Russian revolution. A very short introduction

by S. A Smith

  The war marked a watershed in Europe's history, destroying empires, discrediting liberal democracy, preparing the way for the totalitarian politics of the 1920s and 1930s. It exposed all the belligerents to the severest of tests and found the Russian autocracy wanting. The war had a devastating impact on the empire. Over 14 million men were mobilized; about 67 million people in the western provinces came under enemy occupation; over 6 million were forcibly displaced, of whom half a million were Jews expelled from front-line areas. The eastern front was less static than the western, but neither side was able to make a decisive breakthrough and offensives proved hugely costly. Perhaps 3.3 million died or were lost without trace- a higher mortality than any other belligerent power (although Germany had a higher number of

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  counted dead) - and the total number of casualties reached over 8 million. The mass slaughter and seething hatreds to which the war gave rise fatally compromised the chances of democracy after the autocracy had been overthrown.

  They drove us and we went Where was I going and why? To kill the Germans! But why? I didn't know. I arrived in the trenches, which were terrifying and appalling. I listened as our company commander beat a soldier, beat him about the head with a whip. Blood poured from the poor man's head. Well, I thought, as soon as he begins to beat me, I'll skewer him with my bayonet and be taken prisoner. I thought who really is my enemy: the Germans or the company commander? I still couldn't see the Germans, but here in front of me was the commander. The lice bit me in the trenches. I was overcome with dejection. And then as we were retreating I was taken prisoner. F. Starunov, a peasant conscript in the First World War

  Russian soldiers fought valiantly and generally successfully against Turks and Austrians, but proved no match for the German army in matters of organization, discipline, and leadership. General Brusilov's offensive of June 1916, however, testified to the resilience of the Russian soldiers and by that stage the army had overcome the shortage of shells that had dogged its first months in the field. When the February Revolution came, it was not as the result of military defeat, or even of war weariness, but as the result of the collapse of public confidence in the government.

  In November 1915, after a disastrous first year of battle, Nicholas took personal command of the armed forces. Though diligent, he had neither the ability nor imagination to coordinate the external and the home fronts and stubbornly resisted calls from the duma for a 'government of public confidence'. The empress Alexandra interfered erratically in

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  government and her devotion to the peasant holy man, Rasputin, set rumours flying of sexual shenanigans and treason by 'dark forces' at court. These alienated not only the common people but also many officials, generals, and aristocrats from what was perceived to be a 'pro-German' court. Meanwhile the bureaucracy, never known for its efficiency, buckled under the punishing demands of 'total war'. So disgusted were the middle classes with the ineptitude of the official supply organs that the Union of Towns and the Union of Zemstvos, the organs of local government in the countryside, took on the task of organizing supplies and services for the army. It proved impossible, however, to mobilize transport, industry, and fuel for the army without undermining the civilian economy.

  The government financed the war by raising taxes and foreign loans and by massively increasing the amount of paper currency in circulation. The £ result was a vast increase in government debt and rising inflation. Prices g tripled between 1914 and 1916, while wages doubled. Industrialists e made record profits, while workers struggled to make ends meet. By jg 1916 the intensity of industrial strikes again approached the level of the 1 pre-war period; in January-February 1917 more workers participated in political strikes than in 1913. By the winter, the cities were facing an acute food shortage in a country glutted with food. Asked in January 1917 by Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, how he proposed to regain his subjects' confidence, Nicholas retorted: 'Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people, or that they are to regain mine?'

  The meanings of the revolution

  The February Revolution gave rise to a short-lived mood of national unity and optimism. Liberty and democracy were the order of the day. Overnight everyone was transformed from a subject into a citizen, all agreeing that they must organize in order to realize their freedom. The extraordinary euphoria of public life was captured byV. I. Lenin's wife,

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  2. A political demonstration in Petrograd, 1917

  Nade2da Krupskaia, upon her return to Russia in early April: 'Everywhere people stood about in knots, arguing heatedly and discussing the latest events. Discussion that nothing could interrupt!' Yet from the first, the scope of the revolution was in dispute. For the reluctant revolutionaries of the Provisional Government the overthrow of the tsar was an act of national self-preservation driven by the need to bring victory in war. For the lower classes, liberty and democracy meant nothing short of a social revolution that would bring about the complete destruction of the old structure of authority and the construction of a new way of life in accordance with their ideas of justice and freedom. It was only a matter of time before the social contradictions masked by the common political language would become exposed.

  Nine million soldiers and sailors hailed the downfall of the tsar, seeing the revolution as a signal to overthrow the oppressive command structure in the armed forces. Tyrannical officers were removed and sometimes lynched (about 50 officers were murdered by the sailors of

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  Kronstadt). Insisting that they were citizens of a free Russia, soldiers demanded the right to form committees from the company level upwards to represent their interests. This demand was conceded by the Petrograd Soviet on 1 March, when it passed Order No. 1, the most radical act it ever carried out. General M. V. Alekseev condemned it as 'the means by which the army I command will be destroyed'. Yet the committees were dominated by more educated elements who had little intention of sabotaging the operational effectiveness of the army. In spring at least, democratization did not mean the disintegration of the army as a fighting force. The mood of the soldiers was characterized by Lenin as one of 'revolutionary defencism', by which he meant that soldiers would only fight to defend the gains of the revolution against Austro-Cerman militarism. Hopes for a rapid peace settlement, however, ran high and no one could be confident that the army would continue to fight indefinitely. In particular, it was not clear that the army £ would go on the attack.

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  e Industrial workers were the most organized and strategically jg positioned of all social groups in 1917. Upon their return to work, 1 following the end of the general strike, they, too, set about dismantling 'autocracy' on the shop floor. Hated foremen and administrators were driven out, the old rule books were torn up, and factory committees were formed, especially among the skilled metalworkers, to represent workers' interests to management. Everywhere they demanded an eight-hour working day and wage rises to compensate for wartime inflation, both demands conceded with considerable reluctance by employers. The factory committees took on a wide range of functions, including guarding factory property, overseeing hiring and firing, labour discipline, and organizing food supplies. By October two-thirds of enterprises with 200 or more workers had such committees. Had economic and political conditions been more favourable, it is possible that they might have become part of a corporatist system of industrial relations, taking joint responsibility with employers for production. Meanwhile more slowly, trade unions

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  also revived, taking particular responsibility for wage negotiations. By October they had over 2 million members, organized by industry rather than craft.

  The Soviets were the principal organ of political expression for the workers and soldiers. Some 700 Soviets sprang up in March and April, embracing around 200,000 deputies by summer. By October there were 1,429 Soviets, of which 455 were Soviets of peasants' deputies. Peasant Soviets, however, did not re
ally get off the ground until the end of 1917. Soviets saw themselves as organs of the 'revolutionary democracy' - a bloc comprising workers, soldiers, and peasants, and occasionally stretching (as in Omsk) to include representatives of ethnic minorities and even teachers, journalists, lawyers, and doctors. Their basic principle was that they were directly elected by those they represented and directly accountable to them. During the spring and summer, the moderate socialists, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), were the leading force in the Soviets, because their brand of inclusive politics was most in tune with the popular mood. The moderate socialists saw the function of the Soviets as being to exercise 'control' over local government in the interests of the revolutionary democracy; but in practice many local Soviets quickly took on administrative responsibilities in matters as various as food and fuel supply, education and culture, and law and order. At the beginning of June at the First All-Russia n Congress of Soviets, out of 777 delegates, 285 were SRs and 24S were Mensheviks. The Congress brought into being a national soviet centre, the Central Executive Committee (CEC), controlled by Mensheviks and SRs, that became a bastion of support for the Provisional Government.

  The peasants too responded warmly to the February Revolution. Few mourned the passing of the Romanov dynasty and thousands of resolutions were passed by village communities, applauding the fact that peasants were now citizens and demanding that the social order be reconstructed on the basis of democracy, justice, and equality. Peasant

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  3. Who Has Forgotten His Debt to His Motherland? Merchants address this 2 question to a downcast soldier. The inscription reads 'Little is given, much 5 is exacted.'

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  § resolutions expressed hope that the war would soon be over, but their .2 principal aspiration was to redress the wrong done to them in 1861 by redistributing the gentry's estates. Although there were only about юо.ооо landlord families by 1917, few countries in the world still had estates as large as those in Russia. In the eyes of the peasants, the gentry had no right to these estates since they did not work them. In the moral universe of the peasantry it was an article of faith that only those who made the land productive had a right to it. In one of Tolstoy's fables, the peasants of a village judge strangers by the state of their hands: only if their palms are calloused will they take them in.

  Dual power

  The two forces that brought down the monarchy -the mass movement

  of workers and soldiersand the middle-dass parliamentary opposition -became institutionalized in the new political set-up, the Petrograd

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  Soviet keeping a watchful eye over the Provisional Government. The government, headed by Prince С. Е. Lvov, a landowner with a long record of service to the zemstvos, was broadly representative of professional and business interests. It was liberal, even mildly populist, in its politics; the only organized force within it was the Kadet party, once a liberal party but now evolving rapidly in the direction of conservative nationalism. In its manifesto of 2 March, the government pledged to implement a far-reaching programme of civil and political rights and to convoke a Constituent Assembly. Significantly, it said nothing about the burning issues of war and land. The government, which had no popular mandate, saw its principal task as being to oversee the election of a Constituent Assembly, which would determine the shape of the future polity. It believed that only such an assembly had the authority to resolve such pressing issues as land redistribution.

  The Petrograd Soviet enjoyed the real attributes of power since it controlled the army, transport, and communications, as well as vital means of information. It also had a popular mandate insofar as 1,200 deputies were elected to it within the first week. A few Bolsheviks, anarchists, and others pressed the Soviet to assume full power, but the moderate socialist intellectuals who controlled its executive committee believed that this was not appropriate to a revolution whose character they defined as 'bourgeois', i.e. as destined to bring about democracy and capitalist development in Russia rather than socialism. In addition, they feared that any attempt to assert their authority would provoke 'counter-revolution'. Consequently, they agreed to support but not to join the 'bourgeois' Provisional Government, so long as it did not override the interests of the people. The radical lawyer A. F. Kerensky alone of the Petrograd Soviet representatives determined to join the government, portraying himself as the 'hostage of the democracy' within it. Thus was born 'dual power'. In spite of the prevailing mood of national unity, it reflected the deep division in Russian society between the 'democracy' and 'propertied society'.

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  Outside Petrograd dual power was much less in evidence. In most localities a broad alliance of social groups formed committees of public organizations to eject police and tsarist officials, maintain order and food supply, and to oversee the democratization of the town councils and zemstvos. The government endeavoured to enforce its authority by appointing commissars, most of whom were chairs of county zemstvos and thus representatives of landed or business interests. By summer the parallel existence of the committees, the commissars, the town councils and zemstvos -which by this stage were undergoing democratic election - and the Soviets reflected the deep fragmentation of power in provincial towns and cities. In rural areas peasants expelled land captains, township elders, and village policemen and set up township committees under their control. The government attempted to strengthen its authority by setting uplandand food committees at township level, but these too fell under peasant control. At the very £ lowest level the authority of the village gathering was strengthened by g the revolution, although it became 'democratized' by the participation e of younger sons, landless labourers, village intelligentsia (scribes, jg teachers, vets, and doctors), and some women. The February 1 Revolution thus devolved power to the localities and substantially reduced the capacity of the Provisional Government to make its writ run beneath the county level.

  Until autumn the popular organizations everywhere were dominated by the Mensheviks and SRs. The Mensheviks had originated as a faction of the RSDLP in 1903 after they objected to Lenin's model of a vanguard party, fearing that professional revolutionaries would substitute themselves for the working class. As orthodox Marxists, they believed that Russia did not yet have the prerequisites for socialism: a developed industry and a large working class. Because many - possibly most -RSDLP organizations in the provinces had declined to split along factional lines, it is difficult to estimate how many Mensheviks there were in 1917. By May, there were probably around 100,000 - half of them in Georgia - rising to nearly 200,000 by autumn. The SRs, led by

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  V. M. Chernov, were by far the largest party in 1917. They rejected the Marxist view of the peasantry as petty-bourgeois, believing that the principles of collectivism inherent in the peasant commune made Russia peculiarly fitted for socialism. For this reason, and because they put so much energy into organizing the peasantry during 1905-7, they were seen as the party of the peasantry. By autumn 1917, however, alongside 700,000 members in the army and in the villages, the SRs had 300,000 members in the towns, making them as significant an urban force as the Bolsheviks. The question of whether or not to support the tsarist government in the war had split both Mensheviks and SRs deeply. These internal splits deepened in the course of 1917, especially among the SRs. Their right wing called for war to victory; their centre faction, led by Chernov, shifted a long way from its principles in pursuit of the coalition with the bourgeoisie; while the left wing, who became the Left SRs, increasingly took up a programme that differed little from that of the Bolsheviks.

  Despite the talk of'unity of the vital forces of the nation', the issue of policy on the war put a great strain on the alliance between the Petrograd Soviet and the government. All sections of the populace hoped that the revolution would bring about a speedy peace and most of the moderate socialists on the Soviet executive had been opposed to the war hitherto. The Georgian Menshevik I. G. Tsereteli crafted a polic
y designed, on the one hand, to press the government to seek a comprehensive peace settlement, based on the renunciation of all annexations and indemnities, and on the other, to persuade soldiers that it was their duty to go on defending Russia until peace came about. The Provisional Government formally accepted this policy, but many of its members favoured war to victory. On 20 April, a note to the Allies from the Foreign Minister, P. N. Miliukov, leader of the Kadets, revealed his support for Allied war aims, as set out in secret treaties, which inter alia promised Russia the straits at the mouth of the Black Sea as the prize of victory. Immediately, outraged soldiers and workers took to the streets of Petrograd to demand Miliukov's resignation. Among them

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  could be seen Bolshevik banners proclaiming 'Down with the Provisional Government'. On 2 May Miliukov was forced to resign and Prince Lvov insisted that members of the Soviet executive join a coalition government to resolve the crisis.