The Russian Revolution (7 page)

The political outcome of the 1905 Revolution was ambiguous, and in some ways unsatisfactory to all concerned. In the Fundamental Laws of 19o6-the closest Russia came to a constitutionNicholas made known his belief that Russia was still an autocracy. True, the autocrat now consulted with an elected parliament, and political parties had been legalized. But the Duma had limited powers; Ministers remained responsible solely to the autocrat; and, after the first two Dumas proved insubordinate and were arbitrarily dissolved, a new electoral system which virtually disfranchised some social groups and heavily over-represented the landed nobility was introduced. The Duma's main importance, perhaps, lay in providing a public forum for political debate and a training ground for politicians. The political reforms of 1905-7 bred parliamentary politicians just as the legal reforms of the i86os had bred lawyers; and both groups had an inherent tendency to develop values and aspirations that the autocracy could not abide.

One thing that the 1905 Revolution did not change was the police regime that had come to maturity in the i88os. Due process of law was still suspended (as in the case of the field courts martial dealing with the rebellious peasantry in 1906-7) for much of the population much of the time. Of course there were understandable reasons for this: the fact that in 1908, a comparatively quiet year, i,8oo officials were killed and 2,083 were wounded in politically motivated attacks20 indicates how tumultuous the society remained, and how much the regime remained on the defensive. But it meant that in many respects the political reforms were only a facade. Trade unions, for example, had been made legal in principle, but individual unions were frequently closed down by the police. Political parties were legal, and even the revolutionary socialist parties could contest the Duma elections and win a few seats-yet the members of revolutionary socialist parties were no less liable to arrest than in the past, and the party leaders (most of whom returned to Russia during the 1905 Revolution) were forced back into emigration to avoid imprisonment and exile.

With hindsight, it might seem that the Marxist revolutionaries, with 1905 under their belts and 1917 already looming on the horizon, should have been congratulating themselves on the workers' spectacular revolutionary debut and looking confidently towards the future. But in fact their mood was quite different. Neither Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks had got more than a toehold in the workers' revolution of 1905: the workers had not so much rejected as outpaced them, and this was a very sobering thought, particularly for Lenin. Revolution had come, but the regime had fought back and survived. Within the intelligentsia, there was much talk about abandoning the revolutionary dream and the old illusions of social perfectibility. From the revolutionary standpoint, it was no gain to have a facade of legal political institutions and a new breed of selfimportant, chattering liberal politicians (to summarize Lenin's view of them, which did not greatly differ from Nicholas II's). It was also deeply, almost unbearably disappointing for the revolutionary leaders to return to the familiar dreariness of emigre life. The emigres were never more prickly and contentious than in the years between 1905 and 1917; indeed, the Russians' continual petty bickering became one of the scandals of European Social Democracy, and Lenin was one of the very worst offenders.

Among the bad news of the prewar years was that the regime was embarking on a major programme of agrarian reform. The peasant revolts of 1905-7 had persuaded the government to abandon its earlier premise that the mir was the best guarantee of rural stability. Its hopes now lay in the creation of a class of small independent farmers-a wager on `the sober and the strong', as Nicholas's chief Minister, Petr Stolypin, described it. Peasants were now encouraged to consolidate their holdings and separate from the mir, and land commissions were established in the provinces to facilitate the process. The assumption was that the poor would sell up and go to the towns, while the more prosperous would improve and expand their holdings and acquire the conservative petty-bourgeois mentality of, say, the French peasant farmer. By 1915, between a quarter and a half of all Russia's peasant farmers held their land in some form of individual tenure, although, given the legal and practical complexity of the process, only about a tenth had completed the process and enclosed their land.21 The Stolypin reforms were `progressive' in Marxist terms, since they laid the basis for capitalist development in agriculture. But, in contrast to the development of urban capitalism, their short- and medium-range implications for Russian revolution were highly depressing. Russia's traditional peasantry was prone to revolt. If the Stolypin reforms worked (as Lenin, for one, feared that they might), the Russian proletariat would have lost an important revolutionary ally.

In 19o6, the Russian economy was bolstered by an enormous loan (two and a quarter billion francs) which Witte negotiated with an international banking consortium; and both native and foreign-owned industry expanded rapidly in the prewar years. This meant, of course, that the industrial working class also expanded. But labour unrest dropped down sharply for some years after the savage crushing of the workers' revolutionary movement in the winter of 1905-6, picking up again only around i9io. Largescale strikes became increasingly common in the immediate prewar years, culminating in the Petrograd general strike of the summer of 1914, which was sufficiently serious for some observers to doubt that Russia could risk mobilizing its army for war. The workers' demands were political as well as economic; and their grievances against the regime included its responsibility for foreign domination of many sectors of Russian industry as well as its use of coercion against the workers themselves. In Russia, the Mensheviks were conscious of losing support as the workers became more violent and belligerent, and the Bolsheviks were conscious of gaining it. But this did not noticeably raise the spirits of the Bolshevik leaders in emigration: because of poor communications with Russia, they were probably not fully aware of it, and their own position in the emigre Russian and socialist community in Europe was increasingly weak and isolated.22

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, with Russia allied with France and England against Germany and AustriaHungary, the political emigres became almost completely cut off from Russia, as well as experiencing the normal problems of alien residents in wartime. In the European socialist movement as a whole, large numbers of former internationalists became patriots overnight when war was declared. The Russians were less inclined than others to outright patriotism, but most took the `defensist' position of supporting Russia's war effort as long as it was in defence of Russian territory. Lenin, however, belonged to the smaller group of `defeatists' who repudiated their country's cause entirely: it was an imperialist war, as far as Lenin was concerned, and the best prospect was a Russian defeat which might provoke civil war and revolution. This was a very controversial stand, even in the socialist movement, and the Bolsheviks found themselves very much cold-shouldered. In Russia, all known Bolsheviks-including Duma deputies-were arrested for the duration of the war.

As in 1904, Russia's declaration of war produced a public surge of patriotic enthusiasm, much jingoistic flag-waving, a temporary moratorium on internal strife, and earnest attempts by respectable society and non-governmental organizations to assist the government's war effort. But once again, the mood quickly turned sour. The Russian Army suffered crushing defeats and losses (a total of five million casualties for 1914-17), and the German Army penetrated deep into the western territories of the Empire, causing a chaotic outflow of refugees into central Russia.23 Defeats bred suspicion of treason in high places, and one of the main targets was Nicholas's wife, Empress Alexandra, who was a German princess by birth. Scandal surrounded Alexandra's relationship with Rasputin, a shady but charismatic character whom she trusted as a true man of God who could control her son's haemophilia. When Nicholas assumed the responsibilities of commander-in-chief of the Russian Army, which took him away from the capital for long periods, Alexandra and Rasputin began to exercise a disastrous influence over ministerial appointments. Relations between the government and the Fourth Duma detriorated drastically: the mood in the Duma and among the educated public as a whole was captured in the phrase with which the Cadet Pavel Milyukov punctuated a speech on the government's shortcomings-'Is this stupidity or is it treason?' Late in 1916, Rasputin was murdered by some young nobles close to the court and a right-wing Duma deputy, whose motives were to save the honour of Russia and the autocracy.

The pressures of the First World War-and, no doubt, the personalities of Nicholas and his wife, and the family tragedy of their young son's haemophilia24-threw the anachronistic traits of the Russian autocracy into sharp relief, and made Nicholas seem less like an upholder of the autocratic tradition than an unwitting satirist of it. The `ministerial leapfrog' of incompetent favourites in the Cabinet, the illiterate peasant faith-healer at court, the intrigues of the high nobility leading to Rasputin's murder, and even the epic story of Rasputin's stubborn resistance to death by poison, bullets, and drowning-all these seemed to belong to an earlier age, to be a bizarre and irrelevant accompaniment to the twentieth-century realities of troop-trains, trench warfare, and mass mobilization. Russia not only had an educated public to perceive this, but also possessed institutions like the Duma, the political parties, the zemstvos, and the industrialists' War Industries Committee which were potential agents of transition from the old regime to the modern world.

The autocracy's situation was precarious on the eve of the First World War. The society was deeply divided, and the political and bureaucratic structure was fragile and overstrained. The regime was so vulnerable to any kind of jolt or setback that it is hard to imagine that it could have survived long, even without the War, although clearly change might in other circumstances have come less violently and with less radical consequences than was the case in 1917.

The First World War both exposed and increased the vulnerability of Russia's old regime. The public applauded victories, but would not tolerate defeats. When defeats occurred, the society did not rally behind its government (a relatively normal reaction, especially if the enemy becomes an invader of the homeland, and the reaction of Russian society in 1812 and again in 1941-2), but instead turned sharply against it, denouncing its incompetence and backwardness in tones of contempt and moral superiority. This suggests that the regime's legitimacy had become extremely shaky, and that its survival was very closely related to visible achievements or, failing that, sheer luck. The old regime had been lucky in 1904-6, an earlier occasion when war defeats had plunged it into revolution, because it got out of the war relatively quickly and honourably, and was able to obtain a very large postwar loan from Europe, which was then at peace. It was not so lucky in 1914-17. The war lasted too long, draining not only Russia but the whole of Europe. More than a year before the Armistice in Europe, Russia's old regime was dead.

2 1917: The Revolutions of February
and October

IN February 1917, the autocracy collapsed in the face of popular demonstrations and the withdrawal of elite support for the regime. In the euphoria of revolution, political solutions seemed easy. Russia's future form of government would, of course, be democratic. The exact meaning of that ambiguous term and the nature of Russia's new constitution would be decided by a Constituent Assembly, to be elected by the Russian people as soon as circumstances permitted. In the meantime, the elite and popular revolutions-liberal politicians, the propertied and professional classes, and the officer corps in the first category; socialist politicians, the urban working class, and rank-and-file soldiers and sailors in the second-would coexist, as they had done in the glorious days of national revolutionary solidarity in 1905. In institutional terms, the new Provisional Government would represent the elite revolution, while the newly revived Petrograd Soviet would speak for the revolution of the people. Their relationship would be complementary rather than competitive, and `dual power' (the term applied to the coexistence of the Provisional Government and the Soviet) would be a source of strength, not of weakness. Russian liberals, after all, had traditionally tended to see the socialists as allies, whose special interest in social reform was comparable to and compatible with the liberals' own special interest in political democratization. Most Russian socialists, similarly, were prepared to see the liberals as allies, since they accepted the Marxist view that the bourgeois liberal revolution had first place on the agenda and the socialists were bound to support it in the struggle against autocracy.

Yet within eight months the hopes and expectations of February lay in ruins. `Dual power' proved an illusion, masking something very like a power vacuum. The popular revolution became progressively more radical, while the elite revolution moved towards an anxious conservative stance in defence of property and law and order. The Provisional Government barely survived General Kornilov's attempted coup from the right before succumbing in October to the Bolsheviks' successful coup from the left, popularly associated with the slogan of `All power to the soviets'. The long-awaited Constituent Assembly met but accomplished nothing, being unceremoniously dispersed by the Bolsheviks in January 1918. On the peripheries of Russia, officers of the old Tsarist Army were mustering their forces to fight the Bolsheviks, some under the monarchist banner that had seemed banished forever in 1917. The Revolution had not brought liberal democracy to Russia. Instead, it had brought anarchy and civil war.

The headlong passage from democratic February to Red October astonished victors and vanquished alike. For Russian liberals, the shock was traumatic. The revolution-their revolution by right, as the history of Western Europe demonstrated and even rightthinking Marxists agreed-had finally occurred, only to be snatched from their grasp by sinister and incomprehensible forces. Mensheviks and other non-Bolshevik Marxists were similarly outraged: the time was not yet ripe for proletarian socialist revolution, and it was inexcusable that a Marxist party should break the rules and seize power. The Allies, Russia's partners in the war in Europe, were aghast at the debacle and refused to recognize the new government, which was preparing to pull Russia out of the war unilaterally. The diplomats barely even knew the names of Russia's new rulers, but suspected the worst and prayed for a speedy resurrection of the democratic hopes they had welcomed in February. Western newspaper readers learned with horror of Russia's descent from civilization into the barbarous depths of atheistic Communism.