7 Key excerpts on "Bolsheviks Revolution"

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  Russia And The Soviet Union

  An Historical Introduction--second Edition

  • John M Thompson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  A couple of months later Lenin made it clear that the Bolsheviks intended to dominate not only the government but also the general political life of the country. Lenin had permitted elections to the Constituent Assembly, as promised in the Bolshevik platform, but since the majority of voters were peasants and the Socialist Revolutionary Party was closest to the peasants, the SRs won a majority of seats in the new Assembly. When it convened in January 1918 and it became evident the Bolshevik minority could not control the Assembly, Lenin forcibly dissolved it. Although the moderate socialist parties occasionally contested local Soviet elections during the next few years, for all practical purposes the Bolsheviks, by that act, created a one-party dictatorship over the country, which has existed ever since.

  As a result of the October Revolution in a few days, or weeks at most, power in the largest country in Eurpoe had been transferred into the hands of a radical socialist minority bent on entirely restructuring Russian society and on carrying their proletarian revolution to the advanced countries of the West and eventually to the whole world. Lenin justified the socialist revolution in less industrialized Russia by saying that special circumstances, such as the war and the revolutionary actions of the Russian peasantry, had permitted it and that the October Revolution would fulfill the capitalist stage of history in Russia as it proceeded. It was a rather vague formulation, but Lenin counted on the socialist revolution’s spreading to highly industrialized Western Europe; once the proletariat had come to power there, they could give Russia the assistance it needed to develop an advanced economy and support true socialism. As Lenin often put it, the Bolsheviks needed to hold on to power in Russia until their ally, the workers of the West, came to their aid.

  We know that the October Revolution had fateful consequences for modern world history, but what sort of a revolution was it? It was certainly not an evil conspiracy designed to fasten a new form of human bondage on the Russian people, as some extreme anti-communists have argued. On the other hand it was not a great libertarian revolution opening the way to freedom and plenty for all of Russia, as Soviet historians claim. Neither vilifying the Bolsheviks nor glorifying the masses is a convincing way to interpret the revolution. Rather the Bolsheviks were able to build upon deep popular feelings—resentment of the injustice and oppression associated with old privileged Russia, fear of counterrevolution, revulsion against the war and the sacrifices it entailed, and dreams of a better, securer, more just future—to come to power and have the chance to construct a new order. That many of the aspirations of the masses were unfilfilled and that the Bolsheviks built a revolutionary society quite unlike that which their early members envisaged are key elements of the story that will unfold in the remaining pages of this book. But it is important to remember that the vision, the dream, the yearning for a future good society that animated so many Russians in 1917—not the reality of what actually happened afterward—have had, and still have, a powerful impact on the rest of the world.

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  The Origins of the Russian Revolution, 1861-1917

  • Alan Wood(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6 Interpretations and conclusions

  The Revolution promised, even if in the medium term it did not achieve, a resolution of the social, economic and political contradictions described in the opening chapter. It also marked the culmination of the earlier revolutionary traditions which combined the forces of popular insurrection, intellectual opposition and military defection, and in which elements of Westernism, Slavophilism, Populism, Marxism and anarchism could be identified. Not surprisingly, the highly charged political nature of the events of 1917 has given rise to a wide variety of interpretations and historiographical approaches which span the entire ideological and intellectual spectrum.

  In the former Soviet Union, a strictly orthodox Marxist-Leninist (that is to say Stalinist) approach predominated – was indeed obligatory – in the interpretation of Revolution. According to this view, the October Revolution was the inevitable climax of a process of historical development governed by scientific laws, inexorable economic forces and the dynamics of class struggle. The Russian working class was led to victory in this struggle by the Bolshevik Party – the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’ – with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at its head. The Great October Socialist Revolution’ ushered in a new era in the history of mankind, the era of Socialism, which would in turn develop into full Communism. From the late 1920s until the late 1980s all professional historians, researchers, writers, teachers and students of the Revolution inside the USSR were compelled to operate within this ideological and methodological framework which condemned all other interpretations as ‘deviationist’, ‘counter-revolutionary’, ‘white-guardist’, ‘bourgeois-reactionary’ and generally ‘unscientific’. The writing of history thereby played a legitimizing role in the monopoly of political power enjoyed until recently by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. History was the handmaiden of the State.

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  Lenin and Revolutionary Russia

  • Stephen J. Lee(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  THE BOLSHEVIKS AND THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

  BACKGROUND

  After the collapse of the Tsarist regime, in March 1917 two institutions claimed political authority. One was the Petrograd Soviet, a workers’ council that was elected by soldiers and labourers and consisted mainly of Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary deputies. The other, the Provisional Government, had been set up by a committee of the Duma and was dominated by Constitutional Democrats and Octobrists under the leadership of Prince Lvov.

  At first the Bolsheviks seemed comparatively insignificant. Lenin had returned from exile in Switzerland only in April 1917 and had set himself the task of trying to take over the soviet and use it to destroy the Provisional Government. For a while this seemed impossible.The Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks within the Soviet were prepared to form a political partnership with the Provisional Government; this was cemented in the person of the Socialist Revolutionary Kerensky, who succeeded Lvov as head of the Provisional Government on 9 July. Earlier in the same month Lenin had been seriously embarrassed by an abortive Bolshevik uprising; he had tried to prevent it on the grounds that it was premature. The Provisional Government ordered the raiding of the Bolshevik headquarters and issued warrants for the arrest of the Bolshevik leaders. Lenin escaped this only by going into hiding in Finland. It seemed, therefore, that the Provisional Government had triumphed and that the Bolsheviks had shot their bolt.

  Through much of 1917, however, the Provisional Government faced serious difficulties that eventually worked in favour of the Bolsheviks. It maintained Russia’s support for the Allies but, in the process, suffered further losses of territory to the Germans from July onwards. The economy, too, was in desperate trouble and the peasantry were openly seizing the landlords’ estates in many rural areas. Kerensky, hoping to preside over an orderly land transfer, sent troops to deal with peasant violence, thus antagonising a large part of the population. The Bolsheviks were able to came out openly in support of the peasants. The worst crisis confronting the Provisional Government, however, was the revolt by General Kornilov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian ar my: he tried in August and September to overthrow the Provisional Government and to substitute for it a military dictatorship that he hoped would drive back the German invaders and deal with the internal threat of revolution. Kerensky could rely upon the Petrograd Soviet to mobilise support against Kornilov’s troops, but he needed additional help if he were to save the Provisional Government. In desperation he turned to Bolshevik units known as Red Guards and agreed to arm them if they joined the defence of Petrograd. This decision saved the capital but placed the Provisional Government in grave peril.The liberals pulled out of the coalition with Kerensky, who was now left with a small fraction of his original support.

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  The Soviet Union 1917-1991

  • Martin Mccauley(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Gradually the euphoria of victory gave way to the sober realisation that there were no short cuts to a better life for all, to justice, democracy and freedom on a national scale. A revolution whose success was based on seizing and maintaining political power gradually became one in which the needs of the economy became paramount. The desperate struggle to find the inputs to keep the wheels of industry turning; the confrontation with the peasants; the need to build a Red Army from scratch to win the Civil War; all contributed to the death of democracy. Economic necessity, the ever present shortages and urban hunger, meant that all became dissatisfied. The upsurge of idealism and hopein October when Lenin had envisaged that a republic of soviets would run Soviet Russia, rapidly gave way to a dictatorship of the Party. Factory committees, trade unions, soviets of workers' and peasants' deputies, all fell victim to the overriding, overpowering need to find an institution which would follow willingly every twist and turn of Bolshevik policy. The only institution which was capable of playing such a role was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) or as it became known at the VIIth Congress in March 1918, the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The Bolsheviks when they took power in October 1917 presented it to the IInd Congress of Soviets and thus transformed Russia into Soviet Russia. In less than a year, however, power had slipped from the soviets into the safekeeping of the Communist Party. The revolution which had signalled not socialism overnight for Lenin but the dictatorship of the proletariat revealed its true colours. Not soviet democracy but a dictatorship — and since the Communist Party claimed to be the vanguard of the proletariat — a dictatorship of the Communist Party. THE BOLSHEVIKS SEIZE POWER The IInd Congress of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies convened in Smolny in Petrograd at 10.40 p.m. on 7 November 1917

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  The Conduct of War 1789-1961

  A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial and Russian Revolutions on War and Its Conduct

  • J. F. C. Fuller(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER X Lenin and the Russian Revolution * 1 · Lenin and the March Revolution

  The Petrograd revolution of March 1917 was a popular and not a revolutionary rising, brought about by war weariness and universal discontent. At the time there were three parties in the Duma, the Constitutional Democrats, or ‘Cadets’, who stood for a constitutional monarchy; the Social Democrats, who were Marxists, and the Social Revolutionaries, who represented the peasants. When on 15th March Nicholas II abdicated, it was the first of these parties which picked up his sceptre, and, on the 22nd, formed a Provisional Coalition Government under Prince Gregori Lvov.

  In spite of the general outcry for peace, the Provisional Government determined to remain loyal to Russia’s allies and to continue the war, a decision which was at once challenged by the Petrograd Soviet1 which, on 27th March, issued a proclamation to the peoples of the world calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities.2 Because it represented the most important elements of actual power – the soldiers, factory hands, railway workers, postal, telegraph and other services – and because it voiced the yearnings of the people, the authority of the Provisional Government was stillborn. This separation of responsibility and power unbarred the road to Lenin, and chaotically led to the October Revolution.3

  Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924), better known as Lenin, was both an ardent and unorthodox Marxist. By rejecting the dogma that the new social order would only mature when Capitalism had reduced all but the capitalists themselves to a proletarian level, he knocked the bottom out of Marx’s historical dialectics.1

  When the March Revolution detonated in Petrograd, he was a penniless refugee in Switzerland; he lived in a single room in Zurich rented from a cobbler; of his small band of followers in Russia many were in prison, and to the outer world he was virtually unknown. He had been in Switzerland since the war began, and had spent his time inveighing against his opponents and stimulating his followers. For him, the war had but one purpose – the destruction of the Capitalist system by converting it into a proletarian civil war. He called for the utilization of every means of subversion, the organization of strikes, street demonstrations, and propaganda in the trenches: ‘Civil war, not civil peace – that is the slogan!’2

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  The Pattern of Communist Revolution

  An Historical Analysis

  • Hugh Seton-Watson(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Trotski had argued that if the proletariat were to lead a bourgeois revolution in Russia, it would not be able, as Lenin was suggesting, to limit the revolution to the bourgeois stage. If the proletariat seized power, it would have to carry the revolution on to the socialist stage. But in a country economically and socially so backward as Russia, the socialist revolution would be defeated. Therefore it was essential to the success of the proletarian revolution in Russia that there should be socialist revolutions in industrial Europe. The bourgeois revolution in Russia must be the spark setting off the explosion in Europe.

  1 Republished in Moscow in 1922 under the title 1905. Trotski was the deputy chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies in October 1905. Arrested after the dissolution of the Soviet, he made an impressive speech at the trial. He afterwards escaped from Siberia and went to Vienna.

  The opportunity to test these different theories came in March 1917. The March Revolution was a result of the war. It was caused by a combination of dismay at war casualties, economic hardship and general political incompetence. Never perhaps in history had a great nation made such heroic efforts on behalf of such despicable rulers. The immediate occasion was furnished by workers’ demonstrations, and the issue was decided when the troops in the capital went over to the crowds. On 15th March the Tsar abdicated, and on the following day a Provisional Government of liberal politicians was formed. Beside the government was the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The workers’ deputies were elected in the factories, and the soldiers’ in army units. At this time the soviets, which were formed all over the country, were genuinely representative bodies. They expressed the pent-up feelings of the long-inarticulate masses, until then almost completely excluded from Russian political life. In St. Petersburg the government and the soviet viewed each other with suspicion. The soviet gave a qualified recognition to the government. For its part the government declared its intention of holding, as soon as possible, elections to a Constituent Assembly. But meanwhile the government was based on no legislative body, and the soviet, being the only assembly in the capital that could claim a representative quality, demanded with increasing success that the government should hold itself responsible to it.

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  Lenin's Terror

  The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence

  • James Ryan(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Certainly, as noted earlier, he spoke highly of the instrumental uses of violence in the interests of revolution, but violence was not desirable for itself and Lenin envisaged the possibility, however briefly and realistically, of a peaceful revolution in Russia. In any case he did not seem to envisage the extent of the violence and difficulties that would characterize the early years of Soviet rule in Russia.

  ‘All power to the soviets’

  In February to March 1917 the ‘civil war’ that Lenin had been urging for the previous three years began in Russia. Tensions in Russian society finally spilled over and the Tsar relinquished the throne. In the limited sense that the autocracy had been overthrown, Lenin acknowledged that the bourgeois-democratic revolution had been accomplished in Russia. In fact the resulting government was, he pointed out, unusual, as a system of ‘dual power’ had arisen. Political power was effectively shared between the Provisional Government formed by moderate monarchist and liberal parties in the Duma, and the embryonic form of a workers’ and peasants’ government, the Petrograd Soviet. In April the government would be propped up by the Mensheviks and SRs, despite the (later justified) misgivings among leading Mensheviks about entering such a government.3 Yet Lenin maintained that the democratic revolution had not been thorough-going; Russia was not yet economically ready for complete socialism, though its revolution would, he thought, ‘start’ worldwide socialist revolutions.4 The Russian proletariat had temporarily become the ‘vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat of the whole world’, but was not sufficiently organized or class-conscious to remain as such.5

  Lenin’s reaction to the revolution was immediately to advocate ‘no support of the new government’,6 a position not initially shared by more moderate Bolsheviks in Petrograd.7 From Switzerland, preparing for return to Russia, he dispatched a series of letters to Petrograd Bolsheviks. The rapidity of the Russian revolution, he considered, had been facilitated both by the lessons acquired by the people in 1905, and of course by the war, the ‘mighty accelerator.’8 In his first letter – the only one the Bolsheviks published in Pravda at the time but in edited form, as they considered some of his language too extreme – he proceeded to excoriate the new government as the product of an Anglo-French plot to ensure that the Tsarist autocracy would not conclude a separate peace with Germany. It would slaughter ‘fresh millions’ of Russian workers and peasants in order to continue the imperialist war, an interpretation that later seemed more plausible in the light of the ‘April Crisis’.9 This ‘bourgeois’ government was, he believed, turning against the revolutionary strivings of the masses, negotiating for a monarchist restoration, and fudging on the question of elections for a Constituent Assembly.10 There was no explicit mention that the civil war slogan remained but there was, he believed, a need for the expansion and strengthening of a ‘proletarian militia’ that would replace the old police force and standing army as the ‘executive organ’ of the soviets, and offer ‘serious resistance to the restoration of the monarchy and attempts to rescind or curtail the promised freedoms, or of firmly taking the road that will give the people bread, peace and freedom.’11 He made clear that there was no question of an immediate overthrow of the government, for even if that power were overthrown, the proletariat was not sufficiently organized to retain power. Hence the slogan of the moment ‘must be proletarian organization .’12

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