Russian revolution. A very short introduction

by S. A Smith

  Having entered the government to speed the conclusion of peace, the six socialists who sat alongside eight'bourgeois' ministers found themselves embroiled in preparations for war. Kerensky, the new War Minister, was determined to see the Russian army launch a new offensive out of a desire to see Russia honour her treaty obligations to the Allies. It was clear, however, that many units were reluctant to go on the attack. Kerensky toured the fronts frenetically, whipping up support. In the event only 48 battalions refused to go into action. The offensive quickly turned into a rout. Losses amounted to 400,000 men and the number of deserters was even greater. From now on indiscipline £ turned into organized disobedience, as the committees fell increasingly g under the sway of principled opponents of the war such as Left SRs and e Bolsheviks. In retrospect - although this was not evident at the time -jg this can be seen as the beginning of the end for the Provisional 1 Government, since no government can long survive without control over the armed forces.

  Until June the Bolsheviks remained on the margin of politics. On 3 April Lenin, the party's founder and undisputed leader, returned after almost 16 years in exile. He was a man of iron will and self-discipline, personally modest yet supremely self-confident and intolerant of opponents. His politics were rooted in Marxist theory, which he sought to adapt to Russian conditions, yet he had a capacity to make sharp adjustments to policy and to take tough decisions. Upon his return, his contempt for liberalism and parliamentarianism, his implacable opposition to the 'imperialist'war, and his appreciation of the mass appeal of Soviets caused him to take up what appeared to be very extreme positions. In fact his extremism oriented him well towards the underlying realities of politics. L. B. Kamenev and I. V. Stalin, upon their return from Siberian

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  4. Russian soldiers demonstrating in Petrograd, April 1917

  exile on 12 March, had committed the party to conditional support for the Provisional Government, a revolutionary defencist position on the war, and to negotiations with the Mensheviks to reunify the RSDLP. In his April Theses Lenin denounced each of these policies, insisting that there should be no support for the government of 'capitalists and landlords', that the character of the war had changed not one jot, and that the Bolsheviks should campaign for power to be transferred to the Soviets. Crucially, Lenin concluded that the revolution was moving from its 'bourgeois' stage towards the socialist stage, the First World War having convinced him that capitalism was in its death throes and that socialism was now on the agenda internationally. Trotsky, who had clashed swords with Lenin on many occasions in his Menshevik past, welcomed this conversion to views closer to his own.

  In 1917 the Bolshevik party was very different from the tightly knit conspiratorial party advocated by Lenin in 1903. Though more unified than the SRs, Mensheviks, and anarchists, the Bolsheviks were a diverse lot and even after Lenin's April Theses became official policy, the gradualist views of Kamenev and С. Е. Zinoviev (dubbed 'Lenin's mad dog' by the Mensheviks) continued to enjoy strong support. Alongside cadres who had endured years of persecution, tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, and sailors flooded into the party, knowing little Marxism, but seeing in the Bolsheviks the most committed defenders of the working class. Bolsheviks were indefatigable in agitating for their policies in factories and on street corners. The result was that party membership rose from perhaps 10,000 in March to nearly 400,000 by October.

  On the afternoon of 3 July, soldiers of the First Machine-Gun Regiment, angry at the failure of the June offensive and determined not to be sent to the front, took to the streets to demand that power be transferred to the Soviets. Joined by 20,000 Kronstadt sailors and thousands of workers, they precipitated the severest crisis of the government to date, known as the July Days, a crisis compounded by the resignation of the

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  5. Troops firing on Bolsheviks in July demonstrations

  Kadet ministers from the government. Rank-and-file Bolsheviks, including members of the party's Military Organization, were involved

  in calling the demonstration, but the Central Committee was alarmed at the initiative, since it did not believe that the time was ripe for the overthrow of the government. When the movement showed no sign of abating, however, it resolved to lead it. On 4july a semi-insurrection got underway, as armed soldiers surrounded the headquarters of the government. However, the latter was able to bring in reliable military units and scattered the insurgents. Tsereteli anguished that 'it fell to me as Minister of Internal Affairs to apply repressive methods against those who in the past had been my comrades in the struggle for freedom.' Kerensky ordered 'severe retribution' against the Bolsheviks whom he branded 'German agents'. Orders were issued for the arrest of Lenin, Trotsky, and other leading Bolsheviks, causing Lenin to flee to Finland and the others to be jailed. It looked as though the Bolsheviks were a spent force. Kerensky delighted in his triumph.

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  The nationalist challenge

  The 1897 census revealed that Russians comprised only 44% of the total population of the empire. The more accurate 1926 census recognized the existence of 194 different ethnic groups, varying enormously in size, language, religion, culture, and level of socio-economic development. Nationalist movements had first posed a challenge to the autocracy in 1905 and during the war many became radicalized as the peripheral regions of the empire experienced foreign occupation and evacuation, as Polish and Latvian regiments were formed within the tsarist army, and as Allied propaganda circulated about national self-determination as an Allied war aim. Nationalism, however, was extremely unevenly developed across the empire. Among the 18 million Muslims, for example, it was a weak force. Only the Tatars of the middle Volga, Urals, and Crimea, a scattered population interspersed with Russians, showed much political consciousness and they tended to support a pan-Islamic solution - i.e. extra-territorial, cultural autonomy for all Muslims within a unitary Russian state- rather than a nationalist solution based on each ethnic group having its own national territory. Among the biggest concentration of Muslims in Turkestan - a vast region, which ranged from the northern desert steppe (modern Kazakhstan) east to the khanates of Khiva and Kokand and the emirate of Bukhara, each based on oases and river agriculture - there was barely any ethnic awareness, identities being defined in terms of clans, villages, and oases or, at the macro-level, in terms of the commonwealth of Islam. By contrast, in the Baltic region, the dominance of Germans, together with periodic campaigns of Russification by the tsarist state, had stimulated rather strong nationalist movements, in spite of the fact that neither Latvia nor Estonia had any history of independent statehood.

  The Provisional Government seriously underestimated the destabilizing power of nationalism in 1917, fondly imagining that the abrogation of discriminatory legislation would 'solve' the national question. After February, the most common nationalist demands were not for outright

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  secession but for rights of cultural self-expression and for a measure of political autonomy within the framework of a federal Russian state. Typical was the slogan of the liberal and socialist politicians of the Ukrainian Rada, or National Council: 'Long Live Autonomous Ukraine in a Federated Russia'. Only in the untypical cases of Poland and Finland -where existing states had retained some autonomy after incorporation into the empire - did nationalists demand complete separation. By contrast, in the equally untypical cases of Armenia and Georgia, where nationalism was also strong - both countries having long histories as political entities and their own Christian churches - politicians tended to support the Provisional Government. In the case of the Armenians, who were dispersed between Russia, Turkey, and Persia, the genocide unleashed against them by Turks during the war led the moderate socialist party, known as Dashnaktsutiun, to support the Provisional Government out of fear of Turkey. In Georgia the nationalist movement was dominated by Mensheviks, who had forged a mass movement based on the working class and, unusually, on the peasantry.
Naturally, they were close to the Provisional Government.

  Among the non-Russian masses demands for radical social and economic policies generally eclipsed purely nationalist demands. In general, peasants preferred parties that spoke to them in their own tongue and defended local interests, but they would only support nationalists when they backed their own struggles against the landed gentry. In Ukraine, the nationalist movement was politically divided, weakened by pronounced regional divisions, and limited by the fact that nearly a quarter of the population, concentrated in the towns, was Russian, Jewish, or Polish. Nevertheless the socio-economic grievances of the peasantry had an ethnic dimension since most landowners were Russians or Poles. The middle-class politicians of the Rada were forced to take an increasingly radical stance on the land question in order to maintain peasant support. As this suggests, nationalism was strongest where it was underpinned by powerful class sentiment. In Latvia, for example, a large working class and lower middle class faced a

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  commercial and industrial bourgeoisie that was Jewish, Russian, or Polish. In 1917 nationalist politicians of a liberal or moderate socialist hue rapidly lost ground to Latvian Social Democracy which had a base among workers and landless peasants, the latter hating the 'grey barons', or Latvian farmers, almost as much as the German nobility. Generally, workers in the non-Russian areas were more likely to respond to class politics than to nationalism. In the Donbas and the cities of eastern Ukraine, for example, there was a strong working class, but it comprised Russians and Russianized Ukrainians who supported the pan-Russian struggle for soviet power rather than a strictly nationalist agenda.

  As 1917 wore on, nationalist politicians steadily stepped up their demands for autonomy, partly in the face of obduracy by the Provisional Government, partly as politics in general radicalized. In Estonia the £ government redrew administrative boundaries along ethnic lines after g February but the elected assembly, known as Maapaev, was dissatisfied e with the extent of autonomy on offer. Challenged from the left by jg Russian-dominated Soviets, it steadily moved towards demanding 1 complete autonomy. The reluctance of the government to concede meaningful autonomy was motivated partly by fear that nationalist movements were a Trojan horse for Germany, and by deep attachment to a unified Russian state, especially strong among the Kadets. This was particularly evident in relation to Ukraine. With approximately 22% of the empire's population, Ukraine was by far the largest minority area, and its resources of grain, coal, and iron, together with its strategic position, made it of paramount importance to the government. The latter resisted the Rada's demands for limited devolution of power, with the result that it moved steadily in the direction of separatism. When in September Keren sky finally endorsed the principle of self-determination 'but only on such principles as the Constituent Assembly shall determine', it was too little, too late, and in November the Rada declared Ukraine a republic.

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  Social polarization

  At the root of the crisis that overtook the Provisional Government after July lay a serious deterioration of the economy. In the first half of 1917 production of fuel and raw materials fell by at least a third, with the result that many enterprises closed temporarily or permanently. By October, nearly half a million workers had been laid off. The crisis was aggravated by mounting chaos in the transport system, which led to a shortage of bread in the cities. Between July and October prices rose fourfold and the real value of wages plummeted. Between February and October 2.5 million workers went on strike mainly for higher wages, but though strikes increased in scale during the autumn, especially in the Central Industrial Region close to Moscow, they became ever harder to win outright.

  We demand that the Ministry of Labour speedily order the factory owners and industrialists to stop their game of 'cat and mouse' and immediately undertake the increased extraction of coal and ore and also the production of agricultural tools and equipment, so as to reduce the number of unemployed and halt the closure of factories. If Messrs Capitalists will not pay attention to our demand, then we, the workers of the iron-rolling shop, demand complete control of all branches of industry by the toiling people. Of you capitalists, weeping your crocodile tears, we demand that you stop crying about devastation that you yourselves have created. Your cards are on the table. Your game is up.

  Resolution of the general meeting of the iron-rolling shop of the Putilov

  works, August 1917

  The factory committees responded to the crisis by implementing workers' control of production. Being the labour organizations closest

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  to the rank-and-file, the committees were the first to register the shift in working-class sentiment away from the moderate socialists towards the Bolsheviks. The first conference of Petrograd factory committees at the end of May overwhelmingly passed a Bolshevik resolution on control of the economy. As the economy began to collapse, the factory committees mobilized to prevent what they saw as widespread 'sabotage' by the employers. Workers' control signified the close monitoring of the activities of management; it was not intended to displace management but to ensure that management did not lay off workers in order to maintain profits. Employers, however, resented any infringement of their 'right to manage' and class conflict flared up on a dramatic scale. In the Donbas and Urals employers abandoned the ailing mines and metallurgical plants, leaving the committees struggling to maintain production. The idea of workers' control had not emanated from any political party, but the willingness of Bolsheviks, anarchists, and Left SRs to support it was a majorfactor in their growing popularity. By contrast, the insistence of moderate socialists that workers' control merely exacerbated chaos in the economy turned workers against them.

  In the countryside conflict also began to increase during the summer. The first signs of trouble came when peasants resisted government attempts to get them to hand over grain. The war had seen a fall in the volume of grain marketed - it fell from one-quarter of the harvest before 1914 to one-sixth by 1917 -since peasants had no incentive to sell grain when there were no goods to buy and when the currency was losing its value. Concerned to feed the army and the towns, the government introduced a state monopoly on the sale of grain, but its attempts to induce peasants to sell grain at fixed prices provoked antagonism, peasants preferring to conceal grain or turn it into moonshine. More ominously, peasants grew restive at the slow progress towards solving the land question. The government had set up an unwieldy structure of land committees to prepare the details of the reform, thereby heightening peasant expectations, but was loath to

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  begin land redistribution while millions of soldiers were still in the field. In addition, it was torn between the Kadets, who insisted that landlords must be fully recompensed for land taken from them, and Chernov, the Ministerof Agriculture, who wished to see the orderly transfer of gentry estates to the land committees. From early summer, peasants began to take the law into their own hands. They acted cautiously at first, unilaterally reducing or refusing to pay rents, grazing cattle illegally, stealing wood from the landlord's forests, and, increasingly, taking over uncultivated tracts of gentry land on the pretext that this would boost the nation's grain supply. In the non-black-earth zone, where dairy and livestock farming were paramount, peasants concentrated on getting their hands on meadowland and pasture. Because of the inability of local authorities to react, illegal acts soared, levelling off somewhat during the harvest, but climbing sharply again from September. By autumn peasants were seizing the land, equipment, and livestock on gentry estates and redistributing them outright, especially in Ukraine. As one peasant explained: 'The muzhiki (peasant men) are destroying the squires' nests so that the little bird will never return.'

  By summer the discourse of democracy put into circulation by the February Revolution was being overtaken by a discourse of class, a shift symbolized by the increasing use of the word 'comrade' instead of 'citizen' as the favoured mode of address. Given the underdevelopment
of class relations in Russia, and the key role played in politics by such non-class groups as soldiers and nationalist movements, this was a remarkable development. After all, the language of class, at least in its Marxist guise, had entered politics only after 1905; yet it had been disseminated through endless strikes, demonstrations, speeches, leaflets, newspapers, and labour organizations. The layer of 'conscious' workers, drawn mainly from the ranks of skilled, literate young men, served as the conduit through which ideas of class and socialism passed to the wider workforce. The discourse proved easily assimilable, since it played on a deeply rooted distinction in popular culture between 'them', the verkhi, those at the top, and 'us', the nizy, those at the

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  bottom. In 1917 'we' could signify the working class, 'proletarian youth', 'working women', the 'toiling people', or 'revolutionary democracy'. 'They' could signify capitalists, landlords, army generals or, at its most basic, burzhui - anyone with education, an overbearing manner, soft hands, or spectacles. The antipathy shown towards such groups as engineers or rural schoolteachers testifies to how indiscriminate the rhetoric of class could become.

  The discourse of class served to cement two contending power blocs and to articulate fundamentally opposed sets of values and visions of the social order. It was at the root of the process of political polarization that escalated from late summer. Doubtless the salience of this discourse was linked to the way in which the discourse of nation became appropriated by conservatives. Faced with what they perceived to be processes of elemental revolt and national disintegration, the £ Kadets appealed to the nation to cast aside class and sectional interest. g Yet if the class and nation became sharply counterposed, the discourse e of class was in part an attempt to contest the Kadet vision of the nation-g under-siege and to redefine the meaning of the nation in terms of the 1 toiling people, playing on the double sense of the Russian word narod, which means both 'common people' and 'nation'.