The Russian Revolution

by Richard Pipes

  *According to Professor John Keep, in the first eighteen weeks in power—that is, until early March 1918 when he moved to Moscow—Lenin left Smolnyi only twenty-one times-. Report presented at the Conference on the Russian Revolution, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, January 1988.

  * BK, No. 1 (1934), 107. Jay Lovestone, a founder of the American Communist Party, told the author that once, when speaking with Lenin, he used three-by-five cards. Lenin wanted to know their purpose. When Lovestone explained that, to save Lenin’s time, he had written down on them what he intended to say, Lenin said that Communism would come to Russia when she too learned to use three-by-five cards.

  †S. Liberman, Building Lenin’s Russia (Chicago, 1945), 13. The minutes of the Sovnarkom, which, next to the protocols of the Bolshevik Central Committee, constitute the most important source on early Bolshevik policies, are preserved at the Central Party Archive (TsPA) of the Marx-Lenin Institute in Moscow, under the shelf mark “Fond 19.” They are made available only to the most trusted Communist historians. Others must rely on secondhand references, such as those contained (in very incomplete form) in the biographical chronicle of Lenin’s life: Institut Marksizma-Leninizma pri TsK KPSS, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin: Biograficheskaia Khronika, 1870–1924, V-XII (Moscow, 1974–82). See further E. B. Genkina, Protokoly Sovnarkoma RSFSR (Moscow, 1982).

  * DN, No. 222 (December 2, 1917), 3. The protocols of this congress have not been published: the fullest description of the proceedings, on which the following account is based, appeared in the SR daily, Delo naroda, November 20-December 13, 1917.

  † DN, No. 223 (December 3/16, 1917), 3. The Communist chronicle of the Revolution (Revoliutsiia, VI, 258) distorts the sense of this resolution when it claims that the SRs demanded that power be taken away from the soviets and turned over to the Constituent Assembly. The SRs, in fact, wanted the Assembly and the soviets to cooperate.

  * Vtoroi S’ezd RSDSRP: Protokoly (Moscow, 1959), 181–82. Trotsky in 1903 said something similar: “All democratic principles must be subordinated exclusively to the interests of the party.” (M. Vishniak, Bolshevism and Democracy, New York, 1914, 67.)

  *O. N. Znamenskii, Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie (Leningrad, 1976), 338. Much of the Left SR support came from Petrograd workers and radicalized sailors in the Baltic and Black Sea navies.

  *E. Ignatov, in PR, No. 5/76 (1928), 37. The author claims that these worker signatures were forged but furnishes no proof.

  *Kerensky was, in fact, in Petrograd at this time, but there is no evidence that he tried to organize anti-Bolshevik forces.

  * NZh, No. 6/220 (January 9/22, 1918), 1. Afraid of a backlash, the Bolsheviks ordered an inquiry into the shooting. It revealed that troops from the Lithuanian Regiment had fired on the demonstrators in the belief that in so doing they were defending the Assembly from “saboteurs” (NZh, No. 15/229, February 3, 1918, 11). The Commission of Inquiry discontinued its work at the end of January without issuing a report.

  †Znamenskii, Uchreditel’noe Sobranie, 339. The exact number of the deputies present is not known: it could have been as low as 410: Ibid.

  *Zhelezniakov was a leader of the anarchists who had occupied Peter Durnovo’s villa the previous year and whose arrest caused the Kronshtadt sailors in June 1917 to revolt: Revoliutsiia, III, 108.

  *I. S. Malchevskii, ed., Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), no. Zhelezniakov was killed the following year, fighting in the Red Army.

  *In May 1918, Vladimir Purishkevich, one of the most reactionary pre-revolutionary politicians, published an open letter in which he said that after having spent half a year in Soviet prison he remained a monarchist and would offer no apologies for the Soviet Government which was transforming Russia into a German colony. However, he went on, “Soviet authority is firm authority—alas, not from that direction which I would prefer to have firm authority in Russia, whose pitiful and cowardly intelligentsia is one of the main culprits of our humiliation and of the inability of Russian society to produce a healthy, firm authority of governmental scope’: letter dated May 1, 1918, in VO, No. 36 (May 3, 1918), 4.

  *This attitude was pointed out by Martov in the spring of 1918 when Stalin accused him of slander and brought suit before a Revolutionary Tribunal. Noting that these tribunals had been set up to try exclusively “crimes against the people,” Martov asked: “Can an insult to Stalin be considered a crime against the people?” And he answered: “Only if one considers Stalin to be the people”: “Narod eto ia,” Vperëd, April 1/14, 1918, 1.

  *The idea of a Workers’ Congress had been first advanced by Akselrod in 1906, at which time it was rejected by both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks: Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (London, 1963), 75–76.

  *In fairness it must be noted that a small group of old Mensheviks, among whom were the founders of Russian Social-Democracy—Plekhanov, Akselrod, Potresov, and Vera Zasulich—thought differently. Thus, Akselrod wrote in August 1918 that the Bolshevik regime had degenerated into a “gruesome” counterrevolution. Even so, he and his old Genevan comrades also opposed active resistance to Lenin, on the grounds that it would assist reactionary elements to return to power. A. Ascher, Pavel Axelrod and the Development of Menshevism (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 344–46. On Plekhanov’s attitude: Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov (Stanford, Calif., 1963), 352–61. Potresov criticized his Menshevik colleagues then and later (V plenu u illiuzii, Paris, 1927), but he, too, would not participate in active opposition.

  * NZh, No. 115/330 (June 16, 1918), 3. According to NV, No. 96/120 (June 19, 1918), 3, the Bolshevik faction of the CEC refused to eject the Mensheviks and SRs from the soviets but consented to their expulsion from the CEC.

  *V. Stroev in NZh, No. 119/334 (June 21, 1918), 1. According to one newspaper (Novyi luch, cited in NZh, No. 121/336, June 23, 1918, 1–2), of the 130 delegates initially “elected” to the Petrograd Soviet, 77 were handpicked by the Bolshevik Party: 26 from Red Army units, 8 from supply detachments, and 43 from among Bolshevik functionaries.

  †NZh, No. 127/342 (July 2, 1918), 1. Somewhat different figures are given in Lenin, Sochineniia, XXIII, 547, where the total number of deputies is placed at 582, of whom 405 were Bolsheviks, 75 Left SRs, 59 Mensheviks and SRs, and 43 partyless.

  13

  Brest-Litovsk

  The party’s agitators must protest, time and again, against the foul slander, launched by capitalists, that our party allegedly favors a separate peace with Germany.

  —Lenin, April 21, 19171

  The Bolsheviks’ main concern after October was to solidify their power and to expand it nationwide. This difficult task they had to accomplish within the framework of an active foreign policy, at the center of which stood relations with Germany. In Lenin’s judgment, unless Russia promptly signed an armistice with Germany, his chances of keeping power were close to nil; conversely, such an armistice and the peace that would follow opened for the Bolsheviks the doors to world conquest. In December 1917, when most of his followers rejected the German terms, he argued that the party had no choice but to do the Germans’ bidding. The issue was starkly simple: unless the Bolsheviks made peace, “the peasant army, unbearably exhausted by the war, … will overthrow the socialist workers’ government.”2 The Bolsheviks required a peredyshka, or breathing spell, to consolidate power, to organize the administration, and to build their own armed force.

  Proceeding from this assumption, Lenin was prepared to make peace with the Central Powers on any terms as long as they left him a power base. The resistance which he encountered in party ranks grew out of the belief (which he shared) that the Bolshevik Government could survive only if a revolution broke out in Western Europe and the conviction (which he did not fully share) that this was bound to happen at any moment. To make peace with the “imperialist” Central Powers, especially on the humiliating terms which they offered, was to his opponents a betrayal of international socialism; in the long run, it spelled dea
th for revolutionary Russia. In their view, Soviet Russia should not place her own short-term national interests above the interests of the international proletariat. Lenin disagreed:

  Our tactics ought to rest… [on the principle] how to ensure more reliably and hopefully for the socialist revolution the possibility of consolidating itself or even surviving

  in one country

  until such time as other countries joined in.

  3

  On this issue the Bolshevik Party split in the winter of 1917–18 straight down the middle.

  The history of Bolshevik Russia’s relations with the Central Powers, notably Germany, during the twelve months that followed the October coup is of supreme interest because it is on this occasion that the Communists first formulated in theory and worked out in practice the strategy and tactics of their foreign policy.

  Western diplomacy traces its origins to the Italian city-states of the fifteenth century. From there diplomatic practices spread to the rest of Europe and in the seventeenth century received codification in international law. Diplomacy was designed to regulate and peacefully resolve disputes among sovereign states; if it failed and arms were resorted to, its task was to keep the level of violence as low as possible and to bring hostilities to an early end. The success of international law rests on the acceptance by all parties of certain principles:

  1. Sovereign states are acknowledged to have an unquestioned right to exist: whatever disagreements divide them, their existence itself can never be at issue. This principle underpinned the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. It was violated at the end of the eighteenth century with the Third Partition of Poland, which led to that country’s demise, but this was an exceptional case.

  2. International relations are confined to contacts between governments: it is a violation of diplomatic norms for one government to go over the head of another with direct appeals to its population. In the practice of the nineteenth century, states normally communicated through the ministries of foreign affairs.

  3. Relations among the foreign offices presume a certain level of integrity and goodwill, including respect for formal accords, since without them there can be no mutual trust, and without trust diplomacy becomes an exercise in futility.

  These principles and practices, which evolved between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, assumed the existence of a Law of Nature as well as that of a supranational community of Christian states. The Stoic concept of the Law of Nature, which theorists of international law from Hugo Grotius onward applied to relations between states, posited eternal and universal standards of justice. The concept of a Christian community meant that, whatever divided them, the countries of Europe and their overseas offspring belonged to one family. Before the twentieth century, the precepts of international law were not meant to apply to peoples outside the European community—an attitude which justified colonial conquests.

  Obviously, this whole complex of “bourgeois” ideas was repugnant to the Bolsheviks. As revolutionaries determined to overthrow the existing order, they could hardly have been expected to acknowledge the sanctity of the international state system. Appealing over the heads of governments to their populations was the very essence of revolutionary strategy. And as concerned honesty and goodwill in international relations, the Bolsheviks, in common with the rest of the Russian radicals, regarded moral standards to be obligatory only within the movement, in relations among comrades: relations with the class enemy were subject to the rules of warfare. In revolution, as in war, the only principle that mattered was kto kogo—who eats whom.

  In the weeks that followed the October coup, most Bolsheviks expected their example to set off revolutions throughout Europe. Every report from abroad of an industrial strike or of a mutiny was hailed as the “beginning.” In the winter of 1917–18, the Bolshevik Krasnaia gazeta and similar party organs reported in banner headlines, day after day, revolutionary explosions in Western Europe: one day in Germany, the next in Finland, then again in France. As long as this expectation remained alive, the Bolsheviks had no need to work out a foreign policy: all they had to do was repeat what they had always done—namely, fan the flames of revolution.

  But these hopes waned somewhat in the spring of 1918. The Russian Revolution had as yet found no emulators. The mutinies and strikes in Western Europe were everywhere suppressed, and the “masses” continued to slaughter each other instead of attacking their “ruling classes.” As this realization dawned, it became urgent to work out a revolutionary foreign policy. Here, the Bolsheviks lacked guidelines, since neither the writings of Marx nor the experience of the Paris Commune were of much help. The difficulty derived from the contradictory requirement of their interests as rulers of a sovereign state and as self-appointed leaders of world revolution. In the latter capacity they denied the right of other (“non-socialist”) governments to exist and rejected the tradition of confining foreign relations to heads of state and their ministers. They wanted to destroy root and branch the entire structure of national, “bourgeois” states, and to do so they had to exhort the “masses” abroad to rebellion. Yet, inasmuch as they themselves now headed a sovereign state, they could not avoid relations with other governments—at least until these had been swept away by the global revolution—and this they had to do in accordance with traditional standards of “bourgeois” international law. They also needed the protection of these standards to ward off foreign intervention in their own internal affairs.

  It is here that the dual nature of the Communist state, the formal separation of party and state, proved so useful. The Bolsheviks solved their problem by constructing a two-level foreign policy, one traditional, the other revolutionary. For purposes of dealing with “bourgeois” governments, they established the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, staffed exclusively with dependable Bolsheviks and subject to instructions from the Central Committee. This institution functioned, at least on the surface, in accord with accepted norms of diplomacy. Wherever permitted to do so by host countries, the heads of Soviet foreign missions, no longer called “ambassadors” or “envoys,” but “political representatives” (polpredy), took over the old Russian Embassy buildings, donned cutaways and top hats, and behaved much like their colleagues from “bourgeois” missions.* “Revolutionary diplomacy”—strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms—became the province of the Bolshevik Party acting either on its own or through the agency of special organs, such as the Communist International. Its agents incited revolution and supported subversive activities against the very foreign governments with which the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs maintained correct relations.

  This separation of functions, which reflected a similar duality inside Soviet Russia between party and state, was described by Sverdlov at the Seventh Congress of the Bolshevik Party in the course of discussions of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Referring to the clauses of the treaty which forbade the signatories to engage in hostile agitation and propaganda, he said:

  It follows inexorably from the treaty we have signed and which we must soon ratify at the Congress [of Soviets] that in our capacity as a government, as Soviet authority, we will not be able to conduct that broad international agitation which we have conducted until now. But this in no wise means that we have to cut back one iota on such agitation. Only from now on we shall have to conduct it almost always in the name, not of the Council of People’s Commissars, but of the Central Committee of the party …

  4

  This tactic of treating the party as a private organization, for whose actions the “Soviet” Government was not responsible, the Bolsheviks pursued with rather comical determination. For example, when in September 1918 Berlin protested against the anti-German propaganda in the Russian press (which by then was entirely under Bolshevik control), the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs archly replied:

  The Russian Government has no complaints that the German censorship and German police do not prosecute [their] press organs for … malicious agitation against the pol
itical institutions of Russia—that is, against the Soviet system.… Considering fully admissible the absence of any repressive measures on the part of the German Government against German press organs which freely express their political and social opposition to the Soviet system, it deems equally admissible similar behavior in regard to the German system on the part of private persons and unofficial newspapers in Russia.… It is necessary to protest in the most decisive manner the frequent representations made by the German Consulate General that the Russian Government, by means of police measures, can direct the Russian revolutionary press in this or that direction and by bureaucratic influence instill in it such and such views.

  5

  The Bolshevik Government reacted very differently when foreign powers interfered in internal Russian affairs. As early as November 1917, Trotsky, the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, protested Allied “interference” in Russian matters after Allied ambassadors, uncertain who the legitimate government of Russia was, had sent a diplomatic note to the Commander in Chief, General N. N. Dukhonin.6 The Sovnarkom never let an occasion pass without voicing objections to foreign powers violating the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of its country, even as it repeatedly violated this very same principle with its own conduct.

  As stated, Lenin was prepared to accept any terms demanded by the Central Powers, but because of widespread suspicions that he was a German agent, he had to proceed with caution. Instead of entering immediately into negotiations with Germany and Austria, therefore, as he would have preferred, he issued appeals to all the belligerent powers to meet and make peace. Actually, general peace in Europe was the last thing he wanted: as we have seen, one reason for his urgency in seizing power in October was fear of just such an eventuality, which would foreclose the chances of unleashing a civil war in Europe. Apparently, he did not feel afraid to call for peace since previous appeals had fallen on deaf ears, including the proposals of President Wilson of December 1916, the peace resolution of the German Reichstag in July 1917, and the papal proposals of August 1917. Once the Allies rejected his offer, as he had every reason to expect they would, he would be free to make his own arrangements.