Lenin's Revolution

Russia, 1917-1921

David R. Marples

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317882589
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This study examines one of the key events in history, the Russian Revolution. Since the late Gorbachev period, a wealth of new material has become available to historians that has triggered intense scholarly debate on the nature of revolution. This timely new book takes account of the new scholarship, including - for example - the role of Lenin. It is argued that the intial flexibility of Lenin and the Bolshevik party allowed them to take power, but that the conduct of both changed considerably once they were obliged to take steps to maintain their authority.

This book charts the Febuary Revolution, the October Revolution, the Civil War and the main individuals involved, giving a remarkable degree of clarity to the tumultuous events in Russia whose consequences the world lived with for the rest of the twentieth century.

PART ONE

BACKGROUND

CHAPTER ONE

PRELUDE TO REVOLUTION

EARLY REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS

According to Soviet historiography, a Russian revolutionary tradition began in 1825 with the Decembrist revolt and continued until the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, when Lenin and the Bolshevik Party were swept to power on the arms of the masses. In reality there was no discernible continual movement. The fuel for the revolutionary movements of the 1860s and 1870s was essentially peasant discontent with the existing order, and particularly the aftermath of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. In the early years of the reign of Aleksandr II, Herzen wielded exceptional influence through his journal Kolokol (The Bell), which was published in London, where the philosopher was living. Those most affected were student intellectuals, many of whom had been educated abroad and returned to Russia full of ideas and zeal with which to transform their ‘backward’ native society. Serfdom was Herzen’s main target. Even after the Act of Emancipation, no upheaval was feasible in Russia without the participation of the rural element. In addition, under the influence of the military officer P.I. Lavrov, the revolutionaries were imbued with the idea that they owed a debt to society and to the peasants in particular. It was Lavrov who coined the slogan ‘To the people’, which inspired the movement of the educated urban elite into the countryside to educate the peasants and fill them with the spirit of revolution. These activists were termed Narodniki (Populists).

In 1873–74 this movement began in earnest, but by all accounts it was an abject failure. The Russian peasants, superstitious and wary of visitors from outside their villages, often detained the idealists and handed them over to the local police. Once the tsarist authorities learned of the ‘intrusions’, arrests were widespread and those that managed to escape were obliged to consider alternatives for the continuation of the revolutionary struggle. In 1878 an organization was formed called Land and Liberty (Zemlya i Volya), which was probably the closest that Russia had had to a workable revolutionary society to date and which carried out several violent actions in the cities against officials, particularly in St Petersburg. However, there was little consensus among the members of Land and Liberty as to how best to bring about a social revolution in Russia.

A key question was whether Russia could overthrow the autocratic system while remaining a peasant country. Many revolutionaries believed that this was possible. Russia, it was argued, could base its revolution on the village community, the Utopian organization that was already in place and responsible for the administration of the villages in post-serfdom Russia. Others maintained that under the harsh authoritarian conditions of Russia, their best hope was to resort to terrorism and specifically the assassination of the tsar in order to bring about societal change. By 1879, therefore, the Land and Liberty movement had experienced a rift between the would-be terrorists and those who maintained their faith in the village as the catalyst for revolutionary change. The former group became known as the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) and the latter was known as Black Repartition (Chernyi Pereder’). Initially the People’s Will achieved most attention and established a terrorist tradition that was to continue in Russia into the twentieth century. They sought to remove the existing government with a revolution that would take place in both countryside and town. There was nothing deterministic in their view. Simply put, they felt that the people could be united against the harsh ruling autocracy. Naively, they believed that the main key to change was the removal of the person, rather than the institution, of the tsar.

There was an element of farce about the assassination of Aleksandr II on 1 March 1881, but it was an important event. It provided the revolutionaries with their first real success. But it also demonstrated to those revolutionaries who came after them the sheer futility of pursuing such a policy in the future. Aleksandr was killed by a primitive bomb, thrown at the second attempt by a revolutionary called Grinevitsky, while showing a remarkable disregard for his own safety. The People’s Will had planned the assassination for weeks and meticulously selected a small group to carry out the act, but after the death of Aleksandr, the young revolutionaries were rounded up and their leaders executed. Never again did the People’s Will attain such prominence as in March 1881. That time proved to be both their heyday and death knell. In 1887, when an effort was made to revive the terrorist tradition and remove Aleksandr III on the sixth anniversary of the death of his father, the plot was rapidly uncovered and the ringleaders (including the elder brother of V.I. Lenin, Aleksandr Ulyanov) were hanged. The reign of Aleksandr III is often described as one of the most reactionary periods in Russian history.

Despite the failure of Populism and the grievances engendered by the Act of Emancipation, the noble landowners suffered more setbacks than the peasants in the latter years of the century. Many went bankrupt and left the land, which was then taken over by the peasants themselves or else by those who came from the towns. By the time of the First World War, peasants and former peasants possessed about 90 per cent of the land in the Russian Empire. The complaints, however, continued, and the peasants were anxious to acquire the remainder of the land. They played an increasing role in overall state production of grain but suffered from overpopulation in the European part of the empire. As for the nobles, clearly some benefited by moving to the cities, running businesses and forming new careers. Many others felt alienated from society, particularly from a new class of entrepreneurs that had begun to play an increasing role in the government.

In the last two decades of the century particularly harsh measures were directed against the Jewish population, especially those living in the Pale of Settlement in the western part of the empire. Living conditions there were bleak. Most Jews, who made up a majority or plurality of the population in the major cities (Wilno, Grodno, Minsk, for example), were confined to ghettos and were not permitted to travel outside them. When riots and demonstrations broke out against the Jews in the 1880s, the government made no effort to stop them. Both Aleksandr III and his son Nikolay II were anti-Semites and the reign of the latter was a particularly cruel one for the Jewish population. It has been estimated that there were about 5 million Jews living in the Russian Empire by the end of the nineteenth century. They can be described as a persecuted and distinct minority, and many of the younger generation found their way into the revolutionary movement, one of the few ways to circumvent anti-Jewish pograms and official restrictions on career opportunities [99].

The existence of large minorities in a contiguous empire was particularly important for the birth of the revolutionary movement in Russia. A revolutionary movement could count on a high degree of cooperation from the non-Russians of the empire. Populism, however, had failed manifestly by the reign of Aleksandr III. Marxism, the leading revolutionary current in Europe, had barely begun to penetrate the vast Russian lands. It was primarily an urban phenomenon. However, as Russia experienced a dramatic surge in industrial development and with the manifest decline of Populism, Marxism began to gain in appeal. One reason for the growth of an extremist doctrine was the relative weakness of Russian liberalism because of the small and undeveloped middle class in Russia. Nevertheless, such a liberal tradition did exist, initially in the Russian emigration in Germany.

The major liberal group in Russia was the Constitutional Democrats, better known by the Russian abbreviation, Kadets. The Kadets were formed in the autumn of 1905 during the revolution of that year, but their origins lay in a group of Russian exiles based in Stuttgart. This group, led by the former Marxist Petr Struve, founded a journal called Liberation in an effort to attract reformers who were alienated from Marxism and the class struggle. Subsequently a Union of Liberation was formed which ultimately united with the Zemstvo Constitutionalists to create the Kadet Party. This party proved to be quite durable but it has not always received a favourable press, partly because with the leftward evolution of the political climate in Russia, the Kadets came to represent the hardened property-owning classes trying to stem the tide of revolution. In 1905, however, their policies were moderate and progressive, advocating a constitutional monarchy, the promotion of civil liberties, the abolition of any kind of discrimination based on race, the better treatment of the urban poor, and even the transferral of private land to the peasants, albeit with appropriate compensation to the landowners. Progressive though these tenets may have been in 1905, they seemed seriously outdated in 1917. Nonetheless, the Kadets weathered the tide of change considerably better than most other parties.

The heirs of the Russian Populist tradition formed the Social Revolutionary Party in 1900. The party, known as the SRs, was the largest party in Russia at the time of the 1917 revolutions but was lacking in discipline and organization, and had an indecisive leadership. Often there was little connection between the leadership of the party in St Petersburg and the rank and file in the countryside. The SRs maintained the terrorist traditions of the People’s Will [22] and also had some links with anarchists, particularly among sailors of the Baltic Fleet. The goal of the SRs was the transformation of Russia into a socialist society and one important instrument was to be a Constituent Assembly that would, under their direction, resolve the land question in their favour. The most prominent SR was Viktor Chernov, a trained lawyer from Moscow State University.

LENIN: BACKGROUND AND VIEWS

V.I. Ulyanov (Lenin) was born into a family of petty nobility in Simbirsk on 22 April 1870. He has been one of the most frequently discussed personalities in contemporary literature, and even since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the spate of biographies has continued [36; 39]. The harshest analyses depict him as a vindictive and ruthless tyrant who played a less than glorious role in the October Revolution and was even a coward. The most laudatory remain those written in the Soviet era when Lenin acquired the mantle of a deity, one whose views could not be questioned and whose way of life was a model for all Soviet citizens. For at least 20 years there has been a debate over whether Lenin’s revolution paved the way for Stalin’s cruel and bureaucratic regime which persecuted millions of Soviet citizens. Even with the uncovering of new archival information it is fair to say that this question has not been resolved. One problem is that it is difficult to discern how Lenin would have governed a state in peacetime, in good health, and with a stable economy. These three key factors never occurred during the period 1917–24.

Lenin’s background can be described as bourgeois. The family was relatively affluent, though all the children became revolutionaries. His father, a school inspector in the province of Simbirsk, was a member of the Russian nobility. Lenin’s ancestry was mixed, containing Russian, Kalmyk, Jewish, Swedish and German elements. He appears to have looked up to his older brother Aleksandr, but to have lacked Aleksandr’s pleasant personality and good nature. Soviet versions of Lenin’s life maintain that he became a revolutionary upon the execution of Aleksandr in 1887 [57], a myth perpetuated after Lenin’s death by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. Until 1887, however, Lenin appears to have been an exceptional, even a model student. The first record of his partaking in revolutionary activities dates from the autumn of that year when he was expelled from the Faculty of Law at Kazan University. Such expulsions were not infrequent among Lenin’s contemporaries.

By 1889 Lenin was acquainted with the writings of Marx, including Das Kapital, and he made contact with some of the Russian-based Marxists. In this same year the family moved to Samara, where Lenin both completed his law degree, achieving first class honours, and began to practice as a lawyer. This was a period of his life that was not given much attention in Soviet works. Lenin, already balding, was a small stocky man with reddish hair and Mongolian features. He had an incisive and analytical mind and a domineering nature. It was less his originality than the forceful way in which he projected his ideas that made him a powerful figure. In addition his practicality and flexibility came to be key factors in his later career. He was a much better judge of a political situation than his peers. Some writers have declared that through working in the legal system he came to perceive its subjective nature and the way it favoured the privileged classes. Lenin, however, would have seen that from the outset and there seems to have been something intensely personal in his political posturing.

When did Lenin become a Marxist? The answer seems to be at some point in 1889, at the age of 19. In 1893 he moved to the capital, St Petersburg, where he became better acquainted with the political climate and Marxist circles. Two years later he travelled to western Europe where he met the revered leader of the Russian Marxists, Grigorii Plekhanov, a man who was to retain a significant influence over Lenin even in the days when they had parted ways politically. When he returned to St Petersburg, Lenin seems to have stepped up his political activity as an emissary for this older group of exiled Marxists. Together with his friend Yuly Tsederbaum (Martov), he began to incite the workers to take action. The tsarist authorities arrested and imprisoned both Lenin and Martov, before sending them into exile in Siberia during the period 1897–1900. During this exile, Lenin married his political comrade and faithful ally Nadezhda Krupskaya, a woman of Jewish background. He was allowed comforts that would become unimaginable in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s leadership, and this period of exile appears to have been a formative and constructive period of his life, when he was able to take the time to examine the economic development of Russia and the role therein of his party, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP). Living in the village of Shushenskoye, Yeniseysk province, Lenin and Krupskaya were able to write and communicate freely, and even received a stipend from the government.

During his Siberian exile Lenin wrote and published his most original book, entitled The Development of Capitalism in Russia. This anticipated the increasing stratification of the Russian peasantry, and the eventual alliance of the poorer stratum with the working class (proletariat). The system of the village community would be destroyed by capitalist development and thus could not serve – as the Populists had maintained – as the basis for a social revolution in Russia. Lenin despised the Populists (paradoxically a group much favoured by Marx himself), believing that their goals for the village would result in small-scale peasant capitalism through the village communities. Lenin’s other main target during these last years of the nineteenth century was the group known as the Economists, who, in his view, were perverting the laws of Marxism with an argument that the plight of workers could be alleviated by legal means, through trade union and other agitation to secure appropriate social benefits from the state. Lenin believed that such views were highly dangerous because they served to undermine the revolutionary movement.

During this same period, the RSDWP held its founding congress in a small wooden house in Minsk, Belarus, on 13–15 March 1898, an event of striking insignificance given what was to follow. Virtually all attendees were arrested afterward, no records of the meeting were left, and there appeared to be some doubt whether there would ever be another congress. Certainly it could not be held within the borders of the Russian Empire, where it would be penetrated all too easily by the secret police (Okhrana). In 1900, the Social Democrats established their own newspaper, called Iskra (The Spark). But this positive development was soon to be offset by internal rifts. Lenin was to be the key instigator. After his period of exile Lenin returned to western Europe, and once again his chief preoccupation was with the Economists. In 1902 he published his most famous polemical work, What Is To Be Done?, the title of which was taken from the pamphlet of his mentor Nikolay Chernyshevsky, though the writing was far more dynamic and divisive than that of his revolutionary predecessor.

What Is To Be Done? reads like a programme for revolutionary action, but it is also a work that reflects Lenin’s disillusionment with the chosen class for such action, the proletariat. The traditional Marxist view was deterministic, maintaining that the class conflict was to follow an inevitable pattern, with the bourgeoisie rising up against the feudal aristocracy as a result of the capitalist period, and with a subsequent later struggle between the proletariat against their bourgeois masters. The role of a revolutionary party, it had been surmised by Russian Marxists, was merely to help this process along and wait for the rising of the working class. Lenin, either through impatience or contempt for the proletariat, maintained that left to itself, the latter would do nothing. Hence the Russian Social Democrats must take power on behalf of the workers and rule in their name. To do so the party must be highly centralized, and composed of a small group of ruthless and dedicated revolutionaries. There would be no room in this party for sympathizers of the movement, liberals, or otherwise. According to Adam B. Ulam, this programme was a ‘blueprint for a dictatorship’ [72]. Robert V. Daniels perceives it as part of Lenin’s drive for personal authority [52]. There is no question that this pamphlet proved to be politically the most important of Lenin’s writings.

Its appearance was followed closely by the Second Congress of the RSDWP, initially held in Brussels, but later moved to London following its closure by the Belgian police. Among the 57 delegates were the most prominent Social Democrats centred around the Iskra newspaper, together with an independent socialist group, the Jewish Bund (League). Lenin reiterated his view that the workers, left to their own devices, were not a revolutionary instrument and that most of them were not even aware of Marx’s writings. What was required was a system of ‘democratic centralism’, whereby the main decisions would be taken by a small party of committed and experienced revolutionaries working through a party central committee, which would be elected by a party congress. His emphasis was on rigid discipline in order to take state power. Such views horrified his contemporaries, including his friend Martov, Plekhanov and the older generation (Pavel Akselrod, Vera Zasulich, and others), and fellow Social Democrat L.D. Trotsky, from the Odessa region. In their view Lenin was advocating the rule of a minority party over the workers that would ultimately result in a dictatorship.

There seemed to be little chance that Lenin’s views would preva...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Note on Referencing System
• Note on Dating
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Part One Background
• Part Two: Revolution and War
• Part Three: Assessment
• Part Four: Documents
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Who's Who
• Bibliography
• Index
• Seminar Studies in History