October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

Epilogue: After October

That strange book What Is to Be Done? casts a long shadow. In 1902, Lenin named his own seminal tract on leftist organisation after the novel of forty years previously.

Chernyshevsky’s story is interspersed with dream sequences, of which the most celebrated is the fourth. Here, in eleven sections, the protagonist Vera Pavlovna journeys from the ancient past to a strange, affecting, utopian future. The hinge point of the book, the fulcrum from history to possibility, is the fourth dream’s Section 7: that section, in its entirety, forms the epigraph to this book.

Two rows of dots. Something ostentatiously unspoken. The transition from injustice to emancipation. Informed readers would understand that behind the extended ellipsis lay revolution.

With such discretion the author evaded the censor. But there is something almost religious, too, in this unwriting, from this atheist son of a priest. A political via negativa, an apophatic revolutionism.

For those who cleave to it, a paradox of actually existing revolution is that in its potential for utter reconfiguration, it is, precisely, beyond words, a messianic interruption – one that emerges from the quotidian. Unsayable, yet the culmination of everyday exhortations. Beyond language and of it, beyond representation and not.

Chernyshevsky’s dots, then, are one iteration of a strange story. This book has been an attempt at another.

And the urgent gasp, above, that Chernyshevsky has follow those dots? ‘What will it be like?’ That question, from the present vantage point in history, can only hurt.

Late evening of 26 October 1917. Lenin stands before the Second Congress of Soviets. He grips the lectern. He has kept his audience waiting – it is nearly 9 p.m. – and now he waits himself, silent, as applause rolls over him. At last he bends forward and, in a hoarse voice, speaks his first, famous words to the gathering.

‘We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.’

That provokes new delight. A roar.

Lenin follows the Left SRs, proposing the abolition of private property in land. With respect to the war, Congress issues a ‘proclamation to the peoples and governments of all the belligerent nations’, for immediate negotiation towards democratic peace. Approval is unanimous.

‘The war is ended!’ comes a hushed exclamation. ‘The war is ended!’

Delegates are sobbing. They break not into celebratory but funereal song, honouring those who have died in the struggle for this moment.

But the war is not yet ended, and the order that will be constructed is anything but socialist.

Instead, the months and years that follow will see the revolution embattled, assailed, isolated, ossified, broken. We know where this is going: purges, gulags, starvation, mass murder.

October is still ground zero for arguments about fundamental, radical social change. Its degradation was not a given, was not written in any stars.

The story of the hopes, struggles, strains and defeats that follow 1917 has been told before and will be again. That story, and above all the questions arising from it – the urgencies of change, of how change is possible, of the dangers that will beset it – stretch vastly beyond us. These last pages can only offer a fleeting glance.

Instantly after the uprising, Kerensky meets and plans resistance with the hard-right General Krasnov. Under his command, a thousand Cossacks move on the capital. Within Petrograd itself, motley forces around the Mensheviks and Right SRs in the city Duma form into a group, the Committee for Salvation, arrayed against the new Council of People’s Commissars. The oppositionists’ motivations run the gamut, from deep antipathy to democracy to the sincere anguish of socialists at what they see as a doomed undertaking. Strange and temporary bedfellows they may be, but a bed they decide they must share, including with the likes of Purishkevich: the committee plans an uprising in Petrograd to coincide with the arrival of Krasnov’s troops.

But Milrevcom gets wind of the plans. October 29 sees a scrappy, short-lived ‘Junker mutiny’ in the capital, when military cadets attempt to take control. Again, shells rock the city and the resistance is crushed. Again, Antonov deploys his revolutionary honour, the cultivated culture of the militant, to protect captives from a vengeful crowd. His prisoners are spared: others are not so fortunate.

The next day, at Pulkovo Heights, twelve miles out of Petrograd, Krasnov’s forces face a ragtag army of workers, sailors and soldiers, untrained and undisciplined but outnumbering them ten to one. The fight is ugly and bloody. Krasnov’s forces fall back to the town of Gatchina, where Kerensky is based. Two days later, in exchange for safe passage away, they agree to hand him over.

The erstwhile persuader has a last escapade in him. He makes a successful run for it, disguised in a sailor’s uniform and unlikely goggles. He ends his days in exile, issuing tract after self-exculpating tract.

The pro-coalition All-Russian Executive Committee of the Union of Railway Workers demands a government of all socialist groups. Neither Lenin nor Trotsky, both hard-line on the question, attend the resulting conference: those Bolsheviks who do – Kamenev, Zinoviev and Milyutin – agree that a socialist coalition is the best chance for survival. But at that moment, when the new regime’s survival is under most threat from Krasnov’s approach, many SRs and Mensheviks are as much concerned with military resistance to the government as with negotiation. With Krasnov defeated, they convert to coalition – just as the Bolshevik CC adopts a harder line.

This line is not without controversy. On 3 November, five dissenters, including the Heavenly Twins Zinoviev and Kamenev, resign from the CC. But they will retract their opposition in December, when, with fanfare, the Left SRs join the government. For a brief moment, a coalition arises.

The consolidation of the revolution around the country is uneven. In Moscow, there is protracted, bitter fighting. Opponents of the new regime, though, are disoriented and divided, and the Bolsheviks extend their control.

At the start of January 1918, the government requires of the long-delayed, newly convened Constituent Assembly that it recognise the sovereignty of the soviets. When the CA representatives refuse, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs declare it undemocratic and unrepresentative in this new context: after all, its (Right SR-dominated) membership was chosen before October. The radicals turn their back on it, leaving the assembly to wind down ignominiously. It is then suppressed.

Worse soon comes. On 3 March 1918, after weeks of strained, strange and strung-out negotiations, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the Soviet government and Germany and its allies brings Russia’s role in the war to a close – but under shockingly punitive terms.

Lenin has fought a lonely battle insisting that the invidious demands be accepted, as for him the priority – at almost all costs – is to end the war, consolidate the new regime and await the international revolution. Many on the party’s left demur, sure that the Central Powers are so pregnant with revolution that the war should continue until that very upheaval. But in the face of a devastating German advance, Lenin, threatening again to resign, finally wins the argument.

Russia gains peace but loses swathes of land and population, some of its most fertile regions, and vast industrial and financial resources. In these vacated territories, the Central Powers install counter-revolutionary puppet regimes.

In protest at the treaty, the Left SRs resign from government. Tensions escalate as the Bolsheviks respond to worsening famine with brutal measures of food procurement, antagonising the peasantry, as detailed in a scathing open letter from Maria Spiridonova.

In June, Left SR activists assassinate the German ambassador, hoping to provoke a return to now-‘revolutionary’ war. In July they stage an uprising against the Bolsheviks – and are suppressed. As peasant resistance to the requisitioning hardens, and Bolshevik activists are assassinated – Volodarsky, Uritsky – the government responds with repressive, often sanguinary measures. Thus the one-party state begins to entrench.

The days are punctuated with unlikely political moments. In October 1918, the Mensheviks, who in many cases remain opposed to it, recognise the October revolution as ‘historically necessary’; the same year, as the government desperately shores up the collapsing economy, the left Bolshevik Shlyapnikov voices the strange indignation of many in the party that ‘the capitalist class renounced the organising role in production assigned to it’.

For a while, Lenin remains bullish about the prospects for international revolution, long assumed to be the only context in which the Russian revolution might survive.

Even as Lenin recovers from a failed assassination attempt in August 1918, even after the dreadful murder of the Marxists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany and the collapse of their Spartacist rebellion, Bolshevik optimism is not, at first, much dampened. In the aftermath of the war, Germany is in the throes of a dramatic social polarisation, that will flare up repeatedly between 1918 and 1923. A soviet government arises in Hungary; class struggle erupts in Austria in 1918 and 1919; Italy sees the upheaval of the ‘two red years’ of 1919 and 1920. Even England is rocked by strikes.

But over the course of 1919 and beyond, instance by instance this wave is quelled, and reaction sets in. The Bolsheviks wake up to the extent of their isolation, as the situation within their borders, too, becomes desperate.

In May 1918, 50,000 soldiers of the Czechoslovakian Legion revolt. This, after the false start of Gatchina, kicks off the Civil War.

From 1918 to 1921, the Bolsheviks must fight several counter-revolutionary or ‘White’ forces, backed, assisted and armed by foreign powers. As the Whites encroach on the revolution’s territories, animated by violent nostalgia, ‘Green’ peasant revolts – most famously that of the legendary anarchist Makhno in the Ukraine – stagger the Bolshevik regime. By 1919, Russian territory is occupied by American, French, British, Japanese, German, Serbian and Polish troops. Socialism, the red bacillus, is more irksome to the Americans, British and French than are their wartime foes. David Francis, the American ambassador to Russia, writes of his concern that ‘if these damned Bolsheviks are permitted to remain in control of the country it will not only be lost to its devoted people but Bolshevik rule will undermine all governments and be a menace to society itself’.

Churchill is particularly obsessed with the ‘nameless beast’, the ‘foul baboonery of Bolshevism’, and perfectly explicit that it is his greatest enemy. ‘Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading,’ he declares in 1919. ‘It is sheer humbug to pretend that it is not far worse than German militarism.’ As the war ends, he publicises his intention to ‘Kill the Bolshie, Kiss the Hun’.

The Allies pour troops into Russia, screwing down an embargo, stopping food from reaching the starving population of Soviet Russia. And they funnel funds to the Whites, no matter how unsavoury – supporting a dictatorship under Alexander Kolchak, and regarding Grigory Semenov, whose Cossack forces unleash a reign of terror in Siberia, as, in the words of one American observer, ‘tolerably severe’.

The fractious, squabbling Whites, however, for all their funding, for all the Allies’ support, are unable to win militarily or to gain popular backing, due to their opposition to any concessions for the Russian peasantry or restive national minorities – and to their barbarism. Their troops engage in indiscriminate butchery, burning villages and killing some 150,000 Jews in enthusiastic pogroms, performing exemplary torture – mass flogging, burial alive, mutilation, dragging prisoners behind horses – and summary execution. Their instructions to take no prisoners are often graphically explicit.

Such terror is in the service of their dream of new authoritarianism. If Bolshevism falls to the Whites, the eyewitness Chamberlin writes, its replacement will be ‘a military dictator… riding into Moscow on a white horse’. Not the Italian language but the Russian would have given the world the word for fascism, as Trotsky later puts it.

Under such unrelenting pressures, these are months and years of unspeakable barbarity and suffering, starvation, mass death, the near-total collapse of industry and culture, of banditry, pogroms, torture and cannibalism. The beleaguered regime unleashes its own Red Terror.

And there is no doubt that its reach and depth expand beyond control; that some agents of the Cheka, the political police, seduced by personal power, sadism or the degradation of the moment, are thugs and murderers unconstrained by political conviction and wielding new authority. There are no shortage of testimonials as to their dreadful acts.

Other agents carry out their work with anguish. One may feel sceptical, even disgusted, at the notion of an attempt, under desperate necessity, at an ‘ethical’ terror, a terror as limited as possible, but the testimonials of agents tormented at what they believed they had no choice but to do are powerful. ‘I have spilt so much blood I no longer have any right to live,’ says a drunken and distraught Dzherzhinsky at the end of 1918. ‘You must shoot me now,’ he begs.

One unlikely source, Major General William Graves, who commanded US forces in Siberia, considers himself ‘well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks’. Many of the Soviet regime’s leaders struggle to restrain the degrading tendencies of their own Terror, of which they are horribly aware. In 1918, a Cheka newspaper notoriously calls for torture: the CC excoriates the editors and closes it down, and the Soviet renews its condemnation of any such practice. But without question a political and moral rot is setting in.

Faced with the wholesale collapse, and a continuing and devastating famine, in 1921 the regime rolls back the emergency measures of militarised requisitioning and control known as ‘War Communism’, replacing them with the New Economic Policy, or NEP. From 1921 to 1927, the regime encourages a degree of private initiative, allowing smaller-scale enterprises to make a profit. Wage policies are liberalised, foreign experts and technical advisors authorised. Though the government creates various large collective farms, much land is turned over to the wealthier peasants. The ‘NEPmen’, spivs and wheeler-dealers, start to make good on speculation and burgeoning black markets.

The country labours through a catastrophic aftermath, a rubble of industry, agriculture, and the working class itself. War Communism was a desperate exigency, and NEP is a necessary retreat, allowing a degree of stability, the boosting of production. An expression of weakness, it comes at a cost. The bureaucratic apparatus is suspended now above the broken remnants of the class for which it claims to speak.

Among the Bolsheviks are dissenting grouplets, official and unofficial. Kollontai and Shlyapnikov lead the ‘Workers’ Opposition’, hankering to hand power to a working class that barely exists any more. Old-Bolshevik intellectuals, ‘Democratic Centralists’, oppose the centralisation. The Tenth Congress of 1921 prohibits factions. Advocates of the move, including Lenin, present it as a temporary exigency to unite the party. Those factions that, inevitably, come later – the Left Opposition, the United Opposition – will not be official.

Lenin’s health is failing. He suffers strokes in 1922 and 1923, and struggles in what has been called his ‘final fight’, against the bureaucratic tendencies, the ossification and corruption he sees growing. He grows suspicious of Stalin’s personality and his place within the machine. In his last writings, he insists Stalin be removed from his post as general secretary.

His advice is not followed.

Lenin dies in January 1924.

The regime swifty launches a grotesque death cult, the most ostentatious element of which remains in place today: his corpse. A gnarled and ghastly relic, receiving obeisance from its catafalque.

At the Fourteenth Party Congress, in 1924, against the protests of Trotsky and others, the party performs a giddying about-face. Now it officially accepts Stalin’s claim that ‘in general the victory of socialism (not in the sense of final victory) is unconditionally possible in one country’.

The parenthetical caveat notwithstanding, the embrace of ‘Socialism in One Country’ is a dramatic reversal of a foundational thesis of the Bolsheviks – and others.

The shift is born of despair, as any prospects for international revolution recede. But if it is utopian to hope that international support is around the corner, how much more so is it to wager on the impossible – autarchic socialism? A hard-headed pessimism, no matter how difficult to metabolise, would be less damaging than this bad hope.

The effects of the new position are devastating. As any vestigial culture of debate and democracy withers, the bureaucrats become custodians of a top-down development towards a monstrosity they call ‘socialism’. And Stalin, the ‘grey blur’ at the heart of the machine, builds up his power base, his own status as most equal of all.

Between 1924 and 1928 the atmosphere in Russia grows more and more toxic, infighting in the party more bitter, the shifting of allegiances and cliques more urgent and dangerous. Allies become opponents become allies again. The Heavenly Twins make their peace with the regime. Trotsky does not: he is squeezed out of the CC and the party; his supporters are harassed and abused, beaten up, driven to suicide. In 1928, his Left Opposition is smashed and scattered.

Threats against the regime multiply, and Stalin consolidates his rule. As crisis grips the world economy, he inaugurates the ‘great change’. ‘The tempo must not be reduced!’ he announces in 1931. This is his first Five-Year Plan. ‘We are fifty or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.’

Thus is justified brutal industrialisation and collectivisation, a ruthless centralised control and command economy and political culture. Party activists are hounded in great numbers, forced to betray others, to confess to preposterous crimes with stentorian declarations. They are executed by this counterrevolution against their tradition, in that tradition’s name. Previous loyalty to Stalin is no defence: the long roll call of Bolsheviks put to death in the 1930s and after includes not only Trotsky and Bukharin, but Zinoviev, Kamenev, and countless others.

With this despotic degradation comes a revival of statism, anti-semitism and nationalism, and bleakly reactionary norms in culture, sexuality and family life. Stalinism: a police state of paranoia, cruelty, murder and kitsch.

After a protracted sumerki, a long spell of ‘liberty’s dim light’, what might have been a sunrise becomes a sunset. This is not a new day. It is what the Left Oppositionist Victor Serge calls ‘midnight in the century’.

There have been a hundred years of crude, ahistorical, ignorant, bad-faith and opportunist attacks on October. Without echoing such sneers, we must nonetheless interrogate the revolution.

The old regime was vile and violent, while Russian liberalism was weak, and quick to make common cause with reaction. All the same, did October lead inexorably to Stalin? It is an old question, but one still very much alive. Is the gulag the telos of 1917?

That objective strains faced the new regime is clear. There are subjective factors, too, questions we must pose about decisions made.

The left Mensheviks, committed anti-war internationalists, have a case to answer, with their walkout in October 1917. Coming straight after the congress voted for coalition, this decision shocked and upset even some of those who went along with it. ‘I was thunderstruck,’ said Sukhanov, of an action he never ceased to regret. ‘No one contested the legality of the congress… [This action] meant a formal break with the masses and with the revolution.’

Nothing is given. But had the internationalists of other groups remained within the Second Congress, Lenin and Trotsky’s intransigence and scepticism about coalition might have been undercut, given how many other Bolsheviks, at all levels of the party, were advocates of cooperation. A less monolithic and embattled government just might have been the outcome.

This is not to deny the constraints and impact of isolation – nor to exonerate the Bolsheviks for their own mistakes, or worse.

In his short piece ‘Our Revolution’, written in January 1923 in response to Sukhanov’s memoir, Lenin rather startlingly allows as ‘incontrovertible’ that Russia had not been ‘ready’ for revolution. He wonders pugnaciously, however, whether a people ‘influenced by the hopelessness of its situation’ could be blamed for ‘fling[ing] itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilisation that were somewhat unusual’.

It is not absurd to argue that the ground-down of Russia had no real choice but to act, on the chance that in so doing they might alter the very parameters of the situation. That things might thereby improve. The party’s shift after Lenin’s death, from that plaintive, embattled sense that there had been little alternative but to strive in imperfect conditions, to the later bad hope of Socialism in One Country, is a baleful result of recasting necessity as virtue.

We see a similar curdling tendency in the depiction, at various times by various Bolsheviks, of the dreadful necessities of ‘War Communism’ as desiderata, communist principles, or of censorship, even after the Civil War, as an expression of anything other than weakness. We see it in the presentation of one-person management as part and parcel of socialist transformation. And in the traducing and misrepresentation of opponents; in what, for example, Serge calls the ‘atrocious lie’ according to which the 1921 uprising of Kronstadt sailors against the regime was a White attack, a slander justified (though not by him) as ‘necessary for the benefit of the people’. Nor, considering the aftermath of that revolt, should we gloss over what Mike Haynes – a historian sympathetic to the Bolsheviks – chillingly calls their ‘inability to resist executions’.

Those who count themselves on the side of the revolution must engage with these failures and crimes. To do otherwise is to fall into apologia, special pleading, hagiography – and to run the risk of repeating such mistakes.

It is not for nostalgia’s sake that the strange story of the first socialist revolution in history deserves celebration. The standard of October declares that things changed once, and they might do so again.

October, for an instant, brings a new kind of power. Fleetingly, there is a shift towards workers’ control of production and the rights of peasants to the land. Equal rights for men and women in work and in marriage, the right to divorce, maternity support. The decriminalisation of homosexuality, 100 years ago. Moves towards national self-determination. Free and universal education, the expansion of literacy. And with literacy comes a cultural explosion, a thirst to learn, the mushrooming of universities and lecture series and adult schools. A change in the soul, as Lunacharsky might put it, as much as in the factory. And though those moments are snuffed out, reversed, become bleak jokes and memories all too soon, it might have been otherwise.

It might have been different, for these were only the first, most faltering steps.

The revolutionaries want a new country in a new world, one they cannot see but believe they can build. And they believe that in so doing, the builders will also build themselves anew.

In 1924, even as the vice closes around the experiment, Trotsky writes that in the world he wants, in the communism of which he dreams – a pre-emptive rebuke to the ghastly regime of bones to come – ‘the forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise’.

The specifics of Russia, 1917, are distinct and crucial. It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

John Reed interrupts his own narrative of Prokopovich’s speech to the Duma deputies, prevented by exasperated sailors from martyring themselves. ‘It is beneath our dignity to be shot down here in the street by switchmen,’ he records him saying. Then: ‘What he meant by “switchmen”, I never discovered.’ Louise Bryant, who was also present, likewise noted the odd word. ‘Just exactly what he meant by that was too much for my simple American brain.’

There is a probable answer in an unlikely place.

In 1917, Chaim Grade was a young child in Vilna, Lithuania. Much later, when he had become one of the world’s leading Yiddish writers, in the glossary to the English translation of his memoir Der mames shabosim – My Mother’s Sabbath Days – he records the following:

A nickname from a meeting place. It seems likely that the word Prokopovich deployed as epithet was a disdainful term for ‘revolutionaries’.

Prokopovich had been a Marxist. His move to liberalism paralleled that of many other heretics infected with so-called ‘Economism’, as well as that of the ‘Legal Marxists’. There was a kind of bleak rigour to their stageist dogmas, in which the epochs must succeed one another perforce, like stations along a line.

Little wonder he would scorn the Bolsheviks as switchmen. What could be more inimical to any trace of teleology than those who take account of the sidings of history? Or who even take to them?

The revolution of 1917 is a revolution of trains. History proceeding in screams of cold metal. The tsar’s wheeled palace, shunted into sidings forever; Lenin’s sealed stateless carriage; Guchkov and Shulgin’s meandering abdication express; the trains criss-crossing Russia heavy with desperate deserters; the engine stoked by ‘Konstantin Ivanov’, Lenin in his wig, eagerly shovelling coal. And more and more will come: Trotsky’s armoured train, the Red Army’s propaganda trains, the troop carriers of the Civil War. Looming trains, trains hurtling through trees, out of the dark.

Revolutions, Marx said, are the locomotives of history. ‘Put the locomotive into top gear’, Lenin exhorted himself in a private note, scant weeks after October, ‘and keep it on the rails.’

But how could you keep it there if there really was only one true way, one line, and it is blocked?

‘I have gone where you did not want me to go.’

In 1937, Bruno Schulz opens his story ‘The Age of Genius’ with a dizzying rumination on ‘events that have no place of their own in time’, the possibility that ‘all the seats within time might have been sold’.

By the Forest Shacks are the points, the switches onto hidden tracks through wilder history.

The question for history is not only who should be driving the engine, but where. The Prokopoviches have something to fear, and they police these suspect, illegal branch lines, all the while insisting they do not exist.

Onto such tracks the revolutionaries divert their train, with its contraband cargo, unregisterable, supernumerary, powering for a horizon, an edge as far away as ever and yet careering closer.

Or so it looks from the liberated train, in liberty’s dim light.