The Russian Revolution (3 page)

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 revolutionary 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 passe in an age often described as postmodern. But that is appropriate for our subject, since the industrial and technological modernity for which the Bolsheviks strove now seems hopelessly outdated: the giant smokestacks that clutter the landscape of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe like a herd of polluting dinosaurs were, in their time, the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 1930s, its meaning was hard to distinguish from the actual building of new factories and industrial towns currently in progress. To Communists of that generation, the new smokestacks 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 "revolution betrayed" '.8

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 landowners 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 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 available 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 deal to substantiate their claim to be a workers' party. They also created a broad channel for workingclass upward mobility, since the recruitment of workers to party membership went hand in hand with the promotion of workingclass Communists to white-collar administrative and managerial positions. During the Cultural Revolution at the end of the 1920s, 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 1930s, 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 thereafter. 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 enemies of the revolution in terms of class. To be a noble, a capitalist, or a kulak was ipso facto evidence of counter-revolutionary sympathies. Like most revolutionaries (perhaps even more than most, given their prewar experience of underground party organization and conspiracy), the Bolsheviks were obsessed with counterrevolutionary 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 counterrevolutionary 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 Revolution: 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 1937-8.10 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 against party members, particularly those in high official positions, although arrests and fear quickly spread into the nonparty intelligentsia and, to a lesser degree, the broader population. In the Great Purges, which would be more accurately described as the Great Terror,' 1 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 third edition

Like the earlier editions, this third edition is essentially a history of the Russian Revolution as experienced in Russia, not in the nonRussian territories that were part of the old Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. This limitation must be stressed all the more strongly now that a lively and valuable scholarship on the nonRussian areas and peoples has developed. With respect to its core subject, the third edition incorporates new material that has become available since t99t as well as recent international scholarship. While there are no major changes in the argument or organization of the book, there are a number of small changes reflecting my response to new information and new scholarly interpretations. I have used the footnotes to call attention to important recent (and older) English-language scholarship, as well as Russian scholarship in English translation, and kept citation of Russian-language work and documents to a minimum. The Select Bibliography provides a brief guide to further reading.

1 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 i86os) 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 impoverishment 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 8o 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 II, 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 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 regressive), 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 II 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.