Readings on the Russian Revolution

Debates, Aspirations, Outcomes

Melissa K. Stockdale

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350037427
• eBook ISBN: 9781350037441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Readings on the Russian Revolution brings together 15 important post-Cold War writings on the history of the Russian Revolution. It is structured in such a way as to highlight key debates in the field and contrasting methodological approaches to the Revolution in order to help readers better understand the issues and interpretative fault lines that exist in this contested area of history. The book opens with an original introduction which provides essential background and vital context for the pieces that follow. The volume is then structured around four parts – 'Actors, Language, Symbols', 'War, Revolution, and the State', 'Revolutionary Dreams and Identities' and 'Outcomes and Impacts' – that explore the beginnings, events and outcomes of the Russian Revolution, as well as examinations of central figures, critical topics and major historiographical battlegrounds. Melissa Stockdale also provides translations of two crucial Russian-language works, published here in English for the first time, and includes useful pedagogical features such as a glossary, chronology, and thematic bibliography to further aid study. Readings on the Russian Revolution is an essential collection for anyone studying the Russian Revolution.

PART ONE

1917: Actors, Language, Symbols

Chapter 1

Reflections on the Russian Revolution¹

Richard Pipes

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not a single incident or even a process but a sequence of disruptive and violent acts that occurred more or less concurrently yet involved actors with differing and in some measure contradictory objectives. It began as a revolt of the most conservative elements in Russian society, disgusted by the Crown’s familiarity with Rasputin and the mismanagement of the war effort. From the conservatives the revolt spread to the liberals, who challenged the monarchy from fear that if it remained in place, revolution would become inevitable. Initially, the assault on the monarchy was undertaken not, as widely believed, from fatigue with the war but from a desire to pursue the war more effectively: not to make revolution but to avert one. In February 1917, when the Petrograd garrison refused to fire on civilian crowds, the generals, in agreement with parliamentary politicians, hoping to prevent the mutiny from spreading to the front, convinced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. The abdication, made for the sake of military victory, brought down the whole edifice of Russian statehood.

Although initially neither the social discontent nor the agitation of the radical intelligentsia played any significant role in these events, both moved to the forefront the instant imperial authority collapsed. In the spring and summer of 1917, peasants began to seize and distribute among themselves non-communal properties. Next, the rebellion spread to frontline troops, who deserted in droves to share in the spoils; to workers, who took control of industrial enterprises; and to ethnic minorities, who aspired to greater self-rule. Each group pursued its own objectives, but the cumulative effect of their assault on the country’s social and economic structure by the autumn of 1917 hurled Russia into a state of anarchy.

The events of 1917 demonstrated that for all its immense territory and claim to great power status, the Russian empire was a fragile, artificial structure, held together not by organic bonds connecting rulers and ruled but by mechanical links provided by the bureaucracy, the police, and the army. Its 150 million inhabitants were bound neither by strong economic interests nor by a sense of national identity. Centuries of autocratic rule in a country with a predominantly natural economy had prevented the formation of strong lateral ties: Imperial Russia was mostly warf with little woof… Once these factors are taken into consideration, it becomes apparent that the Marxist notion that revolution always results from social (“class”) discontent cannot be sustained. Although such discontent did exist in Imperial Russia, as it does everywhere, the decisive and immediate factors making for the regime’s fall and the resultant turmoil were overwhelmingly political.

Was the Revolution inevitable? It is natural to believe that whatever happens has to happen, and there are historians who rationalize this primitive faith with pseudoscientific arguments; they would be more convincing if they could predict the future as unerringly as they claim to predict the past. Paraphrasing a familiar legal maxim, one might say that psychologically speaking, occurrence provides nine-tenths of historical justification. Edmund Burke was in his day widely regarded as a mad man for criticizing the French Revolution: seventy years later, according to Matthew Arnold, his ideas were still considered “superannuated and conquered by events”—so ingrained is the belief in the rationality, and therefore the inevitability, of historical events. The grander they are and the more weighty their consequences, the more they appear part of the natural order of things which it is quixotic to question.

The most that one can say is that a revolution in Russia was more likely than not, and this for several reasons. Of these, perhaps the most weighty was the steady decline of the prestige of tsarism in the eyes of a population accustomed to being ruled by an invincible authority—indeed, seeing in invincibility the criterion of legitimacy. After a century and a half of military victories and expansion, from the middle of the 19^th century until 1917, Russia suffered one humiliation after another at the hands of foreigners: the defeat, on her own soil, in the Crimean War; the loss at the Congress of Berlin of the fruits of victory over the Turks; the debacle in the war with Japan; and the drubbing at the hands of the Germans in World War I. Such a succession of reverses would have damaged the reputation of any government. In Russia it proved fatal.

Tsarism’s disgrace was compounded by the concurrent rise of a revolutionary movement that it was unable to quell despite resort to harsh repression. The halfhearted concessions made in 1905 to share power with society neither made tsarism more popular with the opposition nor raised its prestige in the eyes of the people at large, who simply could not understand how a true sovereign would allow himself to be abused from the forum of a government institution. The Confucian principle of T’ien-ming, or Mandate of Heaven, which in its original meaning had linked the ruler’s authority to righteous conduct, in Russia derived from forceful conduct; a weak ruler, a “loser,” forfeited it. Nothing could be more misleading than to judge a Russian head of state by the standard of either morality or popularity. What mattered was that he inspire fear in friend and foe—that, like Ivan IV, he deserve the sobriquet of “Awesome.” Nicholas II fell not because he was hated but because he was held in contempt.

Among the other factors making for revolution was the mentality of the Russian peasantry, a class that was never integrated into the political structure. Peasants made up 80 per cent of Russia’s population; and although they took hardly any active part in the conduct of state affairs, in a passive capacity, as an obstacle to change and, at the same time, a permanent threat to the status quo, they were a very unsettling element. It is commonplace to hear that under the old regime the Russian peasant was “oppressed,” but it is far from clear just who was oppressing him. On the eve of the Revolution, he enjoyed full civil and legal rights; he also owned, either outright or communally, nine-tenths of the country’s agricultural land and the same proportion of livestock. Poor by Western European or American standards, he was better off than his father and freer than his grandfather, who more likely than not had been a serf. Cultivating the allotments assigned to him by fellow peasants, he certainly enjoyed greater security than did the tenant farmers of Ireland, Spain, or Italy.

T he problem with Russian peasants was not oppression but isolation. They were isolated from the country’s political, economic, and cultural life, and therefore unaffected by the changes that had occurred since the time Peter the Great set Russia on the course of Westernization. Many contemporaries observed that the peasantry remained steeped in Muscovite culture: culturally, it had no more in common with the ruling elite or the intelligentsia than the native population of Britain’s African colonies had with Victorian England. The majority of Russia’s peasants descended from serfs, who were not even subjects, since the monarchy abandoned them to the whim of the landlord and the bureaucrat. As a result, for Russia’s rural population the state remained even after emancipation an alien and malevolent force that took taxes and recruits but gave nothing in return. The peasant knew no loyalty outside his household and his commune. He felt no patriotism and no attachment to the government save for a vague devotion to the distant tsar from whom he expected to receive the land he coveted. An instinctive anarchist, he was never integrated into national life and felt as much estranged from the conservative establishment as from the radical opposition. He looked down on the city and on men without beards…

The peasant was revolutionary in one respect only: he did not acknowledge private ownership of the land. Although on the eve of the Revolution he owned nine-tenths of the country’s arable, he craved the remaining 10 per cent held by landlords, merchants, and non-communal peasants. No economic or legal arguments could change his mind; he felt he had a God-given right to the land and that someday it would be his. And by his he meant the commune’s, which would allocate it justly to its members. The prevalence of communal landholding in European Russia was, along with the legacy of serfdom, a fundamental fact of Russian social history. It meant that along with a poorly developed sense of law, the peasant also had little respect for private property. Both tendencies were exploited and exacerbated by radical intellectuals for their own ends to incite the peasantry against the status quo.

Russia’s industrial workers were potentially destabilizing not because they assimilated revolutionary ideologies—very few of them did, and even those few were excluded from leadership in the revolutionary parties. Rather, since most of them were one or at most two generations removed from the village and only superficially urbanized, they carried with them to the factory rural attitudes only slightly adjusted to industrial conditions. They were not socialists but syndicalists, believing that as their village relatives were entitled to all the land, so they had a right to the factories. Politics interested them no more than it did the peasants; in this sense, too, they were under the influence of primitive, non-ideological anarchism. Furthermore, industrial labor in Russia was numerically too insignificant to play a major role in revolution; with at most 3 million workers (a high proportion of them seasonally employed peasants), they represented at best 2 per cent of the population. Hordes of graduate students, steered by their professors, in the Soviet Union as well as the West, especially the United States, have assiduously combed historical sources in the hope of unearthing evidence of worker radicalism in prerevolutionary Russia. The results are weighty tomes, filled with mostly meaningless events and statistics that prove only that while history is always interesting, history books can be both vacuous and dull.

A major and arguably decisive factor making for revolution was the intelligentsia, which in Russia attained greater influence than anywhere else. The peculiar “ranking” system of the tsarist civil service excluded outsiders from the administration, estranging the best-educated elements and making them susceptible to fantastic schemes of social reform, invented but never tried in Western Europe. The absence until 1906 of representative institutions and a free press, combined with the spread of education, enabled the cultural elite to claim the right to speak on behalf of a mute people. There exists no evidence that the intelligentsia actually reflected the opinion of the “masses.” On the contrary, the evidence indicates that both before and after the Revolution, peasants and workers deeply mistrusted intellectuals. This became apparent in 1917 and the years that followed. But since the true will of the people had no means of expression, at any rate, until the short-lived constitutional order introduced in 1906, the intelligentsia was able with some success to pose as its spokesman.

As in other countries where it lacked legitimate political outlets, the intelligentsia in Russia constituted itself into a caste; and since ideas were what gave it identity and cohesion, it developed extreme intellectual intolerance. Adopting the Enlightenment view of man as nothing but material substance shaped by the environment, and its corollary, that changes in the environment inevitably change human nature, it saw “revolution” not as the replacement of one government by another but as something incomparably more ambitious: a total transformation of the human condition for the purpose of creating a new breed of human beings—in Russia, of course, but also everywhere else. Its stress on the inequities of the status quo was merely a device to gain popular support; no rectification of these inequities would have persuaded radical intellectuals to give up their revolutionary aspirations. Such beliefs linked members of various left-wing parties: anarchists, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks. Although couched in scientific terms, their views were immune to contrary evidence and hence more akin to religious faith.

The intelligentsia, which we have defined as intellectuals craving power, stood in total and uncompromising hostility to the existing order; nothing the tsarist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Map: European Russia and Western Siberia, 1914
• Introduction: Post–Cold War Scholarship on the Russian Revolution
• Part One 1917: Actors, Language, Symbols
• Part Two War, Revolution, and the State
• Part Three Revolutionary Dreams and Identities
• Part Four Outcomes and Impacts
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Further Reading
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright