History of the Soviet Union

2

The October Revolution

It was a mark of the abruptness of political change in Russia that when the monarchy fell, what replaced it was not one regime, but two. On the one hand, the politicians surviving from the Duma established a Provisional Government, in which the principal parties were at first the Kadets, later the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. It was called ‘provisional’ because it was to exercise power only until a Constituent Assembly could be convened, elected by all the people. On the other hand, the workers of Petrograd (as St Petersburg was now called) hastened to revive their memories of the days of freedom in 1905 by re-establishing the Petrograd Soviet. They were joined by the soldiers of the capital city’s garrison, active participants in the revolution for the first time, and their joint tribune was known as the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

But government and soviet refrained from trying to oust each other–for good reason. The Provisional Government, which began by abolishing the tsarist police and security services, had no effective power of coercion, and therefore had to tolerate the soviets as expressions of the popular will, at least in the big cities. As the minister of war, Guchkov, said, ‘The Provisional Government does not possess any real power; and its directives are carried out only to the extent that it is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which enjoys all the essential elements of real power, since the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are all in its hands.’ The leaders of the soviets, for their part, recognized that the Provisional Government contained experienced politicians, that it could command the loyalty of the army officers, reduce the chances of counterrevolution, and gain international recognition. The theoretically inclined among them regarded the Provisional Government as a ‘bourgeois’ institution, which the soviets would ‘supervise’, on the workers’ behalf, until such time as the socialist revolution became possible.

The Provisional Government was from the start in a very difficult, arguably an untenable position. It had not been brought to power by election, but nor could it claim direct descent from the old imperial government or the Duma. Prince Lvov, its first prime minister, proclaimed that it had been created by the ‘unanimous revolutionary enthusiasm of the people’. That was to prove a shaky basis, especially since the new government found itself in a situation where it was unable to carry out the reforms that the ‘people’ were expecting. The fundamental difficulty was the war. The peasants might be crying out for a redistribution of the land in their favour, but could such a complex operation be carried out equitably without first a thorough land survey, and while millions of peasant-soldiers, with an impeccable claim to their own shares, were far away from the village at the front, and unable to take part in the share-out? The workers began to organize themselves to exercise a greater share in the running of factories and enterprises, but was it responsible to attempt such intricate reorganization in the middle of keeping up industrial output for the war effort? Could the supplies problems, which had brought the tsarist government down, be solved while the war was on? Most important of all, was the soldiers’ demand to elect their own committees and to take part in the running of their units compatible with the discipline needed at the front line?

While the war continued, none of these questions could be solved without serious and damaging political conflict. And yet, to stop the war proved almost impossible (I say ‘almost’, since the Bolsheviks did eventually achieve it, but at a price which nearly split the party in two). The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet tried to organize a conference of socialists from all the combatant states, to put pressure on their governments to negotiate a peace ‘without annexations or indemnities’. The British and French governments, however, put paid to this plan by refusing to allow representatives from their parliaments to attend. The alternative would have been to sign a separate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but this would have amounted to a capitulation, and not until the Provisional Government was in its final days did any of its members recommend such a desperate step. So the war went on. Its problems continued to undermine the Provisional Government’s efforts to establish a new political system, until the popular expectations aroused by the February revolution finally brought the Bolsheviks to power.

The new-found freedoms of February caused a tremendous upsurge in the ordinary people’s capacity to organize themselves. It is often supposed that the Russians are a passive people, accustomed to doing what their rulers tell them. Actually, this is far from being the case. Partly because of the huge distances, many Russian communities remained, at least up to the early twentieth century, relatively unaffected by central government, and had to improvise their own arrangements. But even where government has been near and ever-pressing, Russians have always been highly inventive in devising social forms such that they appear to be obeying their rulers, whilst in fact running matters as far as possible to their own advantage. This was the centuries-old basis of the peasant commune, which the government had always intended as an agency for taxation and military recruitment. Now, in 1917, with government repression suddenly removed, there was a veritable explosion of ‘self-help’ organizations among Russian workers, peasants and soldiers, each with their own, often exaggerated demands.

The peasants saw in the February revolution an opportunity to rectify what they considered a very longstanding injustice, that much of the land they worked did not belong to them. As a resolution from Samara province put it, ‘The land must belong to those who work it with their hands, to those whose sweat flows.’ Peasants were prepared to support the Provisional Government as long as it appeared to be actively promoting a wholesale transfer of land to them. As the months passed, and the Provisional Government did nothing, they lost interest in it and turned instead to direct action. Ironically, the government helped them to create the institutions which made this possible: the local land committees, which it set up to carry out a land survey and prepare for the ultimate land reform, actually became dominated at the lowest level by the peasants themselves, and increasingly proceeded to direct land seizures. This was especially the case after the army began to break up. A typical scenario was for a deserter to return to the village from the front, bringing news of land seizures elsewhere. The peasants would gather in their traditional mir assembly, or use the facade of the local land committees; they would discuss the situation and decide to take the local landowner’s estate for themselves. They would then all march together up to the steward’s office, demand the keys, proclaim the land, tools and livestock sequestered and give the owners forty-eight hours to leave. Then they would divide up the land among themselves, using the time-honoured criteria employed in the mir, the ‘labour norm’ or the ‘consumption norm’ (i.e. the number of working hands available, or the number of mouths to feed), whichever prevailed in local custom. They used violence where they thought it necessary, or where things got out of hand.

Inevitably, then, a gulf of mistrust opened between the peasants and the Provisional Government. It was widened by the government’s supplies policy. Because of the problem of supplying the towns with bread, the tsarist government in its last months had instituted a grain monopoly at fixed prices. The Provisional Government felt it had no alternative but to continue this, though the belatedly adjusted prices in a period of high inflation inevitably caused resentment among the peasants. Ultimately, indeed, it led to the peasants’ refusing to part with their produce in the quantities needed. This is where the backward nature of the rural economy became a positive strength to the peasants. It was, of course, more convenient for them to buy matches, paraffin, salt, ironmongery and vodka from the urban market, but, if the terms of trade turned badly against them, then peasants could always turn their backs on the market and make do with the primitive products they could manufacture for themselves. During the summer and autumn of 1917 this is what many of them began to do, resuming a natural economy which their fathers and grandfathers had gradually been leaving behind, shutting themselves off from the market and refusing to provide food for anyone outside their own village. All Russian governments had to face this potential isolationism of the peasant communities until Stalin broke open the village economy by brute force in 1929–30.

Nowhere was the exuberant improvisation of the revolutionary period so evident as in the multiplicity of organizations created by the workers of Russia’s cities. Pride of place, of course, belonged to the soviets, to which the workers of Petrograd streamed back as soon as they had a chance in February 1917. It cannot be said, however, that the Petrograd Soviet, or any other large city soviet, lived up to its original ideals. Perhaps that was impossible. The Petrograd Soviet’s plenary assembly consisted of three thousand members, and even its executive committee soon grew to an unmanageable size, so that many of its functions had to be delegated to a bureau of twenty-four members, on which each of the main socialist parties had a prearranged quota of representatives. Naturally enough, these representatives tended to be established politicians and professional men rather than workers or soldiers. In fact, the attempt to introduce direct democracy led to an engaging but unproductive chaos, so that the real business had to be transferred upstairs to a small number of elected officials. This engendered a feeling among the rank and file that their voices no longer counted for anything. As we shall see, this discontent played an important part in the events of 1917, and helped to provide the Bolsheviks with the impetus that carried them to power.

In reaction, workers tended to devote more of their energies to lower level organizations which expressed their aspirations more directly. In some cases this meant the trade unions. These, however, were not well suited to a fast-changing revolutionary situation. They were bodies with some local roots but also strong national organizations: a few of them had managed to survive in shadowy form since 1905, in spite of persecution. They were organized on the ‘production’ principle, that is to say by branch of industry, whatever the precise skill, qualification or rank of their members. This tended to produce hierarchical splits within unions, which weakened their influence. They were also, of course, designed to function within a relatively stable economic and political environment, promoting their members’ interests within that setting. They were not well adapted to fast-changing circumstances or to attempts to assume real power. It is not surprising that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries retained a grip on many unions up to and beyond October.

In this respect, the factory or shop committees (fabzavkomy) were more suited to the circumstances of 1917. Often their origins were similar to those of the soviets of 1905: they began as informal strike committees during the February-March days, but this time at the level of the individual factory or even shop. The question of how they should develop caused controversy. Many Socialist Revolutionaries and most Mensheviks wanted them to run cultural and welfare facilities for the workers and to represent their interests in negotiations with the employers. That, however, would have reduced them virtually to the status of local trade union branches. The Anarchists, on the other hand, and in the short run the Bolsheviks, wanted fabzavkomy actually to run the factories, or at the very least to supervise the management’s discharge of that duty. The Anarchists intended that in that way they should become units in a self-governing society, while the Bolsheviks planned to subordinate them to the state economic administration of an embryonic socialist society. For both of them, however, the immediate watch-word was ‘workers’ control’, and they persuaded a Petrograd congress of fabzavkomy to adopt it at the end of May–the first institution to pass a Bolshevik resolution.

The factory committees were thus in the vanguard of all the workers’ struggles between February and October–for the eight-hour day, for higher pay and better conditions, and then increasingly for ‘control’ itself. At first the pressure was directed particularly against harsh foremen or staff: workers sometimes dealt with unpopular figures by bundling them into a wheelbarrow and carting them out of the factory gates, to the accompaniment of jeers and catcalls, for a ducking in the nearest river. Increasingly, however, the struggles concerned the very survival of enterprises. Faced with newly militant workers, as well as the more familiar problems of shortages of raw materials, fuel and spare parts, employers sometimes decided that the game was not worth the candle, and that their capital would be better invested in something safer. There was a wave of factory closures. The workers regarded these as lockouts, and often reacted by occupying the factory, and trying to keep production going under their own management.

Right from the beginning, some soviets and factory committees had armed contingents at their disposal. These bodies, often formed during the heady days of February, gradually assumed the name of ‘Red Guards’. They were able to provide themselves with weapons and ammunition by courtesy of garrison soldiers, or by pilfering from armaments works. They patrolled factory premises and maintained order in industrial areas (where the writ of the Provisional Government’s militia never really ran). Not until the Kornilov affair at the end of August did they assume real political importance. At that stage, however, the Bolsheviks, now in control of the Petrograd and many other urban soviets, mobilized them as paramilitary units under the soviets’ Military Revolutionary Committees, originally set up to forestall a military coup (see below, page 48). In that form they made a major contribution to the October seizure of power.

The real troubleshooters of 1917, however, were the soldiers, both at the front and in the rear. Their charter was the famous Order No. 1, passed in full session by a seething and chaotic Petrograd Soviet, before any Provisional Government had even been established. It was intended originally for the Petrograd garrison alone, but it soon spread far more widely, probably because it met soldiers’ wishes, and was swiftly taken up in most units. It called on servicemen to elect committees to run all units down to company level, and to send their delegates to the new soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Soldiers were to recognize the soviets (rather than the Duma) as their political authority. In combat situations, officers were to be obeyed as before, but the committees would control the issue of weapons, and off-duty officers were no longer to be recognized as superiors. In practice, in some units the committees actually arrogated to themselves the authority, not mentioned in Order No. 1, of electing and dismissing officers.

The position of officers during 1917 was not enviable. Because of the high casualty rate at the front during two and a half years of war, most of the junior officers were quite recent appointees, from the same social class as their men, often raw and unsure of their new-found superiority. Though some reacted flexibly to the new situation and found a common language with their men, others retreated into an ex-aggeratedly rigid defence of their recently acquired authority. Among the senior officers were rather more survivors from pre-1914, but they were mostly men who had been taught to regard politics as subversive, an affair of which they were properly ignorant. It is not surprising, therefore, that at all levels of the officer corps there was support for a return to the unquestioning discipline of pre-February.

Evidence suggests that the soldiers, especially at the front line, remained patriotic in outlook even after February, and determined at least to prevent the Germans advancing any further into Russia. The revolution did, however, induce in the men a feeling that they no longer had to obey all orders unquestioningly. The soviets’ peace programme circulated among them, and led to a widespread conviction that only a defensive war was still justified: the formula ‘without annexations or indemnities’ was very popular. The peace offensive also aroused expectations that the war would be over soon and that they could return home. These expectations were further sharpened by intensive propaganda from the Bolsheviks, who sent agitators, newspapers and broadsheets to popularize the idea of a separate peace to be concluded without reference to the Allies.

These expectations were rudely jolted by Minister of Defence Kerensky, who in June ordered an offensive on the south-western front. This was timed partly in order to aid the Allies (the mutinies in the French army looked at that stage more serious than the Russian ones), but partly because the officers hoped it would restore a sense of purpose and discipline among their men. The opposite turned out to be the case. Soldiers’ committees discussed the order to advance at great length: some refused, some went ahead initially and then pulled back when they saw the casualty rate. At any rate, the offensive soon turned into a rout in which the Russian army lost territory. Far more serious than that was the effect on morale. Whole units abandoned their positions, and some of them murdered officers who tried to restore order. Then the mutinous soldiers seized freight wagons, or even whole trains, and held them at gunpoint until they were transported deep into the rear. From there they could return home, rifles at the ready, to take a decisive part, as we have seen, in the share-out of land.

The mood of the garrison troops was, if anything, even more radical than that of those at the front. Many of them were recently mobilized peasants or workers, undergoing their training, and still identifying strongly with the class from which they came. The Provisional Government’s initial agreement with the Petrograd Soviet stipulated that these troops would not be sent to the front, but would stay in the capital to ‘defend the revolution’. And in fact the refusal of a machine-gun regiment to be sent to the front sparked off the July Days in Petrograd, when an undisciplined armed mob caused havoc on the streets.

Even at this stage, however, the army did not disintegrate altogether. Some units remained loyal, particularly Cossack ones, with their special traditions, or specialist units, like those from the artillery, cavalry or engineers. Nowhere was the collapse so complete that the Germans felt they could advance without risk. Indeed, the German High Command deliberately held back, fearing that a major advance might be the one factor which could yet restore morale in the Russian army.

At the time of the February revolution the Bolsheviks numbered, at the highest estimate, no more than 20,000, and their leaders were scattered in exile, at home and abroad. For that reason they had even more difficulty than the other parties in adjusting to the sudden changes. They were seriously divided about what to do, but the dominant figures inside Russia, notably Kamenev and Stalin, inclined towards cooperation with the other socialist parties in the soviets in exercising ‘vigilant supervision’ over the Provisional Government. Some even talked of a rapprochement with the Mensheviks.

Lenin had quite different ideas. He was still in Switzerland in February. He returned to Russia with the help of the German High Command, taking a specially provided ‘sealed train’ through Germany to Sweden. The Germans were anxious to facilitate his return, so that he could begin fomenting unrest inside Russia and spread his idea of a separate peace. They also provided the Bolsheviks with considerable funds thereafter, which helped to pay for the newspapers and political agitators who proved so effective among the soldiers and workers.