Russian Revolution

E

The Final Crises of the Provisional Government

The Provisional Government, in chaos because of the collapse of the first coalition, and reeling from the failure of the Kerensky offensive, distracted attention from these disasters thanks to the July Days. Blaming the Bolsheviks for attempting a seizure of power, on July 25 the Provisional Government closed the party’s newspaper, Pravda (Truth), and outlawed its leaders, sending Lenin into hiding. A second Provisional Government coalition eventually formed under Kerensky as prime minister and war minister, on August 7 (it was to last to September 9). The government—again composed of Kadets and moderate socialists—sought allies on the right.

Kerensky had appointed General Lavr Kornilov supreme commander of the army before the formation of the second coalition and Kornilov quickly called for more authoritarian discipline at the front and in the rear. Kerensky hesitated, unwilling to offend Soviet leaders. At the Moscow State Conference, held on August 23-26 by the Provisional Government to rally support, affluent Russia’s representatives hailed Kornilov as a saviour who might overcome national disintegration by a military dictatorship.

During negotiations between Kerensky and Kornilov over the preservation of order in the capital, a misunderstanding between them in a teletype conversation erupted on September 9, cementing Kerensky’s mistrust of the general. Immediately, Kerensky announced the removal of Kornilov as commander-in-chief, and the outraged general ordered his troops to march on Petrograd. To defend the “revolution in danger” Kerensky turned to the Soviet and volunteer armed workers, the Red Guards. Railway workers halted Kornilov’s troops outside Petrograd, and agitators persuaded them to desert. By September 13 Kornilov’s coup attempt was over. Kerensky’s authority and that of the moderate socialists in his government was in tatters; the army endured further desertions and violence against all officers; and the radical socialists were now in the ascendant as defenders of the revolution.

Kerensky formed a “Directory” (September 14 to October 10) under intense pressure from the discredited Menshevik and SR Soviet leaders to call the Provisional Government to account for the Kornilov fiasco. Eventually, a third coalition of Kadets and moderate socialists emerged on October 10, only to be deposed on November 7 by the Bolsheviks. During its short life it tried to reconcile Kadets and moderate socialists in the so-called Pre-Parliament that opened on October 20.

However by now the Petrograd Soviet and many other local soviets around the country were dominated by radical, not moderate, socialists, with a majority of Bolsheviks, Left SRs, and radical Menshevik delegates. The Provisional Government’s partners in “dual power”, the mainstream Menshevik and SR leadership, lost command of the Soviet, and authority over troops in the capital. Moreover, Lenin was now campaigning aggressively within his own party for a seizure of power in the name of the Soviets.

V

The Bolshevik Seizure of Power

From Finland, still an outlaw, Lenin argued with more cautious Bolsheviks in Petrograd, including Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, that the time to take power was at hand. Many in the Party saw the forthcoming Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets as the best place to proclaim Soviet power, in the name of all the socialist parties. Disgusted with the record of the moderate socialists, Lenin scorned the idea of sharing power with them, but among rank and file Bolsheviks, among radicalized workers, and among the Left SRs (who soon separated from the PSR) the idea of socialist pluralism was attractive. Lenin returned to Petrograd on October 23, and persuaded Bolshevik leaders to back a seizure of power. Little planning took place in the following week, but thanks to the deferral of the opening of the Second Congress of Soviets to November 7, more time for preparation remained.

On November 2, Leon Trotsky, now chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, set up a Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet (MRC), and it began to assert its control over the city garrison and over the Red Guards, mobilizing units loyal to the Soviet and replacing moderate socialist commanders with radicals. In response, early in the morning of November 6, Kerensky denounced the MRC and sought to close newspapers and defend the Provisional Government in the Winter Palace by calling in loyal troops.

That day saw the Bolshevik-led MRC take key targets in Petrograd, and the seizure of the Winter Palace that was launched with a shot from the cruiser Aurora. Kerensky managed to escape before the government’s ministers were arrested. On November 7, Lenin and Trotsky announced the seizure of power to the Second Congress of Soviets; Mensheviks and SRs walked out rather than endorse the coup, leaving only the Bolsheviks and their allies, the Left SRs. The Congress passed decrees proclaiming Soviet power across all of Russia, calling for peace, land reform, and the self-determination of nations. It approved the formation of a new government, the Council of People’s Commissars, composed entirely of Bolshevik ministers, led by Lenin.

VI

Consolidating Soviet Power

An immediate attempt to overturn the Soviet government was made by moderate socialists united with Petrograd city councillors, who formed a Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and Revolution, and General Pyotr Krasnov, who led troops in a bid to re-take the capital for Kerensky. Bolshevik-led forces quickly defeated Krasnov’s assault, the Committee was crushed, and the Bolsheviks established their hold of Moscow by November 15. Negotiations with the socialist parties to enter a coalition in the Soviet government took place but moderate socialists effectively demanded a return to the Provisional Government, rejected by Lenin. Later, on December 25, hoping to restrain the excesses of the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs did accept a junior role in the Council of People’s Commissars, and they remained in the government until March 1918.

Lenin found it necessary to proceed with elections to the Constituent Assembly, which began on November 25. They produced a rout for the Bolsheviks who received only 25 per cent of the vote, while the peasant-oriented PSR got 38 per cent. When the Assembly was finally allowed to meet on January 18, 1918, Bolsheviks demanded endorsement of Soviet government measures; when this was rejected, they walked out. Soldiers sent the deputies away that night and a Soviet decree abolished the Assembly.

The Bolsheviks significantly strengthened their rule on December 20, 1917 by founding a new security police force, the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (called the Cheka after its Russian acronym), a forerunner of the KGB. Led by a Polish Bolshevik, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, it conducted terror against enemies of Soviet rule. Its brutal summary justice would lie beyond the scrutiny of courts or other bodies in the new government. By 1919 it had about 37,000 men under command, and it became a major instrument of Soviet authority during the Civil War (see also Red Terror).

The Soviet government negotiated an armistice with Germany and Austria-Hungary that began on December 15, 1917. Talks to end the war commenced, led by Trotsky as Soviet commissar of foreign affairs. When talks failed in February 1918, the Central Powers resumed fighting and rapidly took much of the western periphery of the old empire, including Ukraine. Alarmed Bolsheviks argued bitterly over whether to fight the invaders or sign a punitive peace treaty, as Lenin argued they should. In March 1918 they signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ceding enormous territory to Germany. The losses proved temporary when the Central Powers were defeated in November 1918. The peace satisfied popular anti-war feeling, and allowed the Bolsheviks to prepare for the coming Civil War by organizing the new Red Army.

VII

International Dimensions of the Russian Revolution

Before 1914 the RSDLP looked to Germany’s Social Democrats as the world socialist movement’s strongest party, and participated in the Second International, a union of socialist parties. When this International collapsed in 1914 with the outbreak of war, Lenin, Trotsky, and radical socialists of other nations insistently tried to organize a new International based on opposition to the war. Only after the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik victory did a Third, Communist, International arise in March 1919.

Before this, in April 1917 Lenin’s well-known anti-war stance made him an asset to Germany when its authorities let him return to Russia, but he was always a revolutionary acting according to his own impulses, and hardly the “German agent” that Kerensky’s post-July Days rhetoric claimed. Recently, historians have shown how many countries during World War I used propaganda, secret subsidies, and agents inside Russia in 1917 to foster or suppress anti-war sentiment. They had minimal influence on events. The tide of genuinely revolutionary feeling mobilizing Russia’s population in 1917 was too overwhelming to be the product of foreign spies or money.

Negotiations from November 1917 to February 1918 leading to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk were accompanied by direct Soviet appeals to the peoples of Germany and Austria-Hungary to rise up against capitalism and join the Soviet revolution. Fraternization between Russian and Central Power troops during these months bore some fruit: Soviet “self-determination of nations” appealed to the restive nationalities of the weak Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in early 1918, Vienna and its troops experienced mutinies inspired by the Russian Revolution. A short-lived Soviet republic in Hungary in 1919 supposedly heralded the coming world revolution. Yet spreading revolution to neighbouring countries proved harder than expected.

After the success of 1917, Bolsheviks believed that revolution was imminent in the more developed nations of Central and Western Europe. Russia was underdeveloped, and Marxists argued that its revolutionary leap into socialism would be premature without the assistance of a revolution in highly industrialized Germany. In 1920, during the Russian Civil War, Soviet forces invaded Poland in a fruitless bid to reach Germany and spread revolution (see Soviet (Russo)-Polish War). By 1921 it was obvious that world revolution was years away and the Soviet government largely turned its attention to consolidating its power at home.

VIII

Historians and the Russian Revolution

Historians have regarded the Russian Revolution of 1917 as the most momentous event of the 20th century, and they have disagreed violently about its interpretation. Political developments during the century significantly influenced the views of 1917 which emerged. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 significantly changed how historians see the events of 1917.

The Soviet view of 1917 presented it as the dawn of a new era in human history, the first chapter in the story of the triumph of socialism. In the official Soviet view that evolved under increasingly sinister political changes during the 1920s-1950s, scholarship and critical inquiry withered. The story of the Russian Revolution of 1917 became a fable in which Lenin and his far-sighted Bolsheviks overcame all obstacles, in particular the moderate socialists, (now designated enemies of the people), to win power for the proletariat. At the height of his power, the modest role of Joseph Stalin in the events of 1917 was exaggerated to make him appear as Lenin’s chief helpmate, while the role of Stalin’s arch-rival Trotsky was erased. After the death of Stalin, and the denunciation of his cult of personality, Soviet historians resumed scholarly inquiry about 1917, within carefully defined limits. The role of the Bolsheviks, the continued erasure of Trotsky, and the use of a mandatory Marxist-Leninist ideological framework, could not be questioned. Yet from the 1960s to the 1980s, Soviet historians conducted more detailed work about the social roots of revolution.

A related, but usually overlooked, perspective on 1917 was propagated by leftists in the democratic West who rejected the USSR’s claim to lead the world socialist movement. This view was sometimes called libertarian, after its leftist and anarchist origins. It celebrated the mass impulse to self-government in 1917. This impulse yielded the liberating experiments of factory and army committees, workers’ control of industry, the Red Guards, and peasant committees in rural Russia. In this interpretation Bolshevism was an elitist philosophy that ultimately built a bureaucracy to exploit workers and peasants. This view of 1917 had most influence among political activists of the New Left of the 1960s-1970s, and less impact on scholarly study or public opinion in the West. Soviet historians ignored it.

Western historians generally proposed a classically liberal view of the Revolution. The liberal view denied Marxist claims to know the laws of history, doubted the rigid division of humanity into classes acting in their own interests, and stressed the role of individuals and ideas in history. Liberal historians argued that the intentions and decisions of Nicholas II, Lenin, Kerensky, and other political actors were paramount in 1917. This view demoted social processes at work in 1917 to causes of the second rank; thus the revolution was ultimately a political event, the product of the tsar’s incompetence, the Provisional Government’s political inexperience, and the cunning of the Bolsheviks under Lenin. The undemocratic results of 1917 demonstrated Lenin’s ruthlessness, and the Stalinist and post-Stalin Soviet system with its disregard for liberty and humanity were the logical consequence of Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat. Many observers labelled this school of interpretation “totalitarian” for its emphasis on the totalitarian features of the Soviet system. This view of 1917 dominated public opinion in the Western world during the Cold War and framed most scholarly research until the 1960s, when improving access to Soviet archival sources inspired Western scholars to ask new questions about the revolution’s social origins.

Revisionist scholarship emerged during the 1960s-1980s, from this new focus on social history. When considering 1917, revisionists challenged the Soviet emphasis on Bolshevik leadership and the liberal claim that the key decisions were made by political actors at the summit of society. Detailed research on peasant action, on factory committees, on popular petitions and demonstrations, and other features of the revolution from below, was undertaken using gradually more accessible Soviet archives (although major restrictions remained until 1991). Revisionists also re-examined collections of revolutionary documents long held in Western libraries. They emphasized the importance of long-term social divisions in tsarist society, divisions that were crucial to understanding popular action in the revolutionary year. For this generation of social historians, 1917 was a genuinely popular revolution, but one that gave way to an authoritarian party that arrested, at tragic cost, the breakdown of the state.

Since 1991, with the death of the official Soviet view, and much freer access to Russia’s archives and libraries, research on the revolution has tended to deepen understanding of the profound social processes underlying 1917. At the same time, certain aspects of the story of individuals (Nicholas and Alexandra’s political naivety, Lenin’s cruelty) have found new confirmation in archival revelations. Previously understudied political actors (the Mensheviks, the PSR, the Provisional Government) have been re-examined in light of new sources, refreshing the political history of 1917 by restoring the diversity of voices heard in that year.

In Russia, academic and popular historians have embraced a sceptical anti-communist view of this history, and the social forces which late-Soviet historians had to present as signs of dawning socialism are now studied as symptoms of a national tragedy. In the West, the debates which raged during the 1980s in academic journals between advocates of the totalitarian school and the revisionists have cooled. Scholars have not reached a consensus about the significance of 1917, but the Cold War that shaped old historical views of the Russian Revolution has ended. In the 21st century, with Russia emerging as an energy superpower, the economic and international impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is likely to attract more new research.