The Russian Revolution (10 page)

The February Revolution had given birth to a formidable array of workers' organizations in all Russia's industrial centres, but especially in Petrograd and Moscow. Workers' soviets were created not only at the city level, like the Petrograd Soviet, but also at the lower level of the urban district, where the leadership usually came from the workers themselves rather than the socialist intelligentsia and the mood was often more radical. New trade unions were established; and at the plant level, workers began to set up factory committees (which were not part of the trade-union structure, and sometimes coexisted with local trade-union branches) to deal with management. The factory committees, closest to the grass roots, tended to be the most radical of all workers' organizations. In the factory committees of Petrograd, the Bolsheviks had assumed a dominant position by the end of May 1917.

The factory committees' original function was to be the workers' watchdog over the plant's capitalist management. The term used for this function was `workers' control' (rabochii kontrol'), which implied supervision rather than control in the managerial sense. But in practice the factory committees often went further and started to take over managerial functions. Sometimes this was related to disputes over control of hiring and firing, or was the product of the kind of class hostility that led workers in some plants to put unpopular foremen and managers into wheelbarrows and dump them in the river. In other instances, the factory committees took over to save the workers from unemployment, when the owner or manager abandoned the plant or threatened to close it because it was losing money. As such events became more common, the definition of `workers' control' moved closer to something like workers' self-management.

This change took place as the workers' political mood was becoming more militant, and as the Bolsheviks were gaining influence in the factory committees. Militancy meant hostility to the bourgeoisie and assertion of the workers' primacy in the revolution: just as the revised meaning of `workers' control' was that workers should be masters in their own plants, so there was an emerging sense in the working class that `soviet power' meant that the workers should be sole masters in the district, the city, and perhaps the country as a whole. As political theory, this was closer to anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism than to Bolshevism, and the Bolshevik leaders did not in fact share the view that direct workers' democracy through the factory committees and the soviets was a plausible or desirable alternative to their own concept of a partyled `proletarian dictatorship'. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks were realists, and the political reality in Petrograd in the summer of 1917 was that their party had strong support in the factory committees and did not want to lose it. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks were in favour of `workers' control', without defining too closely what they meant by it.

Rising working-class militancy alarmed the employers: a number of plants were closed down, and one prominent industrialist cautiously expressed his opinion that `the bony hand of hunger' might ultimately be the means of bringing the urban workers back to order. But in the countryside, the landowners' alarm and fear of the peasantry was much greater. The villages were quiet in February, and many of the young peasant men were absent because of conscription for military service. But by May, it was clear that the countryside was sliding into turmoil as it had done in 1905 in response to urban revolution. As in 1905-6, manor houses were being sacked and burned. In addition, the peasants were seizing private and state land for their own use. During the summer, as the disturbances mounted, many landowners abandoned their estates and fled from the countryside.

Although Nicholas II had clung even after the 1905-6 revolts to the idea that Russian peasants loved the Tsar, whatever their opinion of local officials and landed nobles, many peasants responded to news of the downfall of the monarchy and the February Revolution in a quite different way. It seems to have been assumed throughout peasant Russia that this new revolution meant-or should be made to mean-that the nobles' old illegitimate title to the land was revoked. Land should belong to those who tilled it, peasants wrote in their numerous petitions to the Provisional Government in the spring.14 What that seems to have meant to the peasants in concrete terms was that they should get the land which they had tilled as serfs for the nobles, and which had been retained by the noble landowners in the Emancipation settlement. (Much of this land was currently leased from the landowners by peasants; in other cases, the landowners cultivated it, using the local peasants as hired labour.)

If the peasants still held assumptions about the land that went back more than half a century to the time of serfdom, it is scarcely surprising that the agrarian reforms carried out by Stolypin in the years before the First World War had made little impact on peasant consciousness. Still, the evident vitality of the peasant mir in 1917 came as a shock to many people. The Marxists had been arguing since the i88os that the mir had essentially disintegrated internally, surviving only because the state found it a useful instrument. On paper, the effect of Stolypin's reforms had been to dissolve the mir in a high proportion of the villages of European Russia. Yet for all this, the mir was clearly a basic factor in peasant thinking about the land in 1917. In their petitions, the peasants asked for an egalitarian redistribution of lands held by the nobility, the state, and the Church-that is, the same kind of equal allocation among village households that the mir had traditionally organized with regard to the village fields. When unauthorized land seizures began on a large scale in the summer of 1917, the seizures were conducted on behalf of village communities, not individual peasant households, and the general pattern was that the mir subsequently divided up the new lands among the villagers as it had traditionally divided up the old ones. Moreover, the mir often reasserted its authority over former members in 1917-18: the Stolypin `separators', who had left the mir to set themselves up as independent small farmers in the prewar years, were in many cases forced to return and merge their holdings once again in the common village lands.

Despite the seriousness of the land problem and the reports of land seizures from the early summer of 1917, the Provisional Government procrastinated on the issue of land reform. The liberals were not on principle against expropriation of private lands, and generally seem to have regarded the peasants' demands as just. But any radical land reform would clearly pose formidable problems. In the first place, the Government would have to set up a complicated official mechanism of expropriation and transfer of lands, which was almost certainly beyond its current administrative capacities. In the second place, it could not afford to pay the large compensation to the landowners that most liberals considered necessary. The Provisional Government's conclusion was that it would be best to shelve the problems until they could be properly resolved by the Constituent Assembly. In the meantime, it warned the peasantry (though to little avail) not on any account to take the law into its own hands.

The political crises of the summer

In mid-June, Kerensky, now the Provisional Government's Minister of War, encouraged the Russian Army to mount a major offensive on the Galician Front. It was the first serious military undertaking since the February Revolution, as the Germans had been content to watch the disintegration of the Russian forces without engaging themselves further in the east, and the Russian High Command, fearing disaster, had earlier resisted Allied pressure to take the initiative. The Russians' Galician offensive, conducted in June and early July, failed with an estimated 200,000 casualties. It was a disaster in every sense. Morale in the armed forces disintegrated further, and the Germans began a successful counter-attack that continued throughout the summer and autumn. Russian desertions, already rising as peasant soldiers responded to news of the land seizures, grew to epidemic proportions. The Provisional Government's credit was undermined, and tension between government and military leaders increased. At the beginning of July, a governmental crisis was precipitated by the withdrawal of all the Cadet (liberal) ministers and the resignation of the head of the Provisional Government, Prince Lvov.

In the midst of this crisis, Petrograd erupted once again with the mass demonstrations, street violence, and popular disorder of 3-5 July known as the July Days." The crowd, which contemporary witnesses put as high as half a million, included large organized contingents of Kronstadt sailors, soldiers, and workers from the Petrograd plants. To the Provisional Government, it looked like a Bolshevik attempt at insurrection. The Kronstadt sailors, whose arrival in Petrograd set off the disorders, had Bolsheviks among their leaders, carried banners with the Bolshevik slogan `All power to the soviets', and made Bolshevik Party headquarters at the Kseshinskaya Palace their first destination. Yet when the demonstrators reached the Kseshinskaya Palace, Lenin's greeting was subdued, almost curt. He did not encourage them to take violent action against the Provisional Government or the Present Soviet leadership; and, although the crowd moved on to the Soviet and milled around in a threatening manner, no such action was taken. Confused and lacking leadership and specific plans, the demonstrators roamed the city, fell to drinking and looting, and finally dispersed.

In one sense, the July Days were a vindication of Lenin's intransigent stand since April, for they indicated strong popular sentiment against the Provisional Government and the dual power, impatience with the coalition socialists, and eagerness on the part of the Kronstadt sailors and others for violent confrontation and probably insurrection. But in another sense, the July Days were a disaster for the Bolsheviks. Clearly Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee had been caught off balance. They had talked insurrection, in a general way, but not planned it. The Kronstadt Bolsheviks, responding to the sailors' revolutionary mood, had taken an initiative which, in effect, the Bolshevik Central Committee had disowned. The whole affair damaged Bolshevik morale and Lenin's credibility as a revolutionary leader.

The damage was all the greater because the Bolsheviks, despite the leaders' hesitant and uncertain response, were blamed for the July Days by the Provisional Government and the moderate socialists of the Soviet. The Provisional Government decided to crack down, withdrawing the `parliamentary immunity' that politicians of all parties had enjoyed since the February Revolution. Several prominent Bolsheviks were arrested, along with Trotsky, who had taken a position close to Lenin's on the extreme left since his return to Russia in May and was to become an official Bolshevik Party member in August. Orders were issued for the arrest of Lenin and one of his closest associates in the Bolshevik leaderships, Grigorii Zinoviev. During the July Days, moreover, the Provisional Government had intimated that it had evidence to support the rumours that Lenin was a German agent, and the Bolsheviks were battered by a wave of patriotic denunciations in the press that temporarily eroded their popularity in the armed forces and the factories. The Bolshevik Central Committee (and no doubt Lenin himself) feared for Lenin's life. He went into hiding, and early in August, disguised as a workman, crossed the border and took refuge in Finland.

If the Bolsheviks were in trouble, however, this was also true of the Provisional Government, headed from early July by Kerensky. The liberal-socialist coalition was in constant turmoil, with the socialists pushed to the left by their Soviet constituency and the liberals moving to the right under pressure from the industrialists, landowners, and military commanders, who were all increasingly alarmed by the collapse of authority and the popular disorders. Kerensky, despite an exalted sense of his mission to save Russia, was essentially a go-between and negotiator of political compromises, not greatly trusted or respected, and lacking a political base in any of the major parties. As he sadly complained, `I struggle with the Bolsheviks of the left and the Bolsheviks of the right, but people demand that I lean on one or the other.... I want to take a middle road, but nobody will help me.'16

It seemed increasingly likely that the Provisional Government would fall one way or the other, but the question was, which? The threat from the left was a popular uprising in Petrograd and/or Bolshevik coup. Such a challenge had failed in July, but German activity on the north-western fronts was heightening tension in the armed forces surrounding Petrograd in a most ominous way, and the influx of deserters who were aggrieved, armed, and unemployed presumably increased the danger of street violence in the city itself. The other threat to the Provisional Government was the possibility of a coup from the right to establish a law-and-order dictatorship. By the summer, this course was being discussed in high military circles and had support from some of the industrialists. There were signs that even the Cadets, who would obviously have to oppose such a move before the fact and in public statements, might accept a fait accompli with considerable relief.

In August, the coup from the right was finally attempted by General Lavr Kornilov, whom Kerensky had recently appointed Commander-in-Chief with a mandate to restore order and discipline in the Russian Army. Kornilov was evidently not motivated by personal ambition but by his sense of the national interest. He may, in fact, have believed that Kerensky would welcome an Army intervention to create a strong government and deal with left-wing troublemakers, since Kerensky, partially apprised of Kornilov's intentions, dealt with him in a peculiarly devious way. Misunderstandings between the two principal actors confused the situation, and the Germans' unexpected capture of Riga on the eve of Kornilov's move added to the mood of panic, suspicion, and despair that was spreading among Russia's civilian and military leaders. In the last week of August, baffled but determined, General Kornilov dispatched troops from the front to Petrograd, ostensibly to quell disorders in the capital and save the Republic.