A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (54 page)

Yet the possibility of rebellion was always there. The generals noted with horror what happened on Christmas Day 1914, when British and German soldiers climbed out of the trenches to fraternise with each other. British officers were ordered to shoot on sight any German soldier who emerged to fraternise during Christmas 1916.
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Such precautions could not stop the sudden explosion of huge mutinies. The first great eruption on the Western Front was in France in April 1917. An estimated 68 divisions, half the French army, refused to return to the front after an offensive which had cost 250,000 lives. A combination of concessions and repression—the imposition of 500 death sentences and 49 actual executions—restored discipline, but only after some units had raised the red flag and sang the revolutionary anthem, the Internationale. Mutinies elsewhere in the west were not on the same scale as among the French. But 1917 also saw mutinies involving some 50,000 soldiers in Italy, and five days of bloody rebellion by up to 100,000 soldiers in the British base camp at Étaples, near Boulogne. The British generals ended the rebellion by making concessions and then executed its leaders, keeping the whole affair secret.
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The mutinies were part of a growing mood of confusion and dissatisfaction across Europe. It was by no means confined to industrial workers. It also affected many of the middle class who held junior officer rank in the armies. Some sense of it is found in the work of the British war poets, and in disillusioned post-war writings such as Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front
, Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms
, Barbusse’s
Under Fire
, or Myrivillis’s
Life in the Tomb
. Such feelings could lead people to identify with the revolutionary left, as happened to the German playwright Ernst Toller. But it could also lead to forms of right wing nationalism which blamed the collapse of hope in the war on corruption, betrayal and the influence of ‘alien’ forces.

Finally, war dragged the vast numbers of peasants conscripted into the French, Italian, Austro-Hungarian and Russian armies out of their isolated villages and into the turmoil and horror of mechanised warfare. In an era before modern mass communications had penetrated most of the European countryside, the peasant conscripts were subject to experiences and ideas they had never come across before. Many were forced to accept some label of national identity for the first time as they found themselves speaking local dialects in the midst of multinational armies. As they attempted to make sense of what was happening they could be pulled in contradictory directions—influenced by priests practising traditional rites, middle class nationalists speaking similar dialects to themselves, or workers alongside them in the trenches putting socialist arguments and giving some coherence to old resentments against the rich.

Such were the feelings of a vast, bewildered, bitter mass of armed men in the trenches and barracks as the European states tore at each other’s flesh.

February 1917

‘We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution,’ the exiled Lenin told a meeting of young German speaking workers in Zurich in January 1917. He said this after arguing that revolution was, nonetheless, inevitable. ‘Europe is pregnant with revolution,’ he said. ‘The coming years in Europe, precisely because of the predatory war, will lead to popular uprisings under the leadership of the proletariat’.
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The first rising occurred just six weeks later in Petrograd,
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capital of the Russian Empire. The tsar, whose power seemed unchallengeable on the morning of 23 February,
⁶⁰
abdicated on the morning of 2 March. By November a revolutionary government headed by Lenin was running the country.

No one expected a revolution on 23 February. The day was celebrated by socialists as International Working Women’s Day—a tradition established in 1910 following a call from the German socialist women’s leader Clara Zetkin. The underground socialist groups in Petrograd marked it with leaflets, speeches and meetings, but none called for strikes, fearing that the time was not ripe for militant action.
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But the bitterness at bread shortages among women textile workers, many with husbands in the army, was such that they went on strike anyway and marched through the factory areas. A worker from the Nobel engineering factory later recounted:

The next day the movement had grown to involve half the city’s 400,000 workers, with processions from the factories to the city centre, and the slogans had changed from, ‘Bread!’ to, ‘Down with the autocracy’, and, ‘Down with the war.’ Armed police attacked the protests and the government tried to use the many thousands of troops in the city’s barracks, waiting to go to the front, to break them up. But on the fourth day of strikes and demonstrations a wave of mutinies swept through the barracks. Masses of workers and soldiers intermingled and swept through the city’s streets with guns and red flags, arresting police and government officials. Regiments sent by train to restore order went over to the revolution on entering the city. A desperate attempt to return to the city by the tsar was thwarted by railway workers. Similar movements swept Moscow and other Russian cities. The tsar’s generals told him there was no chance of maintaining order anywhere unless he abdicated.

What was to replace the tsar? Two parallel bodies emerged to take on government functions, operating alongside each other from different wings of the Tauride Palace in Petrograd. On the one hand, there was the official opposition within tsarism, the bourgeois politicians of the old state Duma, chosen by a class-based electoral system which gave the overwhelming majority of seats to the propertied classes. On the other, there were workers’ delegates, drawn together in a workers’ council, or soviet, modelled on that of 1905. The key question was which of these rival bodies would take power into its hands. In February those in the Duma were able to form a provisional government with the acquiescence of the soviets. In October the soviet majority was to form a government of its own.

The key figures in the Duma had been critical collaborators with tsarism since the outbreak of the war, working with it to organise the war industries and profiting accordingly, but resentful at the domination of a corrupt court clique around the tsarina and her recently assassinated favourite, Rasputin. They had wanted minor reforms within the tsarist system, certainly not its overthrow. As one of their leading figures, Rodzianko, later told:

In the English, American and French revolutions, and again in 1848, large sections of the propertied classes had turned against the upheavals as they took a radical twist. But they had played some initiating role in the movements. In Russia in 1917 their fear of the industrial workers stopped them doing even this. As the Menshevik historian of the revolution, Sukhanov, wrote, ‘Our bourgeoisie, unlike the others, betrayed the people not the day after the overturn but even before the overturn took place’.
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Leaders of the Duma like Rodzianko and Miliukov were negotiating to reform the monarchy right up until the very moment of the tsar’s abdication. Yet they nominated the government that replaced him—a government led by a Prince L’vov and dominated by major landowners and industrialists. It contained just one figure with any revolutionary credentials at all, a lawyer who had made his name defending political prisoners, Kerensky.

The workers’ delegates of the soviet met initially because of the need to establish some coordination between the activities of different sections of workers. Once rebel regiments sent their delegates to join the workers’ assembly, it became the focus of the whole revolutionary movement. Its elected executive had to take in hand much of the actual running of the city: providing food supplies to the mutinying soldiers; overseeing the arrest of the old police and officials; arranging for each factory to send one in ten of its workers to a militia to maintain revolutionary order; establishing a newspaper which would let people know what was happening at a time when the whole press was strike-bound. Groups of workers and soldiers would turn to the soviet for instructions—and all the time soviets which had sprung up elsewhere in the country were affiliating to the Petrograd soviet. In effect it became the government of the revolution. But it was a government which refused to take formal power and waited for the Duma leaders to do so.

The workers’ delegates in the soviet were to a greater or lesser extent influenced by the underground socialist parties. Wartime repression had all but destroyed their organisational structures, but the impact of their ideas and the standing of their imprisoned, exiled or underground leaders remained. However, these parties did not use their influence in the first days of the revolution to argue against the soviet accepting a government chosen by the Duma leaders. The Marxist parties, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, disagreed repeatedly over tactics. In 1905 the Mensheviks had followed a policy of waiting for the bourgeoisie to take the initiative, whereas the Bolsheviks had insisted workers had to push the bourgeois revolution forward. During the war many Mensheviks had argued for the defence of Russia against Germany and Austria, while Bolsheviks and ‘internationalist’ Mensheviks had opposed any support for the war. But they agreed on the character of the coming revolution—it was to be a bourgeois revolution.

This led the first leading Bolshevik figures to arrive in Petrograd, Stalin and Molotov, to accept the bourgeois provisional government chosen by the Duma. From this it also followed that they could no longer call for an immediate end to the war, since it was no longer a war waged on behalf of tsarism but a war of ‘revolutionary defence’. The only well-known revolutionary to have characterised the revolution differently, to insist it could be a proletarian revolution, had been Leon Trotsky. But he was in exile in America in February and had no party of his own, belonging instead to a loose socialist grouping standing between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.

The workers’ delegates to the soviet were not happy with the composition of the new government. They distrusted Prince L’vov and the collection of landowners and industrialists around him. But they did not have the confidence to tell experienced political leaders with an apparent knowledge of Marxism that they were wrong.

The soldiers’ delegates were even more easily won to support the government than the workers’ delegates. Most had never taken political action before. They had been brought up to defer to their ‘betters’, and even though bitter experience had made them turn against the tsar and the senior officers, they still deferred to those above who seemed on the same side as themselves—to the many regimental junior officers and the provisional government, which had learned to use the language of the revolution only a couple of days after themselves.

The failure of the provisional government

The provisional government was to last, in one form or another, only eight months before it was overthrown by a second revolution. After the event, its failure was ascribed by its supporters to the machinations of Lenin. They claimed Russia would have moved to a form of parliamentary democracy, and industrialised painlessly, if only it had been given the chance. Their version of events has gained new popularity in the decade since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet it does not accord with real developments in 1917.

As the tsar fell, the bourgeois forces behind the provisional government were pushing in one direction, while the masses who made the revolution were pushing in the opposite direction. The gap between them grew wider with every week that passed.

Russia’s capitalists were determined to continue with the very policies which had driven the workers of Petrograd to rise and the soldiers to back the rising. Tsarism had thrown backward, semi-medieval Russia into a war with Germany, the second most advanced capitalism in the world. The result was bound to be economic dislocation on a massive scale, enormous losses at the front, a breakdown in food deliveries to the cities and impoverishment of the urban workforce. Yet the new government was as determined to persist with the war as the old, since Russia’s capitalists were just as keen on expanding the empire across the Black Sea to Istanbul and the Mediterranean as any tsarist general. Their great industries were monopolies run in conjunction with the state, their national markets restricted by the backwardness of agriculture and the poverty of the peasants. What better way to expand those markets than by expanding the borders of the state? They could see no logic but the logic of imperialist war, whatever degree of dislocation it caused. The provisional government continued to accept this, even when it was restructured to give ministerial posts to the ‘moderate’ socialist parties, with Kerensky as prime minister. ‘Even many left wing members of the provisional government secretly agreed with…[the] aims’ of carving out a new empire, including the Dardanelles and ‘satellite’ states in Eastern Europe.
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Continuity in military policy was matched by continuity in policy towards the empire’s non-Russian speaking peoples—more than half the total population. There were traditions of rebellion in Poland, Finland, parts of the Caucasus and, to a lesser degree, the Ukraine. The tsars had used repression and enforced Russification to try and stamp out any movement for self determination. The new government, fearful of losing markets and supplies of raw materials, continued this approach.