October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

  Marooned in Zurich, Lenin was urgently amassing information about the homeland where he had spent only a few months in the last fifteen years. On 3 March, he laid out his political position to his fellow Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, a provocative and brilliant thinker on a range of issues, most notoriously on sexual morality, regarding which her attitudes scandalised even many of her comrades.

  ‘The first stage of the revolution’, Lenin wrote to her, ‘will not be the last.’ And to that prediction he added: ‘Of course, we shall continue to oppose the defence of the fatherland.’

  This was not a given: many on the left, including plenty of former ‘defeatists’, saw the inauguration of a socialist-overseen democratic government as fundamentally changing the nature of the war. They would no longer oppose the defence of Russia. For Lenin, by contrast, revolutionary defeatism was constitutive of his anti-imperialism. And since Russia, he held, was still imperialist, its new government could not alter his opposition to its war. His ideas were hard but not unique in the party: it was in a similar vein, on the 7th, that the Russian Bureau of the CC – on the party’s left – stated its own continuing defeatism, on grounds that ‘the war is an imperialist one and remains so’. On 4 March, Lenin started to publicise his views in several theses co-written with Zinoviev, a member of the Bolsheviks since the 1903 split – an ‘Old Bolshevik’, as such activists were called – and one of Lenin’s closest collaborators.

  Lenin was desperate to return home, though he could not be sure of his reception there. He concocted madcap schemes to get through the war zone, to pass through Sweden to Russia; secret aeroplane flights; carrying a false passport, posing as a deaf mute, to avoid the dangers of speaking. As he schemed, he sharpened his political positions.

  On 6 March, he cabled the CC in Petrograd: ‘Our tactics: complete mistrust, no support for the new government. We especially suspect Kerensky’ – who was, by freakish coincidence, the son of Lenin’s old headmaster. ‘The arming of the proletariat provides the only guarantee. Immediate elections to the Petrograd [Municipal] Duma. No rapprochement with the other parties.’

  Between the 7th and the 12th, starting a week after the tsar’s abdication, Lenin expounded his positions in a series of documents that would become known as the ‘Letters from Afar’. These circulated in Switzerland, but what he most wanted was to disseminate them in Russia, among his Petrograd comrades, in their newly revived journal Pravda.

  In Oslo, his comrade Kollontai was eager for word from him. ‘We must get direction to the party in our spirit,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘we must immediately draw a sharp line between us and the Provisional Government along with the defencists … I am waiting for directives from Vladimir Ilyich.’ As soon as he had finished the first of his ‘Letters from Afar’ laying out his intransigent perspective, Vladimir Ilyich – Lenin – sent it to her. It arrived on the 15th, and Kollontai, ‘thrilled’, she cabled him to say, ‘by his ideas’, set out on the long journey through Sweden, Finland, and on to Russia.

  Lenin was not the only émigré anxious to return. Martov, then based in Paris, had come up with a scheme somewhat less eccentric than any of Lenin’s, though in certain ways even more fraught. Through Swiss intermediaries, Martov suggested that exiled Russians ask the German government for safe passage across its territory, in exchange for the release of German and Austrian internees in Russia. This proposal was for what would soon become legendary as the ‘sealed train’.

  From Mogilev, Nicholas issued requests with stiff dignity. He asked the Provisional Government for permission to join his family at Tsarskoe Selo until his children were well, then to leave the country. Prime Minister Lvov sounded out the British about providing asylum.

  But the Soviet and the people wanted the Romanovs brought to justice. The Provisional Government capitulated to this popular fury. At 3 p.m. on 8 March, four government representatives arrived at Mogilev station, to be greeted by a large and enthusiastic crowd, while Nicholas waited in his imperial train. He surrendered to the newcomers without resistance. ‘Looking ashen,’ one observer wrote, ‘the tsar saluted, fingered his moustache as was his habit, and returned to his train to be taken by escort to Tsarskoe Selo where his wife was already under arrest. His entourage stood in silence on the platform as the train pulled out of the station.’

  Some of the many onlookers saluted these new commissars of the revolutionary government. Others stared, pining, at the dethroned ruler.

  Modernity was insurgent. The old machinery had stalled. The Provisional Government would impound the imperial train at Peterhof, for its finery to moulder on the sidings. It was soon to be overlooked by a new sculpture, an extravagantly expiring double-headed imperial eagle, its two necks craned, suspended, above a supremacist blast. Autocracy thrown down by a poised modernist explosion.

  On 9 March, the United States became the first power to bestow the benediction of recognition on the Provisional Government. Britain, France and Italy soon followed. Such validation overstated certain realities. On the very day of the US recognition, Guchkov shared his frustration with Alexeev, who was now the reluctant commander-in-chief, complaining bitterly that ‘the Provisional Government possesses no real power and its orders are executed only in so far as this is permitted by the Soviet … which holds in its hands the most important elements of actual power, such as troops, railway and postal and telegraph service’.

  The Soviet itself remained ambivalent about the power it held. Such uncertainty notwithstanding, the revolution, and the soviet form, spread in patchwork but accelerating fashion. On 3 March, one sixty-four-year-old resident of Poltava, Ukraine, recorded in his diary that ‘people arriving from Petrograd and Kharkov reported that on 1 March there was revolution … For us in Poltava it’s quiet’. Less than a week later, his tone had changed: ‘Events have been racing with such swiftness that there’s no time to discuss or even simply write them down.’

  The Moscow Soviet gathered as early as 1 March, more than 600 deputies, overwhelmingly working-class in composition, under a bloated seventy-five-person executive committee in which the Bolsheviks were a substantial left wing, and a seven-person presidium. In more inaccessible areas of the empire, the news, and new institutions, might take a long time to arrive. In remoter parts of the Volga countryside, it was only in the second half of March that rumours from telegraphs and conversations began to make real headway. Small communities dispatched messengers to travel to nearby towns to clarify details of the upheaval of which they were hearing. Villagers gathered into assemblies to begin, for the first time, considering not only local issues, but also national ones: the war, the Church, the economy. Ad hoc local committees sprang up in dizzying variety. A chaos of decentralisation. Some villages, towns and territories unconvincingly announced their independence. Very soon, countless soviets existed in the country, and their numbers were growing, but talk of ‘the Soviet’ usually designated the originatory, Petrograd Soviet.

  The realities of the local soviets and of ‘Dual Power’ did not always obey the moderates’ blueprints. In Izhevsk, in the Udmurt Republic, shop stewards set up a powerful soviet on 7 March, which quickly came to dominate local politics. In the provincial capital of Saratov, 60 per cent of the city’s industrial workers elected deputies to their own hastily arranged soviet, which, by the end of the month, hammered out an ad hoc arrangement with the local Duma – which soon, however, faded into insignificance and stopped meeting. Dual, here, gave way to single power – that of the (moderate) soviet.

  Sometimes political confrontation was obviated in a short-lived post-revolutionary burst of class camaraderie – what the journalist and historian William Chamberlin, soon to arrive in Russia, would call ‘an orgy of sentimental speechmaking and fraternisation’. On 10 March, in Petrograd, the Soviet agreed with the factory owners that long-demanded eight-hour day, as well as the principle of worker-elected factory committees and a system of industrial arbitration. Such agreements were as much expressions of bosse
s’ anxiety and workers’ confidence as of consensus, of course: in many places, people were simply refusing to work longer than eight hours anyway, and were policing their new authority with direct action. Unpopular foremen were shoved in wheelbarrows and tipped into nearby canals. When the Moscow bosses resisted the eight-hour day, on 18 March the Moscow Soviet, recognising what workers were instituting as a fait accompli, simply decreed it, bypassing the Provisional Government. And their decree stood.

  In Latvia, both radicalism and conciliation were visible: by 7 March the Riga Soviet comprised 150 delegates from thirty organisations, and the executive committee it voted in on 20 March consisted (temporarily) entirely of Bolsheviks. Their local line, though, was not yet as militant as that of their émigré Latvian Bolshevik comrades in Moscow. The Riga Bolshevik Committee – to their Moscow comrades’ appalled shock – stated on 10 March that it ‘fully submits to all decisions of the new government’ reached in agreement with soviets, and that any ‘attempts to create chaos’ were the work of saboteurs.

  On 6 March demonstrations in favour of the revolution shook Baku, Azerbaijan, the oil-rich city of Azeris, immigrant Russians, Persians, Armenians and others, a patchwork of medieval and modern edifices, watched over by the steep ziggurats of oil derricks. Fifty-two delegates met for the first session of the Baku Soviet. It was opened by the Menshevik Grigori Aiollo, and voted in as its chair Stepan Shaumian, a Bolshevik popular for his role in the legendary 1914 oil strike. But the Baku Soviet, too, was enthusiastic for social peace, and cooperated with the IKOO (Executive Committee of Public Organisations), the new self-appointed local administration born of the city government.

  Such collaboration, as well as that between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in many regions, or simply a certain indifference to the split, would not last. There were already exceptions. The sailors in Kronstadt, for example, disproportionately literate and deeply politicised, tended to join the most radical groups, and taking the most radical positions. The Kronstadt Soviet was controlled by Bolshevik hardliners, anarchists and anti-war Left SRs, already a distinct group.

  The organisational infrastructure of the SRs as a whole accelerated, its newspapers, clubs, agitational schools and meetings and committees proliferating. It recruited so fast, by so many thousands, among workers and intelligentsia as well as the peasants and soldiers – ‘peasants in uniform’ – on whom the party traditionally particularly focused, that among some long-time activists ‘March SR’ became a snide shorthand for undependable political newcomers.

  Traditional peasant uprisings were never far from the surface in these turbulent days. As early as 9 March, agrarian disorder rocked Kazan Province. On the 17th, the Provisional Government insisted, rather nervously, that ‘the land question cannot be solved by means of any kind of seizure’. That would not be its last such appeal. Eventually, on 25 March, it had to respond to inchoate upheaval on the land by proclaiming a state monopoly of grain, buying up all that was not needed for subsistence, animals or seed at fixed prices.

  This could only ever be a stopgap. The land question remained unsolved.

  ‘Democracy’ was a sociological term in Russia in 1917, denoting the masses, the lower classes, at least as strongly as it did a political method. For many in those heady moments, Kerensky exemplified ‘the democracy’. He was adored. Artists painted him, badges and medals celebrated him, poets immortalised him, in a torrent of kitsch.

  ‘You personify the ideal of the free citizen, which the human soul has cherished throughout the ages,’ the collective of the Moscow Arts Theatre told him. The celebrated writer Alexander Kuprin called him ‘an inscrutable and divine spiritual receiver, a divine resonator, a mysterious mouthpiece for the people’s will’.

  ‘For us Kerensky is not a minister,’ read one pamphlet, ‘neither is he an orator for the people; he has ceased to be a simple human being. Kerensky is a symbol of revolution.’ According to the cultish logic of the histrionic dialecticians, Kerensky’s status as ‘minister-cum-democrat’, straddling government and Soviet, was more than mere addition, more even than synthesis. It was apotheosis.

  Under Lvov, with pressure from the Soviet, the Provisional Government pursued social measures apace. On 12 March, it abolished the death penalty. The following day, it got rid of courts martial, except at the front. On 20 March, it eradicated legal discrimination on grounds of faith or nationality.

  ‘A miracle has happened,’ wrote the poet Alexander Blok. ‘Nothing is forbidden … almost anything might happen.’ Every streetcar, every queue, every village meeting hosted political debate. There was a proliferation of chaotic new festivals, re-enactments of the February events. Tsarist statues were torn down, some having been put up for the purpose.

  A ‘Liberty Parade’ in Moscow saw hundreds of thousands of marchers of all classes pray and party behind their banners. There was a circus, a camel and an elephant plastered with placards, a wagon bearing a black coffin labelled ‘The Old Order’, a leering dwarf labelled Protopopov, for the hated ex-minister. People read new books, sang various new versions of the Marseillaise and watched new plays – often lewd, crude retellings of the Romanovs’ overthrow. Irreverence as revenge.

  Gone was the obsequiousness of 1905. Citizens across the empire waged what Richard Stites called a ‘war on signs’, the destruction of tsarist symbols: portraits, statues, eagles. Revolutionary fever infected unlikely patients. Orthodox nuns and monks adopted radical talk, ousting ‘reactionary’ superiors. High-rankers in the Church complained of a revolutionary mood. The main religious newspaper took an ‘anti-ecclesiastical’ line so radical that one archimandrite, or high-ranking abbot, Tikhon, called it a ‘Bolshevik mouthpiece’. At one monastery there was ‘a little revolution’, wrote the British journalist Morgan Philips Price, where ‘monks had gone on strike and had turned out the abbot, who had gone off whining to the Holy Synod … They had already entered into an arrangement with the local peasantry. They were to keep enough land for themselves to work, and the rest was to go into the local commune.’

  Demonstrations voiced existential demands, even at the expense of income. ‘No tips taken here’, said the signs on restaurant walls. Petrograd waiters struck for dignity. They marched in their best clothes under banners denouncing the ‘indignity’ of tipping, the stench of noblesse oblige. They demanded ‘respect for waiters as human beings’.

  The government had equivocated over the issue of women’s suffrage. Many even in the revolutionary movement were hesitant, warning that, though they supported the equality of women ‘in principle’, concretely Russia’s women were politically ‘backward’, and their votes therefore risked hindering progress. On her return to the country on the 18th, Kollontai took those prejudices head-on.

  ‘But wasn’t it we women, with our grumbling about hunger, about the disorganisation in Russian life, about our poverty and the sufferings born of the war, who awakened a popular wrath?’ she demanded. The revolution, she pointed out, was born on International Women’s Day, ‘And didn’t we women go first out to the streets in order to struggle with our brothers for freedom, and even if necessary to die for it?’

  On 19 March, a major procession descended on the Tauride Palace demanding women’s right to vote – 40,000 demonstrators, mostly women, but including many men. ‘If the woman is a slave’, banners read, ‘there will be no freedom.’ Pro-war banners swayed above the marchers, too. This was a cross-class, broad-spectrum feminism, working women side by side with women in fine clothes; liberals and SRs and Mensheviks and Bolsheviks – though the latter, to Kollontai’s disappointment, had not prioritised the march. The weather was dreadful, but the marchers were not put off. They came to fill the long street before the palace. There Chkheidze tried to claim that he could not come out to meet them because he had lost his voice.

  They would not have it. He for the Soviet and Rodzianko for the Provisional Government had to bow to the movement. They launched a bill for universal women’s suffrage, to be passe
d in July.

  It was to the Soviet that the women marched – even those whose placards supported the war. The Soviet in which so many had vested their aspirations, despite its own ambivalence about power.

  It strove to rationalise its structures, without much success. At its largest, that month, it had 3,000 boisterous members – a tiny number from the left (forty Bolsheviks, for example). Every thousand workers voted for a delegate – and every company of soldiers, initially large reserve companies, but quickly extending to those much smaller, skewing the representation heavily in the soldiers’ favour. Ultimately 150,000 troops would have double the representation of 450,000 Petrograd workers. The soldiers’ delegates were predominantly SR followers and, though often radical on the war, tended to be much less so on other issues than their proletarian counterparts.

  One typical March day, the Petrograd general assembly discussed the following topics: a tsarist police plot against a union of Social Democrats; an anti-pogrom commission for the southern provinces; a call on Petrograd bakers not to interrupt work; a dispute over office space between two newspapers; taking over the Anichkov Palace; and posters explaining decisions of the central food committee. Then came some (intriguingly unspecified) negotiations with the Provisional Government; the idea of a soldiers’ newspaper; an obscure point about the Fortress of Peter and Paul; a quarrel between workers and soldiers over bread distribution; the reception of delegations, plus wives, from the various garrisons; and the American Embassy. The list is not exhaustive.