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The road to revolution

The dream of an ideal society in Russiabegan to take shape in the 1880s, when a small group of Russian intellectuals founded a Marxist movement that claimed to represent the interests of the working class. Their leader, G. V. Plekhanov, contended that Russia’s development would be similar to that of Central and Western Europe. The country would be industrialized and would then undergo a bourgeois revolution that would replace the autocratic system of rule with a constitutional order dominated by the middle class, which favored capitalism. Eventually, when industrialization reached maturity and the proletariat (the industrial working class) had become a powerful force, it would stage a second, socialist revolution, which had not yet taken place in Central and Western Europe. In 1898, the Russian Marxists formed the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, which five years later split into the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.

1905: dress rehearsal for 1917?

Many citizens now began to question not only the wisdom of waging war against Japan but also the legitimacy of the entire political system. In the autumn and winter of 1904–5, the liberals, who had held their tongues so long as the government’s policies seemed to be widely supported, unleashed the so-called ‘banquet campaign’ for fundamental constitutional changes. It was astonishingly effective and marked the beginning of a nationwide assault on the autocracy that lasted two and a half years. As the historian Terence Emmons pointed out, the events, modeled on the famous banquets in Paris of 1847–8, were intended to unite the intelligentsia ‘around the constitutional banner.’ The organizers urged liberals throughout the country to hold banquets in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the judicial reforms. The authorities were invariably reluctant to permit the meetings, but in the end they relented, on the understanding that all the gatherings would be ‘private.’

The rash of political meetings that ensued—thirty-eight in twenty-six cities—was unprecedented in Russian history. Zemstvo activists were the most prominent participants, but some local bureaucrats, nobles, journalists, and teachers also took part. The banquets adopted various kinds of resolutions, but to one degree or another all contributed to mobilizing support for the demands of the liberals. Although the banquets were private affairs, several major newspapers described most of them in detail, thus publicizing the demands of the opposition. These meetings, it should be noted, were held at a time of considerable unrest in the country: a growing number of strikes by workers, a series of pogroms aimed at Jews, and several assassinations of officials.

In response to the campaign, P. D. Sviatopolk-Mirsky, the Minister of Internal Affairs, urged the Tsar to take the bold step of establishing an institution composed of elected deputies that would participate in legislative work. Nicholas was not interested and turned for advice to Witte, who opposed any far-reaching constitutional changes. On hearing the news of the Tsar’s decision, Mirsky lost heart. ‘Everything has failed,’ he said to some colleagues. ‘Let’s build jails.’ Support for the beleaguered authorities within society dwindled dramatically, and for that reason alone, Nicholas’s decision to follow Witte’s advice to reject reform must be classed among the most critical of his reign. Liberals warned the government that failure to introduce basic reforms would further enrage the opposition.

The Gapon effect

The liberals had in mind the impact of the banquet campaign on worker-activists. A fair number were impressed by the outpouring of petitions, which they read with great interest and which prompted them to consider producing their own appeals. Even more importantly, a leader of the St. Petersburg workers at this time and a key figure in the unfolding of the revolution, Father Georgii Apollonovich Gapon, established contact with several members of the local branch of the Union of Liberation, who supplied him with newspapers and information on the liberal movement. Actually, Gapon, who was as charismatic as he was enigmatic, had already created an impressive organization of workers. The US ambassador to St. Petersburg considered him to be a ‘thoroughpaced revolutionary’ who ‘utterly deceived’ workers into believing he had their interests at heart. Count Aehrenthal, the Austrian ambassador to Russia, claimed that the ‘Jewish press’ had elevated him to the level of a ‘historical figure,’ whereas in reality he was a degenerate who had violated a twelve-year-old girl. Still others viewed him as nothing but a toady of the tsarist police. About the only judgment on Gapon on which his associates, contemporary observers, and historians can agree is that he had a magnetic personality and was instrumental in triggering the second—and most turbulent and violent—phase of the revolution. Handsome, intelligent, and articulate, he impressed acquaintances with his dedication to humane principles and loyalty to his associates. He was a fine speaker, and, when it served his interests, could be crafty and duplicitous.

Gapon had turned to public service as a student at the Poltava Seminary. He came to have doubts about the Orthodox Church’s emphasis on ritual and its ‘religious formalism,’ which led him to abandon religious work and to devote himself to improving the lot of ‘the toiling and suffering masses.’ Gapon’s organizational skills were outstanding; early in the summer of 1902 he began to lay the groundwork for a political movement that would become a significant force within two years. As a loyal supporter of the autocracy and the government, he set out to steer workers along a path acceptable to the authorities and to employers. His plan fitted almost perfectly with the effort of the government to take the lead in organizing industrial workers to secure better conditions in return for their political loyalty to the tsarist regime. This effort, known as police socialism or Zubatovshchina, was the brainchild of Sergei Zubatov, a police officer and an ardent admirer of tsarism—so much so that when Nicholas II abdicated in 1917, he committed suicide. In 1901, Zubatov formed the first police union and within two years a sizable number of workers had joined the movement.

Although Gapon disapproved of Zubatov’s stress on tight police control over the workers’ unions, the two men agreed to collaborate. Even after Zubatov was ousted from his position as a result of intrigues against him, Gapon continued with his own projects regarding workers. Supplied by the government with a monthly subsidy of a hundred rubles (a substantial sum at the time), Gapon founded the Assembly of the Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St. Petersburg in the summer of 1903. It carefully avoided involvement in labor disputes, concentrating instead on organizing dances, concerts, and lectures, and on promoting various projects for self-improvement. Gapon deliberately restricted himself to activities that were politically innocuous because he planned eventually to expand the organization, in both the capital and other cities, and wanted to avoid any action that might appear provocative or threatening to the authorities. He was amazingly successful, and by January 1905 his organization in the capital had a membership estimated at 20,000. Although workers under the influence of revolutionary movements distrusted him, there is no question, as an article in the journal Byloe (The Past) noted in 1906, that he had ‘cast a spell’ over a large number of ordinary laborers and that his adherents were prepared to ‘march with him through fire and water.’

Early in January 1905, workers at the Putilov Plant in St. Petersburg, a large armaments and shipbuilding factory, decided to go on strike to protest against the arbitrary dismissal of four of their colleagues. Realizing that the mood of the public had turned toward militancy, Gapon was now prepared to reveal his support for fundamental political change. He endorsed the strike and also began feverish preparations for a large procession to be held on Sunday, 9 January, to present the Tsar with a list of proposals for reform. On one day alone, he delivered fifty short speeches to workers, always exuding unbounded confidence in his plans. Generally, he told his audiences that the Tsar was a good man who would help the people once he understood their plight, but occasionally he acknowledged the possibility of failure, in which case it would be evident that ‘we have no Tsar.’

The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks disapproved of the procession, on the grounds that the petition to be presented to the Tsar did not sufficiently stress political demands. In fact, Gapon had given every assurance to the authorities that the procession would be peaceful, but officials nevertheless feared the worst. The people responded enthusiastically to Gapon’s appeal, and early on 9 January somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand appeared, dressed in their Sunday best, at designated places. Many women and children showed up, and all participated in prayer meetings held before the procession began. Marchers carried icons and portraits of the Tsar and sang ‘Save Thy People, O Lord.’ Many pointedly raised their hands and emptied their pockets to show that they were unarmed. Their goal was to reach the Winter Palace, the Tsar’s residence, and to hand the petition to the ruler himself.

Although the petition was moderate in tone, its demands were far-reaching. It called for a constituent assembly elected on the basis of democratic suffrage, civil liberties for all subjects, equality of all before the law, the right to establish trade unions, and an eight-hour working day. It is worth emphasizing that the petition did not demand the abolition of the monarchy or the introduction of socialism. Nor did it contain threats of violence.

The authorities, however, took no chances. Troops were brought in from various regions to reinforce the local garrison, and by the appointed day about nine thousand infantrymen and three thousand cavalrymen were held in readiness in the capital. There is no evidence that the Tsar and his advisers wanted a violent confrontation, but they had made two operational decisions that made a clash unavoidable: first, not to grant Gapon a meeting with the Tsar to present the petition, and second, not to permit marching workers to enter the center of the city. Beyond that, there was no clear-cut plan to be followed by the troops.

As the marchers approached the center of the city, soldiers in a few places ordered them to turn back, but no one paid heed. When one large crowd, which included Gapon, who was surrounded by a protective shield of workers, reached the Narva Gate, a bugle was blown as a signal to the soldiers to open fire. It is not known who ordered the resort to violence to force the marchers to retreat. Gapon escaped injury, but two of his bodyguards and an official of the Assembly died on the spot. Several other bodyguards threw Gapon over a fence, and for several days he hid in different private apartments, including that of the writer Maxim Gorky. Enraged by the violence, Gapon exclaimed, ‘There is no God any longer! There is no Tsar!’

Shooting then erupted at other places and in the afternoon shots were fired at crowds that had gathered in the Winter Palace Square. When the carnage ended, some 130 people had been killed and 299 seriously wounded. The day immediately became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ and is generally considered to have marked the beginning of the Revolution of 1905. For orthodox Marxists, the events of that year did not actually amount to a revolution, because political power was not transferred from one class to another. Non-Marxists, who define a revolution as a fundamental change in the system of legality, might also hesitate to use the term because the Tsar’s authority remained paramount, even though it was clearly reduced.

Yet there are good reasons for the adoption of the term by contemporaries and for its retention by political activists as well as historians. From late 1904 until late 1905, the assault on authority from below was so massive, potent, and successful that the old regime appeared to be disintegrating. The challenge to the established order came from mass movements representing several social groups: liberals among the middle class and nobility, industrial workers, peasants, and some of the national minorities. In addition, by this time many landlords and factory owners had lost confidence in the Tsar. The ultimate aims of these groups differed in fundamental ways, but they were united in their determination to end autocratic rule in Russia, which they all held responsible for the country’s economic stagnation and archaic social and political institutions. In addition, considerable unrest and numerous mutinies disrupted the army and navy. Virtually no geographical region remained unaffected by the turbulence. Moreover, the currents of rebellion were so diverse that at times it seemed as though Russia was undergoing not one revolution but a series of parallel revolutions. Civil order broke down, and for several months the government seemed capable of doing little more than biding its time until the outbursts of defiance, generally unplanned and unorganized, had spent themselves. So effective a challenge to the state’s monopoly of power, even though temporary, may justifiably be characterized as a revolution.

The changes that swept over the Russian Empire would have been unthinkable two years before Bloody Sunday. Newspapers now regularly ignored long-standing restrictions by printing what editors believed the public should know, and the government, in effect acknowledging its impotence, largely ignored infractions of regulations that had been on the books for decades. Readers were informed in vivid detail of disorders in the cities and countryside, the clamor for basic reform, the military disasters Russia had suffered at the hands of Japan, and of discussions by opponents of the autocracy on how to change the country’s institutions. On several occasions, confidential deliberations of senior bureaucrats or official committees were leaked to the press, which readily ran articles about them. The liberal newspaper Russkie vedomosti frequently denounced the incompetence and arbitrariness of the ‘disgraceful… bureaucratic system’ and asserted that nothing short of a constitutional system with civil liberties guaranteed to all subjects would restore order and stability. In May 1905, the newspaper echoed the by-now-popular cry of liberals: ‘We can no longer live like this.’

Unrest in the countryside

Other signs of governmental weakness surfaced. The authorities failed to maintain order during the rash of attacks on innocent civilians by hooligans and right-wing extremists, known as the Black Hundreds, that broke out shortly after Bloody Sunday in many cities and towns. Pogroms against Jews in a wide area of the empire were an especially virulent form of disorder that the authorities failed to stop. The labor unrest that swept across the country in 1905 was unprecedented in its magnitude and thrust. None of the previous strikes had touched as explicitly, directly, and frequently on political issues, and officials soon gave up trying to enforce the law against work stoppages.

Workers scored some notable victories: in 70 percent of the so-called economic strikes, workers won partial or complete victories. In mid-May 1905, during a strike in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, an organization emerged that should be mentioned because of its subsequent importance in Russian history: the soviet (council). The initial purpose of this elected body was to provide workers with unified leadership and to serve as a strike committee, but gradually, as soviets sprang up in over forty cities, many assumed leadership roles in struggles for economic and political change.

The collapse of tsarism

For about a decade after the dissolution of the Second Duma, the Russian leadership did not face a mass movement bent on overturning the tsarist regime, but the political waters were not entirely calm. Unrest in the countryside surfaced periodically, and strikes by workers in various industrial regions were not uncommon. The most dramatic broke out in 1912 in the Lena Goldfields in Siberia, which the army crushed with terrifying brutality, killing some two hundred workers. Far from ending worker unrest, this cruelty spurred workers in other parts of the country to stage strikes during which they voiced economic as well as political demands. In July 1914, a strike movement that often involved violence engulfed various regions. At no time until 1917 did the authorities face the kind of danger to the stability of the state that they had confronted in 1905.

World War I

Once again, the decisive factor in turning deep discontent into revolutionary action was a military conflict that exposed Russia’s weakness and recklessness, and caused untold suffering to millions of ordinary citizens. One of the curious aspects of World War I is that no responsible leader wanted to lead his country into battle; if in 1914 the monarchs and ministers had had any inkling of the consequences of the war, they probably would not have given their armies the order to march. When the fighting ended four years later, millions of people had perished, three monarchs had lost their thrones, national boundaries had been changed, often arbitrarily, revolutions had erupted in several countries, and the ensuing bitterness throughout Europe had set the stage for yet another world war even more costly in every respect than the first one.

Ideology, as much as anything else, dictated the policy of Russian statesmen and of Tsar Nicholas II during the international crisis that erupted on 15 June (commonly noted as 28 June in the Gregorian calendar) 1914. On that day, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, was assassinated, together with his wife, in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, a province populated by Slavs that Austria-Hungary had annexed in 1908. The government in Vienna concluded that the assassination was part of a plan by Serbia to gain control over Bosnia and to establish a new state, Yugoslavia, which was to embrace all southern Slavs. The Austro-Hungarian statesmen feared such a development, because it would most likely lead to the unraveling of their multinational state. They therefore decided on a provocative and aggressive step. They sent an ultimatum to Serbia demanding not only the suppression of all anti-Austrian agitation but also the participation of Austrians in the crackdown. No sovereign government could accept such conditions, and Serbia was no exception. On 15 July (commonly noted as 28 July in the Gregorian calendar), Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.

Russia’s elite contended that their country, long the protector of ‘her little Slav brother,’ could not stand aside and allow fellow Slavs to be subjugated. At this early stage of the crisis, Tsar Nicholas, who insisted on playing a key role in foreign affairs, made a decision that demonstrated his failings as a head of state and proved fatal for his country. He ordered the military leaders to mobilize Russia’s armed forces, but in response to an urgent plea by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany to avoid an irrevocable and provocative action, he rescinded the order and instead called for a partial mobilization, which was to be directed only at Austria-Hungary. When his generals and the foreign minister, S. D. Sazonov, advised him that since the high command had never formulated plans for a partial mobilization, he should revert to the original order; the Tsar complied, setting off a chain reaction that plunged Europe into war. Germany, which was allied with Austria-Hungary, quickly followed suit in mobilizing its own forces, as did France, which was allied with Russia and feared Germany. Great Britain entered the conflict on 22 July (commonly noted as 4 August in the Gregorian calendar) on the side of France, mainly because it, too, feared German domination of the continent. A serious incident in one remote corner of Europe had triggered a world war that no one in a position of authority had expected or wanted.

Initially, the onset of war was greeted by a wave of patriotism throughout Russia, but as in most military conflicts the enthusiasm did not last long. In the Russia of 1914 there were more than the usual reasons for the public’s quick change of heart. For one thing, it soon became evident that the authorities were not in a position to wage war effectively. The Tsar appointed his uncle, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, as Commander in Chief, granting him enormous power and declaring him responsible to the ruler alone. The Grand Duke was totally unsuited for the post, as he himself admitted when he told associates that he did not know what to do. His only attributes were his extraordinary good looks and popularity among the troops. A year after the beginning of hostilities, Nicholas relieved the Grand Duke and made an even worse choice: he assumed the position himself. The Tsar knew even less about warfare than his uncle, but that was not the only reason his assumption of supreme military command was an egregious mistake. From now on, he could not blame others for blunders and defeats on the battlefield. The autocrat became the focus of the growing public discontent with all aspects of the war effort.

The army was ill-prepared for war. Most senior officers were mediocrities who had advanced to high positions only because seniority, not ability, was the determining factor in promotions. The War Ministry focused on building up as large an army as possible: by September 1915, it had mobilized 9.7 million men; two years later that figure had jumped to 15 million, probably the largest army in history. However, in war, as in most human endeavors, quantity does not make up for poor quality. Many of the rank and file were illiterate and unaware of what the war was all about. There were not enough training facilities, and draftees were often demoralized by remaining idle for months. A shortage of junior and non-commissioned officers further delayed the training of recruits. Finally, and perhaps most harmful to morale, the army had to contend with scarcities of equipment of every kind, including food. Equipment lost during battles could not easily be replaced because of the small size and inefficiency of the country’s industrial base. During an offensive, it was not uncommon for the second and subsequent rows of infantrymen to lack weapons; they had to wait until some of their comrades had fallen so that they could pick up their weapons and continue the advance.

Initially, the Russian army scored some victories. In August 1914, it advanced into eastern Prussia in an attempt to relieve the French, who were being attacked at their borders and might have lost Paris had it not been for the offensive of the tsarist army. Later that month, when Marshal Paul von Hindenburg launched a counterattack in the Battle of Tannenberg, the Russians were routed, losing some 300,000 men and 650 guns. Even more serious was the psychological impact of the defeat; Russian soldiers became convinced that the well-trained, highly disciplined, and well-led German army could never be defeated. The Russian advance into Galicia (now Poland) was more successful, but only because the Austro-Hungarian army was similarly ineffective, in part because its ranks contained many Slavs, Ukrainians, and Czechs, who felt little loyalty to their country. When the Germans launched a counter-offensive in May 1915, the tide turned quickly. The Russians were forced to give up virtually all the gains they had made nine months earlier.

By this time, enthusiasm for the war had started to decline sharply. At first, the only reason the government could give for waging war was the brotherly love of Russians for the Slavs, but most Russians could muster little affection for their distant brothers, the Serbs. Then the people were motivated to fight the Germans because they had invaded Russia. Turkey, which had joined the conflict on the side of Germany, had long been despised by many Russians. In mid-1915, the government came up with another reason to fight on with enthusiasm. It reached an agreement with Great Britain and France that after the war, Russia would be given control over Constantinople and the adjoining straits that marked the boundary between Europe and Asia, long a dream of Russian expansionists. A year later, the two allies, eager to prop up the government, promised Russia several districts in Asiatic Turkey. A goodly number within educated and liberal circles reacted positively to the promises, which were kept secret until 1917, but the vast majority of the people had never heard of those territories and could not be persuaded to risk their well-being or their lives for them.

As the war dragged on, domestic conditions worsened at an alarming pace. By 1917, 37 percent of the male population of working age had been drafted, creating a severe shortage of labor. Often, inexperienced people were hired as replacements, and productivity declined. At the same time, since owners of large estates, which were the primary producers of food for the market, could not find enough workers, shortages became an increasingly worrisome problem. With the retreat of the Russian army, large fertile areas were lost, further decreasing the food supply. Even so, the government might have found enough food for the army had the railroad system not broken down. One reason for the breakdown was that most of the lines in the western regions had fallen under the control of the enemy; another was poor management of the railways still available to the Russian authorities. Moreover, by 1917 the number of locomotives had declined from twenty thousand to nine thousand, so that it became ever more difficult to transport goods. In 1916, the government introduced food rationing, but implementation of this measure turned out to be chaotic and inefficient. It was widely disregarded by shopkeepers, who raised prices at a pace that left many people unable to buy the most essential products.

The defeats on the battlefield and the economic hardships at home increased political tensions between various sectors of society. On the one hand, Nicholas insisted that to win the war he had to govern more dictatorially than ever before. On the other hand, the Duma and local institutions such as the zemstvos, and some non-governmental bodies, increased their sphere of activities in the hope of finding ways to cope with the numerous problems facing the country.

The nefarious influence of Rasputin

The autocrat took his role as Commander in Chief seriously and in August 1915 he moved to Mogilev, where the military headquarters were located. He received daily reports on the military situation, but left the conduct of the war to General M. V. Alekseev, who was the actual Commander in Chief. The Tsar’s presence in Mogilev did not lift the spirits of the troops or the people, and did not lead to victories against the German army. On the contrary, disgruntlement with the authorities increased as news spread of the growing influence at the tsarist court of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin, an unkempt and semi-literate monk whose rise to prominence in the late imperial period is one of the more bizarre indications of the degenerate state of Russian politics.

Not much is known about Rasputin’s early life. He was born in 1872 in the province of Tobolsk, 250 miles east of the Ural Mountains; as a young man, he acquired a reputation for horse-stealing and lust. In the early 1890s, he was married and sired three children, but neither marriage nor fatherhood restrained his search for sexual adventures. His wife did not mind. ‘He has enough for all,’ she explained. At some point, Rasputin underwent a religious experience of sorts. He joined an illegal mystical sect and disappeared from Siberia. For a few years, he adopted the lifestyle of the stranniki (holy wanderers), ascetics who traveled throughout the country and lived on charity. After two pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rasputin showed up at the religious academy in St. Petersburg in December 1903. The monk Illiodor, who met him at the time, remembered him as a ‘stocky peasant of middle height, with ragged and dirty hair falling over his shoulders, tangled beard, and steely-grey eyes, deep set under the bushy eyebrows, which sometimes almost sank into pin points, and a strong body odor.’ Illiodor and other clergymen, impressed by Rasputin’s declaration that he wished to repent for his sins by serving God, helped him get settled in St. Petersburg.

Somehow, Rasputin persuaded dignitaries in the capital that he could perform miracles. He first demonstrated his skills by allegedly curing a sick dog beloved by Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich. Late in 1905, Rasputin was introduced to the Tsar and Tsarina, and immediately captivated the royal couple by stopping the bleeding of their only son, Alexis, who suffered from hemophilia. Apparently, Rasputin achieved the feat by means of hypnosis; there is evidence that such a procedure can work. In any case, the Tsarina concluded that Rasputin ‘was a holy man, almost a Christ.’ She also interpreted his appearance at the court as a sign of the mystical union between the peasants and the autocracy; a man of the people, she reasoned, had come to save the dynasty.

Rasputin conducted innumerable affairs, often with ladies close to the imperial court who were convinced that God revealed himself in his words and that his ‘kisses and embraces sanctified each of his faithful disciples.’ Some men actually felt honored to be cuckolded by the lascivious monk. However, many people in St. Petersburg society, including respected political leaders, were scandalized and publicly denounced Rasputin as a ‘fornicator of human souls and bodies.’ None of the expressions of outrage bothered the Tsarina. In fact, during the Tsar’s long absences at the front she relied more than ever on the ‘holy monk’s’ advice as she played a growing role in shaping domestic policies. Early in 1916, for example, the Tsarina urged Nicholas to appoint the incompetent Boris Stürmer as Prime Minister because he greatly valued Rasputin and ‘completely believes in [his] wonderful, God-sent wisdom.’ Unfortunately for Russia—and for the autocracy—Nicholas heeded her advice.

Even archconservatives who revered the autocracy and scorned liberalism and democracy could not bear the embarrassment of this state of affairs. Convinced that Rasputin was undermining the monarchy as well as the state, in December 1916 several took it upon themselves to assassinate the monk. Prince Felix Yusupov, who was married to one of the Tsar’s nieces, organized a conspiracy; he invited the ‘Holy Devil’ to his home for a party. The host plied Rasputin with poisoned wine and cakes, which the monk devoured with few ill effects. Yusupov then fired several shots into the monk, and with the help of the other conspirators, dumped him in the Neva River. They had hoped that the murder of Rasputin would impel conservatives to join a movement to save the monarchy. It was too late. The people of Russia were thoroughly disillusioned with the war and refused to tolerate the hardships it had caused any longer. Only the Tsar and Tsarina and their most loyal followers continued to believe that Russia was pursuing a path that would lead to victory.

The government flounders

The signs of political disarray were visible at all levels of government. Ministers who had been appointed on the recommendation of the Tsarina and Rasputin often remained in office for short periods, only to be followed by even more incompetent successors. A. D. Protopopov, the Minister of the Interior, was allowed to stay in office for several months in late 1916, even though it had become clear that he no longer was fully in command of his faculties. To describe the many changes in 1915–16 in the cabinet, the ultra-conservative Duma deputy V. M. Purishkevich coined the term ‘ministerial leapfrog,’ which brought ridicule on the Tsar’s conduct of affairs. A fair number of people had even persuaded themselves that Rasputin and a group of pro-Germans at the tsarist court were trying to undermine the war effort. This was not true but that did not change any minds.

Although the Duma surrendered much of its power shortly after the onset of the war, it did not disappear completely from the political arena. After voting for war credits in July 1914 it adjourned, which meant that the government could rule by decree. The deputies continued to meet informally, and they played an active role in organizing relief efforts for people enduring wartime deprivations. At first, most deputies enthusiastically supported Russia’s war effort, but within a year they began to suspect that the authorities were bungling affairs at home and on the battlefield. At one of their informal meetings, they issued a series of requests to the Tsar and the government: to convoke the Duma so that it could participate in running the government, to dismiss the most disreputable ministers, to give non-bureaucratic agencies more leeway in running affairs, and, finally, to form a new government that could count on the confidence and support of the nation. Implementation of these measures would not have required a formal change in the Constitution, which still accorded vast powers to the monarchy, but the Tsar granted only minor concessions, such as the dismissal of a few of the most despised ministers.

The concessions did not satisfy the deputies, who were appalled at the poor showing of the army, the incompetence of the military high command, and the insensitive handling of the refugees who had fled the advancing German army, as well as the failure to put a stop to the spate of anti-Semitic pogroms. In despair, in July 1915 the deputies formed a Progressive Bloc that included members of six of the leading parties in the legislature, and even a few representatives from moderate conservative parties. The bloc called for a government that would enjoy the confidence of the country and honor the rule of law. A majority of the ministers wanted to discuss the demands with the deputies, but the prime minister at the time, Goremykin, who had led the government some years earlier without distinction, denounced the bloc as unconstitutional and prorogued the Duma. This ill-conceived move exacerbated political tensions, which reached a high point on 1 November 1916, when P. N. Miliukov, the leader of the Kadets, publicly raised questions about the loyalty to Russia of the authorities in St. Petersburg. In what the historian Melissa Kirschke Stockdale has described as ‘the most notorious address in the history of the Duma,’ Miliukov cited numerous examples of treachery by senior officials. The most dramatic case involved Goremykin’s successor, Prime Minister Stürmer, whose private secretary, Ivan Manasevich-Manuilov, was accused of being in the pay of the German government. The evidence against the suspect appeared in a German newspaper and he was arrested, but the police released him without putting him on trial, apparently because he had succeeded in handing over some of the money he had received from the Germans to none other than the Prime Minister himself.

Miliukov ended his speech with a recital of Stürmer’s worst decisions and after each one he posed a provocative question: ‘Is this stupidity or is it treason?’ To each question the deputies who filled the hall shouted three different responses: ‘Stupidity!’ ‘Treason!’ ‘Both!’ The government immediately ordered the press not to publish any reports on the speech, but it was a futile gesture. Word of the speech reached the public when enterprising citizens managed to produce and distribute many thousands of copies. Miliukov was transformed into a national celebrity.

By this time, discontent with the government’s handling of every aspect of the war and the economy was rampant throughout the country. Its clearest manifestation was the increase in industrial strikes. At the beginning of the war, labor had refrained from ordering work stoppages and not until the spring of 1915 was this policy abandoned. Throughout 1915, over one thousand strikes broke out, involving 550,000 workers. That number rose somewhat in 1916 and the unrest became even more extensive during the first two months of 1917. On the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, close to 140,000 workers, from almost half the factories in the capital, left their jobs. In mid-February, some 84,000 walked out, bringing fifty-two factories to a halt. On the whole, during the war the strikers focused much more on economic than domestic political demands and at times the people who left their jobs voiced hostility toward the foreign enemy, Germany. Whatever the motive, the increasing willingness of workers to engage in illegal strikes was an ominous sign.

The last Tsar

It is difficult to predict the outbreak of a revolution. Hardships may be intense and many people may find themselves in dire straits, but the decision to defy state authority brings enormous risks and is rarely planned. Revolutions generally break out after an unexpected incident arouses mass anger. Certainly, in the early days of 1917, no one predicted the kind of upheaval that soon enveloped the Russian Empire. Even Lenin, probably the most dedicated student and the most fervent advocate of revolution of his time, could not read the writing on the wall. P. B. Axelrod, a leading Menshevik, said of him that: ‘… there is not another man who for twenty-four hours of the day is taken up with the revolution, who has no other thoughts but thoughts of revolution, and who, even in his sleep, dreams of nothing but revolution. Just try and handle such a fellow.’ Nevertheless, in a lecture to young workers in Zurich in January 1917, Lenin predicted that only his listeners would have the good fortune to witness the ‘… victory of socialism. We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.’

Lenin cannot be faulted for failing to foresee the evolution of events in Russia. The upheaval that began in Petrograd late in February 1917 and led to two revolutions—the first for democracy and the second for socialism—was unexpected, leaderless, and spontaneous. Many historians and participants in the revolutionary events (on both the Right and the Left) reject an explanation that stresses spontaneity: it makes the historical process too prosaic and lacking in purposefulness. Thus, Leon Trotsky, who became the second most important leader of Bolshevism and wrote a stirring history of 1917, contended that although no Bolshevik leaders of the first rank were in Petrograd in early 1917, the workers who staged the demonstrations had been schooled in the ideology of Bolshevism and had gained revolutionary experience in 1905 under the guidance of Lenin’s party. As a consequence, the workers in the streets of Petrograd were class-conscious activists driven by firmly held convictions. On the other hand, George Katkov, a learned historian and devotee of the monarchical principle and the Romanov dynasty, contended that the blame for the autocracy’s collapse must be placed on the liberals, and even more so, on the machinations of the German government. The liberals’ relentless campaign and numerous intrigues against the government during the wartime years had undermined public confidence in the authorities. At the same time, the German government, according to Katkov, in an effort to subvert Russia’s war effort, had given substantial sums of money to Russian revolutionaries in 1916 to enable them to mobilize the masses for demonstrations against the regime; those demonstrations evolved into the revolutionary upheaval of 1917.

The Provisional Government

Long before that bloodletting, soon after the Tsar’s abdication, the Duma leadership had settled on a provisional government led by Prince G. E. Lvov, a Kadet who was well regarded because of his extensive work with charitable organizations and service as Chairman of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos. By all accounts, he was well-meaning and eager to serve his country, but unfortunately for Russia he lacked the attributes of leadership; he was neither charismatic nor interested in making the critical decisions that were needed to calm the people and stabilize the nation after the turbulence of the revolution. Despite the various public positions he had occupied, his experience in administrative work was minimal; he did not consider this a drawback, because he had great faith in the ‘sagacity and good will of the people.’ But he had no confidence in the central government’s ability to solve any of the problems it faced. One of his first statements on assuming the office of Prime Minister was so insipid that it is surprising that he lasted in the highest office in the land as long as he did, about four months. ‘The process of the Great Revolution,’ he declared, ‘is not yet completed, yet each day that we live through strengthens our faith in the inexhaustible power of the Russian people, its political wisdom, the greatness of its soul.’ It was widely believed that Miliukov, the most powerful person in the Kadet Party, had pressed Lvov’s candidacy for Prime Minister because he knew the prince would be a figurehead and that he—Miliukov—would become the ‘power behind the throne.’ Miliukov assumed the critical position of Foreign Minister and after considerable wrangling between the liberals and the soviet, one socialist, Alexander Kerensky, joined the cabinet as Minister of Justice. The government could thus claim to be a genuine coalition representing different points of view.

In one of its first actions, the Provisional Government issued its program, which seemed to augur well for the emergence of a democratic Russia. It extended amnesty to all citizens imprisoned for political or religious reasons. It guaranteed freedom of speech and unionization, and legalized strikes, and promised to abolish all restrictions based on social, religious, or national criteria. The government assured the nation that it would remain in power only until a constituent assembly, expected to meet on 30 September and to be elected on the basis of universal, direct, equal, and secret vote, had decided on a constitution and on the form of government for the country. The question of how to deal with the distribution of the land—the most pressing demand of the peasants, by far the largest social group in the country—would be examined immediately, but the final solution of that problem was to be left to the assembly. The government promised to take some measures before then to improve conditions of the poorer peasants.

It was a promising beginning, but it soon became clear that the road to democracy would not be smooth. The Petrograd soviet, which could count on popular support, quickly became a powerful voice of the Left, and its influence grew dramatically once the leaders of the various socialist movements returned from exile. Several were strong personalities, with wide influence in radical circles. Unsurprisingly, it did not take long for the soviet to clash with the Provisional Government over several major issues. The most controversial pertained to the continuation of the war against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. The Left denounced the conflict as imperialistic and called for an immediate peace ‘without annexations and indemnities on the basis of self-determination of peoples.’ Miliukov, however, championed continuation of the war. As already noted, he was the most influential member of the government; he claimed that Russia could not abandon its allies, but he also made no effort to conceal his determination to gain control over Constantinople and the straits. The opposition to him in left-wing circles became so intense that in May he had to resign.

Kerensky now became the dominant figure in the government. Only thirty-six years old, he had distinguished himself as a lawyer and gained a national reputation as a defender of several revolutionaries charged with political crimes, and of M. M. Beilis, a Jew accused in 1913 of ritual murder. Kerensky was a man of the Left and had joined the party of the Trudoviki, who were somewhat more moderate than the Socialist Revolutionaries. His success as a lawyer seems to have gone to his head, and he nurtured great ambitions. He was a fiery orator who, according to the British journalist C. A. Wilson, in Petrograd in 1917, succeeded, at least for a few weeks, in inspiring the troops with his rhetoric:

Crowds gathered for hours to catch a glimpse of him. His path was everywhere strewn with flowers. Soldiers ran for miles after his motor car, trying to shake his hand or kiss the hem of his garment. At his meetings in the great halls of Moscow the audiences worked themselves up into paroxysms of enthusiasm and adoration.

In contrast to most of his left-wing colleagues, Kerensky was no less eager than Miliukov to pursue military victories against the Central Powers but the Petrograd soviet became such a powerful political force that on the most important issues the government could not afford to adopt policies that ran counter to its wishes. On several occasions, the soviet acted entirely on its own, trespassing on the authority of the government even in military matters. The most dramatic and potentially most harmful example was the soviet’s issuance, on 1 March, of Order Number 1. Although addressed to the ‘Garrison of the Petrograd Military District,’ it was quickly assumed to be directed at all the armed forces. It called on soldiers to elect committees that would obey the soviet and to maintain control over all weapons—specifically, not to turn them over to officers. Furthermore, it advised soldiers to follow the orders of their officers and the Provisional Government, but only to the extent that they did not conflict with those of the soviet. Finally, Order Number 1 urged soldiers not to salute officers when off duty and warned officers not to treat men harshly. Clearly, the soviet had arrogated to itself powers normally exercised by the government, and it soon became evident that a novel system of power existed in Russia, which came to be known as dvoevlastie, or ‘dual power.’ A. I. Guchkov, the Minister of War at the time, was appalled and claimed (on 9 March) that the ‘Provisional Government exists only so long as it is permitted to do so by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. In particular, in the military department, it is possible at present to issue only such orders as basically do not contradict the decision of the above-mentioned Soviet.’

Lenin returns to Russia

It was an arrangement that undermined stability and it could not be tolerated for long. Neither the government nor the soviet boasted a leader of sufficient stature, willpower, and daring to attempt a decisive blow against the other side. Lenin, in Switzerland, was eager to return to Russia to support his Bolshevik colleagues, but a glance at the map will reveal the difficulties he faced; either he would have to cross a country at war with his own country, or he would have to travel via France, which would involve a long delay in reaching his homeland. In any case, France would not be eager to send an influential radical opposed to the war to its ally at a time of turmoil. After some hesitation, several senior German officials concluded that it would be to their advantage to have him and a few dozen other socialists in Russia cross their country to reach Russia, where they could stir up trouble and press the authorities to sue for peace; this diversion from the war would give the Central Powers the opportunity to concentrate on defeating the Western powers. To avoid the charge of dealing with the enemy, Lenin insisted that the train on which he traveled be granted the rights of extraterritoriality and that there be no passport controls. Swiss socialists made the final arrangements for Lenin, and he and thirty-one other exiles of various socialist persuasions crossed Germany into Sweden and from there to Petrograd.

On his arrival in the Russian capital on 3 April, Lenin discovered, to his dismay, that even the leaders of his own party (including, incidentally, Joseph Stalin) favored a policy of conditional support for the new regime, although they were trying to apply pressure to extricate Russia from the war. Rejecting this approach as totally misguided, Lenin demanded that his colleagues adopt a radically different stance. His program was presented in detail in the so-called ‘April Theses’ that were issued soon after his arrival in Petrograd. The Theses denounced the imperialist war, which, Lenin insisted, could be ended only after the overthrow of capitalism, and they called on soldiers at the front to fraternize with the enemy to prepare the way for peace. The Theses also urged that support for the Provisional Government be ended and that preparations be made for the assumption of power by the soviet. As he put it, ‘the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sectors of the peasants.’ Finally, the Theses committed the revolutionary government, as soon as it took power, to nationalize the large estates, the vast majority of which belonged to the nobility, and to hand over the land to the Soviets of Farmhands Deputies, which would ensure that a new agrarian policy was adopted for the benefit of the peasantry.

In his ‘First Letter on Tactics,’ published in late April, Lenin acknowledged that his proposals seemed to violate the Marxist doctrine that the working class should take over the government only after control was held by the bourgeoisie and a capitalist economic system established. In a striking confession of opportunism, or pragmatism—which word is chosen depends on one’s political convictions—he declared that ‘theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life.’ One must not, he continued, ‘sacrifice living Marxism to a dead letter.’ In any case, the working class in Russia would seize power together with the peasants, who were also part of the bourgeoisie. A seizure of power in collaboration with the peasantry therefore could be construed as a step toward ‘completing’ the bourgeois-democratic revolution, ‘Why,’ asked Lenin, ‘should this be impossible?’

Even his closest colleagues in the Bolshevik Party found Lenin’s scheme fantastic, and many wondered whether their leader had lost touch with reality, but he was not easily dissuaded and worked diligently to convince party members that his strategy was based on a realistic analysis of conditions in the Russian Empire. He completed a long essay, ‘State and Revolution. The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution,’ in which he went to great pains to demonstrate that he had by no means abandoned Marxism. It also demonstrated that he was a very complicated political activist: despite the hard-headed strategy and tactics he had proposed for the seizure of power by the proletariat, he remained a starry-eyed utopian, whose plans for Russia amounted to nothing less than a perfect society on earth, the kind of society that John Reed, the American journalist reporting on events in Russia in 1917, found so appealing.

Actually, Lenin had written much of ‘State and Revolution’ before the upheaval of 1917, at a time when he was pessimistic about living long enough to witness the triumph of socialism. The work has often been dismissed as an aberration totally unrepresentative of his convictions, but in fact it accurately conveys a streak in his thinking that can also be discerned in his writings of the 1890s and 1918. The utopian impulse was part of his psychological make-up and seems always to have been a part of his political vision. Readers who keep this characteristic in mind will find it easier to understand his strategy and tactics from 1917 until his death in 1924.

Basing himself on Marx, Lenin postulated a traditional two-stage development by Russia toward the final goal of a classless society, although he was not precise in delineating between the bourgeois and the proletarian phases, apparently because the first would gradually grow into the second. After the destruction of bourgeois parliamentarism, the victorious proletariat would establish a democratic republic modeled on the Paris Commune of 1871. The standing army would be abolished, and functionaries would cease to act like ‘bureaucrats’ or ‘officials’ and would be subject to recall at any time. Their salaries would be no larger than that of the average worker, and parliamentary institutions would be replaced by ‘working bodies, executive and legislative at the same time.’ Private ownership of production would, of course, be eliminated. Once resistance to the new order is overcome, ‘the state… ceases to exist’ and ‘it becomes possible to speak of freedom’:

[Under] communism people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copybook maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.

All citizens would be employees of the state; the ‘accounting and control’ necessary to administer the functions of society would be so simplified that any ‘literate person’ would be able to perform them; all he would need was a ‘knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and [of] issuing appropriate receipts.’ Several times in the essay, Lenin categorically denied that he was a utopian dreamer unaware of human failings. On the contrary, he acknowledged that during the initial period of the new order some citizens might indulge in excesses and might violate the ‘rules of social intercourse,’ but he was certain that the culprits would be stopped without recourse to a ‘special apparatus of suppression.’ The initiative would be taken ‘by the armed people themselves, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society, interfere to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted.’ Eventually, the ‘excesses will inevitably begin to wither away.’Lenin could say this with utter confidence because he believed that the source of all evil, exploitation, would have been extinguished; everyone would receive from society ‘as much as he has given to it. Equality apparently reigns supreme.’

That a hardheaded person such as Lenin, who prided himself on his rationality and made a point of dismissing wishful thinking of every kind, could spout such romantic views is puzzling. But a close study of his personality is not easy because—like the eminent revolutionary Robespierre—he went to great lengths to suppress his emotions. We now know that he was highly complex and moved by radically different impulses. One such impulse was rage, which clearly affected many of his judgments and actions. How else can we explain his intemperate denunciations of capitalism and bourgeois society? Not content with pointing out their economic and social inequities, he condemned the capitalist system as a ‘slave society, since the “free” workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are “entitled” only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery.’ Proletarian democracy, he asserted on another occasion, was a ‘million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy. Indeed, ‘[the] more highly developed a [bourgeois] democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms or civil war in connection with any profound divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie.’

That Lenin was at times consumed with rage is also suggested by his mode of writing, which was polemical in the extreme. He quoted his opponents often and at great length, and then heaped abuse on them without ever responding to the substance of their arguments. Thus, after breaking with Karl Kautsky, whom he had revered for many years as the great theorist of socialism, Lenin denounced him for expressing disapproval of Bolshevik violations of democracy as a ‘Marxist in words and a lackey of the bourgeoisie in deeds,’ as a ‘reactionary, an enemy of the working class, a henchman of the bourgeoisie,’ as ‘our revolutionary Judas Kautsky.’ On the inside cover of a book he owned, Lenin wrote that ‘out of every hundred Bolsheviks, seventy are fools and twenty-nine rogues, and only one a real socialist.’ Frequently, he referred to ‘vulgar, stinking liberalism’ and dismissed those he disagreed with as ‘windbags,’ ‘opportunists,’ ‘rogues,’ ‘scoundrels,’ ‘liars,’ ‘swine,’ or ‘poseurs.’ In conversations with colleagues, he would deliver tirades against his enemies during which he could barely control his attacks on those who disagreed with him. Invariably, his outbursts exhausted him and plunged him into listlessness and depression. It was his wife, Krupskaia, who first attributed Lenin’s frenzied and reckless attacks on all who in any way challenged him to his ‘rage.’

His inner rage expressed itself most dramatically in his penchant for violence. ‘Major questions in the life of nations,’ he contended more than once, ‘are settled only by force.’ He defended revolutionary violence as a legitimate response to the violence of ‘reactionary classes,’ but his advocacy of forceful measures was actually much broader than this argument suggests. In a private letter of 11 February 1905, Lenin denounced comrades who had hesitated to organize circles in Russia to promote the Bolshevik cause, and then called for their physical elimination:

I am for shooting on the spot anyone [referring to other Bolsheviks] who presumes to say that there are no people to be had [to work for the Bolshevik cause]. The people in Russia are legion; all we have to do is to recruit young people more widely and boldly, more boldly and widely, and again more widely and again more boldly… This is a time of war.

By contrast, as an analyst of the state of affairs in 1917, and as a political tactician, Lenin was a genius. He sensed before anyone else that the Russian Empire was falling apart, giving the Bolsheviks an opening to seize power. In the weeks after Lenin first offered this analysis, developments throughout the country bore out his perspicacity. Shortly after the collapse of tsarism, people in numerous localities took the initiative in forming local councils or soviets that assumed the functions of government in their areas. In the army, discipline broke down as soldiers, in growing numbers, came to view the war as futile; many deserted and went back to their villages to seize land from the landlords. Workers in numerous factories took control after ejecting their supervisors and bosses from the premises. Finally, in some regions—most notably Finland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Transcaucasia, and Poland—national movements demanded autonomy or complete separation from the empire.

The peasants rebel

The role of the peasants in the country’s social and political disintegration after the collapse of tsarism merits special attention, if for no other reason than that they constituted 80 percent of the population. Despite the activism of the peasants during the Revolution of 1905, there were many within the ruling groups who still did not understand the depth of discontent in the countryside. Most peasants believed fervently that all land belonged to those who worked it and therefore demanded that all the land held by landlords, the state, and the Church should be handed over to them. The liberals and the various socialist parties all favored changes in the system of landholding. Some proposed nationalization of the land, some wished to distribute all land to the peasants, and still others called for more modest changes. In short, the land question was extraordinarily complicated and the discussions over how to proceed promised to be lengthy and contentious.

The peasants were in no mood to wait. They wanted the land issue to be resolved quickly, and since they considered themselves full citizens with the right to play a significant role in shaping the political and legal order of Russia, they increasingly took matters into their own hands. Within weeks of the collapse of tsarism, peasants in many parts of the country formed committees to set the agenda with regard to the land. In certain areas, women, who made up two-thirds of the workforce, because so many men were serving at the front, participated in local committees pressing for rapid change. Returning soldiers were another potent force in supporting peasant demands. It did not take long for peasant dissatisfaction to spill over into direct action to bring about change. Such a turn of events was not unprecedented; between 1910 and 1914 there were 17,000 incidents of peasant unrest in the European areas of Russia alone. In 1917, peasants resorted to direct action on a far greater scale.

The Provisional Government was incapable of stopping any of these mass movements. To complicate matters, it vigorously pursued policies—such as continuation of the war—that provoked a new round of street demonstrations. Foreign Minister Miliukov, after refusing to renounce his support for Russia’s annexationist aims in the war, was disavowed by the Provisional Government and, as noted above, by early May he had no choice but to resign. At about the same time, Guchkov, the Minister of War, followed suit, for reasons already mentioned. In the reconstituted government, six of fifteen ministers were socialists, which led some to believe that it would now be possible to find common ground with the soviet, but it soon became evident that on some issues the government would be riven by strife and that on others it would adopt policies not very different from those of the previous one. On 7 July, Lvov resigned because he considered the new government’s policies too radical. He was replaced by Kerensky, who, despite being a leftist, believed that he could rally the troops and lead them to victory against the Central Powers. The radical Left came to despise him, as is indicated by Trotsky’s sneering description of his attempt to encourage the fighting forces:

Kerensky toured the front, adjured and threatened the troops, kneeled, kissed the earth—in a word, clowned it in every possible way, while he failed to answer any of the questions tormenting the soldiers. He had deceived himself by his cheap effects, and assured of the support of the congress of Soviets, ordered the offensive.

Early in July, the army went on the offensive against the Germans. Initially, it scored some victories, but as soon as it encountered stiff resistance, the weakness of the Russians emerged. Discipline collapsed and they were soon routed. In a desperate attempt to restore discipline, the government reinstituted the death penalty for serious violations of military regulations, but the measure had little effect. Morale could not be revived and discipline could not be restored. At the start of the revolution in March, the army did not want to protect the tsarist order, and four months later many soldiers had lost interest in defending Russia’s borders.

The July days

Early in July, a new wave of unrest erupted in Petrograd. To this day, its origins remain controversial, although no one disputes its importance. In his autobiography, Trotsky insisted that the demonstrations were ‘spontaneous, at the initiative of the masses.’ However, some historians contend that the Bolsheviks instigated the upheaval; they had waged an intense campaign of propaganda among the already radicalized soldiers in support of the party’s demand of ‘All Power to the Soviets,’ and now that demand was especially appealing to disgruntled soldiers and workers. The government’s decision to send a sizable number of troops stationed in the capital to the front in preparation for an offensive against the Germans proved to be the spark that set off the unrest, especially since many suspected that the government was eager to rid Petrograd of the soldiers, who were strong supporters of the Bolsheviks. The Leninists had succeeded in making many converts in the First Machine Gun Regiment, which was housed in the Vyborg District, not far from factories with large numbers of radical workers. On the other hand, the most persuasive argument against the claim that the Bolsheviks instigated the July unrest is that Lenin was in Finland at the time, recuperating from a slight illness, and that his followers were unlikely to have initiated a major action without his presence—he was the one indispensable person in the Bolshevik Party.

No one denies that the Bolsheviks played a major role in the upheaval once it had started. On 3 July, soldiers in the local garrison, enraged over worsening economic conditions and the defeats at the front, took to the streets under banners that called on the soviet to take power. Workers quickly joined the movement and by the second day the crowds in the streets were estimated to number around 500,000. The demonstrators, many of whom carried weapons, scuffled with the police and soldiers loyal to the government; when the unrest ended, several scores of people had been killed and over one hundred had been wounded. At the end of the first day, the leaders of the Bolsheviks in Petrograd had officially given their blessing to the action, perhaps because they could not remain aloof from a movement that echoed their own demands that power be ceded to the soviet. It would be odd if such encouragement did not give a boost to the demonstrators.

The Petrograd soviet, dominated by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, vainly pleaded with the demonstrators to end the street action. At one point, the Socialist Revolutionary Minister of Agriculture, Chernov, tried to convince a large crowd in the streets of the capital that seizure of power by the soviet at that time was inadvisable, because the country was not prepared for so radical a shift in the political system. The angry demonstrators were not persuaded by his argument; they surrounded him and after searching him, several accused him of being ‘one of the people who shoots at the people.’ A worker shook his fists and shouted, ‘Take the power, you son of a bitch, when it is given to you.’ Some members of the crowd then seized the minister and after tearing his coat pushed him into a car and vowed to hold him until the soviet replaced the Provisional Government. Fortunately for Chernov, Trotsky, who was greatly admired by the demonstrators, arrived on the scene and managed to pry the prisoner loose from his captors and bring him back to the Tauride Palace, the building housing the soviet.

The government clamped down on the demonstration by arresting several of its leaders and seeking to take the leaders of some of the radical parties into custody. Several of them, including Lenin, went into hiding, but Trotsky, among others, was jailed and remained in prison for several weeks. Although the uprising had failed in its immediate objective, it had revealed the boldness of the radical movement and put the Provisional Government on notice that its policies had not succeeded in restoring calm.

Most of the news shortly after the July Days, on the economy as well as on the war, continued to be bad, yet one unexpected revelation gave the authorities a ray of hope that they might be able to weather the storm. On 8 July, the sensational, ultraconservative newspaper Zhivoe slovo accused the Bolsheviks of having received substantial sums of money from the German government, and claimed that the infusion of foreign gold had enabled the Bolsheviks to wage their campaign against the Provisional Government. The Germans’ motive, of course, was to undermine Russia’s war effort. Within hours of the appearance of these charges, other newspapers repeated them, some now referring to Lenin as a ‘provocateur.’ Among the political class, the revelation became the central topic of conversation. Even Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism and former ally of Lenin, found the evidence in Zhivoe slovo convincing. Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks vehemently denied the charges, but few of his political opponents found those denials persuasive.

The evidence presented at the time was meager, but years later scholars found some documents that give credence to the accusations. The person who helped arrange the transfer of money to the Bolsheviks is now widely accepted to have been Parvus, the socialist who first advanced the ‘theory of permanent revolution.’ Parvus was intelligent and clever, but he was also an adventurer and intriguer with few scruples about how he pursued his political goals. He had convinced himself that by means of his own self-aggrandizement he would be able to advance the cause of socialism. Moreover, unlike most radicals of his generation, Parvus was not content to restrict himself to politics; he wanted to live the good life as well as influence the course of history, both of which he thought he could do by amassing a fortune. Hence, he engaged in economic speculation and cultivated high government officials in various countries; by 1914, while only in his forties, he had demonstrated exceptional skill in both endeavors, which was enough to raise eyebrows among his socialist colleagues. He came to be known as a socialist tycoon, and his behavior resembled the Marxist caricature of capitalists. When he went to Zurich in 1915, for example, he stayed at the most luxurious hotel, was almost always surrounded by corpulent blonde women, and revealed a penchant for big, expensive cigars and champagne. By the time of his death in 1924, Parvus had led so variegated a career that he was reputed to have been, at one and the same time, a speculator, swindler, Turkish agent, Russian agent, lackey of imperialism, and, above all, traitor to socialism.

Parvus’s opportunity to shape the course of history presented itself after the outbreak of World War I. Convinced that Germany, with its powerful labor movement, represented progress and that autocratic Russia embodied black reaction, he immediately set about trying to forge an alliance between the German government and European—especially Russian—socialists. Such a collaboration was called for, he reasoned, because the military defeat of tsarism would unleash the revolution in Russia, which, in turn, would set off a chain of events that would end in the socialist transformation of Germany and eventually Western Europe.

In February 1915, Parvus established close contact with the German Foreign Office, which he persuaded of the soundness of at least one part of his plan: that Russian socialists could help weaken their nation’s war effort if they possessed sufficient means to mount a massive propaganda campaign among the masses. As a first instalment, the Foreign Office gave Parvus a million marks, and so began his travels to wherever Russian socialists were to be found. At their meetings, he argued political issues with them and lavished funds on them, secure in the conviction that money was a potent political weapon. He also spent a considerable amount of time in Berlin, where he was several times received by dignitaries, who listened to him with great respect and passed his thoughts on to the Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. The safe conduct through Germany granted to Lenin in 1917, and the money given to the Bolsheviks that year, were the logical culmination of this bizarre sequence of events. Notably, a document drafted on 23 August (commonly noted as 5 September in the Gregorian calendar) 1917, by Minister of Foreign Affairs Baron R. von Kühlmann, which was discovered after World War II, indicates that the Bolsheviks ‘received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels and under varying labels.’ Thus, Parvus served Bolshevism not only as a theorist but also in more practical ways.

How much money the Bolsheviks received from Germany is not known and it is therefore impossible to gauge its impact. However, it would probably be a mistake to conclude that the Bolsheviks would not have succeeded in seizing power without it. The charge leveled at Lenin that he was a ‘German agent’ is not tenable. He acted as he did because he believed in the desirability and necessity of a Bolshevik revolution. He succeeded, primarily because of the dreadful conditions in Russia and the innumerable missteps of the men who took over the government after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II.

Democracy endangered: the Kornilov affair

Two months after the July Days, the Provisional Government suffered its most serious blow during a series of strange events that later came to be known as the Kornilov Affair. This blow was delivered not by the Left but by conservatives who had concluded that Kerensky was not capable of restoring stability to Russia. Kerensky, for his part, made one mistake after another in dealing with the challenge from the Right, which undermined his position among liberals and moderate socialists and sealed the fate of the attempt to steer Russia along a democratic path. The affair is also important because it sheds light on the type of leaders—self-serving, adventurous, and even reckless—that had reached the heights of power.

At the beginning of September, it appeared as though the Provisional Government might be able to weather the revolutionary storm. The insurrection of early July had been suppressed, the most important Bolshevik leaders were either in prison or in hiding, the agrarian disturbances had subsided, and a government committee was studying the explosive land question. There were even some signs that the military situation was improving. It seemed that the army might succeed in reestablishing some semblance of discipline in its ranks. More importantly, American troops were arriving in France in growing numbers and their presence, it was thought, would decrease German pressure on the Eastern Front and give the Russian army more time to recover from its defeats and internal turmoil. There was growing optimism that if the government could hold out until the Constituent Assembly met and produced a progressive constitution, the liberal democratic aspirations of the revolution might still be realized.

The unexpected Kornilov rebellion of 27 August undermined the delicate political stability that prevailed in Russia. It aroused fears of counterrevolution and raised new questions about the ability of Kerensky, who had been appointed Prime Minister when Lvov resigned on 20 July, to preserve the gains of the revolution. In political circles, Kerensky was even suspected of having conspired with General Kornilov to enhance his own power. The turmoil that gripped the country revitalized the Left and particularly the Bolsheviks, who exploited the fear that the Right would return to power. Two years after going into exile, Kerensky correctly referred to the Kornilov Affair as the ‘prelude to Bolshevism,’ but because of its complexity, some aspects of the affair still remain unclear.

With good reason, Kerensky had concluded in the summer of 1917 that a major weakness of his government was the lack of support by an assembly representative of the people. Such support, it was generally assumed, would be provided by the Constituent Assembly, but it proved difficult to organize a national election quickly, and hence the voting was postponed several times. Kerensky, therefore, conceived of a way to demonstrate right away that the Russian people supported the government; he would summon a State Conference to be held in Moscow for three days in mid-August. The government made an effort to achieve a balance between the Right and Left among the 2,414 delegates by including in the conference representatives of the trade unions, cooperatives, and soviets; but the moderates and conservatives, who comprised members of the four Dumas, the representatives from the army, the universities, the liberal professions, and various associations of landowners, exceeded their proportion of the population at large. Consequently, the conference was unlikely to be looked upon with favor by the masses, who now played a crucial role in national affairs.

To enhance the prestige of the conference and to demonstrate the wide support for his government, Kerensky invited the Commander in Chief, General Lavr Georgevich Kornilov, to address the delegates. It was one of his greatest mistakes as Prime Minister. Although Kerensky had appointed Kornilov to the highest position in the armed forces during the grave military crisis that followed the collapse of the July upheaval, the general was not the type of person to be forever grateful for the promotion. He had his own agenda and, perhaps more importantly, he had his own ambitions, which were boundless. One of his virtues, in Kerensky’s view, was his greater receptivity to liberal tendencies than his military colleagues. Moreover, Kerensky considered Kornilov a more effective commander than General A. A. Brusilov, who did not have the personal qualities to inspire the troops to carry out orders issued by officers. Kornilov had gained a legendary reputation for his dramatic escape from Austrian captivity in 1916. During the early days of the revolution in February 1917, he had further endeared himself to the Provisional Government with his criticism of the Petrograd Soviet, which, he charged, exercised more authority over the troops than the generals.

Kerensky’s promotion of Kornilov to the post of Commander-in-Chief was a bold but risky decision by the Prime Minister, because in matters political the new leader of the armed forces showed astonishing naïveté. He lacked the ability to express himself diplomatically, and his unrestrained language invariably offended officials. He relied heavily on his public relations official, V. S. Zavoiko, who played a sinister role throughout the affair and formulated Kornilov’s views and requests in provocative language. Patriotic to the core, brave, disinterested in personal wealth, unconcerned for his own safety, Kornilov aimed above all at revitalizing Russia’s fighting force. However, to achieve his aim he could not avoid involvement in politics, an area about which he was amazingly ignorant. For example, he did not understand that there were crucial differences between the relatively moderate socialists, who were dominant in the soviets, and the Bolsheviks.

That the world of politics was alien to him became evident when he indicated that he would accept the post of Supreme Commander only under the following extraordinary conditions: that he would retain responsibility to his own conscience and to the people at large; that he would be given absolute freedom in the issuance of field orders and in the appointment of senior commanders; and that the death penalty would be reintroduced wherever army units were stationed, not merely at the front. In short, he did not accept the principle that the military was subordinate to the country’s political leaders. Surprisingly, Kerensky seems to have accepted the ‘substance’ of Kornilov’s conditions, although he vigorously objected to the ‘ultimative manner’ in which they were presented.

Inevitably, several squabbles arose between Kornilov and Kerensky over appointments and other matters, but they were able to settle their differences because they concurred on two essential points: they wanted to reestablish discipline in the army and order in the country. Both also considered the other necessary to attain these goals. Kerensky had the requisite political experience and public support; Kornilov the military. However, the meteoric rise of Kornilov’s popularity, and the frequent rumors of imminent coups, prompted Kerensky to view the general as a dangerous rival. Kornilov developed a hearty dislike for the Prime Minister, who struck him as an eternal talker who accomplished little.

The tension between Kerensky and Kornilov became evident to the public in mid-August, when both men appeared at the Moscow State Conference. Contrary to the Prime Minister’s plans, the conference quickly revealed that it would not provide the government with the support he had hoped for. Instead of serving as a rallying point for national unity, the gathering tended to bring into even sharper relief the unbridgeable cleavage that divided Russian society. When Kerensky appeared on the podium, the Left and some moderates rose and cheered; the right side of the hall remained seated and silent. On Kornilov’s entry, the Right accorded him a resounding ovation, while Kerensky’s—more numerous—supporters remained silent.

It had already been apparent on 13 August, when Kornilov arrived in Moscow, that many Russians looked to him as their potential savior. There is considerable evidence that members of important business circles in Petrograd and Moscow had been organizing on his behalf for some time, and that they had carefully planned a boisterous reception. As he entered the city, flowers littered the railway station. Crowds of citizens and soldiers lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the hero. A guard of honor composed of officers from the Alexander Military School stood smartly at attention. Various other officers’ organizations sent greetings. A military band played stirring music as Kornilov made his first appearance surrounded by his picturesquely attired Caucasian soldiers. While officers carried Kornilov to the people on their shoulders, a portrait and biography of the hero were widely scattered from automobiles. F. I. Rodichev, a leading Kadet, ended his short address of welcome with the provocative words: ‘Save Russia, and a grateful people will reward you!’

In his opening remarks, Kerensky delivered a vague and fiery speech in which he threatened to put down ‘with blood and iron’ all attempts to overthrow the government, a threat aimed at both Kornilov and the Bolsheviks. General Kornilov’s address dealt with more concrete issues. After painting the condition of the army and the situation at the front in the bleakest colors, he called for the creation of an army based on ‘iron discipline’ in which the prestige of the officers would be restored. He also urged the government to take steps, no matter how harsh, to assure the army of an adequate supply of goods. The Right applauded enthusiastically.

Unexpectedly, the State Conference ended on a conciliatory note. I. G. Tsereteli, a Menshevik and leading spokesman for the Left, and A. A. Bublikov, a leading spokesman for industrial Russia, shook hands on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre. This gesture was meant to symbolize the unity of the nation, ‘the armistice between capital and labor in the name of struggle for Russia.’ In reality, as the British Ambassador to Russia pointed out, the conference accentuated the differences between the various parties. A new governmental crisis was generally expected within a few weeks. Rumors about possible coups d’état were rampant.

Kerensky became increasingly suspicious that a plan was afoot to unseat him. After returning to Petrograd, he told B. V. Savinkov, an adventurer, at one time a revolutionary terrorist, and now the Prime Minister’s right-hand man on military affairs, that at the Moscow State Conference ‘the Counterrevolution had raised its head.’ He was convinced that a diverse group of right-wing conspirators had found a leader around whom they could coalesce: General Kornilov. Which organizations and individuals lent him their active support was still not clear, although it was generally assumed that he could count on General A. S. Lukomsky, his chief of staff. It is now also fairly well established that the League of Officers of the Army and Navy was plotting both in Petrograd and at the Stavka (general headquarters of the armed forces). In addition, suspicion centered on the Council of the Cossack Troops League, which at the time of the Moscow Conference had asserted that ‘General Kornilov cannot be removed.’ Other right-wing groups had issued similar statements.

Although knowledge of the preparations for a plot against Kerensky is still hazy, we know that by late in August military plans had been worked out. On 20 August, an officer arrived at Berdichev with a personal message from Kornilov to General Denikin. It referred to ‘reliable information’ that the Bolsheviks planned ‘a rising’ in the capital within a few days. The Third Cavalry Corps had been sent to Petrograd with orders to ‘crush the uprising, and simultaneously put an end to the soviets.’ Once that objective was achieved, Petrograd was to be declared in a state of war and a new Kornilov Program (content unknown) would be published. Denikin was asked to send a score or more of reliable officers to the capital, where they would be held in readiness for action against an uprising. On 21 August, Quartermaster-General I. P. Romanovsky ordered the distribution of hand grenades to three cavalry units, which were to surround and occupy Petrograd from the south.

At a crucial moment, the Commander-in-Chief received what must have appeared to him as a curious, though welcome, order. On 23 August, Savinkov arrived at the Stavka with a special request from Kerensky. Kornilov was now thoroughly disgusted with the Prime Minister’s indecisiveness and failure to effect any far-reaching measures to restore order and economic efficiency. The general’s mood changed considerably when Savinkov informed him that Kerensky had decided to reestablish capital punishment in areas not directly in the war zone. Furthermore, Savinkov passed on to Kornilov the following additional requests: First, the general was to send the Union of Officers, a certain number of whom were suspected of participating in an anti-government conspiracy, to Moscow, where, Kerensky believed, they would be isolated and thus not in a position to pursue their political goal. Second, Kornilov was to liquidate the political department attached to the Stavka, for the same reason. Third, Kornilov was to send a cavalry corps to Petrograd, to be placed at the government’s disposal. In issuing the third order, Kerensky played right into Kornilov’s hands by moving anti-government troops to the capital.

Strange and confusing as the events of this affair had been up to this point, the most mysterious and bizarre were yet to take place. They are noteworthy because they provide another glimpse into the amateurishness of the country’s leaders, which was probably a consequence of the Tsars’ retention of political power in their hands, which prevented educated citizens from acquiring political experience. On 22 August, the former Procurator of the Holy Synod, V. N. Lvov (not related to the former prime minister) visited Kerensky at the Winter Palace. Posing as the spokesman of important social groups, Lvov offered free advice to the Prime Minister. He told Kerensky that the Provisional Government had lost support among both the Right and the democratic elements. Only by changing its composition could the government be effective. Lvov suggested that elements more moderate than the Kadets needed to be given senior positions. When Kerensky asked Lvov to specify exactly which forces he represented, the latter merely answered that he was backed by a ‘considerable force’ and that he had been instructed to find out whether the Prime Minister was willing to reconstitute the government.

Lvov then proceeded to the Stavka and posed as the fully-empowered emissary of Kerensky. Exactly what Lvov said to Kornilov is not clear, but he seems to have intimated that the government was amenable to the idea of a dictatorship. Kerensky, according to Lvov, was considering three possibilities: the establishment of a new government with himself as dictator; the creation of a new government with unlimited powers, consisting of three or five members, one of whom would be Kornilov; or the appointment of Kornilov as dictator and Supreme Commander of the armed forces. Which of these options, asked Lvov, would the general prefer? Kornilov, elated at Kerensky’s willingness to capitulate peacefully, expressed his approval of the third. The general also asked that Kerensky declare martial law in Petrograd and suggested that both the Prime Minister and Savinkov come to the Stavka, as their safety could not be guaranteed in the capital. The composition of the new government was then freely discussed at headquarters, and it was generally assumed that Kerensky would be named Minister of Justice and Savinkov Minister of War. However, during a conversation with V. S. Zavoiko, Kornilov’s man in charge of public relations, Lvov became convinced that plans were being hatched to assassinate Kerensky.

Lvov hurried to the capital for a second interview with the Prime Minister on the evening of 26 August. When Kerensky learned of Kornilov’s intentions, he was taken aback, and his first thought was to verify Lvov’s message. The affair now took a turn that can only be characterized as bizarre.

After Lvov left his office, Kerensky called Kornilov on the Hughes apparatus (a kind of teletype machine) and impersonated Lvov. He asked the general to confirm the message sent to the Prime Minister. Kerensky, still speaking as Lvov, indicated that the Prime Minister wanted personal confirmation because he did not fully trust Lvov. Kornilov confirmed that Lvov had forwarded his message correctly. At that point, Kerensky identified himself and indicated that he now understood that Lvov had correctly passed Kornilov’s message on to him. The Prime Minister said he would leave for headquarters the next day. It was a brief conversation and there is some question whether either fully understood what the other was saying. Amazingly, Lvov, a man with no authority to conduct high-level negotiations, figured prominently in bringing down the Provisional Government.

Shortly after this conversation on the teletype, Lvov returned to Kerensky’s office to warn the Prime Minister that it would be dangerous for him to go to the Stavka. At that point, Kerensky ordered Lvov’s arrest and decided to deal swiftly with the impending threat to his authority.

At 4 a.m. on 27 August, Kerensky met with his cabinet, which quickly conferred upon him unlimited power to deal with the crisis. Kerensky rejected Savinkov’s advice to negotiate directly with Kornilov as well as Miliukov’s and General Alekseev’s offers to go to military headquarters as mediators. Instead, he sent a message to Kornilov dismissing him as Commander-in-Chief and directing him to hand over his office to General Lukomsky. He also ordered Kornilov to come immediately to Petrograd.

As news of these developments spread, fear gripped the capital. In violation of his promise, Kornilov had appointed General A. M. Krymov commander of the Savage Division, known for its ruthlessness, and ordered him to advance toward the capital, where the Bolsheviks were rumored to be planning an uprising. Petrograd seemed defenseless and many believed that a bloodbath was imminent.

To everyone’s surprise, Kornilov’s rebellion ended without the spilling of a single drop of blood. General Kornilov had not reckoned with the listlessness of his troops, or with the vigorous opposition of the workers. The soviet, controlled by a non-Bolshevik majority, immediately organized workers for defense against the counterrevolution. ‘The Soviet,’ Chernov wrote, ‘did not waste time on words, but acted as it had in the best days of the Revolution.’ It formed a ‘Committee for Struggle with Counterrevolution,’ composed of a wide range of representatives from political parties and trade unions, and it was largely as a result of the efforts of this committee, not the government, that the rebellion was quickly quashed.

Especially effective measures were taken by the railway workers who, heeding the advice of the soviet, crippled the lines of communication and transportation. Some army detachments bound for Petrograd were sent in the wrong direction, realizing the error too late. Tracks were blocked with coaches and in three places were torn up, causing endless delays. Continuous streams of agitators visited the soldiers, urging them to disobey orders. The soviet and the Provisional Government bombarded the soldiers with proclamations bearing the same message. Kornilov’s declarations rarely reached them. A Moslem delegation organized by the soviet was received by the Savage Division; when informed that there had been no Bolshevik uprising, many of its soldiers decided to remain loyal to the government. Many others were persuaded by soviet agitators not to move against the Kerensky government, using the simple argument that it had freed soldiers from tsarist tyranny.

With the revolt obviously crumbling, the Prime Minister called on General Alekseev to help him extinguish what was clearly a senseless and harmful mutiny. Alekseev sent a message to General Krymov informing him that there was no Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd; he also asked him to halt the movement of his troops and to report to him in the capital. Krymov entered Petrograd by himself and spoke briefly with Kerensky. The content of the conversation is not known, but shortly after the meeting ended, the general went into the Bureau of the War Office and shot himself. On 1 September, Generals Kornilov and Lukomsky, realizing that their rebellion had turned into a fiasco, resigned and, together with several other officers, they were arrested on orders of General Alekseev.

Bolsheviks in power

The Kornilov rebellion was essentially a test of strength between Kornilov, who wished to save Russia from Bolshevism and to conduct a successful war against Germany, and Kerensky, who also wanted to win the war and in addition, turn Russia into a democracy. Each of them believed that he was the only one who could save Russia from the abyss. The victor in this fierce conflict, strange as it may sound, was Lenin. The Bolsheviks had supported the struggle against Kornilov, but not because they supported the Provisional Government. Lenin explained their position in a letter of 30 August to the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party:

We will fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, even as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary, we expose his weakness… without renouncing the task of overthrowing Kerensky right now; we shall approach the task of struggling against him in a different way, namely, we shall point out to the people… the weakness and vacillation of Kerensky. This has been done before. Now, however, it has become the main thing.

At this time, a group of sailors visited Trotsky and asked him, ‘Isn’t it time to arrest the government?’ ‘No, not yet,’ Trotsky replied. ‘Use Kerensky as a gun-rest to shoot Kornilov. Afterward we will settle with Kerensky.’

Militarily, the Bolsheviks benefited from Kornilov’s rebellion. In its anxiety to create a fighting force against Kornilov’s advancing troops, the Provisional Government had permitted the indiscriminate arming of workers. Many did not return their arms after the rebellion had fizzled out, and this made possible the formation of the first units of the Red Guard under the command of the soviet. Before the revolt, the soviet could count on the support of some self-organized militias. Within a few weeks, the Red Guards numbered 25,000. ‘The army that rose against Kornilov,’ wrote Trotsky, ‘was the army-to-be of the October [November] Revolution.’ Although Trotsky was exaggerating somewhat, the nucleus of the Bolshevik armed forces was created at that time.

Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of the whole affair was the general demoralization. The rank and file of the army lost what little faith they still had in their officers. Furthermore, soldiers demanded that instead of being treated leniently, the generals who had supported the rebellion ought to suffer the same punishment they were so eager to apply to disobedient men in the ranks. ‘When it was realized,’ Chernov wrote, ‘that discipline and capital punishment were for soldiers, not for generals, the front swelled with anger and turned black like the sea before a tempest. The Bolsheviks had only to catch the favoring wind and fill their sails.’ A new round of desertions, as well as increasing physical attacks on officers, speeded the disintegration of the tsarist army.

Everywhere, Bolsheviks and right-wingers whispered that Kerensky had been in accord with Kornilov on the necessity of a dictatorship, and that the Prime Minister had betrayed the general only under pressure from the soviets. Inevitably, these charges and revelations undermined the confidence of the masses in the Kerensky government. Furthermore, in the light of the sympathy various liberals (especially Miliukov) had expressed for the Kornilov movement, it became impossible for the centrist parties to continue cooperating in the government. Mutual confidence had disappeared. When the Bolsheviks, after the attempted knockout blow from the Right, countered with their own blow in October, they faced no united opposition.

The Bolsheviks reaped their first concrete advantage from the Kornilov Affair on 25 September. In elections that day, they achieved what they had longed for ever since the revolution in March, a majority in the Petrograd soviet. Five days later, they scored the same success in Moscow. Fear of counterrevolution had produced a decisive shift to the left among the working class; that shift could not but encourage the Bolsheviks in their hopes for a forcible seizure of power. Referring to these electoral victories, Lenin wrote to the Central Committees in Petrograd and Moscow of the Russian Social Democratic Party between 7–9 October:

Having obtained a majority in the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies of both capitals, the Bolsheviks can and must take power into their hands. Assume power at once in Moscow and in Petrograd (it does not matter which begins; perhaps even Moscow may begin); we will win absolutely and unquestionably.

To Lenin, the consequences of the Kornilov Affair made his political strategy, first formulated in April, all the more alluring. It consisted of five simple promises to major sectors of Russian society. The Bolsheviks would quickly make peace with Germany, they would permit peasants to seize land, they would urge workers to seize factories, they would encourage soviets that had been established nationwide to assume the role of local governments, and they would permit the secession of ethnic minorities in the outlying regions. In fact, none of these promises was consistent with Bolshevik policies, and several deviated sharply from Marxist doctrine. After the Bolsheviks came to power, they, like their predecessors, wanted to prevent the dissolution of the Russian state. Hence, they tried to halt the disintegration of the army and opposed the claims to independence of most minorities. On the agrarian question, they were firmly opposed to dividing the countryside into smallholdings owned by peasants; they favored nationalization of the land. As committed Marxists, the Bolsheviks favored workers’ control of individual factories; however, the goal was not control by workers at the local level but nationalization of industry with control in the hands of appointees of the national government. Finally, the Bolsheviks favored a centralized political regime in which major decisions were made and enforced by the political leadership in the capital, not by soviets on the local level. For Lenin, these were all matters to be handled once his party was in power; in the fall of 1917, his primary concern was to achieve it.

That turned out to be easier than anyone had imagined. Mass discontent with the existing regime became deeper and more widespread than ever before, in large part because Kerensky had completely failed to restore public confidence in his government. He also made several decisions that were bound to exacerbate public distrust of the authorities in Petrograd. He reshuffled his cabinet and appointed three Kadets to high positions, even though in the public mind the liberal party was widely believed to have been sympathetic to Kornilov. Moreover, Kerensky made only half-hearted attempts to initiate legal actions against the rebels, which troubled his supporters and raised further questions about the Prime Minister’s complicity in the plot.

Preparing for revolution

On the other hand, the Bolsheviks were reinvigorated and full of confidence, although not all the party leaders were convinced that the time for a working class revolution had arrived. Lenin had remained in hiding in Finland ever since the upheaval in July, but couriers frequently brought messages to his colleagues in the capital, urging them to prepare for the toppling of the government. Trotsky was his leading supporter and spokesman in Petrograd. At the time of the March revolution, Trotsky had been in New York, where he earned his living from journalism and lecturing. He lived in an inexpensive apartment in the Bronx, but for him and his family it was luxurious: ‘for the first time in his life,’ Isaac Deutscher noted in his biography, ‘the future leader of the revolution had a telephone in his home.’ However, Trotsky quickly became restless and wanted to participate in the upheaval in his homeland. On 27 March, he and a few other émigrés boarded a Norwegian boat headed for Europe. Its first stop was Halifax, Nova Scotia, where British naval policemen forced all the Russian émigrés to disembark, before moving them to a camp for German prisoners of war in Amherst. The British government, unlike the German government, was eager to prevent a charismatic leader of the Left from reaching Petrograd, where he was bound to stir up the masses against the Provisional Government. Instead, Trotsky, a powerful orator with a gift for bons mots, did his best to arouse opposition to the war among the German prisoners. After German officers urged the commandant of the camp to prohibit Trotsky from addressing the prisoners, the Russian had to halt his effort to radicalize the Germans. In the meantime, Miliukov, then the Foreign Minister in the Provisional Government, was prevailed upon to protest Trotsky’s detention. On 16 April, Trotsky was allowed to leave the camp and a few days later boarded a boat for Finland. From there he took a train to Petrograd, arriving on 4 May.

Trotsky was as passionate a revolutionary as Lenin, but they had their differences over doctrine and tactics. When the schism in Russian Social Democracy occurred in 1903, Trotsky sided with the Mensheviks and for well over a decade rejected Lenin’s conception of a tightly organized socialist party dominated by a small group at the top. Lenin, on the other hand, was not taken with the doctrine of permanent revolution, which Trotsky had put forth in 1905. Soon after Trotsky arrived in Petrograd in 1917, he was appointed to the Executive of the Soviet, but he aligned himself with neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks. He belonged to the Mezhrayonka (Inter-Borough Organization), whose creation he had inspired while still abroad. This was a small group that maintained its independence, but from the beginning it felt more comfortable ideologically with the Bolsheviks than the Mensheviks. Shortly after Trotsky’s arrival in Petrograd, the group joined the Leninists and Trotsky gave up his opposition to Lenin’s views on party organization. As already noted, Lenin had concluded that Russia did not need to undergo a purely bourgeois revolution and could move directly to socialism. From that time, the two worked together closely and except for some differences over tactical issues, they collaborated in leading the second revolution and taking the first steps to introduce socialism. Lenin was clearly the most powerful and celebrated leader, but Trotsky did not lag far behind.

Lenin, while still holed up in Vyborg, Finland, bombarded his colleagues in the capital with letters urging them to waste no time in leading the masses to a revolution for socialism. In a letter of 24 October to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, he predicted that ‘history will not forgive revolutionaries for procrastinating when they could be victorious today (will certainly be victorious today), while they risk losing much, in fact, everything, tomorrow.’ It would be a ‘disaster’ to wait until the convocation of the entire Congress of the Soviets, scheduled to meet on 25 October, to vote on the question of overthrowing the government. The people, he insisted:

…have the right and are in duty bound to decide such questions not by a vote, but by force in critical moments of revolution; the people have the right and are in duty bound to direct their representatives, even their best representatives, and not to wait for them.

The government, he continued, was ‘wavering’ and it ‘must be destroyed at all costs. To delay will be fatal.’ Lenin knew that two members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, G. E. Zinoviev and L. B. Kamenev, opposed his strategy and he made clear that he had no use for them. He advised them to ‘found their own party;’ they would be supported by only a ‘few dozen disoriented people or from candidates to the Constituent Assembly,’ for which he had little use. Certainly, the ‘workers will not join such a party.’

Trotsky assumed leadership of the Military Revolutionary Committee, created on 9 October to supervise the defense of Petrograd in the event that the Provisional Government left the city to evade the German troops that were poised to capture the city. However, the city remained in Russian hands, and very quickly the committee turned its attention to planning and organizing an uprising, and as its leader Trotsky became the guiding force of the insurrection. He frequently spoke at meetings of the soviet; he invariably advocated radical policies, but at the same time he did not want to let it be known that the Bolsheviks were planning an insurrection. When, during a session of the Petrograd Soviet, a deputy confronted the Bolsheviks and asked point blank whether they were preparing to seize power, Trotsky went to the podium and delivered an answer that has been described as a ‘masterpiece of diplomatic camouflage.’ He declared that the Bolsheviks were organizing a staff for the seizure of power but that no decision had been taken to unleash an insurrection. Such a decision would have to be taken by the Petrograd soviet. This answer was technically correct, but it was widely known that the Bolsheviks were making extensive preparations to seize power. Indeed, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party had already expressed support of such a move. Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s biographer and defender, argued that he was under no obligation to reveal that decision because the Central Committee was a ‘private body.’

The critical vote of the Central Committee had actually taken place on 10 October, under circumstances that would be amusing, were the decision not so momentous. A suitable place had to be found for the meeting, for Lenin, still in hiding, was to attend and had to take every precaution not to be seen by the police. Mrs. Sukhanov came to the rescue. Her sympathies lay with the Bolsheviks, but her husband, N. Sukhanov, was a left-wing Menshevik and journalist with a passion for attending as many deliberations of the soviet and other political groups as possible. His apartment in Karpovka was quite a distance—about five miles—from the Smolny, formerly a finishing school for girls of aristocratic families that had become the home of the Smolny Institute, where the soviet now met, and consequently he often spent nights somewhere near his office. On 10 October, his wife gave him ‘a friendly, disinterested piece of advice—not to inconvenience myself by a further journey after work.’ So the ‘lofty assemblage had a complete guarantee against my arrival.’ Sukhanov referred to the meeting as one of the ‘novel jokes of the merry muse of History.’

Several members of the Central Committee arrived from Moscow and the ‘Lord of Hosts,’ as Sukhanov called Lenin, ‘appeared in a wig, but without his beard. Zinoviev appeared with a beard, but without his shock of hair,’ and thus both succeeded in evading the police. The meeting lasted some ten hours. In the end, the vote was ten to two in favor of placing the proposal to stage an uprising on the agenda of the Bolshevik Party, the two holdouts being Zinoviev and Kamenev.

The proposal to waste no time before launching the uprising on the evening of 24 October was based on an important consideration. Trotsky argued that it would be helpful to anticipate the meeting of the Congress of Soviets scheduled for 25 October. It seemed certain that the Bolsheviks would enjoy the support of a majority at the congress because a fair number of people on the non-Bolshevik Left would side with them. Hence, the congress could be asked to vote in favor of the uprising, giving the seizure of power the appearance of national support. Lenin at first rejected this plan on the ground that the congress’s meeting was irrelevant. The critical point for him was to seize power, but a majority favored Trotsky’s plan and in the end Lenin accepted it.

Kerensky’s incompetence

The government did not know the details of the Bolshevik plans, but it knew as early as mid-October, as did many in the capital, that an attempt would soon be made to seize power. The Prime Minister was confident that he would be able to crush the Bolsheviks easily once they called on their supporters to move against the authorities. He boasted to his subordinates, and to foreign diplomats in Petrograd, that he had nothing to fear. On several occasions, he told British Ambassador George Buchanan that ‘I only wish that [the Bolsheviks] would come out, and I will then put them down,’ but he waited until 24 October before taking any action to nip the revolt in the bud. He shut down the Bolshevik newspaper Rabochii Put, which was exactly the provocation Trotsky had hoped for to justify attacking the government. On the same day, he gave the order to armed Bolsheviks to occupy key government buildings and called on Kerensky to surrender. The helplessness of the government became evident at once. Soldiers remained in the barracks and refused to come to the support of the authorities. Only a small battalion of women could be counted upon to defend the Winter Palace, where the government was meeting. Realizing the hopelessness of their situation, the ministers offered no resistance when armed Bolsheviks appeared. Kerensky managed to escape by car, dressed as a woman, which enabled him to leave the capital. He visited various military installations in the hope of enlisting support, but was so discredited that his appeals were rejected.

The truth is that by late October, power lay in the streets of the capital and all the Bolsheviks had to do was pick it up. The conquest of power did not follow any one pattern. In Moscow, the Bolsheviks encountered more resistance than in the capital, but after some fierce fighting they prevailed. It did not take long for the Bolsheviks to take control of the rest of the country, at least the urban centers. There were remarkably few casualties in the capital, far fewer even than in February; it has been estimated that a few Red Guards were wounded, but apparently there were no fatalities. Early in 1918, Lenin himself acknowledged that taking power had been ‘extremely easy.’ The magnitude of the achievements of Lenin and Trotsky becomes all the more striking when it is realized that the Bolsheviks throughout Russia commanded a membership of only about 200,000 and the proletariat, in whose name the revolution was staged, numbered perhaps 3.5 million out of a total population of about 150 million.

Of course, on the day of the revolution neither Lenin nor Trotsky could have been certain of a quick and easy victory. They spent that evening in one of the rooms next to the large hall in the Smolny, where the Second Congress of the Soviets was scheduled to be held. Lenin was nervous and plied Trotsky with questions about the progress of the revolution. Trotsky, too, was restless, and neither could sleep. Hours later, when it was clear that the Bolsheviks had taken power, ‘at least in Petrograd,’ Lenin looked ‘softly at [Trotsky], with that sort of awkward shyness that with him indicates intimacy.’ “You know,” he says hesitatingly, “from persecution and a life underground, to come so suddenly into power.…” He pauses for the right word. “Es schwindelt”[It makes me dizzy], he concludes, changing suddenly to German, and circling his hand around his head. We look at each other and laugh a little.’

A day later, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin put forward Trotsky’s name for election as Chairman of the People’s Commissars, the highest position in the new government. Trotsky ‘sprang’ to his feet and indicated that the nomination was ‘unexpected’ and ‘inappropriate.’ ‘Why not?’ Lenin asked. ‘You were at the head of the Petrograd Soviet that seized power.’ Trotsky would not hear of it because Lenin had been the strategist of the seizure of power and he had inspired the masses to follow the Bolsheviks. A few days later, Lenin said, ‘There is not a better Bolshevik than Trotsky.’

Lenin then suggested that Trotsky be appointed Commissar of the Interior, in many ways the second most important post in the government, for its assignment would be to ‘fight off the counterrevolution.’ Again, Trotsky would not hear of it, but this time he offered a different objection: ‘Was it worthwhile to put into our enemies’ hands such an additional weapon as my Jewish origins?’ Lenin was irritated by that argument: ‘We are having a great international revolution,’ he said. ‘Of what importance are such trifles?’ Trotsky agreed that a great revolution was in progress, yet ‘there are still a good many fools left.’ He prevailed but did accept the foreign affairs portfolio. With the onset of the Civil War, Trotsky was named Commissar of War. For over six years, until Lenin’s death in 1924, he was the second most powerful man in the country. Lenin held the position of Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, a title that made him head of the government.

Lenin’s hunt for support

On 26 October 1917, when victory was assured, Lenin entered the hall where the Congress of Soviets held its meeting. The Bolsheviks enjoyed a majority, so it was not surprising that the delegates greeted their leader with thunderous applause. His first words evoked another ‘overwhelming human roar: “We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order.’’’ He then listed the agenda of the new government:

The first thing is the adoption of practical measures to realize peace… We shall offer peace to the peoples of all the belligerent countries, peace upon the basis of the Soviet terms—no annexations, no indemnities, and the right of self-determination of peoples. At the same time, according to our promise, we shall publish and repudiate the secret treaties… The question of War and Peace is so clear that I think that I may, without preamble, read the project of a Proclamation to the Peoples of All the Belligerent Countries.

After the Congress voted unanimously to support the proclamation on peace, Lenin proceeded to outline his domestic program.

In keeping with a promise he had made earlier in 1917, he vowed to enact the Socialist Revolutionary land program, which called for the distribution of all land to the peasants. As already noted, the SR platform deviated sharply from the standard Bolshevik program, which called for nationalization of all land. However, adopting it was one of Lenin’s shrewdest moves, because it assured him of the support, or at least the political neutrality, of many peasants, still by far the largest social group in the country. Then, Lenin promised to introduce workers’ control in all industrial, commercial, and agricultural enterprises, and to embark on the equalization of wages. All titles in the army, as well as the requirement to salute officers, would be abolished. Soldiers’ committees would elect their officers. Finally, the marriage and divorce laws, which were archaic and kept women in subservience, would be swept aside. These measures amounted to a fundamental economic and social revolution, although it should be noted that only the last remained a permanent feature of the Soviet Union.

When it came to the new political order, the Bolsheviks were far less innovative. Despite pressure from other socialist parties for the creation of a coalition government, they stood their ground and in so doing expressed their contempt for other socialists, some of whom also considered themselves orthodox Marxists. The dispute came to a head during one of the early meetings of the Second Congress of the Soviets. Martov, a leader of the Mensheviks, introduced a motion calling for the formation of a coalition government representing all parties in the Soviet, that is, all the socialist parties. In his view, only in that way could an outburst of violence be prevented. When the Bolsheviks rejected his proposal, he made a serious mistake; he walked out, joining other socialists who had quit the proceedings in protest against the coup. It left the Bolsheviks in full control.

It also gave Trotsky an opportunity to demonstrate the Bolsheviks’ determination to hold on to power and to heap scorn on their former colleagues. As Martov was leaving the hall, Trotsky assured the delegates that the departure of the Mensheviks would not sway the new rulers to change course. ‘The rising of the popular masses,’ he declared, ‘needs no justification. What has taken place is an insurrection not a conspiracy. We have hardened the revolutionary energy of the workers and soldiers of Petrograd. We have openly steeled the will of the masses for a rising, not a conspiracy.’ Then he unleashed a personal attack on the recently departed delegates:

No, a compromise is no good here. To those who have walked out and to those who come with such proposals [for a coalition government], we must say: ‘You are pitiful isolated individuals, you are bankrupt; you have played out your role. Go where you belong: to the dustbin of history.’

In its harshness, Trotsky’s dismissal of the Mensheviks gave a foretaste of the new rulers’ mode of governing.

Shortly after their ascent to power, the Bolsheviks issued a decree suppressing newspapers critical of the new order, which amounted to a repudiation of a reform establishing freedom of the press that had been introduced by the Provisional Government. This measure was supposed to have been temporary, designed to shield the authorities at a time of crisis, but censorship of the press became a permanent feature of Communist rule.

On 7 December, before any indications of organized resistance to the new regime, the Bolshevik government established the Cheka (an abbreviation for All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), the secret police charged with rooting out opposition to the new government. Its Director, F. E. Dzerzhinsky, made no effort to disguise the function of his organization: ‘We represent,’ he declared, ‘organized terror—this must be said clearly.’ He cast his net wide in arresting citizens suspected of opposition, a policy consistent with Lenin’s view that no mercy should be shown to such people. In an article entitled ‘How to Organize Competition,’ written early in January 1918 and published in Pravda on 20 January 1929, Lenin called for a variety of methods to achieve:

…the common aim—to clean the land of Russia of all sorts of vermin, of fleas, of bedbugs—the rich, and so on and so forth. In one place half a score of rich, a dozen crooks, half a dozen workers who shirk their work… will be put in prison. In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with ‘yellow tickets’ after they have served their time, so that all the people shall have them under surveillance, as harmful persons, until they reform. In a fourth place, one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot. In a fifth place mixed methods may be adopted… The more variety there will be, the better and richer will be our general experience, the more certain and rapid will be the success of socialism.

He warned that ‘weakness, hesitation or sentimentality… would be a great crime to Socialism.’

Although the Cheka immediately sought to crush the opposition to Bolshevism—it executed some 882 people within the first six months of its existence—it did not initiate a systematic crackdown until the summer of 1918, when two events triggered what came to be known as the ‘Red Terror.’ On 30 August 1918, Moisei Uritsky, the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs and the head of the Cheka in Petrograd, was assassinated by a young officer, but a far more dramatic murder was attempted on the same day in Moscow. Fanya Kaplan fired three shots at Lenin as he emerged from the Mikhelson Factory, where he had given a speech to workers. One bullet struck Lenin in the arm and did not seriously injure him, but another pierced his neck, causing considerable bleeding. He fell down and was whisked off unconscious to the Kremlin, where several doctors treated him. Initially, the doctors feared for his life, but he made a rapid recovery and resumed full-time work in his office by the end of October.

Although the assassination and attempted assassination had not been coordinated, both were politically motivated. Kaplan was known to be a terrorist as far back as 1906, when she was only sixteen. At that time, she identified herself as an anarchist and was arrested because a bomb she was preparing to use against the Governor-General of Kiev exploded prematurely. She was sentenced to a lifelong term of hard labor in Siberia. Released after the first revolution in 1917, she joined an offshoot of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which had always taken a benign view of terrorism. Kaplan was incensed with Lenin because he had dismissed the Constituent Assembly. Despite her vow not to leave the scene of the crime, she ran away, but was quickly caught by the police, and after repeated refusals to cooperate with her interrogators, was executed on 13 September.

What followed, in the words of William Henry Chamberlin, who wrote the first scholarly and comprehensive history of the Russian Revolution, was ‘one of the most ferocious outbursts of organized revolutionary terrorism since the French Revolution.’ The number of people, nearly all well-to-do, executed by the Cheka over a two-year period remains in dispute: some claim that it was about 12,350. Chamberlin’s estimate was 50,000, and the most recent scholarly work on the subject (by G. Leggett) concluded that the total killed during the Red Terror ran to about 140,000. Certainly, the rapid increase in the size of the secret police would suggest that its activities increased exponentially. In May 1919, the Cheka’s ‘internal army’ numbered about 120,000; a year later, it had increased to 240,000.

Peace with Germany

Lenin understood all along that repression and economic concessions alone would not suffice to consolidate his regime. It was vital to end the war, which continued to drain Russia’s resources and became ever more unpopular. Reaching agreement with the Germans proved far more difficult than Lenin had anticipated. On 20 November, a committee headed by A. A. Joffe, formerly a Menshevik and a friend of Trotsky, met with a German delegation in the Polish city of Brest-Litovsk, the seat of the German headquarters. Within three days, the parties agreed to a ceasefire, but the far more difficult task was to negotiate a permanent end to the war.

On 27 December, the negotiations resumed; this time, Trotsky headed the Russian delegation, a sign of the importance the Bolsheviks attached to a settlement. It turned out that his appointment may not have been wise. As soon as he arrived in Brest-Litovsk, he and members of his entourage passed leaflets to German soldiers, urging them to prepare for a socialist revolution. The stodgy German diplomats and generals were not amused, but worse was to come for the Russians. The Germans offered a peace plan that provided for the separation of Poland from Russia and for the annexation by Germany of territory in western Russia, which would mean loss of the Ukraine, Lithuania, and southern Latvia. Trotsky immediately declared that he would have to return to Petrograd for consultations.

Lenin favored acceptance of the German terms because he believed that Russia needed a ‘breathing spell’ so that Bolshevik power could be consolidated. However, a group within the leadership, headed by N. I. Bukharin, who believed that the revolution would spread to Europe, urged rejection of the terms and resumption of the war, primarily by partisan actions, against the German army, which continued to advance into Russia. He also called for intense agitation in Central Europe in favor of revolution, which, he contended, would so frighten the German government that it would reevaluate its position regarding a peace settlement with Russia. Trotsky came up with an altogether baffling response to the German peace terms. Russia should adopt the following policy: ‘Neither war nor peace.’ In other words, Russia would no longer wage war and would not sign a peace settlement. Out of sixty-three votes at a meeting of party leaders, Lenin’s proposal garnered only fifteen. He also lost in the Central Committee, although by a very small margin. When Trotsky informed the Germans that their terms were unacceptable, the generals responded by ordering a new offensive and penetrated further into Russia. Trotsky now changed his mind and Lenin’s motion to accept Germany’s peace offer passed in the Central Committee by a vote of seven to six.

The losses incurred by Russia as a result of the peace settlement known as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (signed on 3 March, 1918) were enormous: 26 percent of its population, 27 percent of its arable land, 32 percent of its average yearly crops, 26 percent of its railway system, 33 percent of its manufacturing industries, 73 percent of its iron industries, and 75 percent of its coal mines. Russia’s economy declined sharply, which is exactly what the enemy leaders wanted, because it made the country dependent on Germany. It would also provide Germany with much-needed agricultural goods. Lenin’s calculation was quite different: he was certain that the socialist revolution would soon break out in Germany, and once that had occurred, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would be null and void. His calculation that Russia would recover the lands it had lost proved to be right, but not for the reasons he gave.

The Bolsheviks’ expectation of world revolution turned out to be their greatest misjudgment. They looked upon Germany as most likely to be the first to follow their example. The country was highly industrialized, its working class was sophisticated, its socialist party the largest in the world, and several of its socialist theorists ranked among the world’s most insightful exponents of Marx’s teachings. These considerations led the Bolsheviks to endless misinterpretations of developments in Germany. On 21 November 1917, Izvestiia, a Bolshevik newspaper, assured its readers that the ‘German proletariat is already mobilizing its forces and… the struggle has begun, even though it has not yet assumed a violent character.’ Other articles early in February 1918 announced that soviets had been created and that the people of Berlin were arming themselves in preparation for the ‘struggle for a class dictatorship of the proletariat.’ By March 1919, Lenin even believed that a socialist revolution might well break out in the United States in the not-too-distant future. He found it ‘extremely interesting’ that soviets were gaining popularity in America and predicted that ‘sooner or later they will take power into their own hands.’ He based this fanciful forecast on information he had received about the creation of a General Strike Committee that had led a five-day general strike in Seattle in February 1919, which in fact did not have the kind of political significance Lenin attached to it.

Apparently, the Russian revolutionaries did not understand that during the forty-two years of its existence the German Social Democratic Party had shifted away from radicalism and that the German working class generally approved of the abandonment of the far Left. Nor did they understand the significance of the criticism leveled at Leninism by western Marxists who rejected the undemocratic features of Bolshevism. Most notably, Karl Kautsky, the movement’s foremost theorist, published a short book in 1918 attacking the October revolution as a distortion of Marxism; by then, he and Lenin were not on speaking terms. Moreover, the German Social Democratic Party made it abundantly clear that it would not follow Russia’s path to socialism. Eventually, the failure of any Western country to follow Russia’s example deeply influenced developments in Russia; in the 1920s the leaders focused on ‘socialism in one country,’ a turn that led them to build a socialist order at home regardless of developments in the rest of the world.

Death knell for democracy

In January 1918, the Bolsheviks took a step that confirmed the worst fears of democratic socialists. They dispersed the Constituent Assembly, which had finally met after several postponements of its election. The Assembly had been the great hope of those who had taken over the reins of government after the first revolution in March 1917. For the first time in Russia’s history, an assembly elected by all adult citizens, including women, was to write a constitution for the country that would establish a truly democratic system of rule. In the months after the collapse of the autocracy, even the Bolsheviks supported the election and convocation of the Assembly. It is understandable that under the chaotic circumstances of 1917 it took time to organize and hold elections, but it was unfortunate for those who believed in democracy that the process was not completed sooner. The Assembly was the one institution that might have induced sufficient calm to make possible the formation of a government that could have put the country on an even keel. Thirty-six million citizens, over 48 percent of the eligible voters, cast ballots, and the Bolsheviks received a mere one-fourth. Of the 707 deputies, 175 were Bolsheviks, 370 were Socialist Revolutionaries of the Right, and 40 were Socialist Revolutionaries of the Left. Seventeen Kadets and eighteen Mensheviks were also elected. The remaining 120 seats were distributed among other small parties.

Even before the Assembly met, Lenin questioned the legitimacy of the elections and, more important, the legitimacy of the Assembly as a body speaking for the people. He pointed out that the Socialist Revolutionaries had entered the elections as a single party, but since that time—on 28 November—a sector of the party, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, had come out in support of the Bolshevik seizure of power and had in fact joined a new coalition government. Lenin claimed that if the change of heart by a substantial sector of the SR Party had been generally known at the time of the elections, the pro-Bolshevik movements would have won a majority. On 25 December, eleven days before the Assembly met, Lenin published his ‘Theses on the Constituent Assembly,’ in which he made clear that he put no stock in that body regardless of the timing of the split within the Socialist Revolutionary Party. ‘A republic of soviets,’ he declared, ‘is a higher form than the customary bourgeois republic with its constituent assembly.’ Consequently, the Assembly must accept ‘Soviet power [and] the Soviet revolution.’ Otherwise ‘a crisis in connection with the Constituent Assembly can be solved only by revolutionary means.’

The Assembly met as scheduled in the afternoon of 18 January, but under circumstances that could leave no one in doubt that it would accomplish nothing. A peaceful demonstration of about fifty thousand supporters was quickly and harshly dispersed by armed men under the control of the Bolsheviks. As the delegates approached the Tauride Palace, where the meetings were to be held, they noticed—as reported by V. M. Zenzinov—that the entire square in front of it was:

…filled with artillery, machine guns, field kitchens. Machine gun cartridge belts were piled up pell-mell… Everywhere there were armed men, mostly sailors and Latvians… The number of armed men and weapons, the sound of clanking, created the impression of an encampment getting ready either to defend itself or to attack.

Zenzinov also recalled that many delegates walked into the palace determined to work on a democratic constitution, but they feared that they ‘would not return home alive.’ The Socialist Revolutionaries, who had a majority of the delegates, elected their leader, Victor Chernov, to be President of the Assembly, and he immediately faced a move by the Bolsheviks designed to make it impossible for the delegates to accomplish their appointed task. F. F. Raskolnikov, a Bolshevik naval officer from Kronstadt, introduced a motion calling on the Assembly to renounce its assigned task and to devote itself to reorganizing ‘society on a socialist basis.’ When this motion was defeated by a vote of 237 to 136, all the Bolsheviks walked out. The remaining delegates continued to listen to speeches until 4 a.m., at which time a ‘Citizen Sailor’ approached the chairman and asked that the meeting be ended because ‘the guard is tired.’ Chernov objected and asked who had given the order to adjourn, but when armed soldiers marched in to supplement those already in the hall, the chairman, after allowing discussion to continue for twenty more minutes, halted the proceedings until 5 p.m. But in the meantime, the Bolsheviks had decided to dissolve the Assembly, and the delegates were never reassembled.

Some historians have argued that the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly marked the end of the revolution because the Bolsheviks had now shown that they had no intention of giving up power. E. H. Carr, the noted English historian, made a similar point when he referred to Lenin’s vow to disperse the Assembly as ‘a final tearing asunder of the veil of bourgeois constitutionalism.’ The dispersion of the elected delegates charged with writing a democratic constitution for Russia was doubtless an important event, but it is not clear that it should be considered the end of the upheaval of 1917. It merely indicated that Lenin would not easily cede power and that he was not committed to democratic rule, which had been known at least since 1902, when he published What Is to Be Done? In January 1918, several of his most important goals had not yet been achieved and one may doubt whether he himself believed that the revolution had ended. Russia had not yet extricated itself from the war, the economy was in rapid decline, disposition of the lands owned by landlords and the state had not been completed, and clear rules on the management of factories seized from private owners had not yet been formulated. In other words, while the people who ran the country were socialists, socialism remained to be established. It would take years for anything resembling the socialist ideal to be realized, and when it was, the social and economic order in Russia looked quite different from the aspirations and promises of Lenin and other Marxists in the years before 1917.

The struggle to retain power

Within months of seizing power, the Bolsheviks, who in March 1918 adopted the more easily recognizable name ‘Communists,’ faced challenges so severe that it was by no means certain that they would be able to cope with them. In the first place, the economy had disintegrated. Because peasants were unwilling to sell the grain they harvested at the prevailing low prices, the essential staple of most households was in short supply. At the same time, industrial production had declined at an alarming rate: in 1917, industrial output amounted to a mere 33.8 percent of the total in 1913. As a consequence, there simply were not enough manufactured goods to give farmers a return on their crops, a further disincentive to maximize their yields. The danger of mass starvation loomed in the cities, exacerbated by the deterioration of trains and other means of transportation, which prevented satisfactory exchanges between the countryside and the cities.

Politically, too, the authorities faced unsettling and unexpected challenges. In elections to local soviets in May and June 1918, the Mensheviks won numerous victories; it looked as though sentiment among the working class was turning sharply against the new rulers. In June 1918, the government made a bold move to deal with the crumbling economy by introducing a radical program known as ‘War Communism.’ The authorities declared all grain to be a government monopoly and called on poor peasants in the villages to form committees to enforce the requisition of grain from well-to-do peasants; as a reward, committee members would be given a share of the grain, as well as a portion of the industrial goods that reached the villages. These policies were not designed just to deal with the economic crisis. They also served an ideological purpose: they brought ‘class war’ into the villages.

In November 1918, the government took an additional step toward socialism by nationalizing all trade. It called for the establishment of a network of cooperative stores to distribute goods, which were strictly rationed. This measure quickly led to the virtual elimination of private trading. Money, credit, and prices no longer played a significant role in the national economy.

The banks had been nationalized soon after the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the only way for the government to obtain currency was to resort to the printing press, a practice that led to severe inflation. As money declined in value, the government began to collect taxes by forcing citizens to make their payments in kind. Soon wages in many establishments were also paid in kind. By the second half of 1918, 27.9 percent of all wages were paid with goods; by 1921, that had risen to 94 percent. Russia, it was said, had reverted to a medieval economy, in which barter was the principal mode of exchanging goods.

Industrial productivity remained abysmal, in part because of a measure introduced by the Bolsheviks in November 1917. The government, in keeping with its ideological convictions, imposed workers’ control in all factories, a measure that undermined efficiency, since workers had little experience in deciding how to produce high-quality goods at reasonable cost. Lenin realized this; early in 1918 he restored one-man management and also brought back to their previous jobs specialists who had worked in factories before the revolution. In December 1918, the authorities in Moscow, in an effort to increase production, issued a decree compelling all citizens between the ages of sixteen and fifty to hold down a job. No one could move from one job to another without permission from a state agency formed to supervise what came to be known as the ‘nationalization of labor.’ This measure, too, did little to improve efficiency in industry. The government then adopted the practice of drawing up national plans on the assumption that productivity could be stimulated by setting specific targets for industries and factories, but conditions were so chaotic and hardships so severe that decisions made by central agencies in Moscow could not be implemented.

By 1920, it was clear that far from solving the country’s economic problems, War Communism had led to a further decline that can only be described as catastrophic. In the countryside, peasants produced less because they did not wish to surrender their crops to the committees of the poor. During a period of eight years, from 1913 to 1921, agricultural production declined by 54 percent. Malnutrition was widespread; more than seven million people died from starvation or disease, most notably from the epidemic known as the Spanish flu, which also affected other countries. It has been estimated that in the three years from 1918 to 1920 the death rate more than doubled. Large cities saw their populations decline dramatically, as workers returned to farms to feed their families. Moscow lost about one half its population and Petrograd lost even more. Both cities were major industrial centers, and as a result of the exodus the number of workers declined by one half from 1917 to 1920.

The Bolsheviks could claim certain positive results, mainly ideological, from the stringent economic policies imposed under War Communism. The government gained control over the so-called commanding heights of the economy: large industries, transportation, banks, and foreign trade. In addition, some officials gained experience in administering certain important branches of industry, but the price the country paid for these benefits was high, leaving a large percentage of the population in dire straits.

Economic privation and loss in working class support were not the only challenges the Communists faced during their first years in power. They also confronted a military threat from a counterrevolution organized by the opposition to their rule, and from a band of invading armies composed of soldiers from fourteen countries. Some of the invaders intended to restore the eastern front against Germany, others were determined to crush Bolshevism, and some wished to grab land from a weakened Russia, while the primary aim of the United States in sending troops into Russia was to prevent Japan from seizing a huge swath of land in the Transbaikal Region and further east. Lenin turned to Trotsky, his most dynamic and capable subordinate, to build a Red Army to defend the revolution. Trotsky’s success in this endeavor probably marks his greatest achievement.

He knew that a major reason for the collapse of the Provisional Government had been its inability to maintain discipline in the army, and he therefore concentrated on creating a military force that would carry out the orders of the new government. ‘An army cannot be built without repression,’ he wrote in his autobiography:

Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements—the animals we call men—will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear.

True, Kerensky and Kornilov had applied this principle and the army had still crumbled. That did not happen to the Red Army, Trotsky later explained, because the ‘strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution.’

Trotsky proceeded systematically in creating the Red Army. First, he ordered compulsory military training for all workers and peasants who did not hire labor—this provision was to assure that no one hostile to Communism would serve in the new army. To maintain discipline, he restored the death penalty for violators of military rules. Deserters, who were numerous, were occasionally shot or forced to serve in ‘punishment units.’ When an entire unit failed to carry out orders and fled from the enemy, one in ten was to be shot on the spot. Trotsky also ended the election of officers by ordinary soldiers, a reform introduced only a few months earlier; it had quickly become evident that it had not enhanced either efficiency or bravery at the front. When officers who had served in the tsarist army volunteered to join the revolutionary forces, Trotsky welcomed them but warned that if they deserted, their families would be punished. To keep an eye on officers and to conduct propaganda among the troops, politically trustworthy commissars were stationed throughout the army. Within a few months, the Red Army developed into a reasonably effective fighting force. There is a noteworthy irony in this. Only fifteen months earlier, the far left, including the Bolsheviks, had campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty, a stand that was important in securing a majority for the Bolsheviks in the Petrograd Soviet.

Civil war

The Civil War began in the spring of 1918, lasted for roughly three years, and cost the country about 800,000 lives. It was an extremely complicated struggle, as will be evident from a brief discussion of its main features. There were so many zigzags in the fighting that at times it was not clear which side had the upper hand. The counterrevolutionaries, soon to be known as the Whites (a throwback to the monarchists in France, whose standard was white), could count on the support of several groups whose ultimate goals were not identical. In the first place, a fair number of non-Bolshevik politicians who had been active in a wide range of political parties—including a few from the Socialist Revolutionary Party—supported the attempt to unseat the Communists. The Mensheviks remained aloof from this camp; a majority opposed the Leninists, but they refused to align themselves with the Whites, whom they regarded as reactionary. On the other hand, a sizable number of former officials in the Provisional Government joined the Whites, as did several nationalist groups seeking independence, as well as Cossacks and a fair number of intellectuals. The nationalists were especially powerful in the Ukraine, where the Rada (Supreme Council) proclaimed the Ukraine an independent People’s Republic eleven days after the Bolshevik seizure of power. However, it was the senior officers of the Imperial army who composed what has been called the ‘moving spirit’ behind the effort to overthrow the new government.

The first skirmishes between foreign and Russian troops involved Czechs, not the armies of Western countries. A considerable number of Czech soldiers had been dispatched to the Eastern Front in 1914 by the Austro-Hungarian government, but they showed no interest in fighting against Russia, and many deserted to the Russian side. Thomas G. Masaryk, the leader of the Czech national movement, advised the deserters to form a special brigade, which by 1917 numbered about forty-five thousand men, and to join the fight against the Central Powers. Masaryk calculated that if the Czechs contributed to a victory by France, Great Britain, and the United States, he would have a voice at the peace conference and would be in a position to secure Czech independence from Austria-Hungary. The brigade had survived the collapse of the Eastern Front; Masaryk wanted to send the Czech soldiers to France to continue fighting, in hopes of further enhancing the Czechs’ bargaining power at the peace table. The Russians agreed to permit the Czechs to go to France by way of Vladivostok, the country’s largest port on the Pacific Ocean, but only on condition that the troops would travel as ‘free citizens,’ with a minimum of arms. The Czechs refused to surrender their weapons. In what turned out to be a major blunder, Trotsky ordered Russian troops to disarm the Czechs, by force if necessary. A series of clashes broke out in Cheliabinsk in the Urals, which quickly spread all along the Trans-Siberian Railway. By 8 June 1918, the Czechs had taken control of several towns in the area, from Penza in south-central Russia, to Samara on the Volga, and Tomsk in Siberia.

The French government saw in this development an opportunity to realize its overall goal in Russia, and therefore urged the Czechs to stay put and become part of the foreign intervention. French troops had arrived in Murmansk in March 1918, and were followed in short order by additional forces in Archangel and Vladivostok. The successful action of the Czechs in seizing control of a sizable amount of Russian territory persuaded the French that it would be possible to overthrow the Communist government without massive intervention by Western troops. This assessment soon turned out to be a misapprehension of the military situation in Russia.

To help the Czechs and exploit the weakness of the Bolshevik government, in the summer of 1918 the British landed small numbers of troops on the coasts of the White and Black Seas. In addition, the Japanese, eager to extend their influence in Russia, landed troops on the coastal areas of the Sea of Japan. To check the advance of the Japanese, the United States sent a force of some thirteen thousand to Siberia and Archangel. Eventually, eleven other countries sent relatively small detachments of soldiers to Russia. All in all, by late 1918 over two hundred thousand foreign troops had invaded Russian soil. Although the foreign intervention was certainly unwelcome, it was never large enough or sufficiently coordinated enough to pose a serious threat to the regime. Also, public opinion in the interventionist Western countries opposed involvement in yet another military conflict so strongly that by 1921 nearly all the foreign troops were withdrawn.

The indigenous military opposition turned out to be a greater threat to the Communists, but divisions within that camp greatly weakened it. For one thing, the Whites consisted of members of five different groups, whose political programs differed sharply: the tsarists favored a return to the old order, the Octobrists called for a limited monarchy, the Kadets advocated Western-style democracy, the Socialist Revolutionaries wanted a democracy committed to the distribution of land to the peasants, and finally, the representatives of various national minorities pressed for autonomy and, in some cases, independence. The controversies were intense and prevented them from forming a solidly united front against the government. The only common denominator was a strong distaste for Communism.

Not only were the Communists a relatively united force, commanded by a strong leader, they also benefited from their control of central Russia, which enabled them to maintain close supervision of their forces. By contrast, the Whites operated on the periphery, where transportation was primitive, facilities for the production of weapons were scant, and communication between the various commanders was difficult. Moreover, no White commander was as skillful as Trotsky in creating an effective fighting force.

General A. V. Denikin was in some respects the most successful military leader of the Whites. A forty-six-year-old tsarist officer, Denikin had a distinguished military record. During World War I, he quickly rose through the ranks, and by the spring of 1917 was Chief of Staff to the Supreme Commander. He supported General Kornilov in his conflict with Kerensky; when Kornilov’s movement collapsed, both were arrested. In December 1917, the two generals escaped from prison and devoted themselves to forming the Volunteer Army (or White Army) in south Russia. After a shell fired by Soviet troops killed Kornilov in April 1918, Denikin assumed the position of leader of the White Army in south Russia, although technically he remained subordinate to Admiral A. V. Kolchak, who commanded the White Army in Siberia. Denikin built an armed force numbering slightly over 150,000 men; at the height of his power he ruled a vast area, with a population of about forty million. Although the course of the Civil War was incredibly complicated, a consideration of Denikin’s successes and ultimate failure in south Russia sheds light on the fate of all the White armies, despite the significant differences in their experiences.

Militarily, Denikin scored some impressive victories and came close to toppling the Bolsheviks. In July 1919, his troops began to push toward the east and captured the important cities of Kursk, Voronezh, Chernigov, and Orel. The Whites were then some 250 miles from Moscow; by mid-October 1919, there seemed few additional obstacles in their march to the Communist capital. The only city that stood in their path was Tula. However, Denikin now faced a series of unexpected hurdles.

The first hurdle was military: the general ran out of badly needed reserves, because his exhausted army had been depleted by the dispatch of troops to the rear to subdue the roaming bands loyal to N. I. Makhno, the leader of the Free Territorial Society, which was hostile to any form of state authority, Communist or capitalist. Makhno resorted to guerrilla warfare to achieve his anarchist utopia, and by all accounts was not squeamish about the methods he used against anyone who stood in his way. He came to be known as the ‘instigator’ of ‘military ravages’ against innocent citizens and as a ‘human monster’ who reveled in the shedding of human blood. Makhno’s attacks on innocent people were so widespread that Denikin had no choice but to assign part of his army to contain the anarchist.

In addition, Denikin faced a series of social and political tensions in the vast area under his control that he could not deal with, and this failure, as much as anything else, led to his undoing. To govern an area including numerous minorities and social groups, with conflicting interests and aspirations, requires political skills of a high order, but Denikin was politically naïve and inept. In some respects, he seemed to be enlightened and moderate; he always insisted that he was not a reactionary, and refused to approve the use of ‘monarchist slogans’ by the officers under his command. He frequently mentioned that he came from a ‘humble background,’ that his father had been a serf and had never risen beyond the level of a minor official. He had achieved his success in the military by dint of hard work and had none of the advantages of upper-class men who had acquired high positions through family influence. However, he did not support political liberalism; his deepest political conviction was nationalism. He summed up his most cherished ideal thus: ‘Russia shall be great, united, undivided.’ To most Russian peasants and workers in 1919, who were barely making ends meet, these words were not inspiring.

Denikin’s nationalism was so fervent that he could not maintain good relations with the Ukrainian, Cossack, or Caucasian peoples in the region he governed, and their support was essential to winning the war against the Communists. He was remarkably unsophisticated in not perceiving that he had to adopt policies supported by his constituents. He often spoke of his open-mindedness, but did little to introduce badly needed reforms or to uphold those already introduced. Often his most ardent supporters took measures that seriously harmed the interests of ordinary peasants. In areas recaptured by Whites, and under his control, former landlords would return and reclaim land that had been seized by peasants, or given to them by the Bolsheviks. Nor was Denikin an effective leader. He could not maintain discipline within his ranks, or stop the pillaging that often took the form of anti-Jewish pogroms. In his autobiography, Denikin acknowledged his army’s misconduct:

The troops of the army of the south did not avoid the general malady and they blotted their reputation by pogroms of Jews… The inner sores festered in the atmosphere of hatred… The pogroms brought suffering to the Jewish people, but they also affected the spirit of the troops, warped their minds and destroyed discipline.

Other White generals also noted the deleterious impact of the soldiers’ rampages on the combat effectiveness of the entire army.

By the end of 1919, the Communists had inflicted one defeat after another on the Whites. In the fall of that year, the Whites were beaten back by the Reds near Petrograd, and then suffered another crushing defeat at the hands of General S. M. Budenny’s troops near Voronezh, effectively ending the threat to Moscow. The tide had now definitively turned in favor of the Red Army.

Admiral Kolchak, who commanded the Whites in Siberia, fared even worse. Early in 1920, after being thoroughly defeated by government troops, he abdicated, leaving Denikin as the Supreme Commander. Kolchak placed himself at the mercy of the French and Czechs, who handed him over to the local radicals in Irkutsk. In short order, they shot him, even though Lenin professed not to have favored the execution, probably because he did not want to anger the Whites and thus encourage them to fight harder.

Even now, the revolution was not out of danger. In May 1920, Marshal J. K. Pilsudski, who had assumed leadership of the nationalist movement in Poland and played a leading role in regaining the country’s independence in 1918, marched into Kiev with the intention of realizing a lifelong dream: to weaken Russia by establishing independence along its border of Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine. The conflict assumed the character of a seesaw. The Poles were defeated by the Russians, who then marched to the outskirts of Warsaw, only to be defeated by the Poles. Exhausted, the two sides agreed to a ceasefire in October 1920 and a peace treaty in March 1921, which gave Poland control of the western area of the Ukraine and parts of Belorussia.

At this point, only General P.N. Wrangel, who commanded an army of Whites in the Crimea, remained a potential threat to the Communists. As soon as the Leninists had made peace with Poland, they concentrated their forces in the Crimea and defeated Wrangel’s army. Some small armies in various parts of Russia still offered armed resistance; they were defeated in the spring of 1921. The three years of war had been exhausting, but in the end the Communists were masters of a country similar in size to that of the Russian Empire, with the following exceptions: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland became independent states; Bessarabia became part of Romania; and parts of Belorussia and the Ukraine were annexed by Poland. A ‘Far Eastern Republic’ remained under Japanese occupation and some pockets of resistance to Soviet rule persisted in Central Asia for about another decade.

The early years of Soviet rule

Once the new boundaries of Russia had been set, Lenin and Trotsky turned their full attention to domestic political, and economic issues. The Communist Party ran the country, even though it had never received majority support in a free national election. Notably, however, in the early years of Soviet rule, the party itself was not run dictatorially. Its decisions were reached at the highest levels after long discussions and votes. For example, the Central Committee deliberated for some time on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk before passing it by the narrowest of margins. Interestingly, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had joined the government in December 1917, abandoned it six months later. They wanted to resume the war against Germany, but Lenin insisted on a breathing spell to enable the Communists to consolidate their power.

The leading organs of the Communist Party continued to discuss policy options on such matters as the control of industry the appropriateness of employing specialists who did not belong to the party, and the relations of the authorities with cooperatives and trade unions. The government adopted a relatively flexible position on these issues, but maintained a hard line toward political parties that refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new regime. In December 1917, non-socialist parties were outlawed. The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) were not affected by this decree, but when the SRs took positions that clearly challenged the legitimacy of Bolshevik rule, they, too, began to feel the wrath of the authorities.

Actually, the SRs adopted a program that placed them in an ambiguous position. They supported certain groups of Whites in their campaign to overthrow the Communists, but, at the same time, disavowed any support for reactionaries. They favored the distribution of all land to the peasants and, like some of their colleagues on the left, opposed the peace treaty with Germany. Relations between the SRs and the Bolsheviks were never exactly friendly, but after certain events in 1918 they became decidedly frosty. On 6 July, a SR shot and killed Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, the German ambassador to the Soviet Union; at the same time, the SRs staged uprisings in Moscow and Yaroslavl, both of which failed only after considerable blood had been shed. The Left SRs, who supported the Bolsheviks at the time of the Bolshevik seizure of power, were banned from membership in the soviets, and as the historian Evan Mawdsley put it, ‘at this point the Soviet Union became a “one-party state.” The hostility between the SRs and the Communists sharpened immensely in 1922, when several SR leaders were charged with organizing an attempt to assassinate Lenin, sponsoring other terrorist acts, and with having collaborated with General Denikin. At the trial, the defense was not allowed to question witnesses or to produce documents disproving the charges, rendering a verdict of guilty inevitable. Some of the accused received death sentences, which were eventually suspended, apparently because of extensive criticism of this harsh punishment. The accused were then given long prison sentences.

The government’s policy toward the Mensheviks was rather complicated. They were Marxists, they had worked closely with Lenin and Trotsky for several years, and they did not call for the violent overthrow of the regime. Although they disapproved of the Communist government, they sought to replace it by constitutional means, and in that, were unique. They proposed reconvening the Constituent Assembly and called for freely elected soviets. Late in 1917, public support for the Mensheviks declined, because people on the Left were inclined to give the Bolsheviks the benefit of the doubt, but in 1918, as economic conditions worsened, the Mensheviks made a comeback and scored successes in elections to several local soviets. Contrary to all evidence, the government claimed that the Mensheviks were stirring up violent opposition and late in 1918, it closed down their press. At the same time, on 30 November, it legalized the Mensheviks as a political party, probably because it hoped that most of them would see the light and offer support to the new regime. Quite a few did precisely that.

The remaining Mensheviks continued to press for free elections and an end to persecution of the opposition. In addition, the Mensheviks called for the abandonment of War Communism and the adoption of economic policies that would introduce a limited free market. Their influence in the trade unions grew and it has been estimated that, together with other anti-Communist groups, they enjoyed a majority within the labor movement by 1921. This put Lenin in an awkward position. He was prepared to introduce major economic reforms along the lines proposed by the Mensheviks, but he did not want them to receive credit for the switch. He therefore ordered a massive crackdown. Although the government never officially outlawed the party, in the first three months of 1921 the police arrested three thousand Mensheviks; within a year, the movement ceased to be a viable party.

Lenin also faced considerable opposition within the ranks of his own party. The Left Communists, led by Bukharin, opposed the peace treaty with Germany and favored more radical economic policies, such as broader nationalization of industry and an increase in workers’ power to control factories. In March 1919, a so-called Military Opposition emerged and demanded, among other things, that local Communist Party organizations be given a greater say in army affairs. Early in 1921, several party members formed the Workers Opposition, which called for free elections in trade unions and proposed that the unions be authorized to administer all industrial establishments. Its program was clearly designed to weaken the power of the Central Committee of the party, and when Alexandra Kollontai, who had achieved a degree of fame as the foremost female Bolshevik and as the People’s Commissar of Social Welfare, joined this group, it acquired a leader who could attract wide attention to its demands.

A turn to the right: the new economic policy

Before Lenin could deal with the various disputes within the Communist Party, he was confronted with yet another surge of discontent that required immediate attention. In February 1921, workers in Petrograd launched a series of strikes to protest at food shortages. The Mensheviks took advantage of the unrest and began to agitate for democracy, at least for workers. The government quickly arranged for the shipment of substantial quantities of food to the capital and sanctioned the formation of ‘food-finding expeditions by workers.’ To prevent the spread of the strike, the police arrested many Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries who had encouraged workers to join the protest movement.

News of the unrest had spread, and it served to spark far more serious disturbances in Kronstadt, a major military seaport seventeen miles west of Petrograd. The sailors in that city had long been considered model revolutionaries; in 1917, Trotsky referred to them as ‘the pride and glory’ of the Russian Revolution. A fairly large percentage, perhaps even a majority, came from rural families and sympathized with the peasants’ resentment of the hardships caused by the state’s confiscation of their agricultural products. Anarchists and Left Socialist Revolutionaries found a sympathetic audience among the sailors, and by early 1921 they developed what has been called an ‘anarcho-populist’ program designed to fulfill the aspirations of the October Revolution of 1917. Among other things, they called on the government to grant ‘full freedom of action in regard to the land’ to the peasants, to organize new and secret elections of soviets, to permit freedom of speech and press to the workers and peasants, to liberate ‘all political prisoners of socialist parties,’ and, finally, to provide equal rations to all except those engaged in work detrimental to health, who deserved additional allowances. At a mass meeting, even many local Communists supported the demands. Then, on 2 March, the protesters formed a Provisional Revolutionary Committee to direct the movement and to conduct negotiations with the government. The demands of the insurgents were far-reaching: Paul Avrich, the foremost historian of these events, referred to them, with reason, as ‘in many ways the most serious rebellion in Soviet history.’ The most striking feature of the Kronstadt rebellion, as it became known, was that it was plainly a leftist movement that had nothing in common with the various right-wing groups still hoping to overthrow the government, which is precisely why the government found it so menacing. It could have led to a serious split among the supporters of the Bolshevik revolution, undermining the stability of the Communist regime.

The government appealed to the rebels to surrender, and when they refused, Trotsky organized an army to storm the fortress, the rebels’ principal stronghold. It turned out to be a short conflict, although the insurgents resisted bravely. The government denounced the Kronstadt sailors and their supporters as counterrevolutionaries, and showed no mercy to its captives. No trial was ever held and hundreds, perhaps thousands, are estimated to have been summarily executed.

According to Lenin, the sailors’ mutiny in Kronstadt ‘lit up reality better than anything else.’ Actually, he had decided even before the unrest that Russian economic policies needed to move in a fundamentally new direction. This became the central plank in the agenda of the Tenth Party Congress, whose meetings overlapped with the crushing of the rebellion. It was evident beyond any doubt that War Communism had failed to revive the economy. The new policies could succinctly be described as a partial return to capitalism; Lenin knew that the proposals would engender an outcry that he was betraying the cardinal principles of Marxism. To avoid rancorous debates and party divisions, he made a statement on the second day of the congress that laid the groundwork for the way the party and the country would be run for decades:

We do not need any opposition now, comrades, it’s not the time for it. Either here or over there with a rifle, but not with the opposition. It is no good reproaching me, it follows from the state of affairs. No more opposition now, comrades. And, in my view, the congress will have to draw the conclusion that the time has come to put an end to opposition, to put the lid on it, we have had enough opposition.

On the very last day of the congress, Lenin introduced a resolution calling for the immediate ‘dissolution of all groups with separate platforms, on pain of immediate expulsion from the party.’ The resolution also contained a section that remained secret for two years; it gave the Central Committee the authority to carry out the expulsions. Any other course was impossible, according to Lenin, because the country faced ‘external dangers’ too threatening to allow the formation within the party of groups that differed in the slightest degree from the party’s official program. The congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of Lenin’s recommendations.

The new rules on party discipline were designed to eliminate criticism and opposition to the New Economic Policy, which amounted to a fundamental change of direction for the Soviet Union. Although the government retained control over the large industries and the largest banks, much of the rest of the economy was to be privatized. In the countryside, compulsory requisitioning of food would end; instead, a tax would be imposed on farmers. In 1922, that tax was set at 10 percent of a farm’s income, and the rest could be disposed of by peasants as they saw fit. In that same year, peasants were once again permitted to lease and hire labor. The purchase and sale of land continued to be illegal, but land could be leased and it became legal to lease machinery and cattle. In an effort to help poorer peasants, the government fostered the establishment of cooperatives.

For the first time in three years, trade became legal. Currency was introduced and the operations of the newly created State Bank were similar to those in capitalist countries. By 1924, all taxes in kind had been abolished and replaced by hard currency. In the industrial sector, the reforms were somewhat less radical. Both state-owned and privately owned establishments were permitted. However, the impact of private ownership of the means of production should not be overstated. True, within a few years, over 88 percent of industrial enterprises were in the hands of private citizens, but they employed only slightly more than 12 percent of the workforce. The government also decreed that private industry would be permitted to operate only if it did not constitute a threat to state-owned enterprises. That the state still played the preponderant role in the economy is demonstrated by the fact that while only 8.5 percent of the industrial enterprises remained under state control, they employed over 84 percent of the workforce.

The mixed economy proved to be a significant improvement over War Communism, despite some setbacks in its early period. Overall, by the winter of 1927–8, output in many sectors reached the level of 1913, the year before the outbreak of World War I, when civilian production began to decline. Two qualifications should be noted: since 1913, the population of Russia had increased from 139 million to 147 million, which means that the comparison between those two years is somewhat misleading. Moreover, because of the deterioration of the available machinery, the quality of goods produced in 1928 did not measure up to the standards of 1913. On the other hand, the wages of industrial workers in 1927 nearly equaled those of 1913, but if ‘socialized wages,’ such as health insurance and scholarships for education are taken into account, the workers in 1927 can be said to have been better off than their counterparts of fourteen years earlier.

Lenin’s death and the struggle for power

Politically, the years of gradual economic improvement were a period of intense turbulence that boded ill for the future. The troubles began shortly after Lenin’s death in January 1924, at the relatively young age of fifty-three. He had suffered a series of strokes, the first in May 1922, only a year after the New Economic Policy had been introduced. He continued to serve as leader of the country during his last two years, but his energy flagged and he no longer supervised the affairs of state with his former vigor. Still, he was so charismatic a figure in the Communist movement that no one openly challenged his authority. It was only during the last months of his life that he acknowledged that the country faced a serious political danger: one man in his entourage, Stalin, had, in a seemingly unobtrusive manner, amassed so much power that he would be in a position to impose his will on the Communist Party and the state. This deeply troubled Lenin, because he had concluded that Stalin was too rude and too ambitious to occupy so prominent a position. Shortly before his death, Lenin made these apprehensions explicit, by recommending in his testament that Stalin’s wings be clipped. He also indicated that he regarded Trotsky, his right-hand man since 1917, as the most gifted member of the Central Committee, although he considered him to be overly self-confident and absorbed in the ‘purely administrative side of affairs.’ He described Bukharin as ‘the most significant theoretician,’ but regretted that he was weak in dialectics. Somehow, Stalin and his supporters succeeded in keeping the testament secret. It was not until 1926 that Max Eastman, an American writer then sympathetic to communism, managed to obtain a copy and publicize it. At about the same time as he composed the testament, Lenin also published an article in Pravda criticizing Stalin as a poor administrator and again accusing him of rudeness, but Lenin’s attacks were phrased in vague language and therefore did not have a strong impact on leading party members.

Stalin’s rise to political eminence is a fascinating story that should serve as a warning to people who believe that only charisma is the key to success in politics. Stalin was neither a particularly engaging person, nor a sparkling orator. Although he was intelligent, he did not have an original mind, and he never impressed associates as a man of profound insights. Yet he rose to the top position in Russia and remained in office as a dictatorial ruler for twenty-five years, until his death in 1953.

Stalin’s outstanding qualities were shrewdness, a remarkable ability to conceal his ambitions, and ruthlessness, which he also managed to hide until he reached the pinnacle of power. Born in 1879 in Gori, Georgia, to a family of modest means—his father was a cobbler—he was destined for a career in the Orthodox Church. At the age of ten, he was enrolled in an Orthodox seminary, where he studied until 1899, when he either decided to end his religious studies, or was expelled because he showed more interest in revolution than in Christianity—the documents are unclear. However, there is no doubt that he now devoted himself to the revolutionary cause. For the next fifteen years or so, he was a loyal and diligent member of the Marxist movement. He worked hard, but did not impress anyone as having exceptional abilities. His major achievement was the publication of an article on the nationality question from a Marxist standpoint, in which he adopted a dismissive attitude toward the principle of national autonomy, claiming that if minorities were granted autonomy in cultural affairs they would lose interest in political self-government. Within the inner circles of Russian Marxism, it was known that without Lenin’s help the article would never have seen the light of day. In the years after 1903, when Bolshevism was emerging as an independent movement within Russian Marxism, Lenin viewed Stalin as a helpful and useful subordinate.

Stalin’s completion of the revolution

Some historians have referred to Stalin’s economic and political policies as a second revolution—often described as a ‘revolution from above’—because he abandoned the New Economic Policy, vastly increased the state’s role in the national economy, and sought to eliminate inequality of income. Stalin and his supporters claimed, correctly, that they were finally establishing the kind of socio-economic system envisioned by Marx and his earliest supporters.

There can be no doubt about the radicalism of Stalin’s policies and achievements. Within a few years, the Soviet Union became an industrial state and a majority of the population could be classified as proletarian. Industry was tightly controlled by the government, which saw to it that the pay scale of workers would not encompass large differences. At the same time, the government introduced a program of collectivization of agriculture, which meant the elimination of privately-owned farms. The peasants, too, were provided with incomes that did not vary greatly from one to another.

Although these changes were far-reaching, it is not self-evident that they constituted a second revolution. They may more accurately be seen as the fulfillment of Lenin’s plans and those of the Bolshevik Party generally in 1917–18. In its basic thrust, collectivization of agriculture was not all that far removed from War Communism, the economic system imposed on the Soviet Union between 1918 and 1921. At that time, economic power was also concentrated in the hands of the central government. Lenin abandoned his radical economic program not because he had changed his mind about its legitimacy or desirability, but because the economy had declined to a dangerous level. Whether or not he intended the partial return to capitalism that year to be permanent is not clear, but Stalin’s accomplishment in the economic sphere did not contradict Lenin’s earlier dreams for Russia and for the rest of the world.

In the political sphere, Stalin’s policies also did not constitute a revolution. Although far more crude and brutal than Lenin, Stalin, like his master in 1921, sought to put a halt to all opposition to both his policies and his rule. Stalin pursued this goal with inordinate ruthlessness, and produced a political order unprecedented for the degree of governmental control over society in virtually all its aspects. In addition, Russia or, more accurately, the Soviet Union, became a military power of the first rank after World War II, widely feared in much of the world. To use Reed’s evocative expression, forty years after 1917, the Russian Revolution continued to shake the world.

The Five-Year Plan

In 1927, few people in the Soviet Union wanted or expected an upheaval that would once again thrust the country into turmoil, and disrupt the lives of millions of citizens. As already noted, the standard of living of most people approached that of 1913, and peasants owned more land than in the prewar years. True, the people did not enjoy political freedom, but they also did not suffer from overbearing political oppression. It seemed to many that ten years of power had moderated the Communists, who would now concentrate on a gradual strengthening of the industrial sector of the economy.

However, Stalin was moved, by both practical and political considerations, to embark on a new course. By 1927, the revival of the large-scale industry that had existed in 1917 seemed to have run its course; any further increase in production would require new policies. The Soviet Union could try to import new machinery, but for that it would have to export agricultural goods. Yet to increase the agricultural surplus, more industry would be needed to produce machinery for farmers. It was a vicious circle that Soviet leaders believed could be broken only by substantially increasing production and reducing consumption, which would leave sufficient capital for the development of industry. That became the underlying principle of the Five-Year Plans.

These considerations fitted in well with Stalin’s political concerns. In 1925, he had adopted the slogan ‘socialism in one country,’ but under the New Economic Policy the country appeared to be drifting away from socialism. Stalin feared that the peasants were developing into a powerful force and in time would press for a full restoration of capitalism. He therefore launched a campaign against the so-called kulaks (fists), the well-to-do peasants who made up no more than 3.9 percent of the population in the agrarian regions of the country. There was no clear definition of kulak; in the pre-1917 era, the word was applied to peasants who were better off than most, often rich enough to engage in money-lending and mortgaging. In the 1920s, the term referred to any peasant who owned one of the larger farms, draft animals, and machinery, and who employed some workers. It has been estimated that in 1927, the kulaks produced only 13 percent of the country’s grain; 85 percent was produced by middle-income and poorer peasants.

Seventy-five percent of the peasants still lived in communes, which were more important centers of administration than the soviets or cooperatives. According to official statistics, the 2,300 soviets in the countryside disposed of a total budget of about sixteen million rubles, whereas the budget of various peasant associations in the entire country amounted to eighty million rubles. Moreover, the kulaks tended to serve as leaders of local organizations. In short, in the ten years since the revolution the Communist Party had failed to place its loyal followers in key positions in the villages, a state of affairs the government considered a potential threat to its control of the country.

Whither the Soviet Union?

Despite these domestic upheavals, the Soviet Union managed to transform itself into an industrial state of major proportions and an impressive military power within the short period of ten years. These achievements proved to be of critical importance when Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, to be met by resistance so fierce that not only the Germans but also the rest of the world were surprised.

That resistance was all the more surprising because the first response to the invasion seemed to signal a quick and total collapse by the Russians, giving Hitler his greatest victory to date in World War II and assuring his dominance over the entire European continent. A major reason for Germany’s early victories was that Stalin had given every indication that he had little to fear from the Nazis. True, he had ordered some increased spending on the military after the rise to power of Hitler in 1933, but at the same time he pursued domestic and foreign policies that suggested he did not suspect an attack by Germany. The purge of officers in the Red Army in 1937–8, many of them highly qualified strategists and administrators, greatly weakened the military services. Then, on 23 August 1939, Stalin signed a Non-Aggression Pact with the Nazis that gave Hitler a free hand to attack Poland. It also contained several secret provisions stipulating that after Poland’s defeat, Eastern Europe would be divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. The agreement struck many people, among them a number of ardent radicals, as a horrendous betrayal of all that was decent.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the negotiations with the Nazis was Stalin’s conviction that Hitler intended to abide by the treaty permanently, or at least for several years. When Winston Churchill, the British prime minister who had led Britain in its war against Germany since June 1940, warned Stalin that Hitler’s army was poised to attack the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik leader did not believe him, and made no effort to prepare for war. When it became clear that the Germans were indeed on the march, he apparently suffered a nervous breakdown and for about seven days was incapable of running the government or giving orders to military commanders.

The German army, superior in armor, strategy, tactics, and determination, was unstoppable. In addition, in the Ukraine, the Nazis were welcomed by many natives, who believed that life under the invaders would be preferable to rule by the Communists. In one month, the German army, under General von Bock’s leadership, advanced five hundred miles; by mid-October, his troops stood at the gates of Moscow. By this time, the invaders had gained control over territories in which sixty million Soviet citizens (about 30 percent of the total) lived and which contained two-thirds of the country’s oil reserves and three-fourths of its iron ore. In addition, the Russian army had suffered staggering losses: thousands of tanks, guns, and airplanes had been destroyed or captured, and the number of casualties endured during the first four months of the war ran to over three million.

In the meantime, Stalin had recovered, resumed his duties as leader of the country, and, surprisingly, turned out to be extraordinarily effective in rousing the nation for the war effort and in guiding the military to put up a robust defense. He quickly understood that his major task was to appeal to the patriotism of the people; he did not hesitate to invoke many of the symbols of traditional Russian nationalism, which had long been derided by the Communists. Nor did he hesitate to dismiss civilian or military officials incapable of coping with the endless crises they confronted. It did not take the Russian people long to respond positively to his appeals to make sacrifices to save their homeland. The invaders played right into Stalin’s hands. Instead of taking advantage of the masses’ discontents under Communism, the Germans treated the natives in the conquered territories as Untermenschen (subhumans). In short order, Hitler’s army faced millions of hostile people who went to great lengths—including extensive guerrilla warfare—to hamper the invaders.

The tide began definitively to turn against the German army in September 1942, when Hitler’s troops failed to capture Stalingrad, the city on the Volga that the Führer was determined to capture, because he assumed that the capture of the city with that name would be a fatal blow to the country. However, the Russian troops fought gallantly and after a successful counterattack, surrounded the German army, which had no choice but to capitulate in February 1943. Five months later, in July 1943, the Russians defeated the enemy in a now-famous battle near Kursk (in southwest Russia). It was the first time that Soviet troops had beaten the Germans in what had come to be known as a specialty of German commanders: ‘mobile warfare.’ One reason for the Russian success was that the Soviet Union had received a considerable amount of advanced equipment from Great Britain and the United States. After this victory, Russian troops moved quickly westward, but they were ordered to halt their offensive in the summer of 1944, when not far from Warsaw, Poland’s capital. Stalin, it has been suggested, wanted to give the Germans ample time to deliver a serious blow at the Polish Home Army, which had fought on the side of the Russians but made clear its distaste for Communism. Stalin directed his forces to capture Romania and Hungary instead, guaranteeing that these two countries would be satellites of the Soviet Union. Eventually, the Russian troops resumed their march through Poland into Germany. When the war ended, in May 1945, the Soviet army was entrenched in six East European countries, as well as East Germany.

Thus, the sphere of socialism was vastly expanded, leading many people to believe that the Bolsheviks’ original dream of world revolution was at last within reach. However, within a few years, it became clear that the Eastern European countries would not easily succumb to Russian domination. Moreover, the Soviet Union had paid a heavy price for the victory over the German invader. A few statistics will suffice to indicate the country’s losses between 1941 and 1942: agricultural production declined from 95.5 million tons to 30 million tons, and the number of cattle declined by 50 percent. Over the entire war, famine and Nazi brutality toward Russians are estimated to have caused the death of well over twelve million people; in addition, some eight million people died as a result of enemy military action.

In view of these statistics, it is remarkable that within a few years of the end of World War II, the Soviet Union became one of the two great powers in the world, considered by some to approach the strength of the United States. Most notably, the Soviet army vastly extended the reach of Communism: Communist governments were established in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Albania, and East Germany. Although there were indications that the people of these countries chafed under the new regime—rebellions broke out against the new system of rule in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968—all generally remained subservient to the government in Moscow. In 1949, the Soviet Union became a nuclear power, vastly increasing its influence in international affairs. Over the next three decades, the Communists became rivals of the West in many parts of the world and succeeded in establishing footholds in the Middle East, Africa, and even Latin America. China had undergone its own Communist revolution in 1949 and also became an adversary of the West, although its relations with the Soviet Union did not remain cordial for long.

Relations between the Soviet Union and the West cooled to such an extent that the years from 1946 to the early 1990s came to be known as the era of the Cold War, which for the most part was confined to economic, political, and military rivalries between the Communist and capitalist blocs. Actually, the two worlds never overcame the suspicions each harbored of the other during the days of close collaboration in the war against Nazi Germany. The Communists were enraged at the failure of the West to relieve the Soviet army in 1942 and 1943 by opening a second front against Germany. Actually, the West was militarily too weak to do so. On the other hand, political leaders in the West, most notably Winston Churchill, feared that the Soviet Union’s control over Eastern Europe was only a prelude to attempts to spread socialism to Europe and eventually the rest of the world, a fear harking back to the earliest period of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The ‘official’ beginning of the Cold War is generally believed to have been Churchill’s famous speech, made in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, in which he asserted that ‘an iron curtain has descended across the continent [stretching] from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ and urged cooperation between the United States and Europe to nip in the bud any ‘temptation to ambition or adventure,’ a clear reference to what he believed to be the expansionist intentions of Stalin.

Basically, the Cold War amounted to a fierce rivalry between the West and the Soviet Union, but once, in October 1962, the relations between the two sides took a dangerous turn, threatening to lead to a military conflict in which both sides considered using nuclear weapons. Nikita Khrushchev, then the leader of the Soviet Union, had decided that John F. Kennedy, the American president, was a young, inexperienced head of state, who would not dare to respond forcefully to a provocative move by the Soviet Union. Resentful of the Americans having bases in Turkey, within easy striking distance of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev decided to establish bases in Cuba, fifty miles from the United States. When American planes spotted the new facilities, Kennedy became alarmed; after considering an air strike he imposed a blockade, called a ‘quarantine,’ on Soviet ships carrying military supplies to Cuba. For a few days, the two sides were on the brink of war, but after a series of back-channel negotiations, Khrushchev abandoned his plans to place nuclear weapons in Cuba. In return, Kennedy agreed never to attack Cuba and to dismantle military bases in Turkey and Italy from which missiles could be fired at the Communist bloc countries. The Cold War continued for about another three decades, but both sides avoided provocations that could lead to military conflict.

By this time, the Soviet Union had completed more than a decade of what might be called post-Stalinist Communism. Stalin had died early in March 1953, after a series of bizarre events that seemed to suggest that the country was on the verge of another outbreak of state terror similar to the bloodletting of the years between 1936 and 1938. Early in 1953, the authorities announced that a group of doctors, most clearly Jewish, had made plans to murder, by medical means, a large number of people who occupied leading positions in the government. The agencies charged with protecting the nation’s leaders and safeguarding the socialist state were accused of incompetence in not detecting the growing danger. This seemed to be an ominous signal that a new wave of terror from above was being planned. It is now widely believed that this was prevented by Stalin’s unexpected death on 5 March. In fact, rumors widely circulated that he had been murdered. The evidence in support of that charge was not convincing. Stalin was seventy-three years old and it was known that he had suffered a stroke some years earlier. In 1955, N. S. Khrushchev, for many years a major figure in Stalin’s administration, had seized control of the government and immediately took steps to prevent a recurrence of mass terror. He went so far as to have Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s henchman in the terror of the 1930s, shot without trial.

The collapse of the Soviet Union

As a nuclear power, the Soviet Union could rattle its saber, but the government’s focus on worldwide influence was bound to be short-lived. True, the people of the Soviet Union took pride in the country’s military and diplomatic achievements, yet at the same time many citizens became increasingly critical of domestic developments. The standard of living of the vast majority of the people, very low to begin with, lagged far behind that of other industrialized countries. From the mid-1960s, labor productivity in the Soviet Union was significantly lower than that of capitalist America and the welfare states of Europe. For example, in the period from 1951 to 1965, the rate of increase in productivity amounted to between 40 and 50 percent of that of the American workers. In 1963, miners in the United States produced an average of 14 tons of coal per day, whereas their Soviet counterparts produced 2.1 tons per day, even though the level of mechanization was about the same. About one-fifth of what is referred to as the ‘caloric intake’ of the Soviet people had to be imported—this, at a time of growing budget deficits. In a poll of 1991, two-thirds of the people reported that the per capita income of their families was less than 125 rubles a month—about two hundred dollars at the official rate of exchange, but more like twenty dollars on the free market. Health services were in dreadful condition, as is demonstrated by a decline in longevity between 1959 and 1979, from 69.3 years to 67.7 years. Many people in the Soviet Union concluded that the country’s economic system was on the wrong track. Western economists—and in time a growing number of Soviet economists—attributed these dismal statistics to the rigid controls from above, the absence of adequate incentives for hard work, and the prevalence of corruption at every level of society.

It was now also beyond doubt that the economic and social egalitarianism that the founders of Communism had promised was not part of Soviet reality. There were wide differences in income for various categories of workers, and those at the top of the social hierarchy lived far better than the masses. A joke circulating in the 1970s nicely captures the public attitude toward the country’s upper classes and their disrespect for Communist principles. Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the party from 1967 until 1982, took his aging mother on a tour of the lavish country homes where he kept his cars and lived luxuriously. She remained silent until the frustrated Brezhnev finally asked her point blank what she thought of all his comforts. ‘It’s very nice,’ she responded, ‘but what will happen when the Communists come back to power?’

That did not happen. Instead, the Communist system of rule collapsed shortly after M. S. Gorbachev, who acceded to power as General Secretary in 1985, began to introduce major political and economic reforms. Few senior officials expected the fifty-four-year-old Gorbachev, who had held important positions in the Communist Party for some fifteen years, to lead the country in a fundamentally new direction. He was, as the British historian Robert Service put it, ‘a brilliant dissimulator;’ in public he toed the party line, but in private conversations with his family and closest friends he had expressed, ever since his days as a student at Moscow State University (from 1950 to 1955), dissatisfaction with conditions in his country, although he had only the vaguest notion of how to improve matters.

Soon after assuming the office of General Secretary, Gorbachev launched a reform program, but his first effort was ill-advised and unsuccessful. He initiated a campaign against alcoholism, which had become a public health hazard seriously affecting labor productivity; it remains a problem even now, in 2013. The government reduced the output of liquor and restricted its sale, but many people refused to do without their favorite drinks and resorted to using industrial products such as methylated spirits and antifreeze to produce homemade substitutes. Both were of inferior quality and, more important, harmful. Within three years, the government quietly dropped the campaign.

Gorbachev’s cultural and political reforms were more widely appreciated and more enduring. In 1986, he adopted the policy of glasnost, a hazy term that literally meant ‘publicity’or ‘openness,’ but which eventually acquired a variety of meanings. The General Secretary seems to have had in mind little more than that the government would be more forthcoming in explaining its conduct of national affairs. Within short order, that vague program was abandoned in favor of the dissemination of information and opinions on a wide range of issues. More importantly, within two years the press and television were permitted to air subjects that had been officially kept under wraps for decades. Stalinist terror, censorship, the degradation of the environment, corruption, crime, the failings of the health services, and the intrigues at the highest levels of authority were freely discussed. Works of fiction and scholarly books on sensitive subjects that had been proscribed because they did not adhere to the party line were published and widely read by the educated classes, who harbored strong misgivings about the government’s conduct of affairs. They also sensed that economically and socially the country lagged far behind Western democracies.

Glasnost was part of a larger reform that Gorbachev had conceived, which he dubbed perestroika (reconstruction). Again, he did not clearly define the notion; all he said when he first used the word in 1985 was, ‘Obviously, we all must undergo reconstruction, all of us.… Everyone must adopt new approaches and understand that no other path is available to us.’ Perestroika was a watchword, a catch-all for the transformation of Soviet society. Gorbachev considered himself a dedicated Marxist; he wanted to reform the Soviet Union, but he did not intend to abandon the fundamental principles that had inspired the creation of the socialist order in 1917.

His commitment to Marxist doctrines made it impossible for him to cope effectively with the nation’s economic problems, which continued to worsen at an alarming pace. Within one year, 1990, the net national product declined by 9 percent. Prices rose precipitately, and some staple products, such as milk, tea, coffee, and soap, became hard to find. In numerous districts, the authorities introduced rationing. The central government tried various reforms to stimulate the economy, but none worked. Several leading economists recommended the abandonment by the government of central control over the system; it seems that Gorbachev showed interest in this radical step, but in the end could not propose a measure that would undermine the socialist order.

In the political sphere, Gorbachev was bolder. He established a series of institutions that seemed to be the bedrock of a democratic order; the new political structure gave the people a real voice in national affairs. A Congress of People’s Deputies, consisting of 2,250 members, was elected and was to meet annually, serving as a check on the executive part of the government. The congress elected a Supreme Soviet of fifty-four, which met twice a year and served as a legislature operating more or less like Western parliaments. Gorbachev hoped this structure would enable the country to remain loyal to the principles of Marxism.

These efforts at reform were laudable in many respects, but they failed to achieve their purpose to modernize and revitalize the Soviet Union. Gorbachev seems not to have been familiar with a cardinal rule of politics, first enunciated by Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform.’ It did not occur to the General Secretary that, in Soviet society and countries that had adopted the Soviet system of rule, his reforms might unleash a chain reaction of demands for more freedom and better economic conditions that he would not be able to control. He was especially surprised that his proposals triggered protest movements among the national minorities and in Eastern Europe, movements that played a major role in the eventual breakup of the Soviet Union. The entire institution of government had become so inefficient and corrupt that a large percentage of the people would accept nothing less than a new economic and political system. To everyone’s astonishment, in 1991 the Soviet Empire crumbled altogether, and with less bloodshed than in 1917, when the tsarist Empire had collapsed. Eastern European countries abandoned Communism and declared their full independence. More astonishing, the Soviet Union disintegrated into fifteen separate states, the former constituent republics. The Russian Federation, the largest state to emerge from the former Soviet Union, turned to capitalism and democracy after Gorbachev’s removal from office, although the new economic and political systems bear little resemblance to the capitalist democracies of the West.

Only a minority of those who had lived under the Soviet system of rule mourned the end of the dreams of John Reed and Vladimir Lenin. In some respects, the dreams of 1917 were noble, and it is easy to see why so many people were captivated by them, but they were also highly unrealistic, especially in a country as poor and politically undeveloped as Russia. That the experiment of the Russian Revolution failed so quickly is not surprising. By 1945, the Soviet Union had been transformed into what appeared to be a mighty empire, but it was short-lived, lasting a mere seventy-four years, not comparable in durability to other great empires, most notably the Roman, Spanish, and British. In the final analysis, the Soviet Empire collapsed because it was based on utopian ideals, and not even men with pure and noble souls could have realized them. Neither Lenin nor most of his successors could be regarded as men of virtue; they were all too willing to resort to the most ruthless means to realize their dreams, but even then, they could not create the kind of society they considered ideal.

1901–02

Creation of Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR)

1902

Publication of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?

1903

Second Congress of Russian Social Democratic Party: Split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks

1904

January 26: Beginning of Russo-Japanese War with Japan’s attack on Port Arthur

Autumn–Winter: Banquet Campaign of Union of Liberation

1905

January 9: Bloody Sunday

May 14–15: Defeat of Russian fleet at Tsushima Strait by Japanese

August 29: Peace treaty between Russia and Japan

October 9–16: Formation of Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets)

October 12–18: General Strike

October 17: Issuance of October Manifesto

Late October: Formation of Union of October 17 (Octobrist Party)

December 21: Suppression of Moscow

Banquet Campaign

Battle of Tannenberg

Beria, Lavrenti

Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobold von

Bezobrazov, A. M.

Black Hundreds

Bloody Sunday

Bogdanov, B.O.

Bolshevism

Bolshoi Theatre

Bothmer, Karl von

Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of

Brezhnev, Leonid

British coal miners

Bublikov, A. A.

Budenny, S. M.

Bukharin, N. I.

Bunge, N. Kh.

Byloe, (The Past)