14 Revolution in Russia:

Questions about the role of impersonal forces in the Russian Revolution are similar to those about World War I.

The Bolshevik stage was shaped by powerful impersonal forces but also affected by the actions of individuals, in this case two particularly striking ones: Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

There were differing opinions about whether Marx would have welcomed or rejected the Bolshevik Revolution.

It has been an errand that many left-wing intellectuals have taken up, trying to reconcile the nuances of Leninist theory with the realities of Bolshevik practice from 1917 to 1922.

Both Marxists and anti-Marxists agreed that the Bolshevik Revolution was not a proletarian revolution.

Such a revolution was considered undesirable by the antiMarxists.

Some worrisome elements were seen by Marxists.

They expected a Marxist revolution in western Europe.

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The Bolsheviks were isolated in Russia.

Expectations of that sort became important to the justification of taking power.

Despite rapid economic advances before 1914, Russia was the least industrialized of Europe's major powers.

Russia lacked in Marxist terms the "objective conditions" for a proletarian-socialist revolution.
The conditions included a proletarian majority, abundant modern industrial enterprises, and high levels of productivity.
The next stage of development in Russia would be set up by the preliminary bourgeois revolution, which would lead to the rapid advancement of capitalism.

Reliable information about conditions in Russia in early 1917 was not available in western Europe until late 1920.

The rule of the Bolsheviks remained a source of confusion and misconception after that date.
The debate contributed to the split of Europe's prewar socialist parties into hostile Communist and democratic socialist groups.

Russia was entering a stage of development that would require several generations before it could be considered a socialist revolution.

The Bolsheviks came to power in nine months.

The answers to these questions were offered by the Bolsheviks, but they seemed to twist Marxist theory into oddly contorted forms.

During the war, Nicholas II's personal inadequacies became all the more painfully apparent.

His popularity plummeted after Russia was humiliated in its war with Japan.
Nicholas and his wife found out that their only son, Alexei, was afflicted with a rare disease that prevented adequate clotting of the blood after an injury.

The court of the tsar was surrounded by ladies.

They turned to faith-healers and quacks, finding a Russian holy man who was able to stop the bleeding.

He was known for his coarse, drunken behavior at social gatherings and his sexual exploits with ladies of the court.

Conservative monarchists were alarmed by the fact that a man of Rasputin's background could rise to such heights.
At a time when workers' strikes and other signs of civil unrest had reached crisis levels, a group of nobles murdered Rasputin on December 16, 1916.
Nicholas abdicated and a government took over by mid-March.
It was originally composed of figures from the prewar duma.
They were moderate and liberal minded men, representing the hope that Russia could break away from its autocratic past and follow western- European models of parliamentary rule.
These well-dressed men were seen as bourgeois and comfortable, which made them believe that a revolution was underway in Russia.
After two and half years of disastrous warfare, they were elected to the duma by a small part of the population.
The members of the government promised that democratic elections would be held as soon as possible.

The elections were finally held in the autumn of 1917.

Alexander Kerensky was added to the ranks of the government in the interval.

More plausible claims to represent all of Russia, especially the lower orders and the men in uniform, were being put forward by organizations that had already played a role in the 1905 revolution.

Kerensky was from the upper-middle class.
He was a member of the small Trudovik Party, socialist but non-Marxist and less inclined to violence than the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which emerged in the course of 1917 as the most violent party in the world.

There were many parties in the soviets.

For most sol diers, workers, and peasants the subtle ideological distinctions that were of such intense concern to the revolutionary intellectuals meant little compared to concrete, pressing issues (working conditions and distribution of food, allocation of lands, an end to the war).
There was a constant turnover of those elected to these bodies and the soviets votes shifted erratically because of this.
There was a tendency for a small number of relatively educated young men to rise to leadership positions in the soviets.
Most peasants, workers, and soldiers couldn't make effective speeches or write party manifestos, but that was not the case with those who could.

The soviets spread quickly in the early spring of 1917 because of the precedent of 1905.

Most soviets registered socialist majorities after only one socialist was in the initial government.

The soviets were hesitant to claim direct governmental authority because they were afraid that the army generals would stage a military takeover.

Initially, they acted more as monitors of the Government than as confident or assertive leaders.
The soviets were so unpredictable that there was a further problem.
Their meetings were often chaotic and their procedures were constantly changing.

The soviet delegates were elected in a way that benefited the urban working class and the rural peasantry.

The French Revolution had a third power, the seething urban mobs, that constantly pressured the soviet delegates.

It is difficult to believe that any form of government could have responded adequately to the intransigent demands of the Russian Empire at this time.
The angry genie of revolution would not be easily calmed.
The authority of military officers over their men had often vanished by the summer months as authorities were everywhere being challenged.
Workers were taking over factories.
Peasants were taking over large landholders and soldiers were rushing home from the front to get their share.
National minorities wanted independence.
The opening stages of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 were going to solve everything.

The revolution contributed to a breakdown of social discipline and economic productivity.

Mass starvation was threatened by the drop in food deliveries from the countryside to the cities.
The Provisional Government was ill-equipped to satisfy mounting pressure from all sides, who were trying to prevent chaos and preserve Russia's credibility with its war-time allies.

A shake-up in May 1917 resulted in the addition of three more socialists and Kerensky taking over the leadership of the government.

Adding more socialists in subsequent months didn't make a difference because it was too late.
The most divisive decision of the government was to continue the war.
The new offensive against the Austro-Hungarian army in Galicia fell apart after stalling.
Most of the Russian army could no longer be considered a reliable fighting force because the military front had ceased to exist.

Those who hoped that the revolution could be kept within moderate bounds thought that Kerensky was the man of the hour.

He was praised for his oratory, but he lacked the decisiveness, astuteness, and ruthlessness of his Bolshevik enemies.
The July Uprising in Petrograd was largely driven by the Petrograd mob and was blamed on the Bolsheviks.
Even if they had exploited the popular resentments that produced it, the Bolsheviks did not plan it or control it.
The Bolshevik Party's leaders reluctantly identified themselves with the uprising in order to be wrong on the side of the revolutionaries.

Kerensky ordered the arrest of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party because he believed they were the instigators of the revolt.

Many Bolshevik leaders were captured and thrown into jail after they escaped in disguise.
200 rebels were killed in street battles.
The conclusion was that the revolutionaries had overplayed their hand and had been crushed.

That was not the correct conclusion.

At the time of his return from exile in Switzerland to Petrograd in April 1917, his popular following was small and his party in disarray, but the drama and significance of his return was embellished in Bolshevik propaganda.

His most loyal lieutenants were confused by his April Theses, which called for a soviet-led government.

It's not easy to describe the evolution of Lenin's ideas at this time because he so often changed position, yet he came to be accepted by millions throughout the world as the mostEminent theorist of Marxism, and the revolution he and his party made came to rank as the model for Few at the time understood either his theory or his action, and to this day scholars debate both, although most agree that Lenin and his lieutenants were playing it by ear, so to speak, divided in opinion and not really sure where they were headed.

The Marxist position that Russia must pass through a stage of capitalism, but his evolving conception of the nature of that bourgeois stage came close to denying its necessity - or to shortening its duration so much that it had little significance.

The native bourgeois class in Russia was weak and obsequious, so any bourgeois revolution would tend to slide back in reactionary directions.

The question of whether the allied proletariat and peasantry could give up political power to their class enemy was important.

Many true believers in the Bolsheviks were confident that they were acting in the long-term interests of the people.

There is little doubt that many prominent Bolsheviks were driven by a hunger for power or corrupted by the realities of exercising and retaining it.

By the autumn of 1917, political power in Russia had become more accessible as a result of how and why the Bolsheviks were able to take power.

Political authority has become weakened and dispersed so much that formal claims to control the existing organs of central political power have little meaning.

The events of an unpredictable nature and unexpected consequences were played into the hands of the Bolsheviks.

Kerensky's plan to collaborate with the generals in establishing a military dictatorship that would destroy the soviets and reestablish firm authority in Russia gave rise to fears that he wanted to be the Napoleon of the revolution.

Kerensky was worried that the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, General Lavr Kornilov, had a plan to get rid of him.

Kerensky turned for support back to the revolutionary leaders who he had only recently jailed.

The threat of a military takeover, and the refusal of railway workers to transport the troops to the capital, became known as the Kornilov Affair.

The workers and soldiers in Petrograd and Moscow were the most important group in the victory of the Bolshevik Party.
The opportunity to seize power immediately should not be lost, as was argued by Lenin, who urged his fellow party leaders to do so.
It might never happen again.

The other main parties had proved their limitations in dealing with the challenges of the revolution, even though their relationship to Marxist theory was murky.

The time had come for the Bolshevik Party to show what it could do.

The proletarian-socialist revolution in Russia could be expected to connect with the proletarian-socialist revolution in western Europe.

Russia's role was to give the necessary spark to the so-far insufficiently bold proletariat of the west.
Russia was the weakest link of capitalism and breaking that link would lead to a new era of revolutions in Europe and the world.

It was an exciting vision, but it involved a wild gamble, so much so that a number of leading Bolsheviks resisted Lenin's urgings to take power in Russia before proletarian revolution in western Europe had actually appeared.

They argued that the revolution was too small.
Since it seemed to recognize the right of the peasants to establish private plots of land formerly owned by the large landowners, granting land to the peasants had to be counted as dangerously catering to "bourgeois" demands.
The transfer of land to millions of private owners could be described as revolutionary, but it wouldn't be a good basis for a socialist revolution.
The establishment of a politically conservative countryside in France was the result of giving land to the peasants after the events of 1789.

The narodniks had long maintained that Russia's peasants were different from those in western Europe, and at this point peasants were voting in great numbers for the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

Worker control of factories, nationalization of the mineral wealth of the country, and other socialist measures were approved by the Bolsheviks.
The soviet rule was called socialistic in tendency since there was a socialist majority in most of the soviets by late 1917.

It was tempting to conclude that the part of the program that was bourgeois was the most significant since the peasants constituted the majority of the country.

The more industrially developed sectors of the Russian economy, where proletarian numbers had been highest, had shrunk dramatically in the chaos of the period, making this conclusion all the more tempting.
After late 1917, a mass exodus from the urban areas to the countryside began.

The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks on November 6-7 was relatively easy, even though it was confusing.

Kerensky didn't have enough support to offer effective resistance to the Bolsheviks.
The soldiers of the Petrograd garrison gave weapons to his enemies after he tried to send them to the front.
The key locations in the city were quickly secured by the Bolshevik-led forces.

The head of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, a body that had been established in anticipation of the move on the capital, was used by Trotsky to manage the takeover.

Kerensky tried to resist but was forced to flee.
He tried to organize forces outside the capital, but they were not willing to join him.
After escaping to western Europe in 1918, he spent the rest of his life in the United States.

The second general congress of the soviets was to be held at the same time as the takeover.

The congress members gave their approval to the destruction of the government.
The soviets were directly responsible to the Council of People's Commissars.
The head of the organization was Lenin and the minister of foreign affairs was Trotsky.

The soviets assumed all power.

The leaders of the soviets were not in charge of the new executive body of the soviet government, but members of the Bolshevik Party were.
Another important point was laid out.
The second congress of the Bolshevik Party was not a good one.
Most of the delegates were ready to vote for a transfer of power from the government to the soviets, but not necessarily to approve the initiatives taken by the Bolshevik Party in violently driving Kerensky from power.
The delegates to the soviet congress bitterly criticized the Bolsheviks for what they termed a coup d'etat.
Some Bolsheviks initially preferred to see a broad socialist coalition.

There was no effective opposition to the monopoly.

The word went out to the rest of the country and the world that the Soviets had taken over from the Provisional Government.

Russia would be ruled by the Bolshevik Party for most of the twentieth century.
It was always through the soviets in a purely formal sense, but it became involved in manipulating the votes to the soviets and following the principles of one-party rule.

There was a strong competing claim to speak for all of Russia after the elections to the Constituent Assembly.

All parties, including the Bolshevik Party, had expressed their support for the elections, which were initiated in the spring.

Given the size of the country and the turmoil that prevailed in many areas in 1917, holding such elections was an ambitious project, but one that by most accounts was successful in the sense that a large part of the population of the Russian empire actually participated in it.

Universal speach, male and female over the age of twenty, with a special category of eighteen years of age for members of the military, was the basis for the elections to the Constituent Assembly.

The Socialist Revolutionaries won 40 percent of the vote, while the Bolsheviks won 25 percent.

The Bolsheviks were not as disappointed by this quarter of the vote as one might think, since they still registered impressive majorities among the urban workers and soldiers, two elements of the population that were relatively cohesive and thus more easily mobilized than the peasants.

On January 5, 1918, the Constituent Assembly refused to accept the legitimacy of rule by the Council of People's Commissars.

It was denounced by Lenin as a counterrevolutionary body and he took measures to prevent it from meeting again.
The general population's apathy towards the dispersal of the Assembly reinforced the confidence of the Bolsheviks.
Most of the leaders of the other socialist parties refused to be associated with armed opposition to Bolshevik rule.

There were many reasons for the weak opposition to the Bolsheviks.

Left-wing leaders were worried that civil war would result in the victory of reactionary forces.

The other socialist parties were bitterly divided about appropriate action.
Most believed that the strong working-class support for Bolshevik rule made it a fundamental step forward to be defended as "progressive" if also criticized as illegitimate.
The divisions and the willingness to resort to violent resistance to what was viewed as a new workers' state may finally be considered more significant to the initial Bolshevik success than its discipline and ruthlessness.

The formal victory of the Bolsheviks in the autumn and early winter of 1917-18 did not mean that they had established effective rule over the former tsarist empire.

They didn't control the soviets in many parts of the country.
The leaders of the political right and center in Russia thought that the chaos of 1917 had caused criminal elements to take up the reins of state power.
The leaders of France, Britain, and the United States thought that the Bolsheviks were incapable of ruling Russia for very long.

Most of Europe's leaders were alarmed and embarrassed when the tsarist government published the secret treaties it had made with Europe's warring governments.

Military leaders in Germany were not interested in peace without annexations because they held so much territory.

The collapse of Russia's military forces made the Bolsheviks powerless to negotiate peace terms with the Germans.
The peace agreement signed by the Bolsheviks in March of 1918 resulted in huge losses in Poland, the Ukraine, and the territories of the Baltic region.

The United States, Britain, and France began giving support to the anti-Bolshe vik armies that were forming on the fringes of the areas under Bolshevik control.

There were assassination attempts on the Bolsheviks before the armies began to march.

On January 1, 1918, an assassin's bullet narrowly missed Lenin, wounding a companion near him.
Nine months later, after delivering a speech that ended with the words "with us there is only one way, victory or death," Lenin was gravely wounded by a young woman, Fania Kaplan, who had previously been associated with the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
On the same day, another prominent Bolshevik, Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky, was assassinated by a young revolutionary who was previously associated with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

The Cheka was the secret police in Petrograd.

Kannegiesser and Kaplan were both Jewish.
The establishment of the Cheka was a major step by the Bolsheviks in the direction of exercising power with force, as they were concerned about the breakdown of central rule throughout the country.

In the month of January 1918, the Red Army was established with the aim of being able to exercise power.

The term "terrorist" was associated with European revolu tionary traditions dating back to Robespierre's terror of 1793-4.

The association with "Red Terror" was accepted by the Bolsheviks as necessary to defend the workers' state against the counterrevolutionaries.
Robespierre's terror lasted about a year and killed a few thousand, but the Red Terror developed into something far more ruthless, pervasive, and long- lasting, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the torture and imprisonment of many more.

The "land" and "peace" elements of the 1917 slogan were dealt with by the Bolsheviks as they began to impose their will with ruthless violence.

The new rulers of Russia wanted to equalize the allocation of goods and regulate the distribution of food.
Under War Communism, getting food for the cities involved sending out armed units of workers to force peasants to give up what they had stored.

War between the city and country was the result of brutal class conflict.

Some peasants were willing to cooperate with War Communism because they were afraid that the enemies of the Bolsheviks would reverse the land seizures that the new regime had recognized.
There was a lot of uncertainty and confusion, as the civil war drew in an array of mutually hostile groups, often mixing in the hopes of non-Russian nationalities to become independent of the new Soviet regime.

There was stomach-turning cruelty on all sides.

Many foreign observers doubted that the Red Army could survive a civil war in which the White armies were attacking from all directions with support from the western powers.

The Red Army survived and prevailed.
It is more impressive and decisive than the assumption of formal state power in November 1917.
There were many reasons for this turn of events.
The lack of coordination and mutual hostilities of the anti-Bolshevik armies was the most important.
With no military background, Trotsky gave inspiration to the Red Army, while its soldiers fought with determination.
The Red Army was weak and relatively strong.

Even if deceptive promises and the ruthless application of terror were essential to the takeover and continued rule of the Bolsheviks, their ultimate success in retaining power is difficult to explain without recognizing the support they enjoyed from significant parts of the population.

By late 1920 and early 1921, the Bolsheviks realized that their working-class support was faltering and that peasant acquiescence was turning into active opposition.
Following strikes in Petrograd, the Kronstadt naval garrison rose in revolt, accusing the Bolsheviks of betraying the promises of the November Revolution.
The rebels called for soviet rule.

The Red Army was dispatched to crush the rebellion by the sailors at Kronstadt.

There was a bloodbath.
The crisis was over, but the days of Bolshevik rule were numbered unless concessions were made.
The New Economic Policy, or NEP, replaced War Communism in 1921 and involved a partial return to market principles.
Peasants were allowed to sell some of their produce on the open market after they were forced to turn over their crops.
Although the state retained the "commanding heights" of the economy, small-scale urban businessmen were allowed to sell for profit.

War Communism and the hopes for revolution in the west were abandoned in early 1921.

The Bolsheviks did not have reliable information about the conditions in Europe.
The situation in Germany by the late summer of 1918 seemed to be the most promising to the Bolsheviks and, from a Marxist perspective, it was the most important because of Germany's high level of industrialization.
The German Council of People's Commissars resembled the Bolsheviks only in name.
It had not taken power from Prince Max but rather accepted it from him, which is a crucial point in terms of claims to legitimacy.
Until regular elections could be held, it had been formed as a temporary government.
The leader of the German Council, Friedrich Ebert, was a member of the antirevolutionary branch of the SPD.
He was not a fan of the Russian model and the only way to get long-term legitimacy was to have westernstyle elections.

Ebert was determined to prevent a repetition in Germany of the events in Russia, and instead of backing away from a military alliance, Ebert accepted offers of support from the German military to help crush the German revolutionary left.

The left did not have a unified leadership or an agreed-upon revolutionary doctrine.
Many people talked vaguely of doing as they had done in Russia.

The path of the German revolution was different from that of the Bolsheviks.

The German path reflected not only decisions by leaders but also deeper realities, as the German military was less weakened and discredited than its Russian counterpart.
The German general staff would remain an independent power well into the Nazi period.
The German state bureaucracy did not fall as the tsarist bureaucracy did, nor did Germany's major political parties suffer the same fate.
The Germans understood that the Americans would be hostile to a Communist Germany because of their abundant food supplies.
The idea of copying or even allying with Soviet Russia at this point seemed suicidal to many Germans.

The collapse of Austria-Hungary opened the way for a Bolshevik-style revolution, but most of the new regimes, or successor states, set up at the end of the war were anti-Communist.

As the Red Army entered Polish territory in 1920, the Polish people failed to rise up to welcome it.
The Red Army was driven back beyond prewar borders by a Polish counteroffensive.
The soviet regime that came to power in Hungary in 1919 was similar to the Russian model in that the Hungarian Communists came to power because their opponents were weak.
Anti-Communist forces destroyed the Soviet Republic of Hungary.
There was a brief Communist takeover in the former kingdom of Bavaria, but it was easily defeated.
It was noted that most of the Communist leaders in Hungary and Bavaria were Jews.

At this time, Hitler began his political career.

With victory in World War I, British and French leaders faced their own left wing parties from a position of relative strength.

The left in western Europe was larger and more angry than before 1914, but the proponents of violent revolution remained disorganized.
Most of the general population in Britain and France opposed a proletarian dictatorship.
Many voted for candidates from anti-Communist and ultra-nationalistic parties.
The people in France were very angry.
Posters depicting a hairy, Jewish-looking revolutionary with a bloody knife between his teeth appeared throughout France, warning of the horrors that were to come.
The Socialist Party was defeated in the elections.

The results of the efforts to establish Communist parties in western Europe based on Bolshevik principles were not very good.

The Comintern was founded by the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1920 and held a congress of aspiring revolutionaries in Moscow.
The Red Army appeared to be marching into Poland.

The Comintern oversaw the creation of Communist parties in all European countries, but the newly formed Communist parties failed to make a revolution, and the Poles defeated the Red Army.

By early 1921, as Soviet Russia moved toward the New Economic Policy, western Communist parties tended to lapse into the position of waiting for the next revolutionary wave.
They were assured by their Marxist convictions that new revolutionary conditions would appear.

European Marxism and Russian Bolshevism are considered to be historic failures from the perspective of the early twenty-first century.

After the fall of the Soviet empire at the century's end, that judgment was not widely accepted.
To describe the November Revolution and Bolshevik rule in the 1920s and 1930s as successful is problematic.
The soviet regime became a symbol of future possibilities.
Even within the Communist movement, the promise or deeper meaning of the Bolshevik Revolution was highly disputed.

Russia was poorer in 1921 than it had been during the war.

There were 20 million people who lived within the confines of the former Russian empire who had died and millions more who had suffered terrible tragedies.
The industrial growth that had seemed so promising from 1890 to 1914 had been wiped out, and the former Russian Empire had dropped from being a great power to what could be described as a highly vulnerable peasant republic.

The peasant majority in Russia was ruled by a dictatorship of the proletarian minority of the party that claimed to speak for the workers.

"democratic centralism" came to mean rule from the top by an entrenched party elite, all of whom had come to rely on Lenin to assure party unity and coherence.

The re-introduction of a kind of capitalism to Russia was overseen by this alleged party.

Without the spread of proletarian revolution to the advanced economies of the west, the precarious, contradictory Bolshevik regime seemed destined to fail.

It is filled with fascinating detail and is vividly written.