History of the Soviet Union

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In this way Marx overcame, to his own satisfaction and that of most of his followers, the troubling gap between ideal and fulfilment. The trouble is, there was and is no necessary connection between Marx’s vision of intensifying socioeconomic crisis, with everyone moved by their own material interests, and the world of harmony and brother-hood which was supposed to succeed the revolution. Indeed, logically speaking, if the workers were impelled by their own economic interests in making revolution, then the more likely sequel of such a revolution would be further economic struggle, but with a different set of masters. Nevertheless, the idea that the workers’ revolution would somehow magically cancel out all the conflicts of society had enormous attraction. It seemed to be both realistic and optimistic at the same time. It had the simultaneous attractions of a science and a religion. That is what made it so appealing, and nowhere more so than in Russia, where the intelligentsia already had its own troubles with a secular state claiming religious prerogatives.

Certainly the young Vladimir Ulyanov–or Lenin, as he became known–was attracted by precisely this dual nature of Marxism. He had been deeply affected by the execution in 1887 of his elder brother Alexander for membership of a conspiracy to murder the emperor. Lenin was attracted by his brother’s idealism and self-sacrifice, but at the same time he was determined not to give up his own life in vain. He wanted to pursue Alexander’s aim of revolutionary social transformation with certainty. Hence the scientific claims of Marxism were very important to him. Reading Marx’s Capital was, as he later said, a revelation to him, because it seemed to demonstrate that revolution was embedded in the objective evolution of society, if one only had the patience and consistency to await its unfolding. In his own early writings, Lenin made a similar analysis of Russia’s own socioeconomic structure, aiming to show that capitalism was already destroying the economy of the peasant commune, and that capitalism–and therefore ultimately revolution–was inevitable in Russia. Admittedly Lenin felt that Russia had further to go than most of Europe, and, following Plekhanov, he envisaged a revolution in two stages: (i) the ‘bourgeois democratic’ one, when the feudal system, still not entirely destroyed in Russia, would be finally overthrown by an alliance of the ‘bourgeois liberals’ with the as yet small workers’ party; (ii) the later socialist stage, which would come in the fullness of time, when capitalism was fully developed and the working class had reached maturity.

All this had the merit of apparent certainty. But it was predicated on a formidably extensive time scale, and would require daunting patience and self-restraint to realize in full. In fact Lenin did not for long adhere to the full schema, but began to cast around for ways of telescoping the two stages. Furthermore, in his own way, he was aware of the gap between science and prophecy in Marx. He did not share the master’s confidence that the workers would automatically grasp the full significance of their destitution in existing society and how it might be ended. On the contrary, in his pamphlet What is to be Done? (1902) he expressed his fear that, left to themselves, workers would not attempt a revolution but would fight for more limited goals, such as higher wages, better working conditions and more humane treatment from their employers. His own experience of propaganda work in the St Petersburg factories of the 1890s led him to the conclusion that ‘The workers did not have, nor was it possible for them to have, an awareness of the irreconcilable contradiction of their interests with the whole modern political and social system.’ This did not apply just to Russian workers: ‘The history of all countries shows that by itself the working class can only develop a trade union consciousness, that is to say a conviction of the necessity to form trade unions, struggle with the employers, obtain from the government this or that law.’ Only the ‘educated representatives of the propertied classes–the intelligentsia’ could fully understand the real, as distinct from the superficial, needs of the workers. To bring about a revolution, a genuinely revolutionary party was needed, that is, one ‘embracing primarily and chiefly people whose profession consists of revolutionary activity’. That seemed, on the face of it, to exclude any workers, since their profession, perforce, was factory labour.

This was a most important clarification of a weak point in Marxist theory. In actual practice, Lenin never tried to run his party in this way. But he always stuck theoretically to his definition of the revolutionary party, and indeed made it his touchstone of the true revolutionary spirit. For the sake of it he was prepared to break with other Marxists who took a different view. At what was, in effect, the founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party, in Brussels and London in 1903, Lenin insisted that ‘personal participation in one of the party’s organizations’ was to be the key qualification for membership. His principal opponent, Yuly Martov, wanted a more relaxed formulation: ‘regular personal support under the guidance of one of the party’s organizations’. This would make it easier for workers to become full party members, even in conditions of illegality. Lenin lost that particular vote, but nevertheless emerged from the congress with a majority, and henceforth called his faction the ‘Bolsheviks’ or ‘men of the majority’, while Martov’s had to content themselves with the sobriquet ‘Mensheviks’ or ‘men of the minority’.

The issue which provoked the great split in the Russian Social Democratic Party sounds like a minor organizational quibble. In fact, however, this quibble turned out to symbolize more profound disagreements, which drove the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks ever further apart. With time it became clear that they were envisaging two different kinds of revolution. The Mensheviks laid great store by the coming of a parliamentary ‘bourgeois’ republic, in which a mass working-class party would act as a legal opposition until they were numerous enough to take power on their own account. Lenin, however, became increasingly impatient with the protracted timetable entailed by this vision. He hankered after telescoping the whole process, running the two revolutions together by enlisting the peasants (carrying out a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution against the landlords) as auxiliaries of the workers (carrying out their ‘socialist’ revolution against the capitalists). However, he did not fully clarify his ideas on this issue until his final return to Russia from exile in 1917.

In effect, Lenin reintegrated into Russian Marxism certain elements of the Populist tradition: the leadership of a small group of intelligentsia revolutionaries, the readiness to regard the peasants as a revolutionary class, and the telescoping of the ‘bourgeois’ phase of the revolution.

The Populists had, however, their own views. They recovered from their prostration of the 1880s, and by 1901 managed to form a new political party, with its centre in emigration, the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Their theoreticians no longer disputed the proposition that industrial capitalism had come to Russia, but they maintained that it had taken a very different form from the one Marx envisaged. First, it was heavily dominated by the state. Secondly, most of the workers had not really broken away from the countryside: they were ‘peasant-workers’, not proletarians in the Marxist sense. The Socialist Revolutionaries refused, in fact, to recognize any fundamental distinction between workers and peasants: they organized themselves, and with some success, to work among both. They also set up a ‘fighting detachment’ to continue the work of the People’s Will by terrorism directed against officials: they succeeded between 1901 and 1908 in murdering a Grand Duke, several ministers and over a hundred other senior officials.

In 1905, risings broke out in both town and countryside. These outbursts owed little to the organizational efforts of the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, but rather more to their long-term inspiration. The most powerful ingredient of all, however, was the enduring discontent felt by the peasants and workers who made up the great majority of Russia’s population.

The Emancipation Act promulgated by Alexander II in 1861 had released the peasants from personal bondage, but it had not relieved any of their other hardships, and indeed had burdened them with an additional grievance. This was the obligation to pay for land which they already regarded as their own–and indeed, in the Lockean sense that they ‘mixed their labour with it’, so it was. The peasants’ collective legal sense had never accepted the legitimacy of the awards of land made by the tsars to the nobles.

In order to ensure that the peasants would pay for the land ‘newly allotted’ to them, and would discharge their other taxes, the government bound them to a ‘village society’, which was often, though not always, equivalent to the old ‘commune’, or mir. This institution has been the subject of more myth-making and less solid empirical research than perhaps any other in Russian history, partly because its members left little or no written testimony, and partly because ideologists of left and right hoped and feared great things from it. The government saw it as a guarantor of law and order, as well as of primitive social security, while the revolutionaries, at least the Populists, regarded its practices as a kind of rudimentary socialism, which might enable Russian society to proceed straight to real socialism without the unpleasant intermediate stage of capitalism. In Great Russia the mir assembly, consisting of heads of household, periodically redistributed land, adding to the allotments of families grown larger (along with the obligation to pay higher taxes) and subtracting from the allotments of those which had lost members. In the Ukraine and Bielorussia, on the other hand, rather different customs prevailed: land was usually passed down the family hereditarily, and was not subject to periodic redistribution. In both types of commune, timber, meadows, pastures and water-courses were held in common.

The communal land tenure system, though it provided a safety net in time of difficulty, had real economic disadvantages. All the villagers were compelled to adopt a safe but primitive and underproductive form of agriculture: the open three-field system with strip farming. At a time when the peasant population was growing very fast–from around 55 million in 1863 to 82 million in 1897–the mir in effect impeded the introduction of improved seeds, fertilizers or machines; and it offered a disincentive to land improvement, since the cultivator never knew when his plot might be taken away from him and awarded to someone else.

The low level of agricultural productivity was only partly a result of communal tenure. Partly, too, it was a function of low urbanization. Where, as in most of western Europe, there was a dense network of towns and good communications between them, then a receptive market existed for a wide variety of agricultural produce. In Russia this was the case only around St Petersburg and Moscow. Over the remaining expanses of Russia’s main agricultural regions, peasants scratched the soil with wooden ploughs, grew rye and oats, lived on a diet of ‘cabbage soup and gruel’ (as a popular saying had it) and sold very little to the outside world, except when economic need made it unavoidable.

As a result, though the picture varied from area to area, it seems clear enough that most peasants were poor, threatened by hunger in bad years, and that the problem was getting worse. In 1890 more than 60 per cent of peasants called up for the army were declared unfit on health grounds: and that was before the famine of 1891.

The peasants themselves felt that the explanation for all this was obvious: they needed more land, and they had a right to it. In the neighbouring nobles’ fields they saw their own potential salvation. This was an illusion: the total area of peasant landholdings exceeded that of the landowners by nearly three to one, so that simple expropriation of the latter would not solve the problem. But in 1905 the peasants were convinced that it would, and that their grievance was justified. Acting in common, by decision of their mir assemblies, they began to take the law into their own hands, seizing estates and driving the landowners out. It took a long time for the government to restore order.

In fact, there was no simple solution to Russia’s agrarian problem, as the later experience of developing countries confirms. Only a patient combination of improvements in land tenure and in agricultural methods with the gradual development of the commercial and industrial life of the country could in the end have brought greater prosperity to the village. But the myth that there was a simple solution, and that the peasants had a natural right to all the land, was the single most explosive factor in Russian politics in the last years of the tsarist regime.

Peter Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 to 1911, tried to make a start to the process of patient improvement by giving peasant households the right to withdraw from the village commune, set up on their own and enclose their holdings. After a promising start, however, this programme was abruptly curtailed by war and revolution.

Workers, the other great factor in the revolutionary upheaval of 1905, were also restless to an unusual degree in Russia compared with their West European counterparts. This may have been because they had unusually close ties with the land. Under the Emancipation legislation of 1861, a peasant who went into the town to work permanently was still registered with his ‘village society’ and remained legally a peasant. His family still paid taxes there, and he probably sent back money regularly to help them out; perhaps he would return at Christmas or Easter for family celebrations, or in the late summer to help with the harvest. Some workers, especially those in construction and transport, organized themselves in an artisan cooperative, or artel, which had its origins in village life, and was sometimes found even in heavy industry. Individual factories often perpetuated the rural link by recruiting most of their workforce from a particular province; and workers themselves would often form a zemlyachestvo, or regional association, to keep in touch with each other and with their home villages.

Compared with the workers who had lived in the towns for a generation or more, these ‘peasant-workers’ seem to have been unusually prone to unrest at times of crisis. This may have been partly because their right to allotment land in the village gave them something to fall back on, and hence an extra sense of security. Or it may have been because, in the absence of legalized trade unions in the towns, the tradition of collective action was far stronger in the countryside. In their case, too, the newly discovered urban discontents, over housing, pay, working conditions or overbearing foremen, were superimposed on the grievances which they had brought with them from the village. As R. E. Johnson, the most recent student of this subject, has suggested, ‘the fusion of rural and urban discontents and propensities produced an especially explosive mix’.

At any rate, the experience of 1905 suggested that Russian workers, in times of crisis, were unusually good at improvising their own institutions. The body which sparked off the unrest of that year was, ironically, organized by Father Gapon, a priest who wished to save the monarchy. On Sunday 9 January 1905 he led a huge demonstration in the capital, St Petersburg, bearing ikons and portraits of the tsar: they were to march to the Winter Palace with a petition appealing for a living wage and for civil rights. The troops stationed in the streets panicked in the face of the crowd and opened fire: nearly two hundred people were killed and many more wounded.

This incident, which has passed into history as Bloody Sunday, had a dramatic effect: more than any other, it undermined the popular image of the tsar as the benevolent ‘little father’. It helped to release the restraint which the peasants had previously felt about taking the law into their own hands. And it certainly contributed to the wave of strikes, demonstrations and sometimes violence which swept Russia’s industrial cities. In the course of this, workers set up trade unions for the first time, rather begrudgingly legalized by the government. They also improvised councils (or soviets) of workers’ deputies. Beginning as strike committees elected at the workplace, these bodies often found themselves temporarily exercising local government functions as well, in cities whose normal administration was paralysed by strikes. They also negotiated with the employers and the government. In short, they gained a brief but intense experience of self-government, unforgettable to workers who had never before been allowed to organize in their own interests.

The mass popular unrest gave the professional strata and the intelligentsia the chance to press their demands for an elected parliament, or even a constituent assembly, to decide on Russia’s future form of government. Political’ parties were formed, of which the most prominent were the Constitutional Democrats (or Kadets for short), under their leader, the Moscow University history professor, P. N. Milyukov. Their ideal was a constitutional monarchy on the British model, or even a parliamentary republic, as in France.

In the end, faced with a general strike, Tsar Nicholas II reluctantly conceded much of what the Kadets were demanding. In the October Manifesto of 1905 he promised that henceforth the civil rights of all citizens would be observed, and he granted a parliament, the Duma, to be elected on an indirect but fairly broad franchise. Written into its statute was the provision that ‘without [its] consent no law can take effect’. This concession relieved him of the outright opposition of the liberals, and Nicholas was then able to instruct the police and army–which remained almost completely loyal–to crush the workers’ and peasants’ movement.

During the few years of its existence, the Duma was sometimes harassed, sometimes ignored by the government, and indeed twice summarily dissolved. Nevertheless, its mere presence made a great difference to political life. Its electoral assemblies remained as a minimal focus for working-class and peasant political education and activity, even at a time when the government was trying to withdraw some of its concessions of 1905. And the existence of a relatively free press alongside it meant that the reading public (now growing very fast) were incomparably better informed about political issues than they ever had been before. Combined with the rapid growth in literacy, with the bitter political conflicts resulting from 1905, and with ever-accelerating social and economic change, all this was potentially very explosive.

The tsarist monarchy was finally overthrown in the midst of the First World War. Major wars, of course, raise all the stakes in domestic politics, since survival itself is at issue. Furthermore, the government fought this one before a Duma which proved watchful and at times bitterly critical, while the press, though under wartime censorship, remained freer than at any time before 1905. Whether the constitutional monarchy founded by the October Manifesto could have survived if there had been no war is an open question. What is certain is that the war caught it at a very vulnerable moment, when it had not yet fully established itself in the eyes of the public, yet was already suffering from the exposure to fierce criticism which civil liberties made possible. Bloody Sunday had weakened the reputation of the tsar. His standing was now further undermined by rumours–bandied around in the press though never substantiated–that the royal family was being compromised by a ‘holy man’ of dubious credentials, Rasputin, and that the court even had treacherous connections with the enemy, Germany. As the normally restrained Milyukov put it in a famous Duma speech of November 1916, ‘Is this stupidity or is it treason?’

Against the background of such public accusations, the more or less normal difficulties of war, military defeat, shortages of guns and food, became magnified into matters involving the very survival of the monarchy.

The end came relatively suddenly, and to at least the revolutionary parties, unexpectedly, in February 1917, when food queues in Petrograd suddenly turned into political demonstrations, demanding an end to what many still called the ‘autocracy’. When even the Cossacks, long the faithful upholders of order, refused to disperse the crowds, Nicholas II suddenly found that he had no supporters. Liberals and socialists were in agreement, for the first time since 1905, and what they agreed was that the monarchy must go. Fearing for national unity, not even the army generals attempted to resist the demand. Two Duma deputies were sent to see the tsar, who tendered his abdication in a railway carriage outside Pskov, on 2 March 1917.

As we now know, the collapse of the monarchy opened the way to eventual rule by Marxist revolutionaries. Russia became the first country to fall under Marxist socialist domination. In the light of Russia’s previous history it is perhaps possible to see why this should have been so. The country’s life had long been arranged on highly authoritarian lines (at least until 1905), dominated by an ideology which was ostensibly religious but was imposed by secular means and thus forfeited most of its spiritual authority. In this sense Russia was ripe for takeover by a self-avowedly secular ideology bearing unacknowledged religious overtones–which is what Marxism was, especially in its Bolshevik form.

In a very real sense, in fact, the Russian autocracy, especially since Peter I, provided a pattern for socialist rule: the notion of the ideological state to which all ranks of the population owed service absolutely and in equal measure. Much, however, was yet to happen before this variant of Marxist socialism gained the upper hand.

2 (#ulink_d36031bd-3202-542d-bdaa-6c14046ca679)

The October Revolution (#ulink_d36031bd-3202-542d-bdaa-6c14046ca679)

It was a mark of the abruptness of political change in Russia that when the monarchy fell, what replaced it was not one regime, but two. On the one hand, the politicians surviving from the Duma established a Provisional Government, in which the principal parties were at first the Kadets, later the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. It was called ‘provisional’ because it was to exercise power only until a Constituent Assembly could be convened, elected by all the people. On the other hand, the workers of Petrograd (as St Petersburg was now called) hastened to revive their memories of the days of freedom in 1905 by re-establishing the Petrograd Soviet. They were joined by the soldiers of the capital city’s garrison, active participants in the revolution for the first time, and their joint tribune was known as the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

But government and soviet refrained from trying to oust each other–for good reason. The Provisional Government, which began by abolishing the tsarist police and security services, had no effective power of coercion, and therefore had to tolerate the soviets as expressions of the popular will, at least in the big cities. As the minister of war, Guchkov, said, ‘The Provisional Government does not possess any real power; and its directives are carried out only to the extent that it is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which enjoys all the essential elements of real power, since the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are all in its hands.’ The leaders of the soviets, for their part, recognized that the Provisional Government contained experienced politicians, that it could command the loyalty of the army officers, reduce the chances of counterrevolution, and gain international recognition. The theoretically inclined among them regarded the Provisional Government as a ‘bourgeois’ institution, which the soviets would ‘supervise’, on the workers’ behalf, until such time as the socialist revolution became possible.

The Provisional Government was from the start in a very difficult, arguably an untenable position. It had not been brought to power by election, but nor could it claim direct descent from the old imperial government or the Duma. Prince Lvov, its first prime minister, proclaimed that it had been created by the ‘unanimous revolutionary enthusiasm of the people’. That was to prove a shaky basis, especially since the new government found itself in a situation where it was unable to carry out the reforms that the ‘people’ were expecting. The fundamental difficulty was the war. The peasants might be crying out for a redistribution of the land in their favour, but could such a complex operation be carried out equitably without first a thorough land survey, and while millions of peasant-soldiers, with an impeccable claim to their own shares, were far away from the village at the front, and unable to take part in the share-out? The workers began to organize themselves to exercise a greater share in the running of factories and enterprises, but was it responsible to attempt such intricate reorganization in the middle of keeping up industrial output for the war effort? Could the supplies problems, which had brought the tsarist government down, be solved while the war was on? Most important of all, was the soldiers’ demand to elect their own committees and to take part in the running of their units compatible with the discipline needed at the front line?

While the war continued, none of these questions could be solved without serious and damaging political conflict. And yet, to stop the war proved almost impossible (I say ‘almost’, since the Bolsheviks did eventually achieve it, but at a price which nearly split the party in two). The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet tried to organize a conference of socialists from all the combatant states, to put pressure on their governments to negotiate a peace ‘without annexations or indemnities’. The British and French governments, however, put paid to this plan by refusing to allow representatives from their parliaments to attend. The alternative would have been to sign a separate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but this would have amounted to a capitulation, and not until the Provisional Government was in its final days did any of its members recommend such a desperate step. So the war went on. Its problems continued to undermine the Provisional Government’s efforts to establish a new political system, until the popular expectations aroused by the February revolution finally brought the Bolsheviks to power.

The new-found freedoms of February caused a tremendous upsurge in the ordinary people’s capacity to organize themselves. It is often supposed that the Russians are a passive people, accustomed to doing what their rulers tell them. Actually, this is far from being the case. Partly because of the huge distances, many Russian communities remained, at least up to the early twentieth century, relatively unaffected by central government, and had to improvise their own arrangements. But even where government has been near and ever-pressing, Russians have always been highly inventive in devising social forms such that they appear to be obeying their rulers, whilst in fact running matters as far as possible to their own advantage. This was the centuries-old basis of the peasant commune, which the government had always intended as an agency for taxation and military recruitment. Now, in 1917, with government repression suddenly removed, there was a veritable explosion of ‘self-help’ organizations among Russian workers, peasants and soldiers, each with their own, often exaggerated demands.

The peasants saw in the February revolution an opportunity to rectify what they considered a very longstanding injustice, that much of the land they worked did not belong to them. As a resolution from Samara province put it, ‘The land must belong to those who work it with their hands, to those whose sweat flows.’ Peasants were prepared to support the Provisional Government as long as it appeared to be actively promoting a wholesale transfer of land to them. As the months passed, and the Provisional Government did nothing, they lost interest in it and turned instead to direct action. Ironically, the government helped them to create the institutions which made this possible: the local land committees, which it set up to carry out a land survey and prepare for the ultimate land reform, actually became dominated at the lowest level by the peasants themselves, and increasingly proceeded to direct land seizures. This was especially the case after the army began to break up. A typical scenario was for a deserter to return to the village from the front, bringing news of land seizures elsewhere. The peasants would gather in their traditional mir assembly, or use the facade of the local land committees; they would discuss the situation and decide to take the local landowner’s estate for themselves. They would then all march together up to the steward’s office, demand the keys, proclaim the land, tools and livestock sequestered and give the owners forty-eight hours to leave. Then they would divide up the land among themselves, using the time-honoured criteria employed in the mir, the ‘labour norm’ or the ‘consumption norm’ (i.e. the number of working hands available, or the number of mouths to feed), whichever prevailed in local custom. They used violence where they thought it necessary, or where things got out of hand.

Inevitably, then, a gulf of mistrust opened between the peasants and the Provisional Government. It was widened by the government’s supplies policy. Because of the problem of supplying the towns with bread, the tsarist government in its last months had instituted a grain monopoly at fixed prices. The Provisional Government felt it had no alternative but to continue this, though the belatedly adjusted prices in a period of high inflation inevitably caused resentment among the peasants. Ultimately, indeed, it led to the peasants’ refusing to part with their produce in the quantities needed. This is where the backward nature of the rural economy became a positive strength to the peasants. It was, of course, more convenient for them to buy matches, paraffin, salt, ironmongery and vodka from the urban market, but, if the terms of trade turned badly against them, then peasants could always turn their backs on the market and make do with the primitive products they could manufacture for themselves. During the summer and autumn of 1917 this is what many of them began to do, resuming a natural economy which their fathers and grandfathers had gradually been leaving behind, shutting themselves off from the market and refusing to provide food for anyone outside their own village. All Russian governments had to face this potential isolationism of the peasant communities until Stalin broke open the village economy by brute force in 1929–30.

Nowhere was the exuberant improvisation of the revolutionary period so evident as in the multiplicity of organizations created by the workers of Russia’s cities. Pride of place, of course, belonged to the soviets, to which the workers of Petrograd streamed back as soon as they had a chance in February 1917. It cannot be said, however, that the Petrograd Soviet, or any other large city soviet, lived up to its original ideals. Perhaps that was impossible. The Petrograd Soviet’s plenary assembly consisted of three thousand members, and even its executive committee soon grew to an unmanageable size, so that many of its functions had to be delegated to a bureau of twenty-four members, on which each of the main socialist parties had a prearranged quota of representatives. Naturally enough, these representatives tended to be established politicians and professional men rather than workers or soldiers. In fact, the attempt to introduce direct democracy led to an engaging but unproductive chaos, so that the real business had to be transferred upstairs to a small number of elected officials. This engendered a feeling among the rank and file that their voices no longer counted for anything. As we shall see, this discontent played an important part in the events of 1917, and helped to provide the Bolsheviks with the impetus that carried them to power.

In reaction, workers tended to devote more of their energies to lower level organizations which expressed their aspirations more directly. In some cases this meant the trade unions. These, however, were not well suited to a fast-changing revolutionary situation. They were bodies with some local roots but also strong national organizations: a few of them had managed to survive in shadowy form since 1905, in spite of persecution. They were organized on the ‘production’ principle, that is to say by branch of industry, whatever the precise skill, qualification or rank of their members. This tended to produce hierarchical splits within unions, which weakened their influence. They were also, of course, designed to function within a relatively stable economic and political environment, promoting their members’ interests within that setting. They were not well adapted to fast-changing circumstances or to attempts to assume real power. It is not surprising that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries retained a grip on many unions up to and beyond October.

In this respect, the factory or shop committees (fabzavkomy) were more suited to the circumstances of 1917. Often their origins were similar to those of the soviets of 1905: they began as informal strike committees during the February-March days, but this time at the level of the individual factory or even shop. The question of how they should develop caused controversy. Many Socialist Revolutionaries and most Mensheviks wanted them to run cultural and welfare facilities for the workers and to represent their interests in negotiations with the employers. That, however, would have reduced them virtually to the status of local trade union branches. The Anarchists, on the other hand, and in the short run the Bolsheviks, wanted fabzavkomy actually to run the factories, or at the very least to supervise the management’s discharge of that duty. The Anarchists intended that in that way they should become units in a self-governing society, while the Bolsheviks planned to subordinate them to the state economic administration of an embryonic socialist society. For both of them, however, the immediate watch-word was ‘workers’ control’, and they persuaded a Petrograd congress of fabzavkomy to adopt it at the end of May–the first institution to pass a Bolshevik resolution.

The factory committees were thus in the vanguard of all the workers’ struggles between February and October–for the eight-hour day, for higher pay and better conditions, and then increasingly for ‘control’ itself. At first the pressure was directed particularly against harsh foremen or staff: workers sometimes dealt with unpopular figures by bundling them into a wheelbarrow and carting them out of the factory gates, to the accompaniment of jeers and catcalls, for a ducking in the nearest river. Increasingly, however, the struggles concerned the very survival of enterprises. Faced with newly militant workers, as well as the more familiar problems of shortages of raw materials, fuel and spare parts, employers sometimes decided that the game was not worth the candle, and that their capital would be better invested in something safer. There was a wave of factory closures. The workers regarded these as lockouts, and often reacted by occupying the factory, and trying to keep production going under their own management.

Right from the beginning, some soviets and factory committees had armed contingents at their disposal. These bodies, often formed during the heady days of February, gradually assumed the name of ‘Red Guards’. They were able to provide themselves with weapons and ammunition by courtesy of garrison soldiers, or by pilfering from armaments works. They patrolled factory premises and maintained order in industrial areas (where the writ of the Provisional Government’s militia never really ran). Not until the Kornilov affair at the end of August did they assume real political importance. At that stage, however, the Bolsheviks, now in control of the Petrograd and many other urban soviets, mobilized them as paramilitary units under the soviets’ Military Revolutionary Committees, originally set up to forestall a military coup (see below, page 48). In that form they made a major contribution to the October seizure of power.

The real troubleshooters of 1917, however, were the soldiers, both at the front and in the rear. Their charter was the famous Order No. 1, passed in full session by a seething and chaotic Petrograd Soviet, before any Provisional Government had even been established. It was intended originally for the Petrograd garrison alone, but it soon spread far more widely, probably because it met soldiers’ wishes, and was swiftly taken up in most units. It called on servicemen to elect committees to run all units down to company level, and to send their delegates to the new soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Soldiers were to recognize the soviets (rather than the Duma) as their political authority. In combat situations, officers were to be obeyed as before, but the committees would control the issue of weapons, and off-duty officers were no longer to be recognized as superiors. In practice, in some units the committees actually arrogated to themselves the authority, not mentioned in Order No. 1, of electing and dismissing officers.

The position of officers during 1917 was not enviable. Because of the high casualty rate at the front during two and a half years of war, most of the junior officers were quite recent appointees, from the same social class as their men, often raw and unsure of their new-found superiority. Though some reacted flexibly to the new situation and found a common language with their men, others retreated into an ex-aggeratedly rigid defence of their recently acquired authority. Among the senior officers were rather more survivors from pre-1914, but they were mostly men who had been taught to regard politics as subversive, an affair of which they were properly ignorant. It is not surprising, therefore, that at all levels of the officer corps there was support for a return to the unquestioning discipline of pre-February.

Evidence suggests that the soldiers, especially at the front line, remained patriotic in outlook even after February, and determined at least to prevent the Germans advancing any further into Russia. The revolution did, however, induce in the men a feeling that they no longer had to obey all orders unquestioningly. The soviets’ peace programme circulated among them, and led to a widespread conviction that only a defensive war was still justified: the formula ‘without annexations or indemnities’ was very popular. The peace offensive also aroused expectations that the war would be over soon and that they could return home. These expectations were further sharpened by intensive propaganda from the Bolsheviks, who sent agitators, newspapers and broadsheets to popularize the idea of a separate peace to be concluded without reference to the Allies.

These expectations were rudely jolted by Minister of Defence Kerensky, who in June ordered an offensive on the south-western front. This was timed partly in order to aid the Allies (the mutinies in the French army looked at that stage more serious than the Russian ones), but partly because the officers hoped it would restore a sense of purpose and discipline among their men. The opposite turned out to be the case. Soldiers’ committees discussed the order to advance at great length: some refused, some went ahead initially and then pulled back when they saw the casualty rate. At any rate, the offensive soon turned into a rout in which the Russian army lost territory. Far more serious than that was the effect on morale. Whole units abandoned their positions, and some of them murdered officers who tried to restore order. Then the mutinous soldiers seized freight wagons, or even whole trains, and held them at gunpoint until they were transported deep into the rear. From there they could return home, rifles at the ready, to take a decisive part, as we have seen, in the share-out of land.

The mood of the garrison troops was, if anything, even more radical than that of those at the front. Many of them were recently mobilized peasants or workers, undergoing their training, and still identifying strongly with the class from which they came. The Provisional Government’s initial agreement with the Petrograd Soviet stipulated that these troops would not be sent to the front, but would stay in the capital to ‘defend the revolution’. And in fact the refusal of a machine-gun regiment to be sent to the front sparked off the July Days in Petrograd, when an undisciplined armed mob caused havoc on the streets.

Even at this stage, however, the army did not disintegrate altogether. Some units remained loyal, particularly Cossack ones, with their special traditions, or specialist units, like those from the artillery, cavalry or engineers. Nowhere was the collapse so complete that the Germans felt they could advance without risk. Indeed, the German High Command deliberately held back, fearing that a major advance might be the one factor which could yet restore morale in the Russian army.

At the time of the February revolution the Bolsheviks numbered, at the highest estimate, no more than 20,000, and their leaders were scattered in exile, at home and abroad. For that reason they had even more difficulty than the other parties in adjusting to the sudden changes. They were seriously divided about what to do, but the dominant figures inside Russia, notably Kamenev and Stalin, inclined towards cooperation with the other socialist parties in the soviets in exercising ‘vigilant supervision’ over the Provisional Government. Some even talked of a rapprochement with the Mensheviks.

Lenin had quite different ideas. He was still in Switzerland in February. He returned to Russia with the help of the German High Command, taking a specially provided ‘sealed train’ through Germany to Sweden. The Germans were anxious to facilitate his return, so that he could begin fomenting unrest inside Russia and spread his idea of a separate peace. They also provided the Bolsheviks with considerable funds thereafter, which helped to pay for the newspapers and political agitators who proved so effective among the soldiers and workers.

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.

In the long run, some army officers, the liberal parties and many of the Socialist Revolutionaries did come round to the view that it was necessary to fight the Bolsheviks. By that time, however, this meant a civil war in which the Bolsheviks already held many of the advantages.

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Even after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, it was not clear what form of government the Bolsheviks would be able to install, what its relations would be with local soviets as local centres of power, nor what kind of support it would receive from the various sectors of the population. The Bolsheviks had called for ‘All Power to the Soviets’, but Lenin clearly had reservations about that slogan, and the manner in which he had established Sovnarkom did not augur well for the future of decentralized government. The Bolsheviks had also talked a great deal of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and had called their new government a ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’; but how was the proletariat to put their new-found authority into effect? What was to be the relation between the new centralized institutions of the Soviet government (admittedly as yet largely on paper) and bodies like trade unions and factory committees, which had their own narrower interests to defend?

The Bolsheviks had absolutely no clear answer to these questions. As we have seen, they were divided over how and even whether to seize power.

Even Lenin himself had no clear conception of how he was going to run the enormous, divided, war-torn country. He fully admitted this. Not long before the seizure of power, he said, ‘We do not pretend that Marx or Marxists know the road to socialism in detail. That is nonsense. We know the direction of the road, we know what class forces lead along it, but concretely, practically, this will be shown by the experience of millions when they decide to act.’ He did have a general vision, expounded in State and Revolution, of ordinary workers and peasants taking over the smoothly running mechanism of the imperialist economy. He evoked this vision frequently in the early days of the new regime, in language which mixed democratic voluntarism with ruthless authoritarianism. ‘Comrade workers,’ he exhorted them on 5 November 1917, ‘remember that you yourselves are administering the state. Nobody is going to help you if you do not yourselves unite and take over all state affairs. Rally round your soviets: make them strong. Get to work right there, at the grass roots, without waiting for orders. Institute the strictest revolutionary order, suppress without mercy the anarchic excesses of drunken hooligans, counterrevolutionary cadets [yunkera], Kornilovites, etc. Institute rigorous supervision over production and accounting over products. Arrest and deliver to the tribunal of the revolutionary people whoever dares to raise his hand against the people’s cause.’ This was the language of the utopian, confident that he is already on the threshold of the ideal society.

Some of the very early Bolshevik legislation did seem to be putting this vision into practice by creating or strengthening institutions through which workers, peasants and soldiers could gain greater control over their own fate and also over the running of the country.

1. The land decree of 26 October 1917 abolished all private landownership without compensation, and called on village and volost (rural district) land committees to redistribute the land thus secured to the peasants on an egalitarian basis. The decree was couched in the words of a Peasant Congress of June 1917. It reflected the Socialist Revolutionary programme and gave the peasants what most of them wanted at the time, while making no mention of the ultimate Bolshevik aim of nationalization of the land.

2. The decree of 14 November 1917 on workers’ control gave elected factory committees the power of supervision (kontrol) over industrial and commercial enterprises, for which purpose commercial secrecy was to be abolished.

3. Decrees of November and December 1917 abolished all ranks, insignia and hierarchical greetings in the army and subordinated all military formations to elected committees of soldiers, among whose duties would be the election of their officers.

4. Existing judicial institutions were replaced, in a decree of 22 November 1917, by ‘people’s courts’, whose judges would be elected by the working population. Special revolutionary tribunals were to be elected forthwith by the soviets to deal with counterrevolutionary activity, profiteering, speculation and sabotage.

On the other hand, some of the Bolsheviks’ very earliest measures pointed in the other direction, towards tighter central authority. On 2 December 1917 a Supreme Council of the National Economy was set up, almost universally known by its initials, VSNKh (or Vesenkha), to ‘elaborate general norms and a plan for regulating the economic life of the country’ as well as to ‘reconcile and coordinate’ the activities of other economic agencies, among them the trade unions and factory committees. In January 1918 the factory committees were converted into local branches of the trade unions, and the whole structure subordinated to Vesenkha. This was not necessarily done against the wishes of the workers themselves: indeed there is a good deal of evidence that, to keep production going at all in the desperately difficult economic circumstances, many factory committees were only too glad to seek support from some larger entity. Nevertheless, in practice it meant that the economy was becoming very centralized even before the civil war broke out.

The same was true of the decision to set up the Cheka — or, to give it its full name, the Extraordinary Commission for Struggle with Counterrevolution and Sabotage — instituted by Sovnarkom on 7 December 1917. Its immediate task was to combat looting, hooliganism and black market trading, which had increased alarmingly, and to keep watch on organizations known to be opposed to the Bolsheviks. In its early appeals it tried to mobilize the population in the same style as Lenin: ‘The Commission appeals to all workers, soldiers and peasants to come to its aid in the struggle with enemies of the Revolution. Send all news and facts about organizations and individual persons whose activity is harmful to the Revolution and the people’s power to the Commission …’ In practice, the Cheka was never subordinated to any soviet institution, nor indeed to any party body, only to Sovnarkom, and was able to extend its powers unchecked.

Another source of uncertainty about the new Soviet regime was its relation to the outside world. Lenin had encouraged the seizure of power in the expectation that its example would provoke workers’ revolutions in other countries of Europe, especially in Germany. As the months passed and this did not happen, it became clear that the Bolsheviks were going to have to honour their pledge to end the war, not through negotiations with a friendly, socialist Germany, but by reaching some kind of agreement with the old imperial Germany. Given the weakness of the Russian army, which the Bolsheviks themselves had fostered, this could only mean acceptance of whatever terms the German generals cared to dictate. Trotsky, as the newly appointed commissar for foreign affairs, tried to put the new-style ‘public diplomacy’ into effect by addressing the German people directly over the heads of their leaders, but his words produced no immediate effect.

The dilemma of how to deal with this situation very nearly tore the Bolshevik Party in two once again. The Germans were demanding the Baltic provinces and the whole of Bielorussia and the Ukraine, which meant losing a substantial proportion of Russia’s industrial and agricultural wealth. The Left Communists, led by Bukharin, argued that to accept this meant capitulating to imperialism and losing a golden opportunity to continue the world revolution which October had started. Bukharin agreed with Lenin that the Russian army was no longer capable of holding back the Germans in regular warfare, but he rejected this concept of warfare:

Comrade Lenin has chosen to define revolutionary war exclusively as a war of large armies with defeats in accordance with all the rules of military science. We propose that war from our side–at least to start with–will inevitably be a partisan war of flying detachments. … In the very process of the struggle … more and more of the masses will gradually be drawn over to our side, while in the imperialist camp, on the contrary, there will be ever increasing elements of disintegration. The peasants will be drawn into the struggle when they hear, see and know that their land, boots and grain are being taken from them–this is the only real perspective.

Bukharin’s views certainly had wide support in the party. They may appear quixotic, but his recipe for involving the masses, especially the peasants, in the revolution through partisan warfare against an occupying power does closely resemble the methods of later successful Communist leaders, such as Mao, Tito and Ho Chiminh. Lenin, however, took the line of strict Realpolitik. The most precious possession of the world revolution, he argued, was that a Soviet government existed in Russia. That, above all, must not be placed in jeopardy. It followed that the only possible policy was to gain a ‘breathing space’ by capitulating to the German demands and preserving what could be preserved while postponing international revolution to the distant future.

In this controversy we see Lenin on the opposite side from the one he took in October. Then he had been an internationalist in perspective, trusting to the revolutionary élan of the workers all over the world. Now he became distrustful of any working-class revolutionary spirit not guided by the Bolshevik Party (as in What is to be Done? so many years before) and retreated into the one ‘socialist fortress’. The party eventually accepted his arguments, and Soviet Russia signed a treaty at Brest-Litovsk, acceding in full to the German demands. Much flowed from that decision, especially the creation of a relatively conventional army (see below) and the abandonment of ‘open diplomacy’. One might even see here the first glimmerings of ‘socialism in one country’, later to be developed by Stalin. However that may be, Germany’s subsequent defeat by the Western Allies rescued Lenin from the most damaging consequences of his decision: the Germans withdrew from the occupied territories after November 1918.

The Left Socialist Revolutionaries agreed with the Left Communists on this issue and resigned from the government in indignation, calling the Brest-Litovsk Treaty a ‘betrayal’. Thenceforth the Bolsheviks exercised literally ‘one-party rule’. As if to mark this break, they renamed themselves the Communist Party (in memory of the Paris Commune).

The Bolsheviks’ method of seizing and consolidating power led naturally to civil war. This was something Lenin had always accepted. He had repeatedly urged that the First World War should be turned into a class struggle or ‘international civil war’. The same logic underlay his determination in 1917 to shun all agreements with other parties, even from the socialist camp, and to promote a violent seizure of power single-handed.

It took some time, however, for the various anti-Bolshevik forces to grasp the reality of the situation, and to retrieve themselves from their initial reverses. Senior officers from the Imperial Army made their way to the Don Cossack territory in the south, where they tried to assemble an anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army. Because of the divisions among the Cossacks, however, it took them a long time to secure a base area. Long before they did so, an opportunity for anti-Bolshevik activity was created in quite another part of Russia, namely Siberia. Following the termination of hostilities on the German front, the Czech Legion was being evacuated on the Trans-Siberian Railway, when fighting broke out between them and Red Guards at Chelyabinsk. Using the telegraph system, the Czechs managed to gain control over the entire length of the railway. Since this is the one vital artery of Siberia, that meant the whole of that enormous territory, together with the Urals and part of the Volga basin, became an area where anti-Bolshevik forces could gather.