The Russian Revolution (2nd Edition) PDF - Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Russian Revolution, Second Edition Sheila Fitzpatrick OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS The Russian Revolution Sheila Fitzpatrick is Bernadotte E. Schmidt Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago, covering Modern Russian and Soviet social, political, and cultural history, 1917–1953. Her publications include The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (1992), and Everyday Stalinism (OUP, 2000). OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Sheila Fitzpatrick 1994 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 1982 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 1984 Second revised and enlarged edition first published 1994 Reissued 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Fitzpatrick, Sheila The Russian Revolution / Sheila Fitzpatrick.—2nd ed. p. cm. ‘An Opus book’—Half t.p. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921. I. Title. DK265.F48 1994 947.084—dc20 93–46676 ISBN 0–19–280204–6 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire Acknowledgements The first draft of this book was written in the summer of 1979, when I was a Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences of the Australian National University, Canberra. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor T. H. Rigby, who arranged my invitation to A.N.U. and subsequently made very helpful comments on the manuscript; to Jerry Hough, who was a constant source of intellec- tual stimulus and encouragement; and to the students in my courses at Columbia University and the University of Texas at Austin, who were the first audience for much of this book. For help in the preparation of the second edition, I would like to thank Jonathan Bone and Joshua Sanborn, who served as research assistants; Colin Lucas, with whom I taught a course on 'Revolution- ary Violence' in 1993; Terry Martin, who raised a question that I tried to answer in revising Chapter 6; William Rosenberg and Arch Getty, who responded promptly to last-minute queries; Michael Danos, who read the revised manuscript; and all the members of the Workshop on Russian/Soviet Studies at the University of Chicago. Contents Acknowledgements v Introduction I I The Setting 15 The society 16 The revolutionary tradition 23 The 1905 Revolution and its aftermath; the First World War 31 2 1917: The Revolutions of February and October 40 The February Revolution and 'dual power' The Bolsheviks 49 The popular revolution 52 The political crises of the summer 57 The October Revolution 61 3 The Civil War 68 The Civil War, the Red Army and the Cheka War Communism 78 Visions of the new world 83 The Bolsheviks in power 87 4 NEP and the Future of the Revolution 93 The discipline of retreat 96 The problem of bureaucracy 102 The leadership struggle 106 Building socialism in one country III viii Contents 5 Stalin's Revolution 120 Stalin versus the Right 124 The industrialization drive 129 Collectivization I 35 Cultural Revolution 141 6 Ending the Revolution 148 'Revolution accomplished' I 50 'Revolution betrayed' 156 Terror 163 Notes 173 Select Bibliography 185 Index 193 Introduction T H I S second edition of The Russian Revolution appears in the wake of dramatic events-the fall of the Communist regime and the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. Those events have had all sorts of consequences for historians of the Russian Revolution. In the first place, they have opened archives that were previously closed, brought forth memoirs that were hidden in drawers, and released a flood of new material of every kind. In the second place, they have changed the category of the Russian Revo- lution. Until December 1991, the Russian Revolution belonged to the category of 'birth of a nation' revolutions-those, like the American Revolution, that left behind them an enduring national and institutional structure and were the focus of a national myth. Now the Soviet nation that was born in the Russian Revolution appears to be dead, and the Revolution has to be reclassified (which means rethought) as an episode in the long sweep of Russian history. The question is, what kind of episode? In Russia, the Bolsheviks' October Revolution1 is currently in as deep disrepute as was the French Revolution in France after the fall of Napoleon. Journalists write about it as an aberration, an inexplicable but fatal break with the traditions of 'the real Russia' as well as the mainstream of world civilization. To many Russian intellectuals, it seems, the best thing to do with the Russian Revolution would be to erase it, along with the whole seven decades of the Soviet era, from national memory. But history is not so obliging. We are all saddled with our pasts, approving or disapproving. Sooner or later the Russians will have to accept the Revolution back into their history-although, on the analogy of the French Revolution, one might expect at least a century of heated debate about its meaning to follow. For the rest of us, the abrupt end of the Soviet Union only makes its beginnings more intriguing. With major historical problems like the Russian Revolu- tion, there are many importanr questions but no simple answers. It is one of those big ambiguous milestones in human history that we keep coming back to decipher. 2 Introduction Timespan of the revolution Since revolutions are complex social and political upheavals, histor- ians who write about them are bound to differ on the most basic questions-causes, revolutionary aims, impact on the society, politi- cal outcome, and even the timespan of the revolution itself. In the case of the Russian Revolution, the starting-point presents no problem: almost everyone takes it to be the 'February Revolution'* of 1917, which led to the abdication of Emperor Nicholas I1 and the formation of the Provisional Government. But when did the Russian Revolution end? Was it all over by October 1917, when the Bolshe- viks took power? Or did the end of the Revolution come with the Bolsheviks' victory in the Civil War in 1920? Was Stalin's 'revolution from above' part of the Russian Revolution? Or should we take the view that the Revolution continued throughout the lifetime of the Soviet state? In his Anatomy of Revolution, Crane Brinton suggested that revolutions have a life cycle passing through phases of increasing fervour and zeal for radical transformation until they reach a climax of intensity, which is followed by the 'Thermidorian' phase of disillusionment, declining revolutionary energy, and gradual moves towards the restoration of order and ~tability.~ The Russian Bolshe- viks, bearing in mind the same French-Revolution model that lies at the basis of Brinton's analysis, feared a Thermidorian degeneration of their own Revolution, and half suspected that one had occurred at the end of the Civil War, when economic collapse forced them into the 'strategic retreat' marked by the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in I 92 I. Yet at the end of the 1920s~ Russia plunged into another upheaval-Stalin's 'revolution from above', associated with the industrialization drive of the First Five-Year Plan, the collectiviza- tion of agriculture, and a 'Cultural Revolution' directed primarily against the old intelligentsia-whose impact on society was greater even than that of the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918-20. It was only after this upheaval ended in the early 1930s that signs of a classic Thermidor can be discerned: the waning of revolutionary fervour and belligerence, new policies aimed at restoring order and stability, revival of traditional values and culture, solidification of a new political and social structure. Yet even this Thermidor was not quite the end of the revolutionary Introduction 3 upheaval. In a final internal convulsion, even more devastating than earlier surges of revolutionary terror, the Great Purges of 1937-8 swept away many of the surviving Old Bolshevik revolu- tionaries, effected a wholesale turnover of personnel within the political, administrative, and military elites, and sent more than a million people (by latest counts4) to their deaths or imprisonment in Gulag. In deciding on a timespan for the Russian Revolution, the first issue is the nature of the 'strategic retreat' of NEP in the 1920s. Was it the end of the Revolution, or conceived as such? Although the Bolsheviks' avowed intention in 1921 was to use this interlude to gather strength for a later renewal of the revolutionary assault, there was always the possibility that intentions would change as revolutionary passions subsided. Some scholars think that in the last years of his life, Lenin (who died in 1924) came to believe that for Russia further progress towards socialism could only be achieved gradually, with the raising of the cultural level of the population. Nevertheless, Russian society remained highly volatile and unstable during the NEP period, and the party's mood remained aggressive and revolutionary. The Bolsheviks feared counter- revolution, remained preoccupied with the threat from 'class enem- ies' at home and abroad, and constantly expressed their dissatisfaction with NEP and unwillingness to accept it as the final outcome of the Revolution. A second issue that has to be considered is the nature of Stalin's 'revolution from above' that ended NEP in the late 1920s. Some historians reject the idea that there was any real continuity between Stalin's revolution and Lenin's. Others feel that Stalin's 'revolution' does not deserve the name, since they believe it was not a popular uprising but something more like an assault on the society by a ruling party aiming at radical transformation. In this book, I trace lines of continuity between Lenin's revolution and Stalin's. As to the inclusion of Stalin's 'revolution from above' in the Russian Revolu- tion, this is a question on which historians may legitimately differ. But the issue here is not whether 1917 and 1929 were alike, but whether they were part of the same process. Napoleon's revolution- ary wars can be included in our general concept of the French Revolution, even if we do not regard them as an embodiment of the spirit of 1789; and a similar approach seems legitimate in the case of the Russian Revolution. In common-sense terms, a revolution is 4 Introduction coterminous with the period of upheaval and instability between the fall of an old regime and the firm consolidation of a new one. In the late 192os, the permanent contours of Russia's new regime had yet to emerge. The final issue of judgement is whether the Great Purges of 1937-8 should be considered a part of the Russian Revolution. Was this revolutionary terror, or was it terror of a basically different type-totalitarian terror, perhaps, meaning a terror that serves the systemic purposes of a firmly entrenched regime? In my view, neither of these two characterizations fully describes the Great Purges. They were a unique phenomenon, located right on the boundary between revolution and postrevolutionary Stalinism. This was revolutionary terror in its rhetoric, targets, and snowballing progress. But it was totalitarian terror in that it destroyed persons but not structures, and did not threaten the person of the Leader. The fact that it was state terror initiated by Stalin does not dis- qualify it from being part of the Russian Revolution: after all, the Jacobin Terror of 1794 can be described in similar terms.5 Another important similarity between the two episodes is that in both cases the primary targets for destruction were revolutionaries. For dra- matic reasons alone, the story of the Russian Revolution needs the Great Purges, just as the story of the French Revolution needs the Jacobin Terror. In this book, the timespan of the Russian Revolution runs from February 1917 to the Great Purges of 1937-8. The different stages- the February and October Revolutions of 1917, the Civil War, the interlude of NEP, Stalin's 'revolution from above', its 'Thermidorian' aftermath, and the Great Purges-are treated as discrete episodes in a twenty-year process of revolution. By the end of that twenty years, revolutionary energy was thoroughly spent, the society was exhausted, and even the ruling Commuilist Party6 was tired of upheaval and shared the general longing for a 'return to normalcy'. Normalcy, to be sure, was still unattainable, for German invasion and the beginning of Soviet engagement in the Second World War came only a few years after the Great Purges. The war brought further upheaval, but not more revolution, at least as far as the pre-1939 territories of the Soviet Union were concerned. It was the beginning of a new, postrevolutionary era in Soviet history. Introduction 5 Writings about the revolution There is nothing like revolutions for provoking ideological contesta- tion among their interpreters. The bicentenary of the French Revo- lution in 1989, for example, was marked by a spirited attempt by some scholars and publicists to end the long interpretative struggle by consigning the Revolution to the dust-heap of history. The Russian Revolution has a shorter historiography, but probably only because we have had a century and a half less in which to write about it. In the Select Bibliography at the end of this book, I have concentrated on recent scholarly works, reflecting the burgeoning of Western scholarship on the Russian Revolution in the last ten to fifteen years. Here I will outline the most important changes in historical perspective over time and characterize some of the classic works on the Russian Revolution and Soviet history. Before the Second World War, not much was written on the Russian Revolution by professional historians in the West. There were a number of fine eye-witness accounts and memoirs, of which John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World is the most famous, as well as some good history by journalists like W. H. Chamberlin and Louis Fischer, whose insider's history of Soviet diplomacy, The Soviets in World Affairs, remains a classic. The works of interpreta- tion that had most long-term impact were Leon (Lev) Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and the same author's The Revolu- tion Betrayed. The first, written after Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union but not as a political polemic, gives a vivid description and Marxist analysis of 1917 from the perspective of a participant. The second, an indictment of Stalin written in 1936, describes Stalin's regime as Thermidorian, resting on the support of an emergent Soviet bureaucratic class and reflecting its essentially bourgeois values. Of histories written in the Soviet Union before the war, pride of place must be given to a work written under Stalin's close super- vision, the notorious Short Course in the History of the Soviet Commu- nist Party published in 1938. As the reader may guess, this was not a scholarly work but one designed to lay down the correct 'party line'-that is, the orthodoxy to be absorbed by all Communists and taught in all schools-on all questions of Soviet history, ranging from the class nature of the Tsarist regime and the reasons for the 6 Introduction Red Army's victory in the Civil War to the conspiracies against Soviet power headed by 'Judas Trotsky' and supported by foreign capitalist powers. The existence of a work like the Short Course did not leave much room for creative scholarly research on the Soviet period. Strict censorship and self-censorship was the order of the day in the Soviet historical profession. The interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution that became estab- lished in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and remained enthroned at least until the mid-1950s might be described as formulaic Marxist. The key points were that the October Revolution was a true proletarian revolution in which the Bolshevik Party served as the vanguard of the proletariat, and that it was neither premature nor accidental-its occurrence was governed by historical law. Historical laws (zakonomernosti), weighty but usually ill-defined, determined everything in Soviet history, which meant in practice that every major political decision was right. No real political history was written, since all the revolutionary leaders except Lenin, Stalin, and a few who died young had been exposed as traitors to the Revolution and become 'non-persons', that is, unmentionable in print. Social history was written in class terms, with the working class, the peasantry, and the intelligentsia as virtually the sole actors and subjects. In the West, Soviet history became a matter of strong interest only after the Second World War, mainly in a Cold War context of knowing the enemy. The two books that set the tone were fiction, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arthur Koestler's Dark- ness at Noon (on the Great Purge trials of Old Bolsheviks in the late 1930s)~but in the scholarly realm it was American political science that dominated. The totalitarian model, based on a somewhat demonized conflation of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia, was the most popular interpretative framework. It emphasized the omnipo- tence of the totalitarian state and its 'levers of control', paid considerable attention to ideology and propaganda, and largely neglected the social realm (which was seen as passive, fragmented by the totalitarian state). Most Western scholars agreed that the Bolshe- vik Revolution was a coup by a minority party, lacking any kind of popular support or legitimacy. The Revolution, and for that matter the prerevolutionary history of the Bolshevik Party, were studied mainly to elucidate the origins of Soviet totalitarianism. Before the 1970s~few Western historians ventured into the study Introduction 7 of Soviet history, including the Russian Revolution, partly because the subject was so politically charged, and partly because access to archives and primary sources was very difficult. Two pioneering works by British historians deserve note: E. H. Carr's The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, the beginning of his multi-volume History of Soviet Russia, of which the first volume appeared in 1952, and Isaac Deutscher's classic biography of Trotsky, of which the first volume, The Prophet Armed, appeared in 1954. In the Soviet Union, Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 and the partial de-Stalinization that followed opened the door for some historical revaluation and a raising of the level of scholarship. Archive-based studies of 1917 and the 1920s began to appear, although there were still constraints and dogmas that had to be observed, for example, on the Bolshevik Party's status as vanguard of the working class. It became possible to mention non-persons like Trotsky and Zinoviev, but only in a pejorative context. The great opportunity that Khrushchev's Secret Speech offered historians was to decouple Lenin and Stalin. Reform- minded Soviet historians produced many books and articles on the 1920s arguing that 'Leninist norms' in different areas were more democratic and tolerant of diversity and less coercive and arbitrary than the practices of the Stalin era. For Western readers, the 'Leninist' trend of the 1960s and 1970s was exemplified by Roy A. Medvedev, author of Let History Judge. The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, published in the West in 1971. But Medvedev's work was too sharply and overtly critical of Stalin for the climate of the Brezhnev years, and he was unable to publish it in the Soviet Union. This was the era of the blossoming of samizdat (unofficial circulation of manuscripts within the Soviet Union) and tamizdat (illegal publication of work abroad). The most famous of the dissident authors emerging at this time was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great novelist and historical polemicist whose Gulag Archipelago was published in English in 1973. While the works of some dissident Soviet scholars started to reach Western audiences in the 1970s~Western scholarly work on the Russian Revolution was still treated as 'bourgeois falsification' and effectively banned from the USSR (though some works, including Robert Conquest's The Great Tewor circulated clandestinely along with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag). All the same, conditions had improved for Western scholars. They were now able to conduct research in the 8 Introduction Soviet Union, albeit with limited and strictly controlled access to archives, whereas in earlier times conditions had been so difficult that many Western Soviet scholars never visited the Soviet Union at all, and others were summarily expelled as spies or subjected to various kinds of harassment. As access to archives and primary sources in the Soviet Union improved, increasing numbers of young Western historians chose to study the Russian Revolution and Soviet history; and history started to displace political science as the dominant discipline in American Sovietology. That transition began in the late 1970s~and it presaged the coming of age of Western historical scholarship on the Russian Revolution in the 1980s. The interested reader may gauge the extent of the change by looking at the Bibliography and noting how many of the works listed there were published since the appearance of the first edition of this book in 1982. Interpreting the revolution All revolutions have liberti, igalitt?,fraternitt? and other noble slogans inscribed on their banners. All revolutionaries are enthusiasts, zealots; all are utopians, with dreams of creating a new world in which the injustice, corruption, and apathy of the old world are banished forever. They are intolerant of disagreement; incapable of compromise; mesmerized by big, distant goals; violent, suspicious, and destructive. Revolutionaries are unrealistic and inexperienced in government; their institutions and procedures are extemporized. They have the intoxicating illusion of personifying the will of the people, which means they assume the people is monolithic. They are Manicheans, dividing the world into two camps: light and darkness, the revolution and its enemies. They despise all traditions, received wisdom, icons, and superstition. They believe society can be a tabula rasa on which the revolution will write. It is in the nature of revolutions to end in disillusionment and disappointment. Zeal wanes; enthusiasm becomes forced. The moment of madness and euphoria passes. The relationship of the people and the revolutionaries becomes complicated: it appears that the will of the people is not necessarily monolithic and transparent. The temptations of wealth and position return, along with the recognition that one does not love one's neighbour as oneself, and does not want to. All revolutions destroy things whose loss is soon Introduction 9 regretted. What they create is less than the revolutionaries expected, and different. Beyond the generic similarity, however, every revolution has its own character. Russia's location was peripheral, and its educated classes were preoccupied with the country's backwardness vis-a-vis Europe. The revolutionaries were Marxists who often substituted 'the proletariat' for 'the people' and claimed that revolution was historically necessary, not morally imperative. There were revolu- tionary parties in Russia before there was a revolution; and when the moment came, in the midst of war, these parties competed for the support of ready-made units of popular revolution (soldiers, sailors, workers in the big Petrograd factories), not the allegiance of a milling, spontaneous, revolutionary crowd. In this book, three motifs have special importance. The first is the modernization theme-revolution as a means of escaping from backwardness. The second is the class theme-revolution as the mission of the proletariat and its 'vanguard', the Bolshevik Party. The third is the theme of revolutionary violence and terror-how the Revolution dealt with its enemies, and what this meant for the Bolshevik Party and Soviet state. The term 'modernization' has begun to sound pass6 in an age that is often described as post-modern. But that is appropriate for our subject, since the industrial and technological modernity for which the Bolsheviks strove now seems hopelessly outdated: the giant smoke-stacks that clutter the landscape of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe like a herd of polluting dinosaurs were, in their time, the fulfilment of a revolutionary dream. Russian Marxists had fallen in love with Western-style industrialization long before the revolution; it was their insistence on the inevitability of capitalism (which primarily meant capitalist industrialization) that was the core of their argument with the Populists in the late nineteenth century. In Russia, as was later to be the case in the Third World, Marxism was both an ideology of revolution and an ideology of economic development. In theory, industrialization and economic modernization were only means to an end for Russian Marxists, the end being socialism. But the more clearly and single-mindedly the Bolsheviks focused on the means, the more foggy, distant, and unreal the end became. When the term 'building socialism' came into common use in the I930S, its meaning was hard to distinguish from the actual building of new Io Introduction factories and industrial towns that was currently in progress. To Communists of that generation, the new smoke-stacks puffing away on the steppe were the ultimate demonstration that the Revolution had been victorious. As Adam Ulam puts it, Stalin's forced-pace industrialization, however painful and coercive, was 'the logical complement of Marxism, "revolution fulfilled" rather than "revolu- tion betrayed" '.' Class, the second theme, was important in the Russian Revolution because the key participants perceived it as such. Marxist analytical categories were widely accepted in the Russian intelligentsia; and the Bolsheviks were not exceptional, but representative of a much broader socialist group, when they interpreted the Revolution in terms of class conflict and assigned a special role to the industrial working class. In power, the Bolsheviks assumed that proletarians and poor peasants were their natural allies. They also made the complementary assumption that members of the 'bourgeoisie'-a broad group encompassing former capitalists, former noble landown- ers and officials, small shopkeepers, kulaks (prosperous peasants), and even in some contexts the Russian intelligentsia-were their natural antagonists. They termed such people 'class enemies', and it was against them that the early revolutionary terror was primarily directed. The aspect of the class issue that has been most hotly debated over the years is whether the Bolsheviks' claim to represent the working class was justified. This is perhaps a simple enough question if we look only at the summer and autumn of 1917, when the working class of Petrograd and Moscow were radicalized and clearly preferred the Bolsheviks to any other political party. After that, however, it is not so simple. The fact that the Bolsheviks took power with working- class support did not mean that they kept that support forever-or, for that matter, that they regarded their party, either before or after the seizure of power, as a mere mouthpiece of industrial workers. The accusation that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the working class, first heard by the outside world in connection with the Kronstadt revolt of 1921, was one that was bound to come and likely to be true. But what kind of betrayal-how soon, with whom, with what consequences? In the NEP period, the Bolsheviks patched up the marriage with the working class that had seemed close to dissolution at the end of the Civil War. During the First Five-Year Plan, relations soured again because of falling real wages and urban Introduction II living standards and the regime's insistent demands for higher productivity. An effective separation from the working class, if not a formal divorce, occurred in the 1930s. But this is not the whole story. The situation of workers qua workers under Soviet power was one thing; the opportunities avail- able to workers to better themselves (become something other than workers) was another. By recruiting party members primarily from the working class for fifteen years after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks did a good d e a l ~ osubstantiate their claim to be a workers' party. They also created a broad channel for working-class upward mobility, since the recruitment of workers to party membership went hand in hand with the promotion of working-class Communists to white-collar administrative and managerial positions. During the Cultural Revolution at the end of the 192os, the regime cut open another channel for upward mobility by sending large numbers of young workers and workers' children to higher education. While the policy of high-pressure 'proletarian promotion' was dropped in the early 1 9 3 0 ~its~ consequences remained. It was not workers that mattered in Stalin's regime but former workers-the newly-promoted 'proletarian core' in the managerial and professional elites. From the strict Marxist standpoint, such working-class upward mobility was perhaps of little interest. For the beneficiaries, however, their new elite status was likely to seem irrefutable proof that the Revolution had fulfilled its promises to the working class. The last theme that runs through this book is the theme of revolutionary violence and terror. Popular violence is inherent in revolution; revolutionaries are likely to regard it very favourably in the early stages of revolution but with increasing reservations there- after. Terror, meaning organized violence by revolutionary groups or regimes that intimidates and terrifies the general population, has also been characteristic of modern revolutions, with the French Revolution setting the pattern. The main purpose of terror, in the revolutionaries' eyes, is to destroy the enemies of the revolution and the impediments to change; but there is often a secondary purpose of maintaining the purity and revolutionary commitment of the revolutionaries themselves. Enemies and 'counter-revolutionaries' are extremely important in all revolutions. The enemies resist by stealth as well as openly; they foment plots and conspiracies; they often wear the mask of revolutionaries. Following Marxist theory, the Bolsheviks conceptualized the I2 Introduction enemies of the revolution in terms of class. T o be a noble, a capitalist, or a kulak was ipso facto evidence of counter-revolutionary sympa- thies. Like most revolutionaries (perhaps even more than most, given their prewar experience of underground party organization and conspiracy), the Bolsheviks were obsessed with counter-revolutionary plots; but their Marxism gave this a special twist. If there were classes that were innately inimical to the revolution, a whole social class could be regarded as a conspiracy of enemies. Individual members of that class might 'objectively' be counter-revolutionary conspirators, even if subjectively (that is, in their own minds) they knew nothing of the conspiracy and thought themselves supporters of the revolution. The Bolsheviks used two kinds of terror in the Russian Revolu- tion: terror against enemies outside the party, and terror against enemies within. The former was dominant in the early years of the Revolution, died down in the 192os, and then flared up again at the end of the decade with collectivization and Cultural Revolution. The latter first flickered as a possibility during the party faction fights at the end of the Civil War, but was quashed until 1927, when a small- scale terror was directed against the Left Opposition. From then on, the temptation to conduct full-scale terror against enemies within the party was palpable. One reason for this was that the regime was using terror on a considerable scale against 'class enemies' outside the party. Another reason was that the party's periodic purging (chistki, literally cleansings) of its own ranks had an effect similar to scratching an itch. These purges, first conducted on a national scale in 1921, were reviews of party membership in which all Communists were summoned individually for public appraisals of their loyalty, competence, background, and connections; and those judged unworthy were expelled from the party or demoted to candidate status. There was a national party purge in 1929, another in 1933-4, and then-as purging the party became an almost obsessive activity-two more party membership reviews in rapid succession in 1935 and 1936. Though the likelihood that expulsion might bring further punishment, such as arrest or exile, was still comparatively low, with each of these party purges it crept upwards. Terror and party purging (with a small 'p') finally came together on a massive scale in the Great Purges of 1937-8.8 This was not a purge in the usual sense, since no systematic review of party membership was involved; but it was directed in the first instance Introduction I3 against party members, particularly those in high official positions, although arrests and fear quickly spread into the non-party intelli- gentsia and, to a lesser degree, the broader population. In the Great Purges, which would be more accurately described as the Great T e r r ~ r suspicion ,~ was often equivalent to conviction, evidence of criminal acts was unnecessary, and the punishment for counter- revolutionary crimes was death or a labour-camp sentence. The analogy to the Terror of the French Revolution has occurred to many historians, and it clearly occurred to the organizers of the Great Purges as well, since the term 'enemies of the people', which was applied to those judged counter-revolutionaries during the Great Purges, was borrowed from the Jacobin terrorists. The significance of that suggestive historical borrowing is explored in the last chapter. Notes on the second edition The second edition of this book has benefited considerably from the opening of Soviet party and government archives and the end of Soviet censorship. The topics on which we have most new data are those that were previously proscribed in the Soviet Union: terror, repression, Gulag, censorship, the non-canonical Lenin and Stalin, and so on. The archives have yielded up classified Central Committee minutes and Politburo protocols, a suppressed population census, data on the famine of 1932-3 and the Great Purges, secret police reports, citizens' petitions and denunciations, and a host of other materials that historians are still in the process of digesting. Old political scandals have been exhumed and memoirs published. Our picture of Soviet politics and society, especially in the 193os, is much richer and more detailed than it was even five years ago. This is reflected in the new edition, which incorporates as much material from the new sources as could be fitted in without upsetting the balance of the narrative, as well as additional footnote references to important new sources in English and Russian. The Bibliography is largely new because so much English-language scholarship on the Russian Revolution has been published in the last decade; it includes the works of Russian scholars from the Gorbachev and post-Soviet eras where these are available in English. With the exception of the Introduction, the only major structural change is in Chapter 6 , which ends with a new section on the Great Purges. 14 Introduction Like the first edition, this second edition is essentially a history of the Russian Revolution as experienced in Russia, not in the non- Russian territories that were part of the old Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The Setting AT the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia was one of the great powers of Europe. But it was a great power that was universally regarded as backward by comparison with Britain, Germany, and France. In economic terms, this meant that it had been late to emerge from feudalism (the peasants were freed from legal bondage to their lords or the state only in the 1860s) and late in industrializing. In political terms, it meant that until 1905 there were no legal political parties and no central elected parliament, and the autocracy survived with undiminished powers. Russia's towns had no tradition of political organization or self-government, and its nobility had similarly failed to develop a corporate sense of identity strong enough to force concessions from the throne. Legally, Russia's citizens still belonged to 'estates' (urban, peasant, clergy, and noble), even though the estate system made no provision for new social groups like professionals and urban workers, and only the clergy retained anything like the characteristics of a self-contained caste. The three decades before the 1917 Revolution saw not impoverish- ment but an increase in national wealth; and it was in this period that Russia experienced its first spurt of economic growth as a result of the government's industrialization policies, foreign investment, modernization of the banking and credit structure, and a modest development of native entrepreneurial activity. The peasantry, which still constituted 80 per cent of Russia's population at the time of the Revolution, had not experienced a marked improvement in its economic position. But, contrary to some contemporary opinions, there had almost certainly not been a steady deterioration in the peasantry's economic situation either. As Russia's last Tsar, Nicholas 11, sadly perceived, the autocracy was fighting a losing battle against insidious liberal influences from the West. The direction of political change-towards something like a Western constitutional monarchy-seemed clear, though many members of the educated classes were impatient at the slowness of change and the stubbornly obstructionist attitude of the autocracy. After the 1905 Revolution, Nicholas gave in and established a 16 The Setting national elected parliament, the Duma, at the same time legalizing political parties and trade unions. But the old arbitrary habits of autocratic rule and the continued activity of the secret police undermined these concessions. After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, many Russian emigres looked back on the prerevolutionary years as a golden age of progress which had been arbitrarily interrupted (as it seemed) by the First World War, or the unruly mob, or the Bolsheviks. There was progress, but it contributed a great deal to the society's instability and the likelihood of political upheaval: the more rapidly a society changes (whether that change is perceived as progressive or regres- sive) the less stable it is likely to be. If we think of the great literature of prerevolutionary Russia, the most vivid images are those of displacement, alienation, and lack of control over one's destiny. To the nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Gogol, Russia was a troika careering in darkness to an unknown destination. To the Duma politician Aleksandr Guchkov, denouncing Nicholas I1 and his Ministers in 1916, it was a car steered along the edge of a precipice by a mad driver, whose terrified passengers were debating the risk of seizing the wheel. In 1917 the risk was taken, and Russia's headlong movement forward became a plunge into revolution. The society The Russian Empire covered a vast expanse of territory, stretching from Poland in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, extending into the Arctic north, and reaching the Black Sea and the borders of Turkey and Afghanistan in the south. The hub of the Empire, European Russia (including some of the area that is now Ukraine) had a population of 92 million in 1897, with the total population of the Empire recorded by that year's census at 126 million.' But even European Russia and the relatively advanced western regions of the Empire remained largely rural and non-urbanized. There were a handful of big urban industrial centres, most of them the product of recent and rapid expansion: St Petersburg, the imperial capital, renamed Petrograd during the First World War and Leningrad in 1924; Moscow, the old and (from 1918) future capital; Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa, together with the new mining and metallur- gical centres of the Donbass, in what is now Ukraine; Warsaw, Lodz, and Riga in the west; Rostov and the oil city of Baku in the The Setting 17 south. But most Russian provincial towns were still sleepy backwa- ters at the beginning of the twentieth century-local administrative centres with a small merchant population, a few schools, a peasant market, and perhaps a railway station. In the villages, much of the traditional way of life remained. The peasants still held their land in communal tenure, dividing the village fields into narrow strips which were tilled separately by the various peasant households; and in many villages, the mir (village council) would still periodically redistribute the strips so that each household had an equal share. Wooden ploughs were in common use, modern farming techniques were unknown in the villages, and peasant agriculture was not much above subsistence level. The peasants' huts were clustered together along the village street, peasants slept on the stove and kept their animals with them in the house, and the old patriarchal structure of the peasant family survived. The peasants were not much more than a generation away from serfdom: a peasant who was sixty at the turn of the century was already a young adult at the time of the Emancipation of 1861. Of course the Emancipation had changed peasant life, but it had been framed with great caution so as to minimize the change and spread it over time. Before Emancipation, the peasants worked their strips of the village land, and they also worked the masters' land or paid him the equivalent of their labour in money. After the Emanci- pation, they continued to work their own land, and sometimes worked for hire on their former masters' land, while making 'redemption' payments to the state to offset the lump sums that had been given the landowners as immediate compensation. The redemp- tion payments were scheduled to last for forty-nine years (although in fact the state cancelled them a few years early), and the village community was collectively responsible for the debts of all members. This meant that individual peasants were still bound to the village, though they were bound by the debt and the mir's collective responsibility instead of by serfdom. The terms of the Emancipation were intended to prevent a mass influx of peasants into the towns and the creation of a landless proletariat which would represent a danger to public order. They also had the effect of reinforcing the mir and the old system of communal land tenure, and making it almost impossible for peasants to consolidate their strips, expand or improve their holdings, or make the transition to independent small- farming. I8 The Setting While permanent departure from the villages was difficult in the post-Emancipation decades, it was easy to leave the villages tempor- arily to work for hire in agriculture, construction, mining, or in the towns. In fact such work was a necessity for many peasant families: the money was needed for taxes and redemption payments. The peasants who worked as seasonal labourers (otkhodniki) were often away for many months of the year, leaving their families to till their land in the villages. If the journeys were long-as in the case of peasants from central Russian villages who went to work in the Donbass mines-the otkhodniki might return only for the harvest and perhaps the spring sowing. The practice of departing for seasonal work was long-established, especially in the less fertile areas of European Russia where the landlords had exacted payment in money rather than labour from their serfs. But it was becoming increasingly common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, partly because more work was available in the towns. In the years immedi- ately before the First World War, about nine million peasants took out passports for seasonal work outside their native village each year, and of these almost half were working outside agricult~re.~ With one in every two peasant households in European Russia including a family member who left the village for work-and a higher proportion in the Petersburg and Central Industrial Regions and the western provinces-the impression that old Russia survived almost unchanged in the villages may well have been deceptive. Many peasants were in fact living with one foot in the traditional village world and the other in the quite different world of the modern industrial town. The degree to which peasants remained within the traditional world varied not only according to geographical location but also according to age and sex. The young were more likely to go away to work, and in addition the young men came in contact with a more modern world when they were called up for army service. Women and the aged were more likely to know only the village and the old peasant way of life. These differences in peasant experience showed up strikingly in the literacy figures of the 1897 census. The young were very much more literate than the old, men were more literate than women, and literacy was higher in the less fertile areas of European Russia-that is, the areas where seasonal migration was most common-than in the fertile Black Earth r e g i ~ n. ~ The urban working class was still very close to the peasantry. The number of permanent industrial workers (somewhat over three The Setting 19 million in 1914) was smaller than the number of peasants who left the villages for non-agricultural seasonal work each year, and in fact it was almost impossible to make a hard-and-fast distinction between permanent urban-dwelling workers and peasants who worked most of the year in the towns. Even among the permanent workers, many retained land in the village and had left their wives and children living there; other workers lived in villages themselves (a pattern that was particularly common in the Moscow area) and commuted on a daily or weekly basis to the factory. Only in St Petersburg had a large proportion of the industrial labour force severed all connec- tion with the countryside. The main reason for the close interconnection between the urban working class and the peasantry was that Russia's rapid industriali- zation was a very recent phenomenon. It was not until the 1890s- more than half a century after Britain-that Russia experienced large-scale growth of industry and expansion of towns. Even then, the creation of a permanent urban working class was inhibited by the terms of the peasants' Emancipation in the 1860s~which kept them tied to the villages. First-generation workers, predominantly from the peasantry, formed a large part of the Russian working class; and few were more than second-generation workers and urban dwellers. Although Soviet historians claim that more than 50 per cent of industrial workers on the eve of the First World War were at least second-generation, this calculation clearly includes workers and peasant otkhodniki whose fathers had been otkhodniki. Despite these characteristics of underdevelopment, Russian indus- try was in some respects quite advanced by the time of the First World War. The modern industrial sector was small, but unusually highly concentrated, both geographically (notably in the regions centred on Petersburg and Moscow and the Ukrainian Donbass) and in terms of the size of the industrial plants. As Gerschenkron has pointed out, comparative backwardness had its own advantages: industrializing late, with the aid of large-scale foreign investment and energetic state involvement, Russia was able to skip over some of the early stages, borrow relatively advanced technology and move quickly towards large-scale modern prod~ction.~ Enterprises like the famous Putilov metalworking and machine-building plant in Peters- burg and the largely foreign-owned metallurgical plants of the Donbass employed many thousands of workers. According to Marxist theory, a highly concentrated industrial 20 The Setting proletariat in conditions of advanced capitalist production is likely to be revolutionary, whereas a pre-modern working class that retains strong ties to the peasantry is not. Thus the Russian working class had contradictory characteristics for a Marxist diagnosing its revolu- tionary potential. Yet the empirical evidence of the period from the 1890s to 1914 suggests that in fact Russia's working class, despite its close links with the peasantry, was exceptionally militant and revo- lutionary. Large-scale strikes were frequent, the workers showed considerable solidarity against management and state authority, and their demands were usually political as well as economic. In the 1905 Revolution, the workers of St Petersburg and Moscow organized their own revolutionary institutions, the soviets, and continued the struggle after the Tsar's constitutional concessions in October and the collapse of the middle-class liberals' drive against the autocracy. In the summer of 1914, the workers' strike movement in Petersburg and elsewhere assumed such threatening dimensions that some observers thought that the government could not take the risk of declaring a general mobilization for war. The strength of working-class revolutionary sentiment in Russia may be explained in a number of different ways. In the first place, limited economic protest against employers-what Lenin called trade unionism-was very difficult under Russian conditions. The government had a large stake in Russia's native industry and in the protection of foreign investment, and state authorities were quick to provide troops when strikes against private enterprise showed signs of getting out of hand. That meant that even economic strikes (protests over wages and conditions) were likely to turn political; and the widespread resentment of Russian workers against foreign man- agers and technical personnel had a similar effect. Although it was Lenin, a Russian Marxist, who said that by its own efforts the working class could develop only a 'trade-union consciousness' rather than a revolutionary one, Russia's own experience (in contrast to that of Western Europe) did not bear him out. In the second place, the peasant component of Russia's working class probably made it more revolutionary rather than less. Russian peasants were not innately conservative small proprietors like, for example, their French counterparts. The Russian peasantry's tradi- tion of violent, anarchic rebellion against landowners and officials, exemplified in the great Pugachev revolt of the 1770s~was manifest The Setting 2I once again in the peasant uprisings of 1905 and 1906: the Emancipa- tion of 1861 had not permanently quietened the peasants' spirit of revolt because they did not regard it as a just or adequate emancipa- tion and, increasingly land-hungry, asserted their right to the land that had been withheld. Moreover, the peasants who migrated to towns and became workers were often young, freed from family constraints but still unused to the discipline of the factory, and bearing the resentments and frustrations that go with dislocation and incomplete assimilation to an unfamiliar envir~nment.~ To some extent, the Russian working class was revolutionary just because it had not had time to acquire the 'trade-union consciousness' of which Lenin wrote-to become a settled industrial proletariat, capable of protecting its interests by non-revolutionary means, and understand- ing the opportunities for upward mobility that modern urban societies offer those with some education and skills. However, the 'modern' characteristics of Russian society, even in the urban sector and the upper educated strata, were still very incomplete. It was often said that Russia had no middle class; and indeed its business and commercial class remained comparatively weak, and the professions had only recently acquired the status normal in industrialized societies. Despite increasing professionali- zation of the state bureaucracy, its upper ranks remained dominated by the nobility, traditionally the state's service class. Service prerog- atives were all the more important to the nobility because of its economic decline as a landowning group after the abolition of serfdom: only a minority of noble landowners had successfully made the transition to capitalist, market-oriented agriculture. The schizoid nature of Russian society in the early twentieth century is well illustrated by the bewildering variety of self-identifications offered by subscribers to the city directories of St Petersburg, the largest and most modern of Russia's cities. Some subscribers kept to the traditional forms and identified themselves by social estate and rank ('hereditary noble', 'merchant of the First Guild', 'honoured citizen', 'State Counsellor'). Others clearly belonged to the new world, and described themselves in terms of profession and type of employment ('stockbroker', 'mechanical engineer', 'company director', or, as representative of Russia's achievements in female emancipation, 'woman doctor'). A third group consisted of persons who were uncertain which world they belonged to, identifying 22 The Setting themselves by estate in one year's directory and by profession in the next, or even giving both identifications at once, like the subscriber who listed himself quaintly as 'nobleman, dentist'. In less formal contexts, educated Russians would often describe themselves as members of the intelligentsia. Sociologically, this was a very slippery concept, but in broad terms the word 'intelligentsia' described a Westernized educated elite, alienated from the rest of Russian society by its education and from Russia's autocratic regime by its radical ideology. However, the Russian intelligentsia did not see itself as an elite, but rather as a classless group united by moral concern for the betterment of society, the capacity for 'critical thought' and, in particular, a critical, semi-oppositionist attitude to the regime. The term came into common use around the middle of the nineteenth century, but the genesis of the concept may be found in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when the nobility was released from the obligation of compulsory service to the state, and some of its members, educated but finding their education under- utilized, developed an alternative ethos of obligation to 'serve the p e ~ p l e '.Ideally ~ (though not altogether in practice), intelligentsia membership and bureaucratic service were incompatible. The Rus- sian revolutionary movement of the second half of the nineteenth century, characterized by small-scale conspiratorial organization to fight the autocracy and thus liberate the people, was largely a product of the intelligentsia's radical ideology and political disaffection. By the end of the century, when the development of high-status professions had provided educated Russians with a broader range of occupational choice than had existed earlier, an individual's self- definition as an intelligent often implied relatively passive liberal attitudes rather than active revolutionary commitment to political change. Still, Russia's new professional class inherited enough of the old intelligentsia tradition to feel sympathy and respect for the committed revolutionaries, and lack of sympathy for the regime, even when its officials tried to pursue reforming policies or were assassinated by revolutionary terrorists. Moreover, some types of professional avocation were peculiarly difficult to combine with total support for the autocracy. The legal profession, for example, blossomed as a result of the reform of the legal system in the 186os, but the reforms were much less successful in the long term in extending the rule of law in Russian society and administration, particularly in the period of reaction that followed The Setting 23 the assassination of Emperor Alexander I1 by a group of revolution- ary terrorists in 1881. Lawyers whose education had led them to believe in the rule of law were likely to disapprove of arbitrary administrative practices, untrammelled police power and govern- mental attempts to influence the working of the judicial system.' A similar inherent adversary relationship to the regime was associated with the zemstvos, elected local-government bodies that were insti- tutionally quite separate from the state bureaucracy and frequently in conflict with it. In the early twentieth century, the zemstvos employed around 70,000 professionals (doctors, teachers, agrono- mists and so on), whose radical sympathies were notorious. Engineers and other technical specialists working for the state or in private enterprises had less obvious reason to feel alienated from the regime, especially given the energetic sponsorship of economic modernization and industrialization that came from the Ministry of Finance under Sergei Witte in the 1890s and subsequently from the Ministry of Trade and Industry. Witte, indeed, made every effort to rally support for the autocracy and its modernization drive among Russia's technical specialists and businessmen; but the problem was that Witte's enthusiasm for economic and technological progress was obviously not shared by a large part of Russia's bureaucratic elite, as well as being personally uncongenial to Emperor Nicholas 11. Modernization-minded professionals and entrepreneurs might not object in principle to the idea of autocratic government (though in fact many of them did, as a result of their exposure to radical politics as students of the Polytechnical Institutes). But it was very difficult for them to see the Tsarist autocracy as an effective agent of modernization: its record was too inconsistent, and its political ideology too clearly reflected nostalgia for the past rather than any coherent vision of the future. The revolutionary tradition The task which the Russian intelligentsia had taken on itself was the betterment of Russia-first, drawing up the social and political blue- prints for the country's future, and then, if possible, taking action to translate them into reality. The yardstick for Russia's future was Western Europe's present. Russian intellectuals might decide to accept or reject different phenomena that were observed in Europe, but all were on the agenda for Russian discussion and possible inclusion in 24 The Setting the plans for Russia's future. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, one of the central topics of discussion was Western Euro- pean industrialization and its social and political consequences. One view was that capitalist industrialization had produced human degradation, impoverishment of the masses, and destruction of the social fabric in the West, and therefore ought to be avoided at all costs by Russia. The radical intellectuals who held this view have been retrospectively grouped under the heading of 'Populists', though the label implies a degree of coherent organization which did not in fact exist (it was originally used by the Russian Marxists to differentiate themselves from all the various intelligentsia groups that disagreed with them). Populism was essentially the mainstream of Russian radical thought from the 1860s to the 1880s. The Russian intelligentsia generally accepted socialism (as under- stood by Europe's pre-Marxist socialists, especially the French 'utopians') as the most desirable form of social organization, though this was not seen as incompatible with the acceptance of liberalism as an ideology of political change. The intelligentsia also reacted to its social isolation by a fervent desire to bridge the gulf between itself and 'the people' (narod). The strain of intelligentsia thought described as Populism combined anobjection to capitalist industrial- ization with an idealization of the Russian peasantry. The Populists saw that capitalism had had a destructive impact on traditional rural communities in Europe, uprooting peasants from the land and forcing them into the cities as a landless and exploited industrial proletariat. They wished to save the Russian peasants' traditional form of village organization, the commune or miry from the ravages of capitalism, because they believed that the mir was an egalitarian institution-perhaps a survival of primitive communism-through which Russia might find a separate path to socialism. In the early 1870s~the intelligentsia's idealization of the peasantry and frustration with its own situation and the prospects for political reform led to the spontaneous mass movement which best exemplifies Populist aspirations-the 'going to the people' of 1873-4. Thousands of students and members of the intelligentsia left the cities to go to the villages, sometimes envisaging themselves as enlighteners of the peasantry, sometimes more humbly seeking to acquire the simple wisdom of the people, and sometimes with the hope of conducting revolutionary organization and propaganda. The movement had no central direction and no clearly defined political intent as far as most The Setting 25 of the participants were concerned: its spirit was less that of a political campaign than a religious pilgrimage. But the distinction was hard for either the peasantry or the Tsarist police to grasp. The authorities were greatly alarmed, and made mass arrests. The peasants were suspicious, regarding their uninvited guests as off- spring of the nobility and probable class enemies, and often handing them over to the police. This deblcle produced deep disappointment among the Populists. They did not waver in their determination to serve the people, but some concluded that it was their tragic fate to serve them as outcasts, revolutionary desperadoes whose heroic actions would be appreciated only after their deaths. There was an upsurge of revolutionary terrorism in the late 187os, motivated partly by the Populists' desire to avenge their imprisoned comrades and partly by the rather desperate hope that a well-placed blow might destroy the whole superstructure of autocratic Russia, leaving the Russian people free to find its own destiny. In 1881, the 'People's Will' group of Populist terrorists succeeded in assassinating Emperor Alexander 11. The effect was not to destroy the autocracy, but rather to frighten it into more repressive policies, greater arbitrariness and circumvention of law, and the creation of something close to a modern police state.8 The popular response to the assassination included anti semitic pogroms in the Ukraine, and rumours in Russia's villages that nobles had murdered the Tsar because he had freed the peasants from serfdom. It was in the 188os, in the wake of the two Populist disasters, that the Marxists emerged as a distinct group within the Russian intelli- gentsia, repudiating the utopian idealism, terrorist tactics, and peasant orientation that had previously characterized the revolution- ary movement. Because of the unfavourable political climate in Russia and their own repudiation of terrorism, the Marxists made their initial impact in intellectual debate rather than by revolutionary action. They argued that capitalist industrialization was inevitable in Russia, and that the peasant mir was already in a state of internal disintegration, propped up only by the state and its state-imposed responsibilities for the collection of taxes and redemption payments. They asserted that capitalism constituted the only possible path towards socialism, and that the industrial proletariat produced by capitalist development was the only class capable of bringing about true socialist revolution. These premises, they claimed, could be scientifically proven by the objective laws of historical development 26 The Setting that Marx and Engels had explained in their writings. The Marxists scoffed at those who chose socialism as an ideology because it was ethically superior (it was, of course, but that was beside the point). The point about socialism was that, like capitalism, it was a predictable stage in the development of human society. To Karl Marx, an old European revolutionary who instinctively applauded the struggle of 'People's Will' against the Russian autoc- racy, the early Russian Marxists clustered around Georgii Plekhanov in emigration seemed too passive and pedantic-revolutionaries who were content to write articles about the historical inevitability of revolution while others were fighting and dying for the cause. But the impact on the Russian intelligentsia was different, because one of the Marxists' scientific predictions was quickly realized: they said that Russia must industrialize, and in the 1890s~under Witte's energetic direction, it did. True, the industrialization was as much a product of state sponsorship and foreign investment as of spon- taneous capitalist development, so that in a sense Russia did take a separate path from the W e ~ tBut. ~ to contemporaries, Russia's rapid industrialization seemed dramatic proof that the Marxists' predic- tions were right, and that Marxism had at least some of the answers to the Russian intelligentsia's 'great questions'. Marxism in Russia-as in China, India, and other developing countries-had a meaning rather different from that which it had in the industrialized countries of Western Europe. It was an ideology of modernization as well as an ideology of revolution. Even Lenin, who could scarcely be accused of revolutionary passivity, made his name as a Marxist with a weighty study, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, that was both analysis and advocacy of the process of economic modernization; and virtually all the other leading Marxists of his generation in Russia produced similar works. The advocacy, to be sure, is presented in the Marxist manner ('I told you so' rather than 'I support...'), and it may surprise modern readers who know Lenin only as an anti-capitalist revolutionary. But capitalism was a 'progressive' phenomenon to 'Marxists in late nineteenth-century Russia, a backward society that by Marxist definition was still semi-feudal. In ideological terms, they were in favour of capitalism because it was a necessary stage on the way to socialism. But in emotional terms, the commitment went deeper: the Russian Marxists admired the modern, industrial, urban world, and were offended by the backwardness of old rural Russia. It has often The Setting 27 been pointed out that Lenin-an activist revolutionary willing to give history a push in the right direction-was an unorthodox Marxist with some of the revolutionary voluntarism of the old Populist tradition. That is true, but it is relevant mainly to his behaviour in times of actual revolution, around I 905 and in I 917. In the 189os, he chose Marxism rather than Populism because he was on the side of modernization; and that basic choice explains a great deal about the course of the Russian revolution after Lenin and his party took power in 1917. The Marxists made another important choice in the early contro- versy with the Populists over capitalism: they chose the urban working class as their base of support and Russia's main potential force for revolution. This distinguished them from the old tradition of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia (upheld by the Populists and later, from its formation in the early 19oos, by the Socialist- Revolutionary (SR) Party), with its one-sided love affair with the peasantry. It distinguished them also from the liberals (some of them former Marxists), whose Liberation movement was to emerge as a political force shortly before 1905, since the liberals hoped for a 'bourgeois' revolution and won support from the new professional class and the liberal zemstvo nobility. Initially, the Marxists' choice did not look particularly promising: the working class was tiny in comparison with the peasantry, and, in comparison with the urban upper classes, lacked status, education and financial resources. The Marxists' early contacts with the workers were essentially educational, consisting of circles and study groups in which intellectuals offered the workers some general education plus the elements of Marxism. Historians differ in their assessment of the contribution that this made to the development of a revolutionary labour movement.1° But the Tsarist authorities took the political threat fairly seriously. According to a police report in 1901," Agitators, seeking to realize their goals, have achieved some success, unfortunately, in organizing the workers to fight against the government. Within the last three or four years, the easygoing Russian young man has been transformed into a special type of semi-literate intelligent, who feels obliged to spurn family and religion, to disregard the law, and to deny and scoff at constituted authority. Fortunately such young men are not numerous in the factories, but this negligible handful terrorizes the inert majority of workers into following it. 28 The Setting Clearly Marxists had an advantage over earlier groups of revolution- ary intellectuals seeking contact with the masses: they had found a section of the masses willing to listen. Although Russian workers were not far removed from the peasantry, they were a much more literate group, and at least some of them had acquired a modern, urban sense of the possibility of 'bettering themselves'. Education was a means of upward social mobility as well as the path towards revolution envisaged by both revolutionary intellectuals and the police. The Marxist teachers, unlike the earlier Populist missionaries to the peasantry, had something more than the risk of police harassment to offer their stuclents. From workers' education, the Marxists-illegally organized from 1898 as the Russian Social-DemocraticLabour Party-progressed to an involvement in more directly political labour organization, strikes and, in 1905, revolution. The match between party-political organ- ization and actual working-class protest was never an exact one, and in 1905 the socialist parties had great difficulty keeping up with the working-class revolutionary movement. Between 1898 and 1914, nevertheless, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party ceased to be a preserve of the intelligentsia and became in the literal sense a workers' movement. Its leaders still came from the intelligentsia, and spent most of their time living outside Russia in European emigration. But in Russia, the majority of members and activists were workers (or, in the case of professional revolutionaries, former workers). lZ In terms of their theory, the Russian Marxists started off with what seemed to be a major revolutionary disadvantage: they were obliged to work not for the coming revolution, but for the revolution after next. According to orthodox Marxist prediction, Russia's entry into the capitalist phase (which took place only at the end of the nineteenth century) would inevitably lead to the overthrow of the autocracy by a bourgeois liberal revolution. The proletariat might support this revolution, but it seemed unlikely to have more than a secondary role. Russia would be ripe for proletarian socialist revolu- tion only after capitalism had reached its maturity, and that time might be far in the future. This problem did not seem very pressing before 1905, since no revolution was in progress and the Marxists were having some success in organizing the working class. However, a small group- the 'legal Marxists', headed by Petr Struve-came to identify itself The Setting 29 strongly with the objectives of the first (liberal) revolution on the Marxist agenda, and to lose interest in the ultimate goal of socialist revolution. It was not surprising that modernization-minded oppo- nents of the autocracy like Struve should have joined the Marxists in the 189os, since there was at that time no liberal movement for them to join; and it was equally natural that around the turn of the century they left the Marxists to participate in the establishment of the liberal Liberation movement. The heresy of legal Marxism was nevertheless roundly denounced by Russian Social-Democratic leaders, especially by Lenin. Lenin's violent hostility to 'bourgeois liberalism' was somewhat illogical in Marxist terms, and caused some perplexity to his colleagues. In revolutionary terms, however, Lenin's attitude was extremely rational. At around the same time, the Russian Social-Democratic leaders repudiated the heresy of Economism, that is, that the workers' movement should stress economic rather than political goals. There were in fact few articulate Economists in the Russian movement, partly because Russian workers' protests tended to progress very quickly from purely economic issues like wages to political ones. But the emigre leaders, often more sensitive to trends within European Social Democracy than to the situation inside Russia, feared the revisionist and reformist tendencies that had developed in the German movement. In the doctrinal struggles over Economism and legal Marxism, the Russian Marxists were putting clearly on record that they were revolutionaries, not reformists, and that their cause was the socialist workers' revolution and not the revolution of the liberal bourgeoisie. In 1903, when the Russian Social-Democratic Party held its Second Congress, the leaders fell into dispute over an apparently minor issue-the composition of the editorial board of the party newspaper Iskra.13 No real substantive questions were involved, though to the extent that the dispute revolved around Lenin it might be said that he himself was the underlying issue, and that his colleagues considered that he was too aggressively seeking a position of dominance. Lenin's manner at the congress was overbearing; and he had recently been laying down the law very decisively on various theoretical questions, notably the organization and functions of the party. There was tension between Lenin and Plekhanov, the senior Russian Marxist; and the friendship between Lenin and his contem- porary Yulii Martov was on the point of breaking. 30 The Setting The outcome of the Second Congress was a split in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party between 'Bolshevik' and 'Men- shevik' factions. The Bolsheviks were those who followed Lenin's lead, and the Mensheviks (including Plekhanov, Martov, and Trot- sky) constituted a larger and more diverse group of party members who thought Lenin had overreached himself. The split made little sense to Marxists inside Russia, and at the time of its occurrence was not regarded as irrevocable even by the emigres. It proved, neverthe- less, to be permanent; and as time passed the two factions acquired more clearly distinct identities than they had had in 1903. In later years, Lenin was sometimes to express pride in being a 'splitter', meaning by this that he considered large, loosely-knit political organizations to be less effective than smaller, disciplined radical groups demanding a high degree of commitment and ideological unity. But some people also attributed this trait to his difficulty in tolerating disagreement-that 'malicious suspiciousness' that Trot- sky called 'a caricature of Jacobin intolerance' in a prerevolutionary polemic. l4 In the years after 1903, the Mensheviks emerged as the more orthodox in their Marxism (not counting Trotsky, a Menshevik until mid-1917 but always a maverick), less inclined to force the pace of events towards revolution and less interested in creating a tightly organized and disciplined revolutionary party. They had more success than the Bolsheviks in attracting support in the non-Russian areas of the Empire, while the Bolsheviks had the edge among Russian workers. (In both parties, however, Jews and other non- Russians were prominent in the intelligentsia-dominated leadership.) In the last prewar years, 1910-14, the Mensheviks lost working-class support to the Bolsheviks as the workers' mood became more militant: they were perceived as a more 'respectable' party with closer links to the bourgeoisie, whereas the Bolsheviks were seen as more working-class as well as more revolutionary.15 The Bolsheviks, unlike the Mensheviks, had a single leader, and their identity was in large part defined by Lenin's ideas and personality. Lenin's first distinctive trait as a Marxist theoretician was his emphasis on party organization. He saw the party not only as the vanguard of proletarian revolution but also in a sense as its creator, since he argued that the proletariat alone could achieve only a trade-union consciousness and not a revolutionary one. Lenin believed that the core of the party's membership should The Setting 3I consist of full-time professional revolutionaries, recruited both from the intelligentsia and the working class, but concentrating on the political organization of workers rather than any other social group. In What Is To Be Done? (1902), he insisted on the importance of centralization, strict discipline, and ideological unity within the party. These, of course, were logical prescriptions for a party operating clandestinely in a police state. Nevertheless, it seemed to many of Lenin's contemporaries (and later to many scholars) that Lenin's dislike of looser mass organizations allowing greater diversity and spontaneity was not purely expedient but reflected a natural authoritarian bent. Lenin differed from many other Russian Marxists in seeming actively to desire a proletarian revolution rather than simply predict- ing that one would ultimately occur. This was a character trait that would surely have endeared him to Karl Marx, despite the fact that it required some revision of orthodox Marxism. The idea that the liberal bourgeoisie must be the natural leader of Russia's anti- autocratic revolution was never really acceptable to Lenin; and in Two Tactics of Social Democracy, written in the midst of the 1905 Revolution, he insisted that the proletariat-allied with Russia's rebellious peasantry-could and should play a dominant role. Clearly it was necessary for any Russian Marxist with serious revolutionary intentions to find a way round the doctrine of bourgeois revolutionary leadership, and Trotsky was to make a similar and perhaps more successful effort with his theory of 'permanent revolution'. In Lenin's writing from 1905, the words 'dictatorship', 'insurrection', and 'civil war' appeared increasingly frequently. It was in these harsh, violent, and realistic terms that he conceived the future revolutionary transfer of power. The 1905 Revolution and its aftermath; the First World War Late Tsarist Russia was an expanding imperial power with the largest standing army of any of the great powers of Europe. It strength vis- a-vis the outside world was a source of pride, an achievement that could be set against the country's internal political and social problems. In the words attributed to an early twentieth-century Minister of Interior, 'a small victorious war' was the best remedy for Russia's domestic unrest. Historically, however, this was a rather dubious proposition. Over the past half century, Russia's wars had 32 The Setting tended neither to be successful nor to strengthen society's confidence in the government. The military humiliation of the Crimean War had precipitated the radical domestic reforms of the 1860s. The diplomatic defeat that Russia suffered after its military involvement in the Balkans in the late 1870s produced an internal political crisis that ended only with Alexander 11's assassination. In the early 1900s~ Russian expansion in the Far East was pushing it towards a conflict with another expansionist power in the region, Japan. Though some of Nicholas 11's ministers urged caution, the prevailing sentiment in court and high bureaucratic circles was that there were easy pickings to be made in the Far East, and that Japan-an inferior, non- European power, after all-would not be a formidable adversary. Initiated by Japan, but provoked almost equally by Russian policy in the Far East, the Russo-Japanese War broke out in January 1904. For Russia, the war turned out to be a series of disasters and humiliations on land and at sea. The early patriotic enthusiasm of respectable society quickly soured, and-as had also happened during the 1891 famine-attempts by public organizations like the zemstvos to help the government in an emergency only led to conflicts with the bureaucracy and frustration. This fuelled the liberal movement, since autocracy always seemed least tolerable when it was most clearly perceived as incompetent and inefficient; and the zemstvo nobility and professionals rallied behind the illegal Liberation movement, directed from Europe by Petr Struve and other liberal activists. In the last months of 1904, with the war still in progress, the liberals in Russia organized a banquet campaign (modelled on that used against the French King, Louis Philippe, in 1847)~through which the social elite demonstrated support for the idea of constitutional reform. At the same time, the government was under other kinds of pressure, including terrorist attacks on officials, student demonstrations and workers' strikes. In January 1905, Petersburg workers held a peaceful demonstration-organized not by militants and revolutionaries, but by a renegade priest with police connections, Father Gapon-to bring their economic grievances to the attention of the Tsar. On Bloody Sunday (9 January), troops fired on the demonstrators outside the Winter Palace, and the 1905 Revolution had begun. The spirit of national solidarity against the autocracy was very strong during the first nine months of 1905. The liberals' claim to leadership of the revolutionary movement was not seriously chal- The Setting 33 lenged; and their bargaining position with the regime was based not only on support from the zemstvos and the new unions of middle- class professionals but also on the heterogeneous pressures coming from student demonstrations, workers' strikes, peasant disorders, mutinies in the armed forces, and unrest in the non-Russian regions of the Empire. The autocracy, for its part, was consistently on the defensive, seized by panic and confusion, and apparently unable to restore order. Its prospects for survival improved markedly when Witte managed to negotiate peace with Japan (the Treaty of Ports- mouth) on remarkably advantageous terms in late August 1905. But the regime still had a million of its troops in Manchuria, and they could not be brought home on the Trans-Siberian Railway until the striking railwaymen were brought back under control. The culmination of the liberal revolution was Nicholas 11's Octo- ber Manifesto (1905)~in which he conceded the principle of a constitution and promised to create a national elected parliament, the Duma. The Manifesto divided the liberals: the Octobrists accepted it, while the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets) formally withheld acceptance and hoped for further concessions. In practice, however, the liberals withdrew from revolutionary activity at this time, and concentrated their energies on organizing the new Octo- brist and Cadet parties and preparing for the forthcoming Duma elections. However, the workers remained actively revolutionary until the end of the year, achieving greater visibility than before and becoming increasingly militant. In October, the workers of Petersburg organ- ized a 'soviet' or council of workers' representatives elected in the factories. The practical function of the Petersburg Soviet was to provide the city with a kind of emergency municipal government at a time when other institutions were paralysed and a general strike was in progress. But it also became a political forum for the workers, and to a lesser extent for socialists from the revolutionary parties (Trotsky, then a Menshevik, became one of the Soviet's leaders). For a few months, the Tsarist authorities handled the Soviet in a gingerly manner, and similar bodies emerged in Moscow and other cities. But early in December it was dispersed by a successful police operation. The news of the attack on the Petersburg Soviet led to an armed uprising by the Moscow Soviet, in which the Bolsheviks had gained considerable influence. This was put down by troops, but the workers fought back and there were many casualties. 34 The Setting The urban revolution of 1905 stimulated the most serious peasant uprisings since the Pugachev revolt in the late eighteenth century. But the urban and rural revolutions were not simultaneous. Peasant rioting-consisting of the sacking and burning of manor houses and attacks on landowners and officials-began in the summer of 1905 and rose to a peak in the late autumn, subsided, and then resumed on a large scale in 1906. But even in late 1905 the regime was strong enough to begin using troops in a campaign of village-by-village pacification. By the middle of 1906, all the troops were back from the Far East, and discipline had been restored in the armed forces. In the winter of 1906-7, much of rural Russia was under martial law, and summary justice (including over a thousand executions) was dispensed by field courts martial. Russia's landowning nobility learnt a lesson from the events of 1905-6, namely that its interests lay with the autocracy (which could perhaps shield it from a vengeful peasantry) and not with the libera1s.l6 But in urban terms, the 1905 Revolution did not produce such clear consciousness of class polarization: even for most social- ists, this was not a Russian 1848, revealing the treacherous nature of liberalism and the essential antagonism of bourgeoisie and prolet- ariat. The liberals-representing a professional rather than capitalist middle class-had stood aside in October, but they had not joined the regime in an onslaught on the workers' revolution. Their attitude to the workers' and socialist movements remained much more benign than that of liberals in most European countries. The workers, for their part, seem to have perceived the liberals rather as a timorous ally than a treacherous one. The political outcome of the 1905 Revolution was ambiguous, and in some ways unsatisfactory to all concerned. In the Fundamental Laws of 1906-the closest Russia came to a constitution-Nicholas 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 was introduced which virtually disfranchised some social groups and heavily over-represented the landed nobility. 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 The Setting 35 legal reforms of the 1860s had bred lawyers; and both groups had an inherent tendency to develop values and aspirations that the autoc- racy could not abide. One thing that the 1905 Revolution did not change was the police regime that had come to maturity in the 1880s. 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 ,800 officials were killed and 2,083 were wounded in politically motivated attacks1' 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 fa~ade.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' spec- tacular 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 fa~ade of legal political institutions and a new breed of self-important, chattering liberal politicians (to summarize Lenin's view of them, which did not greatly differ from Nicholas 11'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 36 The Setting 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 miry 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 1914, about 40 per cent of peasant households in European Russia had formally separated from the miry although, given the legal and practical complexity of the process, only a relatively small number had completed the later steps towards establishing themselves as proprietors farming their own consolidated and self-contained blocks of land.18 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 1906, 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 1910. Large-scale strikes became increasingly common in the immediate prewar years, culmi- nating 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 The Setting 37 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.l9 When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, with Russia allied with France and England against Germany and Austria-Hungary, 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 sup- porting Russia's war effort as long as it was in defence of Russian territory. Lenin, however, belonged to the smaller group of 'defeat- ists' who repudiated their country's cause entirely: it was an imper- ialist 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 mora- torium 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. 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 38 The Setting 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 deteriorated drastically: the mood in the Duma and among the educated public as a whole was captured in the phrase with which the Cadet Pave1 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 haemophiliazO-threw the an

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