A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  Revolutionary leader who had become minister of agriculture, over the implementation of the land policy. The crucial land problem became more urgent as peasants began to appropriate the land of the gentry on their own, without waiting for the constituent assembly.

  The general crisis and unrest in the country and, in particular, the privations and restlessness in the capital led to the so-called "July days," from the sixteenth to the eighteenth of July, 1917, when radical soldiers, sailors, and mobs, together with the Bolsheviks, tried to seize power in Petrograd. Lenin apparently considered the uprising premature, and the Bolsheviks seemed to follow their impatient adherents as much as they led them. Although sizeable and threatening, the rebellion collapsed because the Soviet refused to endorse it, because some military units proved loyal to the Provisional Government, and because the government utilized the German connections of the Bolsheviks to accuse them of treason. Several Bolshevik leaders fled, including Lenin who went to Finland from whence he continued to direct the party; certain others were jailed. But the government did not press its victory and try to eliminate its opponents. On the twentieth of July Prince Lvov resigned and Kerensky took over the position of prime minister; socialists once more gained in the reshuffling of the cabinet.

  Ministerial changes helped the regime little. The manifold crisis in the country deepened. In addition to the constant pressure from the Left, the Provisional Government attracted opposition from the Right which objected to its inability to maintain firm control over the army and the people, its lenient treatment of the Bolsheviks, and its increasingly socialist composition. In search of a broader base of understanding and support, the government arranged a State Conference in late August in Moscow, attended by some two thousand former Duma deputies and representatives of various organizations and groups, such as Soviets, unions, and local governments. The Conference produced no tangible results, but underlined the rift between the socialist and the non-socialist approaches to Russian problems. Whereas Kerensky expressed the socialist position and received strong support from socialist deputies, the Constitutional Democrats, army circles, and other "middle-class" groups rallied around the recently appointed commander in chief, General Lavr Kornilov. Of simple cossack origin, Kornilov had no desire to restore the old regime, and he could even be considered a democratic general. But the commander in chief, along with other military men, wanted above all to re-establish discipline in the army and law and order in the country, disapproving especially of the activities of the Soviets.

  The "Kornilov affair" remains something of a mystery, although Ukraintsev's testimony and certain other evidence indicate that Kerensky, rather than Kornilov, should be blamed for its peculiar course and its

  being a fiasco. Apparently the prime minister and the commander in chief had decided that loyal troops should be sent to Petrograd to protect the government. Apparently, too, that "protection" included the destruction of Soviet power in the capital. In any case, when Kornilov dispatched an army corps to execute the plan, Kerensky appealed to the people "to save the revolution" from Kornilov. The break between the prime minister and the general stemmed probably not only from their different views on the exact nature of the strengthened Provisional Government to be established in Russia, and on Kerensky's position in that government, but also from the strange and confusing activities of the man who acted as an intermediary between them.

  The revolution was "saved." From the ninth to the fourteenth of September the population of the capital mobilized for defense, while the advancing troops, faced with a railroad strike, encountering general opposition, and short of supplies, became demoralized and bogged down without reaching the destination; their commanding officer committed suicide. Only the Bolsheviks really gained from the episode. Their leaders were let out of jail, and their followers were armed to defend Petrograd. After the Kornilov threat collapsed, they retained the preponderance of military strength in the capital, winning ever more adherents among the increasingly radical masses.

  The Provisional Government, on the other hand, came to be bitterly despised by the Right for having betrayed Kornilov - whether the charge was entirely justified is another matter - while many on the Left suspected it of having plotted with him. The cabinet experienced another crisis and was finally able to reconstitute itself - for the third and last time - only on the twenty-fifth of September, with ten socialist and six nonsocialist ministers, Kerensky remaining at the head. It should be added that the Kornilov fiasco, followed by the arrest of Kornilov and several other generals, led to a further deterioration of military discipline, making the position of officers in many units untenable.

  The October Revolution

  The Bolsheviks finally captured a majority in the Petrograd Soviet on September 13 and in the Moscow Soviet a week later, although the executive committee elected by the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets continued, of course, to be dominated by moderate socialists. Throughout the country the Bolsheviks were on the rise. From his hideout in Finland, Lenin urged the seizure of power. On October 23 he came incognito to Petrograd and managed to convince the executive committee of the party, with some division of opinion, of the soundness of his view. Lenin apparently considered victory a great gamble, not a scientific certainty, but

  he correctly estimated that the fortunate circumstances had to be exploited, and he did not want to wait until the meeting of the constituent assembly. His opinions prevailed over the judgment of those of his colleagues who, in more orthodox Marxist fashion, considered Russia insufficiently prepared for a Bolshevik revolution and their party lacking adequate support in the country at large. Leon Trotsky - a pseudonym of Leon Bronstein - who first became prominent in the St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905 and who combined oratorical brilliance and outstanding intellectual qualities with energy and organizational ability, proved to be Lenin's ablest and most active assistant in staging the Bolsheviks' seizure of power.

  The revolution succeeded with little opposition. On November 7 - October 25, Old Style, hence "the Great October Revolution" - Red troops occupied various strategic points in the capital. In the early night hours of November 8, the Bolshevik-led soldiers of the Petrograd garrison, sailors from Kronstadt, and the workers' Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace, weakly defended by youngsters from military schools and even by a women's battalion, and arrested members of the Provisional Government. Kerensky himself had managed to escape some hours earlier. Soviet government was established in Petrograd and in Russia.

  Part VI: SOVIET RUSSIA

  XXXV

  SOVIET RUSSIA: AN INTRODUCTION

  The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.*

  MARX

  The conception of a community as an organic growth, which the statesman can only affect to a limited extent, is in the main modern, and has been greatly strengthened by the theory of evolution… It might, however, be maintained that the evolutionary view of society, though true in the past, is no longer applicable, but must, for the present and the future, be replaced by a much more mechanistic view. In Russia and Germany new societies have been created, in much the same way as the mythical Lycurgus was supposed to have created the Spartan polity. The ancient law giver was a benevolent myth; the modern law giver is a terrifying reality.

  RUSSELL

  Communist ideology, the Communist party, and Communist direction have constituted the outstanding characteristics of Soviet Russia, that is, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. To be sure, other factors, ranging from the economic backwardness of the country to its position as a great power in Europe, Asia, and the world, have proved to be of major importance. Still, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, whereas other elements in the situation have exercised very significant influences on Soviet policies, without communism there would have been no Soviet policies at all and no Soviet Union. Moreover, it is frequently impossible to draw the line between the communist and the noncommunist asp
ects of Soviet Russia and between communist and noncommunist causes of Soviet behavior because the two modes have influenced and interpenetrated each other and because Soviet leaders have viewed everything within the framework of their ideology.

  Marxism

  The doctrine of communism represents a variant of Marxism, based on the works of Marx and Engels as developed by Lenin. Working for several decades, beginning in the 1840's, Marx and Engels constructed

  * Italics in the original.

  a huge and comprehensive, although not entirely consistent, philosophical system. The roots of Marxism include eighteenth-century Enlightenment, classical economics, Utopian socialism, and German idealistic philosophy - in other words, some of the main traditions of Western thought. Most important, Marx was "the last of the great system-builders, the successor of Hegel, a believer, like him, in a rational formula summing up the evolution of mankind." While an exposition of Marxism would require another book, certain aspects of the doctrine must be constantly kept in mind by a student of Soviet history.

  Marxism postulates dialectical materialism as the key to and the essence of reality. While applicable to philosophy, science, and in fact to everything, dialectical materialism exercised its greatest impact on the study - and later manipulation - of human society, on that combination of sociology, history, and economics that represented Marx's own specialty. "Materialism" asserts that only matter exists; in Marxism it also led to a stress on the priority of the economic factor in man's life, social organization, and history.

  In the social production of their means of existence men enter into definite, necessary relations which are independent of their will, productive relationships which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The aggregate of these productive relationships constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises, and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of the material means of existence conditions the whole process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness.

  The fundamental division in every society is that between the exploiters and the exploited, between the owners of the means of production and those who have to sell their labor to the owners to earn a living. A given political system, religion, and culture all reflect and support the economic set-up, protecting the interests of the exploiters. The base, to repeat, determines the superstructure.

  "Dialectical" adds a dynamic quality to materialism, defining the process of the evolution of reality. For the Marxists insist that everything changes all the time. What is more, that change follows the laws of the dialectic and thus presents a rigorously correct and scientifically established pattern. Following Hegel, Marx and Engels postulated a three-step sequence of change: the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis. A given condition, the thesis, leads to opposition within itself, the antithesis, and the tension between the two is resolved by a leap to a new condition, the synthesis. The synthesis in turn becomes a thesis producing a new antithesis, and

  the dialectic continues. The historical dialectic expresses itself in class struggle: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." As an antithesis grows within a thesis, "the material productive forces of a society," always developing, "come into contradiction with the existing productive relationships," and social strife ensues. Eventually revolution leads to a transformation of society, only to become itself the new established order producing a new antithesis. In this manner the Italian towns and the urban classes in general revolted successfully against feudalism to inaugurate the modern, bourgeois period of European history. That period in turn ran its prescribed course, culminating in the full flowering of capitalism. But, again inevitably, the capitalists, the bourgeois, evoked their antithesis, their "grave-diggers," the industrial workers or the proletariat. In the words of Marx foretelling the coming revolution:

  The expropriation is brought about by the operation of the immanent laws of capitalist production, by the centralization of capital… The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point where they prove incompatible with their capitalist husk. This husk bursts asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

  Interestingly if illogically, the victorious proletarian revolution would mark the end of all exploitation of man by man and the establishment of a just socialist society. In a sense, humanity would return to prehistory, when, according to Marx and the Marxists, primeval communities knew no social differentiation or antagonism.

  Leninism

  Lenin's theoretical contribution to Marxism could in no sense rival the contributions of the two originators of the doctrine. Still, he did his best to adapt Marxism to the changing conditions in the world as well as to his own experience with the Second International and to Russian circumstances, and he produced certain important additions to and modifications of the basic teaching. More to the point for students of Soviet history is the fact that these amendments became gospel in the Soviet Union, where the entire ideology has frequently been referred to as "Marxism-Leninism."

  Among the views developed by Lenin, those on the party, the revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, together with those on the peasantry and on imperialism, deserve special attention. As already mentioned, it was a disagreement on the nature of the party that in 1903 split the Russian Social Democrats into the Lenin-led Bolsheviks and the

  Mensheviks. Lenin insisted on a tightly knit body of dedicated professional revolutionaries, with clear lines of command and a military discipline. The Mensheviks, by contrast, preferred a larger and looser organization. With characteristic determination and believing in the imminent worldwide overthrow of the capitalist system, Lenin decided in 1917 that he and his party could then stage a successful revolution in Russia, although at first virtually no one, even among the Bolsheviks, agreed. After the Bolsheviks did seize power in the October Revolution, Lenin proceeded to emphasize the role of the party and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  Lenin's revolutionary optimism stemmed in part from his reconsideration of the role of the peasantry in bringing about the establishment of the new order. Marx, Engels, and Marxists in general have neglected the peasants in their teachings and relegated them, as petty proprietors, to the bourgeois camp. Lenin, however, came to the conclusion that, if properly led by the proletariat and the party, poor peasants could be a revolutionary force: indeed later he proclaimed even the middle peasants to be of some value to the socialist state. The same April Theses that urged the transformation of the bourgeois revolution into a socialist one stated that poor peasants were to be part of the new revolutionary wave.

  Lenin expanded Marxism in another, even more drastic manner. In his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916 and published in the spring of 1917, he tried to bring Marxism up to date to account for such recent developments as intense colonial rivalry, international crises, and finally the First World War. He concluded that in its ultimate form capitalism becomes imperialism, with monopolies and financial capital ruling the world. Cartels replace free competition, and export of capital becomes more important than export of goods. An economic and political partitioning of the world follows in the form of a constant struggle for economic expansion, spheres of influence, colonies, and the like. International alliances and counteralliances arise. The disparity between the development of the productive forces of the participants and their shares of the world is settled among capitalist states by wars. Thus, instead of the original Marxist vision of the victorious socialist revolution as the simple expropriation of a few supercapitalists, Lenin described the dying stage of capitalism as an age of gigantic conflicts, relating it effectively to the twentieth centu
ry. Still more important, this externalization, so to speak, of the capitalist crisis brought colonies and underdeveloped areas in general prominently into the picture. The capitalists were opposed not only by their own proletariats, but also by the alien peoples whom they exploited, more or less regardless of the social order and the stage of development of those peoples. Therefore, the proletarians and the colonial peoples were natural allies. Lenin, it is worth noting, paid much more attention to Asia than did Western Marxists. Eventually

  – in a dialectical tour de force - even the fact that the socialist revolution came to Russia, rather than to such industrial giants as Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, could be explained by the theory of the "weakest link," that is, by the argument that in the empire of the Romanovs various forms of capitalist exploitation, both native and colonial or semi-colonial, combined to make capitalism particularly paradoxical and unstable, so that the Russian link in the capitalist chain snapped first.

  Many critics have pointed out that Lenin's special views, while differing from the ideas of Marx and Engels, found their raison d'etre both in Russian reality and in the Russian radical tradition. A land of peasants, Russia could not afford to rely for its future on the proletariat alone, and at least the poor peasants, if not the wealthier ones, had to be included to bring theory into some correspondence with the facts. Again, in contrast to, for example, Germany, socialism never acquired in imperial Russia a legal standing or a mass following, remaining essentially a conspiracy of intellectuals. If Lenin wanted results, he had to depend on these intellectuals, on a small, dedicated party. Moreover, in doing so he followed the tradition of Chemyshevsky, of Tkachev especially, of the "Will of the People," and even, broadly speaking - though he would have denied it vehemently - of such populists as Lavrov and Mikhailov-sky, who emphasized the role of the "critically thinking individuals" as the makers of history. Born in 1870, Lenin grew up admiring Chemyshevsky; and his oldest brother, Alexander, was executed in 1887 for his part in a populistlike plot to assassinate Alexander III. Lenin's later persistent and violent attacks on the populists should not, it has been argued, obscure his basic indebtedness to them.