratic Party. Rosa Luxemburg, in the Rote Fahne on November 20, called it a “surviving heirloom of bourgeois revolutions” and a “prop from the times of petty-bourgeois illusions about the unity of the people”; in present-day Germany, however, it can and must be a matter of “socialist democracy,” which was opposed to “bourgeois democracy.” Formally, this was the well Marxist claim that the majority of the proletariat, as the majority of the people, should exercise immediate autocracy in the form of councils; but in fact it was a matter of the will of an activist minority to exercise power alone, for Rosa Luxemburg knew very well that her party, even together with the Independent Social Democratic Party, by no means comprised the majority of the German working class and certainly not the majority of the people. Therefore, the Vorwärts could and had to oppose her as the slogan of the majority social democracy: “Not terror, but freedom; not dictatorship, but democracy.” In fact, with its appeal to the National Assembly, the Ebert government represented the claim of the empirical people and thus the concept of Western democracy. The Central Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils joined it, but the most active minority continued to oppose it, attributing to the German situation a maturity that must lead beyond bourgeois or formal democracy.
But the main difference between Germany and Russia was a political one. For the Russian revolutionaries, there was no event in another country that could have been a model or a nightmare. In Germany, on the other hand, there came from the government and the press constant warnings such as the following: “Let the German workers look to Russia and be warned!”, “Then there will be Russian chaos,” Spartacus said, “the establishment of an Asiatic and reign of terror and hunger like in Russia,” a “blood dictatorship of the Spartacus League” was planned. Such twists could not have emerged from the German situation alone; but since exaggerations in the press reports had not been necessary during the last few months to convey to the German public the awareness that the Bolsheviks were in fact exercising an unprecedented regime of terror in Russia, such statements and assumptions warranted credence.
They became all the more credible because there was no doubt that the Soviet government would intervene. As early as November 11, the Council of People’s Commissars addressed the German workers with a telegram and urged them not to allow themselves to be “talked into” a national assembly, and at the same time grain shipments were promised, although everyone knew that hunger was raging in Russia. Several passages in Radek’s speech on December 30 were in the same vein: nothing evokes such enthusiasm among the Russian workers as when they are told that the time may come “when the German workers will call for your help and where you must fight with them on the Rhine, as they will fight in our place on the Urals.” But had not the longing for peace been the most powerful impulse of the Russian revolution? If Radek was serious, the same impulse would work in Ebert’s favor in Germany.
Nevertheless, during the first days of January 1919, a situation in Berlin arose in which the majority of the proletariat and thus possibly the majority of the capital’s population opposed the government, which, with its call for elections to the National Assembly, represented the majority of the German people, but had little power. This was the so-called January Uprising.
In its early days, it was nothing more than a huge protest demonstration against the dismissal of the police chief Emil Eichhorn, who belonged to the Independent Social Democracy, which had been decreed by the now purely majority socialist government. But against Rosa Luxemburg’s wishes, the decision was made in the relevant bodies to bring about the overthrow of the government, and the document was also signed by Karl Liebknecht, so that the government, for its part, could announce on January 8, with a clever restriction to the already most hated of its opponents: “Spartacus is now fighting for all power…The people shall not be allowed to speak…” Since any reliable republican troops were scarce, the People’s Commissioner Gustav Noske, in cooperation with General von Lüttwitz, had to resort to the units of the old army and the newly formed Freikorps. The situation might be compared to that which would have arisen in Russia if Kerensky and Kornilov had worked together. In any case, the Rote Fahne and Rosa Luxemburg took the side of the fighters with one caveat: Friedrich Ebert was described as the “mortal enemy of the revolution,” and the newspaper turned with the greatest vehemence against the “plum-soft elements” who were willing to negotiate. The reports of the fighting read very much like army reports, but they were dominated by an incomparably stronger moral pathos, based on the conviction that the workers were historically right in relation to the bourgeoisie, which must therefore resort to desperate atrocities such as shooting of parliamentarians by government troops. On January 14, Rosa Luxemburg’s last editorial was published under the heading “Order Reigns in Berlin,” brimming with anger and contempt for the “Berlin petty-bourgeois mob” and the “miserable defeats of Flanders and the Argonnes,” ending with the expression of an unbreakable faith to the eventual triumph of the revolution: “The leadership has failed. But the masses are the decisive factor, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built… ‘Order reigns in Berlin,’ you dull henchmen. Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘rattle up again’ and to your horror announce with the sound of trumpets: ‘I was, I am, I will be!’”
One day later Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were dead. The fact that attempts were made to conceal the circumstances of these deaths, and that until 1933 the opponents spoke of a murder by a few soldiers and officers of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division, is convincing proof of how strong the consciousness of the rule of law still was in Germany, and how little one saw oneself in a genuine civil war, which was a continuation of the Russian one. When, a few months later, Eugen Leviné, the leading man in the Munich Soviet Republic, was sentenced to death and executed, the Independent Social Democratic Party newspaper complained that it was a socialist government of all things that had carried out the first political death sentence in Germany since 1848. The action of the hunter Otto Runge and his instigators could not be morally or legally justified, because it meant the killing of defenseless prisoners. But whoever speaks this truth is nevertheless lying if he does not add that Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, although wholly or partly against their original will, had led an uprising against the government, that for a year in Russia hundreds and thousands of arrested and therefore defenseless opponents, among them the 350 prisoners of the uprising of Yaroslavl had been shot by the Cheka in a trial, and that the officers, who instigated the hunter Runge to his crime, knew this. Far more appropriate than the correct and at the same time mostly untrue statements about the “murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg” are sentences that can be found in a announcement by the Communist Party of Germany from April 1921 about the alleged betrayal of Paul Levi, which reads as follows: Paul Levi stabbed his fighting comrades in the back. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were completely different. They were against the uprising of January 1919, but they fought along with it and fell.
The March fighting of 1919 also took place in a very dangerous situation for the government: severe unrest and large-scale strikes shook central Germany and the Ruhr, and they were motivated not least by anger at a government that failed to advance the promised socialization. But meanwhile, after the January 19 elections, which—unlike in Russia—gained the socialist parties only about 45% of the votes, the National Assembly was constituted in Weimar. Thus, the suspicion is perhaps not unfounded that the government now wanted to finally bring the situation in Berlin under control and literally had the city conquered militarily, with a total of 1,200 people being killed, and the government troops particularly displayed the brutality that relatively small formations of troops often display in confronting large numbers of poorly armed civilians. Lieutenant Marloh, for example, had 29 sailors shot without sufficient cause. Exaggerated rumors of atrocities committed by the Spartacists in Lichtenberg had aroused the troops to great excitement, and further summary executions in turn generated indelible bitterness against the “Noskedians” (translator: communist slur for supporters of Gustav Noske) or “Noske-hounds” in the great mass of the population of East Berlin. However, the Rote Fahne was by no means merely defensive in its appeals and proclaimed: “The revolution can only advance over the grave of that majority Social Democracy…Down with the National Assembly…Your brothers are on strike. The capitalists are faltering. The government is about to topple.”
No sooner had the government in Berlin prevailed than, following the assassination of Kurt Eisner, the Munich Soviet Republic was proclaimed, which was initially ruled by libertarian socialists like Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam for a week, until April 14, with communists like Eugen Leviné, Max Levien and Tobias Axelrod taking their place. There were no serious bloodshed, with the exception of the shooting of several hostages in the Luitpoldgymnasium, but the anarchist sham soviet republic had already frightened the bourgeoisie when it announced on April 10 that revolutionary tribunals would be set up, the verdicts of which would be “immediately executed” with no possibility of appeal. And here the Russian example was overwhelming. The government of the Social Democrat Hoffmann, which had fled to Bamberg, issued an proclamation in which it stated: “Russian terror is raging in Munich, unleashed by elements foreign to the country…” It was certainly more a threat than a reality. But on April 27, Lenin sent a letter of welcome to the Bavarian Soviet Republic, in which he gave very far-reaching instructions in the form of questions: “…what measures (have) you take to fight the bourgeois hangmen Scheidemann and co.? Have you…armed the workers, disarmed the bourgeoisie…restricted the living quarters of the bourgeoisie in Munich for the immediate admission of workers to the homes of the rich…(and) taken hostages from the bourgeoisie?” That antipathy to foreigners and foreign interference was not limited to the right, however, is evident even from the example of Ernst Toller, who said at a crucial meeting of the governing bodies on April 26 that the present government is a misfortune because it always operated on the argument: “In Russia we did it differently.” But “we Bavarians” do not see any Russians! Even more characteristic is a sentence that Thomas Mann entered in his diary on May 2, 1919, when shots could still be heard everywhere being exchanged by the invading Freikorps and the retreating Spartacists: “We talked about (whether it was still possible to save European culture)…or whether the Kyrgyz idea of razing and destroying would prevail…We also spoke of the type of the Russian Jew, the leader of the world movement, this explosive mixture of Jewish intellectual radicalism and Slavic fanaticism for Christ. A world that still possesses the instinct of self-preservation must take action against this race of people with all the energy and utmost brevity that can be mustered…”
In Russia, March and April 1919 marked the first peak of hope for the imminent world revolution. For Lenin, the emergence of the Communist Party of Germany “with such world-renowned and world-renowned leaders as Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring” already meant, in effect, the beginning of the new Communist International, and the founding meeting in Moscow at the beginning of March was for him that just a kind of formal enactment. However, it took place in an extremely modest setting and with almost one delegate from the relevant parties, but above all against the will of Rosa Luxemburg, who had not yet considered the time to be ripe. Indeed, Soviet Russia was in a very difficult position: facing various Allied interventions and the deployment of powerful White armies, it was all but cut off from the rest of the world and faced with a completely disorganized economy. But rarely in history has the discrepancy between an exceedingly meager material base and an enthusiastic, overarching, universal belief been so great. The manifestos and appeals addressed to the whole world by this small gathering of 51 delegates, most of whom were Russians, were imbued with such fire and such force of enthusiasm that no Allied victory proclamation, nor any well-meaning Wilson’s plan for the future, could be addressed to them put aside. In the “Guidelines of the Communist International” written by Bukharin it said: “The new epoch is born. The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, its internal decomposition, the epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat…It must break the rule of capital, make wars impossible, abolish the borders of states, transform the whole world into a community working for itself, bring about the brotherhood and liberation of peoples.” And at the same time, these demands of militant universalism were placed in a great historical line: “Rejecting the half-measures, mendacity and rottenness of the official socialist parties that have survived, we, the communists united in the Third International, feel ourselves to be the direct continuers of the heroic efforts and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations, from Babeuf to Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg.” But these confident hopes and predictions reached their highest point in the May Day appeal which the Executive Committee of the International, aware that it was now honoring the Hungarian and Bavarian Soviet Republics along with the Russian, addressed the communists in Bavaria: “The storm begins. The conflagration of the proletarian revolution is blazing with unstoppable force across Europe. The moment is approaching that our predecessors and teachers awaited…The dream of the best representatives of humanity is becoming a reality…The hour of our oppressors has come. May 1, 1919 must be the day of the advance, the day of the proletarian revolution throughout Europe…In 1919 the great Communist International was born. In 1920 the great International Soviet Republic will be born.”
To a skeptical observer, however, it would have been more likely that the year 1919 would spell the end of the Soviet Republic. In southern Russia, General Denikin’s volunteer army advanced far north, supported by the Allies and especially by the new British Secretary of War, Winston Churchill, with much material and military missions. In Siberia, Admiral Kolchak had overthrown the party government, and his troops, joined by the Czechoslovaks, were outside Samara and not far from Simbirsk by the end of April. In the former Baltic provinces, German troops and the Baltische Landeswehr were still fighting both against the Bolsheviks and against the bourgeois-nationalist Latvians and Estonians; Petrograd remained threatened. To the north, Allied troops remained at Arkhangelsk, striving to install a Russian regime under a Social Revolutionary. The red area was now barely larger than the Grand Duchy of Moscow had been before Peter the Great, and it suffered terribly from starvation, being cut off from the main grain areas and unable to supply its peasants with industrial goods, so that Lenin was forced to send requisition squads of workers from the towns to the villages, who there sought to unite with the village poor in a merciless raid against the kulaks.
Thus, the external civil war ran parallel to the internal class war, and this was the characteristic and unprecedented thing, for never before in modern history had the head of government treated large groups of his own population as “the dogs and pigs of the dying bourgeoisie” or as “spiders” and “parasites” against which a merciless fight had to be fought. On the fronts, however, the fighting was equally bitter on both sides, and even neutral observers frequently reported that it was waged whites with greater ferocity by the Whites than by the Reds, because the latter often only killed the captured officers and treated the men as class brothers and set them at freedom. Indeed, the passage of entire units to the enemy contributed greatly to the defeat suffered by the Kolchak army in May and June before it could establish contact with Denikin, and after a heavy defeat of the Czechoslovaks, the retreat turned into that dramatic escape across the thousands of kilometers of the Trans-Siberian railroad line, in which hundreds of thousands fell and hundreds of thousands more fleeing civilians died of exhaustion.
By the time Denikin advanced toward of Moscow, Kolchak was already defeated, and by the time General Yudenich’s North-West Army reached the outskirts of Petrograd in October, Denikin had already been forced to retreat. The White armies, the Allies, the nationalist Latvians and Estonians, the peasant anarchists of Makhno in the Ukraine and the Ukrainian nationalists under Petlyura, the Poles and the Caucasians fought together against the Bolsheviks and at the same time secretly and partly openly against each other, since some wanted to restore the Russian empire and others wanted to weaken it, as some fought for their own independence and others for acquiring land or securing supplies of raw materials. Moreover, both in Soviet territory and behind the White fronts, Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks effectively sided with the Bolsheviks when the danger seemed great that a reactionary general would enter Moscow victoriously. Lenin well full knew that he owed his victory in the civil war as much to the disunity of his opponents, just as the triumph of his revolution was due to the adoption of the land program of the Social Revolutionaries. Thus, although by the end of 1919, large parts of the former Tsarist Empire had made themselves independent—in addition to the new Baltic Sea states and Finland, not least Georgia—but only Denikin’s troops in the area north of the Crimea whose supreme command soon passed to General von Wrangel, were to be regarded as an efficient and not yet completely discouraged civil war army. Only the Poles, dreaming of a restoration of the borders of 1772, were a threatening external power. But the Russian bourgeoisie and the Russian nobility no longer existed, even if numerous individuals escaped physical annihilation and hid somewhere in the mighty Soviet bureaucracy: the exploiting classes were liquidated, in accordance with the party’s program, and far more than a million of their members found poor shelter in the countries of Europe in one of the largest flight movements the world had seen up to that point. However, the world revolution in 1919 had lost two countries, namely Hungary and Bavaria. But the main reason why Churchill had not been able to prevail against Lloyd George in his demands for stronger White support was that the Prime Minister was greatly disturbed by revolutionary tendencies in England and preferred to have a Bolshevik Russia than a Bolshevik England. And the year 1920 was to bring another push of revolution very soon.
In Germany, in the second half of 1919, there had not been much talk about the Communist Party, but all the more of the intolerable conditions of the Peace of Versailles, of the “war guilt lie” of Article 231, of the shameful demand of the Allies for the extradition of the German war criminals and in particular the former Kaiser. The party had been banned, and at an illegal party conference in Heidelberg, it broke away from those left-wing radicals who had outvoted Rosa Luxemburg at the first party conference on the issue of election participation, and who were now partly drifting into National Bolshevik waters like the two Hamburgers, Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim. Still, it is not unbelievable that General von Lüttwitz, whose troops had saved the Social Democratic Party government a year earlier, was worried not only by the reduction in army strength demanded by the Allies, but also by the growth of Bolshevism, for he had his eye primarily on the focused on the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, which seemed to be getting stronger. These concerns and also the understandable desire to see the first Reichstag elections scheduled soon resulted in the so-called Kapp Putsch, which brought Berlin under the power of the mutinous “Brigade Ehrhardt” for a few days and forced the Reich government to go first to Dresden and then to Stuttgart.
In addition to the resistance of the Berlin civil service and the neutrality of the majority of the Reichswehr, the decisive factor in the early resignation of the Putsch Reich Chancellor Wolfgang Kapp, who had found a lot of support above all in East Germany, was the political general strike, which the Social Democratic members of the Reich government called for to the workers. This appeal basically spoke the language of the proletarian revolution: “We didn't make the revolution in order to recognize the bloody Landsknecht regiment again today. We do not make pacts with the Baltic criminals…Workers, comrades…Use every means to destroy this return of bloody reaction…Strike, lay down work and cut the air off to this military dictatorship…Proletarians, unite!”
It was not surprising that this general strike was now also directed against the government, of which Gustav Noske was a member, and that the left wing of the Independent Social Democratic Party was now sought to make up for the failure of 1918. Nevertheless, the government was obviously surprised at how quickly Red Army detachments were formed in many places in Germany and how successful the unification was, at least in one region, namely the Ruhr area. Here, not only Reichswehr units but also police detachments were defeated, and there was good reason to speak of a German “March Revolution.” The Communist Party of Germany, however, was only slightly involved in this, and at first it had even wanted to maintain a gleeful neutrality in the struggle of the “Ebertines” and the “Lüttwitze,” but rumors soon ascribed them and even to Russians a leading role, and this also aggravated the fighting, in which the government even had to resort to the troops against which their Social Democratic members had called for a general strike. For a good two weeks Germany was a kind of Russia, where a genuine civil war raged between large armed formations, and a speech made by Gustav Stresemann to the Executive Committee of his party on March 28, 1920, referred entirely to the Russian example: it had been established that officers of the Russian Red Army had stayed here in Berlin and that Lenin had sent popular speakers to Germany. Conditions in Germany developed with photographic truth like those in Russia. “Just as in our country they want to disarm troops and create workers’ battalions, as exactly how Kerensky did it, and Lenin was his successor. If it continues like this, Bolshevism will be the sea in which we will finally drown.” But the worst thing he said, was that the Democratic Party was now taking part in attacks on the Reichswehr and was thereby denying the interests of the bourgeoisie. “Can one be surprised if officers waver in the fight against Bolshevism?”
Ultimately, the Reichswehr did not falter and they crushed the uprising, sometimes with great brutality, so that the young soldier confided in his diary: “In the field we were much more humane towards the French.” Thus this short German civil war intensified the hatred on both sides, and it robbed the center even more of self-confidence and moral authority: it intensified the hatred of numerous independents and communists against the soldiery and the Social Democratic Party government, which had once again betrayed the revolution; it intensified the soldiers’ hatred of the Bolsheviks and above all of the social-democratic Marxists, who again and again allowed themselves to be rescued by the soldiers and yet again and again insulted and offended their rescuers. But a deep dislike was now also directed—as with the Russian Whites—against the bourgeoisie, who had proven to be philistine and lacking in energy, although Max Hölz had posters put up during the fighting in the Vogtland on which he threatened to set fire to the whole city at once and slaughter the bourgeoisie immediately upon the arrival of the Reichswehr, regardless of sex or age.
The consequences of the Kapp putsch were strange. The Reichstag elections took place on June 6, 1920, and they cost the Weimar coalition its majority. The Independent Social Democratic Party grew tremendously and was now almost as strong as the Social Democrats, but the German Nationalists also made significant gains. The Social Democrat Hermann Müller first negotiated with the leader of the Independents, Arthur Crispien, but the latter turned down the offer to participate in the government because his party wanted the “possession of political power by the proletariat and its autocracy until the realization of socialism.” In the end a bourgeois government was formed under the center politician Fehrenbach, and since in Bavaria the Social Democrat Hoffmann was replaced by Gustav von Kahr immediately after the putsch, it was ultimately the bourgeois parties that drew the greatest profits from the civil war, even though they had basically only watched it.
The communists thus found their minimum demand fulfilled, namely the end of the social-democratic-bourgeois coalition, but in a completely different way than they had imagined. An alliance of all socialist parties and government leadership by a representative of the trade unions would at least have been a step in the Soviet direction, towards that situation which the Bolsheviks by seizing power had not allowed to develop further. But it now looked as if parliamentary maneuvers were no longer needed to bring about a breakthrough in the world revolution in Germany. In the spring, Josef Pilsudski, once leader of the Polish Socialist Party and now founder of a state not yet defined in its borders and role, had attacked Soviet Russia in alliance with the Ukrainian nationalists Petliura in order to create a large Eastern European federation from the Baltic to the Black Sea that would render Soviet Russia harmless to civilized Europe. But on June 11 Kiev, which had just been conquered, had to be evacuated again, and then the allied Poles and Ukrainians suffered one defeat after another. The question was whether to stop at the so-called Curzon Line, but Lenin got his way, and for the first time the Red Army crossed the borders of their country to bring freedom to the workers and peasants of Poland oppressed by the Pany—the feudal lords—as a precautionary new government announced. But Lenin’s real goal was Germany, that is, revolution in Germany, and Trotsky too now saw the moment approaching when Russians and Germans would join forces in the great battle of the Rhine against the Entente. The hatred of Poland among many German nationalists was so strong that this prospect was greeted with enthusiasm, and the press reports on the Soviet troops now standing on the borders of East Prussia were generally very positive. Western Europe held its breath and seemed completely paralyzed for a time, especially as the Soviet government's appeals to workers to stop all shipments of munitions and materials to Poland fell on fertile ground, particularly among the English trade unions. Articles in the press often portrayed Poland as an all too weak bulwark trying desperately bravely to save the whole of Europe from the onslaught of eastern hordes. Americans were content with a note from Secretary of State Colby equating militant Communism with military autocracy and harshly opposing Americanism. The French supported General Wrangel in the last offensive undertaken in the Russian Civil War, which brought some relief to the Poles. But even General Weygand’s military mission could not have turned the tide of fate if the traditional hatred of the Russians had not been stronger among the Polish workers and peasants than their aversion to the ruling class, which had long since ceased to hold the reins alone. This allowed Pilsudski to reorganize his army and win the Battle of Warsaw. In the preliminary peace of Riga he was promised western Ukraine and large parts of Belarus, and in exchange he let Petlyura and Wrangel fall, just as the Allies had dropped Kolchak in the beginning of the year. Wrangel embarked with his troops from the Crimea for Constantinople in November, and with that the Russian civil war came to an end, which many emigrants considered to be only a temporary end.
Around the same time, the German Communist Party became a mass party, merging with the left wing of the Independent Social Democratic Party to form the United Communist Party of Germany. The prerequisite for this had been the decisions of the Second World Congress of the Communist International, which had been meeting in Moscow during the decisive period of the Soviet-Polish war and whose delegates had followed with the greatest enthusiasm the constant advance of the front lines on the large wall map displayed in the Congress building. Here Lenin had those 21 conditions passed, which now also brought the split to the large left-wing socialist parties in Europe, namely the German Independent Social Democratic Party, the Italian Socialist Party and the French Section of the Workers’ International. These conditions constituted the Communist International as a centralized world party, divided into sections, excluding from itself all reformists, centrists, social-pacifists and even the supporters of the yellow trade union federations, even if they, like the Italian Filippo Turati, had been staunch opponents of the war. They required of each of the sections to create illegal parallel apparatuses in preparation for the civil war phase, to practice systematic propaganda of disintegration in the armies, to undertake the obligation to provide unconditional support to “every Soviet republic” (i.e. practically Soviet Russia), and to leave no doubt by their entire behavior that the Communist International had “declared war on the whole bourgeois world and on all yellow social-democratic parties.” (translator: “yellow” as in coward.) To all incredulous observers, these conditions could mean nothing else than that Russia, defeated in the world war, was seeking, in a manner as subtle as it was insidious, to secure its self-assertion and to prepare its revenge by trying to incite the masses of workers and peasants in the enemy states against the ruling class of their country by taking advantage of freedom of propaganda and freedom of organization, which they withheld from the surviving opponents. The right-wing socialists, on the other hand, had to admit that Lenin obviously equated Western imperialism with the inclusion of a large part of the socialists in the parliamentary system, which had begun in France around 1900 and which even seemed to be gaining acceptance in Russia in 1917, the inclusion that had deep roots in European history and which, by all human judgement, would have prevented another great war if carried out by a large majority and without reservations. But the strong left wings in all parties evidently shared Lenin’s conviction that socialists should not participate, but rule alone, because only then could all rule be abolished. Only this third interpretation could arouse enthusiasm, and in fact no party could raise a higher claim than that expressed in the last sentence of the manifesto passed by the Congress: “Workers and working women! On earth there is only one sign worthy of fighting and dying under: that sign is the Communist International.” And it wasn’t a baseless enthusiasm. Where else in the world could the delegates have been shown a royal palace which, like the tsar’s palace in Tsarskoye Selo, had been converted into a children’s home, where else was there so much effort to eliminate illiteracy, where did ordinary workers have such unlimited opportunities to develop their literary talents or to hold the highest positions in the state? Had not, indeed, the party of progress actually seized power in Soviet Russia?
The tremendous prestige that Soviet communism had won through its victory was nowhere more evident than in Germany. When the Independent Social Democratic Party delegates met in Halle in October 1920 to decide whether or not to accept the 21 conditions, the Comintern emissary, Grigory Zinoviev, was greeted with a roar of rapturous applause, although a strong minority did not raise a hand in greeting. And then Zinoviev spoke for several hours with such captivating persuasiveness that some newspapers in their reports called him the greatest orator of the century. With the strongest emphasis he accused the right-wingers around Crispien and Hilferding with the fact that the fear of the revolution running through their entire policy, and contrasted this with his own faith, which had brought tears to his eyes when a few weeks ago at the Congress of the Awakening Peoples of Asia in Baku, hundreds of Turks and Persians had joined in the singing of the Internationale. Thus, for all mankind, the light would come from the East and the opponents of unification were completely wrong when they complain about the naiveté of the masses, because “the so-called naive, religious belief of the proletarian masses” is “in fact the most important revolutionary factor in world history.” Now in this thesis a very strong change, even a reversal of Marxism, could undoubtedly be seen. But the orthodox Marxists, among them Rudolf Hilferding and Julius Martov, did not find nearly as much support with their speeches “against the Moscow dictate,” although cries of indignation were audible when Martov described the tactics of the Cheka tactics and added that he was ashamed of his country where such things are possible. The majority of the delegates agreed with the decision, which Zinoviev immediately placed in a very broad historical perspective when he said at the end of his speech: “A great united Communist Party will now be formed in Germany, and that is the greatest historical event these days.” Thus the small “Communist Party of Germany, Section of the Communist International” became the large “United Communist Party of Germany,” which of course was also a section of the Communist International. 300,000 members of the Independent Social Democratic Party went along with the move, while 300,000 remained with the old party, which two years later reunited with the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (translator: the name officially used by the Social Democratic Party 1917-1922). The United Communist Party of Germany now had about 350,000 members, and was headed by co-chairmen Paul Levi, a very cultured lawyer and student of Rosa Luxemburg, and Ernst Däumig of the Independent Social Democratic Party.
A little later, Zinoviev published a report on his “Twelve Days in Germany.” Not without good reason could he assert that the vast majority of German workers were on the side of the Russian revolution and that the propaganda of right-wing intellectuals and petty-bourgeois labor aristocrats against the “Moscow scourge” or the “Moscow despots” had fallen on barren ground. Even more interesting, however, were the impressions that the party leader of Petrograd, which according to all reports was desolate and starving, had gained in Germany, impressions of the “lavish shops, bursting with delicacies” and of the “sated, stupid bourgeois” who were masters of the situation. “When will it finally end? When, when will the giant, the German proletarian, stretch his shoulders and shake off all this bourgeois filth that occupies the top of the pyramid? Curse it, thrice curse it, the ‘civilized’ capitalist world that crushes the living soul and turns millions of people into slaves…Only when not one stone is left upon another by German Menshevism will the way be clear; only then will the powerful workers’ organizations in Germany…become powerful lever, with which the German working class overthrows the old Germany and finishes off the bourgeoisie.” Rarely has the inner connection between the criticism of civilization and the intention of annihilation, which is one of the hallmarks of early Bolshevism, been formulated as clearly as here by the chairman of the Communist International. Zinoviev named the complete abolition of money and the naturalization of wages as the remedy that had almost been realized in Russia. But just a few months later this remedy was thrown into the scrap heap in Soviet Russia.
The period of the Russian civil war had been, after all, a time of wartime communism, which on the one hand was associated with great hopes for the imminent realization of a no-longer-capitalist way of life of “everything belongs to everyone” and was characterized by great agitation and cultural impetus, but which nevertheless, already meant a clear suppression of the spontaneous and strengthening of the party and state headquarters as well as disciplining in the army and industry. This raised the question of what role the unions should play in the workers’ state: would they continue to be a representative body of the workers’ interests, or organs of the arbiters for the self-government of industry, or would they be the transmission belts for the party, which might one day have labor requisitioned in much the same was as it requisitioned the peasants’ grain? As early as 1919 and 1920, the beginnings of a workers’ opposition became apparent, and various groups attempted to constitute themselves as an opposition or as a faction. The strongest impetus was the complaint about the Soviet bureaucracy, but also about one-man management, the role of specialists, conformism and opportunism. All of this leads to the paradoxical result that (as Alexandra Kollontai put it) “only the most important class of the Soviet Republic…in its masses leads a shamefully miserable existence in forced labor.”
Lenin, for his part, had a keen sense of the unsustainability and the hopelessness of the situation. He sought to remedy this by giving economic leeway to spontaneity by replacing requisitions with taxes in kind, thereby giving the peasants the opportunity to sell their surpluses on the open market. Now a certain degree of free trade and a class of businessmen and merchants capable of capitalist activity in a variety of ways had to necessarily emerge. This is exactly what Lenin called the “New Economic Policy” (NEP), and he had its main features decided upon at the Tenth Party Congress, which began to meet at the beginning of March. But all the more firmly he stuck to the principle of political party dictatorship and did not hesitate to use the term “state capitalism.” In fact, as early as 1918, he had made very peculiar statements which he now emphatically repeated in his essay “On the Tax in Kind”: “If the revolution in Germany is still hesitant to ‘break out,’ then it is our task to learn the state capitalism of the Germans, to take it over with all our might, to spare no dictatorial methods in order to accelerate this transfer of Western culture to barbaric Russia, without shrinking from barbaric methods of fighting against barbarism.” Now, at the beginning of 1921, the revolution was in Germany had not yet broken out. If Russia, however, became a development-dictatorship, over whose nationalized large-scale industry the top body of the party had unconditional control, while below that level the situation was largely determined by free trade and small-capitalist traders and entrepreneurs, then the anarchist-utopian pathos that seemed to be at the core of communism qua Soviet rule had to be directed with redoubled force against a situation that was by all accounts worse than the high capitalism that prevailed in the West.
The first and most powerful expression of this criticism, because it was organized and armed, and was directed primarily against certain manifestations of War Communism, was the uprising of the sailors and the population of Kronstadt. It coincided with the Tenth Party Congress, and probably not entirely by chance, because there had been numerous unrests and strikes beforehand, especially in Petrograd, and conversely, the forthcoming relaxation of the rules had already made itself felt in various hints.
The following demands were made by the plenary assembly of the crews of the first and second brigades of battleships on March 1, 1921: new elections to the soviets on the terms of secret ballot; freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, anarchists and left-wing socialist parties; freedom of assembly; freedom of trade unions and peasant associations; liberation of all political prisoners belonging to socialist parties; election of a commission to review the trial records of all those locked up in prisons and concentration camps; freedom of peasants to dispose of their land provided they do not use wage labor; free artisanal production based on their own work.
To a large extent, then, these were the demands of 1917, which the Russian Communist Party claimed to have carried out. But this was precisely what Lenin and the party evidently took as an intolerable threat. Immediately preparations were made for the military suppression of the mutiny, and with it the tone of the Kronstadters became even sharper: “To everyone, everyone, everyone!…Wading up to his hips in the fraternal blood of the working people, the bloodthirsty Field Marshal Trotsky was the first to open fire on revolutionary Kronstadt for rebelling against the rule of Communists in order to restore real power of the soviets…In this sea of blood the Communists are drowning all the great and luminous promises and slogans of the workers’ revolution…Life under the yoke has become more terrible than death…Here in Kronstadt the cornerstone of the Third Revolution was laid…which will open a new broad path to creative activity in the spirit of socialism.”
When one considers how central the concepts of the masses, self-activity, liberation, and absence of domination had been in the Russian revolution and how they were invoked here as testimony against that revolution, then it was all too understandable that the Communist International gave the order in Germany to finally achieve a breakthrough with the new mass party and either force victory or at least divert the world’s attention from Kronstadt. In fact, during Easter week, in the midst of the extremely difficult situation in which the bourgeois Fehrenbach government found itself as a result of the excessive reparation demands of the Entente and impotent attempts at resistance, the so-called “March Action” broke out, which was in fact a large-scale uprising in the central German industrial area and also could be described as a “March Revolution,” especially since violent actions also took place in Hamburg and other large cities while the Communist Party of Germany called for a political general strike. However, a police action by Oberpresident Hörsing interfered with the preparations that were made as a result of the so-called theory of the revolutionary offensive, so that there could also be talk of provocation and resistance. The Rote Fahne used extraordinarily sharp language: “The German bourgeoisie and their social-democratic rabble of leaders have wrested the weapons from the hands of the proletariat…Like Kahr on the one hand, the proletariat must on the other: whistle at the law. Every counter-revolutionary has his weapon. The workers must not be worse revolutionaries than those counter-revolutionaries are.”
The difference, however, was that this time the counter-revolutionaries, who were particularly identified as the Bavarian self-defense organization “Organization Escherich,” had not staged a putsch as they had the year before. And there was not nearly as much spontaneous agitation among the workers as in March 1920, so that the party had to resort to a multitude of artificial means: assassinations, demolitions, inciting the security police with slogans like: “Overturn the streetcars, throw hand grenades!” According to the party, hundreds of thousands went into battle, more than the year before in the Ruhr, but not millions, and only with millions could this civil war have been victorious. Therefore, there had been strong resistance in the party leadership, and the delegates of the Comintern, among them Matias Rakosi and Bela Kun, had to use all their authority to get their way.
The worst thing about this defeat, however, was that the previous party leader Paul Levi published a document already in April in which he described the action as “the greatest Bakuninist putsch in history so far,” as a war by the communists against four-fifths of the German workers who had been outrageously insulted by the Rote Fahne. Levi named the envoys of the Comintern as those actually responsible, and characterized them with the evil expression “Turkestans.”
For this, of course, he was expelled from the party, but with the founding of the “Communist Working Group” he completed the first split from the United Communist Party of Germany. Thus, a Western European communism seemed to oppose Soviet communism, and not entirely infrequently the anti-Bolshevism of heterodox communists was spoken of.
Thus, in the spring of 1921, the Communist Party of Soviet Russia had definitely won the great civil war, but at the same time it seemed to have changed in a strange way with the introduction of the NEP. During the war it had been part of the great pan-European party of protest and hope, and afterwards it had won a world-historical triumph as the Russian party of civil war and the social annihilation of hostile classes, which admittedly also included the suppression of massive peasant uprisings, which were hardly be attributed merely to the activity of kulaks. Would it not now either have to expand to all of Europe as a party of world revolution, or else transform itself into a party of industrialization, treading a path that no one before it had ever trodden? Or would it even become a “war party,” as the Menshevik Noe Jordania accused it after Soviet troops crossed a border recognized under international law for the second time in February 1921 and subjugated Georgia?
The fact that it got into this dilemma was due to the defeats suffered by the German party and the German revolution. The transition to the NEP meant only gaining a breathing space, and the new decision-making situation came about in 1923, the year of the great German crisis. But if there was anti-Bolshevism even in the ranks of the communists in 1920 and 1921, then it would have been more than strange if a much more pronounced anti-Bolshevism had not arisen in the meantime on the soil of that bourgeois world, whose executioner communism wanted to be, which would have a word and would also throw a sword into the balance for all future decisions.