A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

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A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 36

by Bushkovitch, Paul


  In late 1915 Nicholas himself took over command of the army, moving from Petrograd to the Stavka, the army headquarters near Mogilev. His move did the army no good and only further disorganized government in the capital, for he remained the sole authority and now it was even harder to get his attention. His repeated consultation with Empress Alexandra and Rasputin probably did not have much impact on policy but served to further alienate the public. The Russian army had mixed successes, for it could do little against the Germans but scored a major victory against Austria in 1916 (the “Brusilov Offensive” led by General Aleksei Brusilov) and against the Turks. Erzerum in eastern Anatolia fell to General Nikolai Yudenich the same year. These successes could not change the general stagnation in the war nor stop the bloodshed. Russia’s casualties mounted toward some two million dead, two-and-a-half million wounded, and five million prisoners of war. In the Duma the Kadet leader Pavel Miliukov spoke of treason in high places (a reference to the Empress Alexandra, among others) and then in December 1916, a group of young aristocrats fearful of the fate of the monarchy assassinated Rasputin. Inviting him to dinner, they first fed him heavily poisoned food and wine, and then when that had no effect on his massive frame, they shot him and put him under the ice of the St. Petersburg canals. Rasputin was gone, and the monarchy soon followed.

  In many respects the fall of the Romanov dynasty was almost an anticlimax. In late February 1917, the worsening food situation in St. Petersburg led to long lines at bakeries and other food stores in working class parts of the city. On International Women’s Day (February 23/March 8; a socialist holiday) many women workers, exhausted by standing in the food lines on top of long work days, went out on strike. In a few hours the men in the factories heard the news and they went out on strike as well, soon shutting down the entire city. Students and the middle classes joined them. The government called out troops, who fired on the demonstrators, killing several dozen. The next day, however, the very same soldiers who had fired refused to fight and mutinied, taking other regiments with them, even the Cossacks. The ministers and the Duma sent increasingly desperate telegrams to the tsar, and Nicholas hurried back from the Stavka. Before he got to the capital he was met by representatives of the government who convinced him to abdicate. This he did, on March 2/15, and the monarchy abruptly came to an end.

  REVOLUTION

  Even before the tsar’s abdication two new governments were forming in Petrograd. As the tsar’s government collapsed, the Duma leaders formed a Provisional Government led by Prince Georgii Lvov, the head of the Union of Zemstvos, a liberal country gentleman with a law degree and a record of service in the local councils and the Duma. His foreign minister was the leader of the Kadet party, the historian Pavel Miliukov. The only more or less radical voice was that of Aleksandr Kerenskii, a lawyer known for defense work in political trials and a member of the Duma’s “Labor Group,” agrarian socialists close to the right wing of the SRs. His father had been the principal of the high school in Simbirsk when Lenin was one of the pupils. These men were the flower of liberal Russia, broadly conceived, but as a group had no idea how to lead the masses and spent much of their time worrying about the reactions of Russia’s wartime allies, Britain, France, and soon the United States. Their preferred solution to all problems facing Russia was to call a Constituent Assembly to write a constitution for a democratic republic that would address the peasants’ desire for the land and the grievances of the workers. In the meantime they would pursue the war, hopefully to an allied victory over Germany.

  The other “government” was the Petrograd Soviet. On Menshevik urging, the workers at nearly every factory in the city elected delegates to the city Soviet, which numbered nearly a thousand members. Its first act was “Order no. 1” that specified that the army was to be run by elected soviets of the soldiers, the officers having command only during operations. As the revolutionary parties came out into the open for the first time in Russian history, the Mensheviks and SRs, not the Bolsheviks, quickly asserted dominance in the Soviet in Petrograd and most other towns. The Menshevik tactic was to refuse support to the Provisional Government and simultaneously push it toward a more radical direction, a hopeless compromise position. Right at the start, the war had to be faced as an issue. While the Russian Mensheviks differed from most European socialists by arguing that the war should be ended without victory for either side, they had no workable plan to stop it, nor did they advocate an immediate socialist revolution. Their position did reflect real popular hostility to the war, and in May Miliukov and others had to leave the Provisional Government, for they wanted to push the war to a victorious end and the Soviet would not have that. Lvov organized a new government with several moderate socialists, including Kerenskii who was in charge of the army and navy, and started a new offensive at the front. Soviets were also formed in Moscow and other cities, in the army, and even in some parts of the countryside. They represented workers, soldiers, and peasants only, not the middle or upper classes. Reelected every few weeks, the local soviets reflected the popular mood very closely.

  In all these deliberations during the first months of the revolution the Bolsheviks remained a minority in the soviets. Lenin heard of the fall of the tsar in Switzerland and managed to return to Russia through Germany, having convinced the German government that he was more of a threat to Russia’s war effort than to their own. He traveled in a train whose doors were sealed until he reached neutral Sweden, reaching Petrograd via Finland on April 3/16, 1917, to the tumultuous welcome of his followers. He found that the Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, had returned from exile and were beginning to organize themselves. They all lacked, however, a clear idea of what their platform ought to be. Lenin’s was absolutely clear, as expressed in the “April Theses.” The fall of the tsar, he wrote, meant that the bourgeois revolution, the one the party had aimed for in 1905, had ended. In the country there was now dual power, the soviets alongside the Provisional Government. The aim should now be the seizure of power by the proletariat with the aim of transforming Russia into a socialist society. The instrument of that seizure was to be the soviets, primarily the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets. The immediate aim of the Bolsheviks was thus to secure a majority in the Petrograd and other soviets.

  The story of the next few months is the story of the fulfillment of that goal. It was the situation of Russia that made it possible, for the whole country entered a major crisis. The collapse of the old government left little effective authority in its place, and much of that was cowed by the revolutionary crowd. In the villages the peasants simply took the land during the summer. In many places there was violence, but often they simply ignored the noble landowner and began to plow up his fields for their own. Sometimes they came to the mansions of the aristocrats and politely told them to leave. However it occurred, the peasant seizure of the land was a cataclysmic change in Russian society, in a few months putting an end to a social order that had lasted for centuries. Most nobles were no longer the masters of the land but impoverished refugees in the big cities. In the cities the workers used their new freedom to demand an eight-hour day, higher wages, and to form factory committees that tried to take control of the work place.

  The left parties all came out into the open and tried to become mass organizations. The time of the revolutionary underground was over. At first the most successful were the SRs, with their traditions of direct action and appeal to the peasantry. For the first time they actually managed to organize significant numbers of peasants into their party, and their working class following was very large. They had one deep problem, however – the war. Even before 1917 some of the SRs had come out against the war, with a position very close to Lenin’s, but remained part of the larger party. As the crisis deepened over the summer of 1917, the split widened. The Mensheviks, always hoping to build a mass party in freer conditions, benefited enormously from the new freedom. When the soviets held their first congress of delegates from all of Russia in June, the SR�
�s and Mensheviks had nearly three hundred deputies each, and the Bolsheviks only a little more than a hundred. Moderation seemed to triumph, but the mood changed very fast.

  The Bolsheviks for the first time were becoming a mass party, too. In place of the few thousand professional revolutionaries the party grew rapidly to over two hundred thousand, with the largest concentration in the large cities and in Petrograd in particular. These new members were overwhelmingly young factory workers, most under twenty-five. As more and more revolutionaries returned from abroad, the Bolsheviks also began to attract dissidents from the Mensheviks, the most important being Trotsky, whose opposition to the war brought him to join Lenin for the first time. Trotsky was a powerful orator, and his speeches were a major weapon in winning the masses to Bolshevism. The new members transformed the Bolshevik party, especially at the level of the rank and file, whose radicalism came to the fore in early July. The Petrograd Bolsheviks staged an armed demonstration that seemed to be turning into a bid for power. The Provisional Government, with support from the city soviet, was able to put it down and arrest many Bolshevik leaders. Lenin went into hiding in Finland and Trotsky landed in jail. In reaction to the events Kerenskii replaced Prince Lvov as prime minister. For a few weeks the revolutionary wave seemed to subside, but that was not to be. The war ground on, discontent in the army multiplied into a gradual collapse of discipline and Kerenskii replaced Brusilov with general Lavr Kornilov as commander in chief, hoping that Kornilov could restore order in the army. The task was beyond his powers. The transport net of the country, already weakened by the war, began to collapse, as did many essential industries and services. In the cities the soviets organized Red Guards, who contributed as much to disorder as to order. Revolutionary organizations and groups “expropriated” buildings for their own use, the most famous example being the Petrograd Soviet’s seizure of the buildings of the Smolnyi Institute in Petrograd, the aristocratic girls’ school founded by Empress Elizabeth. Thus it came to serve as the Bolshevik headquarters. For the middle and upper classes, it was the beginning of anarchy; for the workers, it was the dawn of a new world, chaotic, but their own. Endless discussion and meetings further disrupted factory work but also built a constituency for ever more radical demands. Life in Petrograd was feverish, and in the provinces only a bit calmer. Moscow and all towns and settlements with any industry boiled with meetings, speeches, and demonstrations. On the fringes of the country nationalist movements appeared with demands for autonomy. In Kiev groups of nationalist intellectuals and party activists proclaimed themselves the Ukrainian Rada (council) alongside the Provisional Government and the local soviets. Other groups formed in the Baltics and the Caucasus, though none of them advocated actual independence as yet.

  The July days had put a crimp in the Bolshevik organization and its rise to dominance among the workers. Then at the end of August general Kornilov advanced on the capital with the Mountaineer Cavalry Corps consisting of the Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus – Chechens and Circassians – to restore discipline and order in the country. In the face of this challenge Kerenskii had to turn to the Petrograd Soviet, which armed the workers. The Bolsheviks had grown in strength since the July Days. They were now crucial for the defeat of Kornilov, and their leaders emerged from jail into the open again. The inability of Kerenskii to defend the revolution on his own was the last blow to his power, and from the time of the defeat of Kornilov on September 1/14, the Provisional Government essentially drifted. The locus of action had shifted to the soviets. During and right after the Kornilov episode the Bolsheviks finally secured a majority in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. As the weeks advanced and the economic and military crisis continued to worsen, another Congress of Soviets met, again with delegates from all over the country. Here the divisions in the SR party were to play a decisive role, for the Bolsheviks had clearly won the majority of the city workers, but in the villages they had no organization at all. The left wing of the SR party, increasingly radicalized by the revolution and demanding an immediate end to the war, was prepared to join the Bolsheviks. On October 10/23, Lenin returned from hiding in Finland and assembled the Bolshevik leaders. With the support of Trotsky and Stalin, he overcame the pessimists in the leadership, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and the Bolshevik Central Committee voted to seize power. With the votes of the Left SRs the Bolsheviks captured the leadership of the Congress of Soviets, and on October 25/November 7, 1917, the Red Guards moved on the Winter Palace to eject the Provisional Government. Only a few hundred defenders were left in the palace, officer cadets and the “Women’s Batallion of Death,” a unit formed of mostly middle-class women to fight in the war. On a signal from the naval cruiser Aurora, anchored in the Neva River, several thousand Red Guards in a fast walk through the autumn chill took the palace with minimal firing and casualties. Attempts at looting the wine cellar and the many treasures of the palace were quickly suppressed, and the ministers of the Provisional Government were escorted to prison in the St. Peter and Paul Fortress. Kerenskii escaped south in a US embassy car in a fruitless attempt to rally support at the front.

  Relying on their majority in the Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs now took power, proclaiming Russia a Soviet and Socialist Republic. The Mensheviks and Right SRs walked out of the Congress in protest as Trotsky consigned them to the “garbage heap of history.” The first actions of the Reds were to organize the new government. The Congress of Soviets elected a government of People’s Commissars with Lenin at the head and Trotsky as People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs. The other positions went to prominent Bolsheviks and Left SRs, the most significant among the former being Joseph Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities. Trotsky went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Choristers’ Bridge near the Winter Palace, turned off the lights, and told everyone to go home. For the next few months, he ran foreign policy from a small office in the Smolny Institute.

  The new Soviet government came into power with great support from the workers and intense opposition from the old upper classes, the middle classes, and the intelligentsia. These divisions were reflected in the Constituent Assembly that convened on January 5/18, 1918. Called by the Provisional Government, the Assembly elections had proceeded through the autumn, before and after the Bolshevik seizure of power. In the cities the Bolsheviks routed the moderate socialists (SRs and Mensheviks) leaving the increasingly more conservative and nationalistic Kadets as the second urban party. In the countryside, however, the SRs emerged with the most votes, though most candidates had not declared whether they supported the left or right, muddying the result. The Assembly met for some thirteen hours, after which the Bolshevik guard of Red sailors from the navy simply told the deputies to leave and go home. They obeyed. A few days later another Congress of Soviet Deputies proclaimed the new state, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, with ringing declarations of the rights of the workers, peasants, and national minorities.

  CIVIL WAR AND SOVIET POWER

  By this time civil war had already begun, as groups of military officers in southern Russia came together to organize resistance to the new government and discontent grew among the Don Cossacks. The Cossack leader Kaledin formed a Cossack government of sorts on the Don, and the Reds quickly moved against him. Through the Civil War the Cossacks were to be the foundation of resistance to Soviet power. Living on the southern and eastern fringes of Russia, they were no longer the rebels of the eighteenth century. They combined peasant farming with service in the army, and secure in possession of their land, they had been the tsar’s most loyal servants since the 1790s. The largest and most prosperous of the Cossack hosts was on the Don, and there was the fiercest resistance to the new order. At the same time the nationalist intellectuals in the Kiev Rada declared themselves to be the supreme power in the Ukraine. A Cossack-Ukrainian front seemed to be forming against the Reds in the south. A motley collection of red guards and sailors were enough to defeat both the Don Cossacks and the Rada by January 1
918. At the same time chaos spread through the country, along with episodes of resistance elsewhere. At the end of December 1917, to meet these threats, Soviet authorities also formed the Cheka, the Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle with Banditism and Counterrevolution, an organization that combined security police functions with a sort of political army. Its first head was a Polish Communist, Felix Dzerzhinskii, incorruptible and ruthless.

  The quick defeat of opposition to the Bolsheviks did not mean that order returned. The war had ruined the Russian economy. Inflation was out of control and the transport networks and the distribution of food were breaking down. Heat and light disappeared in Petrograd and other big cities, and workers began to return to their native villages, if they could. In the former capital of the Russian Empire the lights went out in the great palaces, the nobility fled to the south to warmth and food, along with much of the intelligentsia and the middle classes. As the army disintegrated, millions of soldiers clogged the trains going home, taking with them rifles and hand grenades. Criminal gangs terrorized many cities. The first measures of the Bolsheviks only increased the disintegration, for the new government set out to build a new socialist state in the midst of chaos. The workers frequently interpreted socialism to mean that they should physically eject the factory owners and managers and elect committees of workers to run the plants. These committees had no way to procure supplies or distribute the goods, and in the general social chaos labor discipline collapsed. It was a vicious circle. The Bolsheviks went along with this for several months, as part of the need to dissolve the old order, but by spring of 1918, the collapsing economy and the needs of civil war caused them to reverse themselves and begin to appoint single managers, former workers or party activists, to run the factories. In theory these Red managers were accountable to the newly established Supreme Economic Council and the various People’s Commissariats (Industry, Trade, Agriculture, Labor, Food Supplies). Here was the embryo of the later Soviet state.

 

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