The VSVR 1884-1890 (Part 2)
If the first part of his 2nd term had been a period of victories the second would be a period of crises for Lenin. In August 1887 VSVR national debt peaked at just over ¼ of a million pounds sterling. Prior to 1883 the country had not once experienced national debt – now the country owed copious quantities to Britain, China, its own people and the international credit markets.
Yet the period started to some positive news from Eastern Europe as the only country in the Habsburg Sphere of Influence, Wallachia, experienced a communist revolution.
The problems faced by the VSVR and the Comintern as a whole in 1887 were significant. Following on from two failed Counter-Revolutions in Spain the VSVR had sent a permanent garrison of 12,000 men to Iberia, in order to secure Italy there were 20,000 men on the peninsula, the CSR had faced religious and nationalist rebellions in the Balkans and Mesopotamia and as a result 24,000 men had been sent to the CSR, finally Sweden faced constant low level rebellion and lacked a sufficiently large standing army to protect itself and thus received 24,000 VSVR troops to protect it. That meant that some 80,000 Red Army soldiers were now based permanently abroad whilst a small fleet had been sent to Barcelona to project Red Army power across the troubled Mediterranean. There was something deeply worrying about the fact that these Republics required VSVR aid in order to protect them from their own people.
Lenin had also failed to take his foot off of the choking corpse of Anarchism and Trade Unionism. Harsh restrictions remained on the now largely defeated groups whilst the once prosperous Anarchist Zeal newspaper, so often a symbol of the Republic’s freedom of speech, now only survived in the shadiest backstreets of the most Anarchist districts of the largest cities in the most Anarchist regions – otherwise known as Brussels, Antwerp and Brugge. There was also increasing discontent at Lenin’s refusal so declare the state of emergency over and call elections.
The increased reliance on foreign powers due to the debt also meant foreign relations were much more important than in the past. Britain now, effectively, had one hand on the Republic’s testicles and with relations between the two increasingly strained there was a serious fear in Cologne that London might decide to squeeze.
The Republic’s financials issues have already been mentioned. Whilst much of that shameful national debt came from the Wars that the Republic had been involved in for the past 4 years the clear root cause was industry. Industrial subsidies were twice their 1880 levels by 1887 and a massive drain on public finances. Lenin was forced to introduce tough fiscal austerity measures to combat this problem in his budget of 1887 – taxes on the poor increased to 55% whilst a damaging 8% tariff was raised on all goods imported from outside of the Comintern. On top of this social spending was controversially reduced from 100% to 85%. These measures allowed for a small budget surplus but were wildly unpopular.
Into this atmosphere of economic woe and public dissatisfaction arose the last surviving member of the first ever Central Committee, Chairman for ten years and much loved hero of Right and Left alike – Friedrich Engels. Between 1875 (when he faced electoral humiliation) and 1883 (when Karl Marx died) Engels had been involved in a flurry of great works with his old ideological Comrade Karl Marx. The most noteworthy work of this period was of course Das Kapital. Following Marx’s and later his wife’s death Engels fell into a depression as the Republic he had worked for most of his life for started to rip itself apart. However at the People’s Party Conference of 1887, after months of inaction, Engels was invited to speak. He responded to this by delivering a famous defamation of Chairman Lenin and the reigning government of the Republic ‘’Comrade Lenin has failed to remove the control on our freedom for fear of Anarchist violence. But there can be no Anarchist violence for Comrade Lenin has already murdered all our Comrades on the Right! Comrade Lenin seeks to secure himself through conquest, yet Comrade Lenin has tied us to the bourgeoisie in a manner in which we have never been tied before! It is time Comrade Lenin respects the fundamental principles of our Republic and calls an election – let the people and Party decide whether they find his measures to be just’’. The speech caused uproar; the most senior figure in the Republic had just struck against the leadership in a fashion not seen for years.
Engels suddenly found himself thrust back into the forefront of politics – where he wanted to be. He quickly went about reforming the United Front which had existed from 1865 until 1875 and received a huge level of support. The unrepresented Right of the Party flooded towards him whilst a significant slice of the Marxists moved to join him. Indeed Kautsky’s Moderate faction became the first faction to officially join the Front in August 1877, forming the new Front’s core.
The United Front was not to last for long. In late 1887 Engels grew ill and in January he was diagnosed with throat cancer. He was dead by April 1888. Shortly after Engels’ death the Front started to squabble as the Right of the faction refused to accept the uninspiring Kautsky as leader – the Moderates subsequently left, taking with them the faction core. Within a month the United Front had been disestablished for the second time. However Engels’ last hurrah in politics had left a serious mark on the Republic – many Centrist Marxists had been turned off from Lenin by Engels’ words whilst the Right had proven itself to be a force that was still of importance in the Republic and could change things. It also brought anti-Leninist views to the masses and this anti-government block amongst the people would not die away with the collapse of the Front.
Around this time an interesting story emerged in Persia. Between 1886 and 1888 the people of Persia had waged a long and bloody revolutionary war against the oppressive rule of the Shah. Following final victory the new socialist government executed the Shah, destroyed all the Imperial institutions of state and abolished the army. Glorious day! Yet the new government seemed to have failed to realise that many of these institutions were not only in place to oppress them – most were necessary to run it. As the country erupted into chaos the tiny Principality of Kalat declared war on the revolutionary Persian state and smashed the People’s militias in quick time. With the aid of British advisors, weapons and training the Kalatese Army had no troubled in advancing deep into Persian territory. Fearing the state’s utter destruction Persia surrendered a large swathe of its South-Eastern provinces to Kalat. Never had Persia been so humiliated.
One of the most important policies implemented by Lenin back in 1887 to combat the rising industrial subsidies was the policy to end all expansion in industries that were not making a profit. This significantly reduced industrial growth and started to put pressure on factories to provide sufficient employment.
The province of Niederbayen had remained largely rural ever since its union with the rest of the Republic so many years before. Safe employment could always be found in the large agricultural sector of the region and industrial growth had remained stagnant. However sometime around 1887, just as the policy to reduce the expansion of factories was implemented, the region’s collective farms (struggling to pay for their surplus labourers) announced they would only provide 1/3 as many new jobs each year – causing a large migration towards the cities. The problem was with less industrial expansion and the previously low level of rural-urban migration in this region there were simply not enough factories to employ all the new workers and again for the first time in an established province of the Republic large-scale unemployment was experience. By mid 1888 around 40,000 were unemployed in Niederbayern – ¼ of the total industrial workforce. Yet even as new factories came on line the mass migration into the cities of the region continued unabated and unemployed persisted on a large-scale. Worse still in late 1888 and early 1889 these same problems spread to Silesia, Saxony and even East Prussia.
In early 1889, as unemployment reached its peak of 170,000 Republic wide, a new force arrived to challenge Lenin – Rosa Luxemburg. The Luxemburgists called for freedom and decentralisation of the economy as her central tenants (many blamed attempts to manage the entire economy from Cologne as the reason for the unemployment problem). Her most famous quote during this period was ‘’ Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a faction – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter’’. It was meant as an attack on Lenin’s continued suppression of the Right and strengthen her base of support amongst the Right wing of politics. As the Luxemburgists organized marches in every major industrial city Lenin continued to campaign vigorously against her, he believed his only hope of continued control in the Republic was to prove his credentials by solving the problems of the Republic.
In this he was rather successful – by the end of 1889 unemployment had fallen to 80,000 (around 1% of the industrial workforce), national debt was down to around £100,000, most industrial growth was based on profit making factories whilst he was even able to continue the budget surplus after bring the taxes in the poorest back down to 50%.
However the wieght of public pressure could be ignored no longer and he announced the first Chairmanship election for a decade would take place in January 1890. Luxemburg, Kautsky, Bernstein and Schlieffen would all oppose him.
The Comintern in 1890.