Bolshevik Revolution: Social History of the Russian Revolution

366 Pages·1985·6.583 MB·English

by  Marc Ferro

By the same author
The Russian Revolution of 1917: the Fall of Tsarism and the Origins
of Bolshevik Power (l 972)
The Great War 19/4-1918 (1973)
lftARC FERRO
THE
BOLSHEVIK
REVO~IJTIO~
A SOCIAi. HISTODl'
OF THE RlJSSIAl'III RE'\'OLIJTIOl'III
translated by Norman Stone
Routledge & Kegan Paul
London, Boston and Henley
First published in French as La Revolution de 1917:
Octobre, naissance d'une societe by Aubier-Montaignes
Paris, 1976
This translation first published in 1980
First published as a paperback in I 985
Paperback reprinted in 1985
by Routledge& Kegan Paul pie
14 Leicester Square, London WC2H 7PH,
9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02108, USA, and
Broadway House, Newtown Road,
Henley-on-Thames, OxonRG9 IEN
Set in I /pt Plantin by
Oxprint Ltd, Oxford
and printed in Great Britain by
St Edmundsbury Press
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
© this translation Routledge& Kegan Paul Ltd 1980
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Ferro,Marc
October 1917.
I. Russia-Politics and government-/917-1936
2. Russia-History-Revolution, 1917-1921
I. Title
947.084' I DK265 79-41592
ISBN O 7100 0534 2
ISBN O 7102 0550 3
Contents
Preface
Vil
Acknowledgments
XI
Chronology
Xlll
Introduction: the illusions and delusions of revolution I
Part 1 THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE FEBRUARY SYSTEM
I The political crisis 9
2 The failure of counter-revolution 36
3 The failure of the traditional institutions and authorities 59
Part 2 THE BIRTH OF A SOCIETY
4 The nationalities: disintegration, reunion and fusion 91
s
The Revolution in the countryside ll2
6 Labour against capital 140
7 The state - from soviets to bureaucracy 179
8 The October Rising 224
Conclusion 268
Documents 281
Notes 288
Bibliography 328
Index 347
V

Preface
The October Revolution is still almost a contemporary event. Since 1917
we have had to face the questions posed by its meaning and outcome: the
Bolshevik seizure of power, the 'building of socialism', the origins of the
Stalinist terror, the vast contrast between the strict centralization of the
Soviet state and the extraordinary heady atmosphere of 1917 itself.
As we look into the origins of all this, and contemplate a new society
emerging, we can see that some changes came more rapidly or more com
_pletely than others: things did not happen in the same way in the north
and the east, nor were all aspects of life equally affected. The October
Rising and the crises that marked the history of the Revolution did not
have everywhere, and for all of the people, the same significance or
outcome.
A study concerned purely with these crises and with the Bolshevik
seizure of power, can show only one aspect of the upheaval of 1917, and
reveals only one viewpoint - that of the leaders of the Revolution, the
politicians and the militants. This is certainly essential, because they
determined what was to come, but it is only part of the story. We must
also consider the various groups, ethnic or otherwise - peasantry, factory
workers - for each of them had its own history and chronology, its
periods of sterility or energy, its crises; and that history did not
necessarily proceed at the same pace as the historical process that
occupied the headlines, the seizure of power, the end of great nations, or
the rise of socialism - the kind of history which the leading figures and
their opponents composed, in their writings, their speeches or the prin
ciples on which they based their activities and their right to govern, and
which historians, for all the critical spirit they apply, treat in a privileged
way, and with a sense of piety.
The accounts of such historians have to be complemented by others;
and for this, the forefront of the historical stage has to be abandoned so
Vil
viii PREFACE
that we can use sources of a more modest kind than the classic ones - not
sources dealing with leading personalities or institutions, but sometimes
just simple scrawls, fleeting images, often not intended for reproduction,
use or preservation. This enables us to penetrate the body of society, to
witness its change and decay from within. Using different vantage-points
- a factory in Petrograd, a village in the area of troubles, a military unit,
a university or a district committee - it is possible to detect how the
movements inspiring various social groups converged or clashed,
changing, or being changed by, the actions of the parties and political
organizations. In fitting such records together, it is important not to take
them too literally: with the written sources, as with the visual ones, the
statistics and the films, though they are vital records for any alternative
analysis of the traditional sources, the intention behind them as well as the
contents have to be taken into account. What is left out is frequently more
important than what is put in; the implicit may be more important than
the explicit, and what is imagined more than what is real.
This being so, the Revolution of 1917 becomes, in this second volume,
a many-faceted picture, and the chronology has been differentiated, so
that the dates of beginning and end vary according to the particular aspect
of the Revolution. Following the pattern of the first volume, the story of
the struggle for power is taken up to its outcome, the Bolshevik victory on
25 October 1917; however, my study of the forces that supported
Bolshevik power and the birth of the bureaucratic system of the new
people's state (the origins of which I have traced to pre-October days) has
been continued up to the point where the elements of this state had all
been fitted together, at a much later date. The problems of the Revolution
in the factories, the villages and the family have led me to go much further
back into the past, and to extend my account further into the future.
For obvious reasons, these considerations govern the principle of the
book rather than the ordering of chapters. In the first two, I examine the
forefront of the stage, the political crisis and the struggle for power. As
the regime of February collapsed and the Kornilov Putsch failed it
became evident that the helplessness of the state was not simply a con
sequence of defects in the system of dual power, but equally a reflection of
the decay of all kinds of traditional authority: government, church and
army were unable to discharge their traditional functions of repression.
'The state is like a jug,' runs a Russian proverb. 'When it cracks, water
flows.' After February 1917 society itself began to move. In chapter 4 and
thereafter, I have investigated how, both before and after October, first
the nationalities - on the far periphery, and only weakly linked with the
body _of ~he Russian state - and then the peasants, the factories, the
orgamzat10ns of the young, the women, the soviets and similar com-
PREFACE ix
mittees freed themselves and started to bring in changes in social,
political, economic life, and even in the family. I have gone on to show,
again both before and after October, how the central forces and the insti
tutions that were born during the Revolution affected the schemes of one
or other of these groups. This process was associated, in a twofold way,
with the emergence of a parallel state: the bureaucratization of it, even
before October, and its Bolshevization or the evolution of its social
structure account both for the October insurrection and the subsequent
development of the regime (chapters 7 and 8).
Translator's note: A common-sense system of transliteration from the
Russian has been used throughout. In the notes, a bracketed figure refers
to the bibliography - those from (1) to (500) refer to the bibliography of
volume I, and those from (501) to (750) to that of volume II. Throughout,
'volume (or vol.) I' refers to Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of
February 1917, translated by J. L. Richards and Nicole Stone, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, London, 1972; 'volume II' refers to the present work.