The Russian Revolution

Afterword

In November 1918, when the Great War came to an end, the Bolsheviks controlled twenty-seven provinces of European Russia, inhabited by some 70 million people, or one-half of the Empire’s pre-war population. The borderlands—Poland, Finland, the Baltic area, the Ukraine, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Siberia—had either separated themselves and formed sovereign states or were controlled by anti-Bolshevik Whites. The Communist realm encompassed the defunct Empire’s heartland, populated almost exclusively by Great Russians. Ahead lay a civil war in the course of which Moscow would reconquer by force of arms most but not all of its borderland areas and try to spread its regime to Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. The Revolution now would enter another phase, that of expansion.

The first year of Bolshevik rule left Russians not only cowed by the unprecedented application of largely random terror but thoroughly bewildered. Those who had lived through it were exposed to a complete reevaluation of all values: whatever had been good and rewarded was now evil and punished. The traditional virtues of faith in God, charity, tolerance, patriotism, and thrift were denounced by the new regime as unacceptable legacies of a doomed civilization. Killing and robbing, slander and lying were good, if committed for the sake of a proper cause as defined by the new regime. Nothing made sense. The perplexity of contemporaries is reflected in the ruminations published in the summer of 1918 in one of the few relatively independent dailies still allowed to appear:¹

There was a time when a man lived somewhere beyond the Narva Gate, in the morning drunk tea from a samovar placed in front of him. For dinner, he emptied half a bottle of vodka and read The Petrograd Rag. When once a year someone was murdered, he felt indignant for a whole week, at the very least. And now …

About murders, dear sir, they have stopped writing: on the contrary, they inform us that the day before only thirty people have been bumped off and another hundred robbed.… This means that everything is in order. And whatever happens, it is better not even to look out of the window. Today they parade with red flags, tomorrow with banners, then again with red ones, and then again with banners. Today Kornilov has been killed, tomorrow he is resurrected. The day after Kornilov is not Kornilov but Dutov, and Dutov is Kornilov, and they are, all of them, neither officers nor Cossacks nor even Russians but Czechs. And where these Czechs came from, no one knows.… We fight them, they fight us. Nicholas Romanov has been killed, he has not been killed. Who killed whom, who fled where, why the Volga is no longer the Volga and the Ukraine no longer Russia. Why the Germans promise to return to us the Crimea, where did the Hetman come from, what Hetman, why does he have a boil under his nose.… Why aren’t we in an insane asylum?

So unnatural were the new conditions, they so outraged common sense and decency, that the vast majority of the population viewed the regime responsible for them as some terrible and inexplicable cataclysm which could not be resisted but had to be endured until it disappeared as suddenly as it had come. As time would show, however, these expectations were mistaken. Russians and the people under their rule would know no respite: those who experienced and survived the Revolution would never see the return of normalcy. The Revolution was only the beginning of their sorrows.