On the Perspectives of the Left

From the triumph of the Black Hundreds to the victory of the forces of progress?

Roman Kunitsyn

In our Black Hundreds there is one extremely original and extremely important feature, to which not enough attention has been paid. This is the dark peasant democracy, the crudest, but also the deepest.

                   V. I. Lenin “On the Black Hundreds”

1.

Something significant happened to me recently. I'm walking through a shopping center; some kind of light Western music is playing inside, and suddenly I hear an indignant voice from behind me: “This is an outrage! These Americans and British impose sanctions against our country, they prevent Vladimir Vladimirovich from fighting the Nazis in Ukraine, and you are playing their music here? Put on a Russian song immediately! We don’t need this western rubbish!” I looked around: the voice belonged to an ordinary, unremarkable guy who poured out his indignation onto a poor salesman. The guy was dressed rather poorly - in general, a typical representative of the “deep people.” The same sort who enthusiastically, even with some kind of obsession, supported the so-called “special operation in Ukraine.” This is “Putin’s majority,” which, according to official sociologists, has already exceeded 80%. They are workers of factories in single-industry towns, notorious state employees, instructors at universities and technical schools, teachers, and, finally, pensioners. Many now say that teachers are forced to hold rallies in support of the special operation and to line up the schoolchildren in the shape of the letter “Z”. This is partly true, some are forced. And some even try to passively resist, to sabotage, to refuse to go, claiming to be ill, or too busy. But there are also those who do not need to be forced - they go on their own, they shout slogans loudest of all, and wave flags joyfully. There are those who, on Internet forums and social networks, send curses to Ukrainians and those of our compatriots who openly opposed the “special operation.” And, finally, there are those who “hand over” the opponents of the “special operation” to the police, as recently happened to a saleswoman in Pyaterochka and a minibus driver in the Russian provinces. And believe me, there are many more such “Z-patriots” than “saboteurs.”

All this casts doubt on the effectiveness of the strategy that the “protest left” hopes for. Among many of them, there is a widespread belief that “sanctions work against the regime,” and that when both trade bans and the withdrawal of Western companies and investors from the Russian market bring down the economy, then Russians’ standard of living will shrink, their dissatisfaction with the regime will grow, and then its days will be numbered. But, alas, it seems that everything is much more complicated. It is among people with average incomes, which mainly include residents of large cities - a kind of Russian petty bourgeoisie - that opposition, pro-Western and anti-war sentiments are widespread. And the inhabitants of poor provincial towns and villages are stricken with chauvinistic and militaristic psychosis. Go to Moscow - there you will hardly see a car with the letter “Z” stuck on the glass. Go to Uryupinsk or Bryansk - there you will see a dozen such cars on the road within an hour.

It turns out that sanctions, by ruining the middle and petty bourgeoisie of the megacities, “wash away” the supporters of Western-type democracy, the supporters of the speedy cessation of hostilities, and only strengthen the regime. As a result of the sanctions, anti-Western, ultra-nationalist, militaristic, far-right sentiment in Russia will only strengthen. It would seem that the prospects for a “left turn” are not very inspiring... But there is a caveat.

2.

Lenin, in one of his notes, expressed a brilliant thought about the reactionary Black Hundreds movement of his era, a hundred years ago: “In our Black Hundreds there is one extremely original and extremely important feature, to which not enough attention has been paid. This is dark peasant democracy, the crudest, but also the deepest.” This idea of his was later realized in practice. Many strong, genuine, ideological communists of the Civil War years originated precisely from among ... the former Black Hundreds (of course, I don't mean the leaders and ideologues of these organizations, but common, rank-and-file members - from the workers and peasants). It turned out to be much easier for an ordinary poor person, who before the revolution had been an ardent supporter of autocracy and clericalism, to embrace the notions of liberated labor and a just socialist society than those of the Mensheviks, even among the workers, who to the last reproached Lenin that he “doesn't do everything according to Marx.” Yes, the ideological monarchist Black Hundreds, including many of the tsarist General Staff, went after some hesitation to the side of the Bolsheviks (like M.D. Bonch-Bruyevich) and did not go to serve General Denikin or Baron Wrangel, because the power of the commissar seemed to them closer in spirit to the rosy liberal-bourgeois national democracy of the white camp.

Why did this happen? Let us turn to the essence of the Black Hundred ideology. In it, of course, there were many different theses - both nationalistic and religious in nature. But still, the most important thing in it is unconditional, complete, ardent support for the autocracy. This does not mean simply monarchism, because a monarchy can also be constitutional (and it was precisely the supporters of this, for example, the Cadets, whom the Black Hundreds hated much more than the Bolsheviks). Under autocracy, the power of the head of state is generally not limited in any way - neither by any institution (for example, parliament or church) nor by any people (for example, the high aristocracy close to the throne). An autocrat is an absolute monarch, whose will is the law for everyone, regardless of their origin or wealth. Before the will of such an absolute monarch, everyone is equal - the Grand Duke, the rootless smerd, the rich man, and the beggar.

These are the words that must be said. Our Westerners have been wrestling with the riddle for centuries: how can ordinary Russian people want such arbitrariness, fraught with the cruelest tyranny (and which is regularly found in Russian history)? Maybe we have some kind of “wrong people,” who like to be tormented and made rotten by tyrannical power? Westerners who love to talk about the “masochism of Russian peasants” do not understand that the matter is completely different. Long centuries of existence in conditions of suffocating despotism have made “Russian peasants” so. Their most cherished, heartfelt dream is equality, that very “peasant, crude democracy” about which Lenin wrote!

Ordinary Russian people love the ideal of equality, so much so that they are ready to sacrifice even freedom for it. After all, under the rule of an autocratic tyrant, all are equal, and even though ordinary people could experience moral satisfaction seeing princes and boyars tremble before the tsar, how a peasant trembles before a tyrant landowner. At the beginning of the 20th century, the common people of Russia joined the Black Hundred organizations en masse, and did so, moreover, out of conviction, since they believed that the tsar would punish thieving ministers and cruel gendarmes, and that the spectacle of this punishment would be cause for celebration. When it became clear that the tsar could not or did not want to do this, but that the commissars with stars on their caps did, the people followed them.

We see the same thing now. Ordinary people from Uryupinsk and Ulan-Ude, from a deeply depressed province, are happy to observe the flight from the country of such odious figures as Anatoly Chubais, or the confiscation of foreign palaces and yachts in the West, and it seems to them that President Putin has done what Gennady Zyuganov and others had promised to do for 20 years as leaders of the Communist Party, but never did... People, of course, rejoice not in the destruction and death from rockets and bombs, but in the fact that - as it seems to them! – the hated bourgeois oligarchs who pilfered public property in the era of privatization are finally somehow punished, and the arrogant West, which was so proud of the victory over the USSR in the Cold War, has finally received at least some rebuff.

Naturally, the “deep people” also have nationalist stereotypes (these are also, by the way, rooted in an egalitarian attitude towards Ukrainians: “We are one people, there is no reason to point out our peculiarity!”). But I am talking about those attitudes of the “deep people,” which can then be channeled into a left-wing social protest. And which can certainly be channeled into this protest by the appropriate efforts of leftist agitators and propagandists. As the economic crisis forces the authorities to reveal their true neoliberal face more and more, it will be discovered that they did not mean to expel all oligarchs, but only to satisfy the appetites of “their” oligarchs.

3.

It must also be said that, in fact, this applies not only to the Russian “deep people.” We see how ordinary French people from depressed small towns, where the positions of communists and socialists once were strong, vote for Marine Le Pen, how in the USA the inhabitants of the “rust belt,” contemptuously referred to as the middle class “white trash” and “rednecks” give back votes to Donald Trump, how in the hinterlands of Germany, which were once part of the German Democratic Republic, the far-right “Alternative für Deutschland” is winning.

There are “Black Hundreds” in Eastern and Western Europe, and in the USA, and they are now gaining more and more popularity, while the left parties are losing voters, the left ideas are ceasing to be the ideology of the masses and are turning into mental chewing gum for the post-Marxist snobs’ “salons.”

And in the West, as in Russia, these new “Black Hundreds” are supported by people from the “deep people.” Those who eke out a miserable existence on welfare because the factories they worked in have stopped. Those who live in towns where life was once teeming back in the 70s, but since the halt of production, they have turned into slums. These new poor are despised by the wealthy in the big cities. They are despised by official “politically correct” politicians. They are despised even by the Western, “advanced,” left-wing intelligentsia. They are considered uncivilized, vulgar, stupid, xenophobic, racist, drug addicts and alcoholics, fanatically religious, and anti-progressive. Naturally, rednecks and white trash bear little resemblance to the ideal proletarians from Marxist and neo-Marxist treatises. But, by the way, they are very similar to the real proletarians of the 19th century, to whom Marx and his associates in the First International propagandized. These poor of London were of course ignored by any gentleman of good manners...

And the newly poor “deep” Americans, French, and Germans are voting for the far right. The ultra-right at least see them as people, reach out to them, and notice their needs. At least the ultra-right do not pinch their noses at the sight of their “political incorrectness.” The ultra-rightists finally understand that the need for equality and justice has built to an explosive charge in the “new poor,” and they exploit it for their own purposes...

The ideologues of the youth riots of the 1960s taught that the proletariat had become the bourgeois and that the only hope of the social revolutionaries was to be found in various minorities, from racial to sexual. But when the era of neoliberalism broke out, the abyss between the upper and lower classes opened again, and a new, impoverished, hungry people appeared - the proletariat in the Roman and the Marxian sense. And the left, already mired in a countercultural “minority philosophy,” turned away from it with contempt. And now these new proletarians are voting for Trump and Le Pen because that’s exactly what the hated bosses don’t like and it’s so nice to annoy them.

And yet I am convinced that in the West and the East the future belongs to the crude peasant democratism of these new poor, who are still the prisoners of the Black Hundreds, of right-wing bourgeois ideologies. Lenin’s paradoxical thought retains its relevance and its truth even after more than 100 years.

Translation/Copy Editing by Dan Erdman