Fin de siecle, the First World War, the Revolutions of 1917-1918, the Civil war 1917-1922, NEP 1921-1928 from Cambridge history of Russia, volume 3

Russia's fin de siecle, 1900-1914

MARK D. STEINBERG

The critical years from the turn of the century to the eve of the First World War were a time of uncertainty and crisis for Russia's old political, social and cultural order, but also a time of possibility, imagination and daring. A chronological narrative of events is one way to retell this contradictory story. Still useful too is rehearsing the old debate about whether Russia was heading towards revolution in these pre-war years (the 'pessimistic' interpretation as it has been named in the historiography and in much classroom pedagogy) or was on a path, had it not been for the burdens and stresses of war, towards resolving tensions and creating a viable civil society and an adequately reformed political order (the 'optimistic' narrative). The conventional narrative of successive events and likely outcomes, however, suggests more coherence, pattern and telos than the times warrant. To understand these years as both an end time and a beginning, and especially to understand the perceptions, values and expectations with which Russians lived these years and entered the war, the revolution and the new Soviet era, we must focus on the more complexly textured flux of everyday life and how people perceived these experiences and imagined change.

History as event

The years 1900-14 are full of events marking these times as extraordinary years of change and consequence. In 1903, as part of the government's ongoing efforts to strengthen the state by stimulating the expansion of a modern industrial economy, the great Trans-Siberian Railway was completed, symbolising both the growth of the railroad as an engine of industrial development (the driving idea of the minister of finance, Sergei Witte) and the imperial reach of the state.¹ In the same year, in direct opposition to this growing power of the state,

1 T. H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York: Atheneum, 1969).

members of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, meeting at its second congress in Brussels and then London (the stillborn founding congress was in 1898), created an organisation designed to incite and lead democratic and social revolution in Russia, though it also split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, over questions of how disciplined and closed such a party should be.[1]

The year 1904 saw the start of the Russo-Japanese war, a disastrous conflict sparked by Russia's expansion into China and Korea in the face of Japan's own regional desires, further fuelled by Russian overconfidence and racist contempt for the Japanese. The assassination by revolutionaries in the summer of 1904 of the notoriously conservative minister of internal affairs, Viacheslav Plehve, and his replacement by Prince Dmitrii Sviatopolk-Mirskii, who openly spoke as few tsarist officials had before of finding ways for the voice of 'society' to be heard, initiated what many expectantly called a political 'spring' in relations between state and society. A 'banquet campaign', inspired by the French exam­ple of 1847-8, was staged by increasingly well-organised liberals, who gathered over dinner and drinks to make fervent speeches and pass resolutions calling for democratising political change.[2] And then came the 'Revolution' of 1905, an unprecedented empire-wide upheaval, set in motion by the violent suppres­sion on 9 January ('Bloody Sunday') in St Petersburg of a mass procession of workers with a petition for the tsar. The revolution had many faces: workers' and students' strikes, demonstrations (both dignified and rowdy) stretching through city streets, spates of vandalism and other periodic violence, assassi­nations of government officials, naval mutinies, nationalist movements in the imperial borderlands, anti-Jewish pogroms and other reactionary protest and violence, and, by the end of the year, a series of armed uprisings, violently sup­pressed.[3] These revolutionary upheavals extracted a remarkable concession from the government: Nicholas Il's 'October manifesto', which for the first time in Russian history guaranteed a measure of civil liberties and a parliament (the State Duma) with legislative powers.

The years following the 1905 Revolution were marked by a succession of contradictory events. New fundamental laws in 1906 established the legislative Duma but also restricted its authority in many ways - not least of which was the complete lack of parliamentary control over the appointment or dismissal of cabinet ministers. Trade unions and strikes were legalised, but police retained extensive authority to monitor union activities and to close unions for engag­ing in illegal political activities or even allowing political speeches at meetings. Greater press freedom was guaranteed, but in practice was subject to constant harassment, punitive fines and closure for overstepping the bounds of toler­ated free speech. In the early summer of 1907, the new prime minister, Petr Stolypin, seeking to defuse persistent criticism of the government by liberals and the Left in the first and second State Dumas (the first Duma closed after seventy-three days, the second lasted three months), revised the electoral law, reducing representation by peasants, workers and non-Russian nationalities, and increasing that of the gentry, hoping to ensure that the new Duma would be more compliant. Stolypin's 'coup', as it was dubbed, proved effective, in the short term, in quietening the Duma. Stolypin was similarly effective, again at least in the short term, in 'pacifying', as it was then called, continuing politi­cal and social unrest in the country During 1906-7, disagreeable publications were shut down by the hundreds and summary courts martial tried and sen­tenced hundreds of individuals accused of sedition. In the first few months, more than a thousand people were executed, inspiring grim ironic talk of 'Stolypin's necktie' - the noose. These repressions were not without reason: assassinations or attempts on the lives of tsarist officials were frequent during 1906. Characteristically, Stolypin paired his political authoritarianism with a commitment to modernising social reform in Russia, visible above all in laws he was able to pass designed to break up the traditional peasant commune in the hope of leading rural society away from dangerous communalism and out of what many saw as its destabilising backwardness.[4]

The relative stability of the years between 1907 and the start of war in 1914 - a time when many who dreamed of change spoke of Russia as mired in polit­ical darkness, stifling repression, of bleak hopelessness - were marred (or brightened, depending on one's point of view) by unsettling events. Terrorist assassinations continued, in defiance of Stolypin's harsh repressions; indeed in 1911, Stolypin himself was fatally shot, in the presence of the tsar, while at a theatre in Kiev. The year before, the writer Lev Tolstoy's death inspired widespread public acts of mourning for a man who had been excommunicated by the Orthodox Church in 1901 for his influential denial of much of Church dogma and ritual in favour of an ethical religion of inward purity and virtuous practice; adding to his sins and popularity, Tolstoy had made use of his sta­tus as a moral prophet to openly criticise the brutality of the government of Stolypin and Nicholas II. A new wave of strikes broke out beginning in 1910, though especially in the wake of news of the violent death of over a hundred striking workers attacked by government troops in 1912 in the Lena goldfields in Siberia. But perhaps the most ominous events of these years, which filled the daily press, took place abroad. Russians closely followed the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. For many, these were struggles for independence by Slavic Orthodox nations, necessarily and justly backed by Russia. But many also saw in these distant conflicts threatening signs of a much greater European war.

The political ideology of autocracy

As we look beneath the surfaces of these events, it is useful to begin with ideas about the nature of state power in Russia, which were more complex than is allowed by the simple definition of Russia's political order as an 'autocracy'. The Fundamental Laws continued to insist that the Russian emperor (as the tsar was also called since Peter the Great) was a monarch with 'autocratic and unlimited' power, a redundancy meant to suggest both the lack of formal bounds to his authority and the personal nature of his sacred authority and will. In the wake of the manifesto of 17 October 1905, the stipulation that the tsar's authority was 'unlimited' was reluctantly dropped: the new Fundamental Laws of 1906 defined the monarch as holding 'Supreme Autocratic Power', impressive but not 'unlimited', for the law also recognised the new authority of the legislative State Duma.[5]

In practice, even before the 1905 Revolution, the tsar's power was not bound­less in its reach nor could it all emanate directly from his own person. Although all servants of the state were in theory accountable to the tsar, Russia's legions of officials and bureaucrats necessarily exercised considerable practical power. It is impossible to speak, for example, ofthe policies ofthe imperial regime in its final decades without recognising the influence of ministers such as Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Sergei Witte or Petr Stolypin. Their influence, however, was contradictory. On the one hand, Pobedonostsev, a tutor to Nicholas II as well as to his father and the lay official (ChiefProcurator) in charge ofthe Orthodox Church from 1880 to 1905, fought vigorously and, for many years, effectively against any concessions to civil liberties and constitutionalist reform, which he viewed as a dangerous course inspired by the fundamental philosophical error, derived from the Enlightenment, of belief in the perfectibility of man and society.[6] By contrast, Witte and Stolypin, leading government ministers, each eventually holding the post of prime minister (Witte 1903-6 and Stolypin 1906-11) and both loyal to the principle that Russia required and that God had willed a strong state, recognised the need for political and social reform to restore stability to Russia after 1905. Witte's advice, to which Nicholas turned in desperation amidst the upheavals of 1905, was crucial to the decision to issue the October manifesto. And without Stolypin's 'drive and persistence' and 'commanding presence', a recent historian has written, the state's policy of intertwined reform and repression in the years 1906-11 is 'inconceivable'.[7]

Still, the tsar retained, even after 1905, substantial power. He alone appointed and dismissed ministers and he, not the Duma, controlled the bureaucracy, foreign policy, the military and the Church. He retained, by law, veto power over all legislation, the right to dissolve the Duma and hold new elections, and the right to declare martial law. He felt growing regret in his final years for the concessions he made in 1905-6 under duress and did much to undo them. Indeed, it has been argued persuasively that Nicholas II (supported and encouraged by prominent conservative figures) was ultimately a force for instability in the emerging political order of late Imperial Russia. While ministers like Witte and Stolypin and the legislators of the Duma worked to construct a stable polity around the ideal of a modernised autocracy ruling according to law and over a society of citizens, Nicholas II was at the forefront of those embracing a political vision that sought to resituate legitimate state power in the person of the emperor. To put this in more political-philosophical terms, 'rather than accommodating the monarchy to the demands for a civic nation', Nicholas II and his allies 'redefined the concept of nation to make it a mythical attribute of the monarch'.[8]

As a symbolic and performative accompaniment to these ideas, and to quite tangible policies of authoritarian control, the last tsar engaged in an elaborate effort to demonstrate publicly that the legitimacy and even efficacy of his immense authority was grounded not in constitutional relationships with various constituencies of the nation or the empire but in his own personal virtue (devotion to duty, orderliness in private and public life, familial devotion and love, religious piety) and in the mystical bond ofmutual devotion and love uniting tsar and 'people' (by which was meant mainly those whom Nicholas called the 'true Russian people'). Public rituals of national 'communion' and 'love', often gesturing to an idealised pre-modern past, proliferated, such as Easter celebrations in the pre-Petrine capital of Moscow signalling the tsar's communion with the nation and tradition, or journeys of remembrance and dynastic nationalism into the Russian heartland during the 1913 tercentenary of Romanov rule, or the ceremony on Palace Square at the outbreak of war in 1914 when Nicholas, with tears in his eyes, exchanged ritual bows with his people.[9]Nicholas II was not alone, of course, in imagining Russia's salvation to lie in an ideal of the paternal state standing above society - free and independent of government bureaucracy, fractious political parties, selfish social groups and individuals and even law itself- to defend the common good, care for the poor and downtrodden and advance principle over vested interest. Ultimately, the official embrace of this vision of the Russian political nation would contribute to the rejection of monarchy in 1917. But its echoes would also play a part in how state and party were envisioned later in the twentieth century.

Intellectuals and ideologies of dissent

Russia's growing class of educated men and women offered a wealth of alter­native visions of power and society to those of the monarch, the state and their conservative supporters. In spirit, many educated liberals and radicals in the early twentieth century felt themselves to be heirs to the traditions of the nineteenth-century 'intelligentsia', a group distinguished not by education alone, nor even by a shared interest in ideas, but by a cultural and political identity constituted in opposition to a repressive order and in the pursuit of the common good and universal values. Like these forebears, they often suf­fered as individuals for daring to criticise and act against the established order. Still, they managed to meet together, to form clandestine 'circles' (kruzhki), and to organise a series of oppositional parties, ranging from liberals to Social Democrats and neo-populists to militant communists and anarchists.

On the moderate Left, liberals were divided over strategy and tactics - reflected especially in the post-1905 split between the Left-liberal Constitu­tional Democratic Party (Kadets) and the relatively pro-government Union of 17 October (Octobrists). But they shared a common set of goals for trans­forming Russia into a strong and modern polity: the rule of law replacing the arbitrary will of autocrat, bureaucrats and police; basic civil rights (free­dom of conscience, religion, speech, assembly) for all citizens of the empire; a democratic parliament (Kadets viewed the system established after 1905 as incomplete); strong local self-government (many liberals were involved in the zemstvo councils of rural self-government or in city councils); and social reforms to ensure social stability and justice, such as extension of public edu­cation, moderate land reform to make more land available to peasants and protective labour legislation. They also believed strongly in the need for per­sonal moral transformation, making individuals into modern selves inspired by values of individual initiative, self-reliance, self-improvement, discipline and rationality. In many respects, like the monarchy itself, liberals viewed them­selves as acting for the national good rather than the interests of any particular class. This was especially true of the Kadets, who vehemently insisted that they were 'above class' and even 'above party'. The good they sought to promote was, of course, the good of the individual - a liberal touchstone - but also the development of a national community founded on free association and patriotic solidarity.[10]

Socialists shared the democratic goals of the liberals as well as the philo­sophical logic underpinning liberal democracy: that political and social change ought to promote the freedom and dignity of the human person by removing the social, cultural and political constraints that hindered the full develop­ment of the individual. But socialists approached this ideal with the radical insistence that only a transformation root and branch of all social and political relationships, and of the values informing these, could set Russia on the path to true emancipation. Indeed, dissatisfied with the anomic logic of liberal indi­vidualism (though many Russian liberals also worried about the dangers of excessive individualism), socialists favoured linking self-realisation with com­munal notions of solidarity and interdependent interests.

Various underground socialist organisations emerged in the early years of the century. Populist socialists were organised after 1901 around the Socialist Revolutionary Party (the SRs) andpartly represented after 1906 by the Trudovik (Labourist) faction in the State Duma. Ideologically, they viewed the whole labouring narod, the common people, as their constituency, and socialism as a future society embodying, above all, the ethical values of community and liberty. Marxists, who were increasingly numerous and influential and organised around the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, believed they possessed a more 'scientific' and rationalistic understanding of society and history. Socialism, for Marxists, was the historically certain, and more rational and progressive, successor to capitalism, and the industrial proletariat alone, not some idealised 'people', was the social class whose interests and efforts would bring this new order into being. This simple divide between populists and Marxists inadequately suggests the intricate divisions among socialists, though. Populists differed among themselves over issues such as the use of terror, the actual vitality and theoretical importance of peasant communalism and whether and on what terms to ally with liberals. Marxists differed among themselves - often with considerable rancour - over questions of organisation (how centralised and authoritarian the party should be), tactics (such as whether workers should ally with other classes), strategy (whether Russia was ready for socialism) and philosophy (e.g. the relative importance of ethics and revolutionary faith versus scientific reason).[11]

The intellectual differences between two leading Marxists, Vladimir Ul'ianov (known by his party pseudonym Lenin) and Iulii Tsederbaum (Martov), illustrate some of the diversity and complexity that lay behind party programmes. In many ways, Martov fitted well into the long history of the Russian intelligentsia, especially in his passionate preoccupation with the idea of justice. When he discovered Marxism, he found compelling not only Marxist arguments about the natural progress of history and the centrality of the work­ing class but the moral idealism embedded in this rationalist ideology: an end to inequality and suffering, injustice and coercion and Russia's humiliating back­wardness as a nation.[12] Lenin also approached politics with passion, but his was a passion more of reason than of moral sensibility, focused more on the goal of liberation than on the uplifting process of struggle. Indeed, Lenin repeatedly made it clear that he despised the political moralising so common to Russian socialism. For Lenin, the revolution was a matter of rationality and discipline not the romantic heroism of the struggle for justice, goodness and right.[13]

These different sensibilities were reflected in different approaches to key political notions. Everyone, it seemed, from liberals to radical socialists, embraced democracy. Martov - and perhaps most Russian Marxists in the pre-war years - was attracted to Marxism precisely for its democratic promise. They believed that political representation and civil freedoms were goods in themselves, though necessarily needing to be supplemented by the democ­racy of social rights. Lenin, by contrast, was among those who embraced social and political democracy as a goal, but not for its own sake. Rather, Lenin argued, Bolsheviks viewed political democracy as having mainly instru­mental value, as enabling workers more effectively to fight for socialism. Along similar lines, while Martov was among those who believed strongly in what might be called the consciousness-raisingbenefits ofthe experience of struggle (hence his opposition in 1903 to Lenin's advocacy of a vanguard party limited to disciplined professional revolutionaries), Lenin emphasised the centrality in raising consciousness of imposed rationality and leadership. As he famously argued in What Is To Be Done (1902), left to themselves workers were unable to see beyond the economic struggle and understand that their interests lay in overthrowing the existing social system.[14] If socialists were to do more than 'gaze with awe . . . upon the "posterior" of the Russian proletariat',[15] Lenin wrote in his characteristically biting style, it was necessary to create a party (and later critics would suggest that this was the kernel of Lenin's approach to the Soviet state) of full-time revolutionaries to direct the mass movement, who embodied the full consciousness that the masses lacked and were obe­dient to party discipline. In practice, these differences were not absolute. By the eve of the war, both parties were to be found playing large and similar roles among workers: helping to establish and lead workers' organisations and spreading socialist ideas among workers, students and others through underground publications and everyday agitational talk. And the results were impressive. Though these parties had relatively few members, and large num­bers of workers could not understand what they saw as the pointless and harmful squabbling between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, the influence of socialist ideas among workers, students and others was considerable. But as the popularity of socialism grew, so did the variety of motivating logics and approaches.

Across the political spectrum, from liberals to socialists, the 'woman ques­tion' was an essential, if frequently unsettling, issue in debates about demo­cratic change in Russia. If, as most agreed, democratic change meant creating a society in which the dignity and rights of the individual were respected and individuals were able to participate actively in the public sphere, the sit­uation of women was clearly in dire need of change. Women were widely viewed as morally and intellectually different and weak and women's civic roles and personal autonomy were circumscribed. Since the mid-1800s, how­ever, such patriarchalism had been persistently challenged by activist men and increasingly by publicly active women. Often paired with programmes for the emancipation of all people, activists targeted the particular humiliations women endured: sexual harassment, domestic violence, prostitution, lack of education, lack of training for employment, lower wages, undeveloped social supports for maternity and childcare, lack of legal protections and civil rights.

The movement for women's emancipation gained particular force and urgency during and after the 1905 Revolution, as women, though not given the vote, were often heard at meetings appealing for respect as human beings and for equal rights as citizens, and as a series of women's organisations and publications emerged to promote the cause. As a movement, the struggle to improve the situation of women was as divided as the larger political world; and it divided that world. On the one hand, many activists fought directly to overcome women's inferior status, and spoke of the particular sufferings of women in public and private life. On the other hand, many women, especially socialists, argued that feminism, which focused on women's particular needs, risked fragmenting the common cause, which must be to free all people from the restrictions of the old order. Only as part of this 'larger' cause, it was said, could women be emancipated.[16]

In the public sphere

For women and men, the expansion of the public sphere in the late 1800s and early 1900s was one of the most consequential developments in Russian life. The growth of this critically important civic space - the domain of social life in which organised associations mediate between the individual and the state, citizens communicate with one another on matters of general interest, public opinion takes form and the state is restrained in its influence and com­pulsion - dramatically altered the Russian social and cultural terrain, indeed the very texture of individuals' lives, but also had enormous implications for politics. Arguably, it provided the essential foundation for the possibil­ity of democratic civil society. The 1905 Revolution unleashed civic opinion and organisation, enabled further by the partial civil rights promised by the reform legislation that followed, but the history of civic organisations and pub­lic opinion was older. Especially since the late 1800s, voluntary associations had proliferated, including learned societies, literacy and temperance soci­eties, business and professional associations, philanthropic and service organi­sations, workers' mutual assistance funds and varied cultural associations and circles. Already before the de facto press freedoms of 1905 and the freeing of the press from preliminary censorship in 1906, the printed word, includ­ing mass-circulation daily newspapers and a burgeoning book market, had become a powerful medium for disseminating and exchanging information and ideas. In addition, universities, public schools, law courts, organisations of local rural and urban self-government and even the Church stood on the uncertain boundaries of being at once state and civil institutions, though offer­ing an important space for individuals to engage with the emerging public life.[17]

This public sphere could not have emerged with such intensity had it not been for the ongoing economic and social modernisation of the country. Material and social life were changing: the industrial sphere expanded, evi­denced by rising numbers of factories and other businesses and innovations in technology; the size and populations of urban areas grew; a commercial sphere expanded, marked by increasing numbers of consumer goods and new forms of commerce such as department stores and arcades, which tangibly transformed everyday material life; growing also was a middle class of urban professionals, business owners, salaried employees and others; literacy spread, as did the regularity of reading, creating a growing market for the expanding press; and social and geographic mobility made Russia in many ways a country on the move as peasants, workers and the educated journeyed between city and country, between various places and types of work and between occupations and even class levels.

The daily press was a chronicle of the unsettling and inspiring uncertainties of modern life in Russia. Its images of everyday public life were often posi­tive and confident: stories of scientific knowledge and technical know-how; entrepreneurial success and opportunities for upward mobility; the increas­ing role of institutions of culture (museums, schools, libraries, exhibitions, theatres); the growth ofcivic organisation (scientific, technical, philanthropic); and the civilising effects of the constructed beauty and ordered space of city streets and buildings. But the daily press was also filled with a sense of the disquieting forms and rhythms of the modern: a widespread tendency to esteem material values over spiritual values; the egoistic and predatory prac­tices of the growing class of 'capitalists'; frightening attacks on respectable citizens and civic order by 'hooligans'; the pervasive dangers and depredations of con-artists, thieves and burglars; sexual licentiousness and debauchery; prostitution, rape and murder; an epidemic of suicides; widespread public drunkenness; neglected and abandoned children (who often turned to street crime and vice); and spreading morbidity - especially diseases such as syphilis that were seen as resulting from loose morals, or tuberculosis or cholera that were seen as nurtured by urban congestion.[18]

Sex, consumption and popular entertainment were widely and publicly discussed as touchstones for interpreting the meaning of modern public life and the nature of the modern self. Civic discussion of sex often propounded liberal ideals about the individual: personal autonomy, rights to privacy and happiness and the rule of law. But these accounts also dwelled on the need for sexual order, rationality and control, reflecting anxieties about unleashed indi­vidualities.[19] The emergence of a consumer culture similarly impressed many observers as both desirable and disconcerting. Department stores and glass- covered arcades (passazhi) displayed goods and objects of visual pleasure and desire which stimulated notions of being fashionable and respectable - that is, modern materialist and consumerist identities - but also confused identities and raised the spectre of threatening self-creation.[20] Urban mass entertain­ments particularly disturbed the 'culturalist' intelligentsia as the consumption of crass and debasing pleasures rather than the acquisition of uplifting knowl­edge or the improvement of taste. City spaces filled with opportunities for unenlightened public pleasure: music halls, nightclubs, cafes chantants, 'pleasure gardens', cheap theatres and cinemas. These entertainments were especially aimed at the growing urban middling and working classes. Reading tastes often seemed hardly less uplifting. Newspapers 'pandered to crude instincts' with stories of 'scandal' and sensation, while 'boulevard' fiction, often serialised in the press and made available in cheap pamphlets, eroded traditional popular and national values in favour of preoccupations with adventure, individual daring (and suffering), exotic locales and behaviours, material success (or loss) and a pervading moral cynicism.[21]

The unsettling and contradictory character of modern life was also visible in art and literature. One can speak of a pervading 'decadence' in Russian expressive culture, a characteristic sense of disintegration and displacement, even a foreboding, though also an imaginative anticipation, of an approach­ing 'end' that might also be a beginning. Some embraced a melancholy mood. Some turned to an escapist aestheticism: the old world was dying, but at least it should be a beautiful death. Some nurtured a cosmopolitan 'nostalgia for world culture' or turned back to Russia's 'pure' national tradi­tions. Some dwelled on the self as both a new source of meaning and a dark source of danger. And some, especially the 'Futurists', engaged in iconoclastic rebellion in the name of the new and the modern, evoking in their works the noise of factories and of the marketplace and the textures of iron and glass, and challenging 'philistine' tastes and perceptions with bizarre public behaviour and 'trans-rational' words and images meant to herald the new and transcendent. [22]

Sacred stories

The final decades of the imperial order in Russia were also marked by spiritual searching and crisis - a complex upheaval often reduced historiographically to the simple image of a 'religious renaissance'. These were years during which many educated Russians sought to return to the Church and revitalise their faith. But even more evident were non-conformist paths of spiritual search­ing known as God-Seeking. Writers, artists and intellectuals in large numbers were drawn to private prayer, mysticism, spiritualism, theosophy, Eastern reli­gions and other idealisations of imagination, feeling and mystical connections between all things. A fascination with elemental feeling, with the unconscious and the mythic, proliferated along with visions of coming catastrophe and redemption. The visible forms of God-Seeking were extensive. A series of 'Religious-Philosophical Meetings' was held in St Petersburg in 1901-3, bring­ing together prominent intellectuals and clergy to explore together ways to reconcile the Church with the growing if undogmatic desire among the edu­cated for spiritual meaning in life. Especially after 1905, various religious soci­eties arose, though much of this religious upheaval was informal: circles and salons, seances, private prayer. Some clergy also sought to revitalise Ortho­dox faith, most famously the charismatic Father John of Kronstadt, who, until his death in 1908 (though his followers remained active long after), empha­sised Christian living and sought to restore fervency and the presence of the miraculous in liturgical celebration.[23]

One sees a similarly renewed vigour and variety in religious life and spiri­tuality among the lower classes, especially after the upheavals of 1905. Among the peasantry we see widespread interest in spiritual-ethical literature and non-conformist moral-spiritual movements; an upsurge in pilgrimage and other devotions to sacred spaces and objects (especially icons); persistent beliefs in the presence and power of the supernatural (apparitions, posses­sion, walking-dead, demons, spirits, miracles and magic); the renewed vitality of local 'ecclesial communities' actively shaping their own ritual and spiritual lives, sometimes in the absence of clergy, and defining their own sacred places and forms of piety; and the proliferation of what the Orthodox establishment branded as 'sectarianism', including both non-Orthodox Christian denomina­tions, notably Baptists, and various forms of deviant popular Orthodoxy and mysticism.[24] Among urban workers, the often-described decline in Orthodox belief and practice was complicated by a rise of alternative forms of religious faith and enthusiasm. This popular urban religious revival included work­ers' gatherings in taverns to talk about religion; followers of individual mystics and healers; adulation of Lev Tolstoy as well as popular Tolstoyan movements; the charismatic movement known as the 'Brethren' (brattsy), which attracted thousands of workers to an ideal of moral living, to the promise of salvation in this life and to impassioned preaching; and growing congregations of reli­gious dissenters and sectarians. The Orthodox Church hierarchy frequently branded these and other movements as sectarian, and the Church actively tried to restore its influence among the urban population by challenging 'sectarians' to debates, attacking them in a flurry of pamphlets and on occasion (as against the Brethren) anathematising and excommunicating the most visible

leaders.[25]

While these organisational forms reveal the shape and extent of Russia's religious upheaval, its significance as a sign of these unsettled times and of the widespread search for answers and meanings is most evident in the words and images individuals created to speak of what troubled them spiritually about the world and of what they desired and imagined. The strong desire in these years to reinterpret the world was joined by a desire to re-enchant it as well. In 1902, Aleksandr Benua (Benois), the leader of the World of Art movement, noted the widespread feeling that the reigning 'materialism' of the age was too 'astonishingly simple' to answer essential questions about the meaning of the world, too shallow in its answers to satisfy what people needed, and was therefore being replaced, in all the arts, by the 'mystical spirit of poetry'.[26] Symbolist writers like Andrei Belyi sought to penetrate appearances to discover the spiritual essences of things (and of the human self), by exalting imagination, elemental feeling and intuition. Many visual artists, especially after 1905, were similarly drawn towards a spiritual understanding of the power and function of images.[27] In intellectual circles, a sensation-creating volume of essays appeared in 1909 under the title Vekhi (Landmarks or Signposts), authored by a group of leading left-wing intellectuals, mostly former Marxists, who bluntly repudiated the materialism and atheism that had dominated the thought of the intelligentsia for generations as leading inevitably to failure and moral disaster. At the same time, some writers were drawn to a new Messianism, an apocalyptic (if often dark) faith in a coming catastrophe out of which a great redemption would come. The discontent with materialism and the allure of religious and mystical perceptions and imagination reached into unexpected places in these years. Among Marxists, a group associated with the Bolshevik Party (including the future leader of the Proletkul't, Aleksandr Bogdanov, the future commissar of enlightenment, Anatolii Lunacharskii, and the popular writer Maxim Gorky) elaborated in 1908-9 a re-enchanted Marxism known as God-Building. Feeling the cold rationalism, materialism and determinism of traditional Marxism inadequate to inspire a revolutionary mass movement, they insisted on the need to appeal to the subconscious and the emotional, to recapture for the revolution, in Lunacharskii's words, the power of 'myth', in order to create a new faith that placed humanity where God had been but retained a religious spirit of passion, moral certainty and the promise of deliverance from evil and death.[28]

Proletarians

Marxists tended to take an essentialist view of the proletariat: this was the class destined by the logic of history to emancipate humanity from injustice and oppression. No Marxists, least of all the Bolsheviks, believed this would happen until workers were brought to 'consciousness' (soznatel'nost') of their historical situation and mission. But the content of consciousness was not in doubt: a conscious 'proletarian' understood the dehumanising essence of capitalism, felt a sense of collective identity with his class, and recognised the destiny of workers to overthrow capitalism through revolution in order to create, for all humanity, a socialist order. This imagined proletariat was not entirely a fantasy. But the real history of workers in the early twentieth century was considerably more complex. Ultimately, both this ideological construct and the actual conditions and visions of workers would play a critical part in the history of the revolution and the Soviet experiment.

The most visible (and, for many, troubling) sign of Russia's industriali­sation and urban development since the late 1800s was the great visibility of large numbers of industrial workers (42-3 per cent of the populations of St Petersburg and Moscow in 1910-12, and 49 per cent in Baku, for example), uprooted from the countryside and left to fend for themselves in the harsh world of the city.[29] Working conditions had been eased in the late 1800s by labour legislation, which established a factory inspectorate, regulated female and child labour and limited the working day. But conditions remained difficult: overcrowded housing with often deplorable sanitary conditions, an exhaust­ing work-day (on the eve of the war a ten-hour work-day six days a week was the average), widespread disease (notably tuberculosis) and high rates of premature mortality (made worse by pervasive alcoholism), constant risk of injury from poor safety conditions, harsh discipline (rules and fines, at best, but sometimes foremen's fists) and inadequate wages. The characteristic ben­efits of urban industrial life could be just as dangerous from the point of view of social and political stability. Acquiring new skills, even simply learning to cope with city life, often gave workers a sense of self-respect and confidence, raising desires and expectations. The elaborate commercial culture of early twentieth-century Russian cities nurtured desire and hope as well as envy and anger. And urban workers were likely to be or become literate, exposing them to a range of new experiences and ideas. Indeed, the very act of reading and becoming more 'cultured' encouraged many commoners to feel a sense of self-esteem that made the ordinary deprivations, hardships and humiliations of lower-class life more difficult to endure.[30]

The most visible sign of worker discontent was strikes and, beginning in 1905, the growth of trade unions. The upheavals of 1905, in which economic and political demands were constantly interconnected, were unprecedented in vehemence and scale, though foreshadowed by widespread strikes in 1896-7, 1901 and 1903. During 1905, strikes broke out in almost every industry and every part of the country, and workers began forming illegal trade unions, which, along with strikes, were legalised in the wake of the October manifesto (strikes in December 1905, unions in March 1906). The government clearly hoped (and radicals feared) that legalising strikes and unions and allowing workers to vote for representatives to the new State Duma would give workers effective channels for redressing their grievances, thus leading the labour movement onto a more peaceful path. Initially, this appeared to be precisely what hap­pened. Thousands of workers joined the legal unions and concentrated on attaining better economic conditions. The leaders of these unions, and many members, became increasingly cautious, so as not to give the government an excuse to close the unions down. And, among the socialist parties, work­ers tended to choose as their leaders Mensheviks, who emphasised, for the short term, legal struggle for realisable and mainly liberal-democratic gains. This moderation of the labour movement might have continued had not the tsarist government acted in ways that aggravated workers' political attitudes. Although trade unions were legal, they were under the close surveillance and control of the police, who regularly closed meetings, arrested leaders and shut down union papers. Meanwhile, employers endeavoured, often with success, to take back economic gains workers had made in 1905, and to form their own strong organisations. When the strike movement revived in 1910-14, workers' frustrations were sharply visible, not only in the stubborn persistence of strik­ers and the revival of political demands but also in the growing popularity of the more radical Bolsheviks. In the autumn of 1912, Bolsheviks won a majority of workers' votes to the Duma in almost all industrial electoral districts. Many unions elected Bolshevik majorities to their governing boards.[31]

It bears remembering that social and political discontent is a social and cultural construction as much as a natural response to material conditions, tangible relationships or political restrictions. Workers had to see their con­ditions not as the inevitable lot of the poor but as correctable wrongs. They needed a language of justice and right and a belief that alternatives existed. Workers constructed such a vocabulary partly out of traditional sources of moral judgement: religious ethics and communitarian values, for example.

But fresher sources abounded. Magazines, newspapers, pamphlets and books widely disseminated ideas about universal rights, the natural equality of all human beings and the mutability of every political order. Whatever the sources, notions of justice, entitlement and progress were becoming unset- tlingly widespread among Russia's urban poor. These arguments were evident, for example, in demands presented during strikes. Beside appeals for economic or political change (higher wages, shorter hours, civil rights), many demands focused on what have been termed 'moral issues' (or 'dignity issues'). The most obvious of these was the demand for 'polite address'. But even ordinary economic demands for higher wages, shorter hours and cleaner lavatories, were interpreted as necessary so that workers might 'live like human beings'. In the trade union press, we often hear workers speaking of their identity as 'human beings' not 'machines' (or 'slaves' or 'cattle') and their consequent human 'rights'. Popular discontent, of course, was not simply about justice, democracy and rights. It also contained a great deal of anger and resentment. Once aroused to open protest, workers could express a desire to punish and humiliate, even to dehumanise, those who stood above them and whom they blamed for their sufferings. In this spirit, workers put foremen or employers in wheelbarrows, dumped trash on their heads and rolled them out of the shop and into the streets, or, less ceremoniously, beat them, occasionally to death. Plebeian lives encouraged the poor to dream of revenge and reversal as well as of justice.[32]

Evidence of worker 'consciousness' and protest hardly exhausts the story of working-class mentalities in the pre-war years. As any 'conscious' worker would readily admit (and often complained) too many workers were lost in a dire state of'unenlightened melancholy, impenetrable scepticism, and stagnant inertia'.[33] In practice, according to frequent accounts by dismayed working- class activists, this meant (and the talk here was mainly about men) too much alcohol, workers lying to their wives about wages squandered on drink (along with contempt for, and violence against, women), vulgar swearing, sexual licentiousness and crass tastes in boulevard fiction, the music hall and trashy popular cinema. Working-class women were viewed as victims in all this and as lost in 'backwardness' and 'passivity'. In a way, the cultural behaviour of ordinary workers could be seen as a type of defiance against elite moral norms and, by extension, a form of protest against class domination. But, activists constantly worried, such rebellion did not point to any alternative. On the contrary, it seemed a mark of disillusionment and 'impenetrable scepticism', of escapism and ephemeral pleasure at best.

In the countryside

The vast majority of Russians were peasants - at 85 per cent, Russia had the highest proportion of rural dwellers in Europe on the eve of the First World War.[34] A great deal of everyday peasant life had changed little since the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and even from earlier times. Work, community, family and religion remained the hallmarks of everyday life in the village. Subsistence family farming and handicraft manufacture were still central to the texture of everyday life, little changed by technological innovation. Village life was largely controlled by the commune (obshchina or mir), acting most often through its assembly of male heads of household. The commune held collective title to local peasant lands and made the major decisions about land use (what work should be done in each field, when to do it and by which meth­ods) and periodically, according to tradition, redistributed the holdings, which were divided into scattered strips, among peasant families on the basis of a calculus of hands to work and mouths to feed. The commune also carried out a range of fiscal, administrative and community functions: tax collection, mili­tary recruitment, granting or refusing permission to individuals to work away from the village, investigating and punishing petty crimes and misdemeanours, maintaining roads and bridges and the local church or chapel, dealing with outsiders and caring for needy members of the community. The village com­munity was not simply a structural fact of life, but also a cultural value, as can be seen vividly in the collective enforcement ofcommunity values and order - through rituals of charivari (vozhdenie), which publicly humiliated offenders against community interests and norms, and occasional collective violence, some of it startlingly brutal, against deviants and criminals. Community sol­idarity was a moral value as well as a way to survive in a harsh world. The family household remained the foundational unit of everyday peasant social and economic life. Within the family, the male head of household exercised enormous power: controlling, sometimes brutally, behaviour in his household, representing the family at assemblies of the village commune, and holding vil­lage administrative, police and judicial posts. In this patriarchal world, women were relegated to domestic and some farming work and to ceremonial life.

Religious life, in which women had the largest role to play, was an Orthodoxy (though Old Belief was strong in many areas of the country and sectarian­ism common) that complexly blended folk, magical and Church traditions. The timing and form of rituals and celebrations, belief in the pervasiveness of powerful unseen spirits and forces (God, saints, Satan, devils, sprites), reliance on holy men and women (from priests to folk healers), belief in the porous boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead and belief in the power of material objects to embody the sacred (relics, holy water, ritual gestures, icons, incantations, potions and herbs), all partook of both Ortho­dox traditions and what the Church and educated Russians sometimes called 'pagan' residues to create a lived folk Christianity (a vital, syncretic mix poorly captured by the notion of a 'dual-faith', or dvoeverie, in which an essential paganism was only superficially masked by a 'veneer' of Christian faith) that helped make the world meaningful to peasants and give them some measure of control.[35]

Evidence of profound changes in the experiences and expectations of peas­ants in these years is no less impressive. Most visibly, peasants were becoming increasingly engaged politically, especially in the wake of the 1905 Revolution. The abolition of serfdom had left peasants with only part of the land they believed by right belonged to them (it was a sacred verity that land must belong to those who work it), requiring peasants to pay rent or work for wages on the land of others. Noble landownership declined precipitously in these years, with peasant communes purchasing or leasing much of this land, and there is evidence that overall peasant poverty gradually diminished. Still, 'land hunger', as it was widely called, and the old dream of 'black repartition', the redistribution of all the land into the hands ofthe peasantry, remained stub­bornly compelling, nurtured by both the relative poverty peasants felt and their notions of moral right. 'Disturbances' and everyday forms of resistance con­tinued. In the midst of the national crisis of 1905-7, when the possibilities for change seemed high, peasants voiced their discontent and desires openly in petitions to the government and through new political organisations such as the All-Russian Peasant Union. They also took direct action, seizing land, taking and redistributing grain, pillaging landlords' property and burning manor houses.[36]

No less important, peasants were less and less a 'world apart', as they have sometimes been characterised, and more and more entwined in Russia's modern transformation. External changes facilitated this, though what most decisively altered peasants' everyday lives were their own actions and choices. After the turn ofthe century, the government moved towards removing some of the disabilities that marked peasants as a distinct and legally inferior social estate: collective responsibility for tax payment was ended in 1903, corporal punishment was abolished in 1904 and, in 1906, Prime Minister Petr Stolypin promulgated a reform that allowed individual peasants to withdraw from the commune and establish independent farmsteads, though relatively few did. Outsiders (educated reformers, teachers, clergy and others) were increasing in evidence in the villages, organising co-operatives, mutual assistance organ­isations, lectures and readings, theatres and temperance organisations. The rapid expansion of schooling and literacy and the massive rise in newspapers and literature directed at common people (the illiterate could hear these read and discussed in village taverns and tearooms) exposed peasants in unprece­dented ways to knowledge of the larger world. Changing economic oppor­tunities were especially important. Migration to industrial and urban work touched the lives of millions of peasants - the migrants themselves but also their kin and fellow villagers when these individuals returned to the country­side after seasonal or temporary industrial or commercial work, or at least on holidays, or after becoming sick or aged.

As peasants responded to these new experiences and to their own desires, everyday peasant life visibly changed. Many peasants, especially younger men and women who had been to the city, demonstrated new social mores (for example, in personal and sexual relations); began wearing urban-style dress, either bought in urban shops or hand-sewn on the model of pictures in magazines; and purchased, or at least desired, commodities such as clocks, urban furniture, stylish boots and hats, porcelain dishes and cosmetics. Espe­cially for peasants able to experience life beyond the village (through work but also reading), this new knowledge stimulated new desires and expecta­tions. What was said of peasant women who had worked in the city can be said of many individual peasants in these years whose lives were no longer confined by traditional spaces and knowledges: they were 'distinguished by livelier speech, greater independence, and a more obstinate character'. These changes brought pleasure, but also potential frustration and danger.[37]

Nation and empire

The fundamental question of Russian nationhood was also in flux, and under siege, in these years. As a political entity, of course, Russia was not a single ethnic nation but an empire that included large numbers of Ukrainians, Poles, Belorussians, Turkic peoples, Jews, Roma (gypsies), Germans, Finns, Lithua­nians, Latvians, Estonians, Georgians, Armenians and many others, some of whom could claim histories of once having their own states and others who were discovering and inventing themselves as nations. Non-Russian 'minori­ties', based on native language, were already a slight majority in the empire at the time of the 1897 census.[38] The empire's national complexity was no less visible in the strong presence, despite many restrictive laws, of ethnic and religious minorities in urban centres, especially in business and the profes­sions. But how was this imperial society understood? Historians have debated the utility of categories such as empire, imperialism, colonialism, orientalism, frontier and borderlands. At the level of state policy, certainly, it would be foolhardy to apply any single model: the treatment of Jews, Catholic Poles, Orthodox Ukrainians, Muslim Tatars or Uzbeks and 'pagan' Evenks, for exam­ple, was not uniform. Also, local policies, driven by imperial administrators and educators who often better understood local needs and possibilities, could differ from the policy directives coming from St Petersburg. And individuals were treated differently depending on their professions and their degree of assimilation. Most of all, as recent scholars have shown, state policy towards the empire's peoples, even in any single case, was 'enormously ambiguous, variable, uncertain, and contested'.[39]

On the one hand, the government of Nicholas II, and the tsar personally, actively promoted a renewed Russian nationalism that often had dire conse­quences for those defined as outside the national fold. Official images of the tsar's loving communion with his 'people' pointedly excluded non-Russian nationalities. Conversely, he blamed non-Russians (especially Jews) for the dis­turbances of 1905. For Nicholas II and his nationalist allies, it was time again to establish state and society on 'unique Russian principles', which meant 'that unity between Tsar and all Rus' ...as there was of old'. To speak of Russia as Rus', of course, was to offer up an idealised national past, a pure national Russia before imperial expansion or Westernisation, in place of the complex realities of Rossiia the empire.[40] In practice, the state had since the late 1800s been promoting an aggressive 'Russification' of non-Russian nationalities: insisting on Russian as the language of education and administration, promoting the settlement of ethnic Russians in the borderlands, supporting active Orthodox missionary work and building Orthodox churches throughout the empire, increasing quotas on Jews and some other groups in higher education, tolerat­ing and perhaps even instigating anti-Jewish violence ('pogroms'), reducingthe representation of non-Russian national parties in the Duma and suppressing radical nationalist parties and demonstrations.

The government's approach to empire and nation was not a simple matter of Russian nationalist revivalism and the repression of the 'Other', however. Indeed, 'Russification' could also be a policy of trying to assimilate various ethnic groups (or at least individuals) into a common imperial polity, and could mean in practice limited respect for local customs, education in native languages and an active if circumscribed role in administration or education for non-Russians themselves, all in the pursuit of a deeper integration. Imperial diversity was sometimes visibly celebrated in rituals such as the tsar's corona­tion or the arrival in the borderlands of imperial dignitaries.[41] But apparent celebration of the empire's many peoples was often entwined with a compli­cating ideology of national hierarchy and mission. Russian national identity, for many leaders of state and society, was constructed upon notions of Russia as a 'civilised' nation bringing 'order' and 'culture' to 'backward' peoples. Even the reforms of 1905-6, which stipulated religious tolerance and greater pos­sibilities for native leaders to play active roles in civic life, were conceived as part of the effort to integrate the various peoples of the empire into a coher­ent whole, marked by ideals of citizenship, of a non-parochial common good, and even of the universalism of empire.[42] Such talk clashed with other official discourses that relegated Russia's diversity to the shadows and focused on the mythic recovery of the purified national spirit of old Rus'. Still, the dominant official vision remained that of integration and uniformity. This was some­times elaborated in generous and inclusive ways; but most often, especially in the final years of the empire, the model (however contradictory and unstable) was a polity that was simultaneously national-Russian and imperial.[43]

The perspectives and actions of non-Russians themselves greatly compli­cated efforts to strengthen the empire. The late 1800s and early 1900s were a time ofwidespread cultural awakening and nationalist activism. Many groups - Poles, Ukrainians, Finns, Balts, Jews, Georgians, Armenians, Muslims and others - defined themselves as 'nations' and organised movements seeking cultural autonomy and perhaps an independent nation-state, though many activists (especially socialists) saw national revival and emancipation best served in common cause with Russians to fight for civil rights and democ­racy for all within the empire. Changes in the lives and expectations of non- Russians, however, were not limited to the history of political and nationalist movements. For many non-Russian communities, these were also years of social and cultural change and exploring of new possibilities and new identi­ties - probably more than we know, as historians are still only beginning to recover and retell these 'other' Russian histories.

Among Jews, for example, we see the rise around the turn of the century and after of schools promoting Hebrew or Yiddish (each with quite different national agendas) along with growing numbers of Russian-educated Jews; the emergence of a new Jewish literature, written in both Hebrew and Yiddish, and of a Jewish periodical press; increasing secular studies in the yeshivas; the rise of both mysticism and secularising trends within religious life; organised political movements of both Jewish socialism, which sought a transformed Russian Empire, and Zionism, which sought salvation in a new land; and large numbers of Jews living and working outside the Pale of Settlement, often negotiating complex new identities as 'Russian Jews'. Boundaries (not just of settlement but of culture) were far from stable or absolute in Jewish life in these years: we know, for example, that religious Jews were attracted to secular ideologies and that secular radicals might be attracted to prayer and even mysticism. What is certain is that it was no longer possible to speak of Jewish life in Russia, even in the Pale and least of all among the Jewish populations of cities like Kiev, Odessa and St Petersburg, as ghettoised and tradition-bound. Indeed, widespread anti-Jewish prejudice and hatred seemed less a timeless response to Jewish 'otherness' than a reaction to Russia's intensifying crisis and the increasing visibility of Jews in public life.[44]

We see a similar movement of cultural revival and reform, and of civic visi­bility and engagement, especially after 1905, among Russia's Muslims. Organ­isations proliferated - including libraries, charities, credit unions, national congresses and political unions and parties - expressing ideologies ranging from liberalism and socialism to Pan-Islamism and Pan-Turkism. The drive for cultural reform was especially strong. The Jadid (new-method) movement in Islamic education - which grew into a widespread movement of cultural and social reform, echoing trends throughout the Muslim world - sought to create a new modern Muslim steeped both in a revitalised and 'purified' Islam and in modern cosmopolitan knowledge. A major sign and catalyst of change was the growth of native-language publishing, including influential magazines such as the satirical Mulla Nasreddin from Tiflis, which elaborated a new hybrid discourse that blended the world-view of Western modernity (thus, for example, satirising Muslim 'backwardness' and advocating women's rights) with Muslim identities and values (though these too were to be debated

and renewed). [45]

Many non-Russian communities and individuals sought to articulate the meaning of their own 'national' selves and their relationships to others. As an ideal, many sought to be hybrids at once reconnected to their national and religious traditions, free to practise this culture and faith how they wished and imbued with a modern knowledge and identity. Others, just as fervently, resisted challenges to tradition and viewed reformers and those with hybrid ethnic and religious identities with hostility. The sense of crisis and opportunity that marked so much of the Russian fin de siecle was evident in the experience of being a non-Russian subject of the empire, as well as in state policy towards the nationalities 'problem'.

Fin de siecle

The contemporary sense that Russian life in the early years of the twentieth century had become deeply unstable and contradictory highlights the char­acteristic modernity of Russia's historical moment. Modern displacement - of people, traditions, the order of public spaces, identities and values - was everywhere. So was the modern ambiguity of pervading progress and col­lapse, possibility and crisis. Historians have long debated whether pre-war Russia was heading towards inevitable crisis and revolution or towards cre­ating a viable civil society and a reformed political order. This chapter has pointed to evidence for the visibility and plausibility of both narratives. But the focus has been beneath these surfaces to a still deeper contradictoriness. A working-class author, looking back on these years through the wake of the war, revolution and civil war that followed, described the experience of this age as ambiguously marked by 'unexpected pains and joys' and by 'tragedies of immense weight appearing at every step', as a time when 'people sicken, go mad from exhaustion, but really live'.[46] As this writer understood, as late as i9i4, the greatest tragedies and joys were still to come.

The First World War, 1914-1918

MARK VON HAGEN

The Russian Empire entered what became known as the First World War in the summer of 1914 as a Great Power on the Eurasian continent; four years later, the Russian Empire was no more. In its place was a Bolshevik rump state surrounded by a ring of hostile powers who shared some loyalty to the values of the Old Regime, or a conservative version of the Provisional Gov­ernment. The notable exception to this was Menshevik-dominated Georgia in Transcaucasia, which pursued a moderate but socialist transformation of its society. Although all the Central European dynastic empires (Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans, Germany and Russia) failed to survive the suicidal war, what succeeded the Russian Empire, namely, the Soviet socialist state, was unlike any other successor regime. Many of the origins of that Soviet state, and the civil war that did so much to shape it, can be traced to the preceding world war: new political techniques and practices, the polarisation of mass politics, the militarisation of society and a social revolution that brought to power a new set of elites determined to transform society even further while in the midst of mobilising for its own war of self-defence against domestic and for­eign enemies. The war demanded unprecedented mobilisation of society and economy against formidable enemies to the west and south. The industrial mobilisation alone triggered 'a crisis in growth - a modernisation crisis in thin disguise'.¹ But the economic crisis, with its attendant dislocations and disrup­tions, unfolded against the backdrop of an impressive societal recruitment; the involvement of millions of subjects in the war effort raised demands for political reform and exacerbated the crisis of the Old Regime.

The outbreak of war

The outbreak of war followed from the absence of any effective international mechanisms for resolving interstate conflicts on the European continent

1 Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 14.

after the decline of the system of 'balance of power'. The previous diplo­matic arrangements were predicated on no single power gaining overwhelm­ing influence over the affairs of Europe. That balance was disrupted by the rise of a powerful German Reich in Central Europe that was committed to a position of world power under its aggressive emperor, Wilhelm II. Faced with new threats on its western borders, Russia abandoned its traditional nineteenth-century royalist alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary for a new set of relationships, the Triple Entente, with the constitutional monar­chy of Great Britain and republican France, in the 1890s. The immediate casus belli was an Austrian ultimatum to Serbia after the assassination of the Habsburg heir, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914; Russia and Austria-Hungary were divided over other issues of growing contention as well, particularly the fate of Austrian eastern Galicia (today's western Ukraine), where pre-war tensions involved several sensa­tional espionage trials and fears of annexation. Influential German elites, for their part, developed plans to detach the western borderlands of the Russian Empire and reduce their eastern rival to a medium-sized and non-threatening power.

It was these western borderlands (today's Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) which witnessed the war's most devastating violence and whose social structures were unintentionally and dramatically transformed even before the revolutions of 1917 proper. This set of battle­grounds became known as the eastern front ofthe First World War and remains much less well known in English-language literature than the western front that pitted Germany against France and Britain. Transcaucasia (today's Geor­gia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) also became another important front in the war after the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in late October 1914. Here, too, the war strained local resources, destroyed moderate, nascent civil societies and pitted ethnic and social groups against one another in violent struggles for survival.

Although most elites in Russia (as was true for the other belligerent powers) dreaded the outcome of a major continental war, the proclamation of war in July 1914 was greeted in educated society with a wave of patriotism and some willingness to suspend the opposition to the obstreperous regime ofEmperor Nicholas II. Russian elites naively shared the certainty of their counterparts across the continent that the war would be over by Christmas. The call-up of soldiers to military service was less of a patriotic manifestation, with draft riots and other violence providing the first foretaste of the war's challenge to social cohesion.[47] The standing army of the tsar, 1,423,000, was augmented by 5 million new troops by the end of the year. From 1914 to 1916, the last year soldiers were conscripted for the imperial army, 14.4 million men were called to service; by 1917, 37 per cent of the male population of working age was serving in the army. (The Central Powers' numbers, including the armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria, reached 25,100,000, but were fighting on the two major fronts.) Despite the numerical advantages the Russian army enjoyed, its troops faced several disadvantages against the German forces; these included technical matters, such as relatively inadequate railroad lines to transport troops around the fronts, organisational problems caused by political conflicts at the top of the army (particularly between the supreme commander Grand Prince Nikolai Nikolaevich and the minister of war, General Sukhomlinov), and the general inefficiency and corruption of much of the Russian state apparatus. Still, the Germans' Schlieffen Plan called for initially concentrating the major military efforts on the western front, affording some small measure of respite to the Russians in the east.

Military campaigns: 1914-16

During the first months of the war, the eastern front formed north-south from the East Prussian marshes to the Carpathian Mountains. The Russian (First and Second) armies first confronted the Germans in East Prussia and defeated them at Gumbinnen. They were not allowed to savour their victory long before the Germans turned the tables on them at the Battle of Tannenberg, which ended in disaster for the Russians, who lost 90,000 prisoners and 122,000 casualties. The first battles revealed the scandalous shortage of rifles in the Russian army (one for every three soldiers). In a subsequent defeat, the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes, the Russians lost another 45,000 prisoners and 100,000 men killed and wounded. The pain of these defeats was partly allayed when the Russians defeated their Austrian counterparts in Galicia and occu­pied Lemberg (Lwow/L'viv/L'vov) and other important fortress cities for nearly eight months. Austria lost 300,000 men, including 100,000 prisoners, in a blow from which it never quite recovered. The Germans provided the new momentum on the side of the Central Powers with a successful push towards Russian Poland in October.

With a stalemate quickly developing on the western front, the German leadership was persuaded to make the eastern front a higher priority in 1915, a policy which bore fruit in the first major Russian retreat of the war. (It was also during the campaign against Warsaw that the Germans first used poison gas in the war.) The Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes in February ended in the Russians' retreat from East Prussia. After the fall of the fortress of Przemysl, the Russians lost 126,000 prisoners. Lemberg fell in June, Warsaw and Brest- Litovskin August and the German advance was halted only in November. In the meantime, Emperor Nicholas II, against the advice of most of his counsellors, dismissed his great-uncle in August and insisted on taking personal command ofhis armies. The army's admission that 500,000 soldiers had deserted during the first year of war, most of them into German and Austrian prisoner-of-war camps, effectively surrendering to the enemy, raised alarm among the military and political elite.

A new army Chief of Staff, General Mikhail Alekseev, was able to rebuild much of the shattered Russian forces and 1916 brought short-lived victory to the Russian side with the successful June-July offensive of General Aleksei Brusilov, one of the best generals in the Russian camp. Another set of devastat­ing Austrian defeats nearly took the Habsburg monarchy out of the war, but the Germans came to the rescue and Brusilov's advances had outrun his supply lines. Once again, casualties were staggering on both sides (1,412,000 Rus­sian casualties, including 212,000 POWs; 750,000 Austro-Hungarian casualties, 380,000 of them POWs) and contributed to broad demoralisation among both military and civilian populations. Though the war would drag on for another two murderous years, the Russian army, after the defeat of the Brusilov offen­sive, never again threatened the Germans' domination of Eastern Europe. It was the Germans' own defeat in 1918, combined with revolution at home and international pressure, that forced them to abandon the borderlands between Russia and the Reich, and even then they stayed on in various arrangements until Allied High Commissions could organise a transfer of power, for example, in the Baltic states.

The martial law regime and its consequences

On 16 July 1914, wide swaths of the Russian Empire were placed under martial law; this included not only the front-line regions and a broad band of terri­tory behind the lines. It also included the two capitals, Moscow and Petrograd (recently renamed to reflect a more patriotic Slavic identity against the German enemy and its culture). Military authorities had virtually unlimited authority to overturn the decisions of local civilian governments; Russia's tenuous achieve­ments in establishing some autonomy for civilian self-rule in the empire were effectively reversed in a matter of months.[48] The army set up a 'Chancellery for Civilian Administration' to co-ordinate its rule over the population, and the expansion of the power and authority of the army proceeded with little effective resistance. The Duma, which had already had its powers trimmed in Nicholas's determination to roll back the concessions he had made under pressure in 1905, suffered further limitations with the war and had virtually no power to influence the course of the war. Several wartime finance measures, especially the imposition of taxes, were passed by special enactments of the government, without consulting the Duma. Duma deputies at best could use the parliament as a tribune to voice their opposition criticism of the regime, but they had no power over the military budget, war aims or the conduct of the war. Interior Minister Nikolai Maklakov led the government's assault on the Duma; the government declared its intention to extend use of the Clause 87 of the Fundamental Laws, banned press coverage of meetings of the Council of Ministers and effectively abandoned the principle of parliamentary immu­nity. After a largely ceremonial session on 26 July the government refused to reconvene the parliament until it needed a state budget passed. The Fourth Duma met for three days (27-9 January 1915) and was dismissed again until November. And, thanks to the Stolypin coup d'etat of June 1907, the electoral franchise shaped a conservative, Russian nationalist majority in the Fourth Duma (which convened from 1912 to 1917) with virtually no representation from the non-Russian populations or the non-propertied classes. The war, far from saving the Duma as it was hoped by the moderate parties who declared the union sacree, instead offered the government an opportunity to reduce the Fourth Duma from a legislative to a consultative assembly.[49]

The military managed to free itself, however, even from the Petrograd bureaucracies, the Council of Ministers, and wilfully disregarded decisions passed by the State Council, the conservative upper house of the relatively new Russian parliament. For example, in 1915 Chief of Staff Nikolai Ianushkevich, in the name of national security or military strategic interests and evoking the war against Napoleon in 1812, ordered a scorched-earth policy to deny the Germans and Austrians any advantage from the reoccupied territories in Poland and Galicia, over the clear objections of the State Council. The scorched-earth policy made conditions much less tolerable for any future Russian reoccupation, but short-term considerations appeared to win out over longer-term rationale. That policy was also one more illustration of the increasing brutalisation of the war and its devastating impact on the civilian population that fell in its wake.

Occupation policy in the first months of the war was another site for the exercise of the military's new powers. Lemberg's military governor-general, Georgii Bobrinskii, oversaw the expulsion of enemy aliens (German and Austrian citizens) and the arrest and deportation of thousands of Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian community leaders whose loyalty was suspect to the interior of the empire, thereby giving rise to radical emigre circles in nearly every major European Russian city. Martial law authorities confiscated personal and communal property, particularly that of religious, educational and cultural institutions, and transferred them to new owners in violation of any due pro­cess or judicial norms. To staff the occupation administration, the Russian military authorities deployed hundreds of local bureaucrats and notables from the south-west provinces, a stronghold of Russian nationalist parties and move­ments shaped by a largely anti-Polish and anti-Jewish politics of Old Regime elite self-defence. And, under the cover of the Russian occupation, several polit­ically engaged hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, notably Archbishop Evlogii, launched a new campaign for the reconversion of the Galician population to its 'traditional' Orthodox faith from its Greek-Catholic apostasy.

Most Russian subjects in the interior provinces were provisionally spared these massive new intrusions into local social life, but when the retreat of 1915 threw the front lines and the martial law regime far to the east, they too got their first taste of the redrawn borders between civilian and military authority. Moreover, the retreat of the Russian army also brought into the imperial heartland millions of refugees (2.7 million in 1915, which grew to 3.3 million by May 1916) for whom little or no provision had been made by the imperial government. These refugees, not surprisingly, quickly overwhelmed local resources and their alien presence provoked pogroms.

Finally, the military authorities began experimenting with modern tech­niques of political control over the populations under their expanding author­ity, particularly in the area of surveillance. A 'Temporary Statute on Military Censorship' introduced a regime of press and postal controls after the outbreak of war. For the first time, the army began monitoring its soldiers' correspon­dence for signs of discontent or disloyalty to the dynasty and empire; the expansion of surveillance marked both a quantitative and qualitative change over any previous efforts ofthe tsarist bureaucracy. And after the Great Retreat of1915 and the re-emergence ofa vocal opposition in the Duma, the Ministry of Internal Affairs extended the surveillance practices to civilian society. The army also began to invest the first substantial resources in wartime propaganda to persuade the largely conscript army of the righteousness of the Russian cause. Russian conscripts were sent to the front with a vague message of pan-Slavic liberation of their suffering brothers under Habsburg rule overlaid with an insistence on Teutonic barbarism, illustrated, for example, by the atrocities committed by the retreating Hungarian (sic) forces in 1914. The war was cast as a fight for survival between German militarism and Slavic, Orthodox civil­isation. The rhetoric of titanic struggle contributed to the totalisation of the war and the sense that no sacrifice was too great for the cause.

The nationalisation of the empire

The wartime propaganda was one factor in the polarisation of large parts of the imperial population along ethnic or national lines. As in other multinational empires, ethnic and class identities frequently reinforced one another; ethnic groups occupied particular socio-economic niches in the imperial political economy. The relative ethnic peace of the pre-war period was shattered by the war and its policies of ethnic discrimination and militarisation, beginning in the borderlands and moving quickly to the centre.[50] Above all, any Russian subject with German ancestry became a potential target of 'patriotic self- defence' groups, which were vigilante groups who destroyed property and injured or killed individuals. This was true even in the capitals where maximum security measures were ostensibly inplace. In one particularly violent outburst, Moscow mobs destroyed 800 'German' businesses in May 1915. During the first months of the war, the Volynian German population, which had resided in the area as peaceable agriculturists for decades, was brutally uprooted and resettled inland by military order. This was not, by the way, a trend encouraged by the court, who rather feared its consequences, given the German ancestry of the Empress Alexandra and even more distant members of the Romanov family. The number of Baltic and other German nobles who served in the officer corps and throughout the imperial bureaucracy fed a steady stream of rumours about the court's signing a separate peace with the enemy or, more ominously, working for Russia's defeat by the Germans.

The favourite scapegoat of the Russian nationalist Right, of course, had been the Jews, whose often German-sounding names presented the political anti-Semites with all the evidence they needed of the Jews' divided or non­existent loyalty for the Romanov throne and the Russian Empire. The military command, too, was rife with vicious anti-Semites, beginning with Chief of Staff Ianushkevich, who banned Jewish employees in the public organisations that worked behind the front lines in support of the army. Anti-Jewish measures in occupied Galicia spread back into the rear as local military authorities, seemingly on their own initiative, refused to receive Jewish conscripts into their camps and fortresses. Despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of Jewish conscripts in the army, the tone set from above held that Jews were unsuitable soldierly material and incapable of genuine Russian patriotism. These already firmly held prejudices were not only given new life in the conditions of the martial law regime, but the 1915 retreat marked a historic break in imperial policy towards the Jews when the Pale of Settlement was informally ended. Hundreds of thousands of Jews from the western borderlands now sought shelter and new lives in interior provinces that had never seen any or such large numbers of non-Christian aliens. The military made the least provision for accommodating the Jewish refugees from the war zone and often put obstacles in their way.

As was true for nearly all the refugees who fled from the war zone to the relative security of the interior during the war, so, too, Jewish community leaders in the empire began to organise refugee relief for their co-religionists and co-ethnics.[51] These sorts of non-governmental organisations emerged to fill the gap left by the inadequate response of the imperial officials. (The Tatyana Society, symbolically headed by one ofthe emperor's daughters, made little dent in the massive social crisis provoked by the refugee problem.) But because most of these organisations defined themselves along ethnic lines, they had the unintended consequence of further reinforcing not just ethnic or national identities, but increasingly exclusivist ones. An applicant for aid had to demonstrate that she was a full-blooded member ofthe Jewish, Latvian, Polish or other nation. However much good these organisations were able to do for the refugee population, the presence of millions of uprooted human beings left them vulnerable to the often radical appeals of oppositionist parties. The politics of desperation - survival in conditions of economic disorganisation and loss of local control - found fertile ground among the displaced populations who had to leave behind their institutions of communal control and self- support.

The Poles were another popular target of the nationalist right, but the Russian government found itself in the curious position of competing with the Germans for Polish loyalties by promising ever-increasing measures of auton­omy and unification for a post-war Poland. The Germans started the rivalry by promising to restore a united Poland after the Central Powers' victory; the Russians followed quickly with their own promise to return Poland to the map of Europe under Russian protection, of course. The Germans, in support of their war aims of detaching the 'borderlands' from the Russian Empire, sup­ported oppositionist parties and movements in the League of Foreign Peoples of Russia that embraced Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, Georgians and many others. It was not only the Poles who took heart from this international rivalry for their loyalties; other nations of the empire, particularly the Ukrainians and Finns, began to point to the Polish example as appropriate for their aspirations too. When Nicholas II promised Armenians 'a shining future' on a visit to the Caucasus, they, too, expected dramatic changes in the post-war world. Still, many high-ranking military authorities, and their provisional allies in the public organisations, continued to hold Poles in considerable suspicion and resented the promises made to this periodically rebellious (and ungrateful) subject people. For those Russian nationalists who battled the Ukrainian (and, to a lesser degree, the Belorussian) national movement of the early twentieth century, it was the Poles who were primarily the instigators of any sense of distinct Ukrainian nationality that had emerged over the centuries. To 'win back' the Ukrainians from their Polonised culture and their Greek-Catholic faith, it was also necessary to battle the Roman Catholic and Polish influence in the western borderlands.

In support of the Polish 'project' of the Russian government, the army authorised the creation of separate Polish military formations early in the war. Elsewhere, exile communities in the Russian Empire, from Serbs to Czechs, were also offered the opportunity to organise their own national units to take part in the liberation of their people from the Germanic enemies. Before long, the Russian authorities were recruiting such national military units from among the numerous prisoners of war in Russian camps. Armenians similarly were permitted to organise volunteer military units after the entry of the Turks into the war, also in the name of national liberation. In retrospect, the arming of national liberation movements might have seemed a suicidal policy departure for the multinational Russian Empire, but it was following the practice of most of the belligerents. The Germans outfitted anti-Russian Finnish, Polish and eventually Ukrainian units; for the army of Austria-Hungary armed units manned by ethnic groups who had their counterparts across the border were not much of a departure, but a long-standing principle of military organisation, though much criticised. One of the consequences, nonetheless, of the Russian experiments along these lines was the rise of the politics of the nationalisation of the imperial army, which would split not only the army high command, but soldiers' organisations across the empire and civilian organisations and parties as well. During 1917, nearly every major non-Russian national movement began making claims for their own armed forces.

Although all the ethnic and confessional communities of the empire pro­claimed their solidarity with the emperor's war (even those many groups who had no formal representative in the Duma), the wartime climate of suspi­cion, espionage and treason spread from the western borderlands, where the fighting was most intense, into the rest of the empire. After the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war on the side of the Central Powers, the Turkic and Muslim populations of the empire came under increasing scrutiny, despite generally low levels of flight or oppositionist sentiment. The campaigns on the Caucasian front also soon resulted in a large influx of Armenian refugees from the Turkish forced march and massacre of 1915; most of them ended up in the first major city across the border, Baku, which was also home to Azeri Turks and others. Despite the efforts of the enthusiastically pro-Armenian Viceroy Vorontsov-Dashkov in Tiflis, the Armenians suffered new pogroms after their escape from the Ottoman Turks on the part of local Turks who were, similar to their counterparts in European Russia, largely overwhelmed by the influx of new populations without income, housing and community resources.

The most violent ethnic conflict of the war came in the Steppe region and Turkestan (today's Central Asia) in 1916. The army, haemorrhaging from the devastating losses during the first two years of fighting, insisted on a labour mobilisation of ethnic groups previously exempt from military service in June 1916. Throughout July and August the Turkic natives, largely Kazakhs and Kirgiz, rose up against the Russian and Ukrainian peasants who had only recently been resettled in the area as part ofStolypin's solution to the agrarian problem. Conflict over land use and other resources provided the broader context for the bloodletting, but the immediate excuse was the call-up to labour service. As many as 1,000,000 Kazakhs and Kirgiz lost their lives in the widespread pogroms or fled to Chinese Turkestan across the eastern border. Only in mid-January 1917 did Russian officials regain control over the region. In the meantime, 9,000 Slavic homesteads had been destroyed and 3,500 settlers killed in what looked very much like a conventional colonial war.

In short, the wartime policies and the economic hardships that were their mostly unintended consequences shaped a hardening of ethnic and national identities that quickly filled the ideological space after the abdication of Nicholas II and the discrediting of the monarchical principle. This dynamic is key to understanding the dismantling of the Russian Empire in 1917 and beyond.

The politics of war

The war shaped a dramatic transformation of political life in the Russian Empire. At one level, that of the autocrat, it was as if little had changed. Nicholas II seemed as determined as ever to undermine his own government in the name of defence of his autocratic prerogatives. But the poor perfor­mance of the Russian army in the first year of the war, and especially the 'Great Retreat' and munitions crisis of 1915, emboldened the opposition to challenge the court for new political reforms. The Progressive Bloc, a coalition of par­ties from progressive nationalists to Kadets, demanded among other things a government of confidence, amnesty for those convicted or deported without trial on religious and political grounds, the repeal of discriminatory measures against Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and religious minorities, concessions to Finland and the extension of local self-government - in other words, respect for the constitution. The emperor angrily prorogued the Duma and decided to leave for the front to replace his great-uncle as commander-in-chief. That decision was certain to introduce yet more confusion and lack of co-ordination in the government, as court intrigues and constant personnel replacements came to replace policy-making; the possibility of any co-operation with 'society', even in the Duma, seemed more and more remote.

Still, the moderate opposition was able and willing to cloak itself in the cause of patriotism in its conflict with the autocracy to a far greater degree than it had during the Russo-Japanese war. Oppositionist patriotism, in the form of a defence of Russia's Great Power status and the integrity of the empire, united the Right and Centre parties of the political spectrum. The Bolsheviks had cast the lone votes against war credits for the government in the Duma and were promptly arrested on charges of treason, and they were joined by the Mensheviks in a resolution condemning the war and the political and social order that had brought it about. The two largest socialist parties, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, quickly faced splits in their leadership over rival programmes of internationalism and the pursuit of immediate peace or more patriotic justifications for war in the name of com­bating German militarism. Here was born the ideology of defencism (and later, revolutionary defencism), a type of left-wing patriotism that would play a large role during 1917 and after.[52] The revolutionary parties, or at least a large part of their mass membership, thereby began to express an ideological justi­fication for the further pursuit of war and the mobilisation of society in that cause. Against a European-wide tradition of anti-militarism and international peace, this development portended a new era of revolutionary politics. Still, by 1917 society was poised to reorganise itself along lines of war and peace, even if those lines were frequently shifting.

Perhaps an even more important development of the early war years than the relative impotence of the legal political parties and the tacit dissolution of the Duma was the, in part, compensatory rise of what has been recently described as 'the parastatal complex',[53] semi-public, semi-state structures that were summoned into being by the tragically evident shortcomings of the government in outfitting its own war effort and by the political class of educated society demanding a role in this war effort. The largest and most influential of these organisations were: the union of zemstvos, the union of towns and the war industries committees. The zemstvos, organs of local self-government, were the first to propose an expanded role for society when they founded the All-Russian Union for the Relief of Sick and Wounded Soldiers. The Moscow provincial zemstvo convened an emergency session on 7 August 1914, and succeeded in enlisting thirty-five provincial zemstvos in its relief initiative. The tsar reluctantly acknowledged their offer, and ungraciously warned that their existence would be limited to the duration ofthe war. A loose agreement divided up the empire between the Red Cross and the War Ministry, on the one hand, and the union on the other, with the Red Cross serving the immediate front-line area. In fact, the unions' legal status remained unsettled throughout their existence because the Duma was unable to pass legislation regulating their activities; this extra-legal, or illegal, status, was characteristic of several of the agencies that emerged during the war years. This seeming disability notwithstanding, the expansion of zemstvo activities significantly transformed local government and forced open the franchise of the local bodies to include large numbers of the technical and professional intelligentsia. As an indicator of their semi-public, semi-state status, zemstvo doctors were exempt from the draft.[54] From their initial charge to aid in the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the front, the unions moved into army supply of food and clothing, civilian public health and food supply, refugee relief and other spheres.

As the war situation deteriorated, the parastatal complex expanded its activ­ities to help mobilise industry more effectively, in effect becoming an integral part of the military supply administration. In response to the munitions crisis of the first year of the war, patriotic business circles created the war industries committees in mid-1915 and brought together representatives of the govern­ment, business, public organisations and eventually labour, in a revolutionary departure from Russia's traditional administrative practices, but here, too, in the name of mobilising the economy more effectively for the war effort.[55]The issue of working-class participation forced the socialist parties to face squarely the dilemmas of defencism in late 1915 and they split over their tactics towards collaborating with the 'bourgeois' government. Initially, Menshevik Internationalists and Bolsheviks were in a minority in advocating boycott on the grounds that workers must not support a bourgeois government engaged in an imperialistic war. The leaders of the war industries committees them­selves, the industrialists of Moscow and the provinces, largely supported what they called 'healthy militarism' in the name of 'Great Russia'. Though they contributed significantly to the mobilisation of industry for the war, their efforts were frustrated by continuing governmental intransigence, their own disunity and growing social conflicts articulated by the workers' groups that formed throughout the country under their aegis. The imperial government even embarked on a brief experiment to integrate the war effort with the creation of a Special Council for Defence in August 1915.

Later initiatives of the parastatal complex extended to the food supply and the efforts to overcome the failings of the market in getting food to where it needed to be delivered. Ifwe add to this the previously mentioned organisations that arose to tend to the needs of refugees, we have a picture of tremendous, unprecedented self-mobilisation of society in the cause of war. This was as much a 'societalisation' of the military as it was a militarisation of society,[56] in which relations between the civilian and military elites were remarkably intimate. Characteristically, the chairman ofthe unions, Prince L'vov, was fond of extolling the 'unity ofthe army and the people', and the conflation of civilian and military spheres of the Russian state was proceeding at an alarming pace. The model for many in the public organisations was the wartime economy of Germany, but with less reliance on a far less-developed Russian market economy and an even larger role for the state than in Germany itself. As Nicholas II persistently undermined the legitimacy and functioning of the official state institutions, the military and the parastatal complex took over more and more of the state's actual functioning. In so doing, they also came to see themselves as a rival state and increasingly challenged the autocracy on its right to rule on the basis ofthat experience. Indeed, by 1916, the chairman ofthe Council of Ministers, B. V Shtiurmer, warned that Russia would soon have two governments; and in April 1916 the government banned all public congresses and conferences, but had to back down in the face of public pressure. Other government officials and members of the court also feared the ambitions of the war industries committees and saw in them a source of sedition, 'a second government' or even 'revolutionary organ'. That the centre ofboth the unions' activities and the war industries committees' most energetic opposition was in Moscow underlined the emerging split within the Russian ruling elite.

Revolution and the transformation of war

It was probably only the delegation from army headquarters that could have persuaded Nicholas II to abdicate 'for the sake of saving Russia and for the victorious ending of the war' in March 1917. And so the war that Nicholas had reluctantly embarked upon and almost wilfully mismanaged brought him down together with the dynasty itself. The Provisional Government that took power in Petrograd was nothing less than the new elite of the parastatal complex that had grown up in the interstices of government inefficiency dur­ing the wartime years. The new prime minister, Prince L'vov, was chairman of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos; Russia's first-ever civilian war minister, Aleksandr Guchkov, was chairman ofthe Moscow War Industries Committee. Other ministers in the new cabinet (Tereshchenko, Manuilov) shared similar wartime experiences in the public organisations. The new government pro­ceeded to dismiss local officials and replace them with 'their people', often introducing a great deal of confusion into local administration. At the same time, they appealed to 'society' to join with them in the new politics and to help consolidate the 'revolution'.

These appeals were heeded not only by educated society, but by organisa­tions that quickly mobilised to speak for labour, peasants, soldiers, Cossacks and any number of other groups that had felt excluded or marginalised in the imperial political order: urban and rural soviets, trade unions, factory com­mittees, workers' militias, food and land committees and others. They took advantage of the new freedoms to call organisational congresses and make their own claims to the revolution's agenda of transformation. The organisa­tions took on themselves very practical functions largely out of self-defence when the traditional forces of law and order lost control over the country, but they also articulated various ideologies of self-rule and self-government (and freedom from external authorities) in their local affairs. This was a new type of parastatal complex emerging in response to the perceived elite politics of educated society and its organisations.[57]

In particular, workers and peasants, parallel to and often overlapping with various national groups, began arming themselves against marauders in Red Guards, factory militias and partisan detachments in a further stage of the inter- penetration of society and army and in a militarisation of the class divisions of imperial society. At the same time, the new political class, both the Provi­sional Government representatives of educated society and the self-proclaimed spokesmen of democracy (the soldiers, workers andpeasants) in the Petrograd Soviet coalition of moderate socialist parties, appealed to the soldiers to sup­port the revolution and the new state. This change in attitude towards the army was remarkable and was the result of the wartime evolution of atti­tudes towards patriotism and the war itself on the part of nearly all the major political parties. Now that the autocracy was no more and the 'Revolution' was in power, society was expected to understand the need for continued mobilisation and sacrifice for the war against the German enemy. Revolu­tionary defencism permitted a good part of the socialist Left to join with the liberals of the Provisional Government in patriotic unity. The opposition to the war did not go away, however, and splits deepened among the socialists and anarchists between revolutionary defencists, internationalists who sought an honourable, democratic peace and a small but growing minority move­ment, led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who called for Russia's defeat and the radicalisation of the revolution.

The extension of political citizenship to the soldiers in Orders No. 1 and 2 in March 1917 marked a new stage in the conflation of political and military power in Russia. Soldiers made use of their new freedoms to demand democratic reforms of the army, including the election of soldiers' committees to run day-to-day affairs in units. Although intended only for the Petrograd garrison, this new military order spread throughout the disintegrating imperial army as soldiers entered political life as defenders of revolutionary Russia. There were alarming signs of the coming civil war in the army as well, as officers deemed insufficiently sympathetic to the revolution were executed by self-appointed revolutionary committees.

The return of emigres and exiles from years abroad or in Siberia contributed to a general radicalisation of politics towards the left. This included the rise of an important set of non-Russian national proto-elites who began to seize part of the local political resources that were available in the growing vacuum of central control. In Ukraine, Georgia, Latvia, Finland and elsewhere, the new elites began challenging the parastatal complex that had come to power in Petrograd over the terms of rule and governance. The Provisional Govern­ment preferred to postpone any restructuring of the former empire until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, but the continued deterioration of the centre's authority brought forth the response of escalating demands for autonomy for local decision makers. Here, too, soldiers played important, if sometimes conflicting, roles. The army, too, was not only not spared the gen­eral economic deterioration of the country, but probably suffered more and was asked a greater sacrifice. Deteriorating morale in the army led Aleksandr Kerensky, the prime minister of the third coalition Provisional Government, to conclude that a new offensive was the only solution to the further Bolshevisa- tion of the soldiers. That disastrous June offensive against the Central Powers marked the end of the imperial army as an institution and its transformation into a variety of successor militaries. Kerensky, incidentally, in a new stage of the conflation of military and civilian spheres, added to his responsibilities as prime minister those of war minister.

The failed offensive also weakened the resistance of the army high command to another proposed solution to the Bolshevisation of the soldiers, namely, the nationalisation of the imperial army. The largest such movement was among the Ukrainians, who argued that allowing soldiers to fight alongside their co-nationals would enable the military to mobilise their fighting spirit and better defend their native land. This movement spread to other non- Russian groups and frequently provoked counter-mobilisations on the part of self-identified 'Russian' soldiers. The conflicts of the early years of the war, especially in the prisoner-of-war camps, were now infiltrating the army itself. And the constant rhythm of army and national congresses and conferences and the reassignments and reorganisations that were agreed to in the name of these nationalisations led to further disorganisation in the military and the collapse of its fighting capacity. The deterioration of the generals' place in politics was captured by the failure of the coup by General Lavr Kornilov in August, which was itself intended as a move largely to reverse the decline in order and security.

The Bolsheviks who seized power in October 1917 proclaimed peace to all the belligerent powers and hoped that they would have a peaceful breathing spell to consolidate their new regime. The Germans, though they had supported just such a revolutionary outcome in Russia from the beginning of the war (and had sent the Bolshevikleader Vladimir Lenin back from his exile in Zurich across German-occupied Central Europe), saw an opportunity to break the stalemate of the previous year and advanced on the fledgling revolutionary dictatorship. The splits that had transformed the politics of moderate socialists now were replicated in the republic of soviets. Revolutionary defencism moved yet further to the left and allowed the mobilisation of war to be harnessed to a programme of socialist transformation of the nation. The hard-headed Lenin, however, had little initial faith in the demoralised soldiers to defend the latest version of the revolution; he fought hard for peace with the Germans. After they had occupied most of Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic coast, and only after he threatened to resign his party and state posts, did Lenin get his way. He bought peace with the surrender of the western borderlands to the enemy and was not forgiven for many years by patriotic Bolsheviks who wanted to carry the international revolutionary war to Europe and beyond. (Other Russian nationalist forces also considered the Brest Treaty a betrayal of'Russia's' national interests.)

Still, even the initial experience with the steamrollering German army dur­ing the winter of 1917-18 forced another epochal change on the Bolshevik Party, which had not only opposed the war but had also been opposed to a standing, professional army. In the spring of 1918, the party leadership began to jettison its objections to an effective, bureaucratic fighting force and its previous attach­ment to a democratic, militia force that would unite a democratic citizenry in self-defence. Though the Bolsheviks' real baptism by fire would come in the civil war fought against the Whites and other rivals, the German invasion of winter 1917-18 was their wake-up call and had been prepared by the ongoing realignment ofsocialism and war mobilisation that was captured by the slogan of revolutionary defencism and the general trend of conflating military and civilian spheres.

Moreover, the Bolsheviks carried further the innovations in political- military organisation that the Provisional Government had introduced in 1917 under Kerensky. Not trusting in the spontaneous politics of the soldiers but acknowledging their potential as cultural and organisational forces in the country, the Provisional Government created a 'Bureau for Socio-Political Enlightenment' and eventually an entire Political Directorate of the War Ministry to channel the considerable political energies of the soldiers in sup­port of the regime. The Bolsheviks waited only until April I9I8 before it replicated this experiment with its own Political Directorate of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. The conflation of civilian and military spheres that Kerensky attempted to push forward from the summer of 1917 was finally accomplished by the Bolsheviks in their creation of the Council of Defence. The new form of parastatal complex that had emerged over the course of 1917, the soviet network of local organs of self-administration, was attached to the new war mobilisation effort as the revolution spread across a war-weary population.

1918, the final year of war: occupation and intervention

After the winter assault of the Central Powers, the eastern front became the occupation regime of Germany and Austria-Hungary over the lands they acquired under the harsh and exploitative terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.[58]The war had taken its toll on the Central Powers, too, and the Russian Rev­olutions of 1917 had created new senses of possibility for oppositionist politi­cians there too. Not surprisingly, new revolutionary governments supplanted the dynastic monarchies very shortly after the capitulation of Germany and Austria-Hungary in November I9I8. In the intervening year, the two armies served to shield a series of recently proclaimed sovereign states along the western and southern borders of Bolshevik Russia. From Finland to Georgia the Central Powers appeared to have accomplished one of their most impor­tant wartime goals, the detaching of the borderland peoples (Randvolker) from the Russian heartland. Only now that a genuinely revolutionary regime was in place in Petrograd (soon to relocate to Moscow), Germany and Austria- Hungary (and the other major belligerent powers as well) began to fear the 'contagion' would spread to their own war-weary and weakened populations. Early in the war Lenin had called for the transformation of the international war into a global civil war. That threat came much closer to realisation due to the continued involvement of the major belligerent powers in the conflicts on the territory of the now former Russian Empire.

The war also continued by proxy when the Entente Powers recognised the Bolsheviks' leading rivals, the volunteer army of South Russia, as the legiti­mate successor government of Russia, especially after the Bolsheviks signed the peace treaty with the Central Powers and thereby threatened to give the Germans one more respite on the eastern front. In order to keep Russia in the war, mainly the British, French and American (soon joined by the Japanese) governments sent advisers, some arms and military equipment to the anti- Bolshevik forces who became known as the Whites. The core of the White movement was former imperial military men, but they were joined by repre­sentatives of the former civilian political elites of the Provisional Government, who had recently been Centrist-Left in their politics but who mostly moved rapidly to the right over the course of 1917. Among other platforms, they persisted in their patriotic defence of the integrity of the Russian Empire as they had earlier in the war. Because these anti-Bolshevik proto-states (the most important in the south of Denikin and Wrangel, Siberia under Admiral Kolchak and the north-east under General Yudenich) were forced to operate on the peripheries of the former empire, however, in borderland regions of ethnically very mixed populations (and certainly not necessarily dominated by Russian nationals), this politics undermined their cause, especially when the Bolsheviks (and even Woodrow Wilson) were promising varying degrees of national self-determination. Not surprisingly, the Whites made scant progress in uniting the anti-Bolshevik forces across the empire, notably the Cossacks, Ukrainians, Finns and Turko-Muslim peoples. In fact, they were barely able to sustain a united front among themselves over such fundamental issues as the conduct of the anti-Bolshevik war or how much of the recently overturned political and socio-economic orders to restore.

Even had the White military and political leadership been able to forge a more unified front, the Entente allies, too, quarrelled among themselves over the post-war order; both their leaders and their local representatives had little understanding of the local conditions or national political forces where they chose to intervene, and they also faced war-weary populations backhome and in their overseas colonies. The relatively insignificant material contributions of the foreign supporters of intervention in Russian affairs nonetheless helped to prolong the violence and fighting of the civil war for at least three years after the formal end of the world war itself in November 1918. And it provided the Bolshevik state with one of its most powerful founding myths, that of 'capitalist encirclement'. The Russian Soviet Republic declared itself an armed camp and began to build its own form of socialist state under the pressures of wartime mobilisation of economy and society. This was to be only one of many lasting legacies of this brutal, modern, total world war.

The Revolutions of 1917-1918

s. A. SMITH

On 23 February 1917 thousands of female textile workers and housewives took to the streets of Petrograd to protest against the bread shortage and to mark International Women's Day.[59] Their protest occurred against a background of industrial unrest - only the day before, workers at the giant Putilov plant had been locked out - and their demonstration quickly drew in workers, especially in the militant Vyborg district. By the following day, more than 200,000 workers were on strike. The leaders of the revolutionary parties were taken by surprise at the speed with which the protests gathered momentum, but experienced activists, who included Bolsheviks, anti-war Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and non-aligned Social Democrats, gave direction to the movement in the working- class districts.[60] By 25 February students and members ofthe middle classes had joined the crowds in the city centre, singing the Marseillaise, waving red flags and bearing banners proclaiming 'Down with the War' and 'Down with the Tsarist Government'. Soldiers from the garrison proved reluctant to clear the demonstrators from the streets. On Sunday, 26 February, however, they were ordered to fire on the crowds and by the end of the day hundreds had been killed or wounded. The next day proved to be a turning-point. On the morning of 27 February, the Volynskii regiment mutinied and by evening 66,700 soldiers had followed their lead. Demonstrators freed prisoners from the Kresty jail, set fire to police stations, 'blinded' portraits of the tsar and 'roasted', that is, set alight, the crowned two-headed eagle, symbol of the Romanov dynasty.[61]Despite orders from Tsar Nicholas II - with apparent support from the high command - to crush the uprising, the military authorities were unable to summon sufficient loyal troops to do so.

On 27 February pro-war Mensheviks associated with the Workers' Group of the War Industries Committee moved to assert their authority by calling on all factories and military units to elect delegates to a soviet, or council, designed as a temporary organ to direct the revolutionary movement. Within a week 1,200 deputies had been elected to the Petrograd Soviet.[62] On the night of 27 February, the tsar's cabinet resigned, after proposing that the tsar establish a military dictatorship. The liberal politicians in the Duma, who had hitherto reacted to the insurgency with indecision, now formed a temporary committee to restore order and realise their long-standing aspiration of a constitutional monarchy. They endeavoured to persuade the military high command that only the abdication of Nicholas in favour of his son could ensure the successful prolongation of the war. The generals did not need much persuading. Only two corps commanders would offer their services to the tsar, and only a couple would later resign rather than swear loyalty to the Provisional Government. Among the tens of thousands of officers promoted during the war, there was general sympathy for the revolution. Faced with the loss of confidence of his generals, Nicholas abdicated in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail. It did not take much to persuade Mikhail that the masses would not accept this outcome and, as a result, on 3 March the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty came to an end.[63] Few bemoaned the passing of tsarism. The Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905 had shattered popular faith in a benevolent tsar, and residual loyalty to Nicholas had been swept away during the war by rumours of sexual shenanigans and pro-German sympathies at court.

The two forces that brought downthemonarchy-themovement ofworkers and soldiers and the middle-class parliamentary opposition - became institu­tionalised in the post-revolutionary political order, which soon became known as 'dual power'. The Duma committee, which had formed on 27 February, was acutely aware that it had no authority among the masses. Only on 2 March, after political infighting, did it draw up a list of members of a Provisional

Government. Headed by Prince G. E. L'vov, a landowner with a record of ser­vice to the zemstvos, it was broadly representative of professional and business interests and liberal, even mildly populist in its politics. The only organised political force within the new government were the Kadets, a liberal party increasingly defined by its intransigent defence of the imperial-national state. In its manifesto of 2 March, the Provisional Government committed itself to a far-reaching programme of civil and political rights, promising to convoke a Constituent Assembly to determine the shape of the future polity It said noth­ing, however, about the burning issues of war and land. This was in keeping with the Kadet view that the February events constituted a political but not a social revolution.

In a bid to widen their base of support, the Duma politicians pressed the Petrograd Soviet to join the new government. Only Aleksandr Kerensky, a radical lawyer, agreed to do so, proclaiming that he would be hostage of the 'democracy' within the bourgeois government. The rest of the left-wing Mensheviks and SRs on the Executive Committee (EC) of the Soviet rejected the invitation to join the government since they believed Russia was under­going a 'bourgeois' revolution and was destined to undergo a long period of capitalist development and parliamentary democracy before it would be ripe for socialism. At the same time, they rejected calls, such as that which came from the Vyborg district committee of the Bolshevik Party, to make the Soviet the provisional government, since they feared that this might provoke conser­vative elements in the army to crush the revolution.[64] On 2 March, therefore, the Soviet agreed that it would support the Provisional Government in so far as it carried out a programme of democratic reform but would not be bound by its domestic or foreign policies.[65] Thus was born 'dual power', wherein the Provisional Government enjoyed formal authority but the Soviet EC enjoyed real power, by virtue of its influence over the garrison and workers in transport and communications and general support among the populace. Some have cast doubt on the adequacy of the 'dual power' formulation, correctly pointing out that even at this stage real power lay with the workers and soldiers rather than the EC.[66] Nevertheless, it has the merit of reminding us that from the out­set the new revolutionary order expressed the deep social division between the 'democracy' and propertied society.

Outside Petrograd dual power was less in evidence. In most places a broad alliance of social groups formed committees of public organisations that ejected police and tsarist officials, maintained order and food supply and later oversaw the democratisation of the municipal dumas and rural zemstvos. In March, 79 such committees were set up at provincial level, 651 at county (uezd) level and over 9,000 at township (volost') level.[67] The committee in faraway Irkutsk was typical in defining its task as 'carrying the revolution to its con­clusion and strengthening the foundations of freedom and popular power'.[68]Unlike the soviets, whose rising popularity would soon undermine them, the committees were not defined by political partisanship. In the township-level committees in Saratov province, for example, no fewer than three-quarters of members were non-party.[69] In seeking to establish its authority in the local­ities, the Provisional Government chose to bypass these committees and to appoint provincial and county commissars, many of whom were chairs of county zemstvos who hailed from landed or middle-class backgrounds and who did not command popular favour. Grass-roots pressure to democratise zemstvos and municipal dumas soon built up: by mid-October, dumas had been re-elected in 650 out of 798 towns.[70] The democratisation of the zemstvos and the rise of the soviets spelt the end of the public committees. The Provisional Government never established effective authority in the localities and, as the social and political crisis deepened in summer 1917, power became ever more fragmented. In a crucial sphere such as food supply, for example, the govern­ment supply organs, working in tandem with the co-operatives, competed with the respective food-supply commissions of the soviet, the local garrison, trade unions and factory committees.

In the countryside the revolution swept away land captains, township elders and village constables and replaced them with township committees elected by the peasants.[71] By July these were ubiquitous - there being over 15,000 townships across the country - and later some adopted the appellation 'soviet'. The government attempted to strengthen its authority by setting up land and food committees at township level, but these were soon taken over by the peasants. Meanwhile the authority of the village gathering was strengthened, as younger sons, landless labourers, village intelligentsia (scribes, teachers, vets and doctors) and even some women began to participate in its deliberations. The revolution thus substantially reduced the degree of interference in village life by external authority and after October the peasants came to associate this unprecedented degree of self-government with soviet power.

In the course of spring 1917, some 700 soviets were formed, involving around 200,000 deputies.¹⁴ By October, 1,429 soviets functioned in Russia, 706 ofwhich consisted ofworkers' and soldiers' deputies, 235 ofworkers', soldiers' andpeas- ants' deputies, 455 of peasants' deputies, and 33 of soldiers' deputies.¹⁵ They represented about one-third of the population. Soviets saw themselves as rep­resenting the 'revolutionary democracy', a bloc of social groups comprising workers, soldiers and peasants, and often stretching to include white-collar employees and professionals, such as teachers, journalists, lawyers or doc­tors, and in some cases representatives of ethnic minorities. The Omsk soviet described itself as the 'sole representative of the local proletariat and of the general labouring masses of the local population and army'.¹⁶ The basic prin­ciples of soviet democracy were that deputies were elected directly by and were subject to immediate recall by those they represented. The Mensheviks and SRs, who were the leading force in the soviets until autumn, saw their function as being to exercise 'control' over local government in the interests of revolutionary democracy. Soviets generally did not see themselves as rivals to elected organs of local government and championed the democratisation of dumas and the speedy election of a Constituent Assembly. In practice, they soon took on tasks of practical administration, concerning themselves with everything from fuel supply, to education, to policing.¹⁷ In a small number of cases, soviets declared themselves the sole authority in a particular locality: in Kronstadt the soviet, which consisted of 96 Bolsheviks, 96 non-party deputies,

(ed.), Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 12-34; Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets (London: UCL Press, 1996), ch. 5.

14 Gerasimenko, 'Transformatsiia', p. 64.

15 N. N. Smirnov, 'The Soviets', in Edward Acton et al. (eds.), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914-1921 (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 432.

16 Gosarkhiv Omskoi oblasti, f. R-662, op.i, d.8, l.i.

17 Israel Getzler, 'The Soviets as Agents of Democratisation', in Frankel et al., Revolution in Russia, pp. 17-33.

73 Left SRs, I3 Mensheviks and 7 anarchists, caused a furore when it refused to recognise the government in May.[72]

The aspirations of the masses

Liberty and democracy were the watchwords of the February Revolution. New symbols of liberty, of republic and of justice, drawn mainly from the French Revolution and the European socialist and labour movements, made their appearance. 'Free Russia' was personified as a beautiful woman in national costume or as a heroine breaking the chains oftsarism, wearing a laurel wreath, or bearing a shield.[73] These symbols were embraced by all who identified the February Revolution with liberation from autocracy.[74] Red, once a colour to cause the propertied classes to tremble, became an emblem of the revolu- tion.[75] All agreed that, in order to realise freedom, they must organise collec­tively. 'Organise!' screamed placards and orators on the streets, and as people organised, interest in politics grew exponentially. John Reed, the American journalist who later came to witness the revolution, observed: 'For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In railway-trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere.'[76]

Yet from the first, the scope of the democratic revolution was in dispute. For the privileged classes, the overthrow of autocracy had been an act of self- preservation necessitated by the need to bring victory in war and engender a renaissance of the Russian people. For the lower classes, liberty and democracy signalled nothing short of a social revolution that would entail the compre­hensive destruction of the old order and the construction of a new way of life in accordance with justice and freedom. Even peasants proclaimed them­selves free citizens and showed a rudimentary familiarity with notions of a constitution, a democratic republic, civil and political rights. Yet for them, as for the lower classes in general, democracy was principally about solving their pressing socio-economic problems and only secondarily about questions of law and political representation.[77]

There were around nine million men in uniform in 1917 and soldiers were to become a force of huge importance in promoting the social revolution.[78]Though they lacked the high level of organisation ofworkers, they were crucial in weakening the Provisional Government, in politicising the peasantry and, after October, in establishing soviet power. Soldiers and sailors greeted the downfall of the tsar with joy, seeing in it a signal to overthrow the oppressive command structure of the tsarist army. Tyrannical officers were removed and sometimes killed - lynchings being worst in the Baltic Fleet, with Kronstadt sailors killing about fifty officers. Soldiers celebrated the fact that they were now citizens of free Russia, and demanded an end to degrading treatment, the right to meet and petition, and improvements in condition and pay. Crucially, they formed committees at each level of the army hierarchy. This drive to democratise relations between officers and men was authorised on 1 March by Order No. i of the Petrograd Soviet, which proved to be its most radical under­taking. General M. V Alekseev pronounced the Order 'the means by which the army I command will be destroyed'.[79] In practice, the soldiers' committees were dominated by more educated elements, including non-commissioned officers, medical and clerical staff, who had little desire to sabotage the oper­ational effectiveness of the army. Most soldiers wanted a speedy peace, but did not wish to expose free revolutionary Russia to Austro-German attack. At the same time, if democratisation did not mean - at least in the spring and early summer - the disintegration of the army as a fighting force, it was clear that it could no longer be relied upon to perform its customary function of suppressing domestic disorder.

Industrial workers were the most politicised, organised and strategically positioned of all social groups in 1917.[80] Something like two-thirds were recent recruits to industry, either peasant migrants or women who had taken up jobs in the war industries. Yet this was a working class defined by an unusual degree of class consciousness. From the end of the nineteenth century, a layer of so-called 'conscious' workers, drawn mainly from the ranks of skilled, literate young men, had emerged, partly under the tutelage of revolutionary intellectuals, who provided leadership in moments of conflict, and, crucially, served as the conduit through which class politics touched a wider lower-class constituency. During the revolution workers determined that the overthrow of tsarism be followed by the overthrow of 'autocracy' on the shop floor. Hated foremen and administrators were driven out, the old rule books were torn up and factory committees were set up, especially among metalworkers, to represent workers' interests to management. Russian industrialists were not as well organised as their employees, mainly because they were divided by region and branch of industry. Moscow textile manufacturers favoured a more liberal industrial relations policy than the metalworking and engineering manufacturers of Petrograd, who had been far more supportive of tsarism, because of their dependence on state orders.²⁷ For a brief period following February, sections of employers came out in favour of a liberal policy that entailed a formal eight-hour day (perhaps the most pressing demand oflabour), improved wages and conditions, arbitration of industrial disputes, and co- responsibility of factory committees in regulating workplace relations.²⁸ The factory committees took on a wide range of tasks, including overseeing hiring and firing, guarding the factory, labour discipline and organising food supplies. They were the most influential of the plethora oflabour organisations that emerged. Significantly, they were the first to register the shift in lower-class support away from the moderate socialists to the Bolsheviks. In late May the first conference of Petrograd factory committees overwhelmingly passed a Bolshevik resolution on control of the economy.²⁹

in Russia, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); R. A. Wade, Red Guards and Workers' Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni­versity Press, 1984).

27 Ziva Galili, 'Commercial-Industrial Circles in Revolution: The Failure of "Industrial Pro- gressivism" ', in Frankel et al., Revolution inRussia, pp. 188-216; P. V Volobuev, Proletariat i burzhuaziia v 1917 godu (Moscow: Mysl', 1964).

28 V I. Cherniaev, 'Rabochii kontrol' i al'ternativy ego razvitiia v 1917 g.', in Rabochie i rossiiskoe obshchesttvo: vtoraiapolovina XIX-nachalo XXveka (St Petersburg: Glagol', 1994), pp. 164-77; D. O. Churakov, Russkaia revoliutsiia i rabochee samoupravlenie 1917 (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1998), pp. 35-41.

29 S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chs. 3-4.

In I9I7 gender was not a category ofpolitical mobilisation in the same way as class, youth or nationality. Despite their role in triggering the events that led to the February Revolution, women soon found themselves on the mar­gins of revolutionary politics.[81] In March middle-class feminists mobilised to ensure that women received the vote; but as soon as this was granted, their movement lost influence. Most of its leaders were nationalistically inclined and some went on to form the women's 'death battalions', the only instance of women playing a combat role in the First World War. Many educated women threw themselves into work in educational and cultural organisations, the co­operatives and political parties. The one partial exception to the rule of women not organising as women were food riots in which mainly lower-class house­wives, especially soldiers' wives, clashed with traders and shopkeepers over the price and availability of goods and with local governments over the miserable allowances paid to combatants' families.[82] Women workers, who comprised a third of the workforce, participated in strikes and trade unions, but were not prominent in the labour movement, partly because of their responsibilities as wives and mothers, partly because of their lower levels of literacy and partly because they were perceived as 'backward' by labour organisers, who unwit­tingly forged an organisational culture which marginalised them. Despite the fact that the Bolsheviks would not countenance separate organisations for working women, they did most to group them into class organisations, thanks to the initiative of a few leading women, such as Aleksandra Kollontai.[83] In the Constituent Assembly elections, interestingly, turn-out was higher among rural women than among rural men (77 per cent against 70 per cent).[84]

The politics of war, March to July 1917

Despite the talk of 'unity of all the vital forces of the nation', the issue of war divided the Soviet leaders and the Provisional Government. The minister of foreign affairs, Pavel Miliukov, typified government thinking in believing that the revolution would unleash a surge of patriotic feeling that would carry Russia to victory in the war. By contrast, the Soviet leaders wished to see a 'democratic' peace entailing the renunciation of annexations and indemnities, although pending that, they were anxious not to leave Russia vulnerable to Austro-German attack. It was the Georgian Menshevik, I. G. Tsereteli, who crafted a compromise, known as 'revolutionary defencism', designed to uphold national defence while pressing the Provisional Government to work for a comprehensive peace settlement.[85] However, on 18 April Miliukov sent a note to the Allies that spoke of prosecution of war to 'decisive victory' and gave a heavy hint that Russia would stand by the terms of the secret treaties, which included annexations and indemnities. Soldiers and workers came out onto the streets of the capital to demand Miliukov's resignation, and Bolsheviks bore banners declaring 'Down with the Provisional Government'. With Miliukov's resignation on 2 May, Prince L'vov pressed members of the Soviet EC to join a coalition government. Tsereteli managed to overcome the reluctance of Mensheviks to participate in a 'bourgeois' government, convincing them that this would strengthen the chances for peace. Socialists accepted six places in the new government, alongside eight 'bourgeois' representatives. It proved to be a ruinous decision, since in the eyes ofthe masses it identified the moderate socialists with government policy.

The Mensheviks and SRs dominated the popular movement in spring and summer i9i7. In late May 537 SR delegates confronted a mere fourteen Bolsheviks at the First Congress of Peasant Soviets. At the beginning of June, 285 SRs, 248 Mensheviks and only 105 Bolsheviks attended the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets.[86] The First World War had caused Mensheviks and SRs to split between internationalists, who refused to support either side in the war, and defencists, who believed that an Allied victory would represent a triumph of democracy over Austro-German militarism. Tsereteli's policy of 'revolu­tionary defencism' did something to heal the rift in the Menshevik Party, but the decision to join the coalition opened up new divisions. From summer L. Martov, leader of the internationalist wing, advocated the creation of a purely socialist government and the imposition of direct state controls on industry. But the centre-right insisted that there was no alternative to a coalition with the 'bourgeoisie' given that socialism was not yet feasible in Russia. It is difficult to estimate the number of Mensheviks, since many provincial organisations of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party had declined to split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions.[87] By May there may have been as many as 100,000, half of them in Georgia, the faction's stronghold; this probably rose to nearly 200,000 by autumn, only to fall to 150,000 by December. Intel­lectuals dominated the leadership of the Mensheviks, but its members were overwhelmingly workers.[88]

The SRs were the largest political party in 1917. In spring they had about half a million members, which rose to 700,000 by autumn (including Left SRs).[89]They were seen as the party of the peasantry, since they had invested much energy into organising the villages in 1905-7, but they also had a strong base in the factories and armed forces.[90] The February Revolution exacerbated divisions within the party. Viktor Chernov, leader of the centrist majority, approved the policy of coalition on the grounds that it would increase the influence of the 'democracy' within government. He took up the post of minister of agriculture and was active in preparing land redistribution, but his support for legality and 'state-mindedness' alienated him from the party's peasant base. The Left SRs, who were hostile to the 'imperialist' war, began to crystallise as a distinct faction in May; they supported the peasants' seizure of landowners' estates and favoured a homogeneous socialist government rather than a coalition with the 'bourgeoisie'. Their influence grew, and by autumn a majority of party organisations in the provinces had come out in favour of soviet power.

On 3 April, V. I. Lenin returned to Russia from Switzerland. Apart from a six-month stay in 1905-6, he had been away from his native land for almost seventeen years and his record as a revolutionary was largely one of failure.[91]Yet his hatred of liberalism and parliamentarism, his implacable opposition to the 'imperialist' war and his appreciation of the mass appeal of soviets oriented him well to the new conditions in Russia. Prior to his return, the Bolshevik Party was also divided, the return of L. B. Kamenev and Joseph Stalin from Siberian exile having committed it to qualified support for the Provisional Gov­ernment, a revolutionary defencist position on the war and to negotiations with the Mensheviks to reunify the RSDRP. In his April Theses Lenin fulmi­nated against these policies, insisting that there could be no support for the government of'capitalists and landlords', that the character of the war had not changed, and that the Bolsheviks should campaign for power to be transferred to a state-wide system of soviets. The war had convinced Lenin that capital­ism was bankrupt and that socialism was now on the agenda internationally. L. D. Trotsky welcomed his conversion to a view that the revolution in Russia could trigger international socialist revolution. Though more unified polit­ically than the other socialist parties, the Bolsheviks nevertheless remained rather diverse; the more moderate views of Kamenev or G. E. Zinoviev con­tinued to command support, so that key committees like those in Moscow and Kiev would oppose the plan to seize power in October.[92] Owing to wartime repression, the number of Bolsheviks may have fallen as low as 10,000, but in the course of 1917 tens of thousands of workers, soldiers and sailors flooded into the party, knowing little Marx but seeing in the Bolsheviks the most com­mitted defenders of their class interests. By October party membership had risen to at least 350,000.[93]

Six Mensheviks and SRs entered the government on 5 May, believing that their action would hasten the advent of peace. Almost immediately, they became involved in Kerensky's preparations for a new military offensive. This was motivated by his desire to see Russia honour her treaty obligations to the Allies and be guaranteed a place in the comity of democratic states. Keren- sky toured the fronts, frenetically whipping up support for an offensive. On 18-19 July only forty-eight battalions refused to go into battle, but most had rallied for the last time. The offensive was a fiasco and led to about I50,000 losses and a larger number of deserters.[94] In its wake the Russian army unrav­elled as soldiers despaired of seeing an end to the bloodshed, grew angry at the unequal burden of sacrifice and determined to lay hands on gentry estates.

Left SRs and Bolsheviks - whose support was now growing - found their denunciation of the war falling on receptive ears.[95]

On 3 July the Kadet ministers resigned from the government, ostensibly over concessions made to Ukrainian nationalism.[96] By 2 a.m., 60,000 to 70,000 armed soldiers and workers had surrounded the Tauride Palace in Petrograd to demand that the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets (VTsIK) take power. The latter condemned the demonstration as 'counter-revolutionary' and denounced the Bolsheviks for attemptingto 'dictate withbayonets'thepol- icy of the Soviets. Although lower-level Bolshevik organisations were involved in the demonstration, party leaders considered this attempted uprising prema­ture. As more and more soldiers and workers came onto the streets, however, they decided to lead the movement. By the next day, a semi-insurrection was under way. That night the government brought in troops to protect the Soviet, and news that a powerful force was on its way from the northern front, together with the increasingly ugly character of the demonstrations (estimates of total dead and wounded in two days of rioting ran to 400), caused regiments that had been raring for action to lose heart. Kerensky vowed 'severe retribution' on the insurgents and issued orders for the arrest of leading Bolsheviks and for the closure of their newspapers. On 7 July, he formed a 'government of sal­vation of the revolution' and on 21 July, after threatening to resign, persuaded the Kadets to join a second coalition government. It looked as though the Bolshevik goose had been truly cooked.

The peasant revolution

The political awareness of the peasantry was low, but historians often exag­gerate the cultural and political isolation of the village. In the last decades of tsarism, the expanding market for agricultural goods, large-scale migration, the impact of urban consumer culture, rising rates of literacy, mass conscrip­tion, and the arrival of refugees, had brought new ideas and values to the village.[97] In 1917 soldiers returning from the front played a vital role in bring­ing politics into the village, as did agitators sent by urban soviets and labour organisations. The Petrograd Soviet of Peasant Deputies, for example, sent about 3,000 agitators into the countryside, armed with agitational literature produced at a cost of 65,000 roubles.[98] Educated folk were full of tales about the political ignorance of the peasantry, but peasants latched on to elements in the discourse of revolution - such as those of self-government, citizenship and socialism - reinterpreting them according to their lights.[99] Dissatisfaction over the state grain monopoly and the slow progress on land reform caused peasants gradually to become disillusioned with the Provisional Government. This, together with a desperate desire to see peace, a growing attraction to soviet power and an idealised vision of socialism, strengthened peasant support in autumn 1917 for the Left SRs and, to a lesser extent, the Bolsheviks.

The first issue that brought peasants into conflict with the government was that of the state grain monopoly. The war had seen a small decline in the amount of grain grown but, more worryingly, a more substantial fall in the amount of grain marketed, from one quarter of the harvest in 1913 to one sixth in i9i7. Peasants had little incentive to sell grain given galloping inflation and the shortage of consumer goods. The Provisional Government's efforts to force peasants to sell grain at fixed prices provoked them into concealing grain or turning it into alcohol.[100] The second issue that brought peasants into conflict with the government was that of land redistribution. Peasants believed that the revolution would redress the historic wrong done to them at the time of the emancipation of the serfs by transferring gentry, Church and state lands into the hands of those who worked them. The new government, however, had no stomach for carrying out a massive land reform at a time of war. Moreover, it was split between Kadets, who insisted that landlords be fully compensated for land taken from them, and Chernov, who wished to see the orderly transfer of land via the land committees to those who worked it. With a view to allowing the Constituent Assembly to decide the question, the government set up a somewhat bureaucratic structure ofland committees to prepare a detailed land settlement, region by region. This only served to heighten peasant expectations.

From late spring, a struggle began between peasants and landlords. Initially, peasants were cautious, testing the capacity of local authorities to curb their encroachments on landlord property. They unilaterally reduced or failed to pay rent, grazed cattle illegally on the landowners' estates, stole wood from their forests and took over uncultivated tracts of gentry land on the pretext that it would otherwise remain unsown. In the non-Black Earth zone, where dairy and livestock farming were critical, they tried to get their hands on mead­ows and pasture. Seeing the inability of local commissars to respond, illegal acts multiplied, levelling off during harvest from mid-July to mid-August, but climbing sharply from September. Generally, the village gathering authorised these actions, returning soldiers often spurring it on. By autumn the agrarian movement was in full swing, with peasants increasingly seizing gentry land, equipment and livestock and distributing them outright. The movement was fiercest in the overcrowded central Black Earth and middle Volga provinces and in Ukraine. The government introduced martial law in Tambov, Orel, Tula, Riazan', Penza and Saratov provinces, but soldiers in rear garrisons could not be relied upon to put down peasant rebels. The Union of Landowners and Farmers castigated the government for failing to defend the rights of private property.[101]

Political polarisation

By summer the economy was buckling under the strain of war.[102] In the first half of 1917 production of fuel and raw materials fell by over a third and gross factory output over the year fell by 36 per cent compared with 1916. As a result, enterprises closed and by October nearly half a million workers had been laid off. The crisis was aggravated by mounting chaos in the transport system, which meant that grain and industrial supplies failed to get through to the towns. The government debt rose to an astronomical 49 billion roubles, of which 11.2 billion was owed on foreign loans, and the government reacted by printing money, further fuelling inflation. Between July and October prices rose fourfold and in Moscow and Petrograd the real value of wages halved in the second half of the year.

As the economic crisis deepened, class conflict intensified. Between February and October, 2.5 million workers went on strike, stoppages increas­ing in scale as the year wore on, but becoming ever harder to win.[103] The trade unions, which by October had over two million members, were organised mainly along industry-wide lines. They endeavoured to negotiate collective wage agreements with employers' organisations, but negotiations were pro­tracted and served to exacerbate class antagonism.[104] For their part, the factory committees implemented workers' control of production to prevent what they believed to be widespread 'sabotage' by employers. Workers' control signified the close monitoring of the activities of management, rather than its displace­ment, but it was fed by deep-seated aspirations for workplace democracy. The idea of workers' control, though not emanating from any political party, was taken up by Bolsheviks, anarchists and some Left SRs; it proved to be a key reason why worker support shifted in their favour. By contrast, the insistence of the moderate socialists that only state regulation could restore order to the economy - and that 'control' by individual factory committees only exacer­bated the crisis - was another cause of their undoing.[105] Industrialists, resenting any infringement of their right to manage, resorted to ever more extreme mea­sures, including lockouts and the closure of mines and factories in the Urals and Donbass.[106] Having failed to form a single national organisation to represent their interests, they, too, became alienated from the 'socialist' government.

By summer a discourse ofclass was in the ascendant, symbolised in the sub­stitution of the word 'comrade' for 'citizen' as the favoured form of address.[107]Given the underdevelopment of class relations in Russia, and the key role played in the revolution by non-class groups such as soldiers and nationalist movements, this was a remarkable development. After all, the language of class, at least in its Marxist guise, had entered politics only since 1905. Yet it proved easily assimilable since it played on a binary opposition that ran deep in popular culture between 'them', the verkhi, that is those at the top, and 'us', the nizy, that is those at the bottom. People's identities, of course, were mul­tiple - one was not only a worker, but a Russian, a woman, a young person - yet 'class' came to reconfigure identities of nation, gender and youth in its own terms. 'We' could signify the working class, 'proletarian youth', 'working women', the 'toilingpeople' (i.e. peasants as well as workers) or 'revolutionary democracy'. 'They' could signify capitalists, landlords, army generals or, at its most visceral, the burzhui, anyone with an overbearing manner, an education, soft hands or spectacles.[108] Faced by what they perceived to be an elemental conflict tearing the heart out of the Russian nation, the Kadets struggled to uphold a conception of 'state-mindedness', appealing to Russians to set aside all class and sectional strife.[109] In 1918 the liberal P. V Struve characterised the Russian Revolution as 'the first case in world history of the triumph of inter­nationalism and the class idea over nationalism and the national idea'.[110] But this was only partly true. For if exponents of class politics rejected the Kadet vision of the nation under siege - as well as the moderate socialist vision of 'unity of all the vital forces of the nation' - the exponents of class politics never entirely rejected the appeal to the nation: rather they engaged in a struggle to redefine the 'nation' in terms of its toiling people, playing on the ambivalence that inheres in the Russian word narod, which can mean both 'nation' and 'common people'.[111]

If Russian nationalism was in crisis by summer 1917, nationalism among the non-Russian people was in the ascendant.[112] From the late nineteenth century, the tsarist state had been destabilised by rising nationalisms, although these played no direct part in its demise. At the time of the February Revolution nationalism was developed extremely unevenly across the empire - strong in the Baltic and the Caucasus, weak in Central Asia - and movements to form independent nation-states proved irresistible only in Poland and Finland. Ini­tially, nationalists demanded rights of cultural self-expression, such as schooling or religious services in native languages, the formation of military units along ethnic lines, and a measure of political autonomy within the framework of a federal Russian state. The typical aspiration was encapsulated in the slogan of the liberal and moderate socialist Ukrainian National Council, known as the Rada: 'Long Live Autonomous Ukraine in a Federated Russia'. The Pro­visional Government assumed that by abrogating discriminatory legislation against national minorities it would 'solve' the national question. Its reluctance to concede more substantial autonomy was motivated by fear that nationalist movements were being used by Germany - a not unreasonable supposition if one looks to their later record in the Baltic - and by an emotional commitment to a unified Russian state, especially strong among the Kadets. As a result of this reluctance, nationalist politicians stepped up demands for autonomy, at the same time as they tacked to the left in order to keep in step with the growing radicalism of peasants and workers, whose support they needed if they were to create viable nation-states.[113] When in September Kerensky finally endorsed the principle of self-determination 'but only on such principles as the Constituent Assembly shall determine', it was too little and too late.[114] Never­theless if nationalism became one more force undermining the viability of the state, the strength of nationalist sentiment should not be exaggerated. In most non-Russian areas, demands for radical social and economic policies eclipsed purely nationalist demands. Workers, for example, generally inclined to class politics rather than nationalist politics; and though peasants liked parties that spoke to them in their own language and defended local interests, they proved unreliable supporters of 'their' nation-states when called upon to fight in their defence. In general, but not invariably, nationalism proved successful where it was reinforced by class divisions, as in Latvia, Estonia or Georgia.

In autumn 1917 a psychological break occurred in the public mood, with the euphoria of the spring giving way to anxiety, even to a sense of impend­ing doom. This was most evident in many elements that made up Russia's heterogeneous middle classes. The intelligentsia, which had long been losing coherence as an ethically and ideologically defined group, lost confidence in the common people whose interests it had always claimed to champion. By autumn many felt that the existence of civilisation was menaced by the 'dark masses'; so fearful were they that sections of the press referred to them as the 'i.i.', which stood for 'terrified intellectuals'.[115] Students, in the van of the struggle against autocracy between 1899 and 1905, had ceased in the interven­ing years automatically to identify with the Left. When 272 delegates arrived for the All-Russian Congress of Students on 15 May they proved unable to forge a common programme, declaring themselves 'necessary to no one, and our resolutions binding on no one'.[116] Professional groups, such as lawyers, doctors, teachers or engineers, showed rather more confidence. One of the paradoxes of the revolution was that as the power of the state weakened, its reach - via the regulatory economic organs and democratised local admin­istrations - expanded, and opportunities for professionals, managerial and technical staff increased accordingly.[117] The liberal and technical professions, however, showed little political coherence, with lower-status groups, such as primary-school teachers or medical assistants, orienting towards 'revolution­ary democracy', and higher-status groups, such as doctors or secondary-school teachers, orienting towards the Kadets.[118] Beneath professionals were salaried employees (sluzhashchie), a diverse group comprising white-collar workers in public institutions, industry and commerce, and numbering close to 2 million. Their tendency was to align politically with the 'proletariat' by forming trade unions, although hostility towards them on the part of blue-collar workers was by no means uncommon.[119] Salaried employees, along with the lower ranks of professionals, were part of the heterogeneous lower-middle strata, whose ranks also included artisans, traders and rentiers, and who numbered about 14 million by 1915.[120] Many of the latter turned against socialist 'chatterers' in the soviets, demanding a 'strong power' to defend property and security.[121]

Following the July Days, Kerensky, now prime minister, cultivated an image as a 'man of destiny' summoned to 'save Russia'.[122] On 12 July he restored the death penalty at the front, and a week later military censorship. On 19 July he appointed General L. G. Kornilov supreme commander-in-chief of the army. Kerensky hoped to use the reactionary general to bolster his image as a strong man and to restore frayed relations with the Kadets, many of whom talked openly about the need for military dictatorship to save Russia from anarchy. Kornilov and Kerensky entered into negotiations on the need to establish 'firm government', which both understood to mean crushing not only the Bolsheviks but also the soviets. Kerensky, however, demurred at demands to restore the death penalty in the rear and to militarise defence factories and the railways. On 26 August Kerensky received what he took to be an ultimatum from Kornilov demanding that all military and civil authority be placed in the hands of a dictator. Accusing him of conspiring to overthrow the government, he sent a telegram on 27 August relieving Kornilov of his duties. The latter ignored it, ordering his troops to advance on Petrograd. Kerensky had no option but to turn to the Soviet to prevent Kornilov's troops from reaching the capital.

Henceforth politics was a theatre of shadows with the real battles for power going on in society. Kerensky formed a five-person 'directory', a personal dic­tatorship in all but name, in which he had virtually complete responsibility for military as well as civil affairs. But now even Mensheviks and SRs would not countenance a government containing Kadets, since they had been bla­tantly implicated in the Kornilov rebellion.[123] The depth of the crisis among the moderate socialists was revealed at the Democratic Conference (14-19 September), called to rally 'democratic' organisations behind the govern­ment.[124] This proved unable to resolve the question of whether or not the government should involve 'bourgeois' forces. On 25 September Kerensky went ahead and formed a third coalition, but failed to win ratification from the Petrograd Soviet.

The Bolshevik seizure of power

The Kornilov rebellion dramatised the danger of counter-revolution and starkly underlined the feebleness of the Kerensky regime. Crucially, it trig­gered a spectacular recovery by the Bolsheviks after the setback they had suffered following the July Days. The party's consistent opposition to the gov­ernment of'capitalists and landowners', its rejection ofthe 'imperialist' war, its calls for land to the peasants, for power to the soviets and for workers' control now seemed to hundreds ofthousands ofworkers and soldiers to pro­vide a way forward.[125] In the first half of September, eighty soviets in large and medium towns backed the call for a transfer of power to the soviets. No one was entirely sure what the slogan 'All Power to the Soviets', which belonged as much to anarchists, Left SRs and some Mensheviks as to the Bolsheviks, actually meant. While hiding in Finland, Lenin had written his most utopian work, State and Revolution, which outlined his vision of a 'commune state' in which the three pillars of the bourgeois state - the police, standing army and the bureaucracy - would be smashed and in which parliamentary democracy would be replaced by direct democracy based on the soviets.[126] But it is unlikely that many - even in the Bolshevik Party - understood the slogan in that way. For most it meant severing the alliance with the 'bourgeoisie' and forming a socialist government consisting of all parties in VTsIK pending the convening of a Constituent Assembly.[127]

Seeing the surge in popular support for the Bolsheviks, Lenin became con­vinced that nationally as well as internationally the time was ripe for the Bolsheviks to seize power in the name of the soviets.[128] He blitzed the Central Committee with demands that it prepare an insurrection, even threatening to resign on 29 September. 'History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.'[129] The majority of the leadership was unenthusiastic, believing that it would be better to allow power to pass democratically to the soviets by waiting for the Second Congress of Soviets, scheduled to open on 20 October. Having returned in secret to Petrograd, Lenin on 10 October persuaded the Central Committee to commit itself to the overthrow of the Provisional Government. Significantly, no timetable was set (see Plate 5). Zinoviev and Kamenev were bitterly opposed to the decision, believing that the conditions for socialist rev­olution did not yet exist and that an insurrection was likely to be crushed. As late as 16 October, the mood in the party was against an insurrection and the decision of Zinoviev and Kamenev to make public their opposition drove

Lenin to a paroxysm of fury. It fell to Trotsky, now chair of the Petrograd Soviet, to make practical preparations, which he did, not by following Lenin's suggestion of an attack on the capital by sailors and soldiers of the northern front, but by associating an insurrection with the defence of the Petrograd garrison.[130]

On 6 October the government had announced that half the garrison was to be moved out of the capital to defend it against the onward advance of the German army. The Soviet interpreted this as an attempt to rid Petrograd of its most revolutionary elements, and on 9 October created an embryonic Military-Revolutionary Committee (MRC) to resist the transfer. This was the organisation that Trotsky used to unseat the government. On 20 October the government ordered the transfer of troops to begin, but the MRC ordered them not to move without its permission. On the night of 23-4 October, Kerensky ordered the Bolshevik printing press to be shut down, as a pre­lude to moving against the MRC, thus giving Trotsky another pretext to take 'defensive' action. On 24 October military units, backed by armed bands of workers, known as Red Guards, took control of bridges, railway stations and other strategic points. Kerensky fled, unable to muster troops to resist the insurgents. By the morning of 25 October only the Winter Palace remained to be taken. That afternoon Lenin appeared for the first time in public since July, proclaiming to the Petrograd Soviet that the Provisional Government was overthrown. 'In Russia we must now set about building a proletarian socialist state.' At 10.40 p.m. the Second Congress of Soviets finally opened, the artillery bombardment of the Winter Palace audible in the distance. The Mensheviks and SRs denounced the insurrection as a provocation to civil war and walked out, Trotsky's taunt echoing in their ears: 'You are miserable bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you ought to be: into the dustbin of history.'[131]

The establishment of Bolshevik dictatorship

The Bolsheviks determined to break with the vacillation of the Provisional Government by issuing decrees on the urgent questions of peace, land and workers' control of industry.[132] On 26 October they issued a peace decree calling on all the belligerent powers to begin peace talks on the basis of no annexations or indemnities and self-determination for national minorities. The rejection by the Entente of this proposal led to the Bolsheviks suing for a separate peace with Germany. German terms proved to be tough and Lenin's insistence that they be accepted caused what was arguably the deepest schism ever experienced by the Bolshevik Party.⁸² On 18 February the German high command lost patience with Trotsky's stalling tactics and sent 700,000 troops into Russia where they met virtually no resistance. On 23 February it proffered terms even more draconian. At the crucial meeting of the Central Committee that evening, opponents of peace gained four votes against seven in favour of acceptance, while four supporters of Trotsky's formula of 'No war, no peace' abstained. The peace treaty, signed at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March, was massively punitive: the Baltic provinces, a large part of Belorussia and the whole of the Ukraine were excised from the former empire.

On 26 October the Bolshevik government also issued a Land Decree that legitimised the spontaneous land seizures by formally confiscating all gentry, Church and crown lands and transferring them to peasant use.⁸³ Significantly, it did not embody the Bolshevikpolicy of'nationalising' land-that is, oftakingit directly into state ownership -but the SRpolicy of'socialisation', whereby land 'passes into the use of the entire toilingpeople'. This left individual communes free to decide how much land should be distributed and whether it should be apportioned on the basis ofthe number of'eaters' or able-bodied members in each household. The idea of socialising land proved hugely popular. The decree precipitated a wave ofland confiscation: in the central provinces three-quarters of landowners' land was confiscated between November and January 1918.⁸⁴ How much better off peasants were as a result of the land redistribution is hard to say, since there was no uniformity in the amount of land they received, even within a single township. Slightly more than half of communes received no additional land, usually because there was no adjacent estate that could be confiscated. And since two-thirds of confiscated land was already rented to peasants, the amount of new land that became available represented just

The Debate on Soviet Power: Minutes ofthe All-Russian Central Executive Committee ofSoviets, October 1917-January 1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

82 Ronald I. Kowalski, The Bolshevik Party in Conflict: The Left Communist Opposition of 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1991).

83 The following is based on: John Channon, 'The Bolsheviks and the Peasantry: The Land Question during the First Eight Months of Soviet Power', Slavonic and East European Studies 66, 4 (1988): 593-624; Keep, Russian Revolution, p. 5; Figes, Peasant Russia, ch. 3.

84 I. A. Trifonov Likvidatsiia ekspluatatorskikh klassov v SSSR (Moscow: Politizdat, 1975),

p. 90

over a fifth ofthe entire cultivated area. Following redistribution, about three- quarters of households had allotments of up to 4 desiatiny (4.4 hectares), plus a horse and one or two cows. This was sufficient for a basic level of subsistence, but no more.

If the slogan All Power to the Soviets' was widely understood to mean the transfer of power to a coalition consisting of all socialist parties, the Bolsheviks nevertheless went ahead on 26 October and formed a Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) exclusively from members of their own party. Talks with the Mensheviks and SRs to form a coalition government got under way, but were scuttled by the intransigence of hard-liners on all sides. Five Bolsheviks resigned from the Sovnarkom when ordered to withdraw from the talks, saying 'we consider a purely Bolshevik government has no choice but to maintain itself by political terror'. In due course, seven Left SRs didjoin the new government, having been assured that the Sovnarkom would be accountable to the VTsIK- somethingthat never happened-and they engineered the fusion ofVTsIKwith the All-Russian Soviet of Peasant Deputies, whose SR-dominated executive had backed military resistance to the Bolsheviks.

Soviet power was established with surprising ease, a reflection of the pop­ularity of the idea of devolving power to the toilers.[133] In towns and regions with a relatively homogeneous working class, such as the Central Industrial Region or the mining settlements of the Urals, Bolsheviks and their Left SR and anarchist allies asserted 'soviet power' quickly with little opposition. In big commercial and industrial cities with a more diverse social structure, such as Moscow, Smolensk or the Volga cities of Kazan', Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, the Bolsheviks enjoyed a plurality of votes in the soviets but faced a strong chal­lenge from the moderate socialist bloc. Here 'soviet power' was often estab­lished by the local military-revolutionary committee - of which there were 350 nationwide - or by the garrison. Finally, there were the less industrially developed towns, towns of more medium size, or the capitals of overwhelm­ingly agricultural provinces, such as those in the central Black Earth provinces, where the SRs and Mensheviks were heavily ensconced in the soviets. Here moderate socialists put up staunch resistance to soviet power, as did Cossacks and nationalist movements such as the Ukrainian Rada.

The Constituent Assembly symbolised the people's power at the heart of the revolution and the Bolsheviks made much political capital out of the Provisional Government's decision to postpone elections to it. Yet once in gov­ernment, Lenin insisted that there could be no going back to a parliamentary regime now that soviet power, a superior form of democracy in his view, had been established. The Bolsheviks nevertheless decided to allow elections to go ahead. In all, 48.4 million valid votes were cast, of which the SRs gained 19.1m. (39.5 per cent), the Bolsheviks 10.9m. (22.5 per cent), the Kadets 2.2m. (4.5 per cent) and the Mensheviks 1.5m. (3.2 per cent). Over 7 million voted for non-Russian socialist parties, including two-thirds ofUkrainians. The SRs were thus the clear winners, their vote concentrated in the countryside. The main voters for the Bolsheviks were workers and 42 per cent of the 5.5m. soldiers.[134]This represented the peak of popular support for the Bolsheviks: hereinafter they would lose support as soldiers returned to their villages and as worker dis­affection grew. On 5 January the Assembly opened in dispiriting circumstances. The delegates elected Chernov chair and voted to discuss the SR agenda. In the small hours of the morning, the sailor's leader, A. G. Zhelezniakov, announced that 'the guard is getting tired' and put an end to its proceedings for ever.

The Bolshevik seizure of power is often presented as a conspiratorial coup against a democratic government. It had all the elements of a coup - albeit one advertised in advance - except for the fact that a coup implies the seizure of a functioning state machine. Arguably, Russia had not had this since February. The reasons for the failure of the Provisional Government are not hard to pinpoint. Lacking legitimacy from the first, it relied on the moderate social­ists in the Soviet to make its writ run. From summer, it was engulfed by a concatenation of crises - at the front, in the countryside, in the economy and in the non-Russian periphery. Few governments could have coped with such a situation, and certainly not without an army to rely on. Many argue that democratic government was a non-starter in Russia in i9i7. This may under­estimate the extent of enthusiasm for 'democracy' in 1917. It is true, however, that from the first a heavily 'socialised' conception of democracy vied with a liberal conception tied to the defence of private property. Perhaps if the Petrograd Soviet had taken power in March when it had the chance, perhaps if it had hastened to summon the Constituent Assembly and to tackle the land question, the SRs and Mensheviks might have been able to consolidate a parliamentary regime. In the wake of the Kornilov rebellion, a majority of moderate socialists came round to the view that the coalition with the 'bourgeoisie' must end, but that, of course, was not their view in spring. More crucially, on the vital matter of the war there were many in the SR Party whose instincts were little different from those of Kerensky. Therein lay the rub. For the fate of democracy in 1917 was ultimately sealed by the decision of liberals and moderate socialists to continue the war. It was the war that focused the otherwise disparate grievances of the people. It was the war that exacerbated the deep polarisation in society to a murderous extent. It was the war, in the last analysis, that made the Bolshevik seizure of power irresistible.

The Bolsheviks satisfied the demands of tens of millions on the burning issues of peace and land, but their promise to transfer power to the soviets proved to be very short-lived and severely incomplete. Historians debate the extent to which the speedy rise of one-party dictatorship was due to Bolshevik authoritarianism or to circumstances. There can be little doubt that the Bol­sheviks' course of action was powerfully dictated by circumstances such as an imploding economy, a collapsing army, spiralling lawlessness, a disintegrating empire, the fragmentation of state authority and, not least, by extensive oppo­sition to their rule. At the same time, they were never blind instruments of fate. The lesson that Lenin and Trotsky drew from the experience of 1917 was that breadth of representation in government spelt weakness; and in their determi­nation to re-establish strong government - something that millions craved - they did not scruple to use dictatorial methods. By closing the Constituent Assembly they signalled that they were ready to wage war in defence of their regime not only against the exploiting classes, but against the socialist camp. The dissolution of the assembly doomed the chances of democracy in Russia for seventy years and for that the Bolsheviks bear the largest share of blame. Yet the prospects for a democratic socialist regime had by this stage become extremely tenuous. True, some 70 per cent of peasants voted in the assembly elections, but they did so less out of enthusiasm for parliamentary politics than out of a desire to see the assembly legalise their title to the land. Once it became clear that they had no reason to fear on that score, they acquiesced in the assembly's dissolution. The grim fact is that by 1918 the real choice facing the Russian people was one between anarchy or some form of dictatorship.[135]

The Russian civil war, 1917-1922

DONALD J. RALEIGH

While the story of the Russian Revolution has often been retold, the historiog­raphy of the event's most decisive chapter, the civil war, remains remarkably underdeveloped. A generation ago, the nature of available sources as well as dominant paradigms in the historical profession led Western historians of the civil war to focus on military operations, Allied intervention and politics at the top. This scholarship pinned the blame for the resulting Communist dictator­ship on Marxist-Leninist ideology and/or Russia's backwardness and author­itarian political culture. In the 1980s, interest in social history and Bolshevik cultural experimentation stimulated publication of new academic and popu­lar overviews of the civil war,[136] and also of a landmark collaborative volume that shifted the explanation for the Communist dictatorship from conscious political will and ideology to the circumstances of the ordeal.[137] The first full- scale investigations of the civil war in Petrograd and Moscow appeared as well.[138] Some studies issued at this time cast the period as a 'formative' one, emphasising that the Bolshevik behaviour, language, policies and appearance that emerged during 1917-21 served as models for policies later implemented under Joseph Stalin.[139]

Although Soviet historians writing on I9I7 often produced results that were not entirely invalidated by ideological content, this is less the case in regard to the civil war, whose history they patently falsified, undoubtedly owing to

mass discontent with Bolshevik practices after I9I8. Focusing on the political and military aspects of the civil war, Soviet historians published a 'canonical' five-volume survey of the subject between 1935 and 1960.[140] World war and the partial discrediting of Stalinist scholarship following the Soviet leader's death in I953 help to explain the delay in issuing the last volumes in the series. Like their Western counterparts, Soviet historians by the I980s had begun to devote more attention to the 1918-21 phase of the Russian Revolution, resulting in the release of a two-volume authoritative survey to replace the one begun during the Stalin years.[141] They debated periodisation of the civil war, acknowledged opposition parties and regional differences, examined party and state insti­tutions and re-evaluated War Communism. However, they failed to engage deeper interpretive issues or to address the degree of popular opposition to Bolshevik policies.

The opening of the archives has allowed historians to revisit old questions and also to conceptualise the civil war in fresh ways. Lenin became the object of this first trajectory Underscoring his disregard for human life, new writing on the founder of the Soviet state draws on long-sealed documents to confirm his willingness to resort to terror and repression. Such literature breathed new life into the long-standing argument that Stalinism represented the inevitable consequence of Leninism.[142] An attempt to expose the 'revisionist' historians' intellectual dead end and to convict the Bolsheviks of crimes similar to those perpetrated under Stalin mars an otherwise valuable study of the civil war pub­lished in 1994.[143] More importantly, unprecedented archival access and changing intellectual paradigms encouraged historians to carry out local case studies informed by cultural approaches and by an interest in daily life. These works show how the experiential aspects of the civil war constrained and enabled later Soviet history, pointing out that many features of the Soviet system that we associate with the Stalin era were not only practised, but also embedded during the 1914-22 period.[144] Shifting focus away from Lenin and Bolshevik ideology, these investigations interpret this outcome as the consequence of a complex dynamic shaped, among other things, by Russia's political tradition and culture, Bolshevik ideology and the dire political, economic and military crises starting with the First World War and strongly reinforced by the mythol- ogised experience of surviving the civil war. Some of these studies conclude that the 1920s contained few real alternatives to a Stalinist-like system. Herein lies the civil war's significance.

Overview

The origins of the Russian civil war can be found in the desacralisation of the tsarist autocracy that took place in the years before the First World War; in the social polarisations that shaped politics before and during 1917; and in the Bolshevikleadership'sbeliefinthe efficacy of civil war, the imminence ofworld revolution and the value of applying coercion in setting up a dictatorship of the proletariat. When did the civil war begin? Historians have made compelling cases for a variety of starting points, yet dating the event to October 1917 makes the most sense, because that is how contemporaries saw things. Armed opposition to the new Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) arose immediately after the Second Congress of Soviets ratified the Bolshevik decree on land and declaration of peace, when officers of the imperial army formed the first counter-force known as the volunteer army, based in southern Russia. Ironically, the widespread belief among the population that Bolshevik power would soon crumble accompanied what Lenin, and subsequent generations of Soviet historians, called the 'triumphal march' of Soviet power as the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold in cities across central Russia.

During the civil war the Bolsheviks or Reds, renamed Communists in 1918, waged war against the Whites, a term used to refer to all factions that took up arms against the Bolsheviks. The Whites were a more diverse group than the Bolshevik label of 'counter-revolution' suggests. Those who represented the country's business and landowning elite often expressed monarchist sen­timents. Historically guarding the empire's borders, Cossack military units enjoyed self-government and other privileges that likewise made them a con­servative force. But many White officers had opposed the autocracy and some even harboured reformist beliefs. Much more complicated were the Bolshe­viks' relations with Russia's moderate socialists, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and both parties' numerous offshoots, who wished to establish a government that would include all socialist parties. Frequently sub­sumed within the wider conflict between Reds and Whites, the internecine struggle within the socialist camp over rival views of the meaning of revolution prevailed during much of 1918, persisted throughout the civil war, and flared up once again after the Bolsheviks routed the Whites in 1920.[145]

Fearing a White victory, the moderate socialist parties threw their sup­port behind the Reds at critical junctures, thereby complicating this scenario. Moreover, left-wing factions within these parties forged alliances with the

Bolsheviks. For instance, until mid-1918 the Bolsheviks stayed afloat in part owing to the support of the Left SRs, who broke from their parent party fol­lowing October I9I7. Accepting commissariats in the new government, the Left SRs believed they could influence Bolshevik policies towards Russia's peasant majority. In some locales the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition even weath­ered the controversy over the Brest-Litovsk Peace in March I9I8, which ceded eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and Ukraine to Germany, as well as Transcaucasia to Turkey, in return for an end to hostilities. Ratifying the treaty sundered the alliance with the Left SRs, who withdrew from the Lenin government in protest, and also sparked heated controversy within the Com­munist Party, especially among the so-called Left Communists led by Nikolai Bukharin, who backed a revolutionary war against Germany. Renegade Left SRs later formed a new party called the Revolutionary Communists (RCs), who participated in a ruling coalition with the Bolsheviks in many Volga provinces and the Urals. Committed to Soviet power, the RCs perceived otherwise ques­tionable Bolshevik practices as the consequence of temporary circumstances brought about by civil war. The Bolshevik attitude towards the RCs and other groups that supported the Reds reflected the overall strength of Soviet power at any given time. Exercising power through a dynamic of co-optation amid repression, they manipulated their populist allies before orchestrating their merger with the Communists in 1920.[146]

Because political opposition to the Bolsheviks became more resolved after they closed down the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the Lenin govern­ment established the Red Army under Leon Trotsky. He promptly recruited ex-tsarist officers to command the Reds, appointing political commissars to all units to monitor such officers and the ideological education of recruits. This early phase of the civil war ended with a spate of armed conflicts in Russian towns along the Volga in May and June 1918 between Bolshevik-run soviets and Czechoslovak legionnaires. Prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian armies, they were slated to be transported back to the western front in order to join the Allies in the fight to defeat the Central Powers. Their clash with the Soviet government emboldened the SR opposition to set up an anti-Bolshevik government, the Committee to Save the Constituent Assembly, Komuch, in the Volga city of Samara in June 1918. Many delegates elected to the Con­stituent Assembly congregated there before the city fell to the Bolsheviks that November. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks expelled Mensheviks and SRs from local soviets, while the Kadets met in the Siberian city of Omsk in June to establish a Provisional Siberian Government. The rivalry between Samara and Omsk resulted in a state conference that met in Ufa in September, the last attempt to form from below a national force to oppose Bolshevism. Drawing repre­sentatives from disparate bodies, the Ufa Conference set up a compromise five-member Directory But in November the military removed the socialists from it and installed Admiral Kolchak in power. He kept his headquarters in Siberia, remaining official leader of the White movement until defeat forced him to resign in early 1920.

Although its role is often exaggerated, international intervention bolstered the White cause and fuelled Bolshevik paranoia, providing 'evidence' for the party's depictions of the Whites as traitorous agents of imperialist foreign pow­ers. Maintaining an apprehensive attitude towards the Whites whom many in the West viewed as reactionaries, the Allies dispatched troops to Russia to secure military supplies needed in the war against Germany. Their involve­ment deepened as they came to see the Bolsheviks as a hostile force that promoted world revolution, renounced the tsarist government's debts and concluded a separate peace with Germany. Allied intervention on behalf of the Whites became more active with the end of the First World War in November 1918, when the British, French, Japanese, Americans and a dozen other pow­ers sent troops to Russian ports and rail junctures. Revolutionary stirrings in Germany, the founding of the Third Communist International in Moscow in March 1919 and the temporary establishment of Bela Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic at roughly the same time heightened the Allies' fears of a Red men­ace. Yet the Allied governments could not justify intervention in Russia to their own war-weary people. Lacking a common purpose and resolve, and often suspicious of one another, the Allies extended only half-hearted support to the Whites, whom they left in the lurch by withdrawing from Russia in 1919 and 1920 - except for the Japanese who kept troops in Siberia.

Both Reds and Whites turned to terror in the second half of 1918 as a sub­stitute for popular support. Calls to overthrow Soviet power, followed by the assassination of German Ambassador Count Mirbach in July, which the Bol­sheviks depicted as the start of a Left SR uprising designed to undercut the Brest-Litovsk Peace, provided the Bolsheviks with an excuse to repress their one-time radical populist allies and to undermine the Left SRs' hold over the villages. Moreover, with Lenin's approval, local Bolsheviks in Ekaterin­burg executed Tsar Nicholas II and his family on 16 July 1918. Following an attempt on Lenin's life on 30 August, the Bolsheviks unleashed the Red Terror aimed at eliminating political opponents within the civilian population.

The Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-revolution and Sabotage (Cheka), set up in December 1917 under Feliks Dzerzhinsky, carried out the terror.

Seeking to reverse social revolution, the Whites savagely waged their own ideological war that justified the use of terror to avenge those who had been wronged by the revolution. Although the Whites never applied terror as sys­tematically as the Bolsheviks, White Terror was equally horrifying and arbi­trary. Putting to death Communists and their sympathisers, and massacring Jews in Ukraine and elsewhere,[147] the Whites posed a more serious threat to the Reds after the Allies backed the Whites' cause. Until their defeat in 1920, White forces controlled much of Siberia and southern Russia, while the Reds, who moved their capital to Moscow in March 1918, clung desperately to the Russian heartland.