The 1917 revolution

Russia was suddenly without a monarch, for the first time for three hundred years. Duma politicians set up a Provisional Government to head the war effort and plan reforms pending a Constituent Assembly, which would be elected to decide the future form of Russia’s government. Immediately at its side appeared another institution, designed to represent the masses rather than the elites: encouraged by the political vacuum, the workers and peasants, now reinforced by soldiers and sailors, hastened to resuscitate their most effective political weapon of 1905, the soviets. The Petrograd Soviet was backed by a network of similar assemblies in towns throughout the empire. Workers also improvised a variety of other associations: trade unions, factory committees, and, in a growing number of towns, Red Guard militias, which acted both as custodians of civil order and as armed representatives of the working class. Never had the Russian genius for improvised collectives manifested itself so visibly – but not in a form which strengthened national unity. On the contrary, ‘dual power’ made visible the continuing split between elites and masses.

The soviets in a sense embodied the centuries‑ old popular drive towards social justice and self‑ government. Yet what had worked tolerably well in the villages was not so easy to transfer to the towns. The scale was so much bigger, and the problems to be tackled so much more complex. A Menshevik activist has left us a vivid depiction of the working of the Petrograd Soviet, where the crowd was so dense that everyone was standing rather than sitting:

The ‘presidium’ was also standing on a table, while around the shoulders of the chairman was a whole swarm of energetic people who had clambered on to the table and were hindering him from conducting the session.

In such circumstances, little could be decided in plenary sessions, and responsibility inevitably devolved upon executive committees, where the socialist political parties were well represented. During the summer, as the masses became ever more impatient at the temporizing of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks gained ground in soviets throughout the country.

Peasants largely repeated their initiatives of 1905–6, only now with much greater impact, since the forces of law and order had crumbled. At first, peasants hoped the Provisional Government would transfer all land to them, but they became disillusioned at the slow progress it was making. They also became radicalized as soldiers deserting from the front returned to their homes with hopes of a forceful solution. During the late summer and autumn, village assemblies began to take drastic decisions, wherever possible by consensus. Typically, they would assemble with their carts on the village square, bringing weapons if they had them. They would make their way en masse to the local manor house, compel its owner to sign a document transferring the land to the village community, then load valuables onto their carts to take away with them. If the landowner cooperated, he would be assigned a plot of land on equal terms with the villagers; if he resisted, he would be deported or even murdered.

The February Revolution transformed the life of the army. One of the first acts of the Petrograd Soviet was to issue Order No 1, which mandated soldiers to elect committees to run units at company level and above. Theoretically, their responsibility was not to extend to actual combat, where officers retained their authority. This distinction was not always observed in practice, though, and in some units the men set about re‑ electing – or not – their commanders. To most officers, such insubordination was intolerable. One reflected ruefully in a letter:

When we talk about the narod, we mean the nation; when they talk about it, they mean the democratic lower classes. . . . We can find no common language: that is the accursed heritage of the old regime.

His comment reflected aptly the yawning division between obshchestvennost and masses in late Tsarist Russia: the former was creating a nation, the latter struggling for control of their own lives in communities of joint responsibility.

Soldiers were mostly prepared to go on defending Russia’s borders, but they longed for peace, all the same, and were very concerned about their families and landholdings back at home in a period of upheaval and scarcity. In June, they began disobeying orders to undertake an offensive, and mutinies spread along the front. The same thing was happening in France, but there the government managed to restore order and discipline by appealing to the soldiers’ republican patriotism. Such appeals were markedly less effective in Russia, where the army had never become a ‘school of nationhood’, and ordinary people felt much less committed to the political system.

Mutiny was followed by the gradual disintegration of the imperial army and the final breakdown of order in the rear as well. The Bolsheviks were well placed to take advantage of this situation. At this stage, they had no responsibility for the existing regime, or indeed for Russia’s integrity as a state. They found it easy to appeal to workers, peasants, soldiers, and non‑ Russians: they could promise peace, land, bread, workers’ control, national self‑ determination, and ‘all power to the soviets’ without considering the complexities of implementation. Their slogans resonated powerfully in the army and the larger industrial towns, but also caught on among the peasants.

The Bolsheviks gained majorities in most of the urban soviets, notably Petrograd, where in October, with the help of the Red Guards, they gained control of the city and expelled the Provisional Government. This was the great turning point which has gone down to history as the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks’ seizure of power was conducted in the name of ‘all power to the soviets’. But when Lenin appeared before the Second All‑ Russian Congress of Soviets, he announced he was creating a government, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom ), consisting entirely of Bolsheviks. Most Mensheviks and many SRs refused to accept this usurpation of the popular mandate and walked out – thereby giving Lenin a free hand. The remaining SRs joined the Bolsheviks in a short‑ lived coalition, mainly on the grounds that the latter were proposing to satisfy the SR demand for immediate transfer of all land to the peasants.

In November, the long‑ awaited elections to the Constituent Assembly took place. The Bolsheviks performed respectably, but the SRs gained the largest number of seats. Sovnarkom accordingly closed the Assembly after only one session. The Red Guards then forcibly dispersed a workers’ demonstration of support for the Assembly. The writer Maxim Gorky, himself a Bolshevik supporter, remarked bitterly ‘The Petrograd workers were mown down unarmed by cowards and murderers. . . . Do the “People’s Commissars” not realise. . . that they will end up strangling Russian democracy altogether? ’

It cannot be said, then, that the Russian people ever voted in their majority for the Bolsheviks. It was tragic that, in fighting for land, freedom, and self‑ government, the Russian communities of joint responsibility should have delivered themselves into the hands of an even more oppressive regime.