History of the Soviet Union

In this way Marx overcame, to his own satisfaction and that of most of his followers, the troubling gap between ideal and fulfilment. The trouble is, there was and is no necessary connection between Marx’s vision of intensifying socioeconomic crisis, with everyone moved by their own material interests, and the world of harmony and brother-hood which was supposed to succeed the revolution. Indeed, logically speaking, if the workers were impelled by their own economic interests in making revolution, then the more likely sequel of such a revolution would be further economic struggle, but with a different set of masters. Nevertheless, the idea that the workers’ revolution would somehow magically cancel out all the conflicts of society had enormous attraction. It seemed to be both realistic and optimistic at the same time. It had the simultaneous attractions of a science and a religion. That is what made it so appealing, and nowhere more so than in Russia, where the intelligentsia already had its own troubles with a secular state claiming religious prerogatives.

Certainly the young Vladimir Ulyanov–or Lenin, as he became known–was attracted by precisely this dual nature of Marxism. He had been deeply affected by the execution in 1887 of his elder brother Alexander for membership of a conspiracy to murder the emperor. Lenin was attracted by his brother’s idealism and self-sacrifice, but at the same time he was determined not to give up his own life in vain. He wanted to pursue Alexander’s aim of revolutionary social transformation with certainty. Hence the scientific claims of Marxism were very important to him. Reading Marx’s Capital was, as he later said, a revelation to him, because it seemed to demonstrate that revolution was embedded in the objective evolution of society, if one only had the patience and consistency to await its unfolding. In his own early writings, Lenin made a similar analysis of Russia’s own socioeconomic structure, aiming to show that capitalism was already destroying the economy of the peasant commune, and that capitalism–and therefore ultimately revolution–was inevitable in Russia. Admittedly Lenin felt that Russia had further to go than most of Europe, and, following Plekhanov, he envisaged a revolution in two stages: (i) the ‘bourgeois democratic’ one, when the feudal system, still not entirely destroyed in Russia, would be finally overthrown by an alliance of the ‘bourgeois liberals’ with the as yet small workers’ party; (ii) the later socialist stage, which would come in the fullness of time, when capitalism was fully developed and the working class had reached maturity.

All this had the merit of apparent certainty. But it was predicated on a formidably extensive time scale, and would require daunting patience and self-restraint to realize in full. In fact Lenin did not for long adhere to the full schema, but began to cast around for ways of telescoping the two stages. Furthermore, in his own way, he was aware of the gap between science and prophecy in Marx. He did not share the master’s confidence that the workers would automatically grasp the full significance of their destitution in existing society and how it might be ended. On the contrary, in his pamphlet What is to be Done? (1902) he expressed his fear that, left to themselves, workers would not attempt a revolution but would fight for more limited goals, such as higher wages, better working conditions and more humane treatment from their employers. His own experience of propaganda work in the St Petersburg factories of the 1890s led him to the conclusion that ‘The workers did not have, nor was it possible for them to have, an awareness of the irreconcilable contradiction of their interests with the whole modern political and social system.’ This did not apply just to Russian workers: ‘The history of all countries shows that by itself the working class can only develop a trade union consciousness, that is to say a conviction of the necessity to form trade unions, struggle with the employers, obtain from the government this or that law.’ Only the ‘educated representatives of the propertied classes–the intelligentsia’ could fully understand the real, as distinct from the superficial, needs of the workers. To bring about a revolution, a genuinely revolutionary party was needed, that is, one ‘embracing primarily and chiefly people whose profession consists of revolutionary activity’. That seemed, on the face of it, to exclude any workers, since their profession, perforce, was factory labour.

This was a most important clarification of a weak point in Marxist theory. In actual practice, Lenin never tried to run his party in this way. But he always stuck theoretically to his definition of the revolutionary party, and indeed made it his touchstone of the true revolutionary spirit. For the sake of it he was prepared to break with other Marxists who took a different view. At what was, in effect, the founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party, in Brussels and London in 1903, Lenin insisted that ‘personal participation in one of the party’s organizations’ was to be the key qualification for membership. His principal opponent, Yuly Martov, wanted a more relaxed formulation: ‘regular personal support under the guidance of one of the party’s organizations’. This would make it easier for workers to become full party members, even in conditions of illegality. Lenin lost that particular vote, but nevertheless emerged from the congress with a majority, and henceforth called his faction the ‘Bolsheviks’ or ‘men of the majority’, while Martov’s had to content themselves with the sobriquet ‘Mensheviks’ or ‘men of the minority’.

The issue which provoked the great split in the Russian Social Democratic Party sounds like a minor organizational quibble. In fact, however, this quibble turned out to symbolize more profound disagreements, which drove the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks ever further apart. With time it became clear that they were envisaging two different kinds of revolution. The Mensheviks laid great store by the coming of a parliamentary ‘bourgeois’ republic, in which a mass working-class party would act as a legal opposition until they were numerous enough to take power on their own account. Lenin, however, became increasingly impatient with the protracted timetable entailed by this vision. He hankered after telescoping the whole process, running the two revolutions together by enlisting the peasants (carrying out a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution against the landlords) as auxiliaries of the workers (carrying out their ‘socialist’ revolution against the capitalists). However, he did not fully clarify his ideas on this issue until his final return to Russia from exile in 1917.

In effect, Lenin reintegrated into Russian Marxism certain elements of the Populist tradition: the leadership of a small group of intelligentsia revolutionaries, the readiness to regard the peasants as a revolutionary class, and the telescoping of the ‘bourgeois’ phase of the revolution.

The Populists had, however, their own views. They recovered from their prostration of the 1880s, and by 1901 managed to form a new political party, with its centre in emigration, the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Their theoreticians no longer disputed the proposition that industrial capitalism had come to Russia, but they maintained that it had taken a very different form from the one Marx envisaged. First, it was heavily dominated by the state. Secondly, most of the workers had not really broken away from the countryside: they were ‘peasant-workers’, not proletarians in the Marxist sense. The Socialist Revolutionaries refused, in fact, to recognize any fundamental distinction between workers and peasants: they organized themselves, and with some success, to work among both. They also set up a ‘fighting detachment’ to continue the work of the People’s Will by terrorism directed against officials: they succeeded between 1901 and 1908 in murdering a Grand Duke, several ministers and over a hundred other senior officials.

In 1905, risings broke out in both town and countryside. These outbursts owed little to the organizational efforts of the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, but rather more to their long-term inspiration. The most powerful ingredient of all, however, was the enduring discontent felt by the peasants and workers who made up the great majority of Russia’s population.

The Emancipation Act promulgated by Alexander II in 1861 had released the peasants from personal bondage, but it had not relieved any of their other hardships, and indeed had burdened them with an additional grievance. This was the obligation to pay for land which they already regarded as their own–and indeed, in the Lockean sense that they ‘mixed their labour with it’, so it was. The peasants’ collective legal sense had never accepted the legitimacy of the awards of land made by the tsars to the nobles.

In order to ensure that the peasants would pay for the land ‘newly allotted’ to them, and would discharge their other taxes, the government bound them to a ‘village society’, which was often, though not always, equivalent to the old ‘commune’, or mir. This institution has been the subject of more myth-making and less solid empirical research than perhaps any other in Russian history, partly because its members left little or no written testimony, and partly because ideologists of left and right hoped and feared great things from it. The government saw it as a guarantor of law and order, as well as of primitive social security, while the revolutionaries, at least the Populists, regarded its practices as a kind of rudimentary socialism, which might enable Russian society to proceed straight to real socialism without the unpleasant intermediate stage of capitalism. In Great Russia the mir assembly, consisting of heads of household, periodically redistributed land, adding to the allotments of families grown larger (along with the obligation to pay higher taxes) and subtracting from the allotments of those which had lost members. In the Ukraine and Bielorussia, on the other hand, rather different customs prevailed: land was usually passed down the family hereditarily, and was not subject to periodic redistribution. In both types of commune, timber, meadows, pastures and water-courses were held in common.

The communal land tenure system, though it provided a safety net in time of difficulty, had real economic disadvantages. All the villagers were compelled to adopt a safe but primitive and underproductive form of agriculture: the open three-field system with strip farming. At a time when the peasant population was growing very fast–from around 55 million in 1863 to 82 million in 1897–the mir in effect impeded the introduction of improved seeds, fertilizers or machines; and it offered a disincentive to land improvement, since the cultivator never knew when his plot might be taken away from him and awarded to someone else.

The low level of agricultural productivity was only partly a result of communal tenure. Partly, too, it was a function of low urbanization. Where, as in most of western Europe, there was a dense network of towns and good communications between them, then a receptive market existed for a wide variety of agricultural produce. In Russia this was the case only around St Petersburg and Moscow. Over the remaining expanses of Russia’s main agricultural regions, peasants scratched the soil with wooden ploughs, grew rye and oats, lived on a diet of ‘cabbage soup and gruel’ (as a popular saying had it) and sold very little to the outside world, except when economic need made it unavoidable.

As a result, though the picture varied from area to area, it seems clear enough that most peasants were poor, threatened by hunger in bad years, and that the problem was getting worse. In 1890 more than 60 per cent of peasants called up for the army were declared unfit on health grounds: and that was before the famine of 1891.

The peasants themselves felt that the explanation for all this was obvious: they needed more land, and they had a right to it. In the neighbouring nobles’ fields they saw their own potential salvation. This was an illusion: the total area of peasant landholdings exceeded that of the landowners by nearly three to one, so that simple expropriation of the latter would not solve the problem. But in 1905 the peasants were convinced that it would, and that their grievance was justified. Acting in common, by decision of their mir assemblies, they began to take the law into their own hands, seizing estates and driving the landowners out. It took a long time for the government to restore order.

In fact, there was no simple solution to Russia’s agrarian problem, as the later experience of developing countries confirms. Only a patient combination of improvements in land tenure and in agricultural methods with the gradual development of the commercial and industrial life of the country could in the end have brought greater prosperity to the village. But the myth that there was a simple solution, and that the peasants had a natural right to all the land, was the single most explosive factor in Russian politics in the last years of the tsarist regime.

Peter Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 to 1911, tried to make a start to the process of patient improvement by giving peasant households the right to withdraw from the village commune, set up on their own and enclose their holdings. After a promising start, however, this programme was abruptly curtailed by war and revolution.

Workers, the other great factor in the revolutionary upheaval of 1905, were also restless to an unusual degree in Russia compared with their West European counterparts. This may have been because they had unusually close ties with the land. Under the Emancipation legislation of 1861, a peasant who went into the town to work permanently was still registered with his ‘village society’ and remained legally a peasant. His family still paid taxes there, and he probably sent back money regularly to help them out; perhaps he would return at Christmas or Easter for family celebrations, or in the late summer to help with the harvest. Some workers, especially those in construction and transport, organized themselves in an artisan cooperative, or artel, which had its origins in village life, and was sometimes found even in heavy industry. Individual factories often perpetuated the rural link by recruiting most of their workforce from a particular province; and workers themselves would often form a zemlyachestvo, or regional association, to keep in touch with each other and with their home villages.

Compared with the workers who had lived in the towns for a generation or more, these ‘peasant-workers’ seem to have been unusually prone to unrest at times of crisis. This may have been partly because their right to allotment land in the village gave them something to fall back on, and hence an extra sense of security. Or it may have been because, in the absence of legalized trade unions in the towns, the tradition of collective action was far stronger in the countryside. In their case, too, the newly discovered urban discontents, over housing, pay, working conditions or overbearing foremen, were superimposed on the grievances which they had brought with them from the village. As R. E. Johnson, the most recent student of this subject, has suggested, ‘the fusion of rural and urban discontents and propensities produced an especially explosive mix’.

At any rate, the experience of 1905 suggested that Russian workers, in times of crisis, were unusually good at improvising their own institutions. The body which sparked off the unrest of that year was, ironically, organized by Father Gapon, a priest who wished to save the monarchy. On Sunday 9 January 1905 he led a huge demonstration in the capital, St Petersburg, bearing ikons and portraits of the tsar: they were to march to the Winter Palace with a petition appealing for a living wage and for civil rights. The troops stationed in the streets panicked in the face of the crowd and opened fire: nearly two hundred people were killed and many more wounded.

This incident, which has passed into history as Bloody Sunday, had a dramatic effect: more than any other, it undermined the popular image of the tsar as the benevolent ‘little father’. It helped to release the restraint which the peasants had previously felt about taking the law into their own hands. And it certainly contributed to the wave of strikes, demonstrations and sometimes violence which swept Russia’s industrial cities. In the course of this, workers set up trade unions for the first time, rather begrudgingly legalized by the government. They also improvised councils (or soviets) of workers’ deputies. Beginning as strike committees elected at the workplace, these bodies often found themselves temporarily exercising local government functions as well, in cities whose normal administration was paralysed by strikes. They also negotiated with the employers and the government. In short, they gained a brief but intense experience of self-government, unforgettable to workers who had never before been allowed to organize in their own interests.

The mass popular unrest gave the professional strata and the intelligentsia the chance to press their demands for an elected parliament, or even a constituent assembly, to decide on Russia’s future form of government. Political’ parties were formed, of which the most prominent were the Constitutional Democrats (or Kadets for short), under their leader, the Moscow University history professor, P. N. Milyukov. Their ideal was a constitutional monarchy on the British model, or even a parliamentary republic, as in France.

In the end, faced with a general strike, Tsar Nicholas II reluctantly conceded much of what the Kadets were demanding. In the October Manifesto of 1905 he promised that henceforth the civil rights of all citizens would be observed, and he granted a parliament, the Duma, to be elected on an indirect but fairly broad franchise. Written into its statute was the provision that ‘without [its] consent no law can take effect’. This concession relieved him of the outright opposition of the liberals, and Nicholas was then able to instruct the police and army–which remained almost completely loyal–to crush the workers’ and peasants’ movement.

During the few years of its existence, the Duma was sometimes harassed, sometimes ignored by the government, and indeed twice summarily dissolved. Nevertheless, its mere presence made a great difference to political life. Its electoral assemblies remained as a minimal focus for working-class and peasant political education and activity, even at a time when the government was trying to withdraw some of its concessions of 1905. And the existence of a relatively free press alongside it meant that the reading public (now growing very fast) were incomparably better informed about political issues than they ever had been before. Combined with the rapid growth in literacy, with the bitter political conflicts resulting from 1905, and with ever-accelerating social and economic change, all this was potentially very explosive.

The tsarist monarchy was finally overthrown in the midst of the First World War. Major wars, of course, raise all the stakes in domestic politics, since survival itself is at issue. Furthermore, the government fought this one before a Duma which proved watchful and at times bitterly critical, while the press, though under wartime censorship, remained freer than at any time before 1905. Whether the constitutional monarchy founded by the October Manifesto could have survived if there had been no war is an open question. What is certain is that the war caught it at a very vulnerable moment, when it had not yet fully established itself in the eyes of the public, yet was already suffering from the exposure to fierce criticism which civil liberties made possible. Bloody Sunday had weakened the reputation of the tsar. His standing was now further undermined by rumours–bandied around in the press though never substantiated–that the royal family was being compromised by a ‘holy man’ of dubious credentials, Rasputin, and that the court even had treacherous connections with the enemy, Germany. As the normally restrained Milyukov put it in a famous Duma speech of November 1916, ‘Is this stupidity or is it treason?’

Against the background of such public accusations, the more or less normal difficulties of war, military defeat, shortages of guns and food, became magnified into matters involving the very survival of the monarchy.

The end came relatively suddenly, and to at least the revolutionary parties, unexpectedly, in February 1917, when food queues in Petrograd suddenly turned into political demonstrations, demanding an end to what many still called the ‘autocracy’. When even the Cossacks, long the faithful upholders of order, refused to disperse the crowds, Nicholas II suddenly found that he had no supporters. Liberals and socialists were in agreement, for the first time since 1905, and what they agreed was that the monarchy must go. Fearing for national unity, not even the army generals attempted to resist the demand. Two Duma deputies were sent to see the tsar, who tendered his abdication in a railway carriage outside Pskov, on 2 March 1917.

As we now know, the collapse of the monarchy opened the way to eventual rule by Marxist revolutionaries. Russia became the first country to fall under Marxist socialist domination. In the light of Russia’s previous history it is perhaps possible to see why this should have been so. The country’s life had long been arranged on highly authoritarian lines (at least until 1905), dominated by an ideology which was ostensibly religious but was imposed by secular means and thus forfeited most of its spiritual authority. In this sense Russia was ripe for takeover by a self-avowedly secular ideology bearing unacknowledged religious overtones–which is what Marxism was, especially in its Bolshevik form.

In a very real sense, in fact, the Russian autocracy, especially since Peter I, provided a pattern for socialist rule: the notion of the ideological state to which all ranks of the population owed service absolutely and in equal measure. Much, however, was yet to happen before this variant of Marxist socialism gained the upper hand.

2 (#ulink_d36031bd-3202-542d-bdaa-6c14046ca679)

The October Revolution (#ulink_d36031bd-3202-542d-bdaa-6c14046ca679)

It was a mark of the abruptness of political change in Russia that when the monarchy fell, what replaced it was not one regime, but two. On the one hand, the politicians surviving from the Duma established a Provisional Government, in which the principal parties were at first the Kadets, later the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. It was called ‘provisional’ because it was to exercise power only until a Constituent Assembly could be convened, elected by all the people. On the other hand, the workers of Petrograd (as St Petersburg was now called) hastened to revive their memories of the days of freedom in 1905 by re-establishing the Petrograd Soviet. They were joined by the soldiers of the capital city’s garrison, active participants in the revolution for the first time, and their joint tribune was known as the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

But government and soviet refrained from trying to oust each other–for good reason. The Provisional Government, which began by abolishing the tsarist police and security services, had no effective power of coercion, and therefore had to tolerate the soviets as expressions of the popular will, at least in the big cities. As the minister of war, Guchkov, said, ‘The Provisional Government does not possess any real power; and its directives are carried out only to the extent that it is permitted by the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which enjoys all the essential elements of real power, since the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are all in its hands.’ The leaders of the soviets, for their part, recognized that the Provisional Government contained experienced politicians, that it could command the loyalty of the army officers, reduce the chances of counterrevolution, and gain international recognition. The theoretically inclined among them regarded the Provisional Government as a ‘bourgeois’ institution, which the soviets would ‘supervise’, on the workers’ behalf, until such time as the socialist revolution became possible.

The Provisional Government was from the start in a very difficult, arguably an untenable position. It had not been brought to power by election, but nor could it claim direct descent from the old imperial government or the Duma. Prince Lvov, its first prime minister, proclaimed that it had been created by the ‘unanimous revolutionary enthusiasm of the people’. That was to prove a shaky basis, especially since the new government found itself in a situation where it was unable to carry out the reforms that the ‘people’ were expecting. The fundamental difficulty was the war. The peasants might be crying out for a redistribution of the land in their favour, but could such a complex operation be carried out equitably without first a thorough land survey, and while millions of peasant-soldiers, with an impeccable claim to their own shares, were far away from the village at the front, and unable to take part in the share-out? The workers began to organize themselves to exercise a greater share in the running of factories and enterprises, but was it responsible to attempt such intricate reorganization in the middle of keeping up industrial output for the war effort? Could the supplies problems, which had brought the tsarist government down, be solved while the war was on? Most important of all, was the soldiers’ demand to elect their own committees and to take part in the running of their units compatible with the discipline needed at the front line?

While the war continued, none of these questions could be solved without serious and damaging political conflict. And yet, to stop the war proved almost impossible (I say ‘almost’, since the Bolsheviks did eventually achieve it, but at a price which nearly split the party in two). The leaders of the Petrograd Soviet tried to organize a conference of socialists from all the combatant states, to put pressure on their governments to negotiate a peace ‘without annexations or indemnities’. The British and French governments, however, put paid to this plan by refusing to allow representatives from their parliaments to attend. The alternative would have been to sign a separate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but this would have amounted to a capitulation, and not until the Provisional Government was in its final days did any of its members recommend such a desperate step. So the war went on. Its problems continued to undermine the Provisional Government’s efforts to establish a new political system, until the popular expectations aroused by the February revolution finally brought the Bolsheviks to power.

The new-found freedoms of February caused a tremendous upsurge in the ordinary people’s capacity to organize themselves. It is often supposed that the Russians are a passive people, accustomed to doing what their rulers tell them. Actually, this is far from being the case. Partly because of the huge distances, many Russian communities remained, at least up to the early twentieth century, relatively unaffected by central government, and had to improvise their own arrangements. But even where government has been near and ever-pressing, Russians have always been highly inventive in devising social forms such that they appear to be obeying their rulers, whilst in fact running matters as far as possible to their own advantage. This was the centuries-old basis of the peasant commune, which the government had always intended as an agency for taxation and military recruitment. Now, in 1917, with government repression suddenly removed, there was a veritable explosion of ‘self-help’ organizations among Russian workers, peasants and soldiers, each with their own, often exaggerated demands.

The peasants saw in the February revolution an opportunity to rectify what they considered a very longstanding injustice, that much of the land they worked did not belong to them. As a resolution from Samara province put it, ‘The land must belong to those who work it with their hands, to those whose sweat flows.’ Peasants were prepared to support the Provisional Government as long as it appeared to be actively promoting a wholesale transfer of land to them. As the months passed, and the Provisional Government did nothing, they lost interest in it and turned instead to direct action. Ironically, the government helped them to create the institutions which made this possible: the local land committees, which it set up to carry out a land survey and prepare for the ultimate land reform, actually became dominated at the lowest level by the peasants themselves, and increasingly proceeded to direct land seizures. This was especially the case after the army began to break up. A typical scenario was for a deserter to return to the village from the front, bringing news of land seizures elsewhere. The peasants would gather in their traditional mir assembly, or use the facade of the local land committees; they would discuss the situation and decide to take the local landowner’s estate for themselves. They would then all march together up to the steward’s office, demand the keys, proclaim the land, tools and livestock sequestered and give the owners forty-eight hours to leave. Then they would divide up the land among themselves, using the time-honoured criteria employed in the mir, the ‘labour norm’ or the ‘consumption norm’ (i.e. the number of working hands available, or the number of mouths to feed), whichever prevailed in local custom. They used violence where they thought it necessary, or where things got out of hand.

Inevitably, then, a gulf of mistrust opened between the peasants and the Provisional Government. It was widened by the government’s supplies policy. Because of the problem of supplying the towns with bread, the tsarist government in its last months had instituted a grain monopoly at fixed prices. The Provisional Government felt it had no alternative but to continue this, though the belatedly adjusted prices in a period of high inflation inevitably caused resentment among the peasants. Ultimately, indeed, it led to the peasants’ refusing to part with their produce in the quantities needed. This is where the backward nature of the rural economy became a positive strength to the peasants. It was, of course, more convenient for them to buy matches, paraffin, salt, ironmongery and vodka from the urban market, but, if the terms of trade turned badly against them, then peasants could always turn their backs on the market and make do with the primitive products they could manufacture for themselves. During the summer and autumn of 1917 this is what many of them began to do, resuming a natural economy which their fathers and grandfathers had gradually been leaving behind, shutting themselves off from the market and refusing to provide food for anyone outside their own village. All Russian governments had to face this potential isolationism of the peasant communities until Stalin broke open the village economy by brute force in 1929–30.

Nowhere was the exuberant improvisation of the revolutionary period so evident as in the multiplicity of organizations created by the workers of Russia’s cities. Pride of place, of course, belonged to the soviets, to which the workers of Petrograd streamed back as soon as they had a chance in February 1917. It cannot be said, however, that the Petrograd Soviet, or any other large city soviet, lived up to its original ideals. Perhaps that was impossible. The Petrograd Soviet’s plenary assembly consisted of three thousand members, and even its executive committee soon grew to an unmanageable size, so that many of its functions had to be delegated to a bureau of twenty-four members, on which each of the main socialist parties had a prearranged quota of representatives. Naturally enough, these representatives tended to be established politicians and professional men rather than workers or soldiers. In fact, the attempt to introduce direct democracy led to an engaging but unproductive chaos, so that the real business had to be transferred upstairs to a small number of elected officials. This engendered a feeling among the rank and file that their voices no longer counted for anything. As we shall see, this discontent played an important part in the events of 1917, and helped to provide the Bolsheviks with the impetus that carried them to power.

In reaction, workers tended to devote more of their energies to lower level organizations which expressed their aspirations more directly. In some cases this meant the trade unions. These, however, were not well suited to a fast-changing revolutionary situation. They were bodies with some local roots but also strong national organizations: a few of them had managed to survive in shadowy form since 1905, in spite of persecution. They were organized on the ‘production’ principle, that is to say by branch of industry, whatever the precise skill, qualification or rank of their members. This tended to produce hierarchical splits within unions, which weakened their influence. They were also, of course, designed to function within a relatively stable economic and political environment, promoting their members’ interests within that setting. They were not well adapted to fast-changing circumstances or to attempts to assume real power. It is not surprising that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries retained a grip on many unions up to and beyond October.

In this respect, the factory or shop committees (fabzavkomy) were more suited to the circumstances of 1917. Often their origins were similar to those of the soviets of 1905: they began as informal strike committees during the February-March days, but this time at the level of the individual factory or even shop. The question of how they should develop caused controversy. Many Socialist Revolutionaries and most Mensheviks wanted them to run cultural and welfare facilities for the workers and to represent their interests in negotiations with the employers. That, however, would have reduced them virtually to the status of local trade union branches. The Anarchists, on the other hand, and in the short run the Bolsheviks, wanted fabzavkomy actually to run the factories, or at the very least to supervise the management’s discharge of that duty. The Anarchists intended that in that way they should become units in a self-governing society, while the Bolsheviks planned to subordinate them to the state economic administration of an embryonic socialist society. For both of them, however, the immediate watch-word was ‘workers’ control’, and they persuaded a Petrograd congress of fabzavkomy to adopt it at the end of May–the first institution to pass a Bolshevik resolution.

The factory committees were thus in the vanguard of all the workers’ struggles between February and October–for the eight-hour day, for higher pay and better conditions, and then increasingly for ‘control’ itself. At first the pressure was directed particularly against harsh foremen or staff: workers sometimes dealt with unpopular figures by bundling them into a wheelbarrow and carting them out of the factory gates, to the accompaniment of jeers and catcalls, for a ducking in the nearest river. Increasingly, however, the struggles concerned the very survival of enterprises. Faced with newly militant workers, as well as the more familiar problems of shortages of raw materials, fuel and spare parts, employers sometimes decided that the game was not worth the candle, and that their capital would be better invested in something safer. There was a wave of factory closures. The workers regarded these as lockouts, and often reacted by occupying the factory, and trying to keep production going under their own management.

Right from the beginning, some soviets and factory committees had armed contingents at their disposal. These bodies, often formed during the heady days of February, gradually assumed the name of ‘Red Guards’. They were able to provide themselves with weapons and ammunition by courtesy of garrison soldiers, or by pilfering from armaments works. They patrolled factory premises and maintained order in industrial areas (where the writ of the Provisional Government’s militia never really ran). Not until the Kornilov affair at the end of August did they assume real political importance. At that stage, however, the Bolsheviks, now in control of the Petrograd and many other urban soviets, mobilized them as paramilitary units under the soviets’ Military Revolutionary Committees, originally set up to forestall a military coup (see below, page 48). In that form they made a major contribution to the October seizure of power.

The real troubleshooters of 1917, however, were the soldiers, both at the front and in the rear. Their charter was the famous Order No. 1, passed in full session by a seething and chaotic Petrograd Soviet, before any Provisional Government had even been established. It was intended originally for the Petrograd garrison alone, but it soon spread far more widely, probably because it met soldiers’ wishes, and was swiftly taken up in most units. It called on servicemen to elect committees to run all units down to company level, and to send their delegates to the new soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Soldiers were to recognize the soviets (rather than the Duma) as their political authority. In combat situations, officers were to be obeyed as before, but the committees would control the issue of weapons, and off-duty officers were no longer to be recognized as superiors. In practice, in some units the committees actually arrogated to themselves the authority, not mentioned in Order No. 1, of electing and dismissing officers.

The position of officers during 1917 was not enviable. Because of the high casualty rate at the front during two and a half years of war, most of the junior officers were quite recent appointees, from the same social class as their men, often raw and unsure of their new-found superiority. Though some reacted flexibly to the new situation and found a common language with their men, others retreated into an ex-aggeratedly rigid defence of their recently acquired authority. Among the senior officers were rather more survivors from pre-1914, but they were mostly men who had been taught to regard politics as subversive, an affair of which they were properly ignorant. It is not surprising, therefore, that at all levels of the officer corps there was support for a return to the unquestioning discipline of pre-February.

Evidence suggests that the soldiers, especially at the front line, remained patriotic in outlook even after February, and determined at least to prevent the Germans advancing any further into Russia. The revolution did, however, induce in the men a feeling that they no longer had to obey all orders unquestioningly. The soviets’ peace programme circulated among them, and led to a widespread conviction that only a defensive war was still justified: the formula ‘without annexations or indemnities’ was very popular. The peace offensive also aroused expectations that the war would be over soon and that they could return home. These expectations were further sharpened by intensive propaganda from the Bolsheviks, who sent agitators, newspapers and broadsheets to popularize the idea of a separate peace to be concluded without reference to the Allies.

These expectations were rudely jolted by Minister of Defence Kerensky, who in June ordered an offensive on the south-western front. This was timed partly in order to aid the Allies (the mutinies in the French army looked at that stage more serious than the Russian ones), but partly because the officers hoped it would restore a sense of purpose and discipline among their men. The opposite turned out to be the case. Soldiers’ committees discussed the order to advance at great length: some refused, some went ahead initially and then pulled back when they saw the casualty rate. At any rate, the offensive soon turned into a rout in which the Russian army lost territory. Far more serious than that was the effect on morale. Whole units abandoned their positions, and some of them murdered officers who tried to restore order. Then the mutinous soldiers seized freight wagons, or even whole trains, and held them at gunpoint until they were transported deep into the rear. From there they could return home, rifles at the ready, to take a decisive part, as we have seen, in the share-out of land.

The mood of the garrison troops was, if anything, even more radical than that of those at the front. Many of them were recently mobilized peasants or workers, undergoing their training, and still identifying strongly with the class from which they came. The Provisional Government’s initial agreement with the Petrograd Soviet stipulated that these troops would not be sent to the front, but would stay in the capital to ‘defend the revolution’. And in fact the refusal of a machine-gun regiment to be sent to the front sparked off the July Days in Petrograd, when an undisciplined armed mob caused havoc on the streets.

Even at this stage, however, the army did not disintegrate altogether. Some units remained loyal, particularly Cossack ones, with their special traditions, or specialist units, like those from the artillery, cavalry or engineers. Nowhere was the collapse so complete that the Germans felt they could advance without risk. Indeed, the German High Command deliberately held back, fearing that a major advance might be the one factor which could yet restore morale in the Russian army.

At the time of the February revolution the Bolsheviks numbered, at the highest estimate, no more than 20,000, and their leaders were scattered in exile, at home and abroad. For that reason they had even more difficulty than the other parties in adjusting to the sudden changes. They were seriously divided about what to do, but the dominant figures inside Russia, notably Kamenev and Stalin, inclined towards cooperation with the other socialist parties in the soviets in exercising ‘vigilant supervision’ over the Provisional Government. Some even talked of a rapprochement with the Mensheviks.

Lenin had quite different ideas. He was still in Switzerland in February. He returned to Russia with the help of the German High Command, taking a specially provided ‘sealed train’ through Germany to Sweden. The Germans were anxious to facilitate his return, so that he could begin fomenting unrest inside Russia and spread his idea of a separate peace. They also provided the Bolsheviks with considerable funds thereafter, which helped to pay for the newspapers and political agitators who proved so effective among the soldiers and workers.