The Russian Revolution

A Beginner's Guide

Abraham Ascher

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780743882
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

1917: the year a series of rebellions toppled three centuries of autocratic rule and placed a group of political radicals in charge of a world power. Here, suddenly, was the first modern socialist state, "a kingdom more bright that any heaven had to offer". But the dream was short-lived, bringing in its wake seventy years of conflict and instability that nearly ended in nuclear war.How could such a revolution take place and what caused it to go so very wrong? Presenting a uniquely long view of events, Abraham Ascher takes readers from the seeds of revolution in the 1880s right through to Stalin's state terror and the power of the communist legacy in Russia today. Original and shrewd, Ascher's analysis offers an unparalled introduction to this watershed period in world history

1
The road to revolution

The dream of an ideal society in Russiabegan to take shape in the 1880s, when a small group of Russian intellectuals founded a Marxist movement that claimed to represent the interests of the working class. Their leader, G. V. Plekhanov, contended that Russia’s development would be similar to that of Central and Western Europe. The country would be industrialized and would then undergo a bourgeois revolution that would replace the autocratic system of rule with a constitutional order dominated by the middle class, which favored capitalism. Eventually, when industrialization reached maturity and the proletariat (the industrial working class) had become a powerful force, it would stage a second, socialist revolution, which had not yet taken place in Central and Western Europe. In 1898, the Russian Marxists formed the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which five years later split into the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.

Bolshevism

‘Bolshevism’ is the name of the Russian Marxist movement that emerged at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party held in August 1903 in Brussels and London. The party split over what appeared to be a minor difference on how to define a party member. Vladimir Lenin, in his pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, written in 1902, had expressed his commitment to the creation of a highly centralized, elitist, and hierarchically structured political party. At the Congress, he defined a party member as anyone who ‘recognized the party’s program and supports it by material means and by personal participation in one of the party’s organizations.’ Lenin was aiming at the formation of a cadre of professional revolutionaries. Iulii Martov, however, wished to define a party member as anyone who supported the party ‘by regular personal association under the direction of one of the party’s organizations.’ Martov and his followers, in other words, favored broad working-class participation in the movement’s affairs and in the coming revolution. It also became evident that, although both factions subscribed to a revolutionary course, the Mensheviks tended to adopt more moderate tactics than the Bolsheviks.

Lenin’s definition was adopted by a vote of twenty-eight to twenty-three; hence his faction adopted the name ‘Bolsheviks’, which means ‘Majoritarians,’ and Martov’s supporters were stuck with the name ‘Mensheviks,’ which means ‘Minoritarians.’ This sobriquet put Martov’s supporters at a disadvantage, even though on other issues they had sided with the majority.

Both groups continued to favor a revolutionary course to transform Russia into a socialist state, and the split did not become final until 1912. Even then, their basic aims continued to be identical, but in the ensuing struggle against the tsarist autocracy the Mensheviks tended to adopt more moderate positions than the Bolsheviks on whether or when to seize power and the economic and political policies to be imposed on Russia after the collapse of the Provisional Government in October 1917.

The Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), which were less doctrinaire than the Marxists but equally militant, claimed to speak for the peasants, who formed the vast majority of the population. The heirs of the populists of the 1870s, in 1901 the SRs formally created a political party committed to the idea that, since most people had been exposed to the egalitarian principles of the commune, the dominant institution in many regions of the country, the Russian Empire could attain socialism without passing through the stage of full-blown capitalism. The village commune, consisting of the elders of peasant households, handled the affairs of the local peasants; it tried peasants charged with minor crimes, it collected taxes, it decided on which youngsters would be recruited into the armed services, and, most importantly, it saw to the periodic distribution of land among its members to prevent wide differences in the holdings of individual families.

The SR Party advocated the transfer of all privately owned land to peasant communes or local associations, which in turn would assign it on an egalitarian basis to all who wished to earn their living by farming. Industry would be similarly socialized. Although the SRs insisted that the final goal, socialism, must be achieved by means of persuasion, they tolerated the ‘Combat Organization,’ an independent organ of the party that carried out dozens of political murders. Political terror, many SRs believed, was necessary to bring about the dismantling of the autocratic regime.

Liberalism emerged as an organized force in the late nineteenth century, when people associated with the zemstvos, institutions that exercised some powers of self-government on the local level, advocated extensive loosening of the autocratic system of government. They were joined in the late 1890s by a variety of middle-class citizens, such as lawyers, doctors, writers, and professors. These articulate intellectuals soon exerted an influence on the national scene far out of proportion to their numbers. Industrialists and businessmen in general were slower to take up the liberal cause; their economic dependence on the state made them politically cautious.

Zemstvo

In 1864, three years after the abolition of serfdom, the tsarist government established zemstvos, institutions of local government at the county (uyezd) and provincial levels in most regions of European Russia. The members of the new institutions were elected, but the electoral process was not democratic as we understand the word. The population was divided into three classes, or colleges: nobility, townsmen, and peasants. The number of representatives each could send to the zemstvos was based on the value of the property owned by each group. Moreover, the county zemstvos elected the delegates to the higher provincial zemstvo. As a result, nobles and government officials, a tiny minority of the population, played a decisive role in the organs of self-government.

Nonetheless, the zemstvos proved to be highly effective in initiating and overseeing the construction of new roads and in maintaining them, supervising local educational institutions, and sponsoring economic development, to mention some of their activities. In time, the zemstvos employed numerous experts such as doctors, agronomists, teachers, and engineers, who were referred to as the ‘third element’ and came to exercise considerable influence in local affairs. Early in the twentieth century, a fair number in this element, which now totaled about twenty thousand, showed strong sympathy for liberalism and socialism and often joined left-wing political movements. The zemstvos remained influential until the Bolshevik ascent to power late in 1917.

Like the Marxists, the liberals favored a fundamental reordering of society, but the two movements differed in their ultimate goals. The liberals advocated the rule of law, the granting of civil liberties to all citizens, a sharp curtailment of the powers of the monarch, the creation of a legislature elected by the people, and the maintenance of a capitalist economy. The journal they founded in 1902, Osvobozhdenie (Liberation)and their underground organization, the Union of Liberation, formed in 1904, helped mobilize public opinion against the old order and thus set the stage for the first Russian revolution.

Russia’s backwardness

Given the economic, social and political backwardness of Russia, the proliferation of political parties, some favoring utopian goals and extremist tactics, is hardly surprising. At a time when much of Europe had turned to some form of popular participation in the political process, Russia continued to be an autocracy in which the Tsar claimed to rule by divine right. This claim was advanced with particular vigor by Nicholas II, who occupied the throne for twenty-three years (from 1894 until 1917), but proved to be singularly unfit to govern the country, as many people in high positions realized. On 19 October 1894, when it was clear that Tsar Alexander III was fatally ill, N. M. Chichaev, the Minister of War, trenchantly assessed the twenty-six-year-old Nicholas:

The heir is a mere child, without experience, training, or even an inclination to study great problems of state. His interests are still those of a child, and it is impossible to predict what changes may be effected. At present, military service is the only subject that interests him. The helm of state is about to fall from the hands of an experienced mariner, and I fear that no hand like his is to grasp it for many years to come. What will be the course of the ship of state under these conditions the Lord only knows.

Nicholas’s private letters and diary indicate that while he exuded personal charm, held strong religious convictions, and harbored deep affection for his wife and other members of his family, he showed no serious interest in politics. He took pains to describe evenings with his family and his various sporting activities, going so far as to note the number of birds he had bagged on his hunts. He could be deeply moved by events such as the loss of his favorite dog, Iman. ‘I must confess,’ he wrote on 20 October 1902, ‘the whole day after it happened I never stopped crying—I still miss him dreadfully when I go for walks. He was such an intelligent, kind, and loyal dog!’ Yet he devoted scant attention to the great events of his rule: the wars with Japan in 1904 and the Central Powers in 1914, the demands of liberals for a constitution, the industrial strikes, the Revolution of 1905, and the breakdown of public order that year.

Although moderately intelligent, Nicholas lacked the personal drive and vision to take charge of the government, to familiarize himself with the workings of the administration, and to instill a sense of purpose and direction in the ministers and bureaucrats. He was also narrow-minded and prejudiced, incapable of tolerating those who did not fit his conception of the true Russian. He especially disliked Jews and attributed his refusal to abolish restrictions on them to an ‘inner voice’ that told him it would be wrong to do so. Nor could he abide the intelligentsia. Once at a banquet when someone uttered the word ‘intelligentsia,’ he exploded: ‘How repulsive I find that word.’ He added, wistfully, that the Academy of Sciences ought to expunge the word from the Russian dictionary. Moreover, Nicholas firmly believed that all the people, except for the intelligentsia, the Jews, and the national minorities, were completely devoted to him.

In fact, a growing number of the population (of well over a hundred million) was becoming increasingly disgruntled. In the countryside, the peasants, who composed over 80 percent of Nicholas’s subjects, chafed at the continued deterioration in economic conditions since their emancipation from serfdom in 1861. In the first place, the rapid growth in population between 1887 and 1905 resulted in a decline in the average landholding of peasant households of over 20 percent, from 13.2 to 10.4 desiatinas (one desiatina equals 2.7 acres). Productivity remained abysmally low, in large measure because the system of communal landownership, which governed about four-fifths of the peasants’ holdings, was not conducive either to long-range planning or to the application of modern methods of farming. Many statistics could be cited to demonstrate the wretched conditions in the countryside, but none is more telling than the following: the Russian death rate was almost double that in England.

The government’s fiscal policies also placed inordinate burdens on the peasantry. The expenses of the state treasury grew eightfold between 1861 and 1905, from 414,000 to 3.205 million rubles, necessitating new taxes, many of which were levied on consumer goods. Peasants had to pay these taxes in addition to the redemption dues that had been imposed on them at the time of emancipation. Unable to meet the tax bills, many poorer peasants were forced to sell their harvest in the fall, when plentiful supplies drove down prices. In the winter and spring, they would have to buy back some of the grain at exorbitant prices or take loans from landlords or kulaks (well-to-do peasants), which they would repay with labor if they lacked cash. For short-term loans, interest rates of 9.7 percent a month or 116.4 percent a year were not uncommon. If the peasant failed to make his payments, he might be subjected to whipping with a birch rod, or his property might be confiscated and sold. These measures did not have the desired effect. In the years from 1871 to 1875, the total peasant arrears in payments of various dues and taxes amounted to 29 million rubles. Twenty years later they totaled 119 million rubles.

The peasants were also forced to endure the heavy hand of bureaucracy. The emancipation of 1861 had freed them from serfdom and in 1864 they were given the right to participate in the election of zemstvos, although they chose far fewer representatives than the nobility. However, the peasants still could not move freely from one place to another and in numerous ways remained at the mercy of local landlords. During the reign of Alexander III (1881–94), the government enacted a series of counter-reforms that vastly increased the arbitrary power of local officials over the peasants. Most notably, provincial governors were charged with appointing land captains, who could overrule decisions of all local institutions, appoint personnel to important governmental positions, and, on their own authority, order the imprisonment of peasants for five days or impose five-ruble fines on them. Only in 1903 did the government prohibit corporal punishment of convicted criminals.

In view of these conditions in the countryside, the peasants’ aloofness from revolutionary movements during the 1880s and 1890s may seem odd. However, organized political action could hardly have been expected from a social class that was geographically dispersed, cut off from urban centers of intellectual life, and still largely (over 80 percent) illiterate. On the other hand, in times of crisis the rural masses constituted yet another social group that sided with the forces opposing the prevailing order. Very often they erupted in elemental outbursts of anger at the authorities when unrest simmered in the towns.

Peasant unrest was not the only sign of social stress in the countryside. The dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry) was losing its grip economically and declining as a social and political force. Still, the nobles were unquestionably the main prop of the autocracy, even though they constituted a small and highly diverse group. According to the census of 1897, 1.5 percent of the population were either hereditary or lifetime nobles, among whom one could find, as the historian Hans Rogger put it:

Rich… and poor ones, rustics and urbanites, reactionaries and liberals, capitalist operators of large estates, employers of hired or tenant labor (the majority of the landed gentry), rentiers, civil servants, officers, and professionals (one-fifth or more) who, at best, kept a tenuous foothold or summer home in the countryside. Half the nobility was non-Russian, and 28.6 percent who were Poles and discriminated against by the state hardly contributed to the solidarity of the class.

Even the ethnically Russian nobles were so diversified in their interests that they did not form a common political front. Although the majority ardently supported the autocracy, quite a few became active in the liberal movement, to the dismay of the Tsar and officials at court.

Although peasant unrest early in the twentieth century was a major factor in destabilizing the tsarist system of rule, the decisive social force behind the revolutionary turmoil turned out to be the industrial workers, a tiny portion of the total population that grew in size after the authorities decided, in the 1890s, that if Russia were to remain a significant player in the international arena it would have to embark on a program of rapid industrialization. However, they did not understand the implications of their decision. They deluded themselves into believing that they could modernize the country economically without altering the traditional social and political order.

The drive to industrialize

No one fostered this illusion more fervently than S. Iu. Witte, the brilliant architect of Russian industrialization who also played a central role in shaping government policies during the first fifteen months of the Revolution of 1905, the first major upheaval in the Russian Empire in the twentieth century. Witte quickly grasped the essentials of any problem he tackled and devised ingenious, if not always effective, solutions. He was masterly in judging the abilities of subordinates and in inducing them to do his bidding, but he was also fiercely ambitious, arrogant, cunning, and given to backstage intrigues. If he encountered obstacles he could not overcome, he lapsed into depression. Yet he always bounced back and pressed hard to implement his policies.

Witte advocated industrialization not because he believed that modernization was desirable in itself or because he wished to raise the standard of living of the Russian masses. He wanted to transform the economy primarily to bolster the political power and greatness of the state. It was this argument that appealed to Tsar Alexander III, who appointed him Minister of Finance in 1892, and to Nicholas II, who retained him in that office until 1903. During those eleven years, Witte’s achievements were, by virtually every standard, remarkable.

Count Witte

Count S. Iu. Witte was one of the two most eminent and gifted statesmen in late Imperial Russia (the other was Pyotr Stolypin) and his personality and career were probably the most colorful. Born in 1849 in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia), into a noble family, Witte aspired to a profession considered unsuitable for an aristocrat; he wanted to be professor of theoretical mathematics at the University of Novorossiisk, where he was an outstanding student. He was prevailed upon to abandon that goal and instead began training as an administrator in the railroads, a burgeoning field in Russia. In 1875, a wreck on the Odessa Railway, in which many lives were lost, endangered his career. He was held responsible for the disaster and sentenced to four months in prison. However, that very same Odessa railway was so successful in transporting soldiers and material during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8 that Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich reduced his sentence to two weeks and allowed him to return to work.

His career then moved from one success to another. He was appointed Director of Railway Affairs in the Ministry of Finance, a post he occupied for eleven years, during which he initiated the first burst of industrialization. In 1903, Tsar Nicholas II appointed him Chairman of the Committee of Ministers, where he added two major accomplishments to his list of achievements: negotiating the peace treaty that concluded the conflict with Japan, from whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• A note on dates
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: The road to revolution
• 2: 1905: dress rehearsal for 1917?
• 3: The collapse of tsarism
• 4: The Provisional Government
• 5: Bolsheviks in power
• 6: The struggle to retain power
• 7: Stalin's completion of the revolution
• 8: Whither the Soviet Union?
• Afterword
• Timeline
• Bibliography
• Index