The Russian Revolution (12 page)

Had the Bolsheviks a popular mandate to rule alone, or did they believe that they had one? In the elections for the Constituent Assembly (held, as scheduled before the October coup, in November 1917), the Bolsheviks won 25 per cent of the popular vote. This put them second to the SRs, who won 40 per cent of the vote (left SRs, who supported the Bolsheviks on the issue of the coup, were not differentiated in the voting lists). The Bolsheviks had expected to do better, and this is perhaps explicable if one examines the vote in more detail.22 The Bolsheviks took Petrograd and Moscow, and probably won in urban Russia as a whole. In the armed forces, whose five million votes were counted separately, the Bolsheviks had an absolute majority in the Armies of the Northern and Western Fronts and the Baltic Fleet-the constituencies they knew best, and where they were best known. On the southern fronts and in the Black Sea Fleet, they lost to the SRs and Ukrainian parties. The SRs' overall victory was the result of winning the peasant vote in the villages. But there was a certain ambiguity in this. The peasants were probably single-issue voters, and the SR and Bolshevik programmes on the land were virtually identical. The SRs, however, were much better known to the peasantry, their traditional constituency. Where the peasants knew the Bolshevik programme (usually as a result of proximity to towns, garrisons, or railways, where the Bolsheviks had done more campaigning), their votes were split between the Bolsheviks and the SRs.

In democratic electoral politics, nevertheless, a loss is a loss. The Bolsheviks did not take that view of the elections to the Constituent Assembly: they did not abdicate because they had failed to win (and, when the Assembly met and proved hostile, they unceremoniously dispersed it). However, in terms of the mandate to rule, they could and did argue that it was not the population as a whole that they claimed to represent. They had taken power in the name of the working class. The conclusion to be drawn from the elections to the Second Congress of Soviets and the Constituent Assembly was that, as of October to November 1917, they were drawing more working-class votes than any other party.

But what if at some later time the workers should withdraw their support? The Bolsheviks' claim to represent the will of the proletariat was based on faith as well as observation: it was quite possible, in Lenin's terms, that at some time in the future the workers' proletarian consciousness might prove inferior to that of the Bolshevik Party, without necessarily removing the party's mandate to rule. Probably the Bolsheviks did not expect this to happen. But many of their opponents of 1917 did, and they assumed that Lenin's party would not give up power even if it lost working-class support. Engels had warned that a socialist party taking power prematurely might find itself isolated and forced into repressive dictatorship. Clearly the Bolshevik leaders, and Lenin in particular, were willing to take that risk.

3 The Civil War

THE October seizure of power was not the end of the Bolshevik Revolution but the beginning. The Bolsheviks had taken control in Petrograd and, after a week of street-fighting, in Moscow. But the soviets that had sprung up in most provincial centres still had to follow the capitals' lead in overthrowing the bourgeoisie (often, at local level, this meant ousting a `Committee of Public Safety' set up by the solid citizenry of the town); and, if a local soviet was too weak to take power, support was unlikely to be forthcoming from the capitals.' Bolsheviks in the provinces, as well as at the centre, had to work out their attitude to local soviets which successfully asserted their authority but happened to be dominated by Mensheviks and SRs. Rural Russia, moreover, had largely thrown off the yoke of authority imposed from the towns. The outlying and non-Russian areas of the old Empire were in various conditions of complex turmoil. If the Bolsheviks had taken power with the intention of governing the country in any conventional sense, some long and difficult struggles against anarchic, decentralizing, and separatist tendencies lay ahead.

In fact, Russia's future form of government remained an open question. Judging by the October coup in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks had reservations about their own slogan of `All power to the soviets'. On the other hand, the slogan seemed to fit the mood of the provinces in the winter of 19r7-t8-but this, perhaps, is only another way of saying that central governmental authority had temporarily collapsed. It remained to be seen just what the Bolsheviks meant by their other slogan of `dictatorship of the proletariat'. If, as Lenin had strongly suggested in his recent writings, it meant crushing the counter-revolutionary efforts of the old possessing classes, the new dictatorship would have to establish coercive organs comparable in function to the Tsarist secret police; if it meant a dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party, as many of Lenin's political opponents suspected, the continued existence of other political parties raised major problems. Yet could the new regime allow itself to act as repressively as the old Tsarist autocracy, and could it retain popular support if it did? A dictatorship of the proletariat, moreover, appeared to imply broad powers and independence for all proletarian institutions, including trade unions and factory committees. What happened if the trade unions and factory committees had different concepts of the workers' interests? If `workers' control' in the factories meant worker selfmanagement, was this compatible with the centralized planning of economic development that the Bolsheviks saw as a basic socialist objective?

Russia's revolutionary regime had also to consider its position in the wider world. The Bolsheviks considered themselves to be part of an international proletarian revolutionary movement, and hoped that their success in Russia would spark similar revolutions throughout Europe; they did not originally think of the new Soviet Republic as a nation state which would have to have conventional diplomatic relations with other states. When Trotsky was appointed Commissar of Foreign Affairs, he expected to issue a few revolutionary proclamations and then `close up shop'; as Soviet representative in the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations with Germany early in 1918, he attempted (unsuccessfully) to subvert the whole diplomatic process by speaking past Germany's official representatives to the German people, particularly the German soldiers on the Eastern Front. Recognition of the need for conventional diplomacy was delayed by the Bolshevik leaders' deep belief in the early years that Russia's Revolution could not survive long without the support of workers' revolutions in the more advanced capitalist countries of Europe. Only as the fact of revolutionary Russia's isolation gradually became clear did they begin to reassess their position vis-a-vis the outside world, and by that time the habit of combining revolutionary appeals with more conventional state-to-state contacts was firmly entrenched.

The territorial boundaries of the new Soviet Republic and policy towards non-Russian nationalities constituted another major problem. Although for Marxists nationalism was a form of false consciousness, Lenin had cautiously endorsed a principle of national self-determination before the war. The pragmatic sense that nationalism had to be accommodated if it were not to become a threat remained. The policy adopted in 1923, when the form of the future Soviet Union was decided, was to disarm nationalism by `granting the forms of nationhood': separate national republics, protection of national minorities, and support for national languages and cultures and the formation of national elites.2

There were limits to national self-determination, however, as became clear with regard to the incorporation of territories of the former Russian Empire in the new Soviet republic. It was as natural for the Bolsheviks in Petrograd to hope for a revolutionary victory of soviet power in Azerbaijan as to hope for it in Hungary-though the Azerbaijanis, as former subjects of Imperial Petersburg, were not very likely to appreciate this. It was also natural for the Bolsheviks to support workers' soviets in Ukraine and oppose the `bourgeois' Ukrainian nationalists, regardless of the fact that the soviets (reflecting the ethnic composition of Ukraine's working class) tended to be dominated by Russians, Jews, and Poles who were `foreigners' not only to the nationalists but also to the Ukrainian peasantry. The Bolsheviks' dilemma-most dramatically illustrated when the Red Army marched into Poland in 1920 and the workers of Warsaw resisted the `Russian invasion'was that policies of proletarian internationalism in practice had a disconcerting similarity to the policies of old-style Russian imperialism.3

But the Bolsheviks' behaviour and policies after the October Revolution were not formed in a vacuum, and the factor of civil war is almost always crucial in explaining them. The Civil War broke out in the middle of 1918, only a few months after the formal conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk peace between Russia and Germany and Russia's definitive withdrawal from the European war. It was fought on many fronts, against a variety of White (that is, antiBolshevik) Armies, which had the support of a number of foreign powers including Russia's former Allies in the European war. The Bolsheviks saw it as a class war, in both domestic and international terms: Russian proletariat against Russian bourgeoisie; international revolution (as exemplified by the Soviet Republic) against international capitalism. The Red (Bolshevik) victory in 1920 was therefore a proletarian triumph, but the bitterness of the struggle had indicated the strength and determination of the proletariat's class enemies. Although the interventionist capitalist powers had withdrawn, the Bolsheviks did not believe that this withdrawal was permanent. They expected that at a more opportune moment the forces of international capitalism would return, and seek to crush the international workers' revolution at its source.

The Civil War undoubtedly had an enormous impact on the Bolsheviks and the young Soviet Republic. It polarized the society, leaving lasting resentments and scars; and foreign intervention created a permanent Soviet fear of `capitalist encirclement' which had elements of paranoia and xenophobia. The Civil War devastated the economy, bringing industry almost to a standstill and emptying the towns. This had political as well as economic and social implications, since it meant at least a temporary disintegration and dispersal of the industrial proletariat-the class in whose name the Bolsheviks had taken power.

It was in the context of civil war that the Bolsheviks had their first experience of ruling, and this undoubtedly shaped the party's subsequent development in many important respects.' Over half a million Communists served in the Red Army at some time during the Civil War (and, of this group, roughly half joined the Red Army before joining the Bolshevik Party). Of all members of the Bolshevik Party in 1927, 33 per cent had joined in the years 1917-20, while only i per cent had joined before 1917.5 Thus the underground life of the prerevolutionary party-the formative experience of the `old guard' of Bolshevik leaders-was known to most party members in the 1920S only through hearsay. For the cohort that had joined the party during the Civil War, the party was a fighting brotherhood in the most literal sense. The Communists who had served in the Red Army brought military jargon into the language of party politics, and made the army tunic and boots-worn even by those who had stayed in civilian posts or been too young to fight-almost a uniform for party members in the 192os and early 1930s.

In the judgement of one historian, the Civil War experience `militarized the revolutionary political culture of the Bolshevik movement', leaving a heritage that included `readiness to resort to coercion, rule by administrative fiat (administrirovanie), centralized administration [and] summary justice'.' This view of the origins of Soviet (and Stalinist) authoritarianism is in many ways more satisfactory than the traditional Western interpretation, which stressed the party's prerevolutionary heritage and Lenin's advocacy of centralized party organization and strict discipline. Nevertheless, other factors reinforcing the party's authoritarian tendencies must also be taken into account. In the first place, a minority dictatorship was almost bound to be authoritarian, and those who served as its executants were extremely likely to develop the habits of bossing and bullying that Lenin often criticized in the years after 1917. In the second place, the Bolshevik Party owed its success in 1917 to the support of Russia's workers, soldiers, and sailors; and such people were much less inclined than the Old Bolshevik intellectuals to worry about crushing opposition or imposing their authority by force rather than by tactful persuasion.

Finally, in considering the link between the Civil War and authoritarian rule, it must be remembered that there was a two-way relationship between the Bolsheviks and the political environment of 1918-20. The Civil War was not an unforeseeable act of God for which the Bolsheviks were in no way responsible. On the contrary, the Bolsheviks had associated themselves with armed confrontation and violence in the months between February and October 1917; and, as the Bolshevik leaders knew perfectly well before the event, their October coup was seen by many as an outright provocation to civil war. The Civil War certainly gave the new regime a baptism by fire, and thereby influenced its future development. But it was the kind of baptism the Bolsheviks had risked, and may even have sought.'

The Civil War, the Red Army, and the Cheka

In the immediate aftermath of the Bolsheviks' October coup, Cadet newspapers issued a call to arms for the salvation of the revolution, General Krasnov's loyalist troops unsuccessfully engaged pro-Bolshevik forces and Red Guards in the battle of Pulkovo Heights outside Petrograd, and there was heavy fighting in Moscow. In this preliminary round, the Bolsheviks were the victors. But almost certainly they were going to have to fight again. In the large Russian armies on the southern fronts of the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Bolsheviks were much less popular than in the north-west. Germany remained at war with Russia and, despite the advantages to the Germans of peace on the Eastern Front, Russia's new regime could no more count on German benevolence than it could on sympathy from the allied powers. As the commander of German forces on the Eastern Front wrote in his diary early in February 1918, on the eve of a renewed German offensive after the breakdown of peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk,