A Companion to the Russian Revolution

Daniel Orlovsky

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781118620854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

A compendium of original essays and contemporary viewpoints on the 1917 Revolution

The Russian revolution of 1917 reverberated throughout an empire that covered one-sixth of the world. It altered the geo-political landscape of not only Eurasia, but of the entire globe. The impact of this immense event is still felt in the present day. The historiography of the last two decades has challenged conceptions of the 1917 revolution as a monolithic entity— the causes and meanings of revolution are many, as is reflected in contemporary scholarship on the subject.

A Companion to the Russian Revolution offers more than thirty original essays, written by a team of respected scholars and historians of 20 th century Russian history. Presenting a wide range of contemporary perspectives, the Companion discusses topics including the dynamics of violence in war and revolution, Russian political parties, the transformation of the Orthodox church, Bolshevism, Liberalism, and more. Although primarily focused on 1917 itself, and the singular Revolutionary experience in that year, this book also explores time-periods such as the First Russian Revolution, early Soviet government, the Civil War period, and even into the 1920's.

• Presents a wide range of original essays that discuss
• Brings together in-depth coverage of political history, party history, cultural history, and new social approaches
• Explores the long-range causes, influence on early Soviet culture, and global after-life of the Russian Revolution
• Offers broadly-conceived, contemporary views of the revolution largely based on the author's original research
• Links Russian revolutions to Russian Civil Wars as concepts

A Companion to the Russian Revolution is an important addition to modern scholarship on the subject, and a valuable resource for those interested in Russian, Late Imperial, or Soviet history as well as anyone interested in Revolution as a global phenomenon.

Part I
Signs, Near and Far

Chapter One
Long‐Term Causes of the Russian Revolution

Peter Waldron

At the beginning of March 1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and the Romanov dynasty's 300‐year rule over Russia came to an abrupt end. Less than eight months later, the Bolshevik party brusquely swept away the Provisional Government that had replaced the autocracy and began the process of establishing the world's first socialist state. The political cataclysms that transformed Russia in 1917 illuminate significant issues about the ways in which revolutions occur, although the interpretation that the Soviet state placed on 1917 over the following decades complicated understanding of the revolutions. The victors of 1917 – Lenin and his successors – argued that their triumph was inevitable and that the history of Russia was a single process leading to the Bolshevik seizure of power in the October revolution. The Soviet interpretation of Russian history concentrated on identifying every component cause of revolution and subjecting it to intense and detailed analysis. This approach to history did not allow that Russia had different possibilities for its development, but instead forced a single, linear explanation of the past onto circumstances that were complex and often uncertain. Soviet historians read history backward, seeing the October revolution as the inevitable consequence of centuries of historical development. For most of the twentieth century, this conceptual framework also helped to shape the understanding of Russian history outside the Soviet Union. The political antagonisms between the USSR and the western world polarized discussion of the Russian revolution, with history often becoming a function of politics. The Marxist–Leninist prism through which the USSR understood its own history produced a reaction in the west, and it was only in the last decades of the century – as the Soviet Union declined and fractured – that more nuanced views of the Russian revolution came to the fore (Suny 2006, 43–54).

Soviet historians minutely dissected every hint of revolt in the Russian past, alert to the slightest expressions of discontent that could demonstrate the deep roots of the October revolution. Russia's social structures were analyzed in great detail to provide evidence of the long‐held commitment of peasants and working people to the overthrow of the Tsarist state. The Soviet state had to reconcile Marxist political ideas, with their focus on the primacy of an industrial working class in making revolution, with Russia's overwhelmingly agrarian society. Lenin himself had performed complex ideological maneuvers to explain how a socialist revolution could take place in the least industrialized of the European great powers, and the Soviet Union recognized that it was continually striving toward the achievement of the utopia of full communism (Harding 1981, 110–34). Marx's explanation of human history argued that economic change lay at the base of the historical process and that politics was a function of economic change and part of the superstructure of society. For a regime that was so intensely political as the Soviet Union, politics played a surprisingly subordinate role in explaining the causes of revolution. The Bolshevik party stood as the vanguard of the working class and of the revolutionary process, but the political regime that Lenin and his party overthrew in 1917 was, for them, doomed to certain failure by the inevitability of economic upheaval and could do nothing to rescue itself. Tsarism – and its pale replacement in the Provisional Government – was fated to collapse. The Soviet explanation of revolutionary change was thus peculiarly one‐dimensional: the inevitability of the collapse of Tsarism was mirrored by the certainty of proletarian victory. The problems in this explanation of revolution were manifold, not least in its unsophisticated assessment of the nature of the Tsarist state.

A central question in explaining the success of revolution in 1917 is to understand why the mighty autocratic Romanov regime collapsed with such speed, leaving the way open for authority to disintegrate during the spring and summer of 1917. The nineteenth‐century Russian state was recognized as being the most powerful in Europe, and the grip that successive monarchs maintained on their empire was acknowledged as being ruthless and brutal. Russia's borders had witnessed sustained expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the growing power of the Romanov regime enabled its armies to expand in northern Europe, to take control of great swathes of Central Asia, and to consolidate its position in the Far East. The Russian army was the largest in Europe and its military might was feared by the other Great Powers, even though Russia had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Crimean war in the 1850s. In February 1917, however, military commanders lost their grip on the garrison of Petrograd and with troops mutinying, the regime was unable to maintain control of its capital city. Within 72 hours of mutiny breaking out, Nicholas II signed his abdication decree (Hasegawa 1981, 487–507). The experience of war since summer 1914 offers some explanation for the rapid downfall of the Tsarist regime, but the roots of revolution run much deeper and the eventual fragility of the imperial Russian state had more profound structural origins. Pressure from sections of Russian society provides some explanation for the revolutionary upheavals of 1917, but the state itself was vulnerable to assault by that point. The nature of revolutionary change – wherever it occurs – is confused and uncertain. No actor in the revolutionary process has any knowledge of how the historical events in which they are participating will turn out and, indeed, people may not see themselves as being part of a revolution. In 1917, when mass media were in their infancy and when communication in Russia was slow and rudimentary, actors in the drama were themselves often unaware of the wider context of their actions. The Soviet state imposed a single and simplistic narrative of change upon all of Russian history before 1917, minimizing the part played in the historical process by contingency, and reduced the significance of individual actions in bringing about social and political change. The passage of time allows us to identify patterns in the past and to see perspectives that were not open to those people who participated in the events of 1917 themselves. But the random event – the stray bullet or the misunderstood conversation – still plays a part in the shaping of the present and, thus, the past. Applying a corrective to the dominant historical narratives of the Russian revolution should not blind us to the ways in which individual actions have steered events in unthought‐of directions.

The Russian state had its origins in the Muscovite princedom that proved able to subdue the other city states of the Russian heartland. Kazan, Novgorod, and Yaroslavl were all overwhelmed by the power of Moscow during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Muscovite Grand Dukes gradually emerged as the pre‐eminent Russian power. Moscow had geographical advantages at the center of the Russian lands, while its rulers were ambitious and prepared to wage war to advance their cause. The forests and slow‐moving rivers of central Russia did not provide formidable obstacles to determined troops and the lack of significant natural features, together with the weakness of Moscow's rivals, made Muscovite expansion easy. The geography of Russia, with its gentle undulations and the absence of any significant hills or impassable rivers, had allowed the Mongols to seize control of large areas of the Russian lands during the thirteenth century and, after their suzerainty had been overthrown, Russia's geography presented few challenges to an expansionist princedom. Territorial expansion became a persistent characteristic of the Muscovite and Russian states, and over the coming centuries it was able to grow with ease, taking control of the great expanses of the Siberian landmass, conquering the Caucasus, and seizing much of Central Asia. The defeat of Sweden by Peter the Great at the start of the eighteenth century transformed Russia into a great European power far removed from its origins in the Muscovite principality. Imperial power became a vital feature of the Russian state and maintaining and expanding the empire required very significant military and financial resources (Lieven 2000, 268–71). The priority of the Russian state was to sustain its imperial and international position: Russian wealth and prestige increasingly derived from its vast empire and the state configured itself to focus on this.

This was a difficult task for the Russian regime. By the mid‐eighteenth century Russia covered more territory than any other state on the globe, yet it remained sparsely populated. The severe climate that affected much of Russia meant that Russian agriculture was precarious and the livelihood that Russia's farmers extracted from the land was unpredictable (Moon 1999, 120–33). Raw materials formed the bulk of Russian trade with the wider world, with timber and furs playing especially important roles. Industrialization came late to the Russian empire, only really taking a hold of the economy in the closing decade of the nineteenth century (Crisp 1976, 5–54). The state's potential for raising revenue from its population was therefore limited. The weakness of Russia's economy, together with the empire's sparse population, presented significant challenges in levying taxation. Until late in the nineteenth century, the Russian state relied heavily on indirect taxation to sustain itself. This was easier to collect than direct taxes, but rendered the state vulnerable to the vagaries of demand by the Russian population. The regime had to be rigorous and determined in order to sustain its revenues and this required significant coercive power. The Russian regime depended on its army, both to maintain its empire and its international standing among the great powers, but also to ensure that it could keep rebellion in check at home. In 1881 Russia's army comprised 844,000 men and the annual process of conscription required significant resources to provide a regular supply of men to fight. It was only in 1874 that the state felt able to move away from a system of conscription for 25 years to service for 6 years in the regular army, followed by a period in the reserves (Fuller 2006, 542–6). Ensuring a steady supply of men and money to maintain the Russian state's imperial and international ambitions provided the mainsprings for a political structure that possessed the authority to impose its will across Russian society.

The autocratic regime that developed in Russia from the sixteenth century concentrated its authority in a single person – the monarch – and ensured that all power derived from the ruler. Russia had no form of national legislative assembly until 1906, and political parties were prohibited until 1905. Until the last decade of the regime's existence, law was made by the monarch and there was no formal system of checks and balances to constrain the power of the sovereign. Monarchs who alienated Russia's noble elite could be deposed – as with Peter III in 1762 – or assassinated – Paul I was strangled in his own bedroom in 1801 – but Russian monarchs were essentially immune to broad popular influence. In these circumstances, the bureaucracy that administered Russia was able to acquire substantial autonomy and its overwhelmingly conservative ethos sustained the apparatus of autocracy. The currents of political thought unleashed by the Enlightenment found no practical outlet in Russia where, although Catherine II debated politics with her closest associates, she never seriously contemplated applying the principles of government by consent to Russia (de Madariaga 1981, 139–83). The French revolution of 1789 merely confirmed to Russia's rulers that they were correct in maintaining the principles of autocracy and refusing to make any concessions to popular opinion. The revolts and revolutions that convulsed western and ce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on Contributors
• Editor’s Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Russian Revolution at 100
• Part I: Signs, Near and Far
• Part II: The February Revolution
• Part III: October and Civil Wars
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement