Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  The agrarian question deepened the rift within the coalition. The Main Land Committee and Chernov’s Ministry of Agriculture became bastions of SR influence and, contrary to the express wishes of the Provisional Government, proposed the ‘socialization’ of land—that is, the abolition of private property and transfer of ownership to peasant communes. The Ministry believed that, in the midst of revolution, just demands took precedence over the laws of a defunct regime. But liberal ministers saw only a crass violation of the rule of law and resigned from the coalition. Significantly, the socialists themselves were divided on this issue. Whereas Chernov fanned the flames of peasant revolution, the Menshevik Minister of Internal Affairs ordered his apparatus to combat peasant lawlessness and to assert control over the land committees. Such fissures, along ideological and class lines, paralleled and deepened the divisions in society at large.

  By early summer the coalition was in a shambles, its popularity waning. The First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June exposed deep rifts on the left and subjected the coalition to withering criticism. To stave off a Bolshevik challenge, the soviet leadership cancelled anti-government demonstrations on 10 June and ordered its own march a week later. It proved a stunning fiasco, as soldiers and workers carried Bolshevik banners: ‘Down with the Capitalist Ministers’, ‘Peace’, and ‘Down with the Bourgeoisie’. The rhetoric of class war prevailed: conciliation, appeals to unity and ‘nation’, in fact any appeals not based squarely on ‘class’ and ‘class conflict’ fell on deaf ears.

  The crisis culminated in the famous ‘July Days’, when soldiers and workers (with the aid of lower-echelon Bolshevik organs) staged an abortive insurrection. The July Days bequeathed unforgettable visual images—the populace scattering under rifle fire in Petrograd’s main squares, angry crowds attacking soviet leaders (‘Why haven’t you bastards taken power?’). The government blamed the Bolsheviks, arrested several key leaders, and accused Lenin himself of ‘treason’ (claiming that he had taken German money to subvert the democratic revolution). As Alexander Rabinowitch has shown, however, the Bolshevik leaders did less to lead than to follow popular radicalism. Troops loyal to the Provisional Government suppressed the disorders, but the crisis reinforced the rhetoric of violence, the sense of insurmountable problems, and lack of confidence in the government’s ability to deal with them. For the short term, however, the combination of force and anti-Bolshevik propaganda restored some semblance of authority.

  But in fact state authority continued to disintegrate. The government now operated under the cloud of military catastrophe, even the threat that Germans would occupy Petrograd itself. And on the domestic front its problems were legion: land seizures and pogroms, strikes and demonstrations by workers, massive breakdowns in supply and transport, and the strident demands of nationalities. In early July the first coalition finally collapsed from disagreements over Ukrainian autonomy (which, to the liberals’ dismay, the socialists proposed to acknowledge) and Chernov’s agrarian policies (which the liberals saw as sanctioning illegal peasant actions). Once Prince Lvov and the Kadet ministers resigned, only a rump cabinet of socialists remained in charge.

  That government now became the personal instrument of Kerensky, who succeeded Lvov as Prime Minister. Kerensky was vain, egotistical, and poorly versed in the left-wing ideologies that he would have to combat. A consummately inept politician, he became a caricature of the strong executive he pretended to be. By late July he had fashioned a second coalition, which called for state intervention in the economy and peace without indemnities or annexations.

  But this coalition was new in another sense: responsible neither to parties nor the soviet, it steadily abandoned a commitment to parliamentary democracy and, instead, sought legitimacy in pseudo-parliamentary assemblies. Thus in mid-August, amidst much pomp and ceremony, Kerensky convoked the so-called ‘State Conference’ in Moscow. It included representatives of traditional corporate interests (government ministries, the Academy of Sciences, and social estates), as well as delegates from the ‘democratic’ institutions (self-government, co-operatives, the ‘labouring’ intelligentsia, and the like). While the left declaration of 14 August reaffirmed the commitments of July, the centre and right catalogued the horrors of the deepening revolution. Ministers spoke candidly about the enormous problems facing the regime. All felt the drama, the sense that things could not go on, that new upheavals were imminent, either from a German attack or a coup from the left or right. Public voices were already warning that either Kornilov or Lenin would sunder this Gordian knot.

  The Kornilov Affair

  General Lavr Kornilov, a war hero of modest origins, became a key public figure in 1917 because of his principles and his determination to suppress disorder during the April crisis. When Kerensky appointed the general as commander-in-chief after the summer offensive, he implicitly sanctioned Kornilov’s plan to restore the army’s fighting capacity by restoring discipline and the death penalty (though without dismantling the army’s democratic committees). But Kornilov had broader political ambitions, for he doubted that the coalition had the will either to win the war or to stabilize the domestic front. Regarding the government as a soviet hostage, he concluded that a true patriot must put an end to dual power. This judgement coincided with that of many landowners, industrialists, and political figures on the centre and right: only suppression of ‘democracy run amok’ could save Russia. In late August Kornilov led loyal troops on a march towards Petrograd to restore order.

  Much ink has been spilled on the Kornilov affair, mostly along predictable political lines, with the left accusing the general of an attempted coup (Kornilov did order the march on Petrograd to destroy the soviet and install himself as a Napoleonic strongman) and the right and centre (who accuse Kerensky of goading Kornilov to act and then perfidiously betraying him). Both accounts are true: the general did attempt a coup, believing that he had Kerensky’s support; and Kerensky did lose his nerve and renege, sacrificing the general in a desperate effort to regain popular support. Workers and paramilitary units known as Red Guards were mobilized quickly to repulse ‘counter-revolution’ and, without much bloodshed, arrested Kornilov and disarmed his troops. Kerensky dissolved the second coalition and declared himself head of a new government, a five-man ‘Directory’.

  The Kornilov affair had enormous repercussions. Kerensky’s machinations soon became public, severely damaging his personal authority. It also lent new credibility to the spectre of counter-revolution—a myth that greatly exaggerated the power of conservative forces, but none the less impelled workers, soldiers, and activists to organize militias, Red Guards, and ad hoc committees to defend the revolution. Even when the Kornilov threat had passed, these armed forces refused to disband and became a powerful threat to the government itself. Thus the Kornilov affair, though a farce and fiasco, further eroded support for Kerensky’s government and facilitated the Bolshevik seizure of power, without, however, in any way pre-ordaining the methods or timing of the October Revolution.

  The Coming of October

  As Kerensky’s authority faded, the strikes reached a newcrescendo in September. They revealed that the workers no longer believed in the capacity of the government to honour its pledges or in the willingness of factory owners to negotiate in good faith. The collapse of production, lock-outs, unemployment, violence, and social polarization profoundly changed the scale and tenor of the strikes. For three days in September, a strike by 700,000 railway workers paralysed transportation; in mid-October 300,000 workers struck at textile factories in Ivanovo and nearby communities; ‘workers’ included pharmacists as well as oil workers. Mood, not just numbers, is critical: the strikes often culminated in violent confrontations that accelerated the breakdown of law and order (already marked by a rise in looting, physical violence, and vigilante street justice). Koenker and Rosenberg point out that the strikes became the workers’ main ‘form of participatory politics’, ‘the central conduit of labour mobilization and, to a lar
ge extent, of management mobilization as well’. The workers’ animosities and aspirations provided the primary drive and justification for early Soviet power—even if, ultimately, the Bolsheviks were to subvert the workers’ democratic impulses and to transform their institutions (soviets, factory committees, trade unions, co-operatives) into instruments of mobilization, hierarchy, and control.

  In a desperate bid to stabilize the situation, Kerensky manœuvred to form yet another coalition cabinet. To offset popular radicalism, he wanted representatives of ‘propertied’ society—the same circles of the Kadet Party and Moscow business circles discredited in the popular mind as Kornilov’s accomplices. In mid-September, the soviet and democratic circles sponsored a Democratic Conference to unite the representatives of ‘democracy’ and to guide Kerensky in forming a stable government. Rather than enhance the regime’s stability and legitimacy, the meeting proved a disaster: the delegates at first voted in favour of a coalition, but without the Kadets—an absurd proposition, since the Kadets were the only ‘bourgeois’ party disposed to ally with ‘democracy’. Later, despite Bolshevik opposition, on 25 September the conference voted for a coalition and thus paved the way for Kerensky’s final cabinet. The moderate left and centre thereby sacrificed their last opportunity to seize power or at least form a ‘unified socialist government’. Desperately seeking to end the crisis, the conference voted to summon another gathering—the Council of the Republic, or so-called ‘pre-parliament’. Intended as a surrogate for the constituent assembly and boycotted by the Bolsheviks, this weak body convened in October to hear gloomy ministerial and committee reports about the deepening crisis; it was the final sounding-board for the aspirations of Russia’s democratic revolution and its Provisional Government.

  The Bolshevik Party meanwhile, debated the prospects of this ‘revolutionary situation’. The Kornilov episode had unleashed a new wave of radicalism, which was reflected not only in an upsurge of agrarian disorders and urban strikes, but also in pro-Bolshevik votes and elections in the soviets. Encouraged by this remarkable shift in mood, Lenin now revived the slogan ‘all power to the soviets’ abandoned after the July Days.

  But internal dissension also rent the Bolsheviks. From various hiding-places Lenin bombarded the Central Committee with letters demanding that the party seize power in the name of the working class. His ‘Letters from Afar’ were a forceful blend of theory and practice, dogma and power. No blind believer in an ‘inevitable’ Bolshevik victory, Lenin insisted that the moment be seized, lest the Germans invade or strike a deal with Kerensky. Confronted with Lenin’s demand for an immediate armed uprising, party members revealed deep differences in their assessment of the situation. Two ‘Old Bolsheviks’, L. B. Kamenev and G. E. Zinoviev, believed that a broad-based socialist coalition, not the Bolsheviks alone, should take power. But the majority (including Trotsky and Stalin) acquiesced in Lenin’s demand: on 10 October, by a 10–2 vote, the Central Committee secretly endorsed Lenin’s theses on seizing power. But it hedged this decision: without setting a timetable, it called for patient work among the troops and proposed to await the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets later in October to legitimize a seizure of power in the name of the soviets. Meanwhile, the Petrograd soviet made a tactical decision of great practical significance when it established the ‘Military Revolutionary Committee’. Ostensibly created to defend Petrograd against the Germans, this Bolshevik-dominated body, working under the cover of soviet legitimacy, became the Bolshevik command centre during the October Revolution.

  The Bolsheviks brilliantly exploited the situation, but owed much to ‘objective conditions’—the ongoing war and economic collapse, the weakness of the government, the fissures within possible rival parties, and the inability of interest groups and democratic organizations to mobilize public opinion. The Bolsheviks exploited Kerensky’s ill-timed counter-assaults to evoke the spectre of ‘counter-revolution’ and, on the night of 24 October, began seizing key centres of power in Petrograd (the Winter Palace itself, of little strategic value, was seized only the next evening). The Bolsheviks then informed the assembled soviet congress that they had taken power in the name of the soviets and were creating a temporary Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. The frustrated SR and Menshevik delegates could only denounce the action and stalk out of the assembly. As Kerensky fled Petrograd in a vain search for support, the Bolsheviks set about constructing a new state order.

  Rebuilding the State

  October signified much, but huge questions remained—how to extend and consolidate soviet power over the vast empire, and how to build the world’s first socialist state and society. Bolsheviks had to address these problems under conditions of war, not only the ongoing Great War but a violent civil war implicit in Bolshevik ideology and the process by which they had come to power.

  These first years were, in Merle Fainsod’s felicitous phrase, ‘the crucible of communism’—an attempt to create a socialist state, economy, society, and culture later known as ‘war communism’. The latter phrase signifies much, not only the wartime conditions, but also a violent militancy that informed Bolshevik measures. Historians have passionately debated the regime’s intentions, the coherence of its war communist programme, the relative weight of civil war and ideology as causal factors, and the role of Lenin. Estimates of Lenin vary wildly, from that of malevolent ideologue and precursor of Stalin to that of a moderate pragmatist opposed to utopian leaps. Some see the ‘seeds of totalitarianism’ (to use an outmoded term) in Bolshevism itself; others blame the crescendo of authoritarianism and violence on the civil war alone.

  Such one-sided interpretations obscure the ambiguities, alternatives, and texture of early Soviet history. October most certainly did not mark the end of the revolution; the new Bolshevik regime had to surmount the same social and national movements that destroyed its predecessors. But the Bolsheviks approached these issues in their own inimitable way. In particular, they attached great significance to ideology—hence the obsessive determination to build socialism as the historical antithesis of capitalism. Regarding ‘class war’ as the dominant reality, they ruthlessly sought to abolish the market and associated ‘bourgeois’ institutions, cultural values and ethical norms. Still, Bolshevik behaviour cannot be reduced to ideology: they also drew—sometimes unconsciously, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes enthusiastically—on traditional political culture and bureaucratic power. It was not the contradictions between these different impulses but their fusion that led to the great successes—and excesses—of the early Soviet regime.

  The Bolsheviks used the cover of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets to legitimize the seizure of power and formation of a workers’ and peasants’ government. But they made haste not only to consolidate power but to use it. That meant a torrent of decrees—like the land decree, which formally nationalized land but in reality empowered peasants to complete the agrarian revolution on their own terms. The Bolsheviks also demolished symbols of the old regime—its ranks, titles, and traditional social estates. They also sought to establish a monopoly on political discourse, re-establishing censorship and banning ‘bourgeois’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’ newspapers. Given the disintegration of administration and law in 1917, early Bolshevik rule (as Peter Kenez has suggested) was largely ‘rule by decree’ using threat, exhortation, and propaganda.

  Constructing power—not only in Petrograd and Moscow, but in the interior and borderlands—was the primary concern. This process replicated the seizure of power itself, as so-called ‘military-revolutionary committees’ and garrison troops seized power in the name of the ‘soviet’. But Lenin sought to monopolize power, not just construct it—hence his fierce opposition to the idea of a coalition with other socialists. Although his first government was eventually forced to include some left SRs, the coalition lasted only a few brief months. Important too was Lenin’s decision to retain the ministerial bureaucracy and cabinet executive: rather than destroy these creatures of the tsaris
t regime (as recently envisioned in his State and Revolution), he simply relabelled ministries ‘commissariats’ and the cabinet ‘Council of People’s Commissars’. With this legerdemain he rebaptized these bodies as qualitatively different, purportedly because they were now part of a workers’ and peasants’ state and presumably staffed by proletarians.

  That was a masterful illusion: few proletarians were prepared for such service. It created, however, a golden opportunity for the white-collar employees of the tsarist and provisional governments, not only the army of petty clerks and provincial officials, but also mid-level technical and administrative personnel in the capitals. They found the transition easy, for example, from local War Industries Committees and zemstvo economic organs into ‘proletarian’ institutions like the Supreme Council of the National Economy (Vesenkha) and its local ‘economic councils’ (Sovnarkhozy). War Communism spawned a fantastic profusion of economic bureaucracies, including vertical industry monopolies called ‘Main Committees’ (Glavki) that were direct heirs of the earlier administration. Thousands of employees and technical personnel, economists, statisticians, agronomists, and middle- and lower-ranking managers, specialists with higher education, university graduates, and sundry other professionals poured into these organizations. Typical was the case of doctors and lesser medical personnel, who quickly found a home in revolutionary projects for public health. Similarly scientists and engineers eager to remake the world after technocratic visions eagerly joined in ‘building socialism’. Hence the Bolshevik triumph was a triumph of the lower-middle strata providing the very infrastructure of the Soviet state. In this sense the white-collar engagement was as important as the workers’ and peasants’ movements lionized in official discourse and mythology.