Revolutionary Russia

New Approaches to the Russian Revolution of 1917

Rex A. Wade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134397631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This collection presents the major recent writings on the Russian Revolution and its context. It brings together key texts to illustrate new interpretive approaches and covers the central topics and themes. Together, the chapters in this volume form a coherent representation of both the events and the theories and debates that relate to them.

Part I

The Varieties of Social History

1

Petrograd in 1917

The View from Below

Steve A. Smith

“Social history” has been arguably the most important revisionist trend in writing about the history of the Russian Revolution. It had a major impact immediately and has remained extremely influential and an important ingredient in most current histories. It is thus the logical starting point for a book in a series called “Rewriting History.” Studying history “from the bottom up” using the methods of “social history” began later for Russian history, and especially the history of the revolution, than it did in West European and American history. After a few scattered essays in the 1970s, it blossomed in the 1980s. Steve Smith’s Pεδ Πετρογραδ was one of the most important of the outpouring of social history works on the revolution. It focused on the industrial workers of the capital, Petrograd (St. Petersburg), who played a key role in both the February and October revolutions and in the process of popular political radicalization that led from the one to the other.

Smith’s main themes, as well as those of the social history research and writing of the 1980s in general, are conveniently summarized in the essay given here: the importance of the “revolution in the factories”; the workers as rational, self-motivated actors with concrete needs and expectations; that workers’ actions grew out of their “own experience of complex economic and social upheavals and political events”; the importance of the workers’ own organizations such as factory committees and Red Guards; their increasingly distrustful attitude toward the Provisional Government and their gradual alienation from the Revolutionary Defensist (moderate socialist) leaders of the Petrograd Soviet; the workers’ political radicalization and turn toward the slogan of “All Power to the Soviets” when their expectations were not met; the growing correspondence between workers’ aspirations and the politics of the Bolshevik party that prepared the ground for the October Revolution. Arguing that “it is clear that, rather than the Bolshevik party, the working class itself was the major factor in Petrograd politics in 1917,” Smith (and the “social historians” generally) reject the older picture of workers (and soldiers and peasants) as an inert mass or mindless mob manipulated by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks won, they conclude, because “their analysis [of events] and proposed solutions seemed to make sense” to workers, soldiers, and the lower strata of society in general.

This “social history” approach reshaped the conceptualization of the revolution and altered the writing of its history. It led to an appreciation of the growth of popular support for the radical parties, especially the Bolsheviks, as an important precondition for the October Revolution. Smith’s conclusion that the October Revolution was “the political resolution of a long-drawn out social crisis” and of deep social divisions reflects the fundamentally new interpretation of the Bolshevik rise to power that social history provided (even though most social historians, like others, did not question the old notion of October as “a well-organized coup carried out by the Bolshevik party at the behest of Lenin”). The social historians were criticized, however, for writing “history with the politics left out”; the reader might reflect, while reading this and the next essay, on whether or not that was a fair criticism. This essay was written without source citations for the various quotations; interested readers can find these in Smith’s Pεδ Πετρογραδ (see Further reading) on which this essay is based.

Map 1 Petrograd, 1917.

* * *

The City, its Industry and Workforce^*

Petrograd was the capital of the Russian Empire and the foremost financial and industrial center in an overwhelmingly agrarian society. In 1917 it had a population of 2.4 million, making it by far the largest city in Russia. The city had been built by Peter the Great as Russia’s “window on the West.” Its Western architecture and layout symbolized the incorporation of Russia into Western culture and the European state system. Here was the seat of government, the court of Nicholas and Alexandra, the major institutions of learning and the arts, of law, commerce, and industry. In the central districts of the Admiralty, Kazan′, and Liteinyi stood the palaces of the most eminent aristocratic families, the apartments of the gentry and wealthy bourgeois, elegant emporia, banks, and company offices. Yet just across the Neva River, to the northeast, were the slums and teeming factories of the Vyborg district; and encircling the city (moving in a clockwise direction) were the predominantly proletarian districts of Okhta, Nevskii, Moscow, Narva-Peterhof, and Vasil′evskii, where poverty, overcrowding, and disease were rife. Here there were few open spaces, and no proper roads, pavements, water supply, sewage system, or street lighting. Rubbish was piled up in the streets and open cesspools posed a mortal threat to public health.

With the outbreak of war in 1914, Petrograd became the major center of armaments production in Russia – meeting two-thirds of the nation’s defense requirements. The industrial workforce grew by 60 percent to reach 392,800 by 1917 (or 417,000 if one includes factories in the suburbs of the city). Most of this expansion took place in industries producing directly for the war. By 1917 no fewer than 60 percent of the workforce were employed in the metal industries. compared to 11 percent in textiles and 10 percent in chemicals. About half of the workforce were newcomers to industry, made up of peasants drawn from their ailing villages by the prospect of lucrative work in industry and of women responsible for the support of families now that husbands and brothers were at the front. Many of these newcomers had strong ties to the countryside and their experience of urban and factory life was limited. They were a different breed from the skilled men who had worked in industry for many years, whose wages were fairly good, and who were reasonably educated and politically aware. No fewer than 68 percent of the city’s workforce worked in enterprises of more than a thousand workers – a degree of concentration unparalleled elsewhere in the world. The concentration of experienced, politically aware workers in large units of production was critical in facilitating the mobilization of the working class in 1917.

Under the old order, Russian workers had few of the rights that workers in the West enjoyed – the rights to strike, to form independent trade unions, and to negotiate collectively with employers. During the war the disciplinary regime within industry – especially those enterprises owned by the government itself – became especially repressive. Although the wages of most strikers in Petrograd rose until the winter of 1916–17, their conditions generally deteriorated. Working hours increased along with the intensity of work, resulting in a huge rise in industrial accidents. Those brave enough to challenge the situation courted transfer to the front, arrest, or dismissal. Workers known to have connections with the revolutionary underground were especially at risk. Yet in spite of the harsh reprisals of the employers and the state, the level of strikes and revolutionary activity rose steadily, as conditions of work deteriorated and as the level of carnage at the front mounted. Even so, in the winter of 1916, notwithstanding the vociferous protests at the dwindling bread supply, rising food prices, and the seemingly interminable war, few would have dared predict that within months the Romanov dynasty would come crashing down.

The February Revolution: Dispensation in the Factories

The revolution of February 1917 came unexpectedly. It began on February 23 [March 8], International Women’s Day, when thousands of angry housewives and women workers, ignoring pleas from labor leaders to stay calm, surged onto the streets. A worker at the Nobel engineering works in the Vyborg district recalled:

We could hear women’s voices in the lane overlooked by the windows of our department: “Down with high prices!” “Down with hunger!” “Bread for the workers!” I and several comrades rushed at once to the windows. … The gates of No. I Bol′shaia Sampsonievskaia mill were flung open. Masses of women workers in a militant frame of mind filled the lane. Those who caught sight of us began to wave their arms, shouting: “Come out!” “Stop work!” Snowballs flew through the windows. We decided to join the demonstration.

The next day 200,000 workers were on strike in Petrograd. By February 25 armies of demonstrators were clashing with troops, and the revolution had commenced. On February 27 the climax came when whole regiments of the Petrograd garrison deserted to the insurgents. The same day, the highly respectable leaders of the Duma refused to obey an order from the tsar to disperse and, with the reluctant support of the army generals, they declared themselves a Provisional Committee (“Government” from March 3). On March 3 Nicholas II finally agreed to abdicate, and Russia was free.

In 1905 the autocracy had withstood the revolutionary movement for nearly twelve months before finally moving to crush it; in February 1917 the autocracy succumbed in fewer than twelve days. The difference lay in the fact that in 1905 the army had basically remained loyal to the tsar, whereas in 1917, after three years of bloody and senseless war, the soldiers threw in their lot with the insurgents on the streets. Victory became assured once the liberal conservative opposition agreed to dispense with the tsar, believing that only thus could the war be won and the revolutionary movement halted.

The downfall of Nicholas “The Bloody” filled the workers and soldiers of Petrograd with joy and elation. They had no real sense of this as a “bourgeois” revolution, with all that that implied. Instead they believed that Russia was embarking on a democratic revolution that would bring enormous benefits to the common people. A general meeting at the Dinamo works declared:

The people and the army went onto the streets not to replace one government by another, but to carry out our slogans. These slogans are: “Freedom,” “Equality,” “Land and Liberty” and “An End to the Bloody War.” For us, the unpropertied classes, the bloody slaughter is unnecessary.

At this stage, a majority of workers, trusting implicitly in the Soviet as “their” representative, and unwilling to risk dissension in the revolutionary ranks, supported the policy of the moderate socialists in giving conditional support to the Provisional Government. They made no attempt, however, to hide their distrust of the latter. The common attitude was nicely summed up in a resolution from the Izhora works:

All measures of the Provisional Government that destroy the remnants of the autocracy and strengthen the freedom of the people must be fully supported by the democracy. All measures that lead to conciliation with the old regime and that are directed against the people must meet with decisive protest and counteraction.

From the beginning, therefore, workers were distrustful of the Provisional Government, which they felt to be bound by a thousand threads to landowning and business interests.

With regard to the burning question of the war, workers in Petrograd also tended at this stage to go along with the policy of the Soviet Executive Committee. In contrast to the Bolsheviks, who after April denounced the war as “imperialist” and called on workers to urge civil war against their own governments, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries – although divided into “Defensist” and “Internationalist” wings – tended to put the accent not on opposing the war, but on working for peace. They pressed the new government to work earnestly for a democratic peace between the belligerents, who would renounce all indemnities and annexations of territory. The February Revolution strengthened support among Petrograd workers and soldiers for this policy. Lenin described their attitude as one of “revolutionary defensism” in that they were prepared to continue to fight until such time as peace was achieved, in order to defend revolutionary Russia from Austro-German militarism.

Revolution in the Factories

On returning to their workbenches after the February strikes, workers proceeded to dismantle the autocratic structure of management in the factories, just as it had been dismantled in society at large. The creation of a “constitutional” factory was seen to be the prerequisite of an enhancement of the status and dignity of workers within society as a whole. Democratization of factory relations assumed a variety of forms. First, hated foremen and administrators fled or were expelled. At the giant Putilov works, for example, where some 30,000 workers were employed, workers thrust the one-time leader of the factory Black Hundreds, Puzanov, into a wheelbarrow, poured red lead over his head, and trundled him off to a nearby canal, into which they threatened to deposit him in punishment for his past misdemeanors. Second, the factory rule books, with their punitive fines and humiliating searches, were torn up. Third, and most important, factory committees were created to represent the interests of workers to management.

In the large state-run enterprises the new committees temporarily took over the running of the factories, since the old administration had fled. On March 13 committee members from factories belonging to the Artillery Department defined the aim of the new factory order as being “self-management by workers on the broadest possible scale”; and the functions of the committees were specified as the “defense of the interests of labor vis-à-vis the factory administration and control over its activities.” To our ears talk of control smacks of workers ousting management and running things by themselves, but in Russian the word control has the most modest sense of supervision or inspection. What these workers from the state plants envisaged was not that the committees should permanently run the enterprises, but that they should have full rights to oversee the activities of the official management and be fully informed of what was going on.

In the private sector the activities of the committees in the spring of 1917 were less far-reaching. There they functioned more or less as trade unions, for trade unions did not become properly established in Petrograd until the early summer. The first act of the committees was unilaterally to introduce an eight-hour working day, something that had eluded them in 1905, and to limit or abolish overtime work. Under enormous pressure, the Soviet and the Petrograd Society of Factory and Works Owners formally agreed to the introduction of an eight-hour day on March 10. The committee then proceeded to press for large wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps
• Series editor’s preface
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Note on spelling and dates
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Part I: The varieties of social history
• Part II: Language and identity
• Part III: Revisiting the Provisional Government and the failure of the moderates
• Part IV: Rethinking the Bolshevik seizure of power
• Further reading
• Index