Isaak Nahman Steinberg: Anti-authoritarianism instead of martyrdom

The name Isaak Nahman Steinberg can be found on the list of forgotten and largely unknown revolutionaries that is difficult to reconstruct, but by no means short. This is what the sociologist Hendrik Wallat writes in the 2014 publication “Isaak Steinberg – Social Revolutionary and Jewish Intellectual,” which was published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. With his research, Wallat has ensured that Steinberg is no longer so unknown. Now there is even the opportunity to read one of his central works again: A new edition of Steinberg’s book from 1931 was recently published under the title “Violence and Terror in the Revolution”; There was already a German-language edition in 1974, which has long been sold out. When the publisher advertises the book on the back “as a new edition of a key work for understanding Soviet-Russian history from the Russian Revolution to the present,” readers are initially cautious about such superlatives. But describing Steinberg as a “forerunner of later important political science works by Hannah Arendt, for example” is actually not an exaggeration.

Warning against authoritarianism

Steinberg belonged to the group of those who warned very early on of the authoritarian tendencies in socialism without defending capitalism. This distinguishes him from theorists like Karl Kautsky, who published the book “Bolshevism and Terror” in 1919, but it quickly becomes clear that he wanted to defend social democracy – even though it was responsible for the murder of thousands in the years 1918 to 1923 alone rebellious workers in Germany. As a leading politician of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Steinberg was also one of the protagonists of the October Revolution. It wasn’t just the Bolsheviks who were involved in this, as Stalinist hagiography would later claim, in a reading that anti-authoritarian leftists reproduce to this day when they dismiss the October Revolution as a mere authoritarian coup by the Bolsheviks. What is also little known today is that anarchists ensured that the Constituent Assembly, a parliament elected after the October Revolution in 1917 and dominated by a majority of bourgeois parties, was closed. Many leftists beyond the Bolsheviks were convinced at the time that a bourgeois parliament was no longer needed in a Soviet republic.

Steinberg’s writing can be read as an antidote to any authoritarianism in the name of revolution.

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The Left Socialist Revolutionaries were not only driving forces in the October Revolution, but afterwards formed a coalition government together with the Bolsheviks. In this government, Issak Steinberg served as Justice Minister from December 1917 to March 1918 and, in his few months in office, laid the foundations for a socialist judicial reform that was intended to prevent authoritarianism and terror. Almost twelve years later, already in exile, Steinberg wrote about the October Revolution’s slide into despotism and authoritarian rule: After an attempted assassination of Lenin at the end of 1917, the Bolshevik press reacted for the first time with threats against representatives of the overthrown ruling classes, and The garrison of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg reminded their opponents of the “September murders” in a resolution. This referred to the massacre of the Jacobins in September 1792 during the French Revolution. In his moral-philosophical reflections that characterize “Violence and Terror in the Revolution,” Steinberg repeatedly addresses this bloody upheaval of the French Revolution.

Steinberg often asks himself why he and his comrades did not seek greater conflict with the Bolsheviks and turn against revolutionary terror. He subsequently gives a plausible explanation for this: “The Bolsheviks? But they saw this whipping up of passions as a weapon in the class struggle; They tried to unleash them by every means possible. The Mensheviks and the Right Socialist Revolutionaries? At that time, these were the mainstays of resistance to the social revolution. Their activity was aimed at weakening, humiliating and overthrowing socialist power. This is how Steinberg describes the social conditions after the October Revolution, which are often ignored today.

fatherland ideologies

Unfortunately, Steinberg does not explain why he lost his position as Minister of Justice after just a few months. As can be found elsewhere, it was not about his criticism of the Bolsheviks – which was only formulated so succinctly later – but about a foreign policy issue: the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, which the German regime imposed on Russia after the Soviet government fell after the October Revolution was eliminated from the First World War. The young Soviet power called on the soldiers of all belligerent countries to imitate the Russian soldiers, to also lay down their arms and refuse to fight against the soldiers of other countries. An appeal was made for the solidarity of workers in all countries based on the correct realization that it was predominantly proletarians who were killing each other in the trenches.

But the ideology of defending the fatherland, which was also advocated by the vast majority of social democratic parties in all warring countries, was also anchored in large parts of the population. The front initially held and German imperialism took advantage of the situation to occupy large parts of Russia and use this loot to confirm a peace dictated by Brest-Litovsk. This caused great controversy within the revolutionary camp in Russia. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries wanted to prevent the signing of this treaty by killing the German ambassador to Russia. In response, all Socialist-Revolutionary ministers, including Issak Steinberg, had to leave the government. After reading the book, the unanswered question remains whether Steinberg and his comrades, if they had stayed in office longer, could have prevented the slide into authoritarianism.

The question of violence

Steinberg’s almost 100-year-old work can still be read with benefit today because his discussion of the Bolshevik line is not just a criticism of old communist and neo-Leninist groups. Steinberg’s writing can be read as an antidote to any authoritarianism in the name of revolution. In the foreword to the original edition, Steinberg emphasizes that he is not a pacifist: “We try to draw a line between terror and violence; but we openly admit that this limit can often disappear.”

Steinberg is very self-critical about the thesis he puts forward in the book that not a single unnecessary drop of blood or a single unnecessary tear should be shed even in a revolution. He concedes a few sentences later that the questions surrounding the use of force are inherently complicated. That sounds like a phrase at first. But later Steinberg formulated a claim that is still useful today to distinguish mere militarism from the militancy of an emancipatory left. »You enter the revolution with the red flag in your hand; but the black nap of mourning surrounds this flag.« This mourning goes out to all people who lost their lives or their health in the revolutionary struggle.

Such an approach differs fundamentally from the martyr cult, with which many left-wing movements in different countries do not mourn the deaths of the revolution, but rather heroize them. The hero cult often differs little, at least in form, from the nationalist phrases that are intended to commemorate the victims of wars that are waged in the name of nation and honor.

Steinberg emphasizes that a social revolution cannot be about simply killing opponents: “On the contrary, we want to preserve them (not as classes, but as working people) for socialist society.” In doing so, he turns against propagandists in the revolutionary camp who use terms such as “destroy” and “eradicate.” Steinberg, on the other hand, wrote in the name of a humanism, which he described in a letter to the left-wing writer Ernst Toller as “the historical heritage of socialism.” In the afterword to the book, Hendrik Wallat summarizes the polemic with the following appropriate words: “The Russian Revolution was an authentic act of the masses, which Steinberg defends with a pathos that has now become alien to us.”

Isaak Steinberg: »Violence and terror in the revolution. The fate of the humiliated and insulted in the Russian Revolution«. Anares Verlag 2024, 354 pages, br., 25€.

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