Lars Lih’s What was Bolshevism: The Trap of Continuity

 Originally published by Left Voice.

The Canadian academic Lars Lih is an independent scholar of Soviet history with a particular focus on Lenin and Bolshevism. Lih’s magnum opus Lenin Rediscovered (2005) is a serious study of Lenin’s What is To Be Done? (WITBD), in which he challenged Cold War caricatures of the Bolshevik leader as an elitist bent on totalitarian domination. In this work, Lih proved that Lenin was a dedicated Marxist committed to the emancipation of the working class.

What Was Bolshevism? includes many of Lih’s previously published essays on Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. The nineteen chapters cover a multitude of topics such as war communism, the New Economic Policy, Stalinism, and perestroika. In contrast to Lenin Rediscovered, Lih deemphasizes Lenin and focuses on leading communists such as Trotsky, Bukharin, Stalin, and Zinoviev to understand the meaning of Bolshevism. In erudite and accessible writing, Lih deconstructs longstanding myths on the Left and Right. Still, Lih cannot truly understand Bolshevism since his methodology is marred by textual formalism and an overemphasis on political continuity. 

Bolshevism and Kautskyism

In contrast to the rest of the book, Lih’s introductory chapter centers around Lenin and repeats his previous arguments on WITBD. Following Lenin Rediscovered, he claims both Cold Warriors and leftist activists have largely misunderstood Lenin since they considered WITBD to be the foundational text of Bolshevism. Rather, Lih claims that Bolshevism’s political ideas adhered to the orthodox Marxism of Karl Kautsky: “I assume the essential continuity of Bolshevism’s message from its beginnings… Much of my writing over the last decade or so has examined the case for the alleged ruptures in 1914 and 1917 and found them wanting.” (p. 4)

Lih argues that WITBD did not advocate a “party of a new type” or a vanguard organization of proletarian revolutionaries. Rather, Lenin’s political ideas followed the model of the German Social Democratic Party as codified by Karl Kautsky’s Erfurt Program: “This book defined Social Democracy for Russian activists – it was the book one read to find out what it meant to be a Social Democrat. In 1894, a young provincial revolutionary named Vladimir Ulianov translated The Erfurt Program into Russian just at the time he was acquiring his life-long identity as a revolutionary Social Democrat.” (p. 45)

Kautsky’s ideal was that social democracy should be the party of the whole class – embracing all tendencies of the working-class movement. The implication of Lenin’s arguments in WITBD was that the party could not be “a party of the whole class.” Due to the uneven nature of consciousness inside the working class, the party should seek to organize its advanced layers. This was not in order to create a conspiratorial organization, but because a disciplined and centralized party of Marxists could act more effectively in the working-class movement than a loose and undisciplined one.

Kautsky believed that the steady accumulation of votes and parliamentary seats by social democracy guaranteed victory, meaning the party did not have to engage in revolutionary action. In effect, history would inevitably go their way. In contrast to Kautsky’s “revolutionary” fatalism, Lenin’s approach was dominated by what Georg Lukács called the “actuality of revolution.” This meant he viewed every action by the party as crucial links in a chain leading to the goal of proletarian revolution. This viewpoint had drastic effects on how Lenin envisioned the role of a communist party. For Lenin, a vanguard party was not a vehicle for collecting votes, nor did it passively await the revolution. While revolution could only happen in certain situations, this did not mean that communists could not prepare for it now. It was imperative for the party to carry out revolutionary agitation in non-revolutionary situations in order to organize forces for when the moment of overturn arrived. 

Lih notes the similarities between Lenin and Kautsky’s language, but he does not see the gulf that separated them in terms of action. German Social Democracy betrayed its socialist commitments in World War I and the German Revolution of 1918. By contrast, the Bolsheviks successfully mobilized the working class against capitalism and the Tsar. In both theory and practice, Bolshevism meant a repudiation of Kautsky’s Erfurtian politics.

If all Lih was doing was highlighting the influence of Kautsky on Lenin, then there would be no objection. Lenin himself recognized his political debt to Kautsky. Yet Lih goes further than that and stresses that there were few, if any, breaks in Lenin’s ideas. It is certainly true that Lenin emerged from within the Second International and used its language and formulations. However, he developed something radically new from that raw material. On a host of ideas ranging from the vanguard party, the state, imperialism, philosophy, and socialist revolution, Lenin’s Bolshevism was vastly different from Kautsky’s “Orthodox Marxism.”

As a result, Lih’s Kautskyization of Lenin transforms Bolshevism from a distinctive revolutionary current into just unoriginal followers of Kautsky and social democracy. In effect, this amounts to a delegitimization of Leninism and its replacement by Kautskyism. By stressing the aspect of continuity over discontinuity in Lenin, Lih cannot comprehend Bolshevism. Lih’s method is one devoid of dialectics, discontinuity, and ruptures. For those interested in a more in-depth discussion on the problems of Lih’s approach, I encourage you to read my The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky which is summarized here.

War Communism 

At least half of Lih’s book is devoted to Bolshevik debates surrounding “war communism.” Following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks were confronted with economic collapse, foreign invasion, and civil war. In response, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Soviet leadership implemented policies to militarize labor and requisition grain from the peasants in order to feed the army. These policies were known as “war communism.” Lih challenges the consensus on war communism from scholars such as Moshe Lewin, Isaac Deutscher, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Orlando Figes, and Martin Malia that see these policies as a deluded fantasy where the Bolsheviks genuinely believed they were entering communism itself: “The myth of a leap into communism, of euphoria-induced hallucination, of a ‘short-cut to communism’, of glorification of coercion as the royal road to communism, etc., is still dominant in most works that reach the larger reading public.” (p. 7)

Leon Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1920) is generally singled out as the emblematic Bolshevik text embodying the utopian hopes about war communism. In a chapter devoted to Terrorism and Communism (originally published in 2007), Lih performs a valuable service by noting that Trotsky did not believe these fantasies. Rather, the coercive policies advanced in Terrorism and Communism were not meant to presage communism but were emergency measures to deal with societal collapse: “We find in Trotsky’s speeches of 1920 innumerable variations on two overriding themes. One is the austere ‘blood, sweat and tears’ evocation of the economic ruin facing the country unless extraordinary efforts were made. The other is an insistence on the manifold difficulties created by the breakdown of the capitalist system combined with the primitive, incomplete ‘caricature’ version of socialist institutions set up during the war.” (p. 252)

Lih’s penetrating analysis of Terrorism and Communism stands in stark contrast to Trotsky-sympathetic writers such as Ernest Mandel, Isaac Deutscher, and Tony Cliff. They viewed Terrorism and Communism as Trotsky’s “worst book” which foreshadowed the authoritarian politics of Stalinism. Lih effectively challenges that position by situating Trotsky’s proposals in the concrete circumstances of civil war and as a sensible answer to save the revolution from collapse. For Lih, Trotsky was not a bloodthirsty utopian but was an eminently practical revolutionary leader. 

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek relied upon Lih in his introduction to Verso’s edition of Terrorism and Communism. Žižek views Trotsky largely as an icon of revolutionary hopes, but not as a theorist who can tackle the material conditions of the Russian Civil War or understand the Stalinist Thermidor. Despite his Lacanian verbiage, Žižek’s work benefits immensely from Lih’s historical research. As Harrison Fluss noted in his overview: “Žižek’s intervention is an important one in that he promotes Lih’s reconstruction of Trotsky’s work and at least attempts to rescue Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism from undeserved oblivion. He challenges us to read Trotsky anew, free of stereotypes and clichés.”

Nikolai Bukharin

If there is a central figure in What Was Bolshevism, then it is the Marxist theorist Nikolai Bukharin. As Lih admits, Bukharin plays an oversized role in the revolution and appears in most chapters. Bukharin’s prominence can partly be explained by the influence of Stephen Cohen (Bukharin’s major English language biographer) who was Lih’s personal friend and mentor. For Lih, Bukharin’s place in Bolshevism is analogous to Kautsky in German Social Democracy: “Let me make a comparison that both sides would reject with indignation: Bukharin was the Karl Kautsky of Bolshevism. Just as Kautsky was the authoritative spokesman of revolutionary Social Democracy over several decades, Bukharin played the same role for the post-war heir of revolutionary Social Democracy.” (p. 23)

The overview of Bukharin’s work enables Lih to explain the essentials of the Bolshevik Weltanschauung:

This underlying outlook was based on a narrative about the heroic mission of the proletariat: the proletariat conquered and defended a new state authority in order to be able to build a benevolent mono-organizational society by drawing peasant farms into a unified socialist framework. Civil war and social collapse were close-to-inevitable consequences of proletarian revolution: they imposed high but justifiable costs. After a new equilibrium had been painfully established, society could proceed more smoothly toward a completely organized and planned society. (p. 335)

In several chapters, Lih performs a detailed textual analysis of Bukharin’s major works such as The ABC of Communism (1919) and The Economics and Politics of the Transition Period (1920). Lih believes that Bukharin, like Trotsky, was a practical leader who did not believe war communism was the beginning of a classless society.

Similar to his analysis of Lenin, Lih claims Bukharin maintained a consistent political outlook throughout his life. For example, Lih argues that Bukharin’s views underwent no major changes from war communism to the adoption of a semi-market economy under the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. This reasoning leads Lih to conclude that Bukharin’s gradualist strategy in the 1920s was consistent with his earlier “left communist” views: “All in all, Bukharin’s views support an interpretation of war communism and NEP that puts much greater emphasis on the continuity in the Bolshevik outlook during these two periods.” (p. 337)

Moreover, Lih claims Bukharin’s pro-NEP political strategy did not imply an embrace of market socialism but was a viable path to communism: “I take Bukharin seriously when he insists that the NEP was neither a retreat nor a cause for serious rethinking but a strategy that was genuinely meant to overcome the market.” (p. 336) While Lih is correct that Bukharin did not advocate utopian delusions during war communism, his views did drastically shift with the adoption of the NEP. By stressing continuity, Lih cannot appreciate the development and changes in Bukharin’s positions.

During the 1920s, Bukharin, alongside Stalin, was a major champion of the NEP and market mechanisms against Trotsky and the Left Opposition. What stands out with Bukharin was that he advocated a serious approach to deal with real problems. The weakness in his strategy was the assumption that capitalist economics in the Soviet countryside could gradually and painlessly “grow” into socialist relations. As a result, Bukharin did not see the growing class polarization in the countryside and the breakdown of the NEP at the end of the 1920s.

If Bukharin’s line had somehow prevailed, then the USSR would likely have possessed a thin veneer of “socialism” while being largely governed by capitalist social relations — he would have ended up as the Soviet Deng Xiaoping. While this cannot be proven definitively since his line was defeated, Stephen Cohen has noted that market reformers in the USSR, China, and Eastern Europe echoed Bukharin’s arguments, programs, philosophies, and theories. Even Lih observed that the celebration of the NEP during perestroika signified the restoration of capitalism: “With the detachment of hindsight, we can see that the perestroika reformers found NEP attractive, not as a pathway toward the mono-organizational society, as Bukharin did, but rather away from it.” (p. 30)

Lih’s focus on continuity also means he glosses over changes in Bukharin’s philosophy. In the 1930s, when Bukharin was under arrest and awaiting trial, he wrote The Philosophical Arabesques. As a work of Marxist philosophy, Bukharin’s book ranks alongside Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason and Engels’s Anti-Dühring. Throughout this work, Bukharin strikes back against the Stalinist vulgarization of dialectical materialism and dismissal of Hegel. Bukharin returned to first principles by defending Hegel, Spinoza, and monism. Yet Lih admits in the book Cataclysm 1914 that Hegel and philosophical questions are “outside my competence.” (p. 389) This means he cannot recognize the philosophical stakes in Bukharin’s work.

Lih’s fixation on surface appearances means he cannot appreciate Bukharin’s Aesopian approach. He minimizes the fact that Bukharin was Stalin’s prisoner and a dead man on leave. In order to save his work for posterity, Bukharin was forced to write in code by praising Stalin. As Helena Sheehan notes in her introduction to The Philosophical Arabesques, Bukharin was speaking in code to future generations: “As other commentators have suggested, his trial testimony, as well as his prison manuscripts, must be read as a coded attempt to communicate covertly something sometimes utterly at odds with what he was asserting overtly.” (The Philosophical Arabesques, p. 24) Instead, Lih takes the praise of Stalin in Bukharin’s prison writings at face value: “I myself belong to the Horton school of Bukharin interpretation: like the Dr Seuss character of that name, Bukharin by and large meant what he said and said what he meant. I do not mean to apply this to every last bit of Stalin flattery, but I do think Bukharin had persuaded himself that, despite inevitable difficulties, Stalin’s Russia was on the high road to socialism.” (p. 400)

The Aesopian language in Bukharin’s prison writings served another purpose as well. As a committed antifascist, Bukharin considered his work to be theoretical weapons for the USSR in the struggle against Nazi Germany and fascist irrationalism. In private correspondence with Stalin, he begged the General Secretary to publish his writings, even if his name was removed: “I wrote [the prison manuscripts] mostly at night, literally wrenching them from my heart. I fervently beg you not to let this work disappear… Don’t let this work, perish… This is completely apart from my personal fate.” (The Philosophical Arabesques, p. 16)

While Bukharin was sincere in his support of socialism and the USSR, he did not extend that to Stalin. At his 1938 trial, Bukharin used coded language to turn the tables on his prosecutors and speak to the larger court of world history. In her memoirs, his widow Anna Larina noted that Bukharin defied Stalin at his trial while maintaining his belief in Soviet socialism: “But the most amazing thing is that, despite everything, the time of shining hopes had not passed for him. He would pay for these hopes with his head. Moreover, one reason for his preposterous confessions in the dock—incomplete, but sufficiently egregious confessions—was precisely this: he still hoped that the idea to which he had dedicated his life would triumph.” (This I Cannot Forget, p. 305) By contrast, Lih is unable to disentangle the differing meanings of socialism and Stalin in Bukharin’s works.

If we were to follow Lih’s “Horton school” on Bukharin’s show trial, then we would end up accepting his confessions to fantastic crimes as genuine. Lih never quite goes this far and does acknowledge Bukharin’s resistance: “It is likely that the full meaning of this duel must be sought in the long-standing and highly intense personal relations between Stalin and Bukharin. For our purposes, we should note that Bukharin’s resistance was partly a struggle against the genre of classical melodrama that Stalin wished to impose on him.” (p. 453) Yet the implicit logic of the “Horton school” can easily find itself justifying a Stalinist narrative.

Continuity and Discontinuity

There is undoubted value in Lih’s work in providing a textual exegesis to the writings of Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and other Bolsheviks. He is more than capable of unearthing documents and 

then comparing them to find a common language and continuity. Yet this textual methodology also possesses severe limits. Lih thinks it is sufficient to look at one’s ideas and how they are presented instead of looking at their actual practice and distinctiveness. Lih’s formalism means he sees practice as almost a dirty activity and not worthy of attention. 

By prioritizing continuity, Lih cannot grasp the true breaks that occur in political life.
Throughout the book, he privileges continuity in Bolshevism which is further extended backward to Kautsky and then forward to Bukharin, Zinoviev, and others. The shared Kautskyist heritage of Bolshevism explains Lih’s softness on Stalin, who had a very mechanical and stagist view of Marxism similar to Kautsky’s. Thus, Lih sees Stalin as part of a common Kautskyist-Bolshevik family and a true believer in world revolution: “Stalin was not hypocritical in his support for world revolution, since from his point of view no sacrifice of state interests was involved. His caution about revolutionary prospects in particular cases did not mean he dismissed all revolutionary prospects for the foreseeable future.” (p. 365)

Since he believes there are no fundamental differences between Bolshevism and Stalinism, Lih can easily include texts from the latter as answering the book’s central questions. For example, he observes that Stalin’s 1938 Short Course possessed a strident defense of the Bolshevik party line: “The real hero of the Short Course is the Bolshevik party line. The party line, based solidly on a knowledge of the laws of history, is forced to fight against innumerable critics and scoffers from right and left and goes on from triumph to triumph – this is the narrative of the Short Course.” (p. 517)

Stalin could certainly use the appropriate Marxist language when needed. For that matter, so could Kautsky. Superficially, it could be claimed that Stalinists and social democrats were Marxists due to their slogans and party membership. However, their words and actions represented a clear break from Bolshevism. In order to understand Bolshevism, it is necessary to do more than accept slogans at face value.

Lih claims not to provide his “own answer” to the meaning of Bolshevism, but this is inaccurate. He stresses the “underlying continuity and a gradual metamorphosis” (p. 1) of Bolshevism throughout its history — a relatively seamless transition going from Kautsky to Lenin to Bukharin to Stalin. Ultimately, by seeing just the continuity and not the breaks between Kautskyism, Bolshevism, and Stalinism, Lih misses the main and overarching points.

Lars T. Lih,  What Was Bolshevism?  (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024), 582 pages. $45.