The Russian Revolution
Page 2
iunkers
) parading in Petrograd: March 1917.
48
. Ex-Tsar Nicholas at Tsarskoe Selo, March 1917, under house arrest. The Library of Congress.
49
. Leonid Krasin.
50
. Lenin: Paris 1910.
51
. Kerensky visiting the front: summer 1917. Courtesy Bakhmeteff Archive, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
52
. Russian soldiers fleeing Germans: July 1917.
The Daily Mirror
(London).
53
. The July 1917 events.
54
. P. N. Pereverzev.
Niva
, No. 19 (1917).
55
. The Palace Square in Petrograd after the suppression of the Bolshevik putsch.
56
. Mutinous soldiers of the 1st Machine Gun Regiment disarmed: July 5, 1917. VAAP, Moscow.
57
. Leon Trotsky.
58
. General Lavr Kornilov.
59
. Kornilov feted on his arrival at the Moscow State Conference.
60
. Vladimir Lvov.
61
. N. V. Nekrasov.
62
. Soldiers of the “Wild Division” meet with the Luga Soviet.
63
. The Military-Revolutionary Committee (Milrevkom).
64
. Grigorii Zinoviev. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
65
. L. B. Kamenev. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London.
66
. N. I. Podvoiskii.
67
. Cadets (
iunkers
) defending the Winter Palace: October 1917.
68
. The Winter Palace, after being seized and looted by the Bolsheviks. VAAP, Moscow.
69
. The Assembly Hall in Smolnyi.
70
. Cadets defending the Moscow Kremlin: November 1917. VAAP, Moscow.
71
. Fires burning in Moscow during battle between loyal and Bolshevik forces: November 1917. VAAP, Moscow.
72
. Iakov Sverdlov.
73
. Latvians guarding Lenin’s office in Smolnyi. State Museum of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Leningrad.
74
. Lenin and secretarial staff of the Council of People’s Commissars. VAAP, Moscow.
75
. One of the early meetings of the Council of People’s Commissars. VAAP, Moscow.
76
. Voting for the Constituent Assembly.
77
. Electoral poster of the Constitutional-Democrats. Poster Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.
78
. F. M. Onipko.
Niva
, No. 19 (1917).
79
. Victor Chernov. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
80
. The Russian delegation arrives at Brest-Litovsk.
81
. The signing of the Armistice at Brest.
82
. Russian and German troops fraternizing: Winter 1917–18. Culver Pictures.
83
. Kurt Riezler.
84
. A. Ioffe.
85
. Armored train of Czech Legion in Siberia: June 1918. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London.
86
. General Gajda, Commander of the Czech Legion. National Archives, Washington, D.C.
87
. Maria Spiridonova. Isaac N. Steinberg Collection, Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, New York.
88
. Colonel I. Vatsetis.
89
. Boris Savinkov.
90
. Lieutenant-Colonel A. P. Perkhurov.
91
. A German-Russian love affair: contemporary Russian cartoon.
92
. Iurii Larin.
93
. A common sight on the streets of Moscow and Petrograd in 1918–21. Hoover Institution Archives: Boris Sokoloff Collection.
94
. A typical peasant “bourgeois-capitalist.”
95
. Ipatev’s house—the “House of Special Designation.”
96
. Ipatev’s house surrounded by a palisade. National Archives, Washington, D.C.
97
. Alexis and Olga on board the ship
Rus’
.
98
. The murderer of Nicholas II, Iurovskii, with his family.
99
. Isaac Steinberg. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
100
. Feliks Dzerzhinskii.
101
. Fannie Kaplan. David King Collection, London.
102
. Dzerzhinskii and Stalin.
MAPS
Russian Empire circa 1900
European Russia
Petrograd
German Advance into Russia, 1917–1918
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the course of working on this book I have benefited from the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smith Richardson Foundation, to which I would like to express my warm appreciation. I am also grateful to the Hoover Institution at Stanford, California, for giving me access to its unrivaled collections.
ABBREVIATIONS
ARR
Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii
BK
Bor’ba klassov
BM
Berliner Monatshefte
Brogkauz & Efron
Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar’ Ob-va Brogkauz i Efron
, 41 vols.
BSE
Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia
, 65 vols.
Dekrety
Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti
, 11 vols. (Moscow, 1957– )
DN
Delo naroda
EV
Ekonomicheskii vestnik
EZh
Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’
Forschungen
Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte
GM
Golos minuvshego
Granat
Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar’ Tov-va Granat
, 55 vols.
IA
Istoricheskii arkhiv
IM
Istorik Marksist
IR
Illustrirovannaia Rossiia
ISSSR
Istoriia SSSR
IV
Istoricheskii vestnik
IZ
Istoricheskie zapiski
Jahrbücher
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas
KA
Krasnyi arkhiv
KL
Krasnaia letopis’
KN
Krasnaia nov’
Lenin,
Khronika
V. I. Lenin:
Biograficheskaia Khronika, 1870–1924
, 13 vols.
(Moscow, 1970–85)
Lenin,
PSS
V. I. Lenin,
Polnoe Sobranie sochinenii
, 5th ed. 55 vols.
(Moscow, 1958–65)
Lenin,
Sochineniia
V. I. Lenin, Sochineniia
, 3rd ed., 30 vols.
(Moscow-Leningrad, 1927–33)
LN
Literaturnoe nasledstvo
LS
Leninskii sbornik
MG
Minuvshie gody
NChS
Na chuzhoi storone
ND
Novyi den’
NKh
&
nbsp; Narodnoe khoziaistvo
NoV
Novoe vremia
NS
Nashe slovo
NV
Nash vek
NVCh
Novyi vechernyi chas
NZ
Die Neue Zeit
NZh
Novaia zhizn’
OD
L. Martov
et al
, eds.,
Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v
nachale XX veka
, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1910–14)
Padenie
P. E. Shcheglovitov, ed.,
Padenie tsarskogo rezhima
, 7 vols.
(Leningrad, 1924–27)
PN
Poslednie novosti
PR
Proletarskaia revoliutsiia
PRiP
Proletarskaia revoliutsiia i pravo
Revoliutsiia
N. Avdeev
et al., Revoliutsiia 1917 goda:
khronika sobytii
, 6 vols. (Moscow, 1923–30)
RL
Russkaia letopis’
RM
Russkaia mysl’
RR
Russian Review
RS
Russkoe slovo
RV
Russkie vedomosti
RZ
Russkie zapiski
SB
Staryi Bol’shevik
SD
Sotsial-Demokrat
SiM
Strana i mir
SR
Slavic Review
SS
Soviet Studies
SUiR
Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii
SV
Sotsialisticheskii vestnik
SZ
Sovremennye zapiski
VCh
Vechernyi chas
VE
Vestnik Evropy
VI
Voprosy istorii
VIKPSS
Voprosy istorii KPSS
VO
Vechernye ogni
VS
Vlast’ sovetov
VZ
Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte
VZh
Vestnik zhizni
ZhS
Zhivoe slovo
INTRODUCTION
This book is the first attempt in any language to present a comprehensive view of the Russian Revolution, arguably the most important event of the century. There is no shortage of surveys of the subject, but they concentrate on the political and military struggles for power over Russia between 1917 and 1920. Seen from the perspective of time, however, the Russian Revolution was a great deal more than a contest for power in one country: what the victors in that contest had in mind was defined by one of its leading protagonists, Leon Trotsky, as no less than “overturning the world.” By that was meant a complete redesign of state, society, economy, and culture all over the world for the ultimate purpose of creating a new human being.
These far-reaching implications of the Russian Revolution were not evident in 1917–18, in part because the West considered Russia to lie on the periphery of the civilized world and in part because the Revolution there occurred in the midst of a World War of unprecedented destructiveness. In 1917–18 it was believed by virtually all non-Russians that what had occurred in Russia was of exclusively local importance, irrelevant to them and in any event bound to settle down once peace had been restored. It turned out otherwise. The repercussions of the Russian Revolution would be felt in every corner of the globe for the rest of the century.
Events of such magnitude have neither a clear beginning nor a neat end. Historians have long argued over the terminal dates of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Similarly, there is no indisputable way to determine the time span of the Russian Revolution. What can be said with certainty is that it did not begin with the collapse of tsarism in February–March 1917 and conclude with the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War three years later. The revolutionary movement became an intrinsic element of Russian history as early as the 1860s. The first phase of the Russian Revolution in the narrow sense of the word (corresponding to the constitutional phase of the French Revolution, 1789–92) began with the violence of 1905. This was brought under control by a combination of concessions and repression, but violence resumed on an even grander scale after a hiatus of twelve years, in February 1917, culminating in the Bolshevik coup d’etat of October. After three years of fighting against internal and external opponents, the Bolsheviks succeeded in establishing undisputed mastery over most of what had been the Russian Empire. But they were as yet too weak to realize their ambitious program of economic, social, and cultural transformation. This had to be postponed for several years to give the ravaged country time to recover. The Revolution was resumed in 1927–28 and consummated ten years later after frightful upheavals that claimed millions of lives. It may be said to have run its course only with the death of Stalin in 1953, when his successors initiated and carried out, by fits and starts, a kind of counterrevolution from above, which in 1990 appears to have led to a rejection of a good part of the Revolution’s legacy.
Broadly defined, the Russian Revolution may thus be said to have lasted a century. A process of such duration in a country of Russia’s size and population was bound to be exceedingly complex. An autocratic monarchy that had ruled Russia since the fourteenth century could no longer cope with the demands of modernity and gradually lost out to a radical intelligentsia in whom commitment to extreme Utopian ideas combined with a boundless lust for power. Like all such drawn-out processes, however, it had its culminating period. In my estimation, that period was the quarter of a century extending from the outbreak of large-scale unrest at Russian universities in February 1899 to the death of Lenin in January 1924.
Because the aspirations of the intellectuals who assumed power in October 1917 were so extreme, I found it necessary to treat many topics besides the customary political-military power struggle. To the Russian revolutionaries, power was merely a means to an end, which was the remaking of the human species. In the first years of their rule they lacked the strength to attain an objective so contrary to what their people desired, but they did try and in so doing laid the foundations of the Stalinist regime, which would resume the attempt with far greater resources. I devote considerable attention to these social, economic, and cultural antecedents of Stalinism, which, even if only imperfectly realized under Lenin, from the outset lay at the very heart of the Russian Revolution.
This volume is divided into two parts.
Part I, “The Agony of the Old Regime,” describes the decay of tsarism, culminating in the mutiny of the Petrograd military garrison in February 1917, which in surprisingly short time not only brought down the monarchy but tore apart the country’s political and social fabric. It is a continuation of my Russia under the Old Regime, which traced the development of the Russian state and society from their origins to the end of the nineteenth century. Part II, “The Bolsheviks Conquer Russia,” recounts how the Bolshevik Party seized power first in Petrograd and then in the provinces inhabited by Great Russians, imposing on this region a one-party regime with its terror apparatus and centralized economic system. Both these parts appear in the present volume. A sequel, Russia under the New Regime, will deal with the Civil War, the separation and reintegration of the non-Russian borderlands, Soviet Russia’s international activities, Bolshevik cultural policies, and the Communist regime as it took shape in the final year of Lenin’s dictatorship.
The difficulties confronting a historian of a subject of such complexity and magnitude are formidable. They are not, however, as is commonly believed, caused by a shortage of sources: although some of these are, indeed, inaccessible (especially documents bearing on Bolshevik decision-making), the source materials are quite sufficient, far beyond the capacity of any individual to absorb. The historian’s problem, rather, is that the Russian Revolution, be
ing part of our own time, is difficult to deal with dispassionately. The Soviet Government, which controls the bulk of the source materials and dominates the historiography, derives its legitimacy from the Revolution and wants it treated in a manner supportive of its claims. By single-mindedly shaping the image of the Revolution over decades it has succeeded in determining not only how the events are treated but which of them are treated. Among the many subjects that it has confined to historiographic limbo are the role of the liberals in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions; the conspiratorial manner in which the Bolsheviks seized power in October; the overwhelming rejection of Bolshevik rule half a year after it had come into being, by all classes, including the workers; Communist relations with Imperial Germany in 1917–1918; the military campaign of 1918 against the Russian village; and the famine of 1921, which claimed the lives of over five million people. Writing a scholarly history of the Russian Revolution, therefore, demands, in addition to absorbing an immense mass of facts, also breaking out of the mental straitjacket that seventy years of politically directed historiography have managed to impose on the profession. This situation is not unique to Russia. In France, too, the revolution was for a long time mainly grist for political polemics: the first academic chair devoted to its history was founded at the Sorbonne only in the 1880s, a century after the event, when the Third Republic was in place and 1789 could be treated with some degree of dispassion. And still the controversy has never abated.
But even approached in a scholarly manner, the history of modern revolutions cannot be value-free: I have yet to read an account of the French or the Russian revolution that does not reveal, despite most authors’ intention to appear impartial, where the writer’s sympathies lie. The reason is not far to seek. Post-1789 revolutions have raised the most fundamental ethical questions: whether it is proper to destroy institutions built over centuries by trial and error, for the sake of ideal systems; whether one has the right to sacrifice the well-being and even the lives of one’s own generation for the sake of generations yet unborn; whether man can be refashioned into a perfectly virtuous being. To ignore these questions, raised already by Edmund Burke two centuries ago, is to turn a blind eye to the passions that had inspired those who made and those who resisted revolutions. For post-1789 revolutionary struggles, in the final analysis, are not over politics but over theology.
This being the case, scholarship requires the historian to treat critically his sources and to render honestly the information he obtains from them. It does not call for ethical nihilism, that is, accepting that whatever happened had to happen and hence is beyond good and evil: the sentiment of the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdiaev, who claimed that one could no more judge the Russian Revolution than the coming of the Ice Age or the fall of the Roman Empire. The Russian Revolution was made neither by the forces of nature nor by anonymous masses but by identifiable men pursuing their own advantages. Although it had spontaneous aspects, in the main it was the result of deliberate action. As such it is very properly subject to value judgment.