Some have argued that Tsarist society was already doomed by 1900. But we have seen that much recent research portrays a rapidly industrializing society, whose archaic features stand out precisely because of the speed and scale of change. The empire's main problems were symptoms of growth rather than stagnation. But they were tricky enough to require intelligent and agile leadership, and that was missing in the early twentieth century. Given this book's focus on the importance of leadership in Inner Eurasian mobilizational systems, it should come as no surprise if I argue that, like fish in the old Russian proverb, “Ryba gnyot s golov” (“fish rot from the head”), the Tsarist mobilizational system also rotted from the head downwards.
It was not inevitable that the system would collapse, even under the immense strains of World War I. It is not absurd to imagine a twentieth century in which the Russian Empire survived the war and emerged as a flourishing capitalist society under a somewhat archaic political system. The Russian mobilization machine broke down mainly because of a failure of leadership in a period of turbulent change, the type of change that the system had survived many times before. Not until the center collapsed did the whole system break down. And only then did the peripheries fall away. As in 1260, in the early seventeenth century, and once again in 1991, the timing and nature of the collapse reflected a breakdown at the top of the system. This is why the final collapse caught so many observers by surprise. As so often in the past, disciplined elite networks had held together a mobilization machine that kept functioning even under great pressure. But when elite solidarity finally snapped, the system sprang apart. In a highly centralized system the center was the system's least predictable and most vulnerable component, because its functioning depended so much on the whims, the personality, the political skills, and the fate of a tiny group of leaders.
Unlike the crises of 1260 and 1991, but like that of the early seventeenth century, the 1917 breakdown was followed by the rapid creation of a new mobilizational system that borrowed much from its predecessor, equaled it in scale, and eventually exceeded it in power and discipline. The rapid rebuilding of a new mobilizational system also depended on the quality of leadership, in this case the extremely skillful leadership that allowed the Bolsheviks to seize political opportunities few others had seen in a fast-moving crisis. If Tsarism had not collapsed, those opportunities would not have arisen and Bolshevism would have remained a historical irrelevance.
What distinguishes the 1917 crisis most decisively from those of 1260, the early seventeenth century, and the 1991 crisis is the scale of elite turnover. The 1917 crisis removed not just the central rivet of the old system, the autocratic monarchy, but the entire network of landowners, officials, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs that had bound it together for centuries. At the top of the system, hardly anyone survived. However, at middle and lower levels of government and within the army, there was much more continuity in personnel, and this may help explain many continuities in the governing style and methods of the Tsarist and Soviet systems, above all their shared commitment to disciplined, autocratic government. Towards the end of his life, Lenin feared that middle-level Soviet officials might preserve political attitudes and styles of rule from the Tsarist period, and in his critique of Stalinism, The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky argued that such continuities helped explain the Stalinist “betrayal” of the revolution. Despite their profound ideological differences, the Tsarist and Soviet elites faced the same fundamental challenge of modernizing a peasant country in the era of fossil fuels, while coping with huge military and economic challenges from abroad. That shared challenge, combined with the survival of many middle-level officials, may help explain the extent of evolutionary convergence between the two systems. Much survived into the Soviet era from the political culture of Russia's traditional mobilizational system.1
In July 1914 war broke out between the two superpower alliances that had emerged in early twentieth-century Europe. The cold wars conducted between imperial powers in the late nineteenth century and fought out in colonial empires far from Europe now turned into a hot war in Europe's industrial heartland. Many observers, impressed by the German blitzkrieg of 1870, expected the war to end fast. Instead, as combatants learnt how to mobilize the vast human, economic, and military resources of modern, fossil-fuel-powered industries, from machine guns to tanks and planes, the war turned into the largest and one of the bloodiest ever fought. It was also the first major fossil fuels war. As Daniel Yergin writes, “in the course of the First World War, oil and the internal combustion engine changed every dimension of warfare, even the very meaning of mobility on land and sea and in the air.”2 The struggle to adapt fast to the new technical, economic, military, and organizational realities and opportunities of the fossil fuels era put such strain on existing political systems and economies that, by its end, three traditional empires had collapsed: the German Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Russian Empire.
How ready was the Russian Empire for war?3 Some, at least, were convinced even before the war began that the empire would collapse. A few months before war broke out, a former police official and Minister of the Interior, P. N. Durnovo, predicted what might happen with eerie precision:
In the event of defeat, … social revolution in its most extreme form is inevitable. … the trouble will start with the blaming of the Government for all disasters. In the legislative institutions a bitter campaign against the Government will begin, followed by revolutionary agitations throughout the country, with Socialist slogans, capable of arousing and rallying the masses, beginning with the division of the land and succeeded by a division of all valuables and property. The defeated army, having lost its most dependable men, and carried away by the tide of primitive peasant desire for land, will find itself too demoralized to serve as a bulwark of law and order. The legislative institutions and the intellectual opposition parties, lacking real authority in the eyes of the people, will be powerless to stem the popular tide, aroused by themselves, and Russia will be flung into hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.4
On the other hand, the system did survive two and a half years of grueling and debilitating warfare, and that suggests it had more resilience than Durnovo supposed.
By some criteria, the Russian army performed well. Military reforms since 1874 had created a large reserve army which, by 1914, numbered 2.6 million, in addition to an active army of 1.4 million.5 The peacetime Russian army was already Europe's largest. In 1914, 4 million more were drafted from the reserves, and a further 10 million would be drafted during the rest of the war. Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War had revealed significant weaknesses, and after 1906 the government had committed a lot of resources to military reform, with the support of the Duma. In the years after 1906, Russian industrial growth and military reforms were impressive enough to persuade many German leaders, including Moltke, the Chief of the German General Staff, that Russian military capabilities were increasing fast, so that if war was inevitable it had better come sooner rather than later. As Wildman has shown, there are few signs that the army was collapsing even early in 1917.6 Discipline held at the front, and, though it retreated, the army kept at bay the richer and better equipped armies of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires for three years. The war would also demonstrate for the first time the military significance of oil, a resource that Germany lacked, while Russia had large supplies in the Caucasus.
But Russia's weakened and increasingly divided government failed to do what Russian governments had traditionally done so well: it failed to mobilize Russia's vast human and military resources effectively enough. Numerous exceptions to conscription, based on education and ethnicity, meant that only 25–30 percent of the young males technically eligible for the draft actually served in the army, in comparison to 80 percent in France and 50 percent in Germany. The Russian government mobilized a smaller percentage of its population than the other major combatants: c.8.8 percent, compared to 12.7 percent in Britain, 19.9 percent in France, and 20.5 percent in Germany.7 Furthermore, the ending of lifelong recruitment meant that Russian soldiers were no longer as thoroughly socialized into the army's culture as they had been before the mid-nineteenth century. At the upper levels of the officer corps, nobles still set the tone, bringing traditions of amateurishness that undermined the effectiveness of the highly professionalized middle-rank officers, and the well-trained professionals of the General Staff.8
Early in the war, the army suffered major defeats, beginning in August 1914 with the battles of Tannenberg (during which the Russian army lost 90,000 prisoners and 122,000 killed and wounded) and the Masurian lakes (in which it lost 45,000 prisoners and 100,000 killed and wounded). In the fall of 1915, German armies advanced into much of eastern Poland and Lithuania. By the end of 1916, after the defeat of a major Russian offensive led by General A. A. Brusilov in June and July, Russia's northwestern borders were pushed back to those of the late seventeenth century. By 1917, 1.7 million soldiers had died, about 8 million had been wounded, and 2.5 million were prisoners of war. Huge casualties removed an entire cohort of experienced soldiers and officers, so that more and more officers and soldiers were hastily trained and poorly disciplined draftees. In its search for conscripts, the government was forced to breach some old taboos, trying to recruit in Central Asia, for example (which generated a huge uprising in 1916), or recruiting family breadwinners.
As the fighting continued, Russia struggled to supply its armies. Russia's railway network was one twelfth as dense as Germany's and one seventh as dense as Austria's, and its main lines were designed to carry grain to the Black Sea rather than to move troops to the empire's western borders. With less productive capacity than its enemies, Russian war industries could not make up fast enough for losses of weapons and equipment, and Russia suffered from a chronic shortage of heavy mortars and high explosive shells. German and Austrian armies together fired 340 million artillery rounds of all calibers during the war, while Russia fired only 50 million, or one seventh as many.9 The scale and duration of the war turned it into a production contest, one that Russia, facing two more industrialized enemies, was bound to lose in the long run.10 As early as December 2, 1914, Nicholas II wrote to his wife, Alexandra, that:
The only great and serious difficulty for our army is again the lack of ammunition. Because of that our troops are obliged, while fighting, to be cautious and to economize. This means that the burden of fighting falls on the infantry. As a result our losses are enormous. Some army corps have been reduced to divisions, brigades to companies, et cetera …11
Turkey's entry into the war in October 1914, on the side of the Central Powers, ended any hope of importing allied supplies through the Mediterranean, while the northern supply route through Archangel and Murmansk was closed for much of the year and serviced by one single-track rail line.
The government also failed to mobilize enough cash, because its capacity to exert fiscal pressure had declined since the middle of the nineteenth century. With the abandonment of redemption payments in 1907, the government lost its traditional grip on rural resources. Increasingly, it had to extract resources from the countryside, using commercial rather than mobilizational levers, and this it was ill-equipped to do. To lure resources from the countryside, the towns would have to supply cheap industrial goods, from nails to plowshares, at a time when industrial production was being diverted to military supplies. The ad hoc methods of autocracy compounded the problem. Nicholas's impulsive decision to introduce prohibition at the start of the war was a fiscal catastrophe.12 It deprived the government of almost a third of its pre-war revenues; indeed, the Ministry of Finance had originally planned to raise liquor taxes to help pay for the war. It would take at least two years to make up for the fiscal losses caused by prohibition alone.13 Here is one of many examples of spectacular incompetence at the top of the system. A. I. Shingarev, reporting for the Duma's budgetary and financial commission on August 18, 1915, wrote:
From time immemorial countries waging war have been in want of funds. Revenue has always been sought either by good or by bad measures, by voluntary contributions, by obligatory levies, or by the open confiscation of private property. But never since the dawn of human history has a single country, in time of war, renounced the principal source of its revenue.14
Prohibition also meant that peasants no longer had to sell grain to buy liquor. Instead, they ate their surplus grain, or used it to fatten their livestock (an effective way of banking surplus produce). Some peasants even tried distilling their surplus grain to produce “samogon” or illicit vodka. In 1914, peasants sent 24 percent of the grain harvest to market. By 1917 they were sending only 15 percent. Yet the army and towns had to be fed, and peasant grain became even more important as production from large commercial farms declined when their agricultural wage workers were drafted into the army. Rather than increasing, the vital exchanges between town and country were declining.
Part of the problem was monetary. The nominal cost of paying for the war rose by almost nine times in just three years, while prohibition and the ending of foreign trade had significantly reduced government income. Short of cash, the government abandoned the gold standard and started printing money. In two and a half years, money supply quadrupled, beginning an inflationary spiral that would end only after the Civil War. All combatant powers used the printing press to pay for war, but the economic and political costs of inflation were greater in a less commercialized economy such as Russia. Those costs were felt most acutely by wage earners, because inflation lowered the real value of wages just when the government needed to attract more labor to its factories. In 1916, the police reported that in the capital (now renamed Petrograd), wages had risen by 100 percent since 1914, while prices had risen by 300 percent.15 Eventually, inflation would generate dangerous levels of discontent in the major towns and the capital.
The government might have managed industrial unrest if discipline had held amongst garrison troops in the cities. But it did not. In the army as a whole, discipline held up as well as in the other combatant armies, despite large-scale desertions. The garrison troops, however, consisted largely of poorly trained recruits, or troops recovering from wounds and waiting to be returned to the front, or family breadwinners resentful at having been mobilized after the abolition of laws exempting them from recruitment. Some garrison troops were even industrial workers, being punished for strike activity. A more competent government might have anticipated the military problems such policies would cause in the cities.
Even these challenges might have been manageable if it had not been for one more fatal weakness: widening divisions within Russia's ruling elites. Tsarism finally collapsed when it was abandoned by Russia's civilian and military elites. At the beginning of the war, there was a broad, patriotic consensus, and parliamentary, military, and industrial elites rallied around the Tsar. But military defeats and the government's refusal to negotiate seriously with the Duma majority soon dissipated patriotic enthusiasm and elite unity. Many Duma leaders became convinced that the government's failure to consult with the Duma majority was undermining the war effort by failing to mobilize the immense reserves of military, administrative, and entrepreneurial talent among educated Russians. In 1915, the Tsar made some grudging concessions to the conservative liberals who now dominated the Duma. In May, he allowed the formation of a Central War Industries Committee (WIC) that brought together representatives of industry, workers’ organizations, and members of the Duma political elite. By bringing a wider range of expertise and experience to bear on the problem of supplies, the WIC helped improve the management of transportation, fuel supplies, grain supplies, and supplies to the army. The Tsar also allowed the creation of an All-Russian Union of Zemstvo and Municipal Councils (Zemgor), which took an active role in tasks such as welfare and dealing with the flood of refugees from occupied regions.16
These changes demonstrated the willingness of the country's political elites, and even some of its working-class leaders, to work with the government if it offered them some role in mobilizing the country's resources. But Nicholas feared that by enhancing the Duma's role in the war effort, he might unwittingly create an alternative government. In this way, fears for his own authority limited his willingness to seek better ways of mobilizing for war. As he turned away from the leading forces in the Duma, he began to appoint ministers with a vision as narrow as his own, or to seek advice from unofficial advisers without either skill or insight, such as his wife's favorite, the Siberian monk Rasputin.
After major German advances in the fall of 1915, Nicholas II appointed himself commander-in-chief. Appalled by this decision, some army commanders began to see the Tsar himself as the major barrier to victory. A. A. Brusilov was reported to have said that, if forced to choose between the Tsar and Russia, “I will take Russia.”17 In October, leaders of the Octobrist and Kadet parties formed a “Progressive Bloc,” which demanded a “Ministry of Public Confidence,” that is to say a ministry chosen from Duma leaders. Soon, this demand was supported by most Duma members. But Nicholas rejected their demands. This ensured that from now on the task of mobilizing the country's military, economic, and even moral resources for war was carried out by a government that lacked the talents, the connections, the experience, and the support of much of Russia's political, commercial, and even military elite. Without real expertise at the top of the system, unofficial advisers such as Rasputin became increasingly influential. They also became increasingly visible, which further undermined the government's prestige. Like Brusilov, Duma leaders began to fear that they might have to choose between a Tsar whose policies threatened ruin and defeat, and an elite coup that might rally Russian society and generate a more competent government. As in any highly centralized political system, weakness or incompetence at the top undermined the cohesion and power of the entire system.
The dilemma faced by Duma leaders was described well in a famous article written by the liberal politician Vasily Maklakov in September 1915.
Imagine that you are driving in an automobile on a steep and narrow road. One wrong turn of the steering-wheel and you are irretrievably lost. Your dear ones, your beloved mother, are with you in the car. Suddenly you realise that your chauffeur is unable to drive … should you continue in this way, you face inescapable destruction. Fortunately, there are people in the automobile who can drive, and they should take over the wheel as soon as possible. But it is a difficult and dangerous task to change places with the driver while moving. One second without control and the automobile will crash into the abyss. There is no choice, however, and you make up your mind; but the chauffeur refuses to give way … he is clinging to the wheel and will not give way to anybody. … Can one force him? This could easily be done in normal times with an ordinary horse-drawn peasant cart at low speed on level ground. Then it could mean salvation. But can this be done on the steep mountain path? … One error in taking a turn, or an awkward movement of his hand, and the car is lost. You know that, and he knows it as well … So you will leave the steering-wheel in the hands of the chauffeur … And you will be right, for this is what has to be done.18
The high stakes magnified the impact of minor crises. In February 1917, cold weather disrupted railway traffic, which cut supplies of fuel and grain to the towns and the capital. Bakeries closed and the government introduced rationing, which prompted panic buying and long food queues. Factories without fuel shut down. Then temperatures rose, and workers went onto the streets to protest. International Women's Day on February 23 coincided with protests against bread shortages. By February 24, the demonstrations were as large as those at the height of the 1905 Revolution. Despite the uncertain discipline of garrison troops, on the evening of the 25th Nicholas ordered them to fire on rioters. Some units obeyed, provoking memories of Bloody Sunday. But most units refused to obey, and by the 27th most of the garrison troops in the capital had mutinied.
The Tsar could surely have ridden out even this crisis if he had the support of military and political leaders, just as he had survived the October 1905 crisis after making concessions to the liberals who dominated Russia's elites. Indeed, units were sent from the front to restore order in the capital. By now, though, Nicholas had exhausted all reserves of support in the army and the Duma. When he prorogued the Duma on February 27, its members stayed in session, illegally. This was an act of revolutionary defiance from a group whose members would have greatly preferred to support a reformed Tsarist government. Duma members also began to negotiate with the “Soviet,” an institution modeled on the revolutionary Soviets of 1905, which emerged more or less spontaneously on February 27, and immediately acquired authority over the popular uprising and the garrison troops in the capital. On March 1, the Petrograd Soviet issued “Order No. 1,” commanding all military units in the capital to obey only the orders of the Soviet. The order of the Soviet and the defiance of the Duma broke the ties of political and military discipline that had held, so far, despite the strains of war.
Most political and military leaders now decided that Russia's chances of survival were better without the Tsar. In his memoirs, M. V. Rodzianko, the President of the Duma, reported that in January 1917, General Krymov told Duma members in a private meeting, “The feeling in the army is such that all will greet with joy the news of a coup d’état. It has to come; it is felt at the front. Should you decide to do this, we will support you.”19 Though troops were sent from the front to suppress the mutiny in the capital, General Alekseev, the commander-in-chief of the army, halted their advance, believing it would exacerbate the crisis. Then, as Eric Lohr writes, on the morning of March 2, Alekseev “conducted something close to a coup d’état, sending a circular to the leading army commanders making the case for Nicholas to abdicate.”20 The generals agreed with Alekseev. Faced with a united front of his commanding generals, Nicholas caved in. He agreed to abdicate on the same day, March 2.
What if? This analysis suggests that, despite the strains of the war, the breakdown was political. It arose from a split within Russia's elites that could have been avoided. If Nicholas had shown slightly more flexibility, if he had persisted with the political compromises he was edging towards in the middle of 1915, if he had collaborated more closely with Russia's military and political elites by appointing a “Ministry of Public Confidence,” he would not have been alone in the crisis of February 1917, Duma and army leaders would surely have helped suppress riots in the capital, and the system might have held, as it did in 1905 after the publication of the October Manifesto. Cooperation with the Duma would have allowed the appointment of more competent officials to key ministries, better decision making in general, and perhaps a durable military stalemate on the eastern front until the military tide turned on Germany's western front. The Russian mobilizational system would have made a significant first step towards a more collaborative, if not yet fully democratic, system of government, by incorporating within the mobilizational system more of the expertise and influence of Russia's intellectual, political, military, and business leaders. And after the war, the rapid growth rates of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century might well have resumed. Paul Gregory argues that:
Because barriers to growth would have continued to disappear, Russian growth would likely have accelerated. If this insight is correct, Russian growth over the next half century (1913–1963) would have exceeded the rates recorded for the period 1885–1913.21
In the real world, the monarchy's collapse broke the old mobilizational system.
The abdication of Nicholas II on March 2, like the death of Khan Mongke in 1259 or Tsar Fedor in 1598, released the catch holding together a tightly coiled piece of machinery. With the Tsar gone, the system sprang apart. As Eric Lohr writes:
The regime change itself was the single most important cause of the series of events that led to the disintegration of the state and the army, the agrarian revolution and the emergence of minority nationalist movements. With the loss of the tsar as the symbolic centre of authority and loyalty, little held the empire together.22
Nicholas II abdicated on March 2, handing power to his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, rather than to his own son, the hemophiliac Alexis. A day later, on March 3, Grand Duke Mikhail accepted the advice of Duma leaders that he, too, should abdicate. He handed power to the Provisional Committee of the Duma, “until the Constituent Assembly … shall by its decision on the form of government express the will of the people.” In practice, that left power in the hands of the Duma's Provisional Committee and the Petrograd Soviet, an odd couple of institutions that represented, together, most sections of the ruling elite, and claimed to represent the entire population of the empire. The Provisional Committee of the Duma became the new government. It retained a degree of legitimacy because the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich transferred power to it in his own act of abdication. But it remained “provisional,” as it was expected to be replaced after the meeting of a Constituent Assembly.
In this way, the shadow government that Nicholas had feared in 1915 became the real government. Its first leader was Prince G. E. L'vov (1861–1925), a zemstvo leader and one of the country's wealthiest landowners. Alexander Guchkov, a businessman and the leader of the Octobrists, became Minister of War, while another industrialist, A. I. Konovalov (1875–1948), became Minister of Trade and Industry. Paul Miliukov, the historian and leader of the Kadets, became Minister of Foreign Affairs, and A. F. Kerenskii (1881–1970), a lawyer and socialist, became Minister of Justice. The members of the new government represented the key groups within Russia's upper classes: the landed nobility, the business elite, the liberal intelligentsia, and the radical, socialist intelligentsia.
However, real power over the garrison troops in the capital was held, not by the Provisional Government, but by the Soviet, whose authority was accepted by most of the soldiers and workers of working-class Petrograd. The Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet occupied opposite wings of the Tauride palace, which had been built in the late eighteenth century by Catherine the Great's former lover, Grigorii Potemkin. Alexander Kerenskii, a leader of the moderate left-wing Trudovik group, and one of the few politicians who belonged to both the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet, shuttled between the palace's two wings as the two institutions searched for common ground. These frantic negotiations, between groups whose ideologies seemed poles apart, demonstrate the underlying desire for unity of all Russia's educated groups, despite the polarization of elite opinion. On March 6, the two bodies agreed that the Provisional Committee of the Duma would form a new government, on condition that it grant civil rights similar to those of the Liberation program of 1905. The socialists who dominated the Soviet agreed to support what they all saw as a “bourgeois” government, mainly because, like most socialists, they believed that Russia lacked the preconditions for socialism. Instead, most of the socialists in the Soviet expected a longish period of bourgeois rule, during which they would act as a sort of loyal opposition.
In this way there emerged a hybrid ruling structure that came to be known as “Dual Power.” This, too, was a sort of smychka, but an awkward and unstable one. Briefly, the new government enjoyed almost universal support, as it issued legislation embodying many of the reforms demanded during the 1905 Revolution. It promised to summon a Constituent Assembly, and granted universal, equal suffrage to men and women, along with full civil rights. The anti-autocratic liberal reforms launched in the first weeks of its existence reflected the anti-authoritarian mood of the period, but they made little political sense in a society with little experience of democracy, and in the middle of a cruel and debilitating war. In a declaration of April 26, the new government announced that government should henceforth be based on consent, not coercion. It granted freedom of religion and the press, abolished the Tsarist system of provincial governors, transferring their power to the elected zemstva, and replaced the Tsarist local police with local militia. In May, it announced that elections would be held in November for a Constituent Assembly. These simple measures dismantled much of the coercive and administrative machinery of the Tsarist mobilizational system. Without that machinery, the new government found it lacked the power to handle the daunting mobilizational challenges it faced. Whether it was to fulfill the radical goals of its left wing, or to prosecute the war more effectively, as its right wing hoped, it would need to be able to mobilize significant power, authority, and resources behind a clear program, and it no longer had the means to do so.
Despite the temporary show of unity, experienced politicians understood the extent of the divisions within Russian society. As one liberal politician put it in his memoirs:
Officially we celebrated, we praised the revolution, shouted “hurrah” to the fighters for freedom, wrapped ourselves with red bunting and marched under red flags … We all said “we,” “our” revolution, “our” victory, and “our” freedom. But inside, in our solitary discussions, we were horrified, we shuddered, and felt ourselves to be prisoners of inimical elements moving along some sort of uncharted path.23
Deep divisions of class, culture, and ethnicity that had once been bridged by the locking mechanism of a disciplined elite class now opened with terrifying speed. M. T. Florinsky, a Russian historian who fought during the war, writes:
The conflict between the attitude of the masses and that of the educated classes … was fundamental, insoluble, fatal … There was no room for compromise between the two points of view, and the conflict had to be fought out to its bitter end.24
Though obscured for a time by nationalism, war, and the rhetoric of democratization, the ancient divide between mobilizers and mobilizees became all too apparent in 1917. There was no single platform that could generate a shared commitment linking Russia's old elite groups with the mass of the rural and urban population. In November, the Kadet scientist Vladimir Vernadskii wrote in his diary: “It is a tragic situation. … It is clear that unrestrained democracy, the pursuit of which I set as the goal of my life, requires corrections.”25 Yet the delegitimization of traditional forms of authoritarian rule meant that each group had to act as if it sought a broad, democratic support base. And curiously, the very search for supporters often mobilized constituencies with very different aims. As Peter Holquist puts it:
Russia's political class had imposed a democratic and elective political structure on a highly fractured political field. The institutions it had summoned into being thus became the vehicles for expressing and mobilizing existing social divisions and new political ones, rather than overcoming them.26
Not until late in 1917 would an increasing number of political groups begin to admit, frankly, that they could not possibly represent the whole of society because divisions ran so deep. The Bolsheviks were the first political party to say publicly that they had no intention of trying to represent all classes. Lenin said it as early as April 1917, in the “April Theses,” in what was much more than a mere tactical move. Lenin had always been exceptionally optimistic about the possibilities for a popular uprising.27 But it is a sign of the reluctance of elite groups to admit these realities that it took the bullying pressure of Lenin to force such policies even on the radical intellectuals who dominated the Bolshevik party.
The deep class divisions became apparent within two months of the Tsar's abdication. Members of the Soviet, aware of the war weariness of working-class Russians, and committed to improving the living conditions of workers and peasants, saw the change of government as an opportunity to negotiate an end to the war, and launch fundamental social and economic reforms. But members of the Provisional Government saw the revolution as a chance to prosecute the war more effectively and with renewed energy. In late April, Miliukov, the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, announced that the government intended to continue the war until it could achieve a “just peace.” His announcement provoked massive demonstrations in the capital, and he and his ally, Guchkov, the Minister of War, were forced to resign.
Now discipline began to break down in the army. At the front, rank-and-file troops began to act as if the Soviet's Order No. 1 applied to the entire army rather than just to garrison troops. They began to debate, and sometimes reject, the orders of their officers if they seemed to conflict with those of the Soviet. They also began to elect their own Soviets. The abolition of the death penalty at the front further undermined the chain of military command. Officers led attacks with no certainty that their troops would follow them. Meanwhile, freedom of the press allowed anti-war parties, including the Bolsheviks, to circulate anti-war propaganda at the front. A second Brusilov offensive, between June 18 and mid-July, had some initial success but soon broke down. Kerenskii, who became Prime Minister on July 8, reinstituted the death penalty under pressure from his new commander-in-chief, Kornilov. Desertions increased and the army began to dissolve, though, as always, discipline held best at the front line.
Fissures also appeared in the towns and factories, in the countryside and far from the center. Though factory discipline was essential to the war effort, the momentum of revolution and the demands of the Soviet forced the Provisional Government to make significant concessions to labor. It granted an 8-hour day and recognized the right to form factory committees that could negotiate on behalf of workers. Factory owners were appalled as they lost control over their own factories. Konovalov, the Minister of Trade and Industry and himself a successful industrialist, argued in May:
When we overthrew the old regime we believed absolutely that freedom would bring about a great expansion of the productive forces of the country. Now it is not a question of thinking about developing productive forces, but of making every effort to protect [industry] … from total ruin. And if the confused minds do not see reason soon, if people do not realise that they are sawing off the branch they are sitting on, if the leaders of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies do not manage to control the movement and to guide it into the channels of legitimate class struggle, then scores and hundreds of enterprises will close down. We shall experience the complete paralysis of national life and shall embark upon a long period of irreparable economic disaster when millions will be unemployed, without bread, without a home, and when the crisis will affect one branch of the economy after the other, bringing with it everywhere death, devastation, and misery, partly ending credit and producing financial crises and everyone's ruin.28
Meanwhile, workers found that whatever promises the new government had made, it was too weak to defend their interests. It was no more able than the Tsarist government to reduce inflation. Prices rose from 300 percent of the 1914 level in January 1917 to 755 percent by October.29 Supplies remained precarious. The new government had to introduce rationing, and by autumn it was sending armed detachments to requisition food from the countryside.
In the villages, peasants sensed the government's loosening grip on the land and demanded the land redistribution they had dreamed of for decades. In contrast, their landlords expected the new government to protect property rights. Having dismantled much of the traditional apparatus of government, the Provisional Government could satisfy neither of these contradictory demands, even if it had had the will and unity needed to do so. It evaded the problem by postponing consideration of land redistribution until the election of a Constituent Assembly in November. Most peasants were unwilling to wait, and in April they began seizing landlords’ land. Having replaced the police with local militias, the government could do little to stop land seizures. In March, officials reported disorders in 34 districts; in April, in 174; and in July, in 325. Most land was seized just before the spring or autumn sowing. Peasants would meet together, often at a local church, and move off with whatever weapons they could find to take over the land they wanted and expropriate stored grain and livestock. Local landlords or their agents often fled. If not, they were often forced to sign documents handing over much of their property. Orlando Figes cites an account of land seizures in early 1918 from the Saratov provincial land department:
Yesterday, 26 January, at 12 noon the entire commune of Kolybelka, led by the chairman of the village committee, appeared at my khutor. They arrested me and my family, as well as two policemen who happened to be at my house, and left a guard with us with a warning not to go out of the house. They also placed armed guards around my farm and made threats to my labourers. Then they took away all my grain and seed, except 40 pud of rye, and locked up my barns. I asked them to weigh the grain they had taken, but they refused as they loaded up their 56 carts until they were overflowing.30
Landlords despaired of the government's ability or willingness to protect their rights. Their worst fears were confirmed when, in May, the Socialist Revolutionary leader Victor Chernov, a long-time advocate of land redistribution, became Minister of Agriculture.
It was increasingly apparent that a government attempting to represent all classes could not defend any, because of the deep divisions between mobilizers and mobilizees within the class smychka of Russia's traditional mobilizational system. Where one group wanted to defend traditional property rights while the other wanted to overthrow them, where one group wanted to continue the war while another wanted to end it, where one group sought stricter industrial discipline while the other sought workers’ control, where one group wanted to hold the empire together while the other wanted to let it fall apart, there could be no middle ground, and any party that acted as if there was had to adopt contradictory or ineffective policies that eventually alienated everyone. In 1917, the same dilemma appeared many times and in many different guises. To support the war was to alienate a war-weary soldiery, while to propose ending the war prompted accusations of treachery from the country's upper classes. As Ronald Suny puts it, “Nadklassnost’ (the Kadet notion of standing above class considerations) was simply a utopian stance in a Russia that was pulling apart along class lines.”31
Without the central rivet of autocracy, the empire also fractured along ethnic and national faultlines. According to the 1897 census, Great Russians (a category that does not include Ukrainian and Belarussian speakers) made up just 45 percent of the empire. Within Russia itself, the empire also included Jews, Germans, and Finnic-speaking communities; in the west, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians, as well as Finns; in the Caucasus it included Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Circassians, Chechen, and other, smaller national groups. In the Urals and western Siberia could be found Bashkirs, Tatars, Kalmyk; in Central Asia, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz (though national differences in this region were not as clearly defined as they would become in the Soviet era); and, in Siberia, Mongols and Buriats as well as many smaller indigenous nations.
By early 1917, German armies had occupied Poland, Lithuania, and parts of Belarus and Latvia, cutting them off from the empire and allowing national movements to flourish. In Kiev, an Executive Committee claimed to represent the Provisional Government, while a Kiev Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies represented the left. There also appeared a third institution, the Central “Rada” or Council, formed by liberal and socialist nationalists on March 4, and presided over by the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky. The Rada soon became the most important institution in Ukraine, and in June it demanded Ukrainian autonomy. In Siberia, there appeared among the Russian population the same loose structures of Soviets and government officials as in Russia, as well as zemstva, which had never existed before in Siberia. There also emerged a movement for Siberian autonomy, formed at a meeting in Tomsk on October 1.32
In the second half of 1917, the mobilizational system cobbled together early in 1917 fell apart with terrifying speed.
The Bolshevik party was the first to publicly abandon the democratic fiction of nadklassnost’, a government of all classes. Resident in Switzerland during the war, Lenin negotiated with the German government to return to Petrograd through enemy territory. He arrived at Petrograd's Finland station on April 3. In the “April Theses,” which he rammed through the party immediately after his return, the Bolsheviks announced that they opposed the war, rejected the Provisional Government, envisaged a rapid transition beyond the bourgeois stage of the revolution to the formation of a government of workers’ and peasants’ Soviets, and intended to abolish private property in the land. The Bolsheviks seemed to be the first party to take their socialist slogans seriously, and that would win them much support in 1917. Lenin's extremism and his customary optimism about the possibilities of a popular revolution in Russia would enable the Bolsheviks to outflank Russia's moderate socialists.33
On the right, conservative groups also abandoned the idea of an all-class government, committing instead to the defense of property, continued prosecution of the war, and political and national stabilization. Both left-wing and right-wing groups could mobilize significant support, and it is tempting to think that either might have won the contest in 1917, given some luck and the political skills needed to survive the political equivalent of a rodeo. If the right had succeeded, the revolutionary breakdown might have ended, like the “Time of Troubles,” with a restoration, perhaps even a restoration of the Romanov dynasty, along with the aristocratic, commercial, military, and official elites that had been its traditional supporters. In the event, though, both skill and fortune favored the far left, which is why the Bolsheviks, a party few took seriously in February 1917, were ruling the country a year later.
For most of 1917, centrist politicians such as Kerenskii dominated the Provisional Government and continued to argue for a government of both Russia's nizy, or lower classes, and its verkhi, its former elites. This was like trying to straddle an earthquake. As divisions widened, the government found it no longer had any political ground to stand on.
In May, after the resignation of Kadet and Octobrist members of the Provisional Government, Kerenskii became Minister for War, and the Socialist Revolutionary leader Victor Chernov became Minister for Agriculture. In June, Kerenskii tried to hold the army together by reinstating the death penalty. He also launched a huge and initially successful offensive on the Galician front under General Brusilov. On July 8, after the offensive had broken down and the Prime Minister, Prince L'vov, had resigned, Kerenskii became Prime Minister. Just before this, during the “July Days” (July 3–7), radical supporters of the Bolsheviks had pushed them into attempting a coup, against the advice of Lenin and most other Bolshevik leaders. Kerenskii arrested as many Bolshevik leaders as he could, and accused Lenin of treachery for accepting German money to reach Petrograd. Lenin fled into hiding across the nearby Finnish border.
To understand the chaotic and complex events of the next three months, it may help to focus on two key aspects of the crisis. The first is the remobilization of both the right and the left behind more “étatist” approaches to rule that are reminiscent of Russia's traditional political culture; the second is the pivotal role of leadership.
As the political ground vanished beneath the Provisional Government, politicians to the left and right began to argue for more centralized and coercive methods of rule. Once again, ancient traditions of elite discipline and strong government revived in a time of crisis.
These tendencies were magnified by the challenge of total war, which encouraged more étatist approaches to rule in all combatant governments. Fighting the war meant mobilizing people, money, and supplies fast and on a huge scale, and market forces could not do the job fast enough. Increasingly, the demands of mobilization trumped those of economic efficiency. So all combatant governments tried to increase their power and reach in order to keep large armies in the field and well supplied. The trend towards stronger governments with greater mobilizational reach would outlive the war and shape much of the history of the twentieth century. Soviet experiments with planning, in both the Civil War and the 1930s, were modeled in part on the direct mobilizational methods of war-time Germany.34 And, though the Soviet state would take these trends to exceptional lengths, state power would increase in all the world's major powers. In the late nineteenth century, the French government, which accounted for some 15 percent of French GDP, seemed a juggernaut. At the same time, the UK and US governments accounted for only about 10 percent of GDP in their respective countries.35 A century later, in the early twenty-first century, the average share of government expenditure in the countries of the OECD was 45 percent of GDP, with some spending well over 50 percent. Even the US government accounted for about 40 percent of US GDP.
In Russia, these trends would eventually go further than anywhere else. In most European combatant nations, institutional and economic structures checked the growth of state power once the intense pressures of making war had ended. But in Russia, étatist approaches to governance had a broader appeal and deeper cultural roots, and faced less resistance than in societies where capitalism had made greater inroads.36 And there was widespread disillusionment with liberal ideals. The zemstva, independent courts, and political parties introduced in the late nineteenth century had proved ineffective as instruments of rule, so even Russian liberals retained a traditional faith in the importance of the state. As Holquist argues,
There existed a strong current of statism within Russian society itself, an ethos conditioned by the lack of prewar institutions, strengthened by the war experience, and infused with new urgency by the collapse of tsarism. The entire political class shared a common transformatory agenda to create a new society through the power of the state. The Bolshevik program for conflating state and society thus mapped onto an important preexisting current in Russian political culture.37
The Russian word gosudarstvennost’ captures these attitudes well, though it has no easy translation into English. Literally, it means something like “stateness” or “statehood.” In practice, it hints at statehood as a form of social being that can be present or absent, and when present is associated with strength, stability, security, and prosperity. It has largely positive overtones, so it means much more than gosudarstvo, or “state,” which implies merely a neutral institutional framework to contain social and class competition.
Officials in the Russian state bureaucracy had long held an almost mythic faith in the efficacy of the state. Educated society also came to idolize the state as an ideal in its own right and an instrument for achieving all its own fondest dreams. Opponents of the autocracy often looked to the state not simply as a tool of repression but also as the only available instrument for overcoming backwardness. The struggle, therefore, was less between “state and society” than between autocracy and society over how best to employ the state to transform Russian reality.38
Growing support for a strong state was apparent even before the February revolution. It is particularly clear in the politics of grain supply, where market forces had proved to be ineffective mobilizers. Most officials charged with maintaining food supplies to the army and the cities came to share a hostility to market forces, and an increasing attraction to planning. Many would bring those commitments to their work during the Civil War, on whatever side they found themselves.39 As early as August 1916, officials of the Russian Ministry of Agriculture argued that the government should take over the grain trade, the most fundamental of all exchanges between Russia's cities and its villages.
The war has advanced the social life of the state [sotsial'nuiu zhizn’ gosudarstva] as the dominant principle, in relation to which all other manifestations of civil life must be subordinated … Germany's military-economic practice, which is the most intensive in the world conflict, shows how far this process of étatisation [ogosudarstvlenie] can proceed … All these state measures related to the war … represent a hitherto under-appreciated foundation for the systematic construction of future domestic and foreign trade … The state cannot allow grain to remain a circumstance of free trade.40
These ideas survived the collapse of the autocracy. As early as March 25, 1917, the Provisional Government instituted a grain monopoly and set compulsory prices for grain sales. But enforcement was half-hearted and ineffective. Six months later, on October 16, the new (socialist) Minister of Food Supply, Prokopovich, declared:
We must cease our attempts at persuasion … a shift to compulsion is now absolutely necessary. … [W]ithout this shift we will not be able to save either the cause of our homeland or the cause of our revolution.
Working together, the Ministries of War, Internal Affairs, and Food Supply began to consider sending out armed detachments to ensure that towns and workers could be fed.41 On the issue of state control over grain supplies, Bolshevik policies would differ little from those of the Provisional Government, and under the Bolsheviks many food-supply officials simply carried on as they had before the October revolution. The main difference was that the Bolsheviks implemented the same policies more ruthlessly, more systematically, and with less restraint.
Alerted by the attempted Bolshevik coup during the “July Days” to the danger of a left-wing uprising, liberals and conservatives began to argue openly for more discipline and less democracy. In August, the industrialist Riabushinskii borrowed the language of socialist parties to argue that the Russian state was indeed “bourgeois,” so that its leaders should “think in a bourgeois manner and act in a bourgeois manner.”42 What did this mean in practice? In September, the American journalist John Reed was told, “What Russia needs is a Strong Man. We should get our minds off the Revolution now and concentrate on the Germans.”43 In August, the socialist Minister of Labor Skobelev announced it was the duty of every worker “to devote all his strength to intensive labour and not lose a minute of working time.”44
Such comments suggest that there was taking place a sort of regathering of traditional elites across political lines. Given skillful leadership, a conservative “bourgeois” government might have emerged, representing the remnants of Russia's former political, industrial, and intellectual elites. After all, most of the experience of government, of administration, and of economic management lay with the country's traditional elites. The rapid formation of White armies during the Civil War points to the same conclusion: all the preconditions existed for rebuilding the ancient elite traditions of cohesion and unity as in 1612. But organizing a government of any kind under the conditions of 1917 would prove a complex challenge, and no right-wing leader emerged with the necessary political skills.
Some thought that General L. G. Kornilov, whom Kerenskii appointed commander-in-chief on July 16, might fit the bill. He gained an enthusiastic upper-class following, including support from the influential Union of Army and Navy Officers. He held talks with leading financiers, and began to talk of restoring discipline not just at the front but also in the rear. On August 25, he began moving troops towards the capital to restore discipline, and refused to back down when Kerenskii ordered him to halt. Kornilov's coup was almost as poorly thought through as the July uprising of the Bolsheviks. Trains carrying troops were diverted into sidings by anti-Kornilov railway workers, and as the troops hung about on railway platforms, they were harangued by socialist orators. Most soldiers decided they wanted no part in a coup against the Soviets, an institution that most soldiers supported. By September 1, Kornilov's “coup” was over. According to Trotsky, Alekseev, the former chief-of-staff, said that Kornilov had “a lion's heart and the brains of a sheep.”45
By October, military discipline had broken down, the government could no longer protect landed property in the countryside or industrial property in the cities, or control the peripheries of the empire, or supply food to the towns. Industrial discipline hardly existed, the Provisional Government had lost the respect of both the right and the left, and the country seemed headed for anarchy. The right would mobilize once again during the Civil War, but by then it had lost the political and military initiative to its opponents, the Bolsheviks. The right had also lost the country's industrial and agricultural heartland.
In the months before October, few, even within the Bolshevik party, would have confidently predicted the emergence of a strong left-wing government from the revolutionary maelstrom. In March 1917, the Bolsheviks made up only 40 of the 1,500 or so members of the Petrograd Soviet. They seemed utterly insignificant, and most Bolshevik leaders in the capital accepted the socialist consensus that Russia was not ready for a socialist revolution. A year later the Bolsheviks would negotiate a peace treaty with Germany. How, in such a short period, did such an unlikely group of revolutionaries form a government that would rebuild a disciplined ruling group and a strong state, and rule most of Inner Eurasia for more than 70 years?
Part of the answer is that Russia's traditional political elites had failed to unite effectively in support of a strong government. And part of the answer is that the Bolsheviks did unite effectively, under the skillful leadership of Lenin. As Oleg Khlevniuk argues, most historians would probably accept that without Lenin, there would have been no October revolution.46 In a society in political, economic, and military free fall, the ability to improvise, to see unexpected political opportunities, and to maneuver quickly and decisively really mattered. So did a bit of luck.
When Lenin first returned from exile on April 3, 1917, even the Bolshevik leaders in the capital, including Stalin, expected a long period of bourgeois rule. They accepted the view of most European socialists that, though the preconditions for socialism might exist in the more advanced capitalist societies of Europe and the West, such as Germany, they did not yet exist in the Russian Empire. In contrast Lenin argued that a Russian revolution, however premature, could trigger a worldwide revolution. This scenario justified a much more ambitious and radical program that offered no compromise with Russia's elites, the “bourgeoisie.” In the “April Theses,” Lenin argued that Russia's industrial workers, soldiers, and peasants should seize power in their own right, igniting a global explosion that would allow the building of socialist societies throughout the world. Their commitment to an imminent world socialist revolution gave the Bolsheviks a revolutionary élan and optimism that other socialist parties lacked. It attracted broad working-class support, and also attracted other radical socialists such as Trotsky, who had made similar arguments since as early as 1905. By May, most factory committees in Petrograd supported the Bolshevik program, and so did most sailors of the Kronstadt naval base, as well as increasing numbers of soldiers at the front. On July 3, as we have seen, pro-Bolshevik military units in the capital forced the party to attempt a coup, and the party was crushed, as Lenin had feared it would be. However, just two months later, Kornilov's right-wing coup failed equally spectacularly, leaving the right in disarray. By September governmental structures were so weak that small forces could tip the balance either way.
In early September, just after the failure of Kornilov's coup, Lenin, who was still hiding over the border in Finland, demanded that Bolshevik leaders start preparing for a coup. Now was the time, he argued, because the party's popularity was rising fast among the armed forces, on the railways, and in the factories, while the Petrograd Soviet was supported by most working-class Russians, including the Bolshevik paramilitary “Red Guards.” When the Bolsheviks won majorities on the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets in September, this gave them new legitimacy as leaders of the working classes, at least in the major cities. With an eye to socialist legitimacy, Lenin also hoped that an uprising might force the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, due to meet on October 25, to take power in the name of Russia's working classes.
As Robert Daniels has argued, in a curious sense, the October revolution was triggered by another botched coup from the right.47 On October 23, Kerenskii, aware of Bolshevik preparations for a coup, ordered soldiers to close the Bolshevik military paper. Like Nicholas's order to shoot on demonstrators in February, this prompted a mutiny of garrison troops. The Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) of the Soviet, formed to defend the Soviet against a right-wing coup, was now dominated by Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, who had joined the party in July. It was based at Smolny, a former girls’ school, and now the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet. John Reed captured vividly the frenetic atmosphere in Smolny during these crucial days.
The massive façade of Smolny blazed with lights as we drove up, and from every street converged upon it streams of hurrying shapes dim in the gloom. Automobiles and motor-cycles came and went; an enormous elephant-coloured armoured automobile, with two red flags flying from the turret, lumbered out with a screaming siren. It was cold, and at the outer gate the red Guards had built themselves a bonfire. At the inner gate, too, there was a blaze, by the light of which sentries slowly spelled out our passes and looked us up and down. … [Inside] The long, bare, dimly illuminated halls roared with the thunder of feet, calling, shouting … A crowd came pouring down the staircase, workers in black blouses and round black fur hats, many of them with guns slung over their shoulders, soldiers in rough dirt-coloured coats and grey fur shapki pinched flat, a leader or so – Lunacharskii, Kameniev – hurrying along in the centre of a group all talking at once, with harassed anxious faces, and bulging portfolios under their arms.48
In response to Kerenskii's order, the MRC ordered garrison troops to defend the Soviet by seizing the capital's communication hubs: bridges, railway stations, the post office, and the telephone exchange. Then they were ordered to attack the Provisional Government's headquarters in the Winter Palace. Pro-Soviet troops stormed the palace on the evening of October 26 and, though Kerenskii escaped, the Bolshevik-led Soviet now controlled the capital.
Moderate socialists attending the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets were appalled. Even among the Bolsheviks many still hoped to form a government based on a broad left-wing coalition. Lenin was spared the embarrassment of having to compromise with moderate socialists when most Mensheviks and right-wing Socialist Revolutionaries walked out of the Congress of Soviets in protest at the storming of the Winter Palace. Trotsky famously consigned them to “the dustbin of history.”
The Congress of Soviets was now dominated by a coalition of Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). It issued a series of foundational decrees proposed by the Bolsheviks. These announced an end to the war and abolished “landlord ownership of land.” The decree on land, issued on October 26, declared that “Private ownership of land shall be abolished forever; land shall not be sold, purchased, leased, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated.”49 The Congress also assumed power by establishing a “Soviet of People's Commissars,” headed by Lenin and including both Bolsheviks and Left SRs. The new government claimed authority over all local government institutions. It also announced the right of all subject peoples to secede, a measure which, like the decree on land, implied that the government had much more control over events than they really had. The Soviet government lacked formal legitimacy, governmental experience, a bureaucracy, a financial system, and a disciplined army. But what it had was a strong and purposeful leader, a high degree of unity, and a simple program that could attract broad popular support even in the army, which now constituted the most powerful coercive institution in the country even as it disintegrated. In a society in political free fall, these were powerful levers. Finally, the new government faced enemies that were weaker and even more divided than itself.
In many other cities of the Russian Empire, the balance of local forces was similar to that in Petrograd. In town after town, local coups were organized on the Petrograd model, and power in the towns, like forts in the steppes, was the key to power in the country as a whole. The transfer of power was particularly smooth where the industrial working class was dominant and reasonably homogeneous, as in the Central Industrial Region or the Urals. Where urban populations were larger and more diverse, as in Moscow or Smolensk or some of the large towns on the Volga, there was often more conflict before local military revolutionary committees established their authority with the support of local troops. In less industrial towns the local Bolsheviks often faced opposition from moderate socialists.50 In Petrograd itself, there were skirmishes when Kerenskii tried unsuccessfully to use Cossack units to suppress the October uprising.
The countryside was a different story. Here, most peasants supported the pro-peasant Socialist Revolutionaries, who consequently gained a majority of votes for the Constituent Assembly when elections were finally held in December. But though most people lived in the villages, the towns were the key to power. From the start, the Bolsheviks showed they were willing to enforce discipline ruthlessly where it was possible and necessary. In the capital, they shut down opposition newspapers. In December, they created a special police agency, the Cheka, or “All-Russian Commission for Suppression of Counter-Revolution, Sabotage, and Speculation.” Though extremely weak, the Bolsheviks had just enough authority over the army for the Germans to negotiate an armistice with them in December.
As the Bolsheviks consolidated their grip on the key strategic points – the capital, the army, and the major cities – their conservative opponents, having lost the political initiative, left the capital and gravitated towards the Don Cossack region, where they had friends. The Cossack Ataman Kaledin invited members of the Provisional Government to gather in order to overthrow the Bolsheviks, and in this way, the Don Cossack territory became the “Russian Vendée,” the mustering point for the first serious anti-Bolshevik armies.51 Those who took up Kaledin's invitation formed a motley coalition. They included the former commander-in-chief, General Alekseev, as well as Generals Denikin and Kornilov, many Kadets, including Miliukov, Struve, and Shingarev, and a former SR revolutionary and terrorist, Boris Savinkov. Here, with the Don Cossacks, they began to form an anti-Bolshevik “Volunteer” army. Divisions within the Kadets ensured the rapid collapse of Kaledin's government, and Kaledin shot himself in despair on January 29, 1918. In February, pro-Soviet forces occupied Rostov and Novocherkassk. Then, in April, an anti-Soviet insurgency backed by German forces overthrew the Soviet regime on Cossack territory and a new Don Cossack government, the “All-Great Don Host,” emerged under Ataman Krasnov. Now the Don Cossack region would become the base for a major anti-Bolshevik movement. Many hoped to repeat the achievements of Minin and Pozharskii by creating a national army that would rid the country of the alien forces of Bolshevism.
The armies that fought the Civil War had one foot in the organic energy era and the other in the fossil fuels era. Cavalry armies dominated the fighting, as they had during the Mongol conquest of Rus’ almost 700 years earlier. But railways speeded the movement of armies, weapons, and supplies, and machine guns dominated many battlefields. Each side made a point of eliminating local elites when it seized new territory, and the eventual Bolshevik victory prompted a mass exodus of the former landlord class, most entrepreneurs, most liberal politicians, and many military leaders. How the Bolsheviks built a new and exceptionally powerful mobilizational machine in the chaos of civil war is a remarkable if brutal story. This is not the time to tell that story in detail. Instead, we focus on some of the crucial steps in the construction of rival mobilizational machines, only one of which would survive the Civil War.
That the Bolsheviks would make few concessions to democratic principle became clear early in January 1918, when they ordered troops to disperse the Constituent Assembly, which was elected in December and met on January 5 in the Tauride Palace. The Bolsheviks had only 24 percent of the 703 delegates, while their main socialist rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, had 40 percent. The closing of the Constituent Assembly persuaded even many socialists to take up arms against the Bolsheviks.
On January 28, the government, which had vowed to defend itself with volunteer militias, announced the formation of a more traditional “Workers-Peasants’ Red Army.” It had little choice, as its enemies and rivals were also beginning to mobilize real armies. In December, Finland declared independence, and in Ukraine an elected Rada declared independence and negotiated a peace treaty with Germany. Troops supporting the Rada were soon fighting pro-Bolshevik forces, but in Ukraine, divisions between Russians and Ukrainian nationalists, both seeking the support of a large peasant class whose support went mostly to the Socialist Revolutionaries, made for a peculiarly chaotic situation. In April 1918, German forces established a puppet regime in Ukraine under “Hetman” Skoropadsky, which survived only until the end of the year. In Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, an anti-Bolshevik Transcaucasian government appeared in November, only to split early in 1918 into separate national governments. In Ufa, in the heart of Bashkiria, a gathering of Muslim nationalists debated the prospects for Muslim autonomy, and established Islamic ministries of religion, education, and finance. The Soviet government was at first sympathetic to notions of pan-Islamic autonomy, and created a special Commissariat of Muslim Affairs.52
In late 1917 and early 1918, the German army posed the most dangerous threat to the Bolsheviks. But German terms for a peace settlement were so harsh that in February Trotsky, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, announced grandly that his government would accept “neither war nor peace.” The Germans called his bluff and resumed their advance on Petrograd. They faced no significant opposition. Ever the realist, Lenin persuaded his colleagues to accept even harsher terms at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on March 3. The Bolsheviks surrendered the Baltic provinces, Poland, Georgia, Finland, and much of Ukraine. They abandoned most of the territory Russia had conquered in the west since the seventeenth century, along with about 60 million people, 2 million sq. kilometers of territory, and something like one third of the empire's agricultural production. On March 12, to avoid the danger of a sudden German advance, the Bolsheviks moved their capital back to Moscow, where it has stayed ever since. At the seventh Party Congress in early March, they renamed the party the “Communist Party.” The Left SRs left the coalition with the Bolsheviks on March 19, leaving the Bolsheviks in sole control of the government and free of any need to compromise with other parties.
In the months after October, military conflicts were confused and, apart from German units, were fought by small, undisciplined militia armies. But both sides began to recruit troops and mobilize resources by force. In the Don Cossack region, the Don army commander proclaimed:
Today a punitive detachment is being dispatched by steamboat from Razdory to Starocherkasskaia, in order, by force of arms, to put an end to the harmful propaganda and to force the deluded [Cossacks] to come to the defense of their native region at this critical moment. … [T]he campaign ataman has ordered me to warn that any deviation or demonstration of neutrality will be mercilessly punished by military force.53
Between May 1918 and February 1919, the All-Great Don Host would sentence almost 25,000 people to death, though many would be pardoned or amnestied.54 Kornilov and other White generals told their men, “Take no prisoners! The more terrible the terror, the more victories.” The Bolsheviks launched terror campaigns against the SRs and other enemies.55 These were the first steps towards the creation of new mobilizational systems, built almost, but not entirely, from scratch, in a world brutalized by three years of war.
In May 1918, the Bolsheviks suddenly found themselves facing a much more disciplined anti-Bolshevik army of 45,000 Czech and Slovak former prisoners of war. Formed in 1917, by the end of that year the so-called “Czech Legion” had 60,000 men and was probably the largest organized contingent of troops in the former Russian Empire with the exception of German units.56 In March 1918, the Bolsheviks agreed to let the entire Czech army travel east along the Trans-Siberian railway so it could be transported across the Pacific and through the Panama Canal to fight on the western front. Dispatched eastwards on 70 trains threaded along vast stretches of the railway, the Czech forces turned on the Bolsheviks in May, when Czech troops in Chelyabinsk were ordered to disarm. Czech units promptly seized stations and towns along the Trans-Siberian railway, and the telegraph links between them. Using the armed trains they now controlled like mobile forts, they took over stations and settlements in much of Siberia. By June, with allied support, their role had changed. Their aim now was to control Siberia and support allied intervention against the Bolsheviks.
The military threat from the Czech troops forced the Bolshevik government to take some critical military decisions. In the belief that a world revolution was imminent, and that their duty was to survive long enough to fuel the coming global conflagration, they decided to mobilize ruthlessly. By May 1918, Lenin and Trotsky had persuaded the Party to adopt more traditional forms of mobilization that depended less on revolutionary enthusiasm and more on good organization and strict discipline. The Party began to build a traditional army, with traditional military discipline and command, compulsory recruitment, and experienced officers. Trotsky was appointed Commissar for War on April 8, and presided over the military mobilization. The ruthlessness and determination of the Bolsheviks explains one military act of immense symbolic importance: the execution of the royal family. They were shot in Yekaterinburg in the Urals (Soviet Sverdlovsk), early in the morning of July 17, 1918, by the Cheka unit guarding them, as Czech units advanced on the town. The execution had been ordered by the Bolshevik government. Lenin argued it was vital “that we shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to rally around.”57 All sides in the Civil War used terror against their enemies. On August 30, a Left SR, Dora Kaplan, shot at Lenin in Moscow. She failed to kill him but ensured his premature death, which may have allowed the eventual rise of Stalin. The Cheka executed Kaplan four days later, and then shot hundreds of SRs held in Bolshevik jails.
The first step in military mobilization was to recruit Tsarist officers, or “military specialists” as the Party called them. To reduce the likelihood of betrayal, the Party appointed Communist Commissars to supervise former Tsarist officers. Often, it kept their families as hostages. However, many former Tsarist officers were happy to serve the Bolsheviks if that meant defending Russia from foreign invasion. As in the “Time of Troubles,” it turned out that, even when unity and discipline had broken down at the top of the system, traditions of unity, cohesion, and discipline, often taking nationalist forms, survived among middle- and lower-level officials and officers. The Party also trained new cadres of working-class officers. By 1921, only a third of the officer corps consisted of “military specialists,” and 65,000 new officers had been trained, two thirds from the peasantry, a fifth from the intelligentsia, and just over a tenth from the industrial working class.58 The Party promised special treatment to Red Army men and their families.59
A second decision tightened military discipline. Many in the Party agonized over whether a socialist army should use traditional forms of discipline, but Trotsky insisted on it. He personally ordered the shooting of deserters in one of the first encounters with the Czech Legion at Sviyazhsk, near Kazan’. His ruthlessness helped turn the tide, and in September 1918, the Red Army turned back Czech units. In July, the Party began drafting its own members into the army, which ensured a rapid militarization of the Party's political culture.60
A third task was to recruit soldiers. By August 1918, the Red Army had 500,000 men. In 1919 alone, the army grew from 800,000 to almost 3 million men.61 By the end of the Civil War, in January 1920, the Red Army had 5 million soldiers, and included almost 50,000 former Tsarist officers. No Civil War armies found it easy to recruit, but Bolshevik ideology probably made their task easier than that of the Whites. Even peasants, if forced to decide between the Reds and the Whites, were likely to lean towards the Reds who had promised to abolish landlord property rights. White leaders, in contrast, insisted on defending traditional property rights in the land.62
A fourth task was to feed and equip the Red Army, in an economy broken by more than three years of war. Early measures taken by the Party laid the foundations for what would come to be known as “War Communism.” Trotsky wrote of the spring and summer of 1918: “There was no food. There was no army. The railways were completely disorganized. The machinery of state was just beginning to take shape. Conspiracies were being hatched everywhere.”63 In December 1917, the new government created a “Supreme Council of the National Economy,” Vesenkha, to plan and coordinate the economy. At first its powers were limited, but it reflected the Bolshevik commitment to mobilizing whatever resources were available. In the middle of 1918 the government formally nationalized all the country's factories, having already nationalized the railways and the fleet. This was “direct mobilization” in its simplest and crudest form. After an initial period of near anarchy in which the government supported the idea of workers’ councils, it also introduced military-style discipline in many factories. In the countryside, it used the direct methods of grain requisitioning introduced by the Provisional Government. Getting food to the towns and to army units was a task of great urgency, particularly after losing so much of the Ukrainian bread basket after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Detachments of armed workers and soldiers were sent into the countryside, formally to buy grain, but in practice to take what they needed, under a system known as prodrazverstka or “allocation of resources.” As Lenin admitted after the Civil War,
The essence of “War Communism” was that we actually took from the peasant all his surpluses and sometimes not only the surpluses but part of the grain the peasant needed for food. We took this in order to meet the requirements of the army and to sustain the workers.64
The task of mobilization was simplified to some extent by the archaic nature of the military conflict. Though fought with railways and artillery, the Russian Civil War was very different from World War I. It was fought largely on horseback, though trains played a crucial role in moving troops, and the Communists, with control of the center, also controlled most of the country's rail network.
The Party was now fully committed to the direct mobilization of resources, so much so that towards the war's end, at the ninth Party Congress in March and April 1920, Trotsky proposed to militarize the entire labor force. Instead of demobilizing soldiers, he suggested they be used as “labor armies,” in imitation of the Third Army which had helped repair the rail network in the Urals. As Trotsky explained (in Mark von Hagen's summary):
The armies provisionally erased all status markers that distinguished workers from soldiers; furthermore, they applied military methods to traditionally civilian economic tasks by stressing discipline and sacrifice at the expense of material incentives. Finally, Trotsky recommended the labor armies as vehicles to introduce socialist planning into the devastated economy. He … defended the militarization of labor as the only means to build socialism in a backward country.65
Market forces played an ever-diminishing role. The Bolsheviks had come to power committed to planning production and distribution and they banned most forms of private trade. In any case, hyperinflation destroyed the monetary system as the Bolsheviks printed money even more enthusiastically than the Tsarist and Provisional governments. Between the October revolution and the middle of 1921 the amount of money in circulation rose from 20 billion to 2.5 trillion rubles and prices rose 8,000 times. Communist idealists approved, describing the printing press as “that machine gun which attacked the bourgeois regime in its rear, namely, through its monetary system.”66 As confidence in the monetary system collapsed, the Party had little choice but to mobilize people and resources by allocation, and usually that meant by force.
Some Party members, including Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii, managed to persuade themselves that the methods of War Communism, far from being unpleasant compromises with a harsh reality, were actually the birth-pangs of a new, socialist world, in which the fundamental mobilizational decisions would be made not through the market but through rational planning, and in the interests not of a small minority but of the vast majority of society. They argued that the structures emerging during the Civil War were not temporary improvisations, but represented the very essence of communism. After all, many elements of a socialist society seemed to be emerging spontaneously: money was vanishing, trade was dwindling, a working-class government was in power, it was controlling resources directly, and local Soviets were playing an active role in government.
But the pressures under which the system operated were huge, and what held it together was elite discipline. The Bolshevik party had a long tradition of internal discipline. Lenin had always been keen to eliminate disruptive elements from the party, a strategy with striking parallels to the methods of other builders of disciplined elites, from Chinggis Khan and Timur to Peter the Great. Such methods began with Lenin's centralist interpretation of the notion of “democratic centralism,” and the split from the Mensheviks during the second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party. They continued with the decisive turn away from the moderate socialist position in April 1917, then the removal of the Left SRs in mid-1918, and the tightening of party rules on discipline during the Civil War. In the early days of the Civil War, elections continued within the party. But soon they were replaced by appointments from above, often at the demand of lower party organs desperate for competent and effective officials and officers. The party itself was militarized as party members were attached to and fought in the Red armies and as soldiers and officers were recruited into the party. Militarization made military discipline seem normal within the party itself. These disciplinary principles were accepted formally by the eighth Party Congress in March 1919:
The Party finds itself in a situation in which the strictest centralism and most severe discipline are an absolute necessity. All decisions of a higher body are absolutely obligatory for lower ones. Every decree must first be implemented, and appeal to the corresponding party organ is admissible only after this has been done. In this sense outright military discipline is needed in the Party in the present epoch. All party enterprises which are suitable for centralization (publishing, propaganda, etc.), must be centralized for the good of the cause.67
Bolshevik party discipline held just long enough to defeat the White armies. With victory in sight, sharp divisions appeared over tactics and strategy. But despite some bruising arguments, the party remained united under its unquestioned leader, Lenin. It also showed a remarkable capacity to reunite after difficult internal arguments, as it had so many times before, over the October coup itself, over the Brest-Litovsk treaty, over the formation of a traditional army, and on several other critical issues.68
While the Reds were united, their opponents were divided. The Whites were divided, first, by ideology. Little united them apart from hostility to the Bolsheviks. Their ideologies ranged from right-wing monarchism to revolutionary socialism. Kornilov was a traditional military conservative; his aide, Savinkov, was a former Socialist Revolutionary terrorist. The dominance of military men favored right-wing ideologies and forms of Russian nationalism that alienated populations in the borderlands in which many White armies fought. Most Whites were committed to defending private property in the land, which alienated the peasantry from whom they were trying to recruit soldiers. The Whites were also divided geographically, being confined to the peripheries of the former empire in the south, the north, and Siberia. This made it difficult for them to coordinate their plans in the critical campaigns of 1919. Finally, the Whites accepted support from foreign powers, while the Reds attracted patriotic support because they seemed to be defending Russia's core territory from foreign invasion. Tsarist Russia's former allies in Europe were horrified at the Bolshevik takeover, particularly after the Bolsheviks made peace with Germany. They formally recognized the White armies as legitimate rulers of Russia. And Britain, France, the USA, Japan, and many other nations eventually intervened directly in the Civil War, by sending military advisers, supplies, and sometimes small contingents of troops to support the White armies. However, war weariness ensured that allied support would be half-hearted, and the presence of foreign contingents supporting the White armies alienated patriotic Russian officers. Many officers fought for the Bolsheviks purely out of patriotism.
The major military campaigns took place in 1919 and 1920. As we have seen, the first anti-Bolshevik army, the Volunteer Army, began to form on Don Cossack territory at the end of 1917. In June 1918, in Samara on the Volga, Victor Chernov formed a “Committee of the Constituent Assembly,” or “Komuch,” in support of the now-dispersed Constituent Assembly. Other anti-communist governments appeared in Omsk and in Archangel in the far north. In November 1918, Admiral Kolchak formed a right-wing government in western Siberia, and by early 1919 he was recognized as the leader of all White forces. In the spring of 1919, Kolchak advanced on the heartland from the east, and an army under General Yudenich attacked Petrograd from Estonia in the west. Those attacks were blunted before General Denikin managed to launch an invasion from the south. The failure to coordinate this three-pronged attack on the Bolshevik heartland proved fatal. For a brief while, the Bolsheviks controlled little more territory than the principality of Muscovy in the mid-fifteenth century. Denikin's armies would reach Orel, just 400 kilometers south of Moscow. But by October they were in retreat, and by 1919 the main White armies had been defeated. In the campaigns of 1919 in particular, the Bolsheviks benefited from their control of the heartland and the hub of the Russian railway network, which made it easier to move troops from front to front. Most of eastern Ukraine was conquered by Red armies in November 1920, though anarchist armies under Nestor Makhno remained active until late in 1921.
In April 1920, Polish armies invaded Ukraine. Red armies counter-attacked and invaded Poland, hoping to trigger proletarian uprisings throughout eastern Europe. But the armies of newly independent Poland checked the Red Army's advance in a campaign described vividly in Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry. The Bolshevik advance ground to a halt in a campaign marred by rivalries between different commanders, and particularly between Stalin and General Tukhachevskii, who had played a crucial role in the defeat of Kolchak. In October, Poland and the Bolsheviks signed an armistice. A formal treaty was signed in Riga in 1921. Stabilization of the western front allowed Red armies to defeat the last White army in the far south, now commanded by General Wrangel, in November 1920.
Victory in the heartlands also allowed the Red Army to begin mopping up operations in other parts of the former Russian Empire, from Central Asia to the Far East. The Bolsheviks, for whom class seemed a more natural mobilizational category than ethnicity, were surprised by the mobilizational power of nationalist movements during the Civil War, and would make great efforts either to incorporate nationalist movements on their own terms or to crush them as anti-revolutionary.69 What emerged, as Martin puts it, was “a strategy aimed at disarming nationalism by granting the forms of nationhood.”70
In practice, the Bolsheviks supported national rights while the old system was breaking down, and supported centralism as they started gathering power in their own hands. As opponents of imperialism they were committed to national liberation from colonial rule. Yet their analysis of nationalism as a bourgeois phenomenon meant that they saw no contradiction in ignoring nationalist movements supported by their enemies. Such dialectical subtleties gave the Bolsheviks plenty of room for maneuver during the rapidly changing events of the Civil War.
The peripheries played a distinctive role in the Civil War precisely because the Bolsheviks occupied the old imperial heartland. Anti-Bolshevik armies formed on all sides of the heartland, in Archangel to the north, in the Baltic provinces, in Ukraine and Crimea, and in Siberia. So the geography of the crucial year, 1919, is very much a story of White armies closing in on the Bolsheviks before being driven back, piecemeal, by Red armies that would eventually secure Bolshevik control over most of the former Tsarist empire. The history of the Civil War in regions away from the heartland will be discussed briefly in Chapter 15.
After the reconquest of eastern Siberia in 1922, the Bolsheviks/Communists controlled most of the former Russian Empire. The major exceptions were the more industrialized western provinces, where independent states emerged in Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Under the treaty of Riga, the Soviet government also surrendered parts of western Ukraine and Belarus to Poland.
By 1921, the traditional Russian mobilizational order had vanished. An entire ruling elite had been removed by the death, expulsion, or exile of the royal family, the nobility, the former capitalist classes, and much of the intelligentsia. In their place, a new mobilizational order had appeared, whose leaders came mostly from the radical intelligentsia. In many ways, the new system was very different from the one it replaced. Its leaders insisted they were about to build a new order, not just in Russia and Inner Eurasia, but throughout the world. They claimed to represent not a mobilizational elite, but the vast, previously exploited majority of society, and they claimed to be mobilizing resources in the interests of the majority of the population. In principle, they were turning the mobilizational pyramids of the past upside down. They claimed to represent the mobilizees rather than the former mobilizers.
In practice, though, their methods of rule already looked eerily similar to those of the past, and so, too, did the new mobilizational pyramid they were building. During the Civil War, the Bolshevik leaders had often adopted the methods of the Tsarist mobilization machine. They could claim, with some plausibility, that they had little choice during the Civil War. Now, though, those enemies had been defeated, and they faced the challenge of implementing the more democratic and egalitarian policies they had promised as socialists. Could they build an entirely new kind of mobilizational system, one organized in the interests of the vast majority of the population? Or would the claim that dangerous enemies still existed beyond the borders of the Soviet Union justify a continuation of traditional methods of mobilization and rule? These questions would hang over the entire Soviet experiment.
At the beginning of his article, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” Marx described how the past can cling, vampire-like to the most radical reform projects:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.71
Inner Eurasia's ancient mobilizational traditions clung with equal tenacity to the new mobilizational structures that had emerged during the Civil War.