The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Russian Revolution

637 Pages·2023·4.554 MB·English

by  Geoffrey Swain (editor), Charlotte Alston (editor), Michael C. Hickey (editor), Boris Kolonitsky (editor), Franziska Schedewie (editor)

ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
18.1 ‘For the honour, glory, and prosperity of our great Homeland …’ 289
18.2 ‘The Fatherland is in danger, the blood that we shed demands
a war until victory. Comrade soldiers, to the trenches immediately!
Return Lenin to Wilhelm!’ 294
Tables
4.1 Wagons loaded (excluding tankers) on Russia’s Railway Network,
January–February 1916 and January–February 1917 59
4.2 Ministers of Ways of Communication under the Provisional
Government, 1917 69
4.3 Food deliveries to army stores at the fighting fronts, November
1915–November 1917 71
21.1 Newspaper and journal distribution, according to the entries
in Periodicheskaia pechat‘ v Rossii v 1917 godu. Bibliograficheskii
ukazatel’ 331
Introduction
GEOFFREY SWAIN, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
In his personal record of 1917, the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov recalled the first
weeks of revolution with these words.
The revolution had spread like wildfire over the whole face of Russia. From all
parts there came hundreds and thousands of reports about the upheaval that
had taken place easily, instantaneously, and painlessly, sprinkled with living
water the oppressed and stagnant masses of the people and called them to life.
Telegrams spoke of the ‘recognition’ or ‘adherence’ of the troops (together with
the officers), peasants, civil servants, bourgeoisie, and people of all kinds… In the
twinkling of an eye soviets formed everywhere, of course unmethodically and
with no astute philosophizing. But they were organizations, points of support for
the democracy and the revolution… Probably hundreds of mass-meetings and
organized assemblies took place in Petersburg every day.1
Three months later things were more organized, but popular democracy still stood
to the fore. Morgan Philips Price, the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian
but writing on this occasion for the radical newspaper Common Sense, reported on
the opening of the First Congress of Soviets in early June.
From the workshops, the trenches and the battlefield over 700 delegates of
organized revolutionary democracy have gathered together for the constructive
work that lies ahead… They came in groups, bearing with them the mark of
the regions whence they hailed. One room was filled by a jolly gang of Little
Russians [Ukrainians], who immediately got their accordion going round with
their samovar. In another room there was a group of soldiers from the garrisons
in Turkestan, in another some dark-eyed people from the Caucasus. There were
bulky soldiers from the ranks and serious-looking officers from the trenches;
there were artisans from the Moscow factories and mining representatives from
the Don. But it was not long before the raw national materials had worked up
into the political finished article. On the next day they began to split up into
their party sections – the SRs in one room, the Bolsheviks in another, and the
Mensheviks in another.2
A further six months on and the scene would be very different, as Russia descended
into civil war. By then ‘bourgeois’ democracy had been discarded when the
2 THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
Constituent Assembly was dispersed on 6 January 1918, and ‘soviet’ democracy
was already withering on the vine as the Bolsheviks discovered that any version
of democracy meant sharing power with those parties which did not match their
ideological convictions. By early 1919, the Bolshevik dictatorship was firmly
established, and the civil war was at its height. By the end of the civil war, not only
was the Bolshevik Party the only source of political authority, but the Politburo had
established centralized control over the rank and file; the system that would operate
until 1991 was in place.
The Bolsheviks refused to share power with other socialist parties and insisted
on a dictatorship because they had a purpose: they were seeking to implement the
ideas of Marx and Engels about establishing a future, communist, class-less society.
The writer Maxim Gorky summed it up well in one of the ‘untimely thoughts’ he
published on 20 November 1917, less than a fortnight after the Bolshevik Revolution.
The working class cannot fail to understand that Lenin is only performing a
certain experiment on their skin and on their blood, that he is striving to push
the revolutionary mood of the proletariat to its furthest extreme and see – what
will come of this? Of course, he does not believe in the possibility of the victory
of the proletariat in Russia under the present conditions, but he is hoping for
a miracle. The working class should know that miracles do not occur in real
life, that they are to expect hunger, complete disorder in industry, disruption of
transportation and protracted bloody anarchy followed by a no less bloody and
gloomy reaction.3
Lenin was indeed hoping for a miracle, that the revolution in Russia would become a
revolution throughout Europe, and that other, advanced industrial countries would
support Russia in the work of building a socialist future. There were times during the
civil war when this seemed possible, but as Charlotte Alston notes in her concluding
contribution to this volume, Lenin told the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921
that ‘so long as there is no revolution in other countries, only agreement with the
peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia’. Lenin’s miracle cure of world
revolution was on hold, and the Bolshevik vision of socialism could only be built
through continued dictatorship.
Bolshevik rule in Russia would inspire and terrify in equal measure for the next
seventy-four years. The politics of the twentieth century would be dominated by
those trying to spread communism and those trying to prevent its spread: Hitler’s
monstrous war against ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ only served to increase the number of
countries which declared their loyalty to Leninism, but none was from the industrially
advanced world. In the end Soviet Russia, for all its achievements, would prove to
be built on sand. As Gorky wrote, miracles do not occur in real life. The state, which
was founded on ideological commitment, lost its ideology. If Russian youngsters in
the 1960s wanted to reform communism, by the 1990s they were simply tired of
communism and had no loyalty to an economic system which could build ballistic
missiles but not deliver consumer goods. They were tired of waiting for miracles.
It was inevitable that a state which defined itself by an ideology, would find its
history being written in ideological terms. Both the Bolsheviks and their opponents,
Charlotte Alston points out, stressed that what happened in October 1917 was a
INTRODUCTION 3
well-planned coup by the Bolshevik Party, and for too many years historians debated
whether this was a good or a bad thing, rather than asking whether it was actually
an accurate interpretation of what took place. A century after the end of the Russian
Civil War and thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is time to look
at the Russian Revolution dispassionately. In 2021, Chris Read, Britain’s leading
historian of revolutionary Russia, wrote a historiographical overview of the works
published to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Playing with the words
of John Reed, whose classic book Ten Days That Shook the World was one of the
earliest first-hand accounts of the revolution, Read wrote about ‘ten months which
no longer shake the world’. He noted that what was missing in current history writing
was the sense of a popular revolution, ‘“ordinary” people consciously pursuing
their own interests’.4 This handbook hopefully will do something to capture that
sense of a popular revolution which Sukhanov and Philips Price described so well,
the excitement and enthusiasm which so characterized the spring 1917, not just in
Petrograd but across the whole empire as the news of the revolution was spread by
the provincial press.
The aim of this handbook is to bring together a collection of essays which offer
a comprehensive picture of the Russian Revolution in the light of contemporary
scholarship, by drawing on the work of researchers from Britain, Europe, the
United States and Russia itself. Many of the essays are written by established
experts in the field, but others are the work of up-and-coming scholars. All are
based on recent research and taken together they offer a reference point for any
student wishing to know more about the events and significance of Russia in 1917,
one of the key turning points in world history. Definitions of what to include in
a ‘comprehensive picture’ may differ, but the editors followed a clear logic when
selecting the subject matter for analysis and their decision to group the essays
within six sections.
The section Political Crises covers the main political developments during
1917–18. The Bolsheviks taking power in October 1917 is not seen as an end point,
rather there is a broader time-scale to the transfer of political power, pushing the
story firmly into the initial Soviet period when parties other than the Bolsheviks
still mattered, and the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Politburo had not been firmly
established. Peter Waldron begins with the Duma crisis which developed during
the First World War and reached a climax as 1917 began. The public organizations
established during the course of the war had become too powerful to dissolve, even
though they openly defied the Tsar. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa then takes us through the
events of the February Revolution, exploring the interrelationship between leaders
and led. The popular insurgency provided the colour on the canvass, but it was the
Duma Committee which painted the final picture. Next Ian Thatcher explores the
disillusionment of the liberals, as they discovered that the rule of law was not so
easy to establish. In the end, the Provisional Government could not guarantee the
operation of its own laws.
It is a truism that if the Provisional Government could have launched a successful
offensive in summer 1917, the outcome of Russia’s revolution would have been very
different. Anthony Heywood explores the never-ending crisis of wartime logistics,
drawing the stark conclusion that, for all its efforts, the Provisional Government
4 THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
could only offer the population a second hungry winter. Sally Boniece then explores
the beneficiaries of that hunger, the parties which came to power as the events of
October unfolded. She focuses not simply on the Bolshevik seizure of power, but
their need to forge an alliance with the political voice of the peasantry, the Left
SRs. Finally, Lara Douds considers the evolution of the Soviet regime, the end of
coalition politics and the development of government through the Bolshevik Party’s
Politburo.
The section Politicians and Parties focuses on three of the key political players,
as well as on some of the lesser studied political parties. It opens with Boris
Kolonitskii’s study of ‘the darling of the revolution’, Alexander Kerensky. The
personification of the revolution in February, its great enforcer over the summer,
by the autumn he was hated in equal measure by those of both Left and Right.
Viktor Chernov led revolutionary Russia’s biggest political party, the Socialist
Revolutionaries (SRs), the party which won the elections to the Constituent
Assembly. As Hannu Immonen shows, although the SRs experienced splits and
divisions during the revolutionary year, Chernov was still an active figure in the
first months after October, reasserting the influence of his party. Lenin was the
undoubted victor of 1917, moulding the Bolshevik Party to his will. Barbara Allen
details the growing confidence of the Bolshevik Party and Lenin’s determination
to press ahead with armed insurrection. Before one-party rule and the hegemony
of the Politburo were finally established during the course of the civil war, other
‘internationalist’ parties could influence events. Lutz Häfner explores the fate of
these other parties on the left, sometimes in alliance with the Bolsheviks, sometimes
opposing them. Then, Dmitrii Ivanov considers the role of the Anarchists. Although
small in number, they were among the most committed revolutionaries, actively
supporting the Bolshevik seizure of power and taking a leading role in defending
the Soviet regime against its earliest opponents.
The section Social Groups considers the impact of 1917 on workers, peasants,
soldiers, the lower middle strata and the old elites, groups which both supported
and opposed the revolution. Nikolai Mikhailov discusses the role of workers and
what he sees as their perpetual struggle to establish a ‘workers’ constitution’ aided
by the Bolsheviks but ultimately frustrated by them too. Peter Fraunholtz considers
the peasantry, whose desire for land made them impatient with the Provisional
Government. As peasants seized land and gibed at handing over their grain, the
Provisional Government increasingly resorted to force in its confrontations with
them. Konstantin Tarasov considers the soldiers, as the army democratized and
then disintegrated. The committee structures associated with democratization
were soon seen as both oppressive and pro-war by a soldiery favouring peace.
The re-election of the committees opened up opportunities for the Bolsheviks and
their internationalist allies. Daniel Orlovsky shows how the lower middle strata
played a key role both in the early days of the revolution, and as the Bolsheviks
prepared to take power. Matthew Rendle discusses the élites of the old regime,
their willingness to accept the revolution and their ability to use the new freedoms
to start defending their own interests, actions perceived by others as counter-
revolutionary.
INTRODUCTION 5
Gender is the first issue addressed in the section Identities. Rochelle Ruthchild
reminds us that no account of 1917 can be complete without an examination of
the role played by women, not only because a women’s demonstration started the
February Revolution but because women forced female enfranchisement onto the
revolutionaries’ agenda and then participated in elections with as much if not more
enthusiasm than men. Siobhán Hearne then explores the impact of 1917 on changing
understandings of masculinity. Although the Bolsheviks were keen to abolish the
patriarchal family, the communist ethos remained implicitly coded as masculine and
masculine identity was firmly linked to military service. Elizabeth White moves the
discussion to the question of the impact of 1917 on childhood. She considers the
new children’s rights and experimental education, alongside the terrible problem of
civil war orphans. Finally, Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal considers the role of the
artist in developing a new revolutionary culture. Was the aim of the revolution to
destroy the old bourgeois culture and create a new proletarian one, to preserve all
cultural artefacts for the benefit of posterity, or was Bolshevik cultural policy an ad
hoc mix of iconoclasm and the prevention of destruction?
Much of the best research on the Russian Revolution undertaken in recent years
had been into regional studies of the revolution, while the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the emergence of newly independent states had prompted a plethora of
new national histories describing the brief emergence of new nations during 1917–18,
before their later incorporation, often unwillingly, into the Soviet Union. Being
‘comprehensive’ in these circumstances was a challenge for the editors when planning
the section Regions and Peoples. To give a flavour of this mountain of research, it
was decided to focus on just three aspects, felt to be significant and symptomatic: a
new source base for regional studies, two local studies from strategically important
yet very different parts of Russia, and two studies of those emerging nations most
closely tied to Russia. Franziska Schedewie and Dennis Dierks show just how vibrant
the regional press was in 1917, bringing the debates of the capital, and its heroes
and heroines, to every corner of the Russian Empire. Next Michael Hickey explores
the impact of the revolution in Smolensk province, in the west of Russia, showing,
among other things, how long after October the local Bolsheviks were dependent in
this region on political allies. Sarah Badcock considers the situation on the Volga, to
the east of Moscow, where land hunger meant that peasants were determined to seize
land, whatever the Provisional Government might say; and they would do it by fair
means or foul. Nataliya Kibita explores the revolution in Ukraine, considering how
national and social revolution became entwined and led to contradictory outcomes.
The national revolution failed, but the social revolution succeeded. Gero Fedtke
considers the revolutionary events in Turkestan, which predated those in Russia.
These saw the revolutionaries challenged by their chauvinistic colonial attitudes and
uncertain how to engage with the indigenous Muslim community.
The section on The Civil War represents even more of a compromise engineered
by the editors. In many ways, the civil war is a subject in its own right, and yet
it emerges directly from the revolution, and the new revolutionary state was not
fully established until the civil war was over. Not to include the civil war in this
handbook would mean stopping the story in December 1917, or even, arguably,
6 THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
in April 1917 since it was during that month’s demonstrations that some Kadets
and some Bolsheviks first took pot shots at each other. The editors’ solution to this
dilemma was to ask Evan Mawdsley, whose study of the civil war has served as a
benchmark for many years, to write an essay offering an overview of the fighting.
With this context established, four essays follow. Murray Frame gives an account
of the Red home front, and the steady centralization of power and militarization of
society as the war progressed. Nikolaus Katzer looks at the White home front and
the difficulties the Bolsheviks’ opponents faced in establishing unity and constructing
a viable state: the result was a permanent sense of insecurity behind White lines.
Geoffrey Swain then addresses the question of world revolution, for there were
moments during the civil war when that Bolshevik dream came a little closer to
reality. Finally, Charlotte Alston reflects on the state of the revolution by 1921, once
the fighting was over and the Bolshevik state established.
Translations were the work of the individual authors, with the following
exceptions: Eve Rosenhaft translated the essay by Nikolaus Katzer, Dmitrii Ivanov
that by Boris Kolonitskii and Diana Swain that by Nikolai Mikhailov.
Work on the essays presented here was largely undertaken during the height of
the Covid crisis, when universities had to adapt overnight to online teaching and
research libraries were closed. I would like to thank the authors involved for staying
the course and seeing the handbook through to completion.
CHAPTER ONE
Public organizations and
the Duma crisis
PETER WALDRON, UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA
When the Russian monarchy came to an end at the beginning of March 1917, Prince
Georgii L’vov became the first prime minister of the new Provisional Government
that took power in the wake of Nicholas II’s abdication. L’vov had been a member
of the short-lived First Duma that was elected early in 1906, but he was not
nominated for election to the Second Duma and played no further part in Russian
parliamentary politics.1 Even though leading figures from the Fourth Duma that had
sat right through the war years played a central role in pushing the Tsar towards
renouncing the throne, it was L’vov who took the premiership in March 1917.2 His
role during the First World War had been as chairman of the Zemstvo Union, the
organization that brought together the elected councils from Russia’s provinces and
districts founded with the aim of providing aid to Russia’s wounded troops. The
revolution that dislodged Nicholas II also represented a failure for Russia’s Duma:
it proved unable to capitalize on its position as the elected national parliamentary
body and to establish itself as the successor to the Tsar. This chapter will discuss
how the Duma became marginalized during the war years and analyse why the
existing parliamentary institutions were unable to emerge as central players in the
political crises that gripped Russia as the war developed. But parallel to the Duma’s
failure to build on its position as Russia’s sole nationally elected legislative body,
public organizations emerged as a social and political force during the war years.
Russian local government – the zemstvo and municipal dumas – took advantage
of the disarray of both central government and the Russian parliament to expand
its influence and power, while elements of Russian private industry united to try
to support the war effort through war-industries committees. The second focus of
the chapter will be this increasing impact of autonomous organizations in a state
which had traditionally placed very tight limits on the activity of groups that were
independent of government. The failure of the Russian parliamentary system was
mirrored by an expansion in the significance of organizations that drew their
influence from a wider social sphere.
Writing on Russia’s experience of the First World War has been shaped by the
coming to power of the Bolsheviks less than nine months after the fall of the Tsar.
10 THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
For the Soviet regime, the First World War and the collapse of the Romanov dynasty
were merely an inevitable part of the march towards the socialist revolution that
brought the Bolsheviks to power in October 1917. With rare exceptions,3 Soviet
history gave the war years from 1914 only cursory treatment, instead tracing the
roots of revolution back from October 1917 and focussing overwhelmingly on the
elements in the Russian past that provided the Soviet regime with legitimacy. The
Russian liberals who formed the core of the Provisional Government that came to
power in March 1917 and who had played a crucial role in the public organizations
that came to prominence during the war were consigned to the ‘dustbin of history’
and discussed merely as insubstantial obstacles on the way to the Bolshevik seizure
of power. During the Cold War, Western historical writing too was shaped by the
Soviet experience: access to archives in the Soviet Union was stringently controlled
by the state and the focus of much Western writing too was on the Bolsheviks and the
nature of their regime. Some scholars succeeded in transcending the conventional
boundaries of writing on the history of early twentieth-century Russia,4 but it was
only really with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that Russia’s First World
War began to receive proper scholarly attention. Russian historians were freed of
the ideological constraints imposed by the Soviet regime and, with much greater
access to archives, scholars from around the world were able to discuss the war
years as a discrete set of events, rather than just as a prelude to the revolutions of
1917. The centenary of the outbreak of the war provided a powerful impetus to
reassess Russia’s wartime experience, with the publication of major pieces of writing
and collections of documents that have illuminated hitherto unexplored areas.5 The
unevenness of historical writing on the war years presents challenges, with some
areas of this very deeply textured period having received sustained scrutiny only
since the 1990s, but the wealth of source materials now available provides scope for
real historical enquiry.
THE DUMA DURING THE WAR
At the start of November 1916, Russia’s Fourth Duma convened in Petrograd for
its first sitting since late June. The Duma’s wartime sittings had been significantly
truncated in comparison to its pre-war activity: during the first year of the war,
it had sat for only four days and even the longer Duma session that began in the
summer of 1915 contained only sixty sittings.6 For Russia’s government, the Duma
presented a source of potential – and, indeed, real – opposition to its handling of
the war and ministers wanted to minimize opportunities for parliament to express
opinions that were critical of the Tsarist regime. But by autumn 1916 and after more
than two years of war, with little sign that Russia’s fortunes were improving, many
Duma members were in no mood to remain quiet. Sensing the mood, the chairman
of the Council of Ministers, B. V. Sturmer, decided against making a speech at
the opening of the new Duma session on 1 November,7 so that the sitting was
dominated by a speech from the leader of the liberal Kadet party, Pavel Miliukov.
Recognized as the most prominent of Russia’s liberal politicians, Miliukov delivered
a devastating attack on the government. Listing a catalogue of accusations against
ORGANIZATIONS AND THE DUMA CRISIS 11
the government, Miliukov asked repeatedly if the cause of each of the regime’s
failings was ‘stupidity or treason’? In particular, he drew unfavourable comparisons
between the way in which the other allied powers had approached sustaining
political and social support for the war and the deep divisions that had developed in
Russia, divisions that Miliukov placed firmly at the door of the Tsarist government.
‘The government persists in claiming that organizing the country means organizing
a revolution, and deliberately prefers chaos and disorganization’, he declared,
before going on to attack Protopopov, the recently appointed Minister of Internal
Affairs, for his part in the government’s work.8 Miliukov’s speech was greeted with
huge and excited enthusiasm by the majority of Duma members: only the Right
remained silent. His intention in accusing the government of acting treasonously
was to again make the opposition’s case that they should play a full part in the war
effort, but Miliukov’s barbs directed at Protopopov – who had previously been the
Duma’s senior vice-president and a member of the moderate Octobrist party – had a
different aim. Miliukov wanted to stress that it should be for the Duma opposition –
the Progressive Bloc that had come into being in the summer of 1915 – to determine
the nature of a new cabinet, rather than for the Tsarist regime to try to pick off
individual Duma members and persuade them to hold government office.9
The anger obvious in Miliukov’s speech and the frustration that he displayed at
Protopopov’s appointment were evidence of deeper problems besetting the Duma.
The Duma had been recalled for just a single day at the start of the war in July 1914
to offer patriotic support and to vote for finance to support the war effort, and
then did not meet again until the end of January 1915. That winter sitting lasted
only three days, and the Duma continued to voice its support for the government,
voting to approve the budget with even the potentially most vigorous critics of
the regime – the Mensheviks and Trudoviks – abstaining rather than casting votes
against funding for the war and thus appearing unpatriotic.10 The willingness of
the Duma to offer such sustained support to the government changed significantly
during the summer of 1915 as German armies swept eastwards, forcing Russia’s
troops to retreat along a very wide front. The great industrial city of Riga came
close to being taken by the Germans in August, with more than 2 million refugees
leaving their homes in the western areas of the Russian empire by late 1915.11 It
was evident that the government was failing to resist the German advance and that
this lack of military success was having an impact on Russian society more widely.12
Moderate political and social opinion turned quickly against the government, with
demands for changes in policy that would help improve Russia’s fortunes against
Germany and Austria-Hungary. Central to these demands were calls for the Tsarist
regime to include figures from liberal and moderate opinion in the government,
and there were signs in the spring of 1915 that the Tsar and his advisers had
taken some heed of these demands. Some of the most conservative ministers in
the government were replaced with more moderate men: Vladimir Sukhomlinov,
the long-serving minister of war, was removed and his place taken by General
Aleksei Polivanov, a much more popular figure.13 Three further ministers followed
Sukhomlinov into retirement in the following weeks, and the more liberal men who
now occupied ministerial positions – with the agriculture minister A.V. Krivoshein