Not every delegate to the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, discussed in the previous chapter, was prepared to be classified by Lenin as either a Menshevik or a Bolshevik. A revolutionary who did not fit neatly into one camp or the other was Leon Trotsky. While closer to, and identified with, the Mensheviks after the split of 1903, Trotsky did not actually join them. He maintained good relations with individual Mensheviks, but between 1903 and 1917 he was ‘a revolutionary without a revolutionary base’.1 He laid particular emphasis on the need for the Russian proletariat to make common cause with the more numerous proletariat of western Europe and to have their support. He also favoured compressing to a minimum the period separating a ‘bourgeois revolution’ from socialist revolution. By 1917, he felt that Lenin had come round to his view on these two major issues, and he joined forces with the Bolsheviks. Although, in his few years in power, following the Bolshevik revolution, Trotsky was at least as authoritarian as his colleagues, he had been an early observer of the dangers inherent in Lenin’s model of party organization, writing in 1904: ‘Lenin’s methods lead to this: the party organization first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single “dictator” substitutes himself for the Central Committee…’2 Against that, Lenin’s insistence on ‘the importance of centralization, strict discipline and ideological unity within the party’ made some sense for a political party operating as an underground organization in a police state.3 When, however, even fifty or sixty years after the Communists had come to power, Soviet politicians invoked Lenin in support of their strictly disciplined, rigidly hierarchical party, the implication that Lenin would have wished or expected such a form of organization to prevail for so long was dubious.
Nevertheless, it is hardly fanciful to discern here what political scientists call ‘path dependency’, a pattern of acceptance of earlier institutional choices, albeit ones made in different circumstances and under different constraints. There was a logic of development whereby the centralized Bolshevik party (with the leadership often operating in secrecy) introduced its own distinctive brand of still more authoritarian rule once it had supplanted the old regime and itself occupied the offices of state.4 It was not only numerous later scholars but also many of Lenin’s contemporaries, among them disenchanted former comrades, who viewed Lenin’s antipathy to ‘looser mass organizations allowing greater diversity and spontaneity’ as not just a matter of expediency and tactical necessity but as reflecting an authoritarian mindset.5 One such contemporary, Nikolay Volsky, who had joined the Bolsheviks and had become devoted to Lenin, broke with him because he could no longer stand his intolerance and intemperance when they were discussing philosophical views of which Lenin disapproved.6 The Mensheviks, from 1903 onwards, pointed to the dangers of dictatorship inherent in Lenin’s utter certainty of his own correctness taken together with his insistence on disciplined obedience within the Bolshevik group. Lenin’s intolerance was evident long before he became the first leader of the Soviet Union. Indeed, in the last two or three years of his life he was more open to doubts than he had been throughout his whole career as a professional revolutionary.7
The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were far from being the only warring factions in the Russian revolutionary movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The party which enjoyed most support among the Russian peasantry – who constituted over 80 per cent of the population – was the Socialist Revolutionary Party, known simply as the SRs. They emerged in the 1890s as an offshoot of the Russian populist movement. Their leader and principal theorist was Viktor Chernov, who argued that the peasantry must form the ‘main army’ for the revolution, even if the proletariat were to be in the vanguard. Chernov was not a Marxist. He wanted to avoid the coming of capitalism in Russia. Like his populist forerunners of the 1860s and 1870s, he believed that the peasant commune could form a bridge to socialism in Russia. The Marxists, on the contrary, argued about the extent to which capitalism had already arrived in that country.
The 1905 Revolution and the Last Years of Tsarist Russia
The first of three revolutions which culminated in the Bolshevik takeover in late 1917 occurred against a background of appalling social conditions in the Russian cities, poverty in the countryside, and a lack of basic political rights and freedoms. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, quite a rapid industrialization was getting under way in Russia, notwithstanding the numerical dominance of the peasantry. The abolition of serfdom (a form of slavery) in 1861 involved too many concessions to the landowners – who were to be deprived of their property in the form of people but kept their land – for it to be a satisfactory settlement for the peasantry.8 It did, however, mean that peasants could now leave the countryside and seek work in the towns as industry developed. Thus there emerged a first-generation industrial proletariat, albeit a small proportion of the total population – a social group disorientated by the move from rural poverty to city squalor.
An economic depression, which began in 1899, provided further grounds for discontent in the expanding ranks of the workers, and there were major (although localized) strikes in several Russian cities in the early years of the twentieth century.9 In addition to these domestic problems, in 1904–05 Russia was fighting an unsuccessful war with Japan. Its failure in this conflict came as a great shock to the political elite no less than to the population as a whole. They had regarded themselves as a great European power and, by definition, superior economically and militarily to any Asian state. Although both sides were to blame for the outbreak of the war, the Japanese had turned out to be more efficient in the conduct of it. The war ended with Japan securing more of the imperial spoils. It damaged the reputation of the tsar, Nicholas II, and deepened the sense of political crisis in Russia.10
One curious element in the Russian political struggle was what was known as ‘police socialism’. This was a movement encouraged by some officials, partly as a result of their recognition of genuine popular grievances, and partly to steal the thunder of the Revolutionaries. But, paradoxically, it was a march led by the rather mysterious police socialist leader, a priest named Father Georgy Gapon, which triggered the 1905 Russian Revolution. In early January 1905 some 120,000 workers were on strike in St Petersburg and Gapon took up their cause. In a petition to the tsar they asked for ‘justice and protection’, saying that they were impoverished, oppressed, over-burdened and treated contemptuously.11 Gapon led a vast unarmed procession – many of the marchers drawn from the ranks of the striking workers – in the direction of the Winter Palace to hand over their petition. The march – which took place on 9 January, according to the Julian calendar used in Russia until 1918 (and still used by the Orthodox Church), 22 January according to the modern calendar – was entirely peaceful until the procession was fired upon by troops instructed to prevent them from reaching the palace. The tsar himself had been sufficiently unconcerned about the impending protest to have left St Petersburg for the weekend. That day became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Apart from the deaths of many of the marchers, other peaceful demonstrators were massacred in different parts of the city. It was rumoured at the time that thousands had died. The real figures – approximately 200 dead and 800 wounded – were bad enough.12
This was the beginning of the end for the autocracy. The tsar’s reputation never fully recovered from Bloody Sunday. Many who had formerly looked up to Nicholas II now held him responsible for the cold-blooded murder of his innocent subjects. The event set in motion a year of revolutionary turmoil. Throughout 1905 there were daily strikes and demonstrations and looting of landlords’ homes. The SRs succeeded in killing the tsar’s uncle, the Grand Duke Sergey, who had made himself especially unpopular as an advocate of repression. Pressure on the government came from many quarters – from trade unions, from a peasant union which was formed in the middle of 1905 at the instigation of the SRs, and also from the professional classes, who were demanding some participation in government. Thus, there was liberal as well as revolutionary pressure. One source of the former was the zemstvos, the local government authorities which had been set up by Alexander II as part of the Great Reforms of the 1860s. With so many forces ranged against the autocracy in 1905, there was still a vital difference from 1917. In 1905 the great part of the army stood firmly on the side of the authorities. In 1917 the army was in disarray and open revolt.
The continuous strikes of 1905 culminated in a general strike – the first of its kind – in October. Faced by this, the government made concessions, urged upon Nicholas II by his prime minister, Count Sergey Witte, a moderate conservative. The tsar issued what became known as his ‘October Manifesto’, which granted personal liberty to the population at large and proposed elections for a national duma on the basis of a wide suffrage. Even in principle, this new assembly was to be a good deal less than a parliament. It could ‘participate’ in supervising the legality of legislation introduced by the tsar and his ministers but it did not have clear legislative supremacy. And neither the tsar nor his government was responsible to it. The Manifesto was a contradictory document and it reflected confusion in Nicholas’s own mind. The tsar thought he had safeguarded the unlimited autocracy, although the Manifesto did include a promise that no law would take effect without the approval of the Duma. The word ‘Duma’ is derived from the Russian verb ‘to think’, but there was an evident lack of clear thought in its institutional design.
Between the elections to the first Duma in 1906 and 1917 there were four dumas, although they represented a narrowing, rather than a widening, of the suffrage. Increasing control by the authorities over the composition of this legislative assembly accordingly reduced the number of radical critics in the last two Dumas. Even in 1905, the tsar’s October Manifesto did not satisfy Russia’s emerging liberals, and it was treated with contempt by the revolutionaries. The day after the promulgation of the Manifesto, tens of thousands of people gathered in front of St Petersburg University, aroused, in Trotsky’s words, ‘by the struggle and intoxicated with the joy of their first victory’.13 Trotsky adds: ‘I shouted to them from the balcony not to trust an incomplete victory; that the enemy was stubborn, that there were traps ahead; I tore the Tsar’s manifesto into pieces and scattered them to the winds.’14
Trotsky was to play a leading role in a quite different institution which emerged in 1905 and was to have later political resonance. This was the formation of the first soviet. Although ‘soviet’ is simply the Russian word for council, it acquired from the outset a revolutionary connotation from its origins as a strike committee in St Petersburg and by its full title, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. After the arrest of the Soviet’s first president, a ‘presidium’ was elected, with Trotsky at the head of it. He became the main driving and intellectual force of the Soviet, an organization which was to be skilfully revived in 1917. Trotsky was also formulating at this time his theory of ‘permanent revolution’. In part, this was his view, already alluded to, that the ‘bourgeois’ and ‘socialist’ revolutions would interact with each other and that it would be necessary to lose no time after the former before pressing on with the latter. Moreover, in the Russia of 1905, he argued, it was ‘the strikes of the workers that for the first time brought Tsarism to its knees’ and this led him to draw optimistic conclusions about the West. If ‘the young proletariat of Russia could be so formidable, how mighty the revolutionary power of the proletariat of the more advanced countries could be!’15
When, however, Petr Stolypin was appointed Minister of the Interior in 1906 and, while keeping that post, became Chairman of the Council of Ministers (or prime minister) the following year, the revolutionaries found they were up against a more formidable opponent than most of the tsarist appointees. Stolypin stepped up the forcible repression, closing down radical newspapers and arresting (in some cases executing) tens of thousands of opponents of the regime. He combined this, however, with a policy of implementing reforms. In particular, he instituted an important land reform designed to turn the peasant into something more like the farmer of western Europe. The policy involved breaking up the old village commune, known as the obshchina or mir, which had since the 1861 abolition of serfdom collectively owned the land the peasants worked. The aim was to carry through an enclosure movement and create individual peasant land ownership. The reform worried a number of revolutionaries, Lenin among them. They did not believe that it could prevent revolution from ultimately taking place, but they feared it might postpone it by decades. The belated reform, however, was less successful than liberals hoped and revolutionaries feared. The country gentry were mainly opposed to it and did their best to undermine it. The peasants themselves were not initially eager to accept the risks of farming on their own account, thereby losing the shared resources (even if at times it meant shared misery) provided by the commune. Moreover, they did not trust the source or the motives behind this renewed ‘emancipation’. Stolypin in the end had the support only of a narrow band of liberal conservatives. His reforms went too far for traditionalists, his willingness to disband the Duma and change the electoral system in order to get a more compliant assembly antagonized the liberals, and the revolutionaries had good cause to regard him as an implacable enemy.
Stolypin was almost assassinated in 1906–in the attempt on his life several people were killed and two of his children were injured. Although 1906 and 1907 were considered a relatively quiet time, in comparison with 1905, assassinations of officials by the revolutionaries continued on a large scale. Numerous bank robberies took place, some of them led by Ioseb Djugashvili, in order to pay for the upkeep of the revolutionary movement.16 This Georgian Bolshevik, who had studied in a religious seminary (until his expulsion from it in 1899), was to become better known as Stalin, the name he began using in late 1912. Lenin himself sanctioned a number of the raids and regarded them as a legitimate part of the struggle with tsarism. As his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya put it: ‘the Bolsheviks thought it permissible to seize tsarist treasure and allowed expropriations’. The Mensheviks, in contrast, were strongly opposed to bank robberies.17
In 1911 Stolypin was eventually assassinated, a fate which he had assumed would be his from the time he became Chairman of the Council of Ministers.18 The person who shot him – in a theatre in Kiev at a celebratory performance attended by the tsar – had both Socialist Revolutionary and police associations. It has remained unclear for which side he was acting on this occasion, although some of the evidence points in the direction of disaffected members of the tsarist secret police. It was the head of the Kiev Okhrana who gave the killer, Dmitry Bogrov, the ticket for the Kiev opera house on the fateful day. Bogrov was subsequently hanged without a public trial.19
Liberal reformism in Russia between 1905 and 1917 was represented mainly by the Constitutional Democrats, a political party popularly known as the Kadets, and by a still more moderate liberal party, the Octobrists, so called to indicate their support for the tsar’s 1905 October Manifesto. Apart from liberalism and revolutionary socialism, these were years in which a powerful current of nationalism, xenophobia and anti-semitism also came to the fore. There were pogroms of Jews and, as a result, large-scale Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire to Western Europe and North America. Discrimination against Jews was nothing new in Russia and other parts of the Empire, including especially Ukraine. It is one reason why Jews were so very well represented in the leading ranks of the revolutionary parties – not so much the SRs with their populist origins but both the Mensheviks (in particular) and the Bolsheviks.
In the forefront of persecution of the Jews was the nationalist Union of the Russian People, or the Black Hundreds, as Russian democrats called them. It was formed in 1905 with the blessing of Nicholas II in order to mobilize the mass of the people against revolutionaries and radical reformers.20 Many of the Black Hundreds themselves regarded the tsar as too weak and hesitant in his efforts to suppress the revolutionaries. Anyone who was regarded as a democrat and an opponent of the autocracy was liable to be beaten up by the Black Hundreds, but Jews in particular, were singled out. Several thousand were murdered in the course of 1905–800 in Odessa alone. By the end of 1906 the Union of the Russian People had around 300,000 members.21 Some of the demagogic and anti-semitic organizations formed in Russia between the beginning of the twentieth century and 1917 looked remarkably like prototypes of the fascist movements which flourished elsewhere in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. It would be naïve to assume that the only conceivable alternative to socialist or Communist revolution in 1917 was a gradually developing liberal democracy. Liberals had far less support not only than the revolutionaries but also than the bigots from the opposite side of the political spectrum. An entirely possible alternative to the victory of the Communists was the development of an extremely right-wing nationalist regime.
The growing crisis in Russian society was brought to a head by the outbreak of the First World War. Lenin and many of the revolutionaries declared that this was an imperialist war and would have nothing to do with it. However, the advent of war split the socialist movement throughout Europe. Some of its leading representatives (such as Eduard Bernstein in Germany and Keir Hardie in Britain) opposed it on pacifist grounds, others primarily on the political grounds that it was imperialist, but many rallied to the defence of their particular motherland. Any known Bolsheviks who remained in Russia, including members of the Duma, were arrested following Russia’s entry into the war in alliance with France and Britain against Germany and Austria-Hungary.22 Russian Marxists were split on whether or not to support Russia’s war effort. Lenin and Trotsky were prominent among the ‘defeatists’, not only opposing the war on principle but also believing that it presented a great opportunity. They were convinced that a Russian defeat would hasten the success of revolution. Plekhanov, on the contrary, believed that the cause of socialism would be advanced by the victory of Russia and its allies. In reality the legitimacy of the regime was by now sufficiently weak that when the army suffered major setbacks, Russians as a whole did not rally behind the state authorities and defence of the motherland in the way they had when attacked by Napoleon and the French army in 1812, or as they were to do in the Second World War under the onslaught of Hitler’s Germany. Incompetence in the conduct of the war, vast human losses, and dwindling confidence in the authorities made the tsarist regime more vulnerable than ever before.23
Nicholas II’s wife Alexandra was the granddaughter of the British queen Victoria, whom she revered, but mainly German by ethnic origin. As a result, doubts were – quite wrongly – cast on her commitment to the Russian cause. A more major concern among some of the tsar’s ministers as well as courtiers was the influence exerted over the empress by Grigory Rasputin. A charismatic and bisexual Siberian peasant, he had been associated with a sect which engaged in sexual orgies, intermingled with religious revelations. It was the influence Rasputin was believed to wield which, however, most agitated his rivals for the tsar’s attention. He was held by some – particularly the Empress Alexandra – to possess mystical powers. Rasputin won the trust of Nicholas, and still more of his wife, through his apparent ability to stop the bleeding of their haemophiliac son and heir to the throne, Alexei, at a time when the medical profession was quite unable to help.
Rasputin’s impact increased during the First World War, especially during the periods when the tsar was away from the capital at the front. The fact that his advice was so readily accepted by Alexandra – who in turn wielded profound influence over her husband – outraged many in the court and government. Rasputin was murdered in December 1916 by a group which included the tsar’s first cousin, the Grand Duke Dmitry, and an ultra-conservative Duma deputy, V.M. Purishkevich. Even the murder added to the legendary status of Rasputin. A heavy drinker at the best of times, he downed several glasses of poisoned wine and ate some cyanide-laced cake without any obvious ill-effects. One of the conspirators, Prince Felix Yusupov, after an hour of impatient waiting for Rasputin to expire, shot him with a pistol and, assuming he was now dead, briefly left the room. By the time he returned, Rasputin was making his way through the courtyard snow in the direction of the embankment of the River Neva. Two more shots finally killed him and his weighted body was subsequently dumped in the Neva.24
The 1917 Revolutions
The removal of Rasputin did nothing, however, to save the old regime. By the second half of 1916 and early 1917, the crucial factor was increasing disaffection in the Russian army. These ‘peasants in uniform’, as Lenin called them, were sick of the war. When soldiers were brought in to suppress a strike in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed in 1914) in October 1916, they fired at the police instead of at the workers. Well over a million Russian soldiers were killed in the First World War, more than four million were wounded, and some two and a half million were taken prisoner.25 Bolshevik promises of peace and land had much popular resonance in 1917, but the revolution which ended over three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty (founded in 1613) came as a complete surprise to most Marxist revolutionaries. Three of the most famous of them, Nikolay Bukharin, Leon Trotsky and the one woman who was to become a prominent member of the first Bolshevik government, Alexandra Kollontai, were all in New York on the eve of the February revolution.26 Like almost all of the leading Bolsheviks, Lenin, too, was living abroad at the time. In a sparsely attended lecture he delivered in Zurich in January 1917, commemorating the twelfth anniversary of the 1905 revolution, he clearly had no inkling that revolution in Russia was imminent, although he had no doubt that it would eventually occur. He said: ‘We old folks may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.’27 Lenin was at that time aged forty-seven.
On 12 March, according to the modern calendar–27 February on the Julian calendar – the first of the two revolutions of 1917 took place. The tsar was as surprised as was Lenin. On 7 March he had written to his wife from the front: ‘I greatly miss my half-hourly game of patience every evening. I shall take up dominoes again in my spare time.’28 On the eve of the decisive day of what was to become known as the February Revolution, almost all the factories in Petrograd were on strike, there was widespread looting, and mutiny was spreading throughout the garrisons stationed in the Russian capital.29 The climax came when the Duma attempted to take power into its own hands and formed a committee which became the nucleus of a provisional government. Simultaneously, a Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was formed in Petrograd, modelling itself on the institution which had sprung to life briefly in 1905. Between them the Duma and the Soviet took command. The Soviet, realising that a large part of the army was behind them, renamed itself the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Most of the ministers in the pre-existing government were arrested, and when the tsar tried to return to Petrograd, his train was diverted. Nicholas II abdicated on 15 March. He was persuaded by senior generals that the Duma had taken control and that there were serious doubts about the loyalty of the Petrograd garrisons, should they be asked to come to his defence. The throne was offered to Grand Duke Mikhail, who had supported the February Revolution. He had the good sense to decline it. Yet he was refused permission by Lenin to emigrate and was shot by a group of Bolsheviks in June 1918. A month later Nicholas II, the Empress Alexandra, their four young daughters and still younger haemophiliac son were brutally killed in Ekaterinburg in the Urals, where they had been kept under house arrest. The decision to exterminate the entire family was taken by the top leadership of the Bolsheviks, including Lenin.30
The Bolsheviks, however, had played no part in the drama which put an end to the Romanov dynasty. The Mensheviks, some of whom were active in the Petrograd Soviet, and Socialist Revolutionaries played a small part in that February Revolution. More important was the spontaneous unrest, together with the efforts of liberals in the Duma to force out the tsar and introduce efficient government. In the succinct judgement of one of the leading historians of twentieth-century Russia, Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘the autocracy collapsed in the face of popular demonstrations and the withdrawal of elite support for the regime’.31 The fact that the army was not prepared to defend that regime was ultimately the decisive factor in bringing to an end monarchical rule in Russia.
Lenin was able to re-enter Russia courtesy only of the German authorities, who were delighted to facilitate the return from Switzerland of someone who would cause trouble in the enemy camp and who was opposed to Russian participation in the war. The idea of getting back to their homeland by train, with the connivance of the German High Command (and in a sealed carriage), had been Martov’s. Lenin, for his part, was happy that some Mensheviks as well as Bolsheviks should take this route back to Russia, since it meant that the Mensheviks would not subsequently be able to use collaboration with the Germans as a stick with which to beat him and his supporters.32 Lenin and the group of returning revolutionaries arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd shortly before midnight on 3 April 1917. He had busied himself during the journey writing a document which he was to call his ‘April Theses’. These did not openly call for the overthrow of the recently established Provisional Government, but they implicitly rejected the orthodox Marxist idea that there should be a lengthy period of bourgeois rule before the society would be ready for socialist revolution. And on his arrival in Petrograd, when he addressed a crowd of several thousand from the roof of an armoured car supplied by local Bolsheviks, Lenin’s message was that no support should be offered to the Provisional Government and that the task of genuine socialists was to bring down capitalism in Russia and throughout Europe.33
The Provisional Government of Russia in 1917 was headed first by Prince Georgy Lvov, a member of the Kadet party, and from July by Alexander Kerensky, a moderate socialist politically and somewhat histrionic temperamentally. Under both its leaders the Provisional Government failed in three main ways. First, it carried on with the war at a time of great war-weariness. While Germany and its allies were by now losing the war, the progress of Russia’s allies was obscured by the success of Bolshevik propaganda. Second, the government failed to disband the private army – the Red Guard – which the Bolsheviks had quickly set up. Third, it failed to deal with the land problem. The peasants were clamouring for more land, and some of them forcibly seized land belonging to large landowners. The Provisional Government insisted that they could take no action on this problem until a Constituent Assembly had been formed, and they delayed the convening of such an assembly, adding to public impatience. A Congress of Soviets was held in June 1917, and shortly afterwards the Petrograd Soviet issued its Order No. 1, aimed at the armed forces. It instructed the soldiers to obey the Provisional Government only if their orders did not conflict with those of the Soviet. This was clearly an executive act of the kind which only a government should have the right to take. However, the Soviets were speedily acquiring power without responsibility while the Provisional Government, which had responsibility, was rapidly losing power.
The period was accurately described as one of ‘dual power’, and as such, it neither could nor did last. It had nothing in common with an agreed separation of powers but meant that there were two bodies vying for full power within the one state. More than seventy years later, as the Soviet state was coming to an end – in 1991–a form of dual power (with the Russian president and legislature pitted against the Soviet president and legislature) once again played an important part in bringing about the collapse of a regime. In the latter case, however, there was nothing like as acute an ideological divide as in the year in which Communist rule was born. In 1917 Lenin and Trotsky, the two key figures in the overthrow of the Provisional Government, decided that the soviets, which were increasing in both numbers and popular support, would be a suitable instrument of the next revolution. Besides their slogan, ‘All Power to the Soviets’, the Bolsheviks promised ‘freedom, bread, and peace’. They did not actually wish all power to be in the hands of the soviets until they controlled the soviets, but they made progress in that direction throughout the year. The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) remained the most popular party with the peasantry, but the Bolsheviks were the better organized.
That is not to say that the Bolshevik party in this year of revolutions operated in anything like the disciplined way that Lenin had advocated in What is to be Done?. Too much emphasis can be, and has been, placed on Bolshevik organization as an explanation of their success in 1917. Strict party discipline was to come later, but this was a time of great expansion in party numbers and much open disagreement within the leadership, including on the crucial question of whether the Bolsheviks should seize power by force.34 A stark example of the lack of unity of the Bolsheviks came in July 1917, when a crowd of sailors from the port of Kronstadt, along with soldiers and workers from Petrograd factories, took part in a massive street demonstration under the banner of ‘All Power to the Soviets’ with the intention of bringing down the Provisional Government.
From Lenin’s standpoint, this was dangerous and premature. It led to the arrest of a number of Bolsheviks, as well as of Trotsky (who did not formally join the Bolshevik party until early October). Orders were issued for Lenin’s arrest, and since rumours were now being spread that he was a German agent, he decided to seek safety in Finland. The left-wing insurrection of the ‘July Days’ was followed in August by an attempt from the opposite end of the political spectrum to seize control. General Lavr Kornilov attempted to lead his troops to Petrograd to suppress the soviets and the danger, as he saw it, of socialist revolution. He believed that Kerensky would welcome such assistance. Kerensky’s response, while initially ambivalent, was ultimately hostile, and in any event, railwaymen obstructed and diverted the troop trains. Kornilov was arrested, though he later took part in the civil war against the Bolsheviks, being killed in battle in 1918.
The Bolsheviks, although far from united in 1917, were organizationally stronger than the SRs and much more ruthless than the Mensheviks. Their intransigent insistence on condemning compromise with the Provisional Government and ‘willingness to seize power in the name of the proletarian revolution’ caught the mood of the urban workers and of disaffected soldiers and sailors.35 Lenin and Trotsky succeeded in winning great influence over the Petrograd and other soviets. On 12 October, according to the old calendar, Trotsky took command of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and on 25 October (7 November according to the modern calendar) the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. Bolshevik troops took over public buildings and arrested ministers of the Provisional Government. Kerensky escaped and lived on until 1970, mainly in the United States.
Although 7 November entered history as the day of the successful Bolshevik revolution, in many respects it was more of a coup than a revolution. It supplanted the regime that had been established as a result of the earlier (February) revolution, which had initially commanded widespread support. At the time they seized power, the Bolsheviks were not the most popular party in Russia. This was made abundantly clear by elections for the Constituent Assembly, which were held in December 1917. The Bolsheviks had earlier in the year supported, for propaganda purposes, the holding of these elections, and they allowed them to go ahead. The SRs won 299 seats compared with the Bolsheviks’ 168. Of the other parties, the Left SRs with 39, the Mensheviks with 18, and the Kadets with 17 were the largest.36 When the Constituent Assembly opened on 18 January the Bolsheviks broke it up. Its first day was also its last. In Lenin’s words: ‘The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly by the Soviet regime is the full and open liquidation of formal democracy in the name of the revolutionary dictatorship.’37
Bolshevik Power and the Civil War
One of the most respected figures in the international Marxist movement, Karl Kautsky, who in his youth had known Marx and Engels personally, wrote a book in 1918 entitled The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, arguing that Lenin’s ‘revolutionary dictatorship’ was far removed from what Marx had in mind when he used the phrase (and very infrequently) ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Marx, Kautsky wrote, had not meant by this ‘a form of government’.38 Having come later than socialists such as Bernstein to an understanding of where Lenin’s ideas were leading, Kautsky now insisted:
The proletarian class struggle, as a struggle of the masses, presupposes democracy…Masses cannot be organised secretly, and above all, a secret organisation cannot be a democratic one. It always leads to the dictatorship of a single man, or of a small knot of leaders. The ordinary members can only become instruments for carrying out orders. Such a method may be rendered necessary for an oppressed class in the absence of democracy, but it would not promote the self-government and independence of the masses. Rather would it further the Messiah-consciousness of leaders, and their dictatorial habits.39
Kautsky also observed that ‘quite properly’ the Bolsheviks had stopped calling themselves Social Democrats, and now ‘described themselves as Communists’.40 Lenin was outraged by Kautsky’s sober analysis of the undemocratic character of the Bolshevik revolution. Even though he had already assumed the reins of government, he devoted time to writing a vitriolic reply, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, in which invective substituted for reasoned argument. As Kautsky had noted, the Bolsheviks began calling themselves Communist in 1918. From that time onwards the gulf between socialists who accepted the principles of democracy and Communists who rationalized dictatorship in the name of the class power of the proletariat grew ever wider.
Although the Bolsheviks had taken power surprisingly easily, holding on to it over the next few years was much harder. Immediately after the October Revolution, a government was formed called the Council of People’s Commissars (or Sovnarkom in its Russian acronym). Lenin presided over it. Trotsky become the commissar for foreign affairs, and Stalin was appointed commissar for nationalities. Its first acts were to issue a Peace Decree and a Land Decree. The former called on the governments of all the peoples still at war to begin immediate negotiations for a peace without annexation of territory. This proposal met with no response, but with its army first demoralized and then disbanded, Russia was in no position to carry on the fight. Trotsky announced in February 1918 that the war with Germany was over and that the Russian army was to be demobilized. Later in the month the army was reformed as the Red Army – the Workers’ and Peasants’ Army – but its first task was to deal with enemies within the state rather than engage in a European war. The Germans had responded to Trotsky’s declaration by ordering their troops to advance into Russia, and so in early March 1918 the Soviet government was forced to accept very unfavourable peace terms, involving significant loss of territory which had belonged to the Russian Empire, and sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Nevertheless, the widespread demand for an end to the war had been met.
The Land Decree also responded to at least a substantial body of peasant opinion. It abolished private ownership of the land and established, in principle, joint ownership of it by those who worked in agriculture. However, class war ensued in the countryside, as poor peasants, with Bolshevik encouragement, turned against the richer peasants. The peasantry as a whole, however, resisted attempts by the revolutionary government to take away, in compulsory requisitions, the food they had produced. In the civil war which broke out in Russia in the middle of 1918, the peasants sometimes supported the Red Army and sometimes the White Army, but the cruelty of both sides rapidly alienated them. The Bolsheviks had originally supposed that their army could be composed largely of volunteers, especially workers. This soon proved inadequate, and so they instituted compulsory call-up. On Trotsky’s initiative, they also recruited officers from the former Imperial army, but put alongside them armed Bolshevik commissars to ensure they remembered which side they were fighting on.
The Whites were a disparate army of anti-Bolsheviks, who naturally included also Imperial army officers, although among their keenest volunteers were Cossacks, who had centuries ago succeeded in escaping from serfdom by settling in empty land in southern Russia. Many of them fought to prevent the Bolsheviks from encroaching on the territory which they freely farmed. Given the social composition of Russia at the time, it is hardly surprising that most of the soldiers on both sides were from the peasantry. While most factory workers supported the Bolsheviks, the peasants were deeply ambivalent about the civil war. Those who could keep out of the conflict did so. Sometimes they would welcome the arrival of the Whites, only to find that they wished to restore the old system of landlordism, whereupon the peasants would co-operate with the Reds to drive them out. What they wanted, as some of them put it, was neither a Red nor a White, but a Green government, by which they meant one that would safeguard the distinctive interests of the rural communities.
Within Russia the anti-Bolshevik forces were reinforced by foreign help, especially from the Czechs. Small British forces were landed, partly to prevent military equipment which had been provided for the former Russian government falling into Bolshevik hands. Winston Churchill was keen to launch an all-out offensive against the new Soviet regime, but David Lloyd George, the British prime minister at the time, identified the new government with the Russian people as a whole and took the view that nobody could defeat Russia on Russian soil. The identification of the Bolsheviks with Russia was an oversimplification, since Russia remained deeply divided, although Lloyd George’s scepticism about the practicality of Western military intervention was no doubt justified.
Once British forces had been landed in Russia, small contingents were also sent by France, the United States, Italy, Canada and Japan.41 They, perhaps, helped to delay the defeat of the Whites, but did not play a decisive role. The one element in the foreign intervention which was significant for a time was the Czech Legion. Some 40,000 Czechs – who had come to fight against Austria, since their goal was an independent state and the defeat, therefore, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – were in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. The change of regime in Russia put a stop to their participation in the European war, and as they journeyed through Russia they found themselves in conflict at times with the Red Army. The Czechs had superior training and equipment and won a number of victories in these skirmishes before they returned to their homeland. In contrast, the British and other troops which had been sent to Russia to combat the Bolsheviks were too few to have a bearing on the ultimate outcome, although the foreign intervention in the civil war was given great prominence in later Soviet historiography.
As early as December 1917 the Bolsheviks created a new organization called the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Fighting Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, better known in its abbreviated Russian form as the Cheka. Headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a revolutionary of Polish noble extraction, it became the main instrument of the Red Terror. It was, in effect, the successor to the tsarist political police, the Okhrana, albeit in a more ruthless variant. The Cheka was many times larger than its tsarist predecessor, and in the years of its existence while Lenin was still alive it killed some 140,000 people.42 It became a feared instrument of mass arrests and a pitiless killing machine in its subsequent incarnations as the OGPU and especially NKVD. In the final form it took in the Soviet era, by then more politically restrained, it was known as the KGB. The Cheka was intended to be a temporary organization, dealing with the ‘extraordinary’ situation which faced the Bolsheviks as they tried to hold on to power in the immediate aftermath of revolution. However, like many a supposedly temporary institution, it survived and prospered under its various different names until the end of the Soviet Union – and, arguably, even beyond. Throughout the Communist period the political police liked to refer to themselves as ‘Chekists’, since this gave them a certain revolutionary elan, even when they were acting in the 1970s in defence of an ageing, conservative political elite.
The civil war ended in 1922 with the Bolsheviks triumphant. Leon Trotsky, as the war commissar, had been both efficient and ruthless and the Cheka had also played its violent part. Bolshevik organization was superior to that of the Whites. Lenin led the government and Stalin was playing an increasingly important part in the Communist Party organization, the Bolsheviks having renamed themselves the Communist Party in 1919 (although ‘Bolshevik’ was retained in brackets until 1952). Yet force and organization alone did not produce the victory of the Reds in the civil war. Although there was still at this stage open argument within the party, the Bolsheviks possessed a more coherent ideology than the Whites. The latter not only failed to win over the peasant majority in the country, they also produced neither an outstanding leader nor a unifying idea.