The Russian Revolution (9 page)

The Soviet democracy had to entrust the power to the propertied elements, its class enemy, without whose participation it could not now master the technique of administration in the desperate conditions of disintegration, nor deal with the forces of Tsarism and the bourgeoisie, united against it. But the condition of this transfer had to assure the democracy of a complete victory over the class enemy in the near future.7

But the workers, soldiers, and sailors who made up the Soviet's rank and file were not so cautious. On i March, before the formal establishment of the Provisional Government or the emergence of `responsible leadership' in the Soviet, the notorious Order No. i was issued in the name of the Petrograd Soviet. Order No. i was a revolutionary document and an assertion of the Soviet's power. It called for democratization of the Army by the creation of elected soldiers' committees, reduction of officers' disciplinary powers, and, most importantly, recognition of the Soviet's authority on all policy questions involving the armed forces: it stated that no governmental order to the Army was to be considered valid without the counter-signature of the Soviet. While Order No. i did not actually mandate the holding of elections to confirm officers in their positions, such elections were in fact being organized in the more unruly units; and there were reports that hundreds of naval officers had been arrested or killed by the sailors of Kronstadt and the Baltic Fleet during the February Days. Order No. i therefore had strong overtones of class war, and totally failed to offer reassurance about the prospects for class cooperation. It presaged the most unworkable form of dual power, that is, a situation in which the enlisted men in the armed forces recognized only the authority of the Petrograd Soviet, while the officer corps recognized only the authority of the Provisional Government.

The Executive Committee of the Soviet did its best to retreat from the radical position implied by Order No. i. But in April Sukhanov commented on the `isolation from the masses' produced by the Executive Committee's de facto alliance with the Provisional Government. It was, of course, only a partial alliance. There were recurrent conflicts between the Soviet Executive Committee and the Provisional Government on labour policy and the problem of peasant land claims. There were also important disagreements about Russia's participation in the European war. The Provisional Government remained firmly committed to the war effort; and Foreign Minister Milyukov's Note of 18 April even implied a continued interest in extending Russian control over Constantinople and the Straits (as agreed in the Secret Treaties signed by the Tsarist government and the Allies), before a public outcry and renewed street demonstrations forced him to resign. The Soviet Executive Committee took the `defensist' position, favouring continuation of the war as long as Russian territory was under attack but opposing annexationist war aims and the Secret Treaties. But on the floor of the Soviet-and in the streets, the factories, and especially the garrisons-the attitude to the war tended to be simpler and more drastic: stop fighting, pull out of the war, bring the troops home.

The relationship that developed between the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee and the Provisional Government in the spring and summer of 1917 was intense, intimate, and quarrelsome. The Executive Committee guarded its separate identity jealously, but ultimately the two institutions were too closely bound to be indifferent to each other's fate, or to dissociate themselves in the event of disaster. The link was strengthened in May, when the Provisional Government ceased to be a liberal preserve and became a coalition of liberals and socialists, drawing in representatives of the major socialist parties (Mensheviks and SRs) whose influence was predominant in the Soviet Executive Committee. The socialists were not eager to enter the government, but concluded that it was their duty to strengthen a tottering regime at a time of national crisis. They continued to regard the Soviet as their more natural sphere of political action, especially when it became clear that the new socialist Ministers of Agriculture and Labour would be unable to implement their policies because of liberal opposition. Nevertheless, a symbolic choice had been made: in associating themselves more closely with the Provisional Government, the `responsible' socialists were separating themselves (and, by extension, the Soviet Executive Committee) from the `irresponsible' popular revolution.

Popular hostility to the `bourgeois' Provisional Government mounted in the late spring, as war weariness increased and the economic situation in the towns deteriorated.' During the street demonstrations that occurred in July (the July Days), demonstrators carried banners calling for `All power to the soviets', which in effect meant the removal of power from the Provisional Government. Paradoxically-though logically in terms of its commitment to the Government-the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet rejected the slogan of `All power to the soviets'; and in fact the demonstration was directed as much against the existing Soviet leadership as against the Government itself. `Take power, you son of a bitch, when it's given you!' shouted one demonstrator, shaking his fist at a socialist politician.' But this was an appeal (or perhaps a threat?) to which those who had pledged themselves to `dual power' could not respond.

The Bolsheviks

At the time of the February Revolution, virtually all leading Bolsheviks were in emigration abroad or in exile in remote regions of the Russian Empire, arrested en masse after the outbreak of war because the Bolsheviks not only opposed Russia's participation but also argued that a Russian defeat would be in the interests of the revolution. The Bolshevik leaders who had been exiled in Siberia, including Stalin and Molotov, were among the first to return to the capitals. But those in emigration in Europe found it much more difficult to return, for the simple reason that Europe was at war. To return via the Baltic was dangerous and required Allied cooperation, while the land routes ran across enemy territory. Nevertheless, Lenin and other members of the emigre community in neutral Switzerland were very anxious to return; and, after negotiations conducted by intermediaries, the German government offered them the chance to cross Germany by sealed train. It was clearly in Germany's interest to let Russian revolutionaries opposed to the war return to Russia, but the revolutionaries themselves had to weigh the desirability of returning against the risk of compromising themselves politically. Lenin, together with a small contingent of mainly Bolshevik emigres, decided to take the risk, and set off towards the end of March. (A much larger group of Russian revolutionaries in Switzerland, including almost all the Mensheviks, decided that it was more prudent to wait-a shrewd move, since they avoided all the controversy and accusations that Lenin's trip provoked. This group followed in a second sealed train, by similar arrangement with the Germans, a month later.)

Before Lenin's return to Petrograd early in April, the former Siberian exiles had already begun to rebuild the Bolshevik organization and publish a newspaper. At this point the Bolsheviks, like other socialist groups, showed signs of drifting into the loose coalition around the Petrograd Soviet. But the Menshevik and SR leaders of the Soviet had not forgotten what a troublemaker Lenin could be, and awaited his arrival with apprehension. It turned out to be justified. On 3 April, when Lenin stepped off the train at the Finland Station in Petrograd, he responded curtly to the Soviet's welcoming committee, addressed a few remarks to the crowd in the rather harsh voice that always grated on his opponents, and departed abruptly for a private celebration and conference with his Bolshevik Party colleagues. Clearly Lenin had not lost his old sectarian habits. He showed no signs of the joyous emotions that, in these early months, often led old political antagonists to embrace as brothers in honour of the revolutionary victory.

Lenin's appraisal of the political situation, known to history as the April Theses, was belligerent, uncompromising, and distinctly disconcerting to the Petrograd Bolsheviks who had tentatively accepted the Soviet line of socialist unity and critical support for the new government. Scarcely pausing to acknowledge the achievements of February, Lenin was already looking forward to the second stage of revolution, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. No support should be given to the Provisional Government, Lenin stated. Socialist illusions of unity and the `naive confidence' of the masses in the new regime must be destroyed. The present Soviet leadership, having succumbed to bourgeois influence, was useless (in one speech, Lenin borrowed Rosa Luxemburg's characterization of German Social Democracy and called it `a stinking corpse').

Nevertheless, Lenin predicted that the soviets-under revitalized revolutionary leadership-would be the key institutions in transferring power from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. `All power to the soviets!', one of the slogans of Lenin's April Theses, was in effect a call for class war. `Peace, land, and bread', another of Lenin's April slogans, had similar revolutionary implications. `Peace', in Lenin's usage, meant not only withdrawal from the imperialist war but also recognition that such withdrawal `is impossible... without the overthrow of capital'. `Land' meant confiscation of the landowners' estates and their redistribution by the peasants themselvessomething very close to spontaneous peasant land seizures. No wonder that a critic accused Lenin of `plant[ing] the banner of civil war in the midst of revolutionary democracy'.10

The Bolsheviks, respectful as they were of Lenin's vision and leadership, were shocked by his April Theses: some were inclined to think that he had lost touch with the realities of Russian life during his years in emigration. But in the following months, under Lenin's exhortations and reproaches, the Bolsheviks did move into a more intransigent position, isolating themselves from the socialist coalition. However, without a Bolshevik majority in the Petrograd Soviet, Lenin's slogan of `All power to the soviets!' did not provide the Bolsheviks with a practical guide to action. It remained an open question whether Lenin's strategy was that of a master politician or simply that of a cranky extremist-a left-wing counterpart of the old socialist Plekhanov, whose unreserved patriotism on the war issue had taken him out of the mainstream of Russian socialist politics.

The need for socialist unity seemed self-evident to most of the politicians associated with the Soviet, who prided themselves on submerging their old sectarian disagreements. In June, at the First National Congress of Soviets, a speaker asked rhetorically whether any political party was prepared to take on the responsibilities of power alone, assuming that the answer was negative. `There is such a party!' Lenin interjected. But to most of the delegates, it sounded more like bravado than a serious challenge. It was a serious challenge, however, because the Bolsheviks were gaining popular support and the coalition socialists losing it.

The Bolsheviks were still in a minority at the June Congress of Soviets, and they had yet to win a major city election. But their growing strength was already evident at the grass-roots level-in the workers' factory committees, in the committees of soldiers and sailors in the armed forces, and in local district soviets in the big towns. Bolshevik Party membership was also increasing spectacularly, although the Bolsheviks never made any formal decision to launch a mass recruitment drive, and seemed almost surprised by the influx. The party's membership figures, shaky and perhaps exaggerated as they are, give some sense of its dimensions: 24,000 Bolshevik Party members at the time of the February Revolution (though this figure is particularly suspect, since the Petrograd party organization could actually identify only about 2,000 members in February, and the Moscow organization 6oo); more than 100,000 members by the end of April; and in October 1917 a total of 350,000 members, including 6o,ooo in Petrograd and the surrounding province and 70,000 in Moscow and the adjacent Central Industrial Region. i i

The popular revolution

Seven million men were under arms at the beginning of 1917, with two million in the reserve. The armed forces had suffered tremendous losses, and war weariness was evident in the increasing desertion rate and the soldiers' responsiveness to German fraternization at the front. To the soldiers, the February Revolution was an implicit promise that the war would soon end, and they waited impatiently for the Provisional Government to achieve this-if not on its own initiative, then under pressure from the Petrograd Soviet. In the early spring of 1917, the Army, with its new democratic structure of elected committees, its old problems of inadequate supplies, and its restless and uncertain mood, was at best a doubtfully effective fighting force. At the front, morale had not totally disintegrated. But the situation in the garrisons around the country, where reserve troops were stationed, was much uglier.

Traditionally, Russia's soldiers and sailors of 1917 have been categorized as `proletarians', regardless of their occupation out of uniform. In fact most of the enlisted men were peasants, although workers were disproportionately represented in the Baltic Fleet and the armies of the Northern and Western Fronts, since their recruitment area was relatively industrialized. It can be argued in Marxist terms that the men in the armed forces were proletarian by virtue of their current occupation, but the more important thing is that this is evidently how they regarded themselves. As Wildman's study indicates,12 front-line soldiers in the spring of 1917-even when prepared to cooperate with officers who accepted the Revolution and the new norms of behaviour-saw the officers and the Provisional Government as belonging to one class, that of the `masters', and identified their own interests as those of the workers and the Petrograd Soviet. By May, as the Commander-in-Chief reported with alarm, `class antagonism' between officers and men had made deep inroads on the Army's spirit of patriotic solidarity.

The Petrograd workers had already demonstrated a revolutionary spirit in February, although they had not then been sufficiently militant or psychologically prepared to resist the creation of a `bourgeois' Provisional Government. In the first months after the February Revolution, the main grievances expressed by workers in Petrograd and elsewhere were economic, focusing on bread-andbutter issues like the eight-hour day (which the Provisional Government rejected on the grounds of the wartime emergency), wages, overtime, and protection against unemployment.13 But there was no guarantee that this situation would continue, given the tradition of political militancy in the Russian working class. It was true that the war had changed the composition of the working class, greatly increasing the percentage of women as well as somewhat increasing the total number of workers; and it was usually believed that women workers were less revolutionary than men. Yet it was women workers whose strike on International Women's Day had precipitated the February Revolution; and those who had husbands at the front were particularly likely to object strongly to continuation of the war. Petrograd, as a centre of the munitions industry in which many skilled male workers had been exempted from military conscription, retained a comparatively large proportion of its prewar male working class in the factories. Despite the police round-up of Bolsheviks at the beginning of the war, and the subsequent arrest or military drafting of large numbers of other political troublemakers in the factories, Petrograd's major metallurgical and defence plants were employing a surprisingly large number of workers who belonged to the Bolshevik and other revolutionary parties, and even Bolshevik professional revolutionaries who had come to the capital from Ukraine and other parts of the Empire after the outbreak of war. Other revolutionary workers returned to their factories after the February Revolution, increasing the potential for further political unrest.