Reflections on the Russian Revolution of 1917 in a Post-Communist World

CHANGES IN THE PRESENT lead to changes in the way we look at the past, and the Russian Revolution of 1917 is a good example of this. In 1970 a Soviet dissident called Andre Amalrik wrote a book called Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? He was in fact only seven years out in his calculations, but in 1970, and indeed in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as Soviet leader, few would have believed Amalrik’s prediction. With rare exceptions historians did not forecast or expect the death of the Soviet Union but once it had happened it became impossible to continue to see Soviet history or the Russian Revolution in the same way as in the past. Textbooks are now written which have chapters headed ‘Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to 1917’ and ‘Soviet Russia 1917-1991’. The Soviet era is now an historical period with a beginning, a middle and an end. For the first time since it took place the Russian Revolution has become truly part of history, not just part of politics. This is already changing the questions historians ask about it.

The Russians started the reconsideration of Soviet history under Gorbachev. When Gorbachev introduced his policy of perestroika, or economic reconstruction, he coupled it with glasnost, or openness, as a way of getting popular support for economic changes. One of the most exciting parts of the policy of glasnost was the rediscovery of the past. In 1987 Gorbachev made a speech to representatives of the media saying that there should not be any ‘blank pages’ in Soviet history or literature. Films and novels which had been published abroad, like Dr Zhivago, or the works of Solzhenitsyn, appeared for the first time in the Soviet Union. Writers, filmmakers and journalists enthusiastically responded to the call to critically re-examine Soviet history, although professional historians were more cautious. Gorbachev had intended the criticism to be restricted to the Stalin years; to collectivisation of agriculture, the famine and the purges. Lenin and the Revolution were not to be criticised and Gorbachev talked of returning to the ‘true Leninism’ of the New Economic Policy. With glasnost, however, this proved to be impossible.

Meanwhile in the West historians of Russia were following events in the Soviet Union with wide-eyed fascination. The first major study to emerge in the new situation was Professor Richard Pipes’s two volume study of the Russian Revolution (1990 and 1994). Pipes returned to an earlier liberal approach, which described October as a coup d’état with no support from the population as a whole, leading to a devastating civil war. Pipes attacked the ‘revisionist’ school of social historians, who wrote ‘history from below’. Studies of popular radicalism, Pipes argued, legitimised the Bolshevik regime by portraying October as a mass movement. Pipes also emphasised the continuity between the Tsarist autocracy and the Bolshevik one-party system. This approach has led to a spate of reviews and arguments as social historians justify their approach.

In both the West and in Russia the old nineteenth-century questions about Russian history have returned. Is Russia part of Europe or not? Are Western patterns of development, both economic and political, relevant to the Russian situation? Can an area that big and that backward, and containing over one hundred different nationalities, be governed democratically, or is the only choice for Russia one between autocracy and anarchy? Nicholas II was supposed to have said, ‘it is me or chaos’. If, for all their hopes of introducing radical change and a brave new world, the Bolsheviks, are to be seen as, in practice, reintroducing a strong, authoritarian, centralised government, was the real revolution of 1917 not October but the months of the Provisional Government after February? Were there real democratic alternatives to Bolshevism in 1917 and what lessons are there in the failure of the Provisional Government for Boris Yeltsin’s attempt today to introduce democracy in Russia?

Let us now consider the months between February and October 1917 with these thoughts in mind. The Provisional Government was, as every textbook tells us, a government of ‘bourgeoise liberals’. Nevertheless the Kadet party (Constitutional Democrats), who dominated the first Provisional Government from February to May, was very radical by Western liberal standards. They described themselves as social reformers, having ‘no enemies to the left’. In February they announced freedom of speech, of the press and assembly and religious belief, a political amnesty and the abolition of the death penalty. All these were introduced in the middle of a major war. They argued that they were not a bourgeois party but a national one, representing everyone, regardless of class. They saw the revolution primarily as a political revolution and they thought they had plenty of time to achieve political reform.

They were a ‘provisional’ government until a Constituent Assembly could be called to decide upon a form of government for the new Russia. The use of a term from the French Revolution was deliberate. All revolutionaries in Russia in 1917 were very conscious of their French forebears and spent much of the year trying to decide who was Robespierre, who was Napoleon and what stage they were in. The Constituent Assembly would represent the popular will and was to be elected on full universal suffrage, including female suffrage, with secret ballots, and on a proportional representation system. Meanwhile, they themselves had not been elected, and suffered from a lack of legitimacy. Their failure to establish quickly a new political structure to replace the tsarist one they dismantled was undoubtedly a major reason for their overthrow. The Constituent Assembly was delayed several times and elections finally took place in November after the Bolsheviks had come to power. The Assembly itself was closed by Lenin in January 1918 after meeting for only one day.

There were several reasons why the elections were so fatally delayed. They were at war, which meant that people were dispersed, in the army or sometimes in areas under foreign occupation. Time was needed to draw up voting lists and make arrangements. But also the Kadets were increasingly aware that in full and fair elections they were likely to lose power. Universal suffrage in Russia in 1917 meant giving power to peasants and peasants were expected to vote, as they did, for the Socialist Revolutionary party (SRs), which campaigned for all land to be given to the peasants. Workers and soldiers would vote for the Marxists, and increasingly for their radical, Bolshevik, wing. No one was going to vote for the liberals except themselves; that is the professional classes, the small urban middle class and reformist landowners. 1917 became a classic liberal dilemma. The liberal party would be freely and democratically elected out of office.

By the late summer Paul Milyukov, the Kadet leader and Foreign Minister, was talking about the need to wait for the war to end, of the necessity of educating the peasantry first, and saying that Russia was not ready for democracy. After October he supported the Volunteer Army’s attempt to overthrow the Bolsheviks by force. Meanwhile, in 1917, the failure to hold elections delayed solutions to important problems, above all the peasants’ demand for land distribution and the national minority demands for more autonomy and the transformation of the highly centralised empire into some sort of federation. Such important issues were postponed until they could be decided by the Constituent Assembly. The result was to encourage a drift of power from the centre to the regions.

The loss of central control was in fact encouraged by the government itself. A large number of overlapping committees, Zemstvas, town councils, local soviets and land committees were to be freely elected, and the population was thus to acquire experience of local self government before the Constituent Assembly elections took place. As the Assembly was delayed, and delayed again, the centre increasingly found power slipping out of its grasp. As had happened in 1905, towns, workers’ districts, sometimes whole regions, began to ignore the central government and run themselves through their local soviets. Non-Russian parts of the empire like the Ukraine and the Caucasus demanded local autonomy. After the closure of the Constituent Assembly, local governments were to spring up across Russia itself as well as among the national minorities.

There had been a long tradition in Russia of regionalism, despite the official stress on centralisation and Russification. From the Decembrists to the Populists, regionalists had argued that the true Russia was a federation of regions, based not only on ethnic groups but also on geographical areas. True democracy, some argued, should be on a local basis, not just the calling of an elected parliament. Large states could not be truly democratic. The parallels with post Communist Russia are startling. As early as 1989 the Soviet Union was experiencing a rebirth of regionalism as the central government first weakened and then collapsed.

Faced with this problem in 1917, and with peasant revolt and worker demonstrations and strikes, the Provisional Government was reluctant to use force, but in any case had no instruments of force to use. Much has been written of ‘dual power’ in 1917. In practice it meant that the Provisional Government had responsibility without power and the Petrograd Soviet had power without responsibility. Workers in vital industries like the railways and the telegraph looked to the Soviet as a sort of people’s parliament. Crucially Order No. 1, issued by the Petrograd Soviet to the soldiers of the garrison and the front line, ordered them to form committees responsible to the Soviet and to disarm their officers. From the beginning of the revolution therefore the Provisional Government did not control the army. As the summer wore on and the army started to desert, Kerensky launched a summer offensive to try and revive Russia’s military fortunes. It failed.

The war was crucial to the failure of the Provisional Government. As the first liberal government in February was leftward leaning and prepared to pass social reforms, conflict with the Petrograd Soviet was minimal in the early weeks. That unanimity did not however extend to the war. The first Provisional Government fell in April over its insistence on fulfilling its treaty obligations to the allies and its wish for territorial gains. The Soviet leaders, Mensheviks and SRs, entered the government, which became a liberal-socialist coalition.

With more socialists in the government, policy should have been more radical and its popularity should have increased. Neither happened. Above all, it should have meant that attention was given to the peasantry. Chernov, the SR leader, was now Minister of Agriculture with a programme the peasants supported. But he could not win support from the cabinet. The dominant policy was to wait for the Constituent Assembly. The government continued to demand grain without distributing land. The peasant revolt was to radicalise the towns, as it increased food shortages at a time when the working class were already suffering from unemployment and high prices. It also encouraged desertion from the army as the peasant soldier returned to his village to share in the illegal seizure and division of land. The peasants played an important role in bringing down the Provisional Government. Ironically, they also made an SR government impossible, although peasants still voted overwhelmingly for the SRs in the Constituent Assembly elections. Nevertheless, in October the peasants would not oppose the formation of a Bolshevik government which promised peace and land.

By August Kerensky was putting patriotism and law and order before socialism and appointed General Kornilov as Commander in Chief, knowing Kornilov’s anti-Soviet beliefs. There are real parallels with Gorbachev appointing the hard-liners to his government in the autumn of 1990. Both leaders moved from policies of radical reform to a conviction that strong central government was needed. Both became aware of the danger of becoming puppets of conservative forces, whilst having lost the support of the left. Both survived attempted coups by the people they had appointed, and both lost power shortly afterwards.

After the failure of the summer offensive and the Kornilov affair the Provisional Government in its then form was doomed. What was to replace it? The answer was a socialist government, but of what sort? This brings us to October, ‘Soviet Power’ and socialist democracy. There are several points to be made here within our theme of alternative democratic solutions. The first is the nature of the working class movement in 1917. If the liberals saw the revolution as a political and national one the workers increasingly saw it in terms of class conflict and social change. The government’s failure to solve quickly the economic problems of the year was seen as proof not just of incompetence but of counter revolution. After May the Mensheviks and the SRs shared in this unpopularity. Lenin was to label them ‘petty bourgeois’ and claim that only the Bolshevik party was willing to take power and introduce socialism. Power moved from the smoked-filled committee rooms of the government and the Petrograd Soviet to the streets, local soviets and factory committees. Such bodies, a form of people power or direct democracy, initially viewed political parties, run by intellectuals and students, with suspicion.

Local soviets like the one at the naval base at Kronstadt ran their own militia, their own cultural facilities, supervised factories through factory committees, and sometimes, but not often, put the owner in a wheelbarrow, tipped him into a local river and tried to run the factories themselves. As the months wore on and elections to bodies at all levels multiplied, party consciousness increased. Candidates stood on party tickets, and workers increasingly voted for the party untainted by the failures of the Provisional Government, the party promising action and change, the party whose slogans seemed to promise what people wanted; ‘peace, bread, land and all power to the soviets’. There is, however, ample evidence that, although workers voted Bolshevik, and supported them during the July Days and in October, they expected and wanted an all socialist coalition government, not Lenin’s centralised ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

By 1918-19 there were strikes in the major towns and widespread peasant revolts. By March 1921 the sailors of Kronstadt called for ‘soviets without Bolsheviks’, abolition of censorship and the Cheka and freedom for all socialist parties; that is a return to their vision of socialism in 1917. There were very different views during the revolution as to what ‘socialism’ meant. Was it to be introduced from above by a vanguard party or from below by the workers themselves? Did it mean local self government by the working class or state control of the means of production? Differences of opinion led to conflicts within the Bolshevik party and between the party and the class in the years that followed.

Let us, in conclusion, return to our original question about democracy. Many believed, even from within the Bolshevik leadership, that a coalition socialist government was a possibility in October. Either the second Congress of Soviets or the Constituent Assembly could have produced such a government. The decision to reject a coalition was Lenin’s. In closing the Constituent Assembly he drew a sharp distinction between what he called ‘bourgeois democracy’, a parliament representing all the people, and ‘revolutionary democracy’; that is, the soviets which were purely class bodies. For him a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, was a dictatorship of the working class, led by its vanguard party, the Bolsheviks, to destroy the old order and build socialism. For Lenin by 1917 democracy, in the western sense, and socialism had become alternatives, a view fiercely criticised by western social democrats like Rosa Luxemburg.

In emigration Milyukov returned to his theme that the Russian people were unfitted for democracy and cited the failure of the Provisional Government as proof. Certainly the Kadets did very badly in the Constituent Assembly elections and Lenin’s government was far from democratic. But it all depends on what you mean by democracy. People did practise democracy at a local level in 1917. There was ample experience of voting at both national and local level for all sorts of bodies. The idea of the Constituent Assembly was popular and the turnout good even as late as November. If the majority voted for the SRs that may have been not because they were insufficiently educated, as both Milyukov and Lenin believed, but because that was what they wanted. The Constituent Assembly was not given a chance to govern in 1917, and neither, after October, was the idea of ‘soviet power’ as most workers interpreted it. We must wait to see if this time the Russian people succeed in some form of democratic structure, whether that is through a central, national parliament or other, more local alternatives.

Further Reading: Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919, 1990, and Russia under the Bolshevik Regime 1919-1924, 1994; James White, The Russian Revolution 1917-1921. A Short History, 1994; Beryl Williams, The Russian Revolution 1917-1921, 1987; Robert Service, The Russian Revolution, 1986; Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, 1990; D.H. Kaiser (ed.), The Workers’ Revolution in Russia: The View from Below, 1987; Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union, 1985.

Reflections on the Russian Revolution of 1917 in a Post-Communist World by Beryl Williams. © new perspective 1995

Beryl Williams, Reader in History, University of Sussex, is the author of The Russian Revolution 1917-1921, 1987. Her book on Lenin in the Longman - Profiles in Power series will be published shortly.