A History of Modern Russia

From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century, Third Edition

Robert Service

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674725591
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Russia had an extraordinary twentieth century, undergoing upheaval and transformation. Updating his acclaimed History of Modern Russia, Robert Service provides a panoramic perspective on a country whose Soviet past encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror, and two world wars. He shows how seven decades of communist rule, which penetrated every aspect of Soviet life, continue to influence Russia today. This new edition takes the story from 2002 through the entire presidency of Vladimir Putin to the election of his successor, Dmitri Medvedev.

PART ONE

3

Conflicts and Crises

(1917)

Disputes intensified after the February Revolution about the future of the old Russian Empire. Hardly any politicians, generals or businessmen advocated a return of the monarchy; it was widely taken for granted that the state would become a republic. Yet the precise constitutional form to be chosen by the republic was contentious. The Kadets wished to retain a unitary administration and opposed any subdivision of the empire into a federation of nationally-based territorial units. Their aim was to rule through the traditional network of provinces.¹ In contrast, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries wanted to accede to the national aspirations of the non-Russian population. In particular, they intended to grant regional self-government to Ukraine, which had been merely a collection of provinces in the tsarist period. When the Kadets argued that this would ultimately bring about the disintegration of the state, the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries replied that it offered the sole way to prevent separatist movements from breaking up the state.

The Kadets played for time, stipulating that any regional reorganization would have to await decision by the Constituent Assembly. But popular opinion was shifting against them on many other policies. In particular, the liberal ministers were regarded as having expansionist war aims even after the resignation of Milyukov, the arch-expansionist, from the cabinet.

Yet the Kadets in the Provisional Government, despite being faced by problems with the non-Russians, felt inhibited about making a patriotic appeal exclusively to the Russians. Liberal ministers were understandably wary lest they might irritate the internationalist sensibility of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries. In any case, Russian nationalism was not very attractive to most Russians, who could see for themselves that their non-Russian fellow citizens were as keen as they were to defend the country. There was a general feeling that ordinary folk of all nationalities were oppressed by the same material difficulties. Not having been very nationalistic before the Great War, Russians did not suddenly become so in 1917. On the whole, they responded most positively to slogans which had a direct bearing on their everyday lives: workers’ control, land, bread, peace and freedom. And they assumed that what was good for their locality was good for the entire society.

Yet although the Russians did not act together as a nation, Russian workers, peasants and soldiers caused difficulties for the cabinet. It was in the industrial cities where the soviets, trade unions and factory-workshop committees were concentrated; and since Russians constituted a disproportionately large segment of factory workers, they were to the fore in helping to form these bodies. Furthermore, such bodies were instruments of political mobilization; they were also dedicated to the country’s rapid cultural development.² And they established their internal hierarchies. In early June, for example, soviets from all over the country sent representatives to Petrograd to the First All-Russia Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. This Congress elected a Central Executive Committee to co-ordinate all soviets across the country. A potential alternative framework of administration was being constructed.

Meanwhile the Provisional Government depended on its marriage of convenience with socialists. Liberal ministers gritted their teeth because they recognized that the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries alone could preserve them in power. They had to hope that eventually they would be in a position to annul the marriage and rule without socialist interference. This was always a bit of a gamble, being based on the premiss that no trouble would arise from the other large socialist party which was consolidating itself after the February Revolution: the Bolsheviks. Initially the gamble did not seem a very long shot. The Bolsheviks were a minority in the Petrograd Soviet; there were even those among them who were willing to contemplate giving conditional support to the Provisional Government. Perhaps the Bolsheviks, too, could be embraced in the marital arrangement.

But all this was set to change. On 3 April, Lenin came back to Russia via Germany in a train put at his disposal by the German government. He returned to a party divided on strategy, and he quickly found that there were plenty of Bolsheviks eager to support a policy of vigorous opposition to the cabinet. The February Revolution had disappointed all Bolsheviks. Against their expectations, the monarchy’s overthrow had not been followed by a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’; and the Bolsheviks had failed to gain control over the Petrograd Soviet.

For some weeks they had been in disarray. Several of their leaders – including Lev Kamenev and Iosif Stalin – favoured some co-operation with the Mensheviks; but Lenin put a stop to this. When Kamenev boarded his train on its way to Petrograd, Lenin expostulated: ‘What have you been writing in Pravda? We’ve seen a few copies and called you all sorts of names!’³ Despite not having been in Russia for ten years and having had flimsy contact with fellow Bolsheviks since 1914, he articulated a strategy that successfully expressed the anger of those who detested the Provisional Government. On 4 April he presented his April Theses to comrades in the Tauride Palace. Lenin’s central thought involved a reconstruction of Bolshevism. He called upon the party to build up majorities in the soviets and other mass organizations and then to expedite the transfer of power to them. Implicitly he was urging the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the inception of a socialist order.⁴

His audience was stunned: no Bolshevik had previously suggested that the ‘transition to socialism’ might be inaugurated instantly after the monarchy’s removal. The party’s conventional notion had been that Russia would still require an epoch of capitalist economic development. Yet the Bolsheviks had also always stressed that the bourgeoisie could not be trusted to establish political democracy and that a temporary ‘democratic dictatorship’ should be set up by socialists. Essentially Lenin was now striking out the qualification that socialist rule should be temporary.⁵

The ideas of the April Theses were accepted by the Seventh Party Conference at the end of the month; and his party cut its remaining links with the Mensheviks. Without Lenin, the crystallization of a far-left opposition to the Provisional Government would have taken longer. But while he chopped away at his party’s formal doctrines, undoubtedly he was working with the grain of its impatience and militancy. All Bolshevik leaders had always hated Nicholas II and liberals with equal venom. Few were squeamish about the methods that might be used to achieve the party’s ends. Dictatorship was thought desirable, terror unobjectionable. Bolsheviks wanted to reduce the schedule for the eventual attainment of communism. Their lives had been dedicated to revolutionary aims. Hardly any veteran Bolshevik had evaded prison and Siberian exile before 1917; and, while operating in the clandestine conditions, each had had to put up with much material distress. Lenin’s return gave them the leadership they wanted.

Those who disliked his project either joined the Menshevik party or abandoned political involvement altogether.⁶ The Bolshevik party anticipated socialist revolution across Europe as well as in Russia. The word went forth from Petrograd that when the Bolsheviks took power, great changes would immediately be set in motion. By midsummer 1917 they had worked out slogans of broad appeal: peace; bread; all power to the soviets; workers’ control; land to the peasants; and national self-determination.

The Bolshevik party adhered to democratic procedures only to the extent that its underlying political purpose was being served; and the circumstances after the February Revolution fulfilled this condition. In May and June the Bolsheviks increased their representation at the expense of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in many factory committees and some soviets. The party is said to have expanded its membership to 300,000 by the end of the year. Apparently about three fifths of Bolsheviks were of working-class background.⁷ Such was the expansive revolutionary spirit among them that the Bolshevik leaders were carried away by it at least to some extent. And unlike the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks had neither any governmental responsibility nor many administrative burdens in the soviets. They had the time to conduct inflammatory propaganda, and they used it.

Intellectuals of middle-class origins were prominent in the party’s higher echelons; the return of the émigrés – including Trotski, who worked alongside the Bolsheviks from summer 1917 after years of antagonism to Lenin – reinforced the phenomenon. Their skills in writing articles and proclamations and in keeping records were essential to party bodies. Yet the fact that practices of electivity and accountability pervaded the party impeded Bolshevik intellectuals from doing just as they pleased. At any rate, Bolsheviks were united by their wish for power and for socialism regardless of class origins. From Lenin downwards there was a veritable rage to engage in revolutionary action.⁸ Lenin revelled in his party’s mood. At the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets in June 1917, the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli commented that no party existed that would wish to take power alone. Lenin, from the floor, corrected him: ‘There is!’⁹

Liberal ministers, however, were almost as worried about the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries as about the Bolsheviks. In late June, when the Provisional Government decided to recognize the Ukrainian Rada as the organ of regional government in Kiev, the Kadets walked out of the cabinet.¹⁰ This could not have happened at a worse time. A Russian military offensive had been started on the Eastern front’s southern sector: Prince Lvov and Alexander Kerenski, his War Minister, wanted to prove Russia’s continuing usefulness to her Allies and to gain support at home by means of military success. But German reinforcements were rushed to the Austro-Hungarian lines and Russian forces had to retreat deep into Ukraine. And in those very same days the Bolsheviks were making mischief in Petrograd. They had tried to hold their own separate demonstration against the cabinet earlier in June – and only a last-minute intervention by the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets stopped them. The inhabitants of Petrograd were gripped by the uncertainty of the situation.

The Bolshevik Central Committee drew encouragement from the crisis, and planned to hold yet another armed demonstration in the capital on 3 July. Evidently if things went his way, Lenin might opt to turn the crisis into an opportunity to seize power.¹¹ The Provisional Government quickly issued a banning order. Unnerved by this display of political will, the Bolshevik Central Committee urged the assembled workers and troops, who had sailors from the Kronstadt naval garrison among them, to disperse. By then Lenin had absented himself from the scene, and was spending his time at a dacha at Neivola in the Finnish countryside. But the crowd wanted its demonstration. The sailors from the Kronstadt naval garrison were prominent among the more unruly elements, but local workers and soldiers were also determined to march through the central streets of Petrograd. The Provisional Government ordered reliable troops to break up the demonstration by firing on it. Dozens of people were killed.

Ministers held the Bolshevik Central Committee responsible for the clashes even though it had refrained from participating in the demonstration. Ministry of Internal Affairs officials claimed that the Bolsheviks had received money from the German government. Lenin and Zinoviev managed to flee into hiding in Finland, but Trotski, Kamenev and Alexandra Kollontai were caught and imprisoned. In Petrograd, if not in most other cities, the Bolshevik party reverted to being a clandestine party.

These complications were too much for Prince Lvov, who resigned in favour of his War Minister, Kerenski. Russia’s ruin was ineluctable, according to Lvov, unless her socialists agreed to take prime responsibility for the affairs of state. Certainly Kerenski was already a master of the arts of twentieth-century political communication. He wore his patriotism on his sleeve. He was a brilliant orator, receiving standing ovations from his audiences and especially from women who were enraptured by his charm. He had a picture designed of himself and printed on tens of thousands of postcards; he had newsreels made of his major public appearances. Kerenski was temperamental, but he was also energetic and tenacious. He had carefully kept contact with all the parties willing to lend support to the Provisional Government, and had avoided favouritism towards his own Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries. Kerenski believed he had positioned himself so as to be able to save Russia from political disintegration and military defeat.

His elevation had been meteoric since the February Revolution. Born in 1881 in Simbirsk, he was just thirty-six years old when he succeeded Prince Lvov. By training he was a lawyer and had specialized in the defence of arrested revolutionaries. He also was acquainted with many leading figures in Russian public life through membership of the main Freemasons’ lodge in Petrograd; but he had no experience in administration. And he was thrust into power at a time of the greatest crisis for the country since the Napoleonic invasion of 1812.

His delight at being invited to replace Prince Lvov was followed by weeks of difficulty even in putting a cabinet together. The rationale of his assumption of power was that socialists ought to take a majority of ministerial portfolios; but Tsereteli, the leading Menshevik minister under Lvov, stood down in order to devote his attention to the business of the soviets. Most Kadets, too, rejected Kerenski’s overtures to join him. Not until 25 July could he announce the establishment of a Second Coalition. It is true that he had managed to ensure that ten out of the seventeen ministers, including himself, were socialists. Even the Socialist-Revolutionary leader Chernov agreed to stay on as Minister of Agriculture. Moreover, three Kadets were persuaded to ignore their party’s official policy and join the cabinet. Nevertheless Kerenski was exhausted even before his premiership began, and already he was sustaining himself by recourse to morphine and cocaine.

He focused his cabinet’s attention on the political and economic emergencies in Russia. Diplomatic discussions with the Allies were not abandoned, but there was no serious planning of further offensives on the Eastern front. Nor did Kerenski place obstacles in the way of Men...