Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) captures the cruelty, chaos and violence of the revolutionary whirlwind of 1917. Through Yuri Zhivago’s poetic sensibility we feel the visceral changes tearing the entrails of his native land. At first the imagery is positive and hopeful, anticipating a new beginning:
Everything was fermenting, growing, rising1 with the magic yeast of life. The joy of living, like a gentle wind, swept in a broad surge indiscriminately through fields and towns, through walls and fences, through wood and flesh. Not to be overwhelmed by this tidal wave, Zhivago went out in the square to listen to the speeches … ‘Just think what extraordinary things are happening all around us!’ Yuri said. ‘Such things happen only once in an eternity … Freedom has dropped on us out of the sky…’
But Pasternak chronicles the speed and violence with which those expectations of a new world were crushed. From initial hopes of freedom and democracy, Yuri Zhivago grows alarmed at the random brutality of the Bolshevik Revolution, its unthinking destructiveness and utopian megalomania:
‘It just seems to me that2 with all that’s going on – the chaos, the disintegration, the pressure from the enemy – this isn’t the moment to start dangerous experiments,’ said Yuri. ‘The country has to get over one upheaval before plunging into another one …’ ‘That’s a very naive statement,’ said his travelling companion. ‘All the destruction is right and proper … Society must be smashed to pieces; then a genuinely revolutionary government can put the pieces together on a completely new basis.’ Yuri felt sick; he went out into the corridor …
Zhivago’s hesitation over how to greet the October Revolution – as joyous rebirth or national catastrophe – reflected the attitude of many Russians. After February 1917, the short-lived Provisional Government had begun to introduce Western-style parliamentary democracy; and even after he seized control in October, Lenin continued to promise ‘All Power to the Soviets’, the directly elected local councils of workers, peasants and soldiers. To the surprise of his opponents and many of his own supporters, Lenin stood by the Provisional Government’s promise of free elections to a national constituent assembly, a body that was intended to pave the way for a constitution and a parliament based on universal suffrage. But Vladimir Nabokov Senior sensed this was a cynical ploy:
Everyone expected the Bolsheviks3 to start a campaign against the Constituent Assembly. But they proved to be more cunning. As is well known, they tried to blame the Provisional Government for delaying the convocation of the assembly, and made a great show of their own commitment to convening it. They were waiting to be certain of their own strength, and of their opponents’ weakness … before acting in a very coarse and brutal way.
The millions who turned out to vote on 25 November 1917 knew nothing of the Bolsheviks’ plans and probably believed that democracy in Russia was finally dawning. After a largely peaceful election, in which two-thirds of the population voted, 707 men and women from across Russia were chosen to represent the interests of the people. The Constituent Assembly convened in the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg at four o’clock in the afternoon of 5 January 1918. It was the first freely elected parliament in Russia’s history, an historic moment by any standard. The reformist dreams of liberals down the ages – Witte, Speransky, Chaadayev, Loris-Melikov, the Decembrists and all the others – seemed finally to be coming true.
But like so many democratic experiments in the past, this one too was doomed to failure.
The Bolsheviks had not done well in the elections, and their rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, had a majority in the assembly. With more than twice as many seats as the Bolsheviks, the SRs should have been dominant. But Lenin had already installed a government dominated by his Bolsheviks, and he wasn’t about to let an election remove them from power.
To relinquish the Soviet Republic won by the people4, for the sake of the bourgeois parliamentary system of the Constituent Assembly, would now be a step backwards and would cause the collapse of the October workers’ and peasants’ revolution … We must not be deceived by the election figures. Elections prove nothing. The Bolsheviks can and must take state power into their own hands …
The Constituent Assembly was allowed to exist for just over 12 hours. The Bolsheviks walked out after the first votes went against them. The other parties carried on until four in the morning of 6 January and were then evicted by pro-Bolshevik guards fuelled with vodka and brandishing rifles. When the deputies came back the next day, they found the Tauride Palace locked and surrounded by soldiers.
Lenin’s Bolsheviks had hijacked the embryonic institutions of freedom and democracy. Now they were about to impose a centralised dictatorship even harsher than the one they’d overthrown.
Like the zealots of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks adopted a ‘year zero’ policy, declaring the country a republic, renaming her cities and streets, recasting the Russian alphabet and revising the calendar. The capital was moved from Petrograd to Moscow. The foreign and domestic debts of the old regime were disowned. Religion was persecuted and independent newspapers banned; free love, divorce and abortion were allowed. Titles and ranks were abolished. Old forms of social etiquette were abandoned – instead of using ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’, people were told to call each other Grazhdanin (Citizen), while party members addressed each other as Tovarishch (Comrade).
In the name of ‘protecting the revolution’, legality and justice were jettisoned. In pronouncements signed personally by Lenin, the Bolsheviks declared their political opponents – the liberal KaDety, the Mensheviks and most of the SRs – enemies of the state:
The Right Socialist Revolutionary5 and Menshevik parties are carrying on a desperate struggle against Soviet power, calling openly in their publications for its overthrow and describing it as arbitrary and unlawful. They are defending the saboteurs, the servants of capital, and are going as far as undisguised calls to terrorism … All leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, a party filled with enemies of the people, are hereby to be considered outlaws. They are to be arrested immediately and brought before the revolutionary court …
These were men who had played a distinguished role in the struggle against tsarism, but now they were demonised, arrested and murdered. All who failed to obey the Bolshevik line, including former comrades in arms, were branded bourgeois provocateurs. It would not be long before all opposition parties were banned and a one-party state introduced. It would last until 1991.
Most damagingly, when demonstrators marched in support of democracy and the Constituent Assembly they were fired on by Bolshevik Red Guards. Twelve marchers were killed. In a coincidence resembling a portent, the dead were buried on 9 January, the anniversary of the tsarist murders of Bloody Sunday in 1905. Even the official bard of Bolshevism, Lenin’s favourite writer Maxim Gorky, was outraged:
For almost a hundred years6 the finest Russians have lived by the idea of a constituent assembly that would allow the free expression of democracy in Russia … Rivers of blood have been spilled for this idea. But now the so-called People’s Commissars have given orders to shoot the democrats who march in its honour … The Petrograd workers were mowed down, unarmed … by cowards and murderers … Do the ‘People’s Commissars’, among whom there must be decent and sensible people, not understand … that they will end up strangling the entire Russian democracy?
Lenin was trying to do precisely that. ‘Everything has turned out for the best7,’ he wrote. ‘The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly means the complete and open repudiation of democracy in favour of dictatorship. This will be a valuable lesson.’
Although Gorky remained publicly loyal to the Bolshevik cause, his private letters of the time reveal both his personal disillusion with the revolutionary leadership and an unflinching awareness that Lenin had no interest in freeing Russia from its millennial history of autocratic rule:
Lenin and Trotsky do not have8 the slightest idea of the meaning of freedom or the rights of man. They have been poisoned with the filthy venom of power, and this is shown by the shameful attitude towards freedom of speech, the individual and all those other civil liberties for which the democrats have struggled … It is clear that Russia is heading for a new and even more savage autocracy.
Russian historiography continued to revere Lenin even as it denounced Stalin for the crimes of the Soviet system, but those crimes originated with the first Bolshevik leader. Lenin seemed to care more for ideas than for people. He pursued the cause of the revolution exclusively, single-mindedly, whatever the cost in human suffering. It was he, not Stalin, who founded the one-party state; he who created the feared secret police and the system of forced labour camps later known as the Gulag; and he who first gave the order for summary executions of suspected political opponents. Writing in the 1960s, Vasily Grossman reflected on Lenin’s Mephistophelian attraction:
Lenin’s intolerance, his contempt for freedom9, the fanaticism of his faith, his cruelty towards his enemies, were the qualities that brought victory to his cause … and Russia followed him – willingly at first, trustfully – along a merry intoxicating path lit by the burning estates of the landowners. Then she began to stumble, to look back, ever more terrified of the path stretching before her. But the grip of his iron hand leading her onwards grew tighter and tighter. Imbued with apostolic faith, he walked on, leading Russia behind him … While the West was fertilised with freedom, Russia’s evolution was fertilised by the growth of slavery.
But the Bolshevik regime was fragile, beset by powerful enemies. The state had ground to a halt as civil servants, the banks and the treasury, railway and communications workers all went on strike in protest against the new government. Wages were unpaid; the economy was crumbling. The Bolsheviks had support in the cities, but the countryside overwhelmingly backed their rivals, the SRs. At home, anti-Bolshevik forces were preparing armed opposition and abroad the Western powers were growing ever more hostile, alarmed by the Bolsheviks’ pledge to withdraw from the war against Germany.
Bold measures were needed, and Lenin took them. He issued a decree that abolished all private ownership of land with no compensation; peasant communities were to distribute it among themselves. The Bolsheviks failed to mention that this was actually the Socialist Revolutionaries’ land programme. But it was the greatest shift in land tenure in Russian history, and it persuaded many peasants to fight in the Red Army because they feared the anti-revolutionary White Army would take back the land. (The Bolsheviks, of course, would do exactly that when they imposed collective farms in the 1930s.)
Then, in early 1918, Lenin dispatched his commissar for foreign affairs, Leon Trotsky, to negotiate a peace treaty with the Germans, recognising that an end to the war would be hugely popular. Trotsky was categorical:
We cannot, will not and must not10 continue a war begun by tsars and capitalists in alliance with monarchs and capitalists. We will not and we must not continue to be at war with workers and peasants like ourselves. We are not signing a peace of landlords and capitalists. Let the German and Austrian soldiers know who exactly is sending them into the field of battle and let them know for whom they are being asked to fight … Let them know also that we refuse to fight against them.
Sensing the Bolsheviks’ weakness, the Germans insisted on punitive conditions, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed in March 1918, brought huge territorial losses for Russia. The new Soviet Republic had to forfeit Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, Belorussia and much of Ukraine, losing a quarter of her population and vast swathes of her coalfields, agricultural land and heavy industry. Lenin was criticised, but maintained that immediate peace was the only way to save the revolution:
Either we sign the peace terms11 or we sign the death warrant of the Soviet government … Their knees are on our chest, and our position is hopeless … We are compelled to submit to a distressing peace. But it will not stop the forthcoming revolution in Europe. We can now begin to prepare a revolutionary army … a serious, mighty, people’s army. This peace must be accepted as a respite enabling us to prepare a decisive resistance to the bourgeoisie and imperialists. The proletariat of the whole world will come to our aid. Then we shall renew the fight.
But before thinking about exporting revolution abroad, the Bolsheviks had to deal with a growing menace at home. Supporters of the old order were spoiling for revenge. A violent civil war was about to erupt, and its consequences would be terrible.