‘There will be revolution in Russia, and starting with unlimited liberty it will conclude with unlimited despotism.’

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Devils (1872)

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 Ancien Régime

2 Revolutionaries

3 The Dress Rehearsal

4 The World at War

5 The February Revolution

6 The Agony of Kerensky’s Government

7 The Spoils of War

8 ‘Insurrection is an Art’

9 A Disorderly Coup

10 The New World

11 Dictatorship Over the Proletariat

12 Civil War: Reds and Whites

13 State of Terror

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Picture credits

The Russian Empire, 1878–1917

INTRODUCTION

THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO MADE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION wanted to change the world – and they did. The epic scale of their ambition is the most important thing to remember about the events and the individuals in the drama of 1917. The intention at first may have been to overthrow a Tsar and a dynasty that had ruled Russia for three centuries as an autocracy. But it went way beyond that. The aim of Communism, the faith espoused by the Bolsheviks who seized victory amid the Revolutionary moment, was no less than to perfect mankind and put an end to exploitation by one group of people – one class – by another. It was never simply an attempt at building a new economic and social system based on greater equality, but offered an entirely different way of looking at the world and history. The ‘founders’ Karl Marx and then Vladimir Lenin claimed their ideology was ‘scientific’. But all true believers – and I met many truly brilliant examples over the years and in many parts of the world, whose consciences were sorely tested – always understood that ‘faith’ was the key. The appeal of Communism was religious, spiritual and the Party was the Church: ‘I can see bright green strips of grass, clear blue sky and sunlight everywhere,’ wrote Leon Trotsky, not long before he mounted the Bolshevik coup to begin the new regime of the Soviets. ‘Life is beautiful. Let future generations of people cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence and enjoy it to the full.’* It seems almost quaint to recall this kind of vision, knowing how soon it took for cynicism to eat into the soul of Communism.

Nikolai Lokhoff’s We Reign Over You, an early socialist propaganda poster of the Capitalist Pyramid, painted in 1897, but banned by Tsarist censors.

The messianic scale of the Bolsheviks’ ambition made the scale of their failure so vast and shocking. From day one the revolutionaries encountered the reluctance of many people – the majority, as it turned out – to be perfected in the way that Comrades Lenin and Trotsky had envisaged for them. This is the story of the early years of the Revolution – until around 1921 when the Bolsheviks had won the Russian Civil War, faced famine and disaster and reversed many of their extreme radical measures towards a new reformist course. I will show what the early Bolsheviks wanted to do – as well as how they coerced, bullied, bribed and terrorized their people in their attempt to achieve it. It will show too how they laid the groundwork for the outcomes that followed.

It is no exaggeration to argue that the Russian Revolution has had a more profound impact on the world since 1900 than any other recent event – and on historiography too. The history of most of the twentieth century has been a reaction to ‘the spectre of Communism’ made flesh by the Revolution in Petrograd in 1917. Fascism, the rise of Hitler, high Stalinism, the Second World War, the Cold War, America’s policies of ‘containment’ to confront the Soviets’ superpower status, the emergence of a new incarnation of Russian nationalism under Vladimir Putin – all are in one way or another the result of the Bolshevik Revolution.

By the mid-1970s nearly a third of the world’s land mass was administered by Communist regimes – and the effects of the Soviet style ‘experiment’ continue to manifest themselves in profound fashion. The rise of China as an economic success story and world power dates from the unification of the country under the Communists, for good or ill. Mao Zedong’s successors may have abandoned what most people think of as socialist policies in any way, but Lenin would recognize China’s rigid one-party control under the Communist Party as familiar.

European Russia, 1917

Many modern historians, whatever side they were on in the ideological/cultural divide of the Cold War and its aftermath, have used the Russian Revolution as their chief reference point. Some on the Left argued that Communism cannot be regarded as a failure because it was never properly applied in Russia or the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Many others – and not just historians of the Right – have described the seven decades of Communist rule between the Revolutions of 1917 and the demise of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s as a tragedy for Russia and the world. Broadly, that is how I have tended to see it, as have most writers in the Western tradition until interest in Marxism and anti-capitalist economics began to revive in recent years. Many – perhaps most – historians from the developing world in Africa, Asia and South America have argued from a very different perspective. They saw how the Russian Revolution played a crucially important role in the process of decolonization; their sympathies lay in a different direction.

Was the Revolution a good idea badly implemented, as the socialists believed – or a terrible idea, rather more a nightmare than a dream, implemented with predictably disastrous results? This short introduction explores these issues.

Victor Sebestyen

January 2023

* Leon Trotsky, My Life, An Attempt at an Autobiography (Scribner, New York, 1930).

A NOTE ON DATES

The Julian (Old Style) calendar, used in Russia until February 1918, was thirteen days behind the Gregorian (New Style) calendar used in most of the rest of the world. Thus, according to the Gregorian calendar, the February Revolution of 1917 began on 8 March (Old Style, 23 February) and the October Revolution of 1917 on 7 November (Old Style, 25 October). This book uses the Old Style calendar for dates up until February 1918, and the New Style thereafter.

THE SOVIET UNION, 1920–36

1

ANCIEN RÉGIME

NOTHING DISPROVES MARXIST THEORY ABOUT HISTORY MORE categorically than the Russian Revolution. The classic interpretation from The Communist Manifesto and Capital insists that past and present are driven almost entirely by sweeping economic and social forces, not by the actions of individuals or even small groups of individuals. This story about the events of 1917 – the attempt to change the world through a fundamentalist form of socialism and its swift descent into totalitarian dictatorship – depended on the character and choices of a few key players.

Without the presence of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in Petrograd in October 1917, there would have been no Bolshevik takeover – not then, and not in the way it happened. Even a man as vain and self-centred as Leon Trotsky, himself an inspirational figure in the Revolution and author of one of its most sparkling and brilliant histories, acknowledged the crucial importance of Lenin as leader. He said in the preface that there would have been no book to write if not for Lenin’s role in 1917. The Soviet Union that Lenin built as the world’s first Communist state remained a place in the creator’s image until the end of its existence nearly seventy years after his death: intolerant, ruthless, ultra-secretive, ascetic.

Equally, there would have been no Russian Revolution if not for the weakness and sheer incompetence of the last Tsar, Nicholas II. The first, the original, the truest ‘Communist joke’ – a genre of dark humour that became famous in the Soviet world – was the comment from a Bolshevik commissar as early as 1919 suggesting that Tsar Nicholas should have been given the highest Soviet honour, the Order of the Red Banner, for his ‘services to the Revolution’.

Historians have on the whole been kind to Nicholas II, mainly because of the gruesome manner of his and his family’s death. But he was largely responsible for the destruction of his family, his dynasty and the Russian state as it had existed for 300 years under the Romanov autocracy, one of the most successful imperial families in history until he succeeded to the throne. ‘Revisionist’ biographers who suggested that he was a well-intentioned figure swept away by tides of history are too lenient on him. If at the start of his reign Nicholas II had made any efforts to establish a constitutional monarchy, modernize Russian institutions by introducing liberal reforms and allow political activity to flourish, he might have saved Russia from catastrophe in the twentieth century – and his life. He deserves his place in the dustbin of history. At a time when Russia needed wise and imaginative leadership, it was landed with a ruler totally unequipped for the role. The collapse of Russia’s ancien régime came from the top. Under Nicholas, Russia was ‘an autocracy without an autocrat’ – an observation made frequently at the time.

Nicholas never questioned his rigid belief in the Romanovs’ principles of monarchy. In January 1895, a few weeks after he succeeded to the throne, he told a gathering of provincial nobles that any hopes of liberalization politically were ‘senseless dreams’ and that he had sworn it as his duty ‘to maintain […] autocracy as firmly and unflinchingly as it was preserved by my unforgettable dead father’.

The Romanov Royal Family – Tsar, Tsarina, Tsarevich and four angelic-looking daughters, a photograph taken months before the outbreak of the First World War.

He wanted to be an autocrat but didn’t look or sound like one, and he lacked the personality, the intelligence or the strength of will to be an effective one. He might have been a successful ceremonial monarch. His manners were impeccable, he spoke platitudes elegantly and he looked handsome in a uniform. But that is not how the Romanovs reigned. They clung to an archaic, semimystical idea of monarchy. He had a medieval belief in his divine right to rule, but no understanding of the nature of power.

He was not completely without brains. He was fluent in English, German and French and had decent Italian too. But it was said of him that ‘he could speak several languages impeccably but had nothing intelligent or interesting to say in any of them’. Others who knew him were more generous. ‘He was the best bred person I ever met,’ said one of the less sycophantic courtiers. ‘He had certain abilities, but they were limited by the tremendous parochialism of his education and outlook,’ said another.

—★—

SOME REVISIONIST HISTORIANS – the excellent Richard Pipes, for example, in his groundbreaking Russia Under the Old Regime (1974) – have argued that in the twenty-five years or so before the start of the First World War Russia was on the road to becoming a modern European state. It is true that during that time Russia had boomed economically – up to a point. GDP growth from 1891 to 1910 was 8 per cent per annum, foreign investment was flooding into the country – around half of Russian securities, excluding mortgages, was held by investors from abroad. Alfred Nobel had turned the oilfields around Baku into the world’s second largest producer of oil outside Texas. In some limited ways Russia was a dynamic place, though from a very low bar compared with most of Western Europe and growth was slowing down after around 1905. But in many other ways Russia was entirely undeveloped as a modern society.

Nicholas II and Alexandra during the celebrations marking the 300th anniversary of rule by the Romanov dynasty in Russia, 1913.

The numbers of urban factory workers quadrupled in twenty years, but was still very small compared to Britain, Germany, France or Austria–Hungary, the empires it was competing with to be one of Europe’s ‘Great Powers’. Industrial workers and miners – ‘snatched from the plough and hurled straight into the factory furnace’ in Trotsky’s famous phrase – were banned from any collective trade union activity; until 1910 children of twelve were still working twelve-hour days in atrocious conditions. Russia’s urban population quadrupled from 7 million to 28 million in the thirty-five years after 1870 but general standards of living and of health were shocking by Western standards. The death rate in St Petersburg was the highest of any capital city in Europe – far higher even than Constantinople, which was the next worst. There was a cholera epidemic in the city on average every three years from 1890 to 1912. In the winter of 1908–09, 30,000 people died from the disease. The Tsarist government did next to nothing to improve conditions of Russia’s workers – an obvious fault, as the factories would be