The Russian Revolution
of 1917 consisted of several interwoven chains of collapse. The two political eruptions—the February Revolution which overturned the tsarist monarchy and the second, October Revolution or coup which installed the Bolshevik dictatorship—were attended by upheavals reaching to the very depths of the Empire’s social, economic, and cultural foundations. They were also accompanied by an avalanche of national risings in each of the non-Russian countries which had been incorporated into the Empire, and which now took the chance to seize their independence.
The effects on the prosecution of the War were dramatic. In mid-February 1917 the last of the Romanovs still stood at the head of Europe’s largest war-machine. Within twelve months the Romanovs had been extinguished; their Empire had disintegrated into a score of self-ruling states; and the Bolshevik rulers of the central rump territory had pulled out of the war for good. Following an armistice agreed at Brest-Litovsk, all effective Russian participation in the war ceased from 6 December 1917. German policy, which had been supporting both the aspirations of the separatists and the machinations of the Bolsheviks, scored a triumph of unparalleled proportions.
The disintegration of the Russian Empire must be seen not simply as one of the effects of the Revolution but also as one of its causes. The Russian Tsar had been losing the allegiance of his non-Russian subjects long before the appearance of the Bolshevik dictatorship definitively confirmed their desire for a separate existence. When the Polish provinces were lost due to the German advance in 1915, the Empire’s leading Polish politician, Roman Dmowski, turned his back on Russia once and for all. Henceforth he was to work for Polish independence under the auspices of the Western Powers. A Polish National Committee was set up under his chairmanship in Paris in August 1916. In Lithuania, the
Taryba
or National
Council was set up under German auspices in September 1917. In Finland, an independent republic had to fight for its existence, with German help, from mid-1917 to May 1918. In Ukraine, the national movement came to the fore as soon as imperial power weakened. A Ukrainian Republic was formed in Kiev in November 1917. By the so-called ‘Bread Treaty’ of 9 February 1918, it was able to gain recognition from the Central Powers in return for grain contracts. In the Caucasus, the independent Transcaucasian Federation came into being at the same time.
Faced with this spontaneous wave of separatism, successive Russian governments in Petrograd had little choice but to bow before the storm. The Provisional Government declared itself to be in favour of the independence of the nationalities in April 1917. The Bolsheviks and others followed suit. In reality, despite the rhetoric, the Bolsheviks had no intention of conceding independence to the nationalities. As soon as they seized power in Petrograd, the chief Bolshevik commissar for the nationalities, an obscure Georgian revolutionary known as J. V. Stalin, began organizing branches of the Bolshevik Party in each of the emerging republics, fomenting trouble against each of the fledgeling national governments. Bolshevik policy aimed to restore the defunct Russian Empire in new communist guise. From the start, they sought to impose a centralized Party dictatorship behind a façade of cultural autonomy and nominal state structures. Here lay one of the principal sources of the so-called ‘Russian Civil War’ (see below).
The Revolution in Petrograd, therefore, was addressed to the central government of a state that was already in an advanced state of decomposition. The immediate cause lay in a crisis of management in the tsarist court. The Tsar himself was absent at the front, floundering in his ill-judged determination to conduct the war in person. The Duma was ignored; and the Tsar’s ministers were left at the mercy of a paranoiac ‘German’ Tsarina and her mountebank confidant, the so-called ‘mad monk’, Gregory Rasputin (1872–1916). When urgent wartime business regarding inflation, food shortages, and army supply was neglected, members of the innermost tsarist circle rebelled. Rasputin was murdered by Oxford-educated Prince Felix Yusupov, son of the richest woman in Russia and husband of the Tsar’s niece. In other circumstances, the event might have gone down in history as a petty court intrigue. As it was, it added the last ounce of accumulated resentment that broke the stays of the entire system. For beyond the confines of court politics lay tens of millions of the Tsar’s voiceless subjects— disaffected intellectuals, frustrated constitutionalists, confused bureaucrats, workers without rights, peasants without land, soldiers without hope either for life or for victory. The glittering shell of tsarism stayed upright till the last second, then fell like a house of cards.
The chain of events which led from Rasputin’s murder on 17 December 1916 to the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power ten months later was extremely tortuous and entirely unplanned. In late February the arctic winter, which had contributed to a breakdown of food supplies, changed suddenly to premature spring sunshine. Thousands of strikers and demonstrators poured on to the streets of Petrograd
calling for peace, bread, land, and freedom. On 26 February, on Znamensky Square, a company of the Imperial Guard fired the first fatal volley. The next day 160,000 peasant conscripts of the capital’s garrison mutinied and joined the rioters. The Tsar’s generals prevaricated. The Duma dared to appoint a Provisional Government without him, whilst representatives of various socialist factions convened the Petrograd Soviet or ‘Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’.
In this way there arose the
dvoyevlas’tye
or ‘Dual Power’, where the Duma had to compete with the Petrograd Soviet. Each side took momentous decisions. On 1 March the Soviet issued its unilateral Order No. 1, which called on every military unit to elect a soviet of its own. At a stroke, the authority of the officer corps was ruined throughout the Army. On 2 March the Provisional Government issued an 8-point programme calling for the installation of elected officials in local government and for the replacement of the state police by a people’s militia. At a stroke, the authority of the police and of local officialdom was undermined throughout Russia. The Russian Empire fell apart ‘by telegraph’. That night, Nicholas II abdicated.
For a time an uneasy alliance between the constitutional liberals within the Duma and the moderate socialists within the Soviet—mainly Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SR), both opposed to the Bolsheviks—kept the Dual Power on an even keel. Here the central figure was Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970), a socialist and a lawyer, who was a member both of the Provisional Government and of the Soviet. But their policy of continuing the war was highly unpopular. They only succeeded in stoking the climate of ceaseless discontent which was to prove so favourable to more radical elements. The Provisional Government declared its intention of calling universal elections for a Constituent Assembly, which could then put Russian democracy on to a permanent footing. This gave the Bolsheviks their timetable: to stand any chance of ruling Russia, they had to take control of the soviets and overthrow the Provisional Government before the Constituent Assembly could meet, [
FATIMA
]
Prior to Lenin’s return to Petrograd in April, the Bolsheviks played only a minor role in the revolutionary events. But a deteriorating situation in the spring and summer created a fertile environment for disciplined subversives. On three occasions, in April, in June, and in July, they tried to exploit their growing influence in the Petrograd garrison, seeking to transform street demonstrations into armed insurrections. On the last occasion, the Provisional Government actually ordered the Bolshevik leaders’ arrest on charges of high treason, having learned of their German contacts. Lenin was forced to take refuge in the countryside. In August and September, however, the Government was paralysed by its conflict with the army under General Lavr Kornilov. Kornilov’s abortive
putsch
gave Lenin the respite to plan a coup of his own.
When Lenin slipped back into Petrograd early in October, Kerensky’s government was isolated and thoroughly discredited. The army was disaffected; the soviets were divided. Bolshevik plans aimed to neutralize the main Petrograd Soviet by calling a parallel Congress of Soviets crammed with Bolshevik delegates
from the provinces. Simultaneously the Soviet’s key Military-Revolutionary Committee, now under Bolshevik control, was briefed to supply the necessary soldiers, sailors, and armed workers, for purposes which the Soviet itself had not approved. Trotsky took command, [
SOVKINO
]
FATIMA
O
N
3 May 1917, at the height of the First World War, Pope Benedict XV appealed to the Blessed Virgin Mary for a sign in the cause of peace. Ten days later, three illiterate children reported a vision of Our Lady outside the village of Fatima in Portugal. They heard her say that she was ‘the Lady of the Rosary’, that the advent of Antichrist was at hand, and that a chapel of prayer should be built on the site. Some time afterwards one of the children, Lucia dos Santos, revealed that the Virgin’s prophecy had referred to Russia:
‘I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart. If my requests are heard, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors through the entire world, provoking wars and persecution of the Church … But in the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.’
1
The Marian cult was often associated with anti-Communism, especially during the Spanish Civil War. In 1942 Pius XI initiated the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. On 13 May 1981 Pope John Paul II, who played a prominent personal role in the downfall of Communism, was struck down by a would-be assassin’s bullet in Rome. He prayed to Our Lady of the Rosary, recovered, and joined the pilgrimage to Fatima.
2
Practising Christians must still wrestle with the mysteries of prophecy. Visions of the Virgin, first recorded with that of Elizabeth of Schonau (1164), have persisted throughout modern times. They include La Salette (1846), Lourdes (1854), Pontmain (1871), Knock in Mayo (1879), Banneux in Belgium (1933), and Medjugorje in Bosnia (1981). The apparitions at Medjugorje, near Mostar, which continued to attract thousands, were not authenticated by the Catholic hierarchy. They were all the more disturbing for seemingly having occurred on the site of wartime massacres, foreshadowing the Bosnian horrors of 1992–3.
3
[
BERNADETTE
] [
MADONNA
]
On the night of 25 October the plan was activated. Bolshevik pickets surrounded all government buildings. There was no reaction. On the morning of the 26th, at 10 a.m., Lenin issued a press release:
To the Citizens of Russia
The Provisional Government has been deposed. Government authority has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet… the Military-Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison. The task for which the
people have been struggling has been assured—the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of the landed property of the landlords, worker control over production, and the creation of a Soviet Government. Long live the Revolution of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants!
6
SOVKINO
O
N
24 October 1917 the cinemas of St Petersburg were showing
The Silent Ornaments of Life—a
psychological drama centring on the complex relations of a Prince Obolensky with the gentle Claudia and the scheming Nelly. The very next day power was seized by the Bolsheviks. They had a very different, and very definite, view of cinematic art. ‘Of all the arts,’ wrote Lenin, ‘for us the cinema is the most important.’ Cinema was an instrument not to entertain but to propagandize the masses. In 1919, therefore, Lenin signed a decree transferring the photographic and cinematographic industry to the People’s Commissariat for Education. In due course a ‘Society of Friends of the Soviet Cinema’ was founded by none other than Felix Dzierzhynski, head of the political police.
1
Russian cinema had made its debut shortly after silent movies were launched by Louis Lumière in the Grand Café in Paris on 28 December 1895. There were Russian film directors, Russian newsreels, Russian film studios, and Russian film stars, such as the super-cool Vera Kholodnaya. The first Russian feature film was an historical drama, Drankov’s
Sten’ka Razin
(1908). After the February Revolution 1917 there was a brief flutter of sensational films about contemporary politics, such as
Grisha Rasputin’s Amorous Escapades
. Under the Bolsheviks, all such frivolity was to cease.
The Bolsheviks made no secret of their plans for turning cinema into an arm of the Party. In order to do so, they first had to destroy the existing institutions. In
Kino-Fot
(1922), the poet Mayakovsky wrote lines as if by order of the agitprop department:
For you, a cinema spectacle
For me, almost a
Weltanschauung
!
The cinema—purveyor of movement
The cinema—renewer of literature
The cinema—destroyer of aesthetics
The cinema—fearlessness
The cinema—a sportsman
The cinema—a sower of ideas.
But the cinema is sick. Capitalism has covered its eyes with gold …
Communism must rescue the cinema from speculators.
2
After years of chaos, the State Cinema Board, Sovkino, did not really begin to operate until the mid 1920s. Even then, it was not the expected success until subordinated to thoroughgoing Stalinist planning in the 1930s.
Much of Soviet cinema history was taken up either by socialist realism or by the heroics of the Second World War. But there were shafts of light amidst the gloom—one of them connected with the brilliant productions of ‘The Thaw’ in the 1960s, when Bondarchuk’s
War and Peace
or Kalatozov’s
The Cranes are Flying
were released, others with directors of genius, notably Eisenstein.
Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), son of the chief architect of Riga, belonged to that part of gilded Tsarist youth who threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks. Apart from his technical brilliance, he had a clear idea of his objectives, the most important of which was to convey the irresistible tide of history. He completed only six films; in every one, the human collective is to the fore.
In his first film,
Strike
(1925), Eisenstein portrayed the passion of a workforce as it awakes to its own sense of power. He also caricatured the bosses in the manner of ‘Krokodil’. In
Battleship Potemkin
(1926), which embellished a true incident from the 1905 Revolution, he concentrated on the emotions of the ship’s crew and the oppressions of the common people. The tableau of the Odessa Steps, where a regiment of Cossacks slaughter innocent protesters, must be one of the most famous set-pieces in cinema history. In
October
(1927) he celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup, once again by highlighting the role of the masses in such inspiring (but imaginary) scenes as the storming of the Winter Palace (see p. 920). In
Old and New
(1929) he examined the communal life of the peasantry.
When Eisenstein returned to Russia after several years abroad, he addressed more distant history. His
Alexander Nevsky
(1938) was a prophetic study of the coming conflict with Germany. The tableau of the medieval battle on the ice, where grotesque Teutonic Knights drown
en masse
from the weight of their own armour, was an uncanny allegory of Stalingrad, five years before the event. To have directed a film of
Ivan the Terrible
(1945) while Stalin was still alive and watching—he was an eager movie buff—was a measure of Eisenstein’s unrivalled standing.
Eisenstein’s films prove that great art is not incompatible with overt propaganda. Indeed, as with religious art, when the message is unambiguous, the audience can concentrate on the skill by which it is being conveyed. At the Brussels Film Festival of 1958,
Battleship Potemkin
was voted No. 1 on the list of the world’s twelve best films, [
POTEMKIN
]