A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  seemed tantamount to adopting the slogan 'Workers of the World, Seize Each Other by the Throat!'69

  The Bolsheviks were the only socialist party to remain broadly united in their opposition to the war, although they too had their own defensists during the early days before Lenin had imposed his views. His opposition to the war was uncompromising. Unlike the Menshevik and SR Internationalists, who sought to bring the war to an end through peaceful demonstration and negotiation, Lenin called on the workers of the world to use their arms against their own governments, to end the war by turning it into a series of civil wars, or revolutions, across the whole of Europe. It was to be a 'war against war'.

  For Trotsky and Kollontai, who had both come to see the Russian revolution as part of a European-wide struggle against imperialism, there was an iron logic at the heart of Lenin's slogan which increasingly appealed to their own left-wing Menshevik internationalism. To begin with, in the first year of the war, both had similar doubts about the Bolshevik leader. Whereas Lenin had argued that Russia's defeat would be a lesser evil' than that of the more advanced Germany, they opposed the whole idea of military victors and losers. The dispute, though minor in itself, related to a broader difference of opinion. Lenin had recently come to stress the revolutionary potential of nationalist movements within colonial systems, and he argued that Russia's defeat would help to bring about the collapse of the Tsarist Empire. But Trotsky and Kollontai (like Bukharin for that matter) believed that the nation-state would soon become a thing of the past and thus denied it as a revolutionary force. Nor could they quite yet bring themselves to embrace the Leninist call for a 'war against war'. They preferred the pacifist slogans of their old friends and allies among the Menshevik Internationalists. Neither Trotsky nor Kollontai was ready to cut loose from the Mensheviks, whose doubts about Lenin's rigid dogma on party organization they still shared. And while it was true that both were moving towards the Bolsheviks, they still harboured hopes of reuniting the two wings of the SD Party through a broad campaign for peace.

  Trotsky had joined Martov in Paris in November 1914 and collaborated with him on Nashe slovo (Our Word), without doubt the most brilliant pacifist organ in Europe. He represented its views at the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915, a secret gathering of thirty-eight Internationalists from various countries in a tiny mountain village outside Berne. Its rousing manifesto against the war, passed in opposition to Lenin's civil war resolution, was drawn up by Trotsky himself:

  Working men and women! Mothers and fathers! Widows and orphans! Wounded and crippled! To all who are suffering from the war or in consequence of the war, we cry out, over the frontiers, over the smoking

  battlefields, over the devastated cities and hamlets: 'WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!'70

  By this stage, Kollontai had already thrown in her lot with Lenin. Her love affair with Alexander Shliapnikov, a handsome worker-Bolshevik twelve years her junior, no doubt had something to do with this. He had joined her in Stockholm in the autumn of 1914 and spent the rest of the war years running errands to Russia for Lenin. Yet perhaps it was not so much this romance as her own emotional commitment to the international cause and to ending the war at all costs that brought her under Lenin's spell. The war's oppressive influence was omnipresent. It seemed to be driving civilization to the edge of an abyss. 'So much blood is spilled, so many crimes are committed every day, every hour,' she wrote in her diary at Christmas 1915:

  And the war — it rules over all. Unseen, it decides the fate of each one of us. Before it the individual will is powerless. It was precisely this feeling of helplessness in the face of the war, this sense of the war as an unstoppable force, that had overcome me from the very first days, when I was still in Berlin.

  To Kollontai, only Lenin's call for an armed uprising seemed capable of bringing the war to an end. It alone held out the prospect of restoring the power of human will and action over objective forces. 'This is not just "analysis" ', she wrote of Lenin's war Theses in her diary. 'This is action. This is a political programme .. . Let the barricades answer the war.'71

  For Trotsky, too, the stress that Lenin placed on the power of proletarian will and action gradually brought him closer to the Bolsheviks. Increasingly it appeared to him that his old friend and teacher Martov and the other Menshevik Internationalists had become trapped in their own analysis of objective conditions — which at that time were all working against the revolution — and that they had thus ignored the possibility of cultivating the revolutionary will (the subjective' side of the revolution) in order to overcome these. Through excessive study, the Mensheviks had turned themselves into the prisoners of their own social determinism. Their revolutionary slogans were in danger of becoming no more than phrases. What was called for was action, a 'proletarian revolution' across Europe to bring the war to an end. Martov had agreed with this to begin with, raising Trotsky's hopes of a broad anti-war campaign to reunite the left-wing Mensheviks with the Bolshevik Party. Yet by the autumn of 1915, when the Menshevik Defensists joined the war campaign, Martov had already pulled back from the call to arms and adopted more passive and pacifist views in line with the rest of his parry. Now Trotsky had nowhere to go but leftwards. It was

  not, as he later pretended, a straightforward transition. He still harboured typically Menshevik doubts about Lenin's strict centralism and extremism. It was not until July 1917 that he finally joined the Bolshevik Party, and only then, as he put it, because the Bolsheviks were 'becoming less Bolshevik'. Yet he was moving slowly towards the Bolsheviks and surrounding himself with future Bolshevik leaders. All the main contributors to Nashe shvo, with the exception of Martov, were to align themselves with Lenin during 1917. Some became commissars in the first Soviet government, such as Kollontai (Social Welfare), Anatoli Lunacharsky (Enlightenment), Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko (Military Affairs) and Trotsky himself (Foreign Affairs).72

  For this reason, the trip to New York in 1917 and the collaboration with Bukharin and Kollontai was an important staging post in Trotsky's drift to the left. He rented a three-room apartment in the Bronx which, though cheap by American standards, gave him the unaccustomed luxuries of electric light, a chute for garbage and a telephone. Later there were legends that Trotsky had worked in New York as a dish-washer, as a tailor, and even as an actor. But in fact he scraped a living from emigre journalism and lecturing (in English and German) to half-empty halls on the need for a world revolution. He ate in Jewish delicatessens and made himself unpopular with the waiters by refusing to tip them on the grounds that it was injurious to their dignity. He bought some furniture on an instalment plan, $200 of which remained unpaid when the family left for Russia in the spring. By the time the credit company caught up with him, Trotsky had become Foreign Minister of the largest country in the world. 73

  * * * There was a fundamental division within the Bolshevik leadership, one scarcely noticed by historians, between those who spent the war years abroad and those who spent them in Russia. The exiles (e.g. Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Bukharin and Kollontai) tended to be more international and cosmopolitan in their outlook. Steeped in European culture, they were all too aware of Russia's relative backwardness. Many of them had once been Mensheviks, so they understood well the theoretical problems of trying to introduce socialism into Russia without a simultaneous revolution in the more advanced countries of the West. Those Bolsheviks, by contrast, who had spent the war years in Russia (e.g. Stalin and Dzerzhinsky) tended to adopt a more narrow outlook. Many of them came from non-intelligentsia backgrounds and few had any knowledge of Europe, its culture or its languages. Having spent the war in the underground organizations, in prisons, or in Siberian exile, they tended to emerge from it with a fortresslike, embattled mentality towards the party, the country and its relations with the outside world. Many of them harboured xenophobic attitudes — not least towards the Jewish intellectuals in the party (especially Trotsky). After February

  1917 many of them implied in their speeches that
the returning Bolshevik exiles (although conspicuously not Lenin) had been less than patriotic in the war. Here, in this clash between (if you will) the 'nativists' and the 'cosmopolitans', were the social roots of the party's ideological struggles of the 1920s between 'Socialism in one Country' and 'World Revolution'. It is no coincidence that all Stalin's main allies in his rise to power (Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Kirov, Kuibyshev and Ordzhonikidze) had spent the war years in Russia itself; and that most of his victims in the party (Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, AntonovOvseenko) had spent them abroad.

  While the revolutionary exiles debated ideology, their beleaguered comrades at home were concerned with more practical problems. Arrests, deportations and exile had crippled the Bolshevik Party in Russia (as well as the underground organizations of the Mensheviks and SRs). Orphaned by their leaders, and with their newspaper Pravda suppressed, the Bolshevik organizations had little to guide them. Shliapnikov maintained their last thin line of communication with Lenin, smuggling propaganda into Russia inside the soles of his shoes. It was like returning to the conspiratorial practices of the pre-1905 period. The Bolsheviks in Petrograd numbered fewer than 500 members, once the mass arrests of autumn 1914 had taken their toll. The provincial networks had only a handful of members each. The party's greatest weakness was its shortage of intellectual ability: according to Shliapnikov, there was no one in the capital capable of writing even a leaflet. But there was also the worrying problem of the workers' declining support, both in moral and financial terms, largely as a result of police surveillance and harassment. Trade unions and educational societies were outlawed and militant workers sent into the army. The arrest of five Bolshevik Duma deputies in November 1914 and their trial for sedition the following February evoked little protest from the mass of the workers. Some no doubt had succumbed to the dominant mood of patriotism. But most were afraid of dismissal or, worse, imprisonment, if they should join the 2,000 strikers who came out in support of the deputies. This, after all, was a time when the Black Hundred mobs were encouraged by the police to go round working-class districts singing 'God Save the Tsar' and beat up anyone who failed to take off their hats.74

  Yet, as the war dragged on and the economic crisis deepened, so the majority of the workers swung back towards the militant Left, resuming the pattern of labour protests begun in 1912—14. It was not so much a crisis of economic decline and stagnation as one of hectic inflationary growth. The war witnessed an industrial boom, mainly to meet the needs of the army. The number of railway workers increased by half a million, the building industry grew by a third, and a million of the poorest peasants, most of them women and youths, poured into the factories, where they could be employed on the

  mechanized assembly lines at cheaper rates and for longer hours than older and more skilled workers. To pay for its huge war demands the government printed roubles: the money supply increased eightfold between 1914 and 1917. The resulting boom in consumer demand far outstripped the dwindling supply of consumer goods, as manufacturing switched to war production. Workers had too much money in their pockets and not enough to spend it on, so prices rocketed. The ban on vodka sales — a government monopoly which had soaked up roughly 10 per cent of the workers' incomes before 1914 — only worsened this monetary overhang (which we call inflation). Such were the drinking habits of the Russians that it also caused all manner of social abuses, such as the drinking of eau-de-Cologne, methylated spirits, balsams, varnishes, black-market moonshine (samogon) and the notorious spirit called khanja, made and sold by Chinese workers, which killed hundreds.75 The vodka ban became a major source of plebeian complaint against the government and resentment against the well-to-do, since expensive wines and liqueurs were not subject to the prohibition. All in all, weighing up the minor gains in sobriety against the major losses in revenue, controls on inflation, public health and political authority, the ban on vodka was nothing less than a disaster, which in no small way contributed to the downfall of the old regime.

  But the basic problem was the workers' growing inability to turn their money wages into food. It was a shocking paradox that whereas Russia before the war had exported grain and still been able to feed its urban population, during the war, when all such exports were suspended, it could not always do even this. It was not so much a problem of agricultural production as one of distribution and exchange. Partly it was due to the chronic disruption of transport. Whereas the railways were timetabled to run from east to west in order to supply the army, foodstuffs for the major industrial centres travelled from south to north and, as the army always came first, often ended up rotting in railway sidings waiting for an engine to take them to Moscow or Petrograd. The other part of the problem related to the shift from commercial to peasant farms. The big estates and commercial farms were badly hit by the war. The mobilization of soldiers left them short of hired labour, while the industrial switch to munitions left them short of tools and machines. Overall, agricultural production did not decline but large amounts of estate land were rented out to the better-off peasants, who were less affected by labour shortages (the army on the whole took away only the excess peasant population) and who generally made their own primitive tools. Thus, for example, the private estates of the central agricultural zone reduced their productive area from 21 to 7 million desyatini between 1913 and 1916, whereas the region's peasant farms increased theirs from 47 to 64 million desyatini. For several years before the agrarian

  revolution of 1917—18 the demise of the landed gentry's estates and their replacement by the peasant farms was already under way.

  This shift: towards the smallholding sector led to a decline in the overall rate of marketed grain, since most peasants produced for the needs of their own family farms and usually sold no more than a small proportion of their crops. The growing shortage of consumer goods — and their inflated prices — in the countryside further encouraged these autarkic trends. From 1913 to 1915 the share of peasant grain sold on the market declined from 16 per cent to 9 per cent. With less and less to buy with their money, the peasants increasingly switched from cash crops (wheat, barley and sugar beet) to subsistence crops (rye, oats and potatoes). They ate more, fed their livestock better, stocked up their barns, and turned their grain into vodka rather than sell it on the market for declining profits. Some smallholders also geared their production towards their own domestic handicrafts (wool, hides and cotton), thus making themselves almost self-sufficient. For many peasants, life had never been so good as it was for them at the height of the war. Even their cows were better fed than many of the workers in the city.76

  In August 1915, the government, concerned by the growing problems of food supply in the cities, established a Special Council with extensive powers to purchase grain at fixed prices through local commissioners. But attempting to control the market only further discouraged the peasants from selling their grain: the unregulated prices of manufactures now rose much faster than the fixed prices of food. It was the so-called 'scissors crisis'. In the Moscow markets, for example, the price of rye went up by 47 per cent in the first two years of the war, while the price of a pair of boots increased by 334 per cent and the price of a box of matches by as much as 500 per cent.77 An economic war developed as the peasants withdrew their foodstuffs from the market and the government resorted to increasingly coercive measures in an effort to extract supplies from them. In November 1916, with the food supply of the army and the cities reaching a critical level, the government finally introduced a system of compulsory requisitioning similar to that of the Provisional Government. Yet short of building a massive state of terror, such as the Bolsheviks did with their 'Food Dictatorship', it proved impossible to force the grain from the peasants. Only the black-marketeers (who could lay their hands on hard-to-come-by goods) and the soldiers (who could trade their army boots and coats) managed to persuade the peasants to unlock their barns.

  From the autumn of 1915 the cities of the north began to experience growing foo
d shortages. Long queues appeared outside the bakeries and meat shops. After a ten-hour shift in their factories women would set up stools and benches to wait in line for pitifully small amounts of bread or sugar. By the following autumn they were bringing their beds to sleep outside the food stores,

  often because, with so many local shops closed for lack of provisions, they did not have the time to walk across town and return home in one evening. On the eve of 1917 the average working woman in Petrograd was probably spending around forty hours per week in various queues for provisions.78 The bread queues, in particular, became a sort of political forum or club, where rumours, information and views were exchanged. It was in these queues that the streets began to organize themselves for the coming revolution. The February Revolution was born in the bread queue. It began when a group of women textile workers on the Vyborg side of Petrograd became impatient with waiting in line and went off to rally their menfolk in the neighbouring metal factories for a protest march to the centre of the city.

  The economic crisis had the worst effect on the lowest paid. Skilled metal-workers, in great demand at munitions factories, enjoyed an average rise of 30 per cent in their real wages up to 1916. But unskilled workers and petty officials on fixed salaries, such as teachers, clerks and policemen, found their wages falling further and further behind the rising costs of food and housing. Between 1914 and 1916 the calorie intake of unskilled workers fell by a quarter; infant mortality doubled; crime rates tripled; and the number of prostitutes increased by four or five times. From Petrograd, where he had been living since the start of the war, Gorky wrote to Ekaterina in November 1915:

  We will soon have a famine. I advise you to buy ten pounds of bread and hide it. In the suburbs of Petrograd you can see well-dressed women begging on the streets. It is very cold. People have nothing to burn in their stoves. Here and there, at night, they tear down the wooden fences. What has happened to the Twentieth Century! What has happened to Civilization! The number of child prostitutes is shocking. On your way somewhere at night you see them shuffling along the sidewalks, just like cockroaches, blue with cold and hungry. Last Tuesday I talked to one of them. I put some money into her hand and hurried away, in tears, in such a state of sadness that I felt like banging my head against a wall. Oh, to hell with it all, how hard it has become to live.79