A Bolshevik Approach to Perestroika?

Western observers may have scoffed last year when Mikhail S. Gorbachev titled his speech commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution “Perestroika--the October Revolution Continues.” What could possibly link the revolutionary events of 1917 with the reform program being pursued by Gorbachev for the Soviet Union’s revitalization by the year 2000?

In light of the startling events that have taken place in the Soviet Union during this past year, however, the links are becoming more visible. Indeed, whether one looks at the reform of the Soviet political system, the reorganization of industrial management, fundamental changes in farm policy or the beginnings of a new approach to nationality problems, current Soviet policies often bear striking resemblances to Bolshevik practices and goals in 1917 that were initially undermined by the struggle for survival in the civil war and subsequently obliterated altogether by Josef Stalin.

Take the issue of reform of the Soviet political system. In 1917, before its ranks were decimated by wartime losses, the Bolshevik Party was relatively democratic in its structure and its method of operation. Local party organizations, whose affairs were conducted almost exclusively by elected representatives, had close indigenous ties to workers, soldiers and sailors, ensuring that their slogans and tactics were responsive to mass aspirations. Initiative from below and diversity of opinion and free-wheeling debate at all levels of the party were tolerated and even encouraged. All of these characteristics figured prominently in the Bolsheviks’ success in 1917, and all are among the changes now vigorously fostered by Gorbachev.

In 1917 the chief Bolshevik political slogan was “All Power to the Soviets.” To the revolutionary Russian masses this meant the transfer of political authority from the liberal/moderate socialist Provisional government, formed after the February, 1917, revolution, to national and local governments that would be established by the elected popular assemblies, or soviets, which also had been created after the overthrow of the czar. These new governments would be made up exclusively of representatives of socialist parties, proportional to their relative strength in the soviets. So powerful was the idea of multi-party soviet government among the masses in Russia in 1917 that the possibility of an exclusively Bolshevik regime was never raised publicly during the entire period from February to October. Indeed, even when they overthrew the Provisional government the Bolsheviks had no choice but to act in the name of democratic soviet power.

Even as he has mandated the significant enhancement of independent national and local government institutions at the expense of the former all-embracing power of the Communist Party, Gorbachev has made it clear that the party will remain the only legally recognized one permitted to exist. However, it is difficult to envision how the traditional Soviet one-party system can long survive if, as now appears possible, governmental institutions are to be imbued with genuinely independent political authority, the internal operations of soviets are democratized according to plans already being implemented, and non-party representatives of the countless independent political and environmental groups already in existence are able to nominate candidates for government posts.

Similarly, present efforts to involve ordinary workers more directly and meaningfully in factory management, the repudiation of forced collectivization coupled with the encouragement of family farms, and the apparent willingness of Gorbachev to tolerate a significantly greater degree of autonomy among non-Russian nationalities are deeply rooted in Bolshevik ideals of 1917. Suffice it to note that in 1917 the popular slogan “Workers Control” meant worker participation in management through elective factory committees. Among the peasantry, the Bolshevik agrarian program was invariably interpreted as standing for more land to individual peasants. And ethnic minorities frequently flocked to the Bolsheviks precisely because they stood firmly for national self-determination.

None of this is to suggest that Gorbachev’s democratizing reforms will succeed or achieve their objectives--although one can only hope that this will be the case. It is simply to state that these reforms are by no means foreign to what the October Revolution was all about.