History of the Soviet Union

In the absence of a genuinely conservative political theory, and lacking the support of an independent church, the Russian imperial state often found itself extraordinarily vulnerable when faced with the activists of the revolutionary movement. In effect the state’s own ideals had been hijacked by its opponents, and as a result the government found itself being deserted by those who should have been its natural supporters. Even Dostoevsky, a writer of conservative views, once said that, if he knew that revolutionaries were going to blow up the Winter Palace, he would not report the plot to the police, for fear of ‘being thought an informer’: ‘The liberals would never let me hear the end of it.’ Without necessarily approving of terrorism, in fact, members of the nobility and liberal professions sometimes felt a kind of sympathy for the terrorists’ world outlook. The impeccably liberal Kadet Party in 1906, for example, refused publicly to condemn terrorism for fear of discrediting itself in the eyes of public opinion. In this way the revolutionaries came to constitute a kind of ‘alternative establishment’.

This did not make the practical dilemmas of the radicals any easier. It was not at all clear how they were to achieve their aims. Alexander Herzen, perhaps the first thorough-going Russian socialist, thought the peasant commune should function as the nucleus of the new society, but he was ambivalent about how and even whether a revolution should take place to bring that about. Mikhail Bakunin urged that the only essential thing was to spark off a massive popular uprising by the narod (the common people), and this would of itself purge and destroy the evils of existing society, leaving men free to improvise. Petr Lavrov, on the contrary, hoped that revolution would not be necessary at all: he felt that the educated strata had a debt to the narod, their education having been made possible by the latter’s toil. They should pay this debt off by ‘going to the people’ and passing on the fruits of their education to them, teaching them how they might create a truly humane society on the basis of their own institutions, the mir and the artel. In the 1870s several hundred students tried to fulfil Lavrov’s vision, learning handcrafts and dressing in smocks and felt boots in order to live in the village, practise a trade and pass on the good word. Most, though not all, of the peasants met them with incomprehension and some suspicion: for the time being at least their faith in the ‘little father’ tsar was still unshaken. Many of the student idealists who ‘went to the people’ finished up in prison.

Their failure lent strength to those who argued that a revolutionary movement must lead and it must use violence, disorganizing the government apparatus by terror, and if possible seizing power by a coup d’état. An organization called the People’s Will (Narodnaya volya) was set up to achieve this, and in 1881 it actually succeeded in assassinating the Emperor Alexander II. But setting up a different regime, or even putting effective pressure on Alexander’s successor–that proved beyond their capacities. Their victory was a pyrrhic one: all it produced was more determined repression.

By the 1880s, in fact, the Russian revolutionary movement seemed to be in a blind alley, unable to achieve its aims either by peaceful propaganda or by terrorism. It was in this situation that Marxism presented itself as a panacea in troubled times. Its first Russian exponent, Georgy Plekhanov, was the leader of those who had refused to accept the methods of the People’s Will. He welcomed Marxism because it suggested he had been right all along in rejecting the idea of a coup d’état: no revolution could yet come about in Russia, by any means, simply because objective social and economic circumstances were not yet ripe. Plekhanov’s interpretation thus emphasized Marxism’s determinist features: he argued that capitalism had not yet even begun in Russia, so that naturally the socialist revolution, which could only take place as a result of the contradictions of capitalist society, had no chance of success yet. In his view, Russia must first accept the coming of capitalism, with the concomitant breakdown of the peasant commune and the creation of large-scale industry, because these processes would generate a genuinely revolutionary class, the factory proletariat, which would not let down the hopes of the radical intelligentsia, as the peasantry had done. Plekhanov took up Marxism with such enthusiasm because he discerned in it a scientific explanation of history, and hence the certainty that the revolutionaries, if they followed it, would no longer sacrifice their hopes, and indeed their lives, in vain. Previous revolutionaries he dismissed contemptuously as ‘Populists’.

Historians of Russia often approach Marxism as though it came to the country as a completely formed and internally consistent doctrine. In fact this was far from being the case. Marxism was itself the product of European experiences not unlike those which had troubled the Russian revolutionaries of the 1860s and 1870s, especially the disappointments of the French revolution, and of the European risings of 1848–9. Each time, the shortfall between revolutionary expectation and subsequent reality had been immense. Marx claimed that this was because the revolutionaries had not heeded objective socioeconomic conditions: they were in fact mere ‘utopian socialists’. His kind of socialism, on the contrary, he described as ‘scientific’. He argued that the proletariat, growing now uncontrollably with the expansion of capitalist industry, would overcome the gap between ideal and reality. The factory worker was in a uniquely favourable position to achieve this, since he was both the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ of history: the object in that he was the victim of its economic laws, the subject in that he was conscious of the fact that he had nothing to lose and he was impelled by the vision of the more just and prosperous society that would come out of his revolt. As the unavoidable contradictions of capitalism bore ever more heavily on the workers, so they would inevitably rise and overthrow their oppressors, creating of their shared destitution a more just and humane society.

In this way Marx overcame, to his own satisfaction and that of most of his followers, the troubling gap between ideal and fulfilment. The trouble is, there was and is no necessary connection between Marx’s vision of intensifying socioeconomic crisis, with everyone moved by their own material interests, and the world of harmony and brother-hood which was supposed to succeed the revolution. Indeed, logically speaking, if the workers were impelled by their own economic interests in making revolution, then the more likely sequel of such a revolution would be further economic struggle, but with a different set of masters. Nevertheless, the idea that the workers’ revolution would somehow magically cancel out all the conflicts of society had enormous attraction. It seemed to be both realistic and optimistic at the same time. It had the simultaneous attractions of a science and a religion. That is what made it so appealing, and nowhere more so than in Russia, where the intelligentsia already had its own troubles with a secular state claiming religious prerogatives.

Certainly the young Vladimir Ulyanov–or Lenin, as he became known–was attracted by precisely this dual nature of Marxism. He had been deeply affected by the execution in 1887 of his elder brother Alexander for membership of a conspiracy to murder the emperor. Lenin was attracted by his brother’s idealism and self-sacrifice, but at the same time he was determined not to give up his own life in vain. He wanted to pursue Alexander’s aim of revolutionary social transformation with certainty. Hence the scientific claims of Marxism were very important to him. Reading Marx’s Capital was, as he later said, a revelation to him, because it seemed to demonstrate that revolution was embedded in the objective evolution of society, if one only had the patience and consistency to await its unfolding. In his own early writings, Lenin made a similar analysis of Russia’s own socioeconomic structure, aiming to show that capitalism was already destroying the economy of the peasant commune, and that capitalism–and therefore ultimately revolution–was inevitable in Russia. Admittedly Lenin felt that Russia had further to go than most of Europe, and, following Plekhanov, he envisaged a revolution in two stages: (i) the ‘bourgeois democratic’ one, when the feudal system, still not entirely destroyed in Russia, would be finally overthrown by an alliance of the ‘bourgeois liberals’ with the as yet small workers’ party; (ii) the later socialist stage, which would come in the fullness of time, when capitalism was fully developed and the working class had reached maturity.

All this had the merit of apparent certainty. But it was predicated on a formidably extensive time scale, and would require daunting patience and self-restraint to realize in full. In fact Lenin did not for long adhere to the full schema, but began to cast around for ways of telescoping the two stages. Furthermore, in his own way, he was aware of the gap between science and prophecy in Marx. He did not share the master’s confidence that the workers would automatically grasp the full significance of their destitution in existing society and how it might be ended. On the contrary, in his pamphlet What is to be Done? (1902) he expressed his fear that, left to themselves, workers would not attempt a revolution but would fight for more limited goals, such as higher wages, better working conditions and more humane treatment from their employers. His own experience of propaganda work in the St Petersburg factories of the 1890s led him to the conclusion that ‘The workers did not have, nor was it possible for them to have, an awareness of the irreconcilable contradiction of their interests with the whole modern political and social system.’ This did not apply just to Russian workers: ‘The history of all countries shows that by itself the working class can only develop a trade union consciousness, that is to say a conviction of the necessity to form trade unions, struggle with the employers, obtain from the government this or that law.’ Only the ‘educated representatives of the propertied classes–the intelligentsia’ could fully understand the real, as distinct from the superficial, needs of the workers. To bring about a revolution, a genuinely revolutionary party was needed, that is, one ‘embracing primarily and chiefly people whose profession consists of revolutionary activity’. That seemed, on the face of it, to exclude any workers, since their profession, perforce, was factory labour.

This was a most important clarification of a weak point in Marxist theory. In actual practice, Lenin never tried to run his party in this way. But he always stuck theoretically to his definition of the revolutionary party, and indeed made it his touchstone of the true revolutionary spirit. For the sake of it he was prepared to break with other Marxists who took a different view. At what was, in effect, the founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party, in Brussels and London in 1903, Lenin insisted that ‘personal participation in one of the party’s organizations’ was to be the key qualification for membership. His principal opponent, Yuly Martov, wanted a more relaxed formulation: ‘regular personal support under the guidance of one of the party’s organizations’. This would make it easier for workers to become full party members, even in conditions of illegality. Lenin lost that particular vote, but nevertheless emerged from the congress with a majority, and henceforth called his faction the ‘Bolsheviks’ or ‘men of the majority’, while Martov’s had to content themselves with the sobriquet ‘Mensheviks’ or ‘men of the minority’.

The issue which provoked the great split in the Russian Social Democratic Party sounds like a minor organizational quibble. In fact, however, this quibble turned out to symbolize more profound disagreements, which drove the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks ever further apart. With time it became clear that they were envisaging two different kinds of revolution. The Mensheviks laid great store by the coming of a parliamentary ‘bourgeois’ republic, in which a mass working-class party would act as a legal opposition until they were numerous enough to take power on their own account. Lenin, however, became increasingly impatient with the protracted timetable entailed by this vision. He hankered after telescoping the whole process, running the two revolutions together by enlisting the peasants (carrying out a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution against the landlords) as auxiliaries of the workers (carrying out their ‘socialist’ revolution against the capitalists). However, he did not fully clarify his ideas on this issue until his final return to Russia from exile in 1917.

In effect, Lenin reintegrated into Russian Marxism certain elements of the Populist tradition: the leadership of a small group of intelligentsia revolutionaries, the readiness to regard the peasants as a revolutionary class, and the telescoping of the ‘bourgeois’ phase of the revolution.

The Populists had, however, their own views. They recovered from their prostration of the 1880s, and by 1901 managed to form a new political party, with its centre in emigration, the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Their theoreticians no longer disputed the proposition that industrial capitalism had come to Russia, but they maintained that it had taken a very different form from the one Marx envisaged. First, it was heavily dominated by the state. Secondly, most of the workers had not really broken away from the countryside: they were ‘peasant-workers’, not proletarians in the Marxist sense. The Socialist Revolutionaries refused, in fact, to recognize any fundamental distinction between workers and peasants: they organized themselves, and with some success, to work among both. They also set up a ‘fighting detachment’ to continue the work of the People’s Will by terrorism directed against officials: they succeeded between 1901 and 1908 in murdering a Grand Duke, several ministers and over a hundred other senior officials.

In 1905, risings broke out in both town and countryside. These outbursts owed little to the organizational efforts of the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, but rather more to their long-term inspiration. The most powerful ingredient of all, however, was the enduring discontent felt by the peasants and workers who made up the great majority of Russia’s population.

The Emancipation Act promulgated by Alexander II in 1861 had released the peasants from personal bondage, but it had not relieved any of their other hardships, and indeed had burdened them with an additional grievance. This was the obligation to pay for land which they already regarded as their own–and indeed, in the Lockean sense that they ‘mixed their labour with it’, so it was. The peasants’ collective legal sense had never accepted the legitimacy of the awards of land made by the tsars to the nobles.

In order to ensure that the peasants would pay for the land ‘newly allotted’ to them, and would discharge their other taxes, the government bound them to a ‘village society’, which was often, though not always, equivalent to the old ‘commune’, or mir. This institution has been the subject of more myth-making and less solid empirical research than perhaps any other in Russian history, partly because its members left little or no written testimony, and partly because ideologists of left and right hoped and feared great things from it. The government saw it as a guarantor of law and order, as well as of primitive social security, while the revolutionaries, at least the Populists, regarded its practices as a kind of rudimentary socialism, which might enable Russian society to proceed straight to real socialism without the unpleasant intermediate stage of capitalism. In Great Russia the mir assembly, consisting of heads of household, periodically redistributed land, adding to the allotments of families grown larger (along with the obligation to pay higher taxes) and subtracting from the allotments of those which had lost members. In the Ukraine and Bielorussia, on the other hand, rather different customs prevailed: land was usually passed down the family hereditarily, and was not subject to periodic redistribution. In both types of commune, timber, meadows, pastures and water-courses were held in common.

The communal land tenure system, though it provided a safety net in time of difficulty, had real economic disadvantages. All the villagers were compelled to adopt a safe but primitive and underproductive form of agriculture: the open three-field system with strip farming. At a time when the peasant population was growing very fast–from around 55 million in 1863 to 82 million in 1897–the mir in effect impeded the introduction of improved seeds, fertilizers or machines; and it offered a disincentive to land improvement, since the cultivator never knew when his plot might be taken away from him and awarded to someone else.

The low level of agricultural productivity was only partly a result of communal tenure. Partly, too, it was a function of low urbanization. Where, as in most of western Europe, there was a dense network of towns and good communications between them, then a receptive market existed for a wide variety of agricultural produce. In Russia this was the case only around St Petersburg and Moscow. Over the remaining expanses of Russia’s main agricultural regions, peasants scratched the soil with wooden ploughs, grew rye and oats, lived on a diet of ‘cabbage soup and gruel’ (as a popular saying had it) and sold very little to the outside world, except when economic need made it unavoidable.

As a result, though the picture varied from area to area, it seems clear enough that most peasants were poor, threatened by hunger in bad years, and that the problem was getting worse. In 1890 more than 60 per cent of peasants called up for the army were declared unfit on health grounds: and that was before the famine of 1891.

The peasants themselves felt that the explanation for all this was obvious: they needed more land, and they had a right to it. In the neighbouring nobles’ fields they saw their own potential salvation. This was an illusion: the total area of peasant landholdings exceeded that of the landowners by nearly three to one, so that simple expropriation of the latter would not solve the problem. But in 1905 the peasants were convinced that it would, and that their grievance was justified. Acting in common, by decision of their mir assemblies, they began to take the law into their own hands, seizing estates and driving the landowners out. It took a long time for the government to restore order.

In fact, there was no simple solution to Russia’s agrarian problem, as the later experience of developing countries confirms. Only a patient combination of improvements in land tenure and in agricultural methods with the gradual development of the commercial and industrial life of the country could in the end have brought greater prosperity to the village. But the myth that there was a simple solution, and that the peasants had a natural right to all the land, was the single most explosive factor in Russian politics in the last years of the tsarist regime.

Peter Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 to 1911, tried to make a start to the process of patient improvement by giving peasant households the right to withdraw from the village commune, set up on their own and enclose their holdings. After a promising start, however, this programme was abruptly curtailed by war and revolution.

Workers, the other great factor in the revolutionary upheaval of 1905, were also restless to an unusual degree in Russia compared with their West European counterparts. This may have been because they had unusually close ties with the land. Under the Emancipation legislation of 1861, a peasant who went into the town to work permanently was still registered with his ‘village society’ and remained legally a peasant. His family still paid taxes there, and he probably sent back money regularly to help them out; perhaps he would return at Christmas or Easter for family celebrations, or in the late summer to help with the harvest. Some workers, especially those in construction and transport, organized themselves in an artisan cooperative, or artel, which had its origins in village life, and was sometimes found even in heavy industry. Individual factories often perpetuated the rural link by recruiting most of their workforce from a particular province; and workers themselves would often form a zemlyachestvo, or regional association, to keep in touch with each other and with their home villages.

Compared with the workers who had lived in the towns for a generation or more, these ‘peasant-workers’ seem to have been unusually prone to unrest at times of crisis. This may have been partly because their right to allotment land in the village gave them something to fall back on, and hence an extra sense of security. Or it may have been because, in the absence of legalized trade unions in the towns, the tradition of collective action was far stronger in the countryside. In their case, too, the newly discovered urban discontents, over housing, pay, working conditions or overbearing foremen, were superimposed on the grievances which they had brought with them from the village. As R. E. Johnson, the most recent student of this subject, has suggested, ‘the fusion of rural and urban discontents and propensities produced an especially explosive mix’.

At any rate, the experience of 1905 suggested that Russian workers, in times of crisis, were unusually good at improvising their own institutions. The body which sparked off the unrest of that year was, ironically, organized by Father Gapon, a priest who wished to save the monarchy. On Sunday 9 January 1905 he led a huge demonstration in the capital, St Petersburg, bearing ikons and portraits of the tsar: they were to march to the Winter Palace with a petition appealing for a living wage and for civil rights. The troops stationed in the streets panicked in the face of the crowd and opened fire: nearly two hundred people were killed and many more wounded.

This incident, which has passed into history as Bloody Sunday, had a dramatic effect: more than any other, it undermined the popular image of the tsar as the benevolent ‘little father’. It helped to release the restraint which the peasants had previously felt about taking the law into their own hands. And it certainly contributed to the wave of strikes, demonstrations and sometimes violence which swept Russia’s industrial cities. In the course of this, workers set up trade unions for the first time, rather begrudgingly legalized by the government. They also improvised councils (or soviets) of workers’ deputies. Beginning as strike committees elected at the workplace, these bodies often found themselves temporarily exercising local government functions as well, in cities whose normal administration was paralysed by strikes. They also negotiated with the employers and the government. In short, they gained a brief but intense experience of self-government, unforgettable to workers who had never before been allowed to organize in their own interests.

The mass popular unrest gave the professional strata and the intelligentsia the chance to press their demands for an elected parliament, or even a constituent assembly, to decide on Russia’s future form of government. Political’ parties were formed, of which the most prominent were the Constitutional Democrats (or Kadets for short), under their leader, the Moscow University history professor, P. N. Milyukov. Their ideal was a constitutional monarchy on the British model, or even a parliamentary republic, as in France.

In the end, faced with a general strike, Tsar Nicholas II reluctantly conceded much of what the Kadets were demanding. In the October Manifesto of 1905 he promised that henceforth the civil rights of all citizens would be observed, and he granted a parliament, the Duma, to be elected on an indirect but fairly broad franchise. Written into its statute was the provision that ‘without [its] consent no law can take effect’. This concession relieved him of the outright opposition of the liberals, and Nicholas was then able to instruct the police and army–which remained almost completely loyal–to crush the workers’ and peasants’ movement.