The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  4

  The October Revolution (1917–1918)

  The Provisional Government of Alexander Kerenski was overthrown in Petrograd on 25 October 1917. The Bolsheviks, operating through the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the City Soviet, seized power in a series of decisive actions. The post and telegraph offices and the railway stations were taken and the army garrisons were put under rebel control. By the end of the day the Winter Palace had fallen to the insurgents. On Lenin’s proposal, the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies ratified the transfer of authority to the soviets. A government led by him was quickly formed. He called for an immediate end to the Great War and for working people across Europe to establish their own socialist administrations. Fundamental reforms were promulgated in Russia. Land was to be transferred to the peasants; workers’ control was to be imposed in the factories; the right of national self-determination, including secession, was to be accorded to the non-Russian peoples. Opponents of the seizure of power were threatened with ruthless retaliation.

  Bolsheviks pinpointed capitalism as the cause of the Great War and predicted further global struggles until such time as the capitalist order was brought to an end. According to this prognosis, capitalism predestined workers in general to political and economic misery also in peacetime.

  Such thoughts did not originate with Bolshevism; on the contrary, they had been shared by fellow socialist parties in the Russian Empire, including the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and in the rest of Europe. The Socialist International had repeatedly expressed this consensus at its Congresses before 1914. Each of its parties thought it was time for the old world to be swept away and for socialism to be inaugurated. The awesome consequences of the Great War confirmed them in their belief. Other ideas, too, were held by Bolsheviks which were socialist commonplaces. For example, most of the world’s socialists subscribed strongly to the notion that central economic planning was crucial to the creation of a fairer society. They contended that social utility rather than private profit ought to guide decisions in public affairs. Not only far-left socialists but also the German Social-Democratic Party and the British Labour Party took such a standpoint.

  It was the specific proposals of the Bolshevik party for the new world order that caused revulsion among fellow socialists. Lenin advocated dictatorship, class-based discrimination and ideological imposition. The definition of socialism had always been disputed among socialists, but nearly all of them took it as axiomatic that socialism would involve universal-suffrage democracy. Lenin’s ideas were therefore at variance with basic aspects of conventional socialist thought.

  The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries drew attention to this, but their words were not always understood by socialists in the rest of Europe who did not yet have much information about Bolshevik attitudes. There persisted a hope in Western socialist parties that the divisions between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks might yet be overcome and that they might reunite to form a single party again. And so the mixture of contrast and similarity between Bolshevism and other variants of socialist thought baffled a large number of contemporary observers, and the confusion was made worse by the terminology. The Bolsheviks said they wanted to introduce socialism to Russia and to assist in the making of a ‘European socialist revolution’; but they also wanted to create something called communism. Did this mean that socialism and communism were one and the same thing?

  Lenin had given a lengthy answer to the question in The State and Revolution, which he wrote in summer 1917 and which appeared in 1918. His contention was that the passage from capitalism to communism required an intermediate stage called the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. This dictatorship would inaugurate the construction of socialism. Mass political participation would be facilitated and an unprecedentedly high level of social and material welfare would be provided. Once the resistance of the former ruling classes had been broken, furthermore, the need for repressive agencies would disappear. Dictatorship would steadily become obsolete and the state would start to wither away. Then a further phase – communism – would begin. Society would be run according to the principle: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Under communism there would be no political or national oppression, no economic exploitation. Humanity would have reached its ultimate stage of development.1

  Most other socialists in Russia and elsewhere, including Marxists, forecast that Lenin’s ideas would lead not to a self-terminating dictatorship but to an extremely oppressive, perpetual dictatorship.2 They were furious with Lenin not only out of horror at his ideas but also because he brought them too into disrepute in their own countries. Liberals, conservatives and the far right had no interest in the niceties of the polemics between Bolsheviks and other socialists. For them, Bolshevik policies were simply proof of the inherently oppressive orientation of socialism in general. ‘Bolshevism’ was a useful stick of propaganda with which to beat the socialist movements in their own countries.

  In 1917, however, such discussions seemed very abstract; for few of Lenin’s critics gave him any chance of staying in power. Lenin himself could hardly believe his good fortune. Whenever things looked bleak, he convinced himself that his regime – like the Paris Commune of 1871 – would offer a paradigm for later generations of socialists to emulate. The Bolsheviks might be tossed out of power at any time. While governing the country, they ‘sat on their suitcases’ lest they suddenly had to flee into hiding. Surely the luck of the Bolsheviks would soon run out? The governments, diplomats and journalists of western and central Europe were less interested in events in Petrograd than in the shifting fortunes of their own respective armies. Information about the Bolsheviks was scanty, and it took months for Lenin to become a personage whose policies were known in any detail outside Russia.

  For the events of 25 October had taken most people by surprise even in Petrograd. Most workers, shop-owners and civil servants went about their customary business. The trams ran; the streets were clear of trouble and there were no demonstrations. Shops had their usual customers. Newspapers appeared normally. It had been a quiet autumnal day and the weather was mild.

  Only in the central districts had anything unusual been happening. The Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet as well as the Red Guards, under Trotski’s guidance, were hard at work organizing the siege of the Winter Palace, where Kerenski and several of his ministers were trapped, and in securing the occupation of other key strategic points: the post and telegraph offices, the railway stations, and the garrisons. The battleship Aurora from the Baltic Sea fleet was brought up the river Neva to turn its guns towards the Winter Palace. Kerenski could see that he lacked the forces to save the Provisional Government. Exploiting the chaos, he got into an official limousine which was allowed through the ranks of the besiegers. Lenin had meanwhile come out of hiding. Taking a tram from the city’s outskirts, he arrived at Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny Institute, where he harassed his party colleagues into intensifying efforts to take power before the Second Congress of Soviets opened later in the day.

  The reason for Lenin’s continuing impatience must surely have stemmed from his anticipation that the Bolsheviks would not have a clear majority at the Congress of Soviets – and indeed they gained only 300 out of 670 elected delegates.3 He could not drive his policies through the Congress without some compromise with other parties. It is true that many Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lately accepted that an exclusively socialist coalition, including the Bolsheviks, should be formed. But Lenin could think of nothing worse than the sharing of power with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. The Congress of Soviets might foist a coalition upon him. His counter-measure was to get the Military-Revolutionary Committee to grab power hours in advance of the Congress on the assumption that this would probably annoy the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries enough to dissuade them from joining a coalition with the Bolsheviks.


  The ploy worked. As the Congress assembled in the Smolny Institute, the fug of cigarette smoke grew denser. Workers and soldiers sympathetic to the Bolsheviks filled the main hall. The appearance of Trotski and Lenin was greeted with a cheering roar. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries were disgusted, and denounced what they described as a Bolshevik party coup d’état. The Menshevik Yuli Martov declared that most of the Bolshevik delegates to the Congress had been elected on the understanding that a general socialist coalition would come to power, and his words were given a respectful hearing. Yet tempers ran high among other Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries present. In an act of stupendous folly, they stormed out of the hall.4

  Their exodus meant that the Bolsheviks, who had the largest delegation, became the party with a clear-cut majority. Lenin and Trotski proceeded to form their own government. Trotski suggested that it should be called the Council of People’s Commissars (or, as it was in its Russian acronym, Sovnarkom). Thus he contrived to avoid the bourgeois connotations of words such as ‘ministers’ and ‘cabinets’. Lenin would not be Prime Minister or Premier, but merely Chairman, and Trotski would serve as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The Second Congress of Soviets had not been abandoned by all the foes of the Bolsheviks: the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had remained inside the Institute. Lenin and Trotski invited them to join Sovnarkom, but were turned down. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were waiting to see whether the Bolshevikled administration would survive; and they, too, aspired to the establishment of a general socialist coalition.

  Lenin and Trotski set their faces against such a coalition; but they were opposed by colleagues in the Bolshevik Central Committee who also wanted to negotiate with the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries to this end. Furthermore, the central executive body of the Railwaymen’s Union threatened to go on strike until a coalition of all socialist parties had been set up, and the political position of Lenin and Trotski was weakened further when news arrived that a Cossack contingent loyal to Kerenski was moving on Petrograd.

  But things then swung back in favour of Lenin and Trotski. The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries no more wished to sit in a government including Lenin and Trotski than Lenin and Trotski wanted them as colleagues. The negotiations broke down, and Lenin unperturbedly maintained an all-Bolshevik Sovnarkom. Three Bolsheviks resigned from Sovnarkom, thinking this would compel Lenin to back down.5 But to no avail. The rail strike petered out, and the Cossacks of General Krasnov were defeated by Sovnarkom’s soldiers on the Pulkovo Heights outside the capital. The Bolshevik leaders who had stood by Lenin were delighted. Victory, both military and political, was anticipated by Lenin and Trotski not only in Russia but also across Europe. Trotski as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs expected simply to publish the secret wartime treaties of the Allies and then to ‘shut up shop’.6 For he thought that the Red revolutions abroad would end the need for international diplomacy altogether.

  Trotski met the Allied diplomats, mainly with the intention of keeping the regime’s future options open. The burden of energy, however, fell elsewhere. Sovnarkom was the government of a state which was still coming into being. Its coercive powers were patchy in Petrograd, non-existent in the provinces. The Red Guards were ill-trained and not too well disciplined. The garrisons were as reluctant to fight other Russians as they had been to take on the Germans. Public announcements were the most effective weapons in Sovnarkom’s arsenal. On 25 October, Lenin wrote a proclamation justifying the ‘victorious uprising’ by reference to ‘the will of the huge majority of workers, soldiers and peasants’. His sketch of future measures included the bringing of ‘an immediate democratic peace to all the peoples’. In Russia the Constituent Assembly would be convoked. Food supplies would be secured for the towns and workers’ control over industrial establishments instituted. ‘Democratization of the army’ would be achieved. The lands of gentry, crown and church would be transferred ‘to the disposal of the peasant committees’.7

  Two momentous documents were signed by Lenin on 26 October. The Decree on Peace made a plea to governments and to ‘all the warring peoples’ to bring about a ‘just, democratic peace’. There should be no annexations, no indemnities, no enclosure of small nationalities in larger states against their will. Lenin usually eschewed what he considered as moralistic language, but he now described the Great War as ‘the greatest crime against humanity’:8 probably he was trying to use terminology congruent with the terminology of President Woodrow Wilson. But above all he wanted to rally the hundreds of millions of Europe’s workers and soldiers to the banner of socialist revolution; he never doubted that, without revolutions, no worthwhile peace could be achieved.

  The Decree on Land, edited and signed by him on the same day, summoned the peasants to undertake radical agrarian reform. Expropriation of estates was to take place without compensation of their owners. The land and equipment seized from gentry, crown and church was to ‘belong to the entire people’. Lenin stressed that ‘rank-and-file’ peasants should be allowed to keep their property intact. The appeal was therefore directed at the poor and the less-than-rich. This brief preamble was followed by clauses which had not been written by him but purloined from the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries, which had collated 242 ‘instructions’ set out by peasant committees themselves in summer 1917. Lenin’s decree repeated them verbatim. Land was to become an ‘all-people’s legacy’; it could no longer be bought, sold, rented or mortgaged. Sovnarkom’s main stipulation was that the large estates should not be broken up but handed over to the state. Yet peasants were to decide most practicalities for themselves as the land passed into their hands.9

  Other decrees briskly followed. The eight-hour day, which had been introduced under the Provisional Government, was confirmed on 29 October, and a code on workers’ control in factories and mines was issued on 14 November. This was not yet a comprehensive design for the transformation of the economy’s urban sector; and, while industry was at least mentioned in those early weeks of power, Lenin was slow to announce measures on commerce, finance and taxation. His main advice to the party’s supporters outside Petrograd was to ‘introduce the strictest control over production and account-keeping’ and to arrest those who attempted sabotage.10

  Frequently Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee declared that the new administration intended to facilitate mass political participation. A revolution for and by the people was anticipated. Workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors were to take direct action. ‘Soviet power’ was to be established on their own initiative. But Lenin’s will to summon the people to liberate themselves was accompanied by a determination to impose central state authority. On 26 October he had issued a Decree on the Press, which enabled him to close down any newspapers publishing materials inimical to the decisions of the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.11 Repressive measures were given emphasis. Lenin pointed out that the authorities lacked a special agency to deal with sabotage and counter-revolutionary activity; and on 7 December, Sovnarkom at his instigation formed the so-called Extraordinary Commission (or Cheka). Its task of eliminating opposition to the October Revolution was kept vague and extensive: no inhibition was to deter this forerunner of the dreaded NKVD and KGB.12

  Nor did Lenin forget that the tsars had ruled not a nation-state but an empire. Following up his early announcement on national self-determination, he offered complete independence to Finland and confirmed the Provisional Government’s similar proposal for German-occupied Poland. This was done in the hope that Soviet revolutionary republics would quickly be established by the Finns and the Poles, leading to their voluntary reabsorption in the same multinational state as Russia. Lenin believed that eventually this state would cover the continent.13 His objective was the construction of a pan-European socialist state. Meanwhile Lenin and his colleague Iosif Stalin, People’s Commissar for Nationalities, aimed to retain the remainder of the former empire intact; and on 3 N
ovember they jointly published a Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, confirming the abolition of all national and ethnic privileges and calling for the formation of a ‘voluntary and honourable union’. The right of secession was confirmed for the various nations involved.14

  The Allied ambassadors in Petrograd did not know whether to laugh or cry. How could such upstarts pretend to a role in global politics? Was it not true that Lenin had spent more time in Swiss libraries than Russian factories? Was he not an impractical intellectual who would drown in a pool of practical difficulties once he actually wielded power? And were not his colleagues just as ineffectual?

  It was true that not only the party’s central figures but also its provincial leaders were entirely inexperienced in government. Marx’s Das Kapital was their primer, which was studied by several of them in the prison cells of Nicholas II. Few of them had professional employment in private or governmental bodies before 1917. An oddity was Lev Krasin, a veteran Bolshevik still working for the Siemens Company at the time of the October Revolution. He was later to be appointed People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade. The rest of them were different. Most leading members of the party had spent their adult life on the run from the Okhrana. They had organized small revolutionary groups, issued proclamations and joined in strikes and demonstrations. They had studied and written socialist theory. Public life, out in the gaze of society, was a new experience for them as their days of political obscurity and untestable theorizing came to an end.