Russia: A History

THE years separating the outbreak of war in 1914 and the announcement of the ‘New Economic Policy’ in 1921 form a critical watershed in modern Russian history. The revolutions of 1917, while not an unbridgeable caesura, fundamentally transformed the polity and social order. This era also had a profound impact on the ‘bourgeois’ West, which in the coming decades had to contend with the spectre of a socialist Prometheus in the East.

The First World War

In a memorandum of February 1914 P. N. Durnovo, a former Minister of Internal Affairs, implored the emperor to avoid war with Germany. The Kaiserreich, he argued, was a natural ally, joined by imperial ties of blood and by conservative principles and institutions; it was the alliance with democratic Britain and France that was unnatural. Moreover, the strains of war might topple the fragile order reconstructed from the shambles of 1905. But Durnovo was more prescient than persuasive: within months the government found itself helplessly sucked into the whirlpool of war.

Above all, it feared another diplomatic defeat in the Balkans, not simply out of sympathy for Balkan nationalism, but because of the volatile domestic situation. After decades of high-stakes gambling, in 1908 Russia had suffered a humiliating defeat when Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina and then reneged on a promised quid pro quo. Russia seemed to be losing its long quest to dominate the Ottoman Empire and Black Sea. Russian policy was also driven by its desire to recover great-power status, by its fear of Germany’s growing economic and military might, and by its strategic and diplomatic commitments to France and Britain. And, like the other powers, Russia was unduly deferential towards strategic planning and the general staffs, the ideology of the offensive, and the illusion that war could be localized and won quickly. None imagined the trench warfare, the carnage, the destruction of élites and empires, or the profound domestic upheavals that the ‘Great War’ would bring.

Declaration of war in Russia evoked a moment of ‘patriotic union’, symbolically captured on film that showed Nicholas bowing before several hundred thousand loyal subjects who had massed to sing ‘God Save the Tsar’. Unity proved ephemeral: military defeats and domestic strains rekindled the smouldering social and political conflict. Although Russia did not fare badly against Austria and Turkey, by early 1915 German divisions had dealt a string of shattering defeats. Russia’s stock of ammunition and weapons was perilously low; neither domestic production nor imports could satisfy the gargantuan demand of this first modern war. As morale plummeted, the army replaced a decimated officer corps with young officers from lower social ranks—non-aristocrats who had minimal training and little authority over peasant soldiers. By early 1915 one high official declared that Russia could only pray to her patron saints and rely upon her vast spaces and the spring mud to slow the relentless German advance. Failing the divine intercession of saints and mud, Russia needed ‘total war’—a complete mobilization of resources, human and material.

War, however, proved particularly difficult for Russia, one reason being that the ‘crisis was at the top’—a mutual alienation that divided state and ‘Society’ (professional and economic élites), which had rejected state tutelage and demanded a role in running the country. The war gave centrist parties a splendid opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism and, simultaneously, to exploit the alliance with democratic France and Britain and the wartime crisis in order to extort concessions from the state. Such ambitions reinforced Nicholas’s tendency to distrust ‘Society’, to select weak ministers, to heed his wife’s inept advice, and to reassert the inviolability of autocratic power. Within a few months the ‘patriotic union’ had dissipated; the rancour of prewar politics and recrimination resumed in full force.

To mollify the opposition, however, in mid-1915 Nicholas agreed to replace the most odious ministers with men enjoying the confidence of ‘Society’. These gestures, together with new military débâcles, only redoubled the Duma’s determination to extract political concessions: in August 1915 centrist Duma parties formed the ‘Progressive Bloc’ to press long-standing demands—above all, for a government ‘responsible’ to the Duma. Confronted by a hostile majority in the Duma, appalled by his ministers’ readiness to compromise, Nicholas prorogued the Duma and assumed personal command of the army, relinquishing power to chosen viziers, his unstable wife, and an unsavoury entourage that included the dissolute ‘Grishka’ Rasputin. Military defeat, political incompetence, personal stubbornness, and an adamant refusal to share political power or even consider the question negotiable—all this gradually dispelled the mystique of the Romanov dynasty and even fuelled suspicions that Nicholas and Alexandra were themselves traitors.

Nicholas did, however, accord ‘Society’ a greater practical role in the war by establishing new institutions outside the Duma. Most important were ‘the Union of Zemstvos’ and ‘Union of Municipalities’ (with a joint co-ordinating body called ‘Zemgor’), but these too were rooted in bastions of liberalism—the zemstvo and municipal Duma. Their charge was to organize refugee relief, food supply, and even industrial production and distribution. Another important institution was the War Industries Committee; established on the initiative of Moscow industrialists, its network of local committees mobilized medium and small-scale industry to produce military equipment and ammunition.

The war economy inexorably increased bureaucratic intervention in the economy, if in partnership with the private sector. This co-operation included special councils (on defence, food supply, fuel, and transport), with a mixed membership and a monopoly over vital materials like sugar, leather, and metals. This process (which emulated the policy of other belligerents) enhanced the power of the responsible branches of the bureaucracy and set them against the more traditional ministries still closely tied to the court and nobility. As the lines between ‘public’ and ‘private’ blurred, three competing centres of economic and political power emerged: the state bureaucracy, private industry and capital, and public organizations (with a mixed composition, strong ethos of public service, and moral opposition to vested political and economic interests).

Although the military record improved in 1916 (partly because of the contribution of public organizations), the war also had profound repercussions for the lower social orders. Mobilization of manpower, industries, and transportation inevitably caused disruptions in the production and distribution of food, with dire consequences at the front and at home. Increasingly, the state lost the capacity to requisition food, fuel, and manpower, reflecting the decline in its moral authority or sheer capacity to coerce. Those close to the front suffered most: Russia’s scorched-earth policy denied Germany the spoils of victory, but also unleashed a tidal wave of refugees that overwhelmed the administration and economy of interior provinces. Still more dangerous were the labour and agrarian questions, raised but not resolved by the Revolution of 1905; as inflation and food shortages ravaged the home front, disaffection also spread rapidly among the soldiers and sailors. Unrest also simmered among the lower-middle class and white-collar ‘labourers’, of unpredictable political behaviour, but deeply affected by the privations of war. A state at war also found it increasingly difficult to cow, let alone control, its national minorities; even ‘backward minorities’ grew rebellious—the largest insurrection of 1916, claiming thousands of lives, erupted in Turkestan in response to a new conscription drive. And, as inflation and food shortages reached critical levels at home, disaffection also spread rapidly among the soldiers. By the autumn of 1916 discontent was so intense that the police were issuing dire warnings that the regime’s very existence was in jeopardy And the government itself, paralysed by ‘ministerial leapfrog’ and the tsar’s absence from the capital (to direct the war effort from military headquarters), was steadily losing control of the situation.

The February Revolution

Few contemporaries imagined that, after three centuries of rule, the Romanov dynasty could vanish in several days. Even fewer could have predicted that, within months, a moderate regime of liberals and socialists would disintegrate and in October surrender power to Bolsheviks marching under the banner of ‘All Power to the Soviets’.

The February Revolution began with street demonstrations in Petrograd to protest against food shortages, a direct consequence of wartime privation and the regime’s inability to provision even the volatile capital. For months police officials had issued dire warnings and taken preventive measures (arresting, for example, worker representatives to the Central War Industries Committee). On 23 February (8 March NS) a crowd of women seized the occasion of International Women’s Day to demonstrate against the high bread prices and food shortages.

Their march coincided with calls by the revolutionary underground (from Bolsheviks and others) to resume the demonstrations of December and January. The next day crowds of strikers and demonstrators took to the streets, some reaching the centre of Petrograd. When the regular police failed to disperse the crowds, local authorities called out the troops, but again without effect. The next day Petrograd was virtually paralysed by a general strike. Desperate to regain control, on 26 February the authorities resorted to firearms: the Volhynian regiment opened fire, killing several dozen demonstrators. This volley proved suicidal: the next day the same Volhynian unit (joined by several guards regiments) took sides with the crowds. The insurgents then seized arsenals, emptied the gaols, and burnt the central headquarters of the hated political police. By 28 February the tsarist ministers were under arrest; the police itself had discreetly vanished.

As the government in Petrograd disintegrated, Nicholas desperately struggled to retain power. He formally dissolved the State Duma, attempted to return to the capital, but soon found himself stranded in a provincial town. There, at the urging of his own generals and Duma politicians, he agreed to abdicate for the sake of domestic tranquillity and the war effort. Ironically, his final act as emperor was characteristically illegal: in contravention of the 1797 Law of Succession, Nicholas abdicated not only for himself but also for his son. His abdication, compounded by the dissolution of the Duma, raised the question of legitimacy that would bedevil the Provisional Government throughout its brief existence. The designated heir, Nicholas’s brother Michael, declined the throne until a constituent assembly had defined the nature of the Russian state. Michael probably had no inkling that his decision would bring the monarchy to an end and dramatically accelerate the revolutionary process.

Still earlier, two contenders for power had already emerged in Petrograd. One was the State Duma, which the tsar had dissolved on 27 February and hence had no legal right to rule. None the less, the Duma deputies convened in Tauride Palace and created a ‘Provisional Duma Committee’ that included members from conservative, liberal, and even socialist parties. In essence, the Duma represented ‘propertied society’ (tsenzovoe obshchestvo), which received a preponderant share of power in the Duma under the 1907 electoral law. The Duma Committee took steps to claim power, restore order, and establish contact with the leading public organizations. They also dispatched ‘commissars’ to take command of key ministries, including the Ministry of Communications that controlled the all-important railways. Implicitly acknowledging a lack of legitimacy, the Duma members called its committee ‘provisional’ as would the ‘Provisional Government’. Until conditions permitted a constituent assembly to convene, however, it claimed the right to rule.

The Duma deputies, however, were not the only claimants to power: a mélange of intellectuals, party operatives, and trade-union leaders simultaneously convened in another wing of the same Tauride Palace. Drawing on the experience of 1905, they re-established the famous ‘soviet’ and summoned workers and soldiers to send elected representatives. The result was the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, led by an Executive Committee composed mostly of moderate socialist intellectuals. Curiously, the soviet leaders made no claim to rule: scarred by the failure of 1905, they intended to observe the ‘iron laws’ of a two-stage revolution, whereby a ‘bourgeois’ revolution would beget a ‘bourgeois’ government to rule for a discrete interval before a second, socialist revolution. Because the tsarist police left revolutionary parties in disarray (with ranking members in prison or in exile), the soviet leaders also felt unqualified to seize the reins of power and deemed the ‘bourgeoisie’ better suited for this historic task. Some were also overawed by the myth of counter-revolution, which seemed less likely if Russia were ruled by a bourgeois government.

The year 1917 was a complex story of ‘dual power’, the Provisional Government representing ‘Society’, the soviet representing workers, peasants, and soldiers. With the approval of the soviet, the Duma Committee established a ‘Provisional’ Government, its cabinet drawn largely from liberal Duma circles. Thus the ‘bourgeois’ government required by socialist theory had finally emerged. It vowed to hold free elections for a Constituent Assembly and, in the interim, was to exercise the plenitude of executive, legislative, and even judicial power of the ancien régime. From the outset the Provisional Government had an uncertain status: the Duma committee had simply usurped power, and the soviet agreed to give its support ‘only in so far as’ the government followed the ‘democratic’ script for the Revolution.

Provisional Government

History has judged the Provisional Government harshly, but one must remember that it ruled during a raging war and profound social cataclysm. Eight months afforded little time to build a new state, wage war, and resolve acute social and political questions that had accumulated over many decades.

Its ministers included the leading figures in the Progressive Bloc and public organizations. Most prominent were the Kadet Party leader, P. N. Miliukov (Minister of Foreign Affairs) and the Octobrist leader, A. I. Guchkov (Minister of War). Other appointments proved fateful—in particular, the choice of Prince Georgii Lvov as Minister-President and Minister of Internal Affairs. Although Lvov distinguished himself as head of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and Towns, he was a weak leader and ill-equipped to lead a democratic revolutionary state. At best he exuded a dreamy Slavophile faith in ‘the people’ (narod); at worst he refused to use the instruments of power to restore public order or instil respect for the rule of law that he so cherished. Some appointments were surprising, especially the choice of A. I. Konovalov (a Moscow industrialist) as Minister of Finance and an obscure Kievan sugar magnate, M. I. Tereshchenko, as Minister of Trade and Industry. Although socialists in the Petrograd Soviet declined to join the cabinet, one did agree to serve: Alexander Kerensky a radical SR and Duma deputy, became Minister of Justice.

On 8 March the Provisional Government announced its ‘Programme’ of democratic principles and goals, which envisioned a revolutionary transformation on liberal principles, with appropriate guarantees of civil rights and more autonomy for minorities. The government also vowed to establish the rule of law and later appointed a juridical commission to give counsel on legislation and inculcate respect for the judicial order. But the most far-reaching plank in this Programme was its promise to end bureaucratic hegemony over political life and to create self-government at every level, down to the township (volost’) level. In effect, the government refashioned the pre-revolutionary structure (provincial administration, zemstvos, and town dumas) into a new system of zemstvos and town dumas now elected on the basis of democratic suffrage. The new bodies were to assume the powers of police and administration that had long been identified with autocracy itself. The Programme promised to convoke a constituent assembly ‘democratically’ elected and empowered to resolve the questions of legitimacy and to determine the form of the new Russian state. It was a heady agenda, one not easily realized, especially in the throes of war and social upheaval.

The February Revolution produced not only a liberal, reformist government, but also the soviets, supported by popular forces committed to ‘democracy’. The Petrograd soviet formally recognized the Provisional Government, but immediately began to encroach on its authority. The most famous instance was ‘Order No. 1’: a harbinger of social revolution in the army, it established the soviet’s authority over army units and created soldiers’ committees to check the regular command hierarchy, thereby unleashing a radical ‘democratization’ in the army itself. The military committees, nominally obliged to maintain order, fanned revolutionary and anti-war sentiments among soldiers and officers.

In the provinces the revolution was greeted with jubilation and a replication of ‘dual power’. As word spread from Petrograd, local activists seized power from tsarist administrators and police, who silently melted away. The new structure emerged with astonishing rapidity. Committees of Public Organizations, usually centrist, took formal authority. Chairmen of the old zemstvo boards briefly replaced tsarist governors until ‘commissars’ were sent. Simultaneously, workers and soldiers created soviets in towns, while peasants formed their own village organs—volost committees, peasant unions, and even peasant soviets.

‘Democratization’ extended to the grass roots, blanketing the Russian landscape with township and village committees, factory committees, and every imaginable variety of soviet, union, and professional organization. These organs—manned sometimes by plebeians, but often by white-collar workers—filled the power vacuum left by the ancien régime. As the revolution unfolded, better organized, often antagonistic social groups emerged as the main actors.

Amidst this ‘democratization’, the Provisional Government endeavoured to rule and reform. It granted virtual independence to Poland (in any event, under occupation by the Central Powers) and autonomy to Finland, freed political prisoners, drafted legislation on self-government, made plans for judicial reform, and established countless committees to consider other critical issues. Indeed, the government contemplated or initiated reform in virtually every imaginable sphere—in education (democratization of access and administration), labour relations (the eight-hour day and arbitration chambers), corporate law, and religion (secularization of schools, liberalization of divorce, and separation of Church and state).

It proved far easier, however, to appoint committees than to reform. Apart from the magnitude of its agenda, the government had to rely on the old tsarist bureaucracy and to operate in the absence of an elected, authoritative legislature. Typically, the government established a committee, with great fanfare, collected data and drafted laws, but inevitably elected to defer the main issues for resolution by the constituent assembly. Still, given its narrow timeframe, the government addressed a broad range of critical issues.

Meanwhile, the revolution did not stand still. Within a few weeks, it was clear that the Provisional Government must immediately address new problems (especially food shortages and greater industrial production) as well as old ones (such as land and labour reform). Ultimately, the government was driven to nullify its liberal Programme and adopt very different social and economic policies, essentially more corporatist and socialist than liberal. On 25 March, for example, the government established a grain monopoly to regulate prices for cereals and mandate deliveries to the state—in effect, declaring all grain to be state property. To manage this monopoly, it created a new hierarchy of provisioning committees and ultimately a Ministry of Food Supply. When the government entrusted provisioning (and much of consumer supply) to co-operatives, it undermined not only the market for foodstuffs but also the established commercial infrastructure of the empire. Thus a regime professing liberalism and tarred as ‘bourgeois’ asserted state authority over the economy, shoving aside entire business firms and an entire class. But in the case of land reform the government acted with less abandon: consigning this matter to resolution by the constituent assembly it merely created a Main Land Committee to ‘study’ the issue and directed local land committees to gather information and adjudicate land disputes over such matters as rents and competing land claims.

In the interim, the question of war eroded the foundations of ‘dual power’. At issue were war aims and hence the terms for stopping the carnage. On 14 March the Petrograd Soviet issued an ‘Appeal to All the Peoples of the World’, repudiating expansionist war aims and espousing instead ‘revolutionary defencism’, i.e. to prosecute the war only in defence of Russia and its revolution against German authoritarianism and imperialism. It became clear, however, that the government had not abandoned the tantalizing gains promised by its allies. To allay soviet apprehensions, on 28 March the Provisional Government issued a ‘Declaration on War Aims’ renouncing territorial claims, but on condition that peace cause neither humiliation nor the deprivation of ‘vital forces’. In fact, the government retained its original war aims: in a note to the allies on 18 April, the Foreign Minister (Miliukov) ascribed the government’s Declaration to domestic politics and reaffirmed its determination to observe all treaty obligations, with the implication that the allies must also honour their promises, especially on Constantinople and the Straits.

News of this note ignited a new political crisis in Petrograd, with mass demonstrations on 23–4 April protesting against the government’s foreign policy. The worker and soldier demonstrators carried banners demanding peace and ‘Down with the Bourgeois Government’, and ‘Down with Miliukov and Guchkov’. The Provisional Government refused to deploy troops and use force to restore order. After the two most unpopular ministers (Guchkov and Miliukov) resigned, the government invited the Petrograd soviet to help form a coalition. The soviet leaders reluctantly agreed, a decision that instantly blurred the lines of dual power and made them culpable for the policies of the Provisional Government. This first coalition, which included six socialist ministers (including Viktor Chernov as Minister of Agriculture), avowed a commitment to ‘revolutionary defencism’ in foreign policy, state regulation of the economy, new taxes on the propertied classes, radical land reform, and further democratization of the army.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

Prior to Vladimir Lenin’s return in the famous ‘sealed train’ in early April, the Bolsheviks had already undergone a radical shift in party policy. At the outbreak of the February Revolution, the radical underground activists who dominated the Petrograd apparatus rejected the ‘bourgeois Provisional Government’ and demanded a revolutionary soviet government. But the ranking Bolshevik leaders (including Iosif Stalin) who returned to the capital in early March overruled the radicals and not only joined other socialists in supporting bourgeois rule, but even sought reconciliation with the Mensheviks. This initial crisis revealed deep internal differences that would persist throughout 1917 and beyond.

The differences emerged again in the ‘April crisis’ following Lenin’s return on 3 April. Such divisions made Lenin’s role decisive: his powerful drive, and obsessive belief in revolution overcame the internal party fissures and gave the Bolsheviks a decisive edge over moderate socialists and the Provisional Government. Lenin’s ‘April Theses’ promised peace, bread, land, and workers’ control—that is, not only to end the unpopular war and food shortages, but also to satisfy long-standing grievances. Most controversial of all, he demanded the elimination of dual power and transfer of ‘all power to the soviets’. The ‘professional revolutionaries’ in the party were aghast; it took all Lenin’s energy and personal authority to overcome their caution and to unite the party behind his vision.

His vision drew on mass radicalism and his own ideological utopianism. It also offered a strategic alternative to the discredited ideologies of autocracy and liberalism, which were splintered, politically ineffective, and without a deep social base. The language of socialism and class conflict became the idiom of public discourse for the press, rally, public meeting, and all manner of political propaganda. Lenin projected a strong vision of transforming through technocratic change, of reshaping consciousness, and of making the proletariat a true universal class—for itself and, if need be, in spite of itself.

The All-Russian Crisis

The first coalition quickly exposed the gulf between liberalism and socialism—and the government’s inability to bridge that chasm. The conflicts in the coalition correlated directly with the declining authority of the Provisional Government (and, by contrast, to the surge in Bolshevik influence). On a whole range of issues the coalition could neither agree internally nor satisfy the spiralling expectations of various social groups.

Disagreement in the coalition was profound, especially on central questions like economic regulation, labour, and land. Liberal and socialist ministers agreed on the need for government regulation of the economy, but for radically different ends: liberals sought to preserve the market in wartime, socialists imagined the beginnings of socialist planning. The two sides also differed on the land question: liberals wanted to uphold private property and legality, whereas the left sought to sanction peasant land seizures and local ‘initiative’ regardless of legal niceties. As to workers’ demands (for higher wages, shorter hours, and worker control), the liberal ministers supported factory owners in the patriotic production for the war. Socialists were in a quandary: as state officials supporting labour discipline and resumption of work, they risked appearing as capitalist stooges and becoming easy targets for Bolshevik attacks.

The war itself was divisive. It made liberals illiberal, disposed to defer elections and constituent assembly until more propitious times; they were also under pressure from the allies to keep fighting. The war also invited attacks from the left; neither ‘revolutionary defencism’ nor the ‘renunciation of territorial claims’ stopped the carnage or defused popular discontent. The fact that non-Bolshevik socialists actively supported the war effort (even the June offensive) was grist for Bolshevik propagandists, who identified their own anti-war stance with popular will and tarred all war advocates, especially socialists, as enemies of the people. The disastrous June offensive had no effect on German lines and only hastened the demise of the Russian army, shattering the fragile truce between officers and soldiers and unleashing a wave of mass insubordination and desertion.

Equally explosive was the nationality question. The revolution was a powerful catalyst for the development of national consciousness, encouraging entire peoples to demand autonomy and independence and calling into question the very existence of the Russian Empire. Although national movements varied considerably, most demanded democratization and self-government and drew their leadership from the intelligentsia and ‘semi-professions’—white-collar personnel employed by the co-operatives, zemstvos, schools, and the like. In Finland and Ukraine, for example, activists created national equivalents of the class-based soviets that became centres of growing national consciousness and power. Even the ‘backward’ Muslims organized a Muslim Congress in May to proclaim their hostility to Russian colonialism and to demand autonomy.

Shaken by these anti-Russian movements, neither socialists nor liberals were prepared to comprehend, let alone control, the national revolutions of 1917. In essence, their term ‘imperial’ (vserossiiskii, ‘all-Russian-empire’) connoted ‘Russian’ (russkii), denying any special status for non-Russian peoples; their term ‘statehood’ (gosudarstvennost’) subsumed empire, not just state. Believing that the revolution and new state were a ‘democratic’ antithesis to tsarism, the Provisional Government naïvely assumed that by definition this state could not oppress minority nationalities, that their programme of self-government and democratization would satisfy the aspirations of national minorities, that the latter would be only too grateful. They thus tended to hypostatize the Russian state and to insist that national groups support the democratic revolution and its government. The ministers dimly understood modern nationalism, perhaps because it was so flaccid among Russians themselves. They failed to anticipate that national strivings would quickly escalate into demands for autonomy and independence, and that as minority and Russian interests diverged, the government inevitably would tread in the footsteps of the tsars. Surprised and dismayed, the Provisional Government and much of Russian public opinion accused the minorities of stabbing Russia in the back and undercutting its democratic revolution.

Still more menacing was the threat from lower classes in the Russian heartland—above all, the workers. Some historians have revived an earlier tendency to denigrate the workers’ role in the revolution and even discount it altogether. Recent works by Richard Pipes and Martin Malia, for example, deny that the revolution had any significant social dimension and claim that the prime mover was ideology, the intelligentsia, or some primal Russian obsession with power and authoritarianism. While this ‘un-revisionism’ rightly suggests that the revolution involved more than working-class aspirations, it revives the anti-Bolshevik stereotypes of ‘working-class backwardness’—hence Bolshevik manipulation, hence the illegitimacy and ‘un-Marxian’ character of the 1917 Revolution. Ironically, this conservative view derives from Menshevik sour grapes: to account for their own failure to attract workers, Mensheviks claimed that the workers were just green peasants easily seduced by cunning Bolsheviks.

Beyond the Mensheviks’ confession of their own political ineptness, this thesis has little to commend it: collective action of workers profoundly shaped the politics of 1917. Indeed, the aggressive measures of factory owners and the government’s inability to mediate or satisfy minimal demands contributed to the steady radicalization of the workers. The result, as S. A. Smith has shown, was the growing importance of organizations such as factory committees, as a powerful force for ‘democratization’ demanding workers’ control and self-management and as hotbeds of Bolshevik activism. These organizations enabled Bolsheviks to offer an alternative to the trade unions and to outflank their Menshevik rivals. Nor can any serious account of 1917 ignore strikes and their impact. According to Diane Koenker and William Rosenberg, the eight months of revolution in 1917 witnessed 1,019 strikes involving 2,441,850 workers and employees, led by metal and textile workers (as before), but reinforced by printers and service personnel. It was all a clear expression of dissatisfaction with the Provisional Government and moderate socialists.

Revolution also swept across the countryside, where peasants now found little to prevent the realization of long-standing claims and aspirations. Their maximalist expectations were evident early, as in a resolution from Riazan: ‘The revolution is already three weeks old and nothing has happened yet’—a transparent allusion to the all-important land question. Although the government initially dampened expectations of immediate repartition of land, by early summer the peasant movement had gathered a full head of steam, with a steady increase in disorder, violence, and collective seizure of land. The peasants shared a fundamentally revolutionary, not liberal, conception of law and justice: land should belong to those who actually cultivate it, not the landlords and speculators who merely prevented this rational distribution of land. The war redoubled their feeling of injustice: while city folk obtained draft exemptions and special concessions, the long-suffering village sacrificed its men for slaughter at the front.

The agrarian question deepened the rift within the coalition. The Main Land Committee and Chernov’s Ministry of Agriculture became bastions of SR influence and, contrary to the express wishes of the Provisional Government, proposed the ‘socialization’ of land—that is, the abolition of private property and transfer of ownership to peasant communes. The Ministry believed that, in the midst of revolution, just demands took precedence over the laws of a defunct regime. But liberal ministers saw only a crass violation of the rule of law and resigned from the coalition. Significantly, the socialists themselves were divided on this issue. Whereas Chernov fanned the flames of peasant revolution, the Menshevik Minister of Internal Affairs ordered his apparatus to combat peasant lawlessness and to assert control over the land committees. Such fissures, along ideological and class lines, paralleled and deepened the divisions in society at large.

By early summer the coalition was in a shambles, its popularity waning. The First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June exposed deep rifts on the left and subjected the coalition to withering criticism. To stave off a Bolshevik challenge, the soviet leadership cancelled anti-government demonstrations on 10 June and ordered its own march a week later. It proved a stunning fiasco, as soldiers and workers carried Bolshevik banners: ‘Down with the Capitalist Ministers’, ‘Peace’, and ‘Down with the Bourgeoisie’. The rhetoric of class war prevailed: conciliation, appeals to unity and ‘nation’, in fact any appeals not based squarely on ‘class’ and ‘class conflict’ fell on deaf ears.

The crisis culminated in the famous ‘July Days’, when soldiers and workers (with the aid of lower-echelon Bolshevik organs) staged an abortive insurrection. The July Days bequeathed unforgettable visual images—the populace scattering under rifle fire in Petrograd’s main squares, angry crowds attacking soviet leaders (‘Why haven’t you bastards taken power?’). The government blamed the Bolsheviks, arrested several key leaders, and accused Lenin himself of ‘treason’ (claiming that he had taken German money to subvert the democratic revolution). As Alexander Rabinowitch has shown, however, the Bolshevik leaders did less to lead than to follow popular radicalism. Troops loyal to the Provisional Government suppressed the disorders, but the crisis reinforced the rhetoric of violence, the sense of insurmountable problems, and lack of confidence in the government’s ability to deal with them. For the short term, however, the combination of force and anti-Bolshevik propaganda restored some semblance of authority.

But in fact state authority continued to disintegrate. The government now operated under the cloud of military catastrophe, even the threat that Germans would occupy Petrograd itself. And on the domestic front its problems were legion: land seizures and pogroms, strikes and demonstrations by workers, massive breakdowns in supply and transport, and the strident demands of nationalities. In early July the first coalition finally collapsed from disagreements over Ukrainian autonomy (which, to the liberals’ dismay, the socialists proposed to acknowledge) and Chernov’s agrarian policies (which the liberals saw as sanctioning illegal peasant actions). Once Prince Lvov and the Kadet ministers resigned, only a rump cabinet of socialists remained in charge.

That government now became the personal instrument of Kerensky, who succeeded Lvov as Prime Minister. Kerensky was vain, egotistical, and poorly versed in the left-wing ideologies that he would have to combat. A consummately inept politician, he became a caricature of the strong executive he pretended to be. By late July he had fashioned a second coalition, which called for state intervention in the economy and peace without indemnities or annexations.

But this coalition was new in another sense: responsible neither to parties nor the soviet, it steadily abandoned a commitment to parliamentary democracy and, instead, sought legitimacy in pseudo-parliamentary assemblies. Thus in mid-August, amidst much pomp and ceremony, Kerensky convoked the so-called ‘State Conference’ in Moscow. It included representatives of traditional corporate interests (government ministries, the Academy of Sciences, and social estates), as well as delegates from the ‘democratic’ institutions (self-government, co-operatives, the ‘labouring’ intelligentsia, and the like). While the left declaration of 14 August reaffirmed the commitments of July, the centre and right catalogued the horrors of the deepening revolution. Ministers spoke candidly about the enormous problems facing the regime. All felt the drama, the sense that things could not go on, that new upheavals were imminent, either from a German attack or a coup from the left or right. Public voices were already warning that either Kornilov or Lenin would sunder this Gordian knot.

The Kornilov Affair

General Lavr Kornilov, a war hero of modest origins, became a key public figure in 1917 because of his principles and his determination to suppress disorder during the April crisis. When Kerensky appointed the general as commander-in-chief after the summer offensive, he implicitly sanctioned Kornilov’s plan to restore the army’s fighting capacity by restoring discipline and the death penalty (though without dismantling the army’s democratic committees). But Kornilov had broader political ambitions, for he doubted that the coalition had the will either to win the war or to stabilize the domestic front. Regarding the government as a soviet hostage, he concluded that a true patriot must put an end to dual power. This judgement coincided with that of many landowners, industrialists, and political figures on the centre and right: only suppression of ‘democracy run amok’ could save Russia. In late August Kornilov led loyal troops on a march towards Petrograd to restore order.

Much ink has been spilled on the Kornilov affair, mostly along predictable political lines, with the left accusing the general of an attempted coup (Kornilov did order the march on Petrograd to destroy the soviet and install himself as a Napoleonic strongman) and the right and centre (who accuse Kerensky of goading Kornilov to act and then perfidiously betraying him). Both accounts are true: the general did attempt a coup, believing that he had Kerensky’s support; and Kerensky did lose his nerve and renege, sacrificing the general in a desperate effort to regain popular support. Workers and paramilitary units known as Red Guards were mobilized quickly to repulse ‘counter-revolution’ and, without much bloodshed, arrested Kornilov and disarmed his troops. Kerensky dissolved the second coalition and declared himself head of a new government, a five-man ‘Directory’.

The Kornilov affair had enormous repercussions. Kerensky’s machinations soon became public, severely damaging his personal authority. It also lent new credibility to the spectre of counter-revolution—a myth that greatly exaggerated the power of conservative forces, but none the less impelled workers, soldiers, and activists to organize militias, Red Guards, and ad hoc committees to defend the revolution. Even when the Kornilov threat had passed, these armed forces refused to disband and became a powerful threat to the government itself. Thus the Kornilov affair, though a farce and fiasco, further eroded support for Kerensky’s government and facilitated the Bolshevik seizure of power, without, however, in any way pre-ordaining the methods or timing of the October Revolution.

The Coming of October

As Kerensky’s authority faded, the strikes reached a newcrescendo in September. They revealed that the workers no longer believed in the capacity of the government to honour its pledges or in the willingness of factory owners to negotiate in good faith. The collapse of production, lock-outs, unemployment, violence, and social polarization profoundly changed the scale and tenor of the strikes. For three days in September, a strike by 700,000 railway workers paralysed transportation; in mid-October 300,000 workers struck at textile factories in Ivanovo and nearby communities; ‘workers’ included pharmacists as well as oil workers. Mood, not just numbers, is critical: the strikes often culminated in violent confrontations that accelerated the breakdown of law and order (already marked by a rise in looting, physical violence, and vigilante street justice). Koenker and Rosenberg point out that the strikes became the workers’ main ‘form of participatory politics’, ‘the central conduit of labour mobilization and, to a large extent, of management mobilization as well’. The workers’ animosities and aspirations provided the primary drive and justification for early Soviet power—even if, ultimately, the Bolsheviks were to subvert the workers’ democratic impulses and to transform their institutions (soviets, factory committees, trade unions, co-operatives) into instruments of mobilization, hierarchy, and control.

In a desperate bid to stabilize the situation, Kerensky manœuvred to form yet another coalition cabinet. To offset popular radicalism, he wanted representatives of ‘propertied’ society—the same circles of the Kadet Party and Moscow business circles discredited in the popular mind as Kornilov’s accomplices. In mid-September, the soviet and democratic circles sponsored a Democratic Conference to unite the representatives of ‘democracy’ and to guide Kerensky in forming a stable government. Rather than enhance the regime’s stability and legitimacy, the meeting proved a disaster: the delegates at first voted in favour of a coalition, but without the Kadets—an absurd proposition, since the Kadets were the only ‘bourgeois’ party disposed to ally with ‘democracy’. Later, despite Bolshevik opposition, on 25 September the conference voted for a coalition and thus paved the way for Kerensky’s final cabinet. The moderate left and centre thereby sacrificed their last opportunity to seize power or at least form a ‘unified socialist government’. Desperately seeking to end the crisis, the conference voted to summon another gathering—the Council of the Republic, or so-called ‘pre-parliament’. Intended as a surrogate for the constituent assembly and boycotted by the Bolsheviks, this weak body convened in October to hear gloomy ministerial and committee reports about the deepening crisis; it was the final sounding-board for the aspirations of Russia’s democratic revolution and its Provisional Government.

The Bolshevik Party meanwhile, debated the prospects of this ‘revolutionary situation’. The Kornilov episode had unleashed a new wave of radicalism, which was reflected not only in an upsurge of agrarian disorders and urban strikes, but also in pro-Bolshevik votes and elections in the soviets. Encouraged by this remarkable shift in mood, Lenin now revived the slogan ‘all power to the soviets’ abandoned after the July Days.

But internal dissension also rent the Bolsheviks. From various hiding-places Lenin bombarded the Central Committee with letters demanding that the party seize power in the name of the working class. His ‘Letters from Afar’ were a forceful blend of theory and practice, dogma and power. No blind believer in an ‘inevitable’ Bolshevik victory, Lenin insisted that the moment be seized, lest the Germans invade or strike a deal with Kerensky. Confronted with Lenin’s demand for an immediate armed uprising, party members revealed deep differences in their assessment of the situation. Two ‘Old Bolsheviks’, L. B. Kamenev and G. E. Zinoviev, believed that a broad-based socialist coalition, not the Bolsheviks alone, should take power. But the majority (including Trotsky and Stalin) acquiesced in Lenin’s demand: on 10 October, by a 10–2 vote, the Central Committee secretly endorsed Lenin’s theses on seizing power. But it hedged this decision: without setting a timetable, it called for patient work among the troops and proposed to await the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets later in October to legitimize a seizure of power in the name of the soviets. Meanwhile, the Petrograd soviet made a tactical decision of great practical significance when it established the ‘Military Revolutionary Committee’. Ostensibly created to defend Petrograd against the Germans, this Bolshevik-dominated body, working under the cover of soviet legitimacy, became the Bolshevik command centre during the October Revolution.

The Bolsheviks brilliantly exploited the situation, but owed much to ‘objective conditions’—the ongoing war and economic collapse, the weakness of the government, the fissures within possible rival parties, and the inability of interest groups and democratic organizations to mobilize public opinion. The Bolsheviks exploited Kerensky’s ill-timed counter-assaults to evoke the spectre of ‘counter-revolution’ and, on the night of 24 October, began seizing key centres of power in Petrograd (the Winter Palace itself, of little strategic value, was seized only the next evening). The Bolsheviks then informed the assembled soviet congress that they had taken power in the name of the soviets and were creating a temporary Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. The frustrated SR and Menshevik delegates could only denounce the action and stalk out of the assembly. As Kerensky fled Petrograd in a vain search for support, the Bolsheviks set about constructing a new state order.

Rebuilding the State

October signified much, but huge questions remained—how to extend and consolidate soviet power over the vast empire, and how to build the world’s first socialist state and society. Bolsheviks had to address these problems under conditions of war, not only the ongoing Great War but a violent civil war implicit in Bolshevik ideology and the process by which they had come to power.

These first years were, in Merle Fainsod’s felicitous phrase, ‘the crucible of communism’—an attempt to create a socialist state, economy, society, and culture later known as ‘war communism’. The latter phrase signifies much, not only the wartime conditions, but also a violent militancy that informed Bolshevik measures. Historians have passionately debated the regime’s intentions, the coherence of its war communist programme, the relative weight of civil war and ideology as causal factors, and the role of Lenin. Estimates of Lenin vary wildly, from that of malevolent ideologue and precursor of Stalin to that of a moderate pragmatist opposed to utopian leaps. Some see the ‘seeds of totalitarianism’ (to use an outmoded term) in Bolshevism itself; others blame the crescendo of authoritarianism and violence on the civil war alone.

Such one-sided interpretations obscure the ambiguities, alternatives, and texture of early Soviet history. October most certainly did not mark the end of the revolution; the new Bolshevik regime had to surmount the same social and national movements that destroyed its predecessors. But the Bolsheviks approached these issues in their own inimitable way. In particular, they attached great significance to ideology—hence the obsessive determination to build socialism as the historical antithesis of capitalism. Regarding ‘class war’ as the dominant reality, they ruthlessly sought to abolish the market and associated ‘bourgeois’ institutions, cultural values and ethical norms. Still, Bolshevik behaviour cannot be reduced to ideology: they also drew—sometimes unconsciously, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes enthusiastically—on traditional political culture and bureaucratic power. It was not the contradictions between these different impulses but their fusion that led to the great successes—and excesses—of the early Soviet regime.

The Bolsheviks used the cover of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets to legitimize the seizure of power and formation of a workers’ and peasants’ government. But they made haste not only to consolidate power but to use it. That meant a torrent of decrees—like the land decree, which formally nationalized land but in reality empowered peasants to complete the agrarian revolution on their own terms. The Bolsheviks also demolished symbols of the old regime—its ranks, titles, and traditional social estates. They also sought to establish a monopoly on political discourse, re-establishing censorship and banning ‘bourgeois’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ newspapers. Given the disintegration of administration and law in 1917, early Bolshevik rule (as Peter Kenez has suggested) was largely ‘rule by decree’ using threat, exhortation, and propaganda.

Constructing power—not only in Petrograd and Moscow, but in the interior and borderlands—was the primary concern. This process replicated the seizure of power itself, as so-called ‘military-revolutionary committees’ and garrison troops seized power in the name of the ‘soviet’. But Lenin sought to monopolize power, not just construct it—hence his fierce opposition to the idea of a coalition with other socialists. Although his first government was eventually forced to include some left SRs, the coalition lasted only a few brief months. Important too was Lenin’s decision to retain the ministerial bureaucracy and cabinet executive: rather than destroy these creatures of the tsarist regime (as recently envisioned in his State and Revolution), he simply relabelled ministries ‘commissariats’ and the cabinet ‘Council of People’s Commissars’. With this legerdemain he rebaptized these bodies as qualitatively different, purportedly because they were now part of a workers’ and peasants’ state and presumably staffed by proletarians.

That was a masterful illusion: few proletarians were prepared for such service. It created, however, a golden opportunity for the white-collar employees of the tsarist and provisional governments, not only the army of petty clerks and provincial officials, but also mid-level technical and administrative personnel in the capitals. They found the transition easy, for example, from local War Industries Committees and zemstvo economic organs into ‘proletarian’ institutions like the Supreme Council of the National Economy (Vesenkha) and its local ‘economic councils’ (Sovnarkhozy). War Communism spawned a fantastic profusion of economic bureaucracies, including vertical industry monopolies called ‘Main Committees’ (Glavki) that were direct heirs of the earlier administration. Thousands of employees and technical personnel, economists, statisticians, agronomists, and middle- and lower-ranking managers, specialists with higher education, university graduates, and sundry other professionals poured into these organizations. Typical was the case of doctors and lesser medical personnel, who quickly found a home in revolutionary projects for public health. Similarly scientists and engineers eager to remake the world after technocratic visions eagerly joined in ‘building socialism’. Hence the Bolshevik triumph was a triumph of the lower-middle strata providing the very infrastructure of the Soviet state. In this sense the white-collar engagement was as important as the workers’ and peasants’ movements lionized in official discourse and mythology.

But the most unique—and devastatingly efficient—innovation of these early years was the creation of the hybrid ‘party-state’. Membership in the party itself grew exponentially, from a mere 23,600 members in January 1917 to 750,000 four years later. The party gradually metamorphosed into a hierarchically organized bureaucracy, with the discipline mandated in Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’. At the apex the Central Committee began to specialize in function and policy area to become a shadow cabinet exercising real power. At all levels this party-state system had overlapping competence, with party functionaries in a ‘Bolshevik faction’ making decisions and ensuring implementation. Local party secretaries were plenipotentiaries, directing state institutions and soviets. To control key management positions, the party created the famous nomenklatura system for assigning reliable party members to these posts. The Bolshevik organs gradually marginalized the ‘soviets’ in whose name the revolution had been made; they also eliminated any corporate bodies and social organizations that might temper ministerial power. Hence the key revolutionary institutions of 1917—soviets, factory committees, trade unions, co-operatives, professional associations, and the like—were gradually subsumed into the new bureaucracy or extinguished outright.

This party apparatus became Stalin’s institutional base in the struggle for power. When the Central Committee created the ‘Orgburo’ (Organizational Bureau) to manage this apparatus in 1919, it was under Stalin’s command. Hence, even before becoming General Secretary in 1922, Stalin controlled major appointments, including those of provincial party secretaries; he thereby shaped the composition of party conferences and congresses, a critical asset in the power struggles of the 1920s. Stalin also was the first head of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin), another organ of paramount influence.

Others, however, discerned here a mortal danger to the proletarian state. Many protested against the privileges of ‘bourgeois specialists’ and their prominent role in the new state. Lenin himself rejected such ‘specialist-baiting’, dismissing fears of bourgeois contamination on the grounds that these people now worked for a socialist state and the working class. Bureaucratization was another cause of concern; ‘Democratic Centralists’, a faction at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, demanded decentralization and shift of power from party apparatchiki to soviet democracy. Another group, the ‘Workers’ Opposition’, defended the autonomy of trade unions and the principle of workers’ control. Predictably, the party hierarchy denounced such dissenters and reasserted ‘democratic centralism’ to command obedience and submission.

In December 1917, faced with what seemed to be regime-threatening opposition, Lenin created a supreme political police—the ‘Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage’, known by its Russian acronym Cheka. At its head was a Polish Bolshevik, Feliks Dzerzhinskii, charged with becoming the ‘sword of the revolution’ against ‘class’ enemies, real and imagined. He rapidly made the Cheka a state within a state, arbitrarily meting out revolutionary justice and terror. His empire constructed a network of prisons and labour camps that later became the world’s first concentration camp system.

A critical turning-point came in January 1918, when the long-awaited Constituent Assembly finally convened in Petrograd. Lenin had permitted elections to the Constituent Assembly, something that the socialists and liberals had endlessly promised but endlessly deferred. Bolsheviks garnered only a quarter of the votes, the PSR emerging the clear victor—but only, the Bolsheviks argued, because the ballot failed to distinguish between left SRs (who supported October) and right SRs (who did not). Well before the Assembly convened, Lenin made clear his hostility towards a ‘bourgeois’ (hence irrelevant) parliament. The result was a single, seventeen-hour session on 5–6 January: after passionate SR and Menshevik fulminations against the Bolsheviks, Lenin simply dissolved the Assembly and forbade further sessions.

Civil War

By the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks had extended soviet authority to the Russian heartland but could hardly claim to have a firm grasp on power. For the next three years they would combat and defeat an incredible array of adversaries: White armies of patriots and anti-communists, liberals and SRs, peasant rebels (‘greens’) and urban anarchists, and minority movements spread along the borderlands and inside Russia proper itself. The regime would also combat interventionist forces from Britain, France, the United States, and Japan, and in 1920 became embroiled in a bitter war with Poland. By early 1921, however, the regime had vanquished adversaries, signed treaties with its neighbours, and turned its attention to reintegration and rebuilding.

The civil war began in the winter of 1917/18. Apart from small bands of patriotic officers (interested more in continuing the war against Germany than in defeating Bolsheviks), the first important ‘White’ leader was General M. V. Alekseev. Together with General Kornilov, in January 1918 he created the Volunteer Army in the Don region: its goal was to cast off the German-Bolshevik yoke and reconvene the Constituent Assembly. Throughout its existence, this army operated within the territory of the Don and Kuban Cossacks—a serious handicap, since the Cossacks had their own agenda independent of saving the Great Russian state. The Don Cossack ataman, General A. M. Kaledin, did offer his services to the White generals, but he was unceremoniously abandoned by the Cossacks when a Red force invaded and elicited popular support. After Kornilov himself fell in battle at Ekaterinodar, command passed to General Anton Denikin—an uncharismatic, but intelligent commander of great personal integrity.

Other White forces gathered along the Volga and in Siberia. Perhaps most significant was the Czech Legion, tsarist POWs scheduled for repatriation; ordered to disarm, they resisted and soon found themselves at war with the Bolsheviks. In Siberia (with its strong tradition of autonomous regionalism and great ethnic diversity), moderate SRs and Kadets created the ‘Siberian Regional Council’ at Omsk. On the Volga, radical SRs under Chernov established the ‘Committee to Save the Constituent Assembly’ (Komuch). These SRs evoked little popular support and deemed White generals a greater menace than the Bolsheviks—a sentiment reciprocated by the military. In September 1918 they met at Ufa in a lame attempt to re-establish the Provisional Government (as a ‘Directory’), but it lacked even a programme, much less an apparatus to implement it. In November 1918 the military ousted the radicals (in a coup marked by executions and brutality that were becoming the norm) and installed Admiral A. Kolchak as military dictator and ‘Supreme Ruler’. Kolchak was emblematic of White leadership: a man of deep personal integrity, courage, and patriotism, but a taciturn and erratic personality completely lost in the world of politics. His forces never mounted a sustained threat; he even failed to obtain diplomatic recognition from the allies (at the instigation of Woodrow Wilson, who heeded Kerensky’s advice). He was finally captured and executed by the Cheka in early 1920.

The previous year had already marked the high point of the White assault, mounted from the south by A. I. Denikin’s Volunteer Army. He launched the offensive in the spring of 1919, but made the fatal blunder of splitting his army into two units: a smaller force under Baron P. N. Wrangel (which captured Tsaritsyn on 30 June), a larger formation advancing into the Donbas. In the ‘Moscow Directive’ of 3 July Denikin ordered an assault on the capital along a very broad front stretching from Samara to Kursk. It was an all-or-nothing gamble, for Denikin realized that the Red Army was growing more powerful by the hour, and that further Allied support was dubious. He counted on enthusiasm from the momentary flush of victory, as his armies rapidly captured Kursk, Voronezh, Chernigov, and (on 13–14 October) Orel—a town just 300 kilometres from Moscow. Simultaneously White forces under N. N. Iudenich advanced on Petrograd. But White fortunes soon changed: on 18–19 October Semen Budennyi’s Red Cavalry counter-attacked and smashed the White army advancing on Tula; it was only a matter of time before victory followed in the north, the Crimea, and Ukraine. The final denouement came in 1920, as the remaining White forces, under General Wrangel, were evacuated to Constantinople.

Bolshevik victories, which seemed unlikely, were due to several factors. Geography afforded great strategic advantage: the Bolshevik hold on the central provinces permitted shorter lines of supply and communications, whereas White forces were stretched out along the periphery—in the south, along the Volga, in Siberia, western borderlands, and Ukraine. Moreover, Bolsheviks were better prepared to mobilize human and material resources, for their state administration capitalized on the personnel and organizations of preceding regimes. Whites, by contrast, were inept administrators; their camp was a mobile army engaged in field operations, with neither the skill nor the inclination to put down administrative roots.

Ideology was also important in the Bolshevik victory. The socialist vision had not lost its lustre for many workers, peasants, and white-collar workers. Although Bolshevik social and economic polices unquestionably provoked considerable opposition, the government at least had policies and, more important, provided a public discourse to rationalize these as essential for plebeian victory in a class war. By contrast, the Whites symbolized property and privilege; they utterly failed to articulate an alternative vision acceptable to workers, peasants, and other plebeians caught up in the revolutionary storm.

Bolshevik nationality policy also contributed to their success. Whereas most (especially patriotic Whites) sought to re-establish the empire, the Bolsheviks recognized the volatility of the nationality question and promised national self-determination—albeit, with the proviso that self-determination be subordinate to the interests of the proletariat. Despite the activities of the Commissariat of Nationalities (led by Stalin), the Bolsheviks actually could only abide and applaud the breakup of the empire. By mid-1918 independent states had arisen in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Finland, and Belorussia; a powerful pan-Islamic movement was sweeping through the Muslim peoples of Central Asia. However much Lenin wished to reconquer the lost territories, this consummate Realpolitiker accepted the status quo, if only temporarily. He also wrapped policy in a theory of ‘federalism’, which granted nationalities the trappings of statehood but within the framework of a Russian socialist state.

The Bolshevik cause also benefited from the fractious disunity of their adversaries. They were indeed a motley group—radical socialists, anarchist peasants, moderate Kadets and Octobrists, and of course arch-conservative officers from the gentry. Ultimately the main adversary was the White officer corps, which tended to replicate the politics—and mistakes—of 1917. Thus they plainly despised moderate socialists, even in the cause against Bolsheviks. Moreover, White generals such as Kolchak, Iudenich, and Wrangel were miserable administrators and even worse politicians. That was particularly evident in the nationality question: though fighting amidst non-Russian peoples on the periphery, the Whites loudly proclaimed their goal of resurrecting ‘Great Russia’, with all the minority territories. Such nationalistic views, while typical of the officer corps (and indeed the centre and moderate parties in the Dumas and Provisional Government), were naturally opprobrious to aspiring national groups like the Cossacks.

Intervention by the allies, however much they might have loathed Bolshevism, had little military effect. It could hardly be otherwise: a momentous revolution in the vast Russian spaces could not be channelled, let alone halted or reversed, by the tiny tactical forces of the allied powers. Exhausted by four years of total war, fearful of domestic unrest, the allies provided some men and equipment, but lacked the clear purpose and persistence necessary to stay the course. Nor did they even share common goals. Under Winston Churchill’s leadership, Britain supplied the most money and equipment; its primary aim was to contain German power (and avert a German-Russian alliance) and to prevent Russian advances in Asia and the Near East. For its part, Japan landed troops for the simple purpose of acquiring territory in the eastern maritime provinces. Wilson dispatched American soldiers but eagerly seized on Soviet peace feelers, first at an abortive conference in Prinkipo in late 1918, later in a mission by William Bullitt and the writer Lincoln Steffens to Moscow in early 1919. In the end the allies, having denied unconditional support to the Whites, gradually withdrew from the conflict, having done little more than to reify the myth of hostile ‘imperialist aggression’ against the young socialist state.

War Communism

The civil war left a deep imprint on Bolshevik political culture. War made the Red Army the largest, most important institution in the new state: it absorbed vast resources and, to ensure political reliability, deliberately conscripted the most ‘class-conscious’ elements of the working class and party. As a result, the army not only represented a military force but also provided the formative experience for the first generation of Bolsheviks. Not surprisingly, Soviet Russia developed as a military-administrative state, the military idiom and norm permeating government, economy, and society. Civil war reinforced the ideology of class conflict that informed Bolshevik policy, not just propaganda, during these early years.

Of course, the party still embraced a broad spectrum of opinion and interests. Its radical, impatient wing demanded that socialism be constructed immediately, in a militant fashion. At the time of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty (March 1918), ‘left-wing communists’ also hoped to ride the wave of history and export the revolution beyond Soviet borders. L. Kritsman, in an influential tract written during the civil war, codified the notion of militant and heroic communist state-building and adumbrated a coherent policy agenda of ‘War Communism’—proletarian and collectivist. Lewis Siegelbaum has demonstrated that this famous term has been used without analytical precision, and that a heady mixture of realism and utopian ideology actually shaped Bolshevik policy from mid-1918 to early 1921.

Lenin himself reflected this mix of fantasy and common sense. On many issues he was pragmatic and at odds with the radicals—as, for example, in the bitter controversy over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, where he dismissed left-wing communism as an ‘infantile disorder’. Pragmatism likewise informed his concessions to bourgeois specialists (whom he consistently shielded) and his view on trade unions (where he opposed Trotsky’s militant plans to conscript labour). Lenin was also cautious about nationalizing industry in late 1917 and early 1918; his ‘state socialism’, modelled on the German wartime economy, did not entail state take-over of economic life until much later. All this has inclined some historians to distance Lenin from the radicals and to depict his pragmatism as a clear antecedent for the evolutionary, gradualist plan of socialist development known as the New Economic Policy in the 1920s. Indeed, Lenin himself introduced the term ‘war communism’ in 1921 to discredit his opponents.

Nevertheless, Lenin had not shorn all the radical impulses that brought him power. He was instrumental in establishing the Communist International and pressing its revolutionary mission abroad. He also introduced radical agrarian and food-supply policies. In the spring of 1918, for example, when the new regime faced the perennial grain crisis that bedevilled both the tsarist and provisional governments, Lenin expanded the latter’s ‘grain monopoly’ into a full-scale food supply dictatorship. Similarly Lenin was never comfortable with the original land decree, which closely echoed the SR ‘socialization of the land’—all the more since the countryside was teeming with SR agronomists and surveyors, intent on realizing their own, not the Bolshevik, vision of land reform. Theirs was profoundly non-Marxist, insensitive to ‘class’ or aims of radical transformation.

That vision, which placed so much faith in the peasantry, was anathema to Lenin. Instead, he propagated a scheme of collectivized agriculture and established some prototype large-scale collective farms, appropriately aimed at the ‘poor and landless peasantry’. Although the chaos of the civil war permitted few such experiments, they provided the precedent and rationale for more Promethean efforts in Stalin’s ‘Great Turn’ of 1929–30. More telling still was Lenin’s attempt to foment class war in the villages. At bottom he applied a crude Marxist sociology of village society that divided the peasants into a small class of rich exploiters (the infamous kulaki, often simply the most competent farmers), self-sufficient ‘middle peasants’ (seredniaki), and the revolutionary and exploited ‘poor peasants’ (bedniaki). To stoke the fires of intra-village revolution, the Bolsheviks created ‘Committees of Poor Peasants’ (kombedy) to implement Soviet decrees and to drive the wealthier from power. This policy pitted neighbour against neighbour; it often fostered violence and the settling of old scores that had nothing to do with ‘class struggle’. Moreover, in many blackearth regions peasants viewed Bolshevik commissars, grain detachments, army draft apparatus and the like as worse than any conceivable class enemy. The result was a fierce civil war between organized peasant bands, sometimes called ‘greens’, and Bolshevik forces. Recent research has revealed the extraordinary intensity of this brutal conflict in Tambov and other grain-producing regions as Red Army detachments came to pacify the village. Here civil war persisted long after the Whites had been crushed, providing a primary impulse for the ‘New Economic Policy’ in early 1921.

War Communism also informed the construction of social orders, with appropriate status and disabilities. In the first constitution (July 1918), labour was a universal duty and defined social status. To the toiling classes of workers and peasants were juxtaposed the ‘formers’ (byvshie), i.e. members of the former exploiting class—nobility, bourgeoisie, clergy, and the like. All these ‘exploiters’ were deprived of civil rights and legally classified as the ‘disenfranchised’ (lishentsy). They had no right to work, but could be mobilized for menial labour or public works. Not all the social terror came from above: murderous pogroms against Jews and spontaneous assaults on clergy and other ‘formers’ were also a regular part of daily life during these violent years.

These years of terror and discrimination also brought incredible hardship and privation. Despite the banner of historical progress, the country appeared to have reversed course, with a return to a natural economy, barter, wages in kind, and ‘currency’ in the form of eggs, clothing, and other basic necessities. It was the era of the ‘bagmen’ (meshchochniki), petty traders who plied the black market in grain and other goods. The state summarily and sporadically punished the black marketeers, but in fact had to tolerate a sector that still supplied much of the food and basic commodities.

Revolutionary Culture

Besides the market-place, culture was another key battleground. Under the Provisional Government, cultural leaders organized unions and demanded the creation of a Ministry of Culture to replace the traditional state and court patronage of the arts. As important as cultural creation was cultural destruction (the iconoclastic demolition of symbols from the ancien régime) and the search for new symbols and festivals.

Here too the party divided into radical and conservative camps, reflected in the debate between A. A. Bogdanov and Lenin over the historical meaning of culture and its place in a proletarian state. Both recognized the importance of culture for revolutionary transformation, but had long disagreed on fundamental principles of Marxism and culture. Lenin (the more orthodox Marxist) saw culture as pure superstructure, subordinate to class conflict and the task of seizing and rebuilding power. Culture (from literacy campaigns to university learning) was crucial, yet secondary; it was just another component of the superstructure. Lenin’s conservative tastes carried an aversion to utopian experiments, an affinity for classical Russian culture, and a desire to integrate artists and writers into well-defined hierarchies under party control. His tool was A. V. Lunacharskii’s bailiwick, the Commissariat of Enlightenment, the very ‘Ministry of Culture’ that intellectuals and artists had proposed in 1917. This new patron of the arts sponsored a full range of artistic activities (including the feeding, shelter, and clothing of the intelligentsia); it also attempted to create a new educational system based on such radical doctrines as the Unified Labour School, which jettisoned traditional disciplines and substituted practical work and learning through labour.

Bogdanov’s vision, similar to that of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, could hardly have been more different. It posited the defining role of culture—i.e. cultural transformation was the pre-condition of social and political transformation. To complete the revolution, argued Bogdanov, it was vital to have ‘new people’ mastering the dominant forces of technocracy and technology, information and language. The new people had to create their own culture and hence create themselves. Bogdanov was a true radical, rejecting the traditional high culture as the product of old élites and hence antithetical to the needs of the proletariat. To help fashion proletarian culture (therefore its own essence or being), Bogdanov created the ‘Proletarian Culture Movement’ (proletkult’), a fusion of organization and theory at the grass-roots level all across the country. It enabled ‘workers’ (broadly defined to include not only factory workers, but also white-collar employees, peasants, and others) to produce their own cultural artifacts, from literature to stage performances, from belles-lettres to literary readings. Although the movement was for a time exceedingly popular, that very popularity sealed its doom: proletcult was culture ‘from below’, inevitably representing an alternative to party dogma and inviting different readings of Marxism itself. In addition, the ‘cultural front’ (a military metaphor typical of the time) had too many players (not only the Commissariat of Enlightenment, but the trade unions and party itself), all competing for scarce resources. By the early 1920s, in short, proletarian culture faced a phalanx of determined foes in this ‘proletarian’ state.

Revolutionary enthusiasm pervaded culture and society at many other levels. It was a driving force in high culture—fine arts, literature, architecture, which reflected powerful modernist currents, buttressed by aggressively anti-bourgeois and apocalyptic topoi. ‘Non-objective’ movements like suprematism, as well as constructivism and futurism, flourished in the heady atmosphere of revolution. The same spirit penetrated daily life, most dramatically in the question of the family and women’s status. After secularizing marriage and radically liberalizing divorce, the party sought to address these questions by creating the Women’s Section (Zhenotdel), an apparatus summoned to fashion a new Soviet woman—proudly proletarian, independent, an activist in the vanguard of the party as a leader and builder of consciousness. This vision, like revolutionary culture itself, would arouse rising hostility and suspicion from state and society alike in the 1920s.

In these years, however, the Bolsheviks were cultural revolutionaries, particularly in their feverish attempt to construct a new symbolic world—with new icons, new language, new monuments, new festivals—to bestow legitimacy on the new order. Suggestive of this campaign was the attempt, in early 1918, to sponsor a competition for the design of monuments to commemorate the great deeds of the Russian Socialist Revolution. Lenin himself issued a ‘plan’ for legitimate festivals and for rewriting the past (especially the ‘history’ of the still ongoing revolution itself). The use of festivals for education, socialization, and morale was quickly apparent—in the well-orchestrated celebrations of May Day, the first anniversary of the Revolution in 1918, and later in the public participatory spectacle to re-enact the October Revolution in 1920. Of course there were glitches and crudities (for example, offering special rations and luxury goods to arouse ‘enthusiasm’), and this political theatre allowed variant decodings. The regime also adopted the Gregorian calendar, modernized the alphabet, and expropriated urban space (by renaming streets and squares). Finally, Bolshevik ‘God Builders’ (i.e. those who saw Bolshevism as a new religion with the proletariat as deity) began to foster a cult of Lenin, especially after an SR terrorist critically wounded Lenin in 1918. Party intellectuals then made haste to foster the idea of his immortality and to promote the public worship of this new saint, casting the die for the far more ominous elaborations in later years.