History of the Soviet Union

As soon as he arrived back in Petrograd, Lenin poured scorn on the notion of ‘revolutionary defencism’, conditional support for the Provisional Government, or cooperation with the other socialist parties. The ‘bourgeois’ stage of the revolution, he maintained, was already over, and it was time for the workers to take power, which they could do through the soviets. Russia should unilaterally pull out of the war, calling on the workers of all the combatant nations to convert it into an international civil war by rising against their rulers. Landed estates should be expropriated forthwith, and all other land nationalized and put at the disposal of ‘Soviets of Agricultural Labourers and Peasant Deputies’.

Lenin’s new programme should not have been a complete surprise to those who had read his writings since 1905, but all the same it did represent something of a shift in his thinking. His study of imperialism had led him to the view that the socialist revolution would take place on an international scale, with the colonized nations of the world rising against their exploiters. In this perspective, Russia, as the weakest of the imperialist powers, but also the strongest of the colonies (in the sense that it was exploited by French, German and other capital), was the natural setting for the initial spark of the revolution–though it would need swift support from within economically stronger nations if it was not to die away. Lenin, in fact, had moved close to the position of Trotsky, who since 1905 had been preaching ‘permanent revolution’ on an international scale. Trotsky acknowledged this rapprochement by joining the Bolsheviks in the course of the summer.

Another new facet of Lenin’s thinking was his view that imperialism created the economic prerequisites of socialism–trusts and syndicates, large banks, railways, telegraph and postal services–and that when the imperialist state was smashed, these structures would survive and be taken over by the new proletarian government. Since they were sophisticated and self-regulating, all that would be needed was to ensure that they were used in the interests of the people as a whole, not of a small class of exploiters, and this would be essentially a matter of ‘book-keeping and monitoring’ (uchet i kontrol). ‘Capitalism’, he asserted, ‘has simplified the work of book-keeping and monitoring, has reduced it to a comparatively simple system of accounting, which any literate person can do.’

This vision was the real source of Lenin’s confidence in 1917. He seems to have really believed that, through the soviets, ordinary working people could take power into their own hands, and administer complex economic systems. He called his vision the ‘commune state’, taking as his model the Paris Commune of 1871. This introduced a certain contradiction into his ideas, since of course the Paris Commune had originated in precisely the kind of ‘revolutionary defencism’ which Lenin rejected. But the image was to prove useful to him and to confuse some of his opponents. At any rate there proved to be a good deal of support among Bolsheviks for Lenin’s heightened radicalism, and by May most of his programme had been accepted as party policy.

Initially, the Bolsheviks’ position in the new popular institutions was very weak. With the disappointments of the summer and autumn, however, some existing delegates swung over towards the Bolsheviks, while new ones were elected on a Bolshevik mandate. The appeal of the Bolsheviks lay in their programme of ‘peace, land and bread’. Facing a Provisional Government which could not end the war, and which was therefore incapable of carrying out land reform or ensuring food supplies either, the Bolsheviks were able to offer something which nearly all workers, peasants and soldiers wanted. Bearing these promises in their hands, Bolshevik speakers were often able to win over audiences and gradually the new grass-roots popular insitutions as well. This was the case first of all in the factory committees, then in the soviets of workers’ deputies, then in the soldiers’ committees and in some of the trade unions. The failure of the July uprising and the public revelations about German backing for Lenin reduced this support for a time, but it revived and redoubled with the Kornilov affair at the end of August.

This affair has been the subject of much historical controversy, and it cannot be said that it is clear even now exactly what happened. In the last week of August General Kornilov, commander-in-chief of the Russian army, sent troops from the front to Petrograd, evidently with the intention of dispersing the soviets and arresting all the leading Bolsheviks, probably in order to set up a military government. He was thwarted by the action of Kerensky (now prime minister) in declaring him under arrest, by the railwaymen, who blocked the passage of his troops, and by the soldiers of the garrisons south and west of Petrograd, who fraternized with Kornilov’s troops and persuaded them they were fighting on the wrong side. General Krymov, their commander, committed suicide at this disgrace.

The mysterious aspect of the affair is that Kornilov had been appointed by Kerensky only shortly before, with an apparent mandate to tighten the discipline in the army. Indeed, the early stages of the coup itself were coordinated with Kerensky, who then abruptly changed his mind. The whole business seems, in fact, to have been dogged by the insoluble ambiguities of the Provisional Government’s position. Kerensky wanted to restore military discipline in order to be able to go on fighting the war, especially after the débâcle of the June offensive, but at the same time he knew that the measures Kornilov proposed–abolishing soldiers’ committees at the front, restoring the full power of officers, imposition of full military discipline among rear garrisons, in armament factories and on the railways–would alienate his allies in the soviets, and probably provoke a popular rising with Bolshevik backing. In the end Kerensky could not have it both ways, and he came down on the side of the soviets, in a manner that exposed Kornilov to maximum humiliation.

What is quite certain is that this fiasco dramatically revived the fortunes of the Bolsheviks. It left the High Command confused, demoralized and resentful of the Provisional Government. Alexeyev, Kornilov’s immediate successor, resigned in disgust in the middle of September, saying, ‘We have no army’, and describing his fellow officers as ‘martyrs’ in the face of the general indiscipline. By contrast, the workers’ militias, especially in Petrograd itself, gained enormously in status and self-esteem: under their new name of ‘Red Guards’ they gained many new recruits during September and October. The Bolsheviks’ view of events generally seemed to have been vindicated, and nearly all popular institutions, especially the soviets, swung sharply in their direction. From the beginning of September the Bolsheviks had a majority in the crucial Petrograd Soviet, and Trotsky became its chairman. Moscow soon followed suit, and it became clear that the elections to the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets would result in the Bolsheviks becoming the largest single party.

To forestall any possible repeat of the Kornilov affair, the Petrograd Soviet established on 9 October a Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), to organize the ‘revolutionary defence’ of the capital against either a military putsch or Kerensky’s reported intention of evacuating the city and letting the Germans (already in Riga, only 300 miles away) occupy it and crush the soviet. The motion to establish MRC was supported by left-wing Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries; its first chairman was a Socialist Revolutionary. All the same, the majority of its members were Bolsheviks. The new body immediately set about coordinating the Red Guards and, helped by the impassioned oratory of Trotsky, persuading the garrison troops to recognize it rather than the Provisional Government as their ultimate source of authority.

Throughout September, Lenin, at first from the safety of Finland (a warrant had been out for his arrest since the July Days), then from hiding in Petrograd, bombarded the party Central Committee with letters urging that the moment for the insurrection had come. He cited as evidence the Bolshevik majorities in the soviets, the rising wave of peasant unrest, the intended surrender of Petrograd (which would produce the ‘Paris Commune’ situation), and in the international dimension the recent mutiny in the German Baltic Fleet. Once MRC was in existence, that seemed to him the appropriate instrument for the seizure of power. And indeed, it was on the day after its establishment, 10 October, that he at last persuaded his colleagues on the Central Committee that a rising was ‘on the agenda’.

Even at this stage, however, there were sceptics among Lenin’s closest colleagues, notably Zinoviev and Kamenev, two of the longest standing members of the Bolshevik Party. Their arguments are worth dwelling on, as they represent an important strand in Bolshevik thinking at the time. They maintained that the Bolsheviks had more to gain by working with the other socialist parties in a coalition government based on the soviets, than by going it alone and risking a violent seizure of power. Bolshevik support was rising among peasants, workers and soldiers: they would soon dominate the soviets, and would gain a substantial share of the seats in the Constituent Assembly, whose elections were approaching. Why jeopardize all this by a violent coup, which would alienate everyone? And even if it succeeded, then the Bolsheviks would be left bearing the responsibility alone for the huge tasks of improving the food supply, restoring the industrial economy, and, most difficult of all, either securing peace with Germany or else leading a ‘revolutionary war’ against her. For such tasks a coalition was needed, and, moreover, the Bolsheviks were already in a position to lead it.

Of course, it can be argued that Zinoviev and Kamenev were pleading merely for different tactics, for what became known after the Second World War as the ‘popular front’ policy. Yet major differences of conception underlay their argument. Lenin’s attitude was utopian, even apocalyptic: for him, the Bolsheviks embodied, in some mystical sense, the people, and once they seized power that power would ipso facto be in the hands of the people. Zinoviev and Kamenev, by contrast, were practical politicians, worried about how power could actually be exercised. Probably their views were closer to those of the majority of Bolsheviks in the soviets.

One significant observation they made: ‘Insofar as the choice depends on us, we can and must confine ourselves now to a defensive position.’ That was precisely what, in the event, MRC did, and this fact may have been crucial to the success of the insurrection. For what finally provoked the seizure of power was Kerensky’s action, on the night of 23–24 October, in trying to close down two Bolshevik newspapers and to arrest some Bolsheviks on charges of antigovernment agitation. On the initiative of Trotsky, MRC responded by reopening the newspaper offices, and then, to ensure the safety of the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, due to open the next day in Petrograd, its troops began to occupy bridges, road junctions and railway stations, moving on to take over telegraph offices and government ministries during the following night. Lenin came out of hiding and went to the Smolny Institute, now the headquarters of MRC, to persuade them not to confine themselves to a defensive operation, but to carry on and arrest the Provisional Government. This is certainly what happened, whether because of Lenin’s influence or from the natural dynamic of events. MRC called in Baltic sailors from Kronstadt and Helsingfors, while Kerensky’s attempts to raise units from the front line were almost wholly unavailing, so low was the stock of the Provisional Government among army officers. In the end Kerensky slipped out of the city in a car to continue his efforts in person. The rest of the Provisional Government was duly arrested in the Winter Palace late on the night of the 25th–26th.

Already on the 25th Lenin felt able to issue a proclamation announcing that power had passed into the hands of the soviets. He did not, however, significantly, identify the Congress of Soviets or even the Petrograd Soviet as the new source of authority, but rather MRC, ‘which has placed itself at the head of the proletariat and the garrison of Petrograd’. He thus specifically located power in the institution where the Bolsheviks had perhaps the greatest weight. When the Congress of Soviets met that evening, a large and influential group of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, including most of the members of the executive committee of the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets (back in June), condemned this step as a usurpation and walked out of the assembly, to form a Committee of Public Safety and to try to organize resistance to unilateral Bolshevik rule. A few Mensheviks remained behind, while the much larger number of Socialist Revolutionaries who did so reconstituted themselves as the Left Socialist Revolutionary party, finalizing a break which had existed for some months in all but name.

Now that power was in the hands of the soviets, one might have expected that it would be exercised by the All-Russian Executive Committee (VTsIK), which was elected by the congress to conduct its business between sessions and to hold authority in the soviet movement. This, of course, contained representatives of several socialist parties. Lenin, however, announced that the supreme body in the new ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’ would be the so-called Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), a kind of ‘council of ministers’, whose members would all be Bolshevik. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries were invited to participate, but were unwilling to do so without other socialist parties also being represented.

As a result of the way Lenin and the Central Committee interacted, then, the Bolsheviks had seized power under the guise of defending the soviets against a Provisional Government bent on undermining them. That was the basis on which most of the participants in the seizure of power had acted, and most of them expected a coalition socialist government to follow, resting on the authority of the soviets.

There was indeed an attempt to form just such a government, sponsored by the railwaymen’s union, Vikzhel, which welcomed the departure of the Provisional Government, but condemned the Bolsheviks’ unilateral seizure of power, and invited representatives of the major parties and political institutions to try to reach agreement on the formation of a socialist coalition. Vikzhel backed their invitation with the threat of a railway strike. Against Lenin’s opposition, several leading Bolsheviks did take part in these negotiations, and indeed discussed political options which would have entailed removing Lenin and Trotsky from the government. They were worried by the intolerant and arbitrary measures their government was taking, such as the suspension of non-socialist newspapers. On 4 November five of them–Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Nogin and Milyutin–resigned from the party’s Central Committee, declaring that ‘we cannot take responsibility for the Central Committee’s disastrous policy, which is being pursued against the will of the vast majority of workers and soldiers.’ Other Bolsheviks resigned from Sovnarkom, warning that ‘there is only one way to keep a purely Bolshevik government in power–by political terror.’

This Fronde in the upper levels of the party soon dissipated, however. The Vikzhel negotiations got nowhere, partly because of Lenin’s obstruction of them, partly because the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were unwilling to go on parleying with a party which was suppressing the freedom of the press. The five dissident members of the Central Committee suddenly found themselves isolated, and begged their way back by renouncing their personal opinion. Zinoviev commented, ‘We would prefer to make mistakes together with millions of workers and soldiers, and die together with them, rather than withdraw from events at this decisive historical moment.’ This was to be only the first of many occasions on which doubting Bolsheviks suppressed their personal scruples in the face of the simple fact that their party held power, and of their judgement that this was all that really mattered. As Leonard Schapiro has commented, ‘The greatest weakness of the opposition was that, having supported thus far a policy of insurrection without foreseeing its full implications, they felt it was too late for them to withdraw.’ This is not wholly fair to Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had publicly expressed their doubts before the insurrection, but it well captures the essential dilemma of all Bolsheviks who disagreed with Lenin.

In the event, Vikzhel proved unable to mobilize the railway workers to carry out their threat of a strike. For his part, Lenin decided to broaden somewhat the basis of his regime by admitting seven Left Socialist Revolutionaries to Sovnarkom. They stayed for only three months, before resigning over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (see below, pages 61–2).

In the provinces, as in Petrograd, power also passed to the Bolsheviks in the form of a soviet takeover of some variety. Their opponents were either the scanty and poorly armed forces of the old tsarist local government bodies, the zemstvos and municipalities, or else Committees of Public Safety on the Petrograd model. Where the Bolsheviks had a majority in the local soviet, they assumed power smoothly, and used their domination of the local revkom (equivalent of MRC) to suppress their opponents. Where they did not have such a majority, they formed a soviet consisting simply of workers, or called directly on Red Guards or sympathetic garrison units to form a revkom and take power. Some of the bitterest fighting was in Moscow, where the soviet did not set up a revkom till the Petrograd seizure was already accomplished and the soviet troops needed a further week, with artillery barrages, to overcome the Committee of Public Safety.

The only places where the Bolsheviks’ methods were used successfully against them were, significantly, the national areas, where local support could be secured for a policy directed against the ‘Russians’ or the ‘Muscovites’. A notable example of this was Kiev, where the Ukrainian nationalists managed to swamp the local congress of soviets.

The one body that might successfully have resisted the Bolshevik coup was the officer corps. They, however, after the experience of the Kornilov affair, were less than lukewarm in their support for the Provisional Government. General Cheremisov, commander of the northern front, refused to divert any troops from his sector to defend Kerensky. The latter’s desperate personal mission to the front only succeeded in raising some seven hundred Cossacks commanded by General Krasnov: these advanced as far as the Pulkovo Heights, outside Petrograd, but were resisted and eventually thrown back by a large force of Red Guards and of sailors from the Baltic Fleet. A rising of officer cadets within the city was not coordinated with this expedition and was crushed separately by Red Guards.

In this way, during November and December, the Bolsheviks succeeded in extending their control to most of the country which had been ruled by the Provisional Government. There remained, however, a final potential limit to their authority. This was the Constituent Assembly, whose nationwide elections were imminent even as the seizure of power took place. This body had been the aspiration of Russian democrats and socialists since before the 1905 revolution. The Bolsheviks themselves had criticized the Provisional Government for not hastening its convocation, and even after taking power they called their new ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’ ‘provisional’ in deference to the claims of the assembly.

Privately Lenin had strong forebodings that the Constituent Assembly would not support the Bolsheviks, but he decided that his new government could not allow itself the outrageous inconsistency of forbidding its convocation. His fears were confirmed by the results of the elections, held in November. The Socialist Revolutionaries polled 15.8 million votes and emerged as the largest single party, with 380 seats, while the Bolsheviks, with 9.8 million votes and 168 seats, were a respectable but clear second. Once that was evident, Lenin began to speak of the Assembly as if it were on a level with the Provisional Government, an institution of ‘bourgeois democratic type’ whose only function must be to yield to a ‘democratic institution of a higher order’, namely the soviets.

Even though they had lost the election, the Bolsheviks did permit the assembly to meet. They did everything possible, however, to instil in its members the impression that they were on sufferance, even under direct threat, from the new government. Sovnarkom issued a decree outlawing the leading members of the Kadet Party (which had 17 seats in the assembly), as a party of ‘enemies of the people’ (the first use of a phrase which was to have terrifying implications under Stalin); their newspapers were closed down, and some Socialist Revolutionaries and Kadet delegates were in fact arrested. On the day the assembly opened, 5 January 1918, Red Guards were posted all over Petrograd, especially around the Tauride Palace, where the assembly was to meet. Even during the session itself, soldiers leered at the delegates from the balconies, and took symbolic aim at them with their rifles.

The Bolsheviks put before the assembly a resolution recognizing the authority of the new Soviet government. The assembly rejected it, and went on to pass the first ten articles of a new Basic Land Law, intended to supplant the new Bolshevik legislation on the subject. The guards then requested the chairman to adjourn the session, and locked and sealed the building so that the delegates could not meet the next day. Rejection of the Bolshevik resolution had meant the forcible end of the Constituent Assembly.

Some Socialist Revolutionaries had recognized before the Assembly met that its fate would be decided by force. They had set up a Committee for the Defence of the Constituent Assembly, and, like MRC before them, had appealed for the support of the garrison troops in the city. According to one of their members, Boris Sokolov, the Semenov and Preobrazhensky regiments were prepared to come to their support, but the Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee decided against using arms in defence of the assembly. They anticipated that the government would win any armed confrontation in the capital, and decided therefore to rely on the moral appeal of the Constituent Assembly and the broad support which the Socialist Revolutionaries enjoyed in the country at large. When a workers’ demonstration took place in support of the assembly, then, it was unarmed and was forcibly dispersed by the Red Guards, with the loss of some lives.

The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was confirmed the next day by the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and the Soviet government finally removed the word ‘provisional’ from its title.

Looking at the resistance offered by the moderate socialists, one cannot but conclude that they misjudged both the historical situation and the nature of the Bolshevik Party. They all considered the October seizure of power to be an adventurist putsch, morally reprehensible and objectively unjustified by Russia’s social and economic development. They tended to regard the Bolsheviks as misguided comrades who would be taught a lesson both by history and by the Russian people. None of them thought the Bolsheviks could last long in power. For that reason the reaction of most Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks was to keep their moral record clean for the battles of the future by walking out of the soviets and assemblies where the Bolsheviks had just taken control. In that way they more or less capitulated without putting up a fight (though one should note the places, notably Moscow, which were exceptional in this respect). Only belatedly and reluctantly did many of them come to realize that if the Bolsheviks were to be effectively resisted, then it must be by force.