The Germans, being no fools, set to take advantage of the coup behind the lines of their Eastern Front and dispatched Lenin in a sealed train from exile in Switzerland to the turmoil in Russia, where he arrived in St. Petersburg to stoke the fire of revolt in 1917. In exchange, Lenin vowed to end the war, closing the Russian front; it was a deal similar to that Germans made with Irish rebels a year earlier.
The provisional government had set up a new Duma, which — much like the National Assembly in pre-revolutionary France — had been a puppet advisory council to the monarch, but this time as a real parliament. The Duma became a hornets’ nest of opinions, including socialists.
Parallel to the Duma, government power devolved to a network of grassroots community assemblies (called “soviets”). These were modeled after the workers councils that had been set up in the abortive revolution of 1905; John Reed offers the best description of how they functioned, which was by a fairly chaotic consensus. The net effect was that the Provisional Government and Duma made grand policy and legislation, but at the local level people obeyed the soviets, which also formed militias to defend against armed bands of Tsarists.
In October (November in modern calendars), the Bolsheviks, under a committee led by Lenin led an armed revolt of workers and soldiers, under the slogan “peace, bread and land.” They seized the capital, Petrograd (St. Petersburg), overthrew the government and transferred its authority to the soviets. The very first people Lenin ordered shot, on the first morning of the new regime, were 2,000 members of what was then called the Social Revolutionary Party, much more moderate than the Bolsheviki, despite the name.
Lenin halted the war, signed a peace treaty with Germany in March 1918, launched a campaign of “red terror” (similar to Robespierre in the French Revolution) operated by the Cheka (a secret police that was almost identical originally to the Tsar's Okhrana) to bring opponents (many of them socialists) to heel. A Civil war broke out, indeed Britain, France and the United States sent troops to help the “White” counter-revolutionaries against the “Red” Bolsheviks, which the latter won. Lenin's group named itself the Communist Party and formed, in 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Monday, October 02, 2017
Friday, September 29, 2017
The Russian Coup
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a complex worldwide shattering event, as was the French Revolution launched 1789, and occurred in two stages.
The history of the Russian Revolution is complex and highly controversial. In my opinion, the best outsider account is that by American journalist John Reed (played by Warren Beatty in the film "Reds") who wrote the fairly slim volume Ten Days That Shook the World. The best insider account, Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, includes hilarious inside-jokes but is, I regret, three volumes.
In March 1917 there was effectively a palace coup. Russia was losing its front in World War I and the establishment and some reformists thought the Tsar had to go. Thus far it was a bourgeois revolt.
The French word "bourgeois" originally meant the inhabitants of an urbanized and incorporated borough, “bourg.” The bourgeois were the new class of city merchants that developed starting in the Renaissance, when urban life revived in Europe at the birth of capitalism; Marx extended the term to refer to the new class of investors, entrepreneurs, managers and white collar workers that emerged with industrialization, which he called the bourgeoisie, effectively comfortable people of the cities.
The February Revolution (March in modern calendars) was bourgeois in the sense that it was not a popular outburst. It was primarily the establishment exasperated with a backward monarch who thought he could beat back the modern German army with the same cavalry that had defeated Napoleon (although what Joseph Stalin would call “General Winter” had a lot more to do with the 19th-century victory than Cossacks).
There was no social or economic change intended by the provisional government, which decided to continue to abide by its obligations to the western Allies and continue the highly unpopular war. Peasants and workers perceived that they were fighting for the benefit of the wealthy.
The history of the Russian Revolution is complex and highly controversial. In my opinion, the best outsider account is that by American journalist John Reed (played by Warren Beatty in the film "Reds") who wrote the fairly slim volume Ten Days That Shook the World. The best insider account, Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, includes hilarious inside-jokes but is, I regret, three volumes.
In March 1917 there was effectively a palace coup. Russia was losing its front in World War I and the establishment and some reformists thought the Tsar had to go. Thus far it was a bourgeois revolt.
The French word "bourgeois" originally meant the inhabitants of an urbanized and incorporated borough, “bourg.” The bourgeois were the new class of city merchants that developed starting in the Renaissance, when urban life revived in Europe at the birth of capitalism; Marx extended the term to refer to the new class of investors, entrepreneurs, managers and white collar workers that emerged with industrialization, which he called the bourgeoisie, effectively comfortable people of the cities.
The February Revolution (March in modern calendars) was bourgeois in the sense that it was not a popular outburst. It was primarily the establishment exasperated with a backward monarch who thought he could beat back the modern German army with the same cavalry that had defeated Napoleon (although what Joseph Stalin would call “General Winter” had a lot more to do with the 19th-century victory than Cossacks).
There was no social or economic change intended by the provisional government, which decided to continue to abide by its obligations to the western Allies and continue the highly unpopular war. Peasants and workers perceived that they were fighting for the benefit of the wealthy.
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