On Prabhat Patnaik’s Rejoinder

COMMUNICATION

I approached with eagerness the rejoinder of Prabhat Patnaik (PP) in Mainstream no. 16 of April 6, 2013. I have to say that I was rather disappointed. He basically avoided the subject matter of my paper, namely, how the working classs gains revolutionary consciousness. He only highlighted what was really a side issue added by me at the end of the article, which really did not have any necessary relation with the main thrust of the paper. In that article towards the end I just referred to PP’s earlier Telegraph article where he had claimed that it was the Bolshevik party which had abolished capital punishment in post-1917 Russia, but did not mention that before the Bolsheviks it was the Provisional Government which had abolished capital punishment. It is true that later Kerensky reintroduced it at the front till the Bolsheviks annulled it. I had not mentioned this. To that extent I was of course wrong. Now it so happened that before my paper was published, I had written another piece shortly after the unjust execution of Afzal Guru which EPW had kindly printed in its issue of March 2, 2013. There the focus was on ‘Communists and Death Penalty’, which was a reaction to Afzal Guru’s execution. PP’s same Telegraph article appears also in this earlier piece as a reference point. In what follows I substantially draw on that piece to make my position clear.

In the tragic Afzal Guru case, the CPM had chosen to align itself with the arch Hindu communalists and what the party itself calls the ‘bourgeois-landlord’ classes. Some years back in 2004 members of the same dominant Communist Party—then ruling West Bengal—made unabashed public propaganda with a lot of élan for the execution of Dhananjay Chatterjee on the correctness of which the human rights activists of West Bengal had cast grave doubts. This stand of the Communists in defence of death penalty should not surprise anybody with a modicum of knowledge of the history of their claimed Leninist heritage. The horrendous acts of executions under the Stalin regime are too well-known to need any specific discussion here. However, it is not very much known that years before Stalin had acceded to power as Lenin’s nominee, death penalty was already established in the regime. It is rather late in the day that the top CPM intellectual-theoretician, Prabhat Patnaik, claimed in his column in Kolkata’s Telegraph (December 12, 2012) that the Bolsheviks had abolished capital punishment in Russia in 1917. Most unfortunately it is an

Untruth

. Capital punishment in Russia was abolished not by the Bolsheviks but by the ‘bourgeois’ Provisional Government almost immediately after the fall of the ancien régime as one of its first acts. (See Bunyan and Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1918: Documents and Materials, Stanford University Press, 1934; see also Russian Provisional Government 1917: Documents, volume 1, Stanford University Press, 1961) Of course, shortly afterwards Kerensky restored death sentence partially, at the front, to discipline the soldiers and prevent desertion. After the Bolshevik victory, at the last session of the Second Congress of the Soviets, the Bolshevik Kamenev issued a decree in the name of the Congress to abolish totally the death penalty. However, what is very interesting to note is that on receiving this news Lenin was furious. Bunyan and Fisher cite Trotsky’s book on Lenin: “When Lenin learned of this first legislative act his anger knew no bounds. ‘This is madness. How can you accomplish a revolution without shooting?... What repressive measures have you then? Imprisonment? Who pays any attention to them in a time of bourgeois war when every party hopes for victory?’ Kamenev tried to show that it was a question of repeal of the death penalty which Kerensky had introduced especially for deserting soldiers. But Lenin was not to be appeased... He repeated, ‘it is an inadmissible weakness. Pacifist illusion.’ He proposed changing the decree at once. We told him this would make an extraordinarily unfavourable impression.

“Finally someone said ‘the best thing is to resort to shooting only when there is no other way.’†(Cited by Bunyan and Fisher, p. 124)

By the way, there was no civil war yet. However the Bolshevik Trotsky, who was only second to Lenin in the leadership, himself was instru-mental in reviving the death sentence the very next year. The occasion was the bitter relation that developed between Trotsky and the commander of the Baltic Fleet, Aleksei Shchastny, on the question of the movement of the Baltic Fleet for demolition, faced with the German threat. Trotsky charged him for neglect of duty. He submitted his resignation which was rejected by Trotsky who summoned him to Moscow where Trotsky singlehandedly organised the investigation, sham trial and death sentence on the spurious charge of attempting to overthrow the Petrograd Commune with the larger aim of fighting the Republic. The execution symbolised the restitution of judicial capital punishment. (All this is taken from the recent authoritative book The Bolsheviks in Power by the eminent historian, Alexander Rabinowitch, Indiana University Press, 2007, pp. 242-43, 283.) The same book adds: “Trotsky was the sole witness allowed to testify at the commander’s trial, possibly the first Soviet show trial. In 1995 Shchastny was cleared of all charges and officially rehabilitated.†(p. 435)

Let me conclude by underlining that while Russia under the bourgeois Provisional Govern-ment was, in Lenin’s view, ‘the freest country in the world’ (May 1917) Russia under the Bolshevik Party-state became and remained till its evaporation one of the most repressed countries in the world.

University of Quebec

Montreal Paresh Chattopadhyay