The evolution of the communist state in Russia

The fall of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917 (March by the new style Gregorian calendar) was followed by the setting up of the so-called Provisional Government under Prince Lvov. It immediately made clear its determination to stay in the war on the side of the Western democracies, and its appearance was greeted with satisfaction in London, Paris and latterly Washington (the USA joined the western side in April 1917). The collapse of tsarism removed the embarrasing link with an autocracy which shared none of the principles of the other Entente powers.

Lenin's return
In April 1917 another event took place in Petrograd which attracted little attention in the outside world, although it was the occasion of some jubilation in the Bolshevik fraternity. This was the return to Russian soil of Lenin, by kind permission of the German High Command which had allowed him to travel from his last place of exile in Zurich across German territory in a sealed train. In the strictly short-term perspective of the German warlords, Lenin was to be sent to Russia like 'a virus'(to quote Winston Churchill) to subvert the Russian war effort after the demise of Nicholas II. He was to do this all too effectively, but Field Marshal von Hindenburg and General von Ludendorff were not to be the beneficiaries.

Once home Lenin propounded his own distinct view of the war, which wasn't shared by all his colleagues. These 'April theses' demanded an immediate end to the war, confiscation of private land, the destruction of the bureaucracy, the army and the police, and the cession of all state power to the workers' soviets. The last point was the crucial one. The soviets had reappeared in February 1917, although initially they endorsed the Provisional Government. Lenin's strategy was to undermine this co-operation, and he produced two telling propaganda slogans, 'Bread, Land, and Peace' and 'All Power to the Soviets'. There was to be no Bolshevik co-operation with the bourgeois constituent assembly.

Lenin understood the underlying war-weariness of the Russian people whereas the Provisional Government did not. But in the early months of the life of the Provisional Government the Bolsheviks could only harass it. A notable instance of this was in May 1917 when Foreign Minister Milyukov, the old Liberal leader, sent the Allied powers a note stating the Provisional Government's intention to stay in the war while retaining the old tsarist war aims. When the news of the 'Milyukov Note'reached the streets of Petrograd, there were Bolshevik-instigated protests and the foreign minister was forced to resign.

The new government moved perceptibly to the left, with Alexander Kerensky as prime minister and five other moderate socialists in it. By one of the ironies of history, Kerensky's father Fyodor had recommended the young Lenin for admission to the University of Kazan in 1887, despite the fact that his elder brother was implicated in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III.

The Collapse of the Army
Under increasing pressure from the Bolsheviks, the Provisional Government ran into acute difficulty when its military optimism proved to be ill-founded. While Kerensky's rhetoric had inspired the revolutionary troops, grizzled German veterans proved to be less impressed by 'Mr Persuader', as Kerensky's admirers nicknamed him. The vaunted Brusilov offensive in July 1917 failed to make the predicted advances, and it was then, not in the winter of 1916-17, that the army's morale began to collapse. Officers were shot, loyal troops were attacked by mutineers, Bolshevik agitators were everywhere. Rank and file soldiers did not become Bolsheviks but they wouldn't fight for the Provisional Govermnent either. Here lay the seductive appeal of Lenin's 'Bread, Land and Peace'.

Disruption in industry and the countryside
The Provisional Government also began to lose the battle in the factories and in the countryside. Trade union membership doubled between February and October 1917, and the rank and file unionists began to show themselves to be more radical than the leadership. Factory committees were set up in Petrograd, which soon fell under Bolshevik control and began to expel the owners and managers.

Political change was not limited just to the towns. In the countryside as well the peasants saw their opportunity and seized the land. This action was not the work of the Bolsheviks because the peasants were represented in Parliament by the Social Revolutionary Party, but it put the SRs in a considerable dilenuna. They were supporters of the Provisional Government, but their natural supporters were now apparently acting in an anti-social way. But when the SR minister of agriculture, Chernov, ordered the peasantry to stop their acts of violence, he was ignored. This was the crux of the SR dilemma. To support the Provisional Government meant losing the support of the mass of the peasantry. To oppose it would encourage anarchy in the countryside.

Coup and Counter Coup
Sensing the disintegration of Kerensky's government, the ordinary Bolsheviks became restive. In July 1917, against the advice of the leadership, an attempt was made to overthrow the government in Petrograd which failed. Kerensky ordered the arrest of Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks, and Lenin was forced into hiding in Finland. Kerensky denounced Lenin as a 'German spy', a claim which, given the circumstances surrounding the Bolshevik leader's return, had some force.

The Bolsheviks were saved from embarrassment by a right-wing attempt to undermine the revolution under the former tsarist chief of staff, General Kornilov. Whether Kornilov wanted a restoration of the monarchy or a military dictatorship is uncertain, but Kerensky's attitude towards his attempted coup was at best ambivalent. There is no clear evidence that Kerensky favoured Kornilov but Lenin accused him of 'Bonapartism' , and the Provisional Government was only preserved by the decisive action of the workers. Railway workers refused to transport Kornilov's men to Petrograd, and the Bolshevik Red Guards, a militant militia, mobilised in Petrograd.

The other major effect of the Kornilov episode was that it frightened the Mensheviks and the SRs into unwilling alliance with the Bolsheviks. Russia was now ripe for a further revolution as the major historian of the Bolshevik Revolution has pointed out: 'in the country, as the self-demobilised soldiers returned to their homes, land hunger grew more acute and peasant disorders and the ransacking of estates grew more frequent' (E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution).

Bolshevik divisions
In September 1917 Lenin, still in exile in Finland, wrote letters to the Central Conmiittee of the Bolshevik Party urging the use of force against the waning authority of the Provisional Government. In early October he came to a committee meeting in disguise and forced through a vote to enable the Bolsheviks to prepare for an armed uprising. Even then Zinoviev and Kamenev, the major opponents of the use of force, circulated a letter protesting at this decision. Lenin put the alternatives starkly.
' The position is clear. Either a Kornilov dictatorship or a dictatorship of the proletariat and the poorest state of the peasantry. We cannot be guided by the mood of the masses: that is changeable and unaccountable. We must be guided by an objective analysis and estimate of the revolution. The masses have given their confidence to the Bolsheviks and ask from them not words, but deeds'.
This statement with its reference to the 'changeable and unaccountable' masses was a classic repetition of what Lenin had said in his 1902 pamphlet 'What is to be Done?'. The Bolshevik party was the 'vanguard of the proletariat', the guide of the blind revolutionary potential of the masses who groped about in the autocratic and bourgeois darkness. Put simply, the masses could not be trusted to achieve revolution alone. Nor were they ever to get an opportunity to give a free opinion under the Bolsheviks.

The Bolshevik strike
By now military preparations were being made, despite the protests of the Kamenev-Zinoviev faction, and in the early morning of 25 October (7 November by the Gregorian calendar) the Bolsheviks made their assault under Trotsky's leadership. The support of the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base also meant that they had the assistance of the cruiser Aurora.

In the event, naval assistance was hardly required as the Provisional Government could only find some officer cadets and a regiment of women soldiers who were prepared to fight for it. The Red Guards 'stormed' the Winter Palace and arrested the members of the Provisional Government, although Kerensky escaped in a car loaned by the US embassy (this gave a key to his future fate - to be reproduced as 'living history'at academic seminars in American universities). That afternoon Lenin was able to announce the triumph of the 'workers' and peasants' revolution'. (Some years later the director Eisenstein commemorated the storming of the Winter Palace, with cinematic overkill, using some of the original participants.)

The Consolidation of Bolshevism
Despite its success, the position of the Bolshevik government was precarious. It had seized control of Petrograd (to be renamed Leningrad) and Moscow but its writ hardly ran anywhere else in Russia. The West was hostile, and there were strong counter-revolutionary elements inside Russia. Even potential political allies like the SRs and Mensheviks were alienated by Lenin's contemptuous rejection of representative democracy. In fact the Bolsheviks' popular base was weak, as was shown by the elections to the Constituent Assembly in December 1917 when they only won 101 seats out of 707. This was Russia's last freely contested election until 1990. There were liberal concessions like the abolition of capital punishment, but they were rapidly reneged upon in the emergency which faced Lenin and his colleagues. As early as 20 December 1917 Lenin authorised the setting up of the All Russian Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), the forerunner of the KGB, with the object of 'combating counter- revolution and sabotage'. By a baffling paradox, its first head, the Polish communist Felix Dzerzhinsky, was also put in charge of the ministry for children (a square is named after him in Moscow).

To a limited degree the use of terror by the Bolsheviks could be justified by events because Lenin was seriously wounded by the SR assassin Fanya Kaplan in August 1918. The political case for terror after a socialist revolution had in any case been put forward by Karl Marx as long ago as 1848. Lenin himself said, 'We have never renounced terror, and cannot renounce it,'and his party had only rejected the use of random individual assassination of the SR genre. Kaplan's attempt on Lenin's life was followed by a 'red terror' in which 500 victims, some ex-tsarist ministers, disappeared.

This article is based on material taken from A Traveller's History of Russia and the USSR (© Peter Neville), published by The Windrush Press, and is by kind permission of its author Peter Neville.

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