Read A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium Online
Authors: Chris Harman
Tsarism had given the great landowners half the country’s land, and the old regime had used the full force of the state against any attempt to divide the large estates. The capitalist interests entrenched in the new government were just as hard-headed. Ministers might make speeches about eventual reform, but they insisted that the peasantry must wait in the meantime.
Their policies meant discontent would grow, with or without the Bolsheviks. No one had given the order for the February rising. In the same way, no one ordered the peasants to attack the houses of the great landowners and divide up the land throughout the summer. No one gave orders to the Finns, the Ukrainians, or the peoples of the Caucasus and the Baltic to demand states of their own. And no one told millions of peasants in uniform to desert the front. People who had seen protests topple a 500 year old monarchy did not need anyone to tell them they should try to solve other grievances, especially when many of them guns and had been trained to use them.
The provisional government fanned the flames itself. It showed its real ambition in June, when it tried to launch a military offensive into Austrian Silesia. Discontent soared in the armed forces, especially as Kerensky tried to reimpose tsarist discipline, including capital punishment. The offensive also added to the chaos in the economy. Prices had already almost quadrupled between 1914 and 1917. By October they had doubled again. Deliveries of food to the cities fell, and hunger grew. As right wing historian Norman Stone has pointed out:
Russia did not go Bolshevik because the masses were Bolshevik from the start of the revolution, or because of the machinations of soviet or Bolshevik leaders. She went Bolshevik because the old order collapsed more or less as Lenin—uniquely—had foretold. By the autumn the towns were starving and disease-ridden; stratospheric inflation deprived wage increases, indeed the whole economic life of the country, of any meaning; production of war goods fell back, so that the army could not fight, even if it wanted to. Mines, railways, factories seized up…Economic chaos drove Russia towards Bolshevism.
Bolshevism might have been avoided if there had been any alternative; but the collapse of capitalism was there for all to see.
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The parties and the revolution
The October Revolution was not simply a result of the mechanical development of inhuman forces, however. It depended on the mass of people—the workers, peasants and soldiers—acting in a certain way in response to these forces. It was here that Lenin and the Bolsheviks played a decisive role. Without them there would still have been strikes, protests, the seizure of factories by workers, peasant attacks on the property of landlords, mutinies, and revolts among non-Russian nationalities. But these would not automatically have fused into a single movement attempting a conscious transformation of society.
Instead, they might easily have turned in on one another, allowing unemployed workers, desperate soldiers and confused peasants to fall prey to waves of anti-Semitic and Russian nationalist agitation promoted by remnants of the old order. Under such circumstances, success would certainly have been possible for someone like General Kornilov, who attempted to march on Petrograd in August, to impose a military dictatorship. Capitalist democracy had no chance of survival in the Russia of 1917, but that did not rule out a starving, despairing population allowing a right wing dictatorship to build on their despair. As Trotsky once observed, the fascism born in Italy in 1922 could easily have been born under another name in Russia in late 1917 or 1918.
What made the difference was that a revolutionary socialist party had won the allegiance of a significant minority of Russia’s workers in the decade and a half before the revolution. Large factories had grown up in Petrograd and a few other cities, despite the backwardness of the country as whole. In 1914 half of Petrograd’s 250,000 industrial workers had jobs in enterprises of more than 500 workers, a higher proportion than in the advanced capitalisms of the West.
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They provided fertile ground for socialist propaganda and agitation from the 1890s onwards.
Lenin differed from most other socialist leaders of his generation (he was 47 at the time of the revolution) in his insistence that the aim of agitation should not be to win passive support for left wing intellectuals or organisations of a trade union sort, but to build a network of activists within the working class committed to an insurrection against tsarism. This led him to break with former colleagues such as Martov, Dan and Axelrod, despite apparent agreement on the bourgeois character of the expected revolution. The Bolsheviks were seen as the ‘harder’ of the two Marxist parties—more insistent on delineating the revolutionary party from the middle class intelligentsia or trade union functionaries, and on hammering out theoretical issues so as to arrive at a clarity of purpose. By the summer of 1914 the Bolsheviks were the larger party among Petrograd’s workers, producing a legal paper,
Pravda
, and winning most of the votes for the workers’ representatives in the Duma.
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The war made the differences between the parties even clearer. The Bolsheviks came out solidly against the war (although many would not go as far as backing Lenin’s ‘revolutionary defeatism’), and their Duma deputies were thrown into prison. Many Mensheviks supported the war, with a minority associated with Martov, the ‘Menshevik internationalists’, opposed to it but maintaining links with the majority.
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There was a third party, which was to have more influence among Petrograd’s workers and soldiers in the first months of 1917 than either the Bolsheviks or Mensheviks—the Social Revolutionaries. This was not a Marxist party, but came out of the Russian ‘populist’ tradition which stressed on the one hand the demands of the peasantry, and on the other the role of a heroic armed minority in stirring up revolutionary ferment by exemplary actions (for example by the assassination of unpopular police chiefs). Its best-known leaders tended to come from the middle class, and in 1917 they supported the war and the provisional government, failing even to implement their own programme of land reform. By the autumn, a number of lesser known leaders, the ‘Left Social Revolutionaries’, had split away under the impact of the rising discontent with the government.
The Social Revolutionaries had much greater strength than the Bolsheviks in the Petrograd soviet in February. The Bolsheviks had suffered disproportionately from tsarist repression, and many workers and soldiers did not see the relevance of old party distinctions in the new situation. But many individual Bolshevik workers played a notable part in the February uprising, and the party had a solid core of members in the factories and working class areas—100 members in the giant Putilov plant, 500 in the Vyborg industrial district, with 2,000 in the city as a whole at the beginning of March. It grew rapidly with the revolution, so that its membership in the city was 16,000 by late April.
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With a membership of around one worker in 30, Bolshevik agitation and propaganda reached into most sections of most factories in the city. By late May it could win 20 percent of the votes in the Petrograd local government elections (against 3.4 percent for the Mensheviks and around 50 percent for the Social Revolutionaries).
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The party’s members were confused by its support for the provisional government in February and March. The situation was only clarified when Lenin returned from exile in April. He could see that Russian capitalism could not solve any of the country’s problems, and that its policies were bound to worsen the conditions of workers, peasants and soldiers alike. He responded by developing an argument very close to that of Trotsky—one previously rejected by the ‘orthodox’ Bolsheviks. He pointed out that the working class had played the decisive role in overthrowing tsarism and, in the soviets, had created a far more democratic way of making decisions than any existing under bourgeois rule. The working class had the possibility of moving straight forward to impose policies in the interests of itself and the poorer peasants. But the precondition for this was that the soviets take full power, replacing the old army and police with a workers’ militia, nationalising the banks and giving land to the poorer peasants.
The Bolshevik Party did not operate as a dictatorship, and Lenin’s arguments were at first vehemently attacked by many of the old Bolsheviks in the city. But they found an immediate echo among members in industrial districts such as Vyborg. He articulated clearly what they already felt in a confused way. He did for the militant section of Russia’s workers what Tom Paine’s
Common Sense
did for people in the American colonies early in 1776, or what Marat’s
L’Ami du Peuple
had done for many Parisian
sans culottes
in 1792-93—providing a view of the world that made sense in a situation which contradicted all the old beliefs. He helped masses of people move from being angry victims of circumstance to active subjects of history.
It only took Lenin a couple of weeks to win over the bulk of the party. But it took rather longer to win over the mass of workers, let alone the soldiers and peasants. At first, he told party members, they had to ‘patiently explain’ the need to overthrow the provisional government and end the war. The Bolsheviks could not achieve these aims as a minority which had not yet won over the majority of workers. The behaviour of the provisional government and the spontaneous struggles of workers, peasants and soldiers would ensure that the ‘explaining’ was effective. The Bolshevik vote in municipal and parliamentary elections rose in Petrograd from 20 percent in May to 33 percent in August and 45 percent in November. In Moscow it rose from 11.5 percent in June to 51 percent in late September. At the first all-Russian soviet congress in early June, the Bolsheviks had 13 percent of delegates. At the second congress on 25 October, they had 53 percent—and another 21 percent went to the Left Social Revolutionaries allied to them.
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More was involved than persuading people to mark one set of names rather than another on an electoral slate. The Bolsheviks involved themselves in every workers’ struggle—to keep wages abreast with inflation, to fight deteriorating conditions, and to prevent managers shutting plants and causing economic chaos.
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They encouraged soldiers to challenge the power of their officers, and peasants to divide up the land. The Bolsheviks set out to prove to the exploited and oppressed that they themselves had the power and the ability to run society in their own interests through the soviets.
Every great revolution proceeds through downs as well as ups, through detours in which people risk losing sight of the process as a whole. Russia in 1917 was no exception. The behaviour of the provisional government and the generals led to an explosion of rage from the Petrograd workers and garrison in July, and there were spontaneous moves to overthrow the provisional government. But the Bolshevik leaders (including Trotsky, who had just joined the party) rightly calculated that a seizure of power in Petrograd would gain little support elsewhere at this point, and that the forces of reaction would use this as an excuse to isolate and then destroy the revolutionary movement in the city. They had, somehow, to restrain the movement while showing clear solidarity with it.
The outcome did not immediately seem positive. Bolshevik restraint of the movement led to a certain demoralisation among the revolutionary workers and soldiers, while Bolshevik solidarity with it led the provisional government to arrest many leaders and force others, notably Lenin, into hiding. By clamping down on the movement, the provisional government opened the door to forces which wanted to destroy every symbol of the revolution, including the provisional government itself, and General Kornilov attempted to march on the city. The final step towards the Bolshevik conquest of power for the soviet system consisted, paradoxically, in organising the revolutionary defence of the city against the attempted coup alongside supporters of the provisional government—but in such a way as to undermine any last lingering respect for that government.
Even then, the establishment of soviet power on 25 October was not a foregone conclusion. It was clear that a majority of the all-Russian congress of soviets which convened on that day would back the takeover of power. But leading Bolsheviks such as Zinoviev and Kamenev were opposed, arguing instead for discussions with the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary leaders. By contrast, Lenin and Trotsky were convinced it would be fatal to delay. The mass of people had gained confidence that they could change things, overcoming habits of deference and obedience inculcated by thousands of years of class rule. For the party to delay any further would be to declare it did not share that confidence and, in the process, help destroy it. The economic crisis was deepening by the day, and threatening to transform hope into demoralisation and despair. If this was allowed to happen, the peasants, soldiers and some workers might be attracted to the banner of a military adventurer.
October 1917
The October Revolution in Petrograd was very different in one respect from the February Revolution in the same city—it was much more peaceful. There was less shooting and less chaos. This has led some right wing historians to describe it as a ‘coup’, a minority action carried through by the Bolshevik leaders over the heads of the masses. In fact it was orderly and peaceful precisely because it was not a coup. It was not an action taken by a few figures from above, but by the mass of people organised through structures which expressed their own deepest aspirations. The Bolshevik-led Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd soviet could take decisions which masses of workers and soldiers would obey, because it was part of a soviet which they had elected and whose members they could replace. This gave it an authority the provisional government lacked, and led all but a handful of troops in the city to follow its commands, leaving Kerensky and his ministers little choice but to flee.