Vladimir Lenin, Declaration Of The Rights Of The Toiling And Exploited Peoples

The October Revolution put an emphatic end to Russia's first attempt at a post-Imperial government. Storming the Winter Palace, an accomplishment rather more heroic in later retellings than in the event, socialist forces routed what was left of the Provisional Government that had supplanted the Tsars only six months earlier. Both instigated by the Bolsheviks and subsequently exploited brilliantly by their leader Lenin, the attack had many of the elements of a coup and is often presented by unsympathetic historians as one. However it was widely supported by most of Russia's militant left, particularly soldiers and urban workers, and also had some of the appealing qualities of euthanasia. The Provisional Government had long since proven unable to govern effectively and had no clue as to how to extricate itself from its difficulties. Relatively few Russians at the time cared much that its demise was hastened, although there was nothing like a consensus on what should replace it.

Contrary to several creation myths, the October Revolution did not immediately empower a strong, centralized government with totalitarian ambitions. We will not concern ourselves with the details of the post-revolutionary period. Close study of the emergence of a Bolshevik dictatorship is a different class for another time (at WPUNJ, Hist 429 -- a semester-long inquiry into the birth of the Soviet state and its consolidation under Iosif Stalin). However we will end our study of Imperial Russia by looking briefly at one of the early artifacts of that transition: the so-called Declaration Of The Rights Of The Toiling And Exploited Peoples.

Drafted by Lenin in the immediate wake of the October Revolution, the Declaration was ratified by the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets in January 1918. A statement of principles and intent rather than a detailed blueprint for government, it announced Bolshevik intentions to restructure Russia on the basis of constitutional socialism. The ringing language of this anti-Imperial manifesto (somewhat muted in translation) made it a seminal document for the drafters of the first post-revolutionary constitution. They appropriated it in its entirety, as the preamble to the General Provisions that follow.

On July 10, 1918, the full Constitution was approved by the Fifth Congress of Soviet Deputies as the fundamental law of the newly proclaimed Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic. We will never know how well it might have worked in practical terms, since a number of its crucial provisions were ignored from the start and others would be discarded later in the 1920s-early 1930s when they proved inconvenient. But that -- to repeat -- is a different class for another time....

1. What are the professed organizing principles of the new Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic? What is a) Russian; b) Socialist; c) Federated; and d) Soviet about it?

2. How does the Declaration deal with the problem of World War I?

3. How universal is the Declaration's conception of democracy? What social groups are implicitly excluded from political participation, and why?

4. The central theme of Hosking's textbook for this course has been that the creation and consolidation of Imperial Russia were inimical to the formation of a modern Russian nation. Does the Declaration address this issue, either directly or indirectly? In particular, how does it envision the relationship between Russia (and Russian-ness) and the rest of the former Empire?

Constitution Of The RSFSR, Part I: Declaration Of The Rights Of The Toiling And Exploited Peoples

Article One

1. Russia is proclaimed a Republic of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies. All central and local authority is vested in these Soviets.

2. The Russian Soviet Republic is established on the basis of a free union of free peoples, as a federation of National Soviet Republics.

Article Two

The Constituent Assembly establishes its fundamental goals as the suppression of all forms of exploitation of man by man (1) and the complete abolition of class distinctions in society. It aims to crush exploiters unmercifully, to reorganize society on a socialist basis, and to bring about the triumph of socialism throughout the world. It further resolves:

1. In order to bring about the socialization of land, private ownership of it is abolished. The entire land fund is declared the property of the nation and turned over free of cost to the toilers on the basis of equal rights to its use. All forests, subsoil resources, and waters of national importance as well as all livestock and machinery, model farms, and agricultural enterprises are declared to be national property. (2)

2. As a first step in the complete transfer of factories, shops, mines, railways, and other means of production and transportation to the Soviet Republic of Workers and Peasants, and to ensure the supremacy of the toiling masses over their exploiters, the Constituent Assembly ratifies the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets' laws on workers' control and on the Supreme Council of National Economy. (3)

3. As one of the conditions for the emancipation of the toiling masses from the yoke of capitalism, the Constituent Assembly ratifies the transfer of all banks to the ownership of the workers' and peasants' government.

4. To do away with the parasitic classes of society and to organize the economic life of the country, the universal duty to work is introduced. (4)

5. To give all power to the toiling masses and to make impossible any restoration of the exploiters' rule, the toilers are to be armed, a socialist Red Army established, and the propertied classes disarmed.

Article Three

1. The Constituent Assembly expresses its firm determination to rescue mankind from the clutches of capitalism and imperialism, which have brought on this most criminal of all wars and have drenched the world with blood. It approves wholeheartedly the policies of the Soviet Government in breaking with secret treaties, in organizing extensive fraternization between workers and peasants in the ranks of the opposing armies, and in trying to bring about -- at all costs, by revolutionary means -- a democratic peace between nations on the principles of no annexation, no indemnities, and free self-determination of peoples. (5)

2. With the same goal in mind, the Constituent Assembly demands a complete break with the barbaric colonial policies of bourgeois civilization. They enrich the exploiters of a few select nations at the expense of hundreds of millions of the toiling people of Asia, the colonies, and the smaller countries in general. The Constituent Assembly welcomes the policies of the Council of People's Commissars in granting complete independence to Finland, removing [Russian] troops from Persia, (6) and allowing Armenia the right of self-determination. (7) Soviet law repudiated the debts contracted by the government of the Tsar, landholders, and the bourgeoisie. (8) The Constituent Assembly considers this a first blow against international banking and finance capital. It expresses its confidence that the Soviet Government will adhere firmly to this course of action, until the complete victory of an international revolt by labor against the burden of capital.

Article Four

1. The Constituent Assembly was elected on party lists made up before the November Revolution. At the time, the people were not yet in a position to rebel against exploiters (whose powers of opposition in defence of their class privileges were not yet known) and had not yet done anything practical to organize a socialist society. Thus the Constituent Assembly feels that it would be quite wrong to put itself in even technical opposition to the Council.

2. At this moment in the decisive struggle of the proletariat against the exploiters, the Constituent Assembly believes there is no place for the latter in any organ of government. The government belongs wholly to the toiling masses and their fully empowered representatives, the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies.

3. In supporting the Soviets and the decrees of the Council of People's Commissars, the Constituent Assembly admits that it has no power beyond working out some of the fundamental problems of reorganizing society on a socialist basis.

4. At the same time, wishing to bring about a genuinely free and voluntary (and consequently more complete and lasting) Union of the toiling classes of all the peoples of Russia, the Constituent Assembly confines itself to working out the basic principles of a federation of the Soviet Republics of Russia. It leaves the workers and peasants of each people to decide independently at their own plenipotentiary Soviet Congresses whether or not they desire to take part in the federated government and other federal Soviet institutions (and if so, on what conditions).

Notes:

1. Bolshevik propaganda was fond of the formula, borrowed from Marx/Engels, that capitalism involved the "exploitation of man by man." A sardonic joke sometimes attributed to Trotskii suggests that under Soviet communism, power relationships were the other way around.

2. The language here clarifies the so-called "Decree on Land" that had been issued by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on the morning after the storming of the Winter Palace. That original Decree had given peasants the rights to the land they had been working. However it left open any number of crucial details, including the question of whether mechanized farms, orchards, livestock enterprises, and so on were to be broken up or run communally. The original Decree also left unresolved the issues of peasant rights to untilled arable land, and of individual versus communal rights to fisheries, timber tracts, mineral resources, and other non-agricultural uses of land.

3. The decrees in question dated from November 1917. On the premise that labor ought to control the means of production, the law on Workers' Control proposed an elaborate system of shop- and factory-management councils paralleling the political structure of the Soviets. By the time it was written into the Declaration and the 1918 Constitution it had already proved unworkable and been discarded. The decree setting up a Supreme Council of the Economy essentially superseded the law on Workers' Control, abandoning the principle of control 'from below' in favor of centralized, top-down economic coordination.

4. This originally was directed at landowners and capitalists whose incomes derived from the labor of others, on the principle that those who don't work don't deserve to eat.

5. Much of the language here borrows heavily from Woodrow Wilson, whose views on what postwar international order should look like were heavily promoted in the Provisional spring/summer of 1917 by the US Ambassador to Russia, Col. Edward House. Compare Wilson's "Fourteen Points," drafted virtually simultaneously as Lenin's Declaration: http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/wilson14.htm

6. In other words, from present-day Iran.

7. This is mainly in reference to Turkey's ongoing abuse of its Armenian population, repressive policies with genocidal implications that killed anywhere from 600,000 to upwards of 2 million Armenians between 1915 and 1922.

8. The Soviet government announced that it had no intention of repaying money that the Imperial Government owed to foreign creditors, particularly war-related debts. It also annulled private debts owed overseas, both on the principle that international finance was immoral and to help it keep scarce capital reserves from fleeing to safer havens.

Source: Unattributed Internet translations, revised (syntax clarifications, annotations) by Jon Bone.