Effective Management and Bolshevism By: Nicholas Reed

9/2/2025

Effective Management and Bolshevism By: Nicholas Reed

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Introduction

Communists have always been at the forefront of mass movements built upon the popular grievances which the proletariat hold. These grievances should be carefully analyzed through the framework of Marxism-Leninism. Successful revolutions were built on this model, applying the lessons of their great predecessors without falling into dogmatism. From Mao’s China to Fidel’s Cuba, the Bolshevik Revolution served as an inspiration.

When the Bolsheviks rose to power in 1917, they did so for a very specific reason. It was, in fact, quite simple: they channeled the popular grievances of the people of the Russian Empire. While it was important that the vanguard of the revolution was highly educated in Marxist theory, their success ultimately depended on analyzing the material realities of their time.

Russia’s participation in the First World War was notoriously disastrous, both at the front and at home. The Bolsheviks demanded an immediate end to the war, which the February Revolution failed to deliver. Instead, it brought forth a government that bent the knee to bourgeois interests, both foreign and domestic. Everything changed when Lenin demanded an immediate end to the war, aligning with the popular grievances of the masses. He did not rely on dogma or flowery phrases – he took meaningful, pragmatic action. As Lenin wrote in 1917, “the government is tottering. It must be given the death blow at all costs. To delay action is fatal.”

The same iron-willed mentality could be felt throughout the Bolshevik ranks and was evident in their decision-making, as well as in the way they built revolutionary institutions. In contrast, many contemporary Marxists in the West rely on rigid value systems that have inevitably led to the disunity of the working-class movement. Today, leftist organizations in the West are as common as corner cafés, each with their own flavor and list of grievances. Such behavior, however, is unbefitting of a truly proletarian movement – one that should, by definition, be dedicated to the grievances of the working-class.

Below we will analyze three examples where leading Bolsheviks built proletarian institutions on the basis of dialectical materialism. We will delve into three major issues: the creation of the Red Army, Dzerzhinsky’s management of the Cheka, and Stalin’s attitude towards the National Question.

The Creation of the Red Army

Lenin galvanized the popular will of the masses, channeling proletarian class interests into the creation of a Red Army of workers and peasants. The army is always intimately bound to the ruling power. As the Prussian military theorist Clausewitz noted, “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” The army is the instrument of war, and it must therefore correspond to politics. If the proletariat control the state machinery, they must also dictate the army—not only in its social composition but at every level.

Under the pressure of foreign intervention, the Bolsheviks set out to create a healthy and competent army, organized on principles of military science and rooted in proletarian characteristics. From May 1918 to March 1919, the old Red Guard was completely reorganized into an army based on compulsory military service. Only workers and peasants—non-exploiters of labor—were admitted. In a country embroiled in civil war, in class war, organizing the army along class lines was the dialectical approach. It was not merely Marxist dogma but a dialectical application to the conditions of the time.

But what do we see in the modern Western left? Do we see firm mass organization? Do we see revolution on the horizon? Revolutionary potential is indeed ripe among segments of the Western working class. Yet instead of channeling the popular grievances of the masses, much of the left has resorted to moral value judgments – relying on a monolith of “goodness” and branding anyone who does not conform as deplorable. Such is the nature of dogma, and it is not how the Bolsheviks viewed society. Let us return to the Bolsheviks’ organization of the Red Army and consider how it contrasts with the character of the contemporary left.

The Red Army was also organized in accordance with military science, and it required experienced specialists. While liquidating counter-revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks filled the command structure with the most reliable elements of the old officer corps, such as Aleksey Brusilov and Mikhail Tukhachevsky. They permitted former Tsarist officers to shed their imperial cloak and don the red banner on their sleeve, allowing them to prove themselves to the revolution. But what if the Bolsheviks had relied on rigid, monolithic values? Admitting Tsarist officers into the ranks would have been unthinkable under liberal dogma. The revolution would have been lost, and the red banner reduced to nothing but a glimpse of what might have been. Instead, they relied on a pragmatic dialectical approach.

From October 1918 to March 1919, the Bolsheviks reconquered vast swaths of Soviet territory. No less than 700,000 square kilometers were reclaimed from foreign intervention and the White Tsarist yoke – a territory with a population of some 42 million people. This included 16 oblasts and 16 major cities, where the workers continued their energetic struggle in unison with the Red Army.

In every regiment, the moral tone was set by the Soviet soldier, by the proletarian – showing through their example how to fight and die for socialism. “Communists are always at the front” was not just a popular credo; in the Russian Civil War, it was a reality. The vast majority of the army fought for their class interests. Having just shaken off the shackles of Tsarism, they now fought to preserve their hard-earned freedom.

For the proper organization of the army, and particularly for the effective use of specialists, revolutionary discipline was essential. This was introduced with determination from the top, and with equal vigor it was reinforced from below, instilling a sense of responsibility among the masses. When the people realized that discipline was not being imposed to defend the wealth of the bourgeoisie or to restore land to the landlords, but rather to consolidate and defend the conquests of the revolution, they came to support even the strictest measures aimed at establishing discipline.

The Bolsheviks organized the Red Army along class lines, drawing on the proletariat’s position in their shared struggle against the capitalist class – just as Lenin had organized the revolution around the popular anti-war sentiment.

Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka

The Cheka was officially established by V. I. Lenin in December 1917, appointing Felix Dzerzhinsky as its director. Like the Red Army, the Extraordinary Commission – known as the Cheka – was born of a strictly proletarian character. Its task was to safeguard the revolution and to fight those who sought to drag the country back into the dark, stagnant imperial nightmare that had ruled for a millennium. The obligations of this revolutionary institution were clear: the complete liquidation of counter-revolutionary elements and of all who deliberately took part in the sabotage of the revolution.

Revolutionary tribunals were common place, the judicial hearings of the Cheka’s investigations were observed by the masses. These practices guaranteed the longevity of the revolution, and thus guaranteed the future implementation of socialist principles. No section of the society were out of bounds, even the mighty Red Army and the Bolshevik Party were subject to routine investigations.

To maintain the proletarian character of the rank and file and to root out suspected agents of the bourgeoisie, some of the original members of the Cheka were replaced on December 8, 1917. Averin, Ordzhonikidze, and Trifonov were removed and replaced by V. V. Fomin, S. E. Shchukin, and Ilyin. At the same meeting, the issues of corruption and profiteering—such as black market grain selling – were raised. On December 11, Fomin was ordered to organize a section to suppress speculation, while Shchukin was tasked with carrying out arrests of counterfeiters.

In January 1918, a subsection of the anti-counterrevolutionary effort was created to police bank officials. By 1921, the organization was restructured once again, forming the following sections: Directorate of Affairs, Administrative-Organizational, Secret-Operative, Economic, and Foreign Affairs. Additional units were also created, including Secret-Operative, Investigatory, Transportation, Military (Special), Operative, and Instructional.

The activities of the Cheka demonstrate the honest proletarian character of its leadership and their dialectical style of management. Such practices were lost in its successor organizations, such as the later years of the KGB, when the institution became merely a tool of state management – protecting party assets and repressing dissent rather than organizing along class lines. In contrast to the Cheka, for modern-day leftists such decisive action is unthinkable. The so-called modern left clings to humanism and pacifism in the face of bourgeois aggression. The “Red Terror” was indeed terrible – but only for the enemies of the working class. The reorganization of society could not have been completed without the Cheka, and the Cheka itself would not have succeeded had it relied merely on dogmatic thinking and orthodox interpretations of Marxism. As Dzerzhinsky explained, “We stand for organized terror – this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life.”

Stalin and The National Question

Comrade Stalin explained it eloquently: dogmatic and orthodox beliefs are not a pragmatic way to advance the cause of the working class. This was the case during the organization and foundation of the USSR, particularly in the formation of the National Republics and their entry into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
From the very first days of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the revolutionary tide spread across the entire former Russian Empire, sweeping through every so-called border region of Imperial Russia. In some cases, however, the revolution ran into a reactionary barrier in the form of National Councils and regional governments organized along national lines. Such obstacles appeared in the European territories – Ukraine, Belarus – and in smaller regions such as the Don and the Kuban. These national governments refused to hear of a socialist revolution.

Bourgeois by nature, these governments had no desire to destroy the old order. On the contrary, they saw it as their duty to preserve and consolidate it by every means at their disposal. Essentially imperialist, they had no intention of breaking with imperialism; on the contrary, they were always eager to seize and subjugate fragments of foreign territories whenever the opportunity arose. It is no wonder, then, that the national governments in the border regions declared war on the socialist government in the center. Once they had done so, they naturally became hotbeds of reaction, attracting everything counter-revolutionary in Russia. All the counter-revolutionaries expelled from the country rushed to these centers, forming White Guard national regiments around them.

The plight of these so-called governments is often depicted as a struggle for national liberation against the “soulless centralism” of the emerging Bolshevik state. But this is a fallacy. No government in human history had permitted such extensive decentralization, and none had ever granted its citizens such complete national freedom as Soviet power in Russia. The struggle of the border governments was, and remains, a bourgeois counter-revolution against socialism. The national flag of these oppressed nations was merely tacked on to deceive the masses, to draw on their proletarian energy in service of the national bourgeoisie, conveniently concealing the counter-revolutionary designs of these regimes. Such deceptive struggles can still be seen in our own time.

Recall the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, when colonial-era banners were hoisted in Libya and Syria. Or consider the “color revolutions” in Georgia in 2003, in Ukraine in 2004, and again in 2013. These struggles were not grassroots, but rather stimulated and cultivated by outside forces. At the same time, Occupy Wall Street unfolded concurrently with the Arab Spring, yet many of its own protesters openly cheered the destruction of Libya in 2011 and called for the collapse of the Syrian Arab Republic. The same leftists applauded the Euromaidan movement of 2013, despite Ukraine effectively forfeiting its sovereignty to foreign powers. We can see that these so-called revolutions succeeded in regime change, but why? Simply because they were built on genuine grievances of the masses: demands for better economic conditions and improved governance. Strikingly, it seems their cultivators copied the very tactics of Bolshevism.

The October Revolution was the first in world history to break the slumber of the eastern laboring masses, drawing them out from the shadow of imperialism and into the struggle for a bright and vibrant future. The formation of Soviets in Persia, China, and India testified to this fact. A red star had risen over the East, inspiring the working class to undertake proletarian deeds. And in the aftermath of the great revolution, red flags were raised in the West as well.

The uprisings of workers and soldiers in Austria-Hungary and Germany, the formation of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and the revolutionary struggles of the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary against national oppression all provide eloquent evidence of this.

The Soviet government understood that only on the basis of mutual confidence could mutual understanding arise, and only on the basis of mutual understanding could a firm and indestructible union of peoples be built – a voluntary union of the working people of all the independent Soviet republics. This was precisely the course the Soviet government consistently advocated for uniting the peoples. Thus, out of the collapse of the old imperialist unity, through the creation of independent Soviet republics, the peoples of Russia advanced toward a new, voluntary, and fraternal unity.

This path was by no means easy, but it was the only one leading to a firm and indestructible socialist union of the laboring masses of Russia’s many nationalities. Such was the rhetoric– the dogma – to which the Bolsheviks aspired. Yet the material reality of the time was far different. Stalin himself recognized this and understood that the approach to the national question could not be so rigid. As the Civil War raged across Russia, it revealed the necessity of unity among the peoples of the former empire. The “jailhouse of nations” had at last been broken open, and the task of building a new, united motherland now lay before them. Stalin saw the Russian heartland as the hearth of the revolution, the central cog around which the many peoples would gather and prosper. The survival of the revolution depended not only on unity, but also on respecting the genuine national aspirations of the peoples—as was the case with Finland and Poland.

The border regions of Russia were rich in raw materials, energy, and agricultural land. Yet their very abundance, combined with their underdeveloped sovereignty, left them vulnerable to imperialism. It therefore became the task of Soviet Russia to protect these nations from foreign imperialism and colonization. Without the political, military, and organizational support of the more developed Russian heartland, the border regions would have been inevitably doomed to imperialist bondage.

Stalin rejected the proposal to grant the border regions the right of secession, arguing that it ran contrary to the proletarian aspirations of the nationalities at the time. A material analysis showed that these nations would either join in the construction of socialism or inevitably become vassals of imperialism.

One must study the cases of Georgia, Armenia, Poland, and Finland at the time of the USSR’s formation. These nations had seceded from Russia but retained only the semblance of independence, having in reality been transformed into unconditional vassals of the West. Recall as well the more recent examples of Georgia and Ukraine: though built on genuine popular grievances, their so-called revolutions were aimed at shifting the bloc alignment of the nation, ushering in a new era of neo-colonialism in the region. Tsarism had already implanted among the native nationalities a deep distrust – at times even open hostility – toward everything Russian.
If the union between central Russia and the border regions was to be consolidated, this distrust had to be overcome and replaced with an atmosphere of mutual understanding and fraternal confidence. To achieve this, the Bolsheviks first had to help the masses of the border regions emancipate themselves from the remnants of feudal-patriarchal oppression.

It was necessary that all Soviet organs in the border regions—the courts, the administration, the economic bodies, the organs of direct authority, and even the Party itself – be recruited as far as possible from local people familiar with the life, habits, customs, and language of the native population. The best elements of the local masses had to be drawn into these institutions, and the laboring people had to participate in every sphere of administration, including the formation of military units, so that they could see Soviet power as the product of their own efforts, the embodiment of their own aspirations. For that very reason, it would have been unwise and harmful to alienate the small number of native intellectuals, who may have wished to serve the masses but were unable to do so—perhaps because, not being Communists, they felt themselves surrounded by mistrust and feared possible repressive measures.

It was necessary that all Soviet organs in the border regions – the courts, the administration, the economic bodies, the organs of direct authority, and even the Party itself – be staffed, as far as possible, with local people familiar with the life, habits, customs, and language of the native population. The best elements of the local masses had to be drawn into these institutions, and the laboring people had to participate in every sphere of administration, including the formation of military units. Only in this way could the masses recognize that Soviet power and its organs were the product of their own efforts – the embodiment of their aspirations. For this reason, it would have been unwise and harmful to alienate the small number of native intellectuals who may have wished to serve the people but were unable to do so – perhaps because, not being Communists, they felt surrounded by mistrust and feared possible repression.

The approach of Stalin to the National Question is owed to dialectical thinking. Just as Lenin galvanized the popular will of the masses, Stalin sought to organize the National Republics on the basis of their own material interests and enjoyment of national sovereignty. He did so without relying on monolithic values, but through a rigorous application of the dialectic.

Conclusion

It would be unwise to treat these examples as dogma, for that would run contrary to the very point being made. Instead, they should be understood as examples of the dialectic – the application of Marxist thought to the material reality of the age. Communists were never afraid to innovate, to translate their ideology into practical terms. In some cases, this even meant deviating from the orthodox line of Marxism-Leninism – for instance, in Mao’s China, where the peasantry was seen as the most revolutionary class, whereas in Russia it was the working class. Yet we must distinguish between deviation and revisionism. During the revisionist period of the USSR, mistakes were made as Marxism was reduced to pure dogma, stripped of its innovative character. The same formulas applied in Soviet Russia could not simply be transplanted onto Mao’s China, Hoxha’s Albania, or Kim Il-Sung’s Korea. Rather, these helmsmen followed the example of the Bolsheviks, using the dialectic to analyze and act upon the material realities of their own time.

Author
Nicholas Reed

Effective Management and Bolshevism By: Nicholas Reed

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