Leaflets of the Russian Revolution

Socialist Organizing in 1917

Barbara C. Allen, Barbara C. Allen

• Verlag: Haymarket Books
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781642590173
• Thema: Historia
• Thema: Historia del mundo

When workers and peasants rose up across Russia and smashed the centuries old Tsarist autocracy their actions reverberated across the world, and continue to inspire activists to this day. This carefully assembled and expertly translated collection of documents from the Petrograd socialist movement in 1917 provides contemporary readers with a firsthand glimpse into the revolutionary ferment as it unfolds.

In Leaflets of the Russian Revolution, Barbara Allen selects and introduces the pamphlets and other agitational material that give life to the debates, disagreements and perspectives that animated the masses during the revolution.

PaRt I

The Revolutionary Year 1917

Three years of total war in 1914–16, with attendant economic crises, exhausted Russian society and discredited Tsar Nicholas II’s regime, which fell in February 1917 as a consequence of a mass protest in Petrograd against food and fuel shortages. After tsarist rule in Russia ended, an eight-month contest began between liberals, moderate socialists, and radical leftists over the structure of government in Russia and important questions such as participation in the war and land redistribution. A boisterous range of opinions regarding freedom of speech, the press, and assembly filled newspapers and the streets during 1917. Hopes reigned high that Russia could follow Western Europe in establishing democratic, participatory constitutional government, but fears of anarchy and chaos also loomed large in the face of mounting economic disaster, growing war casualties, a crime wave, the aspirations of minority nationalities for self-rule, and the fragility of the caretaker government that had replaced the tsarist regime. The power of the Provisional Government, which was composed mostly of nominees from the Duma, the weak legislative body that had existed under tsarist rule, was challenged by soviets, which were bodies elected by workers, soldiers, and peasants.

The February Revolution

The prelude to revolution in Petrograd encompassed an impressive strike of 140,000 workers (40 percent of the city’s total worker population) on January 9, 1917, which was the anniversary of the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre, when a peaceful demonstration of workers in the capital city met lethal reprisals from the tsarist government’s Cossack forces. Workers blamed the war and the monarchy for the intolerable economic hardship. Although the strike’s initiators were arrested in late January, the rebellious mood among Petrograd’s workers did not dissipate. Workers engaged in labor protests almost constantly from January 9 to February 22, when directors of the Putilov factory, the largest plant in Russia, locked out workers. Then on February 23, International Women’s Day, women textile workers, angered by long lines and high prices for bread, initiated an insurrection that brought one hundred thousand workers out on strike. Metalworker activists honed the rhetoric of the protestors’ nascent political demands. Soldiers proved reluctant to disperse demonstrators. By the next day, two-thirds of the city’s industrial workforce was on strike. On February 25, middle-class citizens and students joined the demonstrations. Workers attacked police, and even some troops began to turn against them. By February 27, soldiers were in full insurrection, crowds had freed political prisoners and criminals from jail, and the police melted away.3

During the February Revolution, events moved ahead faster than all socialist parties could anticipate. None expected Women’s Day to ignite a revolution. The role of women as a revolutionary catalyst had not been foreseen in the programs and strategies Russian socialists had devised in the nearly two decades prior to the revolution. Russian Social Democrats (SDs), who had organized a party in 1898 and then split into factions in 1903, had a Marxist program based on the inevitability of conflict between labor and capital and the eventual abolition of private property. Bolsheviks wanted only active revolutionaries to be party members, while the Mensheviks allowed that sympathizers could join. The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), whose party formed in 1902, expanded the definition of an exploited class to include peasants as well as workers, and exploiters to include noble landowners along with capitalists. They advocated socialization and equal distribution of the land to those who tilled it, while the SDs’ agricultural plans were poorly developed. Unlike the SDs, the SRs did not have a central organization. Some of them pursued terrorist tactics. The SRs disagreed with Lenin’s view that class divisions had developed among the peasantry. In the underground, many socialists cooperated in their practical work despite the theoretical differences among them.

During the 1917 Revolution, Russian Social Democratic Mensheviks tended toward moderation, while their rivals the Bolsheviks were radical on these questions. Socialist Revolutionaries could be found on both sides of the moderate/radical divide. In addition, individuals changed their positions throughout the year as their interpretations of rapidly fluctuating revolutionary events evolved. While moderate socialists tried to restrain strikes, more radical socialists came out in favor of them. Left socialists cooperated in issuing appeals and organizing events.

Printed leaflets had usually served as signals for mass actions, but issuing revolutionary propaganda was difficult given police harassment. A group of revolutionary Social Democrats called the Interdistrictites (Mezhraionka) was probably the major producer of socialist leaflets during the February Revolution. Bolsheviks in the Vyborg district of Petrograd were among the most radical. They wanted to arm detachments of worker guards, but the most senior representative of the Bolshevik CC in Petrograd, metalworker Alexander Shlyapnikov, refused to authorize this. He argued that worker guards could not stand up against trained military forces. Therefore, in his opinion, it was crucial for workers to win over military units. Indeed, it appeared by February 27 that the revolution could descend into chaotic violence.4

The February Revolution culminated on February 27. Tsarist ministers resigned. Socialists formed the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, a citywide electoral body representing workers and soldiers through political parties and other organizations; its leading body was an Executive Committee. Liberal leaders of the Duma decided to create a temporary government. When, under pressure, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated on behalf of himself and his son on March 2, 1917, power quickly devolved to the Provisional Government, which was created on the same day by agreement between the leaders of the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet. Prince Georgy Lvov, a liberal landowner, was its head. Alexander Kerensky, a pro-war socialist, joined the new government as minister of justice, later becoming minister of war. Moderate and radical socialists (Mensheviks, SRs, Bolsheviks, and unaffiliated socialists) cooperated in creating the Petrograd Soviet. Soviets would form in many Russian cities. Within large cities, there were district soviets. Although a majority of the Soviet Executive Committee had agreed to support the Provisional Government, this was the position of moderate Mensheviks and SRs who regarded the February Revolution as “bourgeois.” They believed it unrealistic and contrary to Marxist theory to oppose the creation of a bourgeois government. Radical socialists such as the Bolsheviks were less willing to give the bourgeoisie the opportunity to consolidate its power.5

The monarchist right having withered as tsarism collapsed, the political spectrum ranged from moderate right to far left. Centrist non-socialists, who were mostly liberal, cooperated with moderate socialists during the interval between the two 1917 revolutions of February and October. The most important liberal party was the Constitutional Democrats [Kadets]; their most prominent spokesman, Pavel Milyukov, became minister of foreign affairs. Liberals desired to protect Russia from German conquest, resolve the economic crisis, create peace among social groups, and prepare elections based on universal suffrage for a Constituent Assembly that would organize a new constitutional government for Russia. Many civic organizations had a liberal bent; these were organized by professionals for political, educational, and cultural causes. As the crisis deepened, those who had seemed liberal came to be perceived as conservative.6

A range of opinions existed among Petrograd Bolsheviks over their stance toward the Provisional Government. Lenin’s views were outlined in his “Letters from Afar,” which he wrote in early March 1917 while still in Switzerland. These consisted of opposition to the Provisional Government, a call for Soviet rule, and opposition to the war. Most Bolsheviks in Petrograd agreed with Lenin’s call for an end to the war, but their opinions varied widely on whether to cooperate with the Provisional Government. A majority of the Petersburg Committee (which did not change its name after war began) advocated non-opposition to the Provisional Government, in line with the resolution adopted by the Petrograd Soviet. The far-left Vyborg District Bolshevik Committee called on workers to seize power.7

Like Lenin, the members of the Russian Bureau of the RSDRP(b) (Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party [Bolsheviks]) Central Committee (Alexander Shlyapnikov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Peter Zalutsky) opposed the Provisional Government and called for the Soviet to form a provisional revolutionary government, which would have had an agenda of ending the war, establishing a democratic republic, securing the eight-hour work day, confiscating landowners’ estates, supplying the army and urban population with food, and calling a Constituent Assembly.8 Nevertheless, the Russian Bureau members, who all were in Petrograd, realized perhaps better than Lenin that they needed to cooperate with other left socialists.

The Russian Bureau membership expanded throughout March as Bolshevik leaders returned from prison or exile. Of these, Lev Kamenev was the most prominent. He led the moderate Bolsheviks, who included Joseph Stalin; these Bolsheviks were closer to the Petrograd Soviet majority’s assessment of the Provisional Government than they were to Lenin’s views. They claimed authority in the name of the former Bolshevik Duma delegation. The CC Russian Bureau struggled ineffectively with the moderate Bolsheviks. Although the Bureau at first rejected Kamenev as a member, he circumvented it by taking control of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda. Kamenev’s group also outmaneuvered the Russian Bureau on the floor of the Soviet by supporting moderate positions in the name of the Bolshevik Party. Unwilling to reveal disunity, Russian Bureau members did not speak.9

When Kamenev’s March 15 Pravda editorial supported continuing the war, consternation ensued among Bolshevik activists. The methods of the moderates, forcing through their own views without consulting rank-and-file members, were as much at issue as their policies. Further, the content of Pravda was not so blatantly defensist, but it still did not publish a large part of Lenin’s letters. Moreover, by March 18, Kamenev had persuaded the Petersburg Committee to vote for “conditional support” for the Provisional Government.10

When Lenin arrived in Petrograd via train across Germany, Sweden, and Finland, the Mensheviks and Kamenev’s Bolsheviks appeared to be on the verge of reunification. Lenin immediately and emphatically expressed his disagreement with Bolshevik moderates’ positions on the war and toward the Provisional Government. His April Theses called for the transformation of world war into international proletarian revolution, for opposition to the Provisional Government, and for a total rejection of any efforts to heal the schism among Russian Social Democrats. Lenin placed priority on “a struggle for transfer of all power to the Soviets,” control over which he hoped soon to wrest from the moderate socialists. Nevertheless, he did not endorse the radical Bolsheviks’ appeals for an immediate seizure of power. He realized that more preparation was necessary before attempting to bring down the Provisional Government. Initially, most Bolsheviks rejected Lenin’s positions, but this soon changed.11

Foreign Minister Milyukov, in assuring the Allies in an April 20 telegram that Russia would wage war according to the tsarist government’s treaties with them, radicalized many leftists. By the Bolsheviks’ Seventh Party Conference (April 24–29, 1917), a large majority of delegates agreed with Lenin’s positions on the Provisional Government and the war. Nevertheless, the conference did not agree wholly with his claim that Russia was undergoing a transition to socialist revolution, but leaned somewhat toward Kamenev’s position that Russia was still in the process of a bourgeois-liberal revolution.12

Workers’ Militia and Red Guard

During the February Revolution, only the police forces had backed the tsarist government out of all the forces of order that had helped the regime survive the 1905 Revolution. All over Russia in the wake of the tsarist regime’s downfall, tsarist police forces disintegrated. Local militias replaced them, with varying degrees of effectiveness as crime spiraled out of control through the year. The Petrograd Soviet officially created the worker militia of Petrograd on February 28, 1917, with the Soviet assigning Bolshevik Alexander Shlyapnikov the task of overseeing the arming and organization of the militia. In spring and summer 1917, the Petrograd worker militias were superseded by the Red Guard, which in late August played an important role in defeating General Lavr Kornilov’s attempts at counterrevolution.13

The extent of the militia’s responsibilities were a sensitive question, as casting them too much in terms of class conflict could provoke opposition from the non-worker social milieu. Shlyapnikov saw the purpose of the workers’ militia as not only to police factory districts, but also to defend gains made for workers during the February Revolution. He revealed this to a March 5 meeting dedicated to forming a civil militia under the Petrograd city administration. The Soviet sent him to the meeting as its representative. He spoke there of the need to broaden the militia’s responsibilities to prevent a restoration of the monarchy and “to ease the movement of the revolution forward.” This was his own opinion; the Soviet had not taken a stance. In late April 1917, the Soviet, Provisional Government, and city administration agreed that worker militias should unite with the civil militia of Petrograd, but many units continued to exist independently of the civil militia.14

When the Petrograd Soviet created a section on militia affairs in mid-March, it removed from Shlyapnikov formal responsibility for links with militias. In late March and early April, he began to advocate a worker “guard.” Shlyapnikov and Konstantin Eremeev, who in December 1917 became Petrograd military district commander, decided to organize the guard in the most “revolutionary” worker districts. Shlyapnikov authored the Vyborg District Soviet’s April 29 decree on the organization of the workers’ guard. The Vyborg regulations restricted membership in the guard to workers who belonged to a socialist party or a trade union, or who were chosen by their fellow factory workers. The regulations defined the main tasks of the workers’ guard as: “1) struggle with the counterrevolution, 2) armed defense of the working class and 3) defense of all citizens’ life and safety.” Other districts modeled their Red Guard units on those of Vyborg. In August 1917, the Red Guard central staff was formed.15

When revolutionary socialists began organizing the Red Guard, moderate socialists and libe...