Lenin turned out to be more prescient than his Menshevik rivals, for revolution did break out in Russia two years later. The fall of the naval base of Port Arthur (Lüshunkou) in the then Russian Far East to the Japanese in December 1904 was even more humiliating for the tsarist regime than its previous major defeat, by the British in the Crimea. For the first time a European power had been defeated by Asians fighting alone. It is therefore not surprising that at this juncture the many subterranean tensions in Russia should burst into open conflict. An orthodox priest, Father Gapon, used the opportunity to press the demands of urban workers. On what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, he organized a demonstration of 50,000–100,000 people, which assumed the form of a religious procession of icon-bearing loyal subjects presenting a humble petition to the Tsar. The petition resounded with the Tsar’s own paternalistic rhetoric. However, the demands were radical, and included democratic suffrage, the legalization of trade unions and civil rights for all citizens. The police declared the march illegal, and when it failed to disperse, troops fired indiscriminately on the peaceful, unarmed crowd.
In the midst of the shooting, Gapon is said to have declared, ‘There is no God any longer! There is no Tsar!’45 Certainly, this unprovoked violence damaged the image of Tsar Nicholas as benevolent father beyond repair. It was now absolutely clear that his familial model of politics would not give workers and peasants what they wanted. Workers responded by setting up a new type of body – the council, or ‘soviet’, of workers’ deputies – to coordinate strikes. These soviets were organized on the basis of direct democracy, rather like the Paris Commune; in theory, constituents could recall their deputies. Some of those elected were socialists – Lev Trotsky was the chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet – and they helped to organize the general strike which forced the regime to grant the ‘October Manifesto’, a promise of elections to a legislative assembly and civil liberties. The Social Democrats, though, had a modest role in the revolution. It was a genuinely cross-class and cross-party affair. As in the 1830 and early 1848 revolutions, liberals, workers and the small number of socialists were united against a hide-bound autocracy.
Lenin was enthusiastic about the revolution, and the October Manifesto convinced him that it would be safe to return to Russia from exile. He was now allied with some of the most left-wing Marxists in the Russian movement – Aleksandr Bogdanov’s ‘Forward’ group – who had the utmost faith in the proletariat’s ability to build socialism in the near future.46 Neither, though, went as far as Trotsky, who argued that Russia was ready for a one-stage ‘permanent revolution’ that would rapidly lead from the bourgeois democratic stage to socialism.47 Lenin argued for a ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ to bring in the bourgeois revolution – unlike the moderate Mensheviks, who urged an alliance between workers and the middle classes.48
In the event, the 1905 revolution broadly followed the course of its failed European predecessors of 1848. The liberals, satisfied with the concessions of October and fearing the radicalism of workers and peasants, abandoned the revolutionary movement. Meanwhile the regime managed to regroup, bringing troops back from the Far East to suppress the peasant unrest. In December some Moscow workers staged a final, doomed resistance in the Presnia district where they threw up barricades and set up a local form of workers’ government. But they were no match for the regime’s artillery; carnage ensued and much of Presnia was reduced to rubble.
Prospects again looked bleak for socialists, and in December 1907 Lenin was forced again into exile, travelling to Switzerland. He devoted himself to reading and writing: he began with philosophy, but as war approached he immersed himself in the latest works on capitalism and imperialism, by people like Luxemburg, the up-and-coming Russian Marxist Nikolai Bukharin, and especially by the influential Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding. Hilferding convinced him that the old competition between small entrepreneurs had given way to a vicious struggle between nation states for markets, leading to imperialist expansion and war between the great powers.49 Capitalism’s fundamental immorality had been exposed. No longer did capitalists even pretend to be liberal humanitarians; they were open racists and Social Darwinists, justifying their interests with war-mongering nationalism. At the same time, though, modern capitalism had become highly centralized, and had prepared the ground for socialist planning.
Lenin, always on the lookout for signs of capitalism’s imminent demise, seized on Hilferding’s insights. In his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1915 and published in 1917, he berated both capitalists and Kautsky’s Second International for supporting war.50 He also followed other, more radical, theorists of imperialism in arguing that just as capitalism was becoming globalized, so would revolution. Because imperial states were exploiting states on the colonial periphery, socialist revolution could occur even in semi-‘backward’ countries. The struggle against capitalism could begin in Russia, although he accepted it would have to be supported by socialist revolutions in other more advanced countries. Lenin also argued that Marxists in colonial societies could lead revolutions for political independence against imperialists, even if capitalism had barely taken hold and socialism was far away. Lenin’s text laid the foundations for the merging of Marxism and anti-colonial nationalism. As will be seen, his Imperialism was crucial in bringing Communism to the non-European world.
Few Russians read Lenin’s Imperialism, but its main function was to explain to himself and his fellow revolutionaries why history was on their side. When, in 1917, the tsarist regime collapsed, workers and peasants behaved as they had done in 1905, establishing soviets, revolutionary committees and other forms of self-government. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were now in a position to offer a confident and seemingly coherent alternative.
V
Between 1913 and 1916, the avant-garde symbolist novelist Andrei Bely (born in 1880) published his great modernist novel, Petersburg. The city had featured as a major character in previous novels, but Bely’s Petersburg was a very different place to that of Chernyshevskii’s and Dostoyevsky’s novels. Set in 1905, it was a city in ferment, surrounded by a ‘ring of many-chimneyed factories’ from which the menacing sound of the revolutionary proletariat emanated, ‘oooo-oooo-oooo’.51 The tsarist official in the novel, Apollon Apollonovich Beleukhov, is no longer an aristocratic reactionary but the embodiment of rational modernization (in the popular Nietzschean imagery of the time, Apollo was the god of reason). The cold Apollon enjoys looking at the perfect cubes and straight lines of Petersburg’s planned streets, and surrounds himself with neo-classical art, including a painting by David. But his command of reason is insufficient to control his own radicalized son, let alone Russia, and he is terrified of the revolutionary forces surrounding him.52 The other embodiments of reason in the novel are equally ineffectual, though more violent. The revolutionary Dudkin and his mentor, the Azef figure Lippachenko, impose dogmatic and violent schemes on others. Dudkin is even visited by the Bronze Horseman, who pours metal into his veins and hails him as ‘my son’.53 Yet the Bronze Horseman and the spirit of modernity solve nothing, merely setting off a cycle of revenge and violence.54
For Bely, as for Pushkin, the Bronze Horseman, with two legs on Russian soil and two rearing into the air, was a symbol of Russia’s division into two – the native traditions of ordinary Russians and the cruel rationalism of Peter the Great.55 But Bely denied that either officials or revolutionaries could reconcile these halves. For him, only the apocalypse, which he identified with the ‘eastern’ revolutionary forces from below, would allow Russia to escape its predicament and ‘leap across history’.56 Ultimately Bely was wrong. The revolution did not bind Russia’s fragmented society together. But he was prescient about the events of 1917. Forces from below were to overwhelm Russia’s bronze horse-men, whether tsarist, liberal or Bolshevik.
The outbreak of war in 1914 brought the third and final crisis for Russia’s post-1815 regime. As Save
nko, the leader of the Nationalist Party, declared in 1915, ‘War is an exam, a great exam’, and it was a tougher one than any the tsarist regime had sat in the past.57 Russia’s main enemy, Germany, was aiming at a ‘total’ mobilization of all resources – men, food, industrial production – for war. And Russia, as a semi-reformed ancien régime, was at a severe disadvantage in the contest. Mistrustful of involvement from society as a whole – both elites and ordinary people – the state found it difficult to engage their support for the war effort. Its factories could not produce enough munitions, and it could not raise the troops needed. These structural weaknesses, combined with poor trench technology, led to massive defeats in Galicia and Poland, and by August 1915 over 4 million soldiers had been killed, wounded or captured.
The crisis forced the Tsar to give in to the reforming Apollon Apollonoviches of his regime, and to allow elements of ‘society’ – members of educated society committed to modernization – a role in the war effort. In some ways this was successful, and by early 1917 Russia had destroyed the Habsburg army and was producing more munitions than the Germans.58 Yet the Russian monarchy’s partial attempts to transform itself from an ancien régime into a mobilized nation state, along the lines of Germany’s, only hastened its end. Its efforts to reform the food supply system were especially disruptive. A peculiar alliance of modernizing ministers and experts, including a future planner under the Bolsheviks, the Menshevik economist V. Groman, tried to replace the market in grain with state-led grain procurement. But the regime could not cope with the organization and transport of supplies, and the peasantry refused to sell grain for the low prices offered.59
Educated society blamed the Tsar for the economic and military disasters, and accusations of inefficiency became intertwined with the poisonous charge of treason. It was commonly believed that Tsarina Alexandra, English in culture though German by birth, was at the centre of a conspiracy centred in Berlin to sabotage the war effort. Tsardom, a branch of the international European aristocracy, lacked the patriotic charisma to unite Russia against its enemies. And when, on 23 February 1917, protests against bread shortages by St Petersburg women developed into a general strike and soldiers’ mutinies, few were willing to defend the regime.
For a brief time Russians were united in favour of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Russia seemed to have experienced its 1789, and everybody was aware of the parallel. The ‘Marseillaise’ (or ‘Marsiliuza’) became the new regime’s national anthem, played at every opportunity, and forms of address based on the old hierarchy were abolished in favour of the terms ‘citizen’ (grazhdanin) and ‘citizeness’ (grazhdanka).60 Even French revolutionary festivals were imitated, with plans for a ‘grandiose-carnival spectacle’ in the Summer Garden in Petersburg, involving a cardboard city representing eighteenth-century Paris.61 Yet, even though socialist party organizations had a minimal role in the February revolution, the new symbolism showed how much more radical the new dispensation was than its French predecessor. The socialist red flag, not a Russian tricolour, was flown over the Winter Palace and effectively became the national flag. It was at this time that the symbols of the urban and rural masses – the hammer and the sickle – first appeared, appended to the Marinskii Palace, the seat of the Provisional Government.62
Yet despite this apparent unity, signs of division between educated, liberal groups on the one side, and workers and peasants on the other, were soon evident. The word ‘comrade’ (tovarishch) – a socialist form of address – could be heard alongside ‘citizen’. And competing with the conventional ‘Marseillaise’, a hymn of praise to nationalist unity translated into a Russian context, was a ‘workers’ Marseillaise’, a socialist version. This exhorted its listeners to ‘kill and destroy’ ‘the parasites’, ‘the dogs’ and ‘the rich’. It also had another competitor, much preferred by all Marxist parties – the anti-nationalist ‘Internationale’, whose words had been written in 1871 by a member of the Paris Commune to the tune of the ‘Marseillaise’, but which had been given new music in 1888.63 Conflicts over symbols and songs were institutionalized from the very beginning of the February revolution in the existence of ‘dual power’. The Provisional Government, dominated by the propertied and professional classes, ruled alongside the Petrograd (formerly Petersburg) Soviet, elected by the lower classes.
The Provisional Government was initially made up of liberals. But from March it included Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary (SR) members of the Soviet, and from July was led by the moderate socialist Aleksandr Kerenskii. The government was committed to liberal democracy and the rule of law, and declared itself a provisional body until one-man-one-vote elections could be held to a Constituent Assembly. It also sought to continue the war, though from the spring only a defensive one, against the Germans.
However, the Provisional Government found it no easier to enlist the support of workers and peasants into its vision of Russia than the Tsar’s reformist ministers. The political and cultural gap between the propertied and educated elites and the mass of the population was too great. The government tried to achieve a compromise on the war, continuing to fight but abandoning the Tsar’s old expansionist war aims. Yet following the failure of the offensive in June, it could not maintain discipline within the army, and elected soldiers’ committees believed it was their right to discuss whether to obey officers’ orders.64 In the countryside, the Provisional Government tried to end food shortages by creating an even tighter state grain monopoly, but peasants were no more willing to grow and sell than before. It made a start on addressing the peasants’ demands for land, but it was slow and cautious. It soon lost control of the countryside as peasants seized landlords’ property, with little fear of retribution.
The Provisional Government also granted concessions to workers, on wages and conditions, but again these were not enough. Conflicts between factory-owners and workers became more acrimonious. Managers who laid workers off were accused of ‘sabotage’, and workers’ factory committees demanded the right to supervise management, or ‘workers’ control’ over their factories.65 A massive wave of strikes ensued in September.
By the summer of 1917 the language of class struggle had permeated popular culture. Demands for the rule of the masses, operating through the soviets, and the overthrow of the ‘bourgeois’ Provisional Government – which, it was claimed, could not be a representative ‘people’s government’ – became common.66 As a resolution of the soldiers’ committee of the 92nd Transport Battalion declared in September:
Comrades! It is time for us to wake up!… It is time to shake off the spell of the bourgeoisie; it is time to discard it like an oozing scab, so that it doesn’t do any more damage to the revolution… The people can rely only on itself and must not extend a comradely hand to the hated enemy. It is time to shake off these ‘saviours of the revolution’, who have stuck to the body of the country like leeches.67
In some cases, this type of language reflected an interest in socialism and Marxism. Anna Litveiko, a Ukrainian factory worker and future Communist Youth (Komsomol) member, remembered her idealism as a young woman:
We thought that Communism would begin as soon as the soviets assumed power. Money was not even mentioned; it was clear to us that money would disappear right away… On clothing, however, our opinions were divided: some of us rejected this form of property as well. And anyway, how were the members of the new society supposed to dress?… I could not part with my own ribbon or braids. Did that mean I was not a true Bolshevik? But I was prepared to give my life for the revolution!68
Much more common among ordinary people, though, was not Marxism but a deep-rooted populist worldview. The socialist word ‘bourgeois’ (boorzhui) was a common insult, but underlying the revolutionary mood was less a Marxist economic critique of exploitation than a moral outrage at the remnants of ancien régime privilege. An officer, writing from the front, recognized the deep-seated resentment which his men displayed towards the socially privileged:
&n
bsp; Whatever their personal attitudes toward individual officers might be, we remain in their eyes only masters… In their view, what has taken place is not a political but a social revolution, in which, according to them, we are the losers and they the winners… Previously, we ruled; now they themselves want to rule. In them speak the unavenged insults of centuries past. A common language between us cannot be found. This is the cursed legacy of the old order.69
His observation was a perceptive one. The demand for dignity, so evident among Chernyshevskii’s students and clerks of the 1860s, had been passed on to workers from the 1890s, and many of the complaints of workers in 1917 were preoccupied with rudeness from superiors. The first act of the Petrograd Soviet, Order No. 1, concerning the army, included the demand that officers address soldiers by the respectful ‘you’ (vy) rather than its informal equivalent (ty).70
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