ISSN: 2158-7051 ==================== INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN STUDIES ==================== ISSUE NO. 6 ( 2017/2 ) |
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, By Ayse Dietrich*, Published by: Pluto Press, London. Written by Neil Faulkner, Year of Publishing: 2017. Subject Area: Russian History. Book Type: History. Total Number of Pages: 272. ISBN: 978 0 7453 9904 1, $20 Paperback.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian
revolution which began in February 1917 with the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II,
ending the Romanov dynasty, and ending in October of the same year with the
Bolsheviks’ seizure of power. It was a major turning point in Russian history,
establishing a regime which lasted 74 years. This
was an effort to make a sudden change from autocracy to democracy,
modernization, equality; it was a collective action of intellectuals, the
driving force of the revolution at its start, who were later joined by millions
of common people who had decided to rise against their oppressors.
The book is comprised
of an Introduction, three chapters, epilogue, timeline, bibliography and index.
In the Introduction the author claims that the revolution was an activity from
below, although many argue that the very beginning of the revolutionary
movement should be attributed to the literary intelligentsia of the 19th
century, who were the seedbed of revolutionary activities. Lenin relied on the literary intelligentsia to provide
revolutionary impetus. The Bolshevik Party actually contained a strong
contingent of genuine intellectuals, and the revolution evoked much sympathy
among the literary intellectuals outside its ranks.[1]
Part one, “The Spark, 1825-1916” contains four subheadings: “The Regime”, “The Revolutionaries”, “Lenin
and the Bolsheviks” and “The Great War”.
Chapter one, “The Regime” describes the last period
of the Romanov dynasty when the country was left in the hands of Tsar Nicholas
II, a weak man, an autocrat who brought his 300-year dynasty to an end by going
to war and leaving the country to his wife and her favorite, Rasputin. At that
time, Russia, as Georgi Plekhanov correctly stated,
was a country which was “inadequately Europeanized in comparison with Europe”, and
“an historical hybrid which entered the industrial age with an absolute monarch
and a state-feudal social structure inherited from the 16th
century”. The autocratic rule of the Tsars and their militaristic manner were
result of the backwardness of the economy; the
weakness of civil society and competition with rival powers.
It was Ivan the Terrible
who created a national state and a centralized dictatorship. His conquests turned
Russia into a military camp. After killing his son and later with his own
death, the Rurik dynasty came to an end; and a period of pretenders and
troubles began. The watchwords of the new dynasty, the Romanovs, were “Autocracy,
Orthodoxy and Nationalism”. While European countries were industrializing, the
gap between the European countries and Russia was widening. Early 20th
century Tsarist Russia was a mixture of the most advanced technology and extreme
backwardness. Awakened by the news of defeat in the East, neglected problems at
home, the revolutionary movements which began in 1905 became known for a
peaceful protest carried out by the industrial workers led by a priest called Gapon to present a petition that
included a list of demands to their “benevolent
Tsar”. The peaceful protest turned into a massacre known as Bloody Sunday that was followed by mass strikes of workers, demonstrations by
peasants, and military mutinies which spread across the Russian Empire, a
“dress-rehearsal” in Lenin’s words. It failed, because it was not well planned;
and lacked a strong leader to lead the movement; in addition, the army remained
loyal to the regime.
In Chapter two, “The Revolutionaries”, the author
introduces the participants in the revolutionary movements: the revolutionary
peoples, radical intelligentsia, peasantry, Social Democrats and the proletariat.
Revolutionary movements began with the Decembrist Revolt in 1825, when a group
of army officers and a number of young nobles and civilians committed to
Enlightenment values and frustrated by Russia’s inability to change, formed
secret political societies to overthrow Alexandr I.
After Alexandr I’s unexpected death, they took this
opportunity to launch a revolt on December 14, the day Alexandr
I’s brother Nicholas I was to ascend the throne. The revolt failed, because
they lacked support from other classes, and they had ideological differences.
But, it was a spark that would ignite a later flame.
This chapter also provides detailed information on the
Russian intelligentsia, and discusses the icons of the radical intelligentsia,
the Narodniks (Populists). The Narodniks believed that political propaganda among the
peasantry would lead to the awakening of the masses and, through their
influence, to the liberalization of the tsarist regime. They “went to the
people”, going into the countryside and dressing like the peasants to gain their
support. However, they they failed to find the
expected support and were not well organized; as a result, their attempt
failed. Next, a secret underground organization called ‘Land and Liberty’ (Zemlya
i volya) appeared,
which later split into ‘Black Partition’ (Chernyj
Peredel) and ‘People’s Will’ (Narodnaya
Volya). Most of the radical intelligentsia joined
People’s Will, a group that favored terror and carried out a series of
high-profile assassinations, including the one which killed Tsar Alexander II
in 1881. Even the assassination of the tsar failed to ignite a revolution. Instead,
it gave the government an excuse to hunt down the revolutionaries, and
establish a police state.
Some Narodniks became the
Social Democrats of the 1880s who all in agreement that the coming revolution
would not led by the countryside, but by the towns. Russia’s backwardness would
only allow a “bourgeois revolution” which would sweep away the autocracy, then the capitalism would develop, creating a further
revolution to achieve socialism. Two factions emerged based on this theory: the
more moderate Mensheviks and the more radical Bolsheviks. The author discusses
the problems of Vladimir Lenin’s formulation of a revolution and introduces the
differences between Lenin, who believed that the only force capable of gaining
a decisive victory over Tsarism was the proletariat and the peasantry, and Leon
Trotsky who held that only the proletariat had the potential to lead the
revolution, only mass strikes in the cities could generate peasant revolt, at
which point the army would mutiny and the Tsarist state disintegrate.
Chapter three, “Lenin and the Bolsheviks” begins with a
short depiction of the prison life of Lenin’s brother Alexander Ulyanov in Schlusselburg Fortress on the Neva River Neva. He had been
charged with committing terrorist activity and was later executed. His death
deeply affected his younger brother Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich
Ulyanov). Young Lenin greatly respected the old revolutionaries of Narodnaya Volya whose individual
terrorism for the collective action of the masses had resulted in failure. This
waste appalled Lenin. Next, the Author provides a detailed
information about Lenin’s politics. To avoid the mistakes made by the Narodniks, Lenin designed the essence of his politics on
the basis of four principles: a vision of the world transformed by
revolutionary action; an underground activist network to turn his vision into a
framework political organization; the growth of this organization into a mass
social movement through recruitment of the most militant people in every
industrial center; and the eventual role of this essentially proletarian-urban
movement in detonating a country-wide insurrection of the Russian narod. For Lenin, the only force capable of gaining
a decisive victory over Tsarism was the people as a whole, i.e. the proletariat
and the peasantry.
The fourth chapter, “The Great War”, describes Russia’s greatest victory of the war. It
was the world’s first modern industrialized war and Tsarist Russia was unequal
to the challenge. Lenin viewed
World War I as an imperialist war, caused by tensions that arose from the simultaneous
expansion of several European empires. As the nations at the
core of capitalism competed to expand their exploitative sphere, their
interests intersected and conflicted with one another, producing the
Great War. According to Lenin, a victory for Tsarism would strengthen
the regime, and support for the Tsarist war-effort would undermine the class
struggle. Therefore, Russia’s defeat in an imperialist war was to be welcomed. The key task for Russian socialists was to continue the
struggle against the Tsar. Therefore, the betrayal of German Social Democracy
(SPD) shocked Lenin and the revolutionaries. The
chapter also talks about the last period of the Romanov Dynasty, the social
crisis, discontent, strikes, and the Bolshevik’s anti-war politics.
Part two, “The Tempest, 1917” contains four chapters: “The
February Revolution”, “Dual Power”, “Counter-Revolution”, “The
October Days”.
Chapter five, “The February Revolution”, describes
the first five days of the revolution. On the first day nobody, including
Lenin, expected this coming revolution, 23 February 1917 (in the old Russian
calendar) was the day when tens of thousands of female textile workers from the
Vyborg District of the city gathered on the Nevsky Prospekt, in Petrograd, and went on strike to protest
shortages of bread; later they were joined by men from the factories. On the
second day, 24 February, the number of the demonstrators doubled, and they
marched under the slogans “Bread!”, “Down with the autocracy!”, and “Down with
the war”. By the third day, 24 February, the strike had spread, and factories
and shops were closed. The workers formed a provisional revolutionary committee
to lead the struggle against the police and the army. The police had been
defeated, and the military had failed to support them. On the fourth day, 26
February, the regime had decided to restore order through terror and Cossack
squadrons fired on workers in different parts of the city, forcing the unarmed
demonstrators to surrender. On the fifth day, 27 February, the soldiers, sickened
by what they had done, refused to fire on the demonstrators again. This was the
start of the military mutiny, and the soldiers began to help to hunt down the
police and find arms for the workers. The strike was now general; workers left
the factories, and soldiers joined them in the center of the city. The crowds
waved red banners and hailed the revolution. The Tsar lost control of his
garrison in the capital, and abandoned his headquarters, his generals and his
subjects to settle in Tsarskoe Selo
with his family.
Chapter six “Dual Power” describes how the battle had
been waged through a mass action of the Narod, the
common people of Russia from below, with the rest following their lead. Power
now passed to the Provisional Government, composed of landlords, industrialist,
and right-wing professors. Although the war was the most pressing issue, there
were other issues that had been neglected for decades. The workers demanded
higher wages, shorter working hours and control over production, while the
peasants wanted debt-free land. The Provisional Government represented the
opposite: war, empire, the restoration of order and
the defense of private property. The Provisional Government could not restore
order to a country suffering from such deep rooted problems like inflation, the
collapse of food production, disease, and general social disorder. On the other
hand, the Petrograd Soviet was very powerful and was regarded as a people’s
parliament, forming a dual-power with the Provisional Government. The
Provisional Government took no actions to limit the power of the Soviet. When
Lenin arrived in Petrograd from Switzerland on 3 April, he presented his April
Theses. In these he rejected any support for the Provisional Government,
demanded an end to the dual-power arrangement and the transfer all power to the
Soviets, and called for an immediate end to the imperialist war. The ‘April
Days’ brought down the First Provisional Government of Cadets. Finally, the
chapter provides information on a demonstration supported by the Bolsheviks which
became known as the ‘July Days’ where thousands
of soldiers and workers poured onto the streets of Petrograd to protest the
Provisional Government. However, this demonstration failed and resulted in the
arrest of numerous Bolshevik leaders.
The seventh chapter, “Counter-Revolution”, examines the Second Provisional Government,
a coalition of Cadets and Reformists with Kerensky as Premier and a majority of
Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries. After the July Days the Provisional
government arrested the leaders, but allowed the Bolshevik Party to continue.
The collapse of the July Days greatly demoralized proletarian Petrograd. The lie that Germany funded Lenin’s party created disarray, with some
members abandoning the party. The chapter also discusses Kerensky’s attempt
to benefit from this situation and his start of a counter-offensive against the
Bolsheviks; the failure of his offensive on the Eastern Front; the failure of
his attempt to destroy the revolutionary movement and the Bolsheviks with the
help of general Kornilov; the rebirth of the Red
Guards to fight against Kornilov and Kerensky, and the
victory of the Committee for Struggle with Counter-Revolution.
Chapter eight, “The October Days”, examines the October
Insurrection, the Bolshevik ‘coup’, the Provisional Government’s struggle to
prevent the spread of the revolution to the countryside, and the failure to hinder
the masses from supporting the Bolsheviks. It was a peasant movement in the
countryside where authorities lacked the means to restore order, which eventually
led to a peasant revolution carried out from below.
Chapters nine, ten and
eleven form the third part, “The
Darkness, 1918-1938”. Chapter nine “The World Revolution” describes the establishment the new
government and the Council of People’s Commissars (the Sovnarkom)
by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, as well as the decrees issued by
the Sovnarkom which depended almost entirely on the
initiative and creativity of the masses. It also describes the various crises
that faced the revolution: shortages of food and fuel in the cities; the
inability to produce the goods needed in rural regions or supply the industrial
centers; the growing gap between town and country, proletarian and peasant;
cold and disease. Long term survival would require the worker’s state to end
its isolation, gain access to Europe’s reserves of industrial power, and make the
working class an international class. In short, only world revolution could
rescue the Bolshevik regime. Chapter nine also examines why the world
revolution failed and Russian Revolution was isolated.
Chapter ten, “The Revolution Besieged”, begins with
an examination of the Civil War and economic recovery strategies, War Communism
and the New Economic Policy (NEP). It then moves on to look at the results of
the election of the Constituent Assembly which met on 5 January 1918, the
failure of the Bolsheviks and the abrupt closure of both the Assembly and the
other parties. Finally, the authoritarianism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the
reasons for the Whites’ failure and the Bolsheviks’ victory in the Civil War,
the economic collapse and social transformation after the war, the introduction
of the centralized state-controlled economy, the disastrous effects of War
Communism and its subsequent abandonment, and the implementation of the new
economic policy (NEP) and its consequences are all discussed.
The final chapter, chapter
eleven, “Stalinism”, examines the negative effects of the NEP in the
revolutionary traditions of the party, the rise of the NEP man and wealthy
kulaks, Lenin’s last struggle, his Testament regarding Stalin, the destruction
of opposition within the party, and the party-state bureaucracy that emerged
under Stalin. In addition, the effects of the state-capitalist economy based on
forced collectivization of agriculture, the state-driven investment in heavy
industry and arms production, the destruction of what remained of Lenin’s
Bolshevik Party and the Russian revolutionary tradition, the deportation of the
kulaks, state terror, the persecutions of the slave-laborers in the Gulags, and
Stalin’s use of Comintern to conduct counter-revolutionary
activities instead of promoting world revolution are all discussed.
The book’s Epilogue, “A
Century of War and Revolution”, makes a number of claims: that the political
crisis unleashed by the Russian Revolution was global and protracted; that the
century since 1917 has been a century of war and revolution; that this epoch continues
to witness war and revolution; and, finally, that the Russian revolution of
1917 should be taken as a lesson regarding contemporary crises in the sense
that waves of popular resistance are capable of acquiring the mass, energy and
direction needed to sweep away a rotten system.
This book is a very
important contribution to the numerous studies that have been written for the
approaching centennial of the Russian Revolution. It is a very well-written,
readable source which provides a comprehensive presentation of the preconditions
and the core concepts that led to the Bolshevik Revolution and describes the
positive and the negative effects of the state policies that its leaders
imposed.
[1]Daniels, R.V.,
“Intellectuals and Russian Revolution”, The American Slavic and East European
Review, Vol.20, No.2, 1961, pp.273.
*Ayse Dietrich - Professor, Part-time, at Middle East Technical University, Department of History. Editor and the founder of the International Journal of Russian Studies. e-mail: editor@ijors.net, dayse@metu.edu.tr, dietrichayse@yahoo.com
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