Modern World

UNIT 17 POLITICAL REVOLUTION: RUSSIA

Structure
17.1 Introduction
17.2 Prelude to Revolution: Russian Specificities
17.3 The 1905 Revolution: A Dress Rehearsal for 1917
17.4 The October Revolution
17.4.1 Who Were the Bolsheviks
17.4.2 Soviets
17.4.3 Lenin’s April Thesis
17.4.4 Worsening Situation
17.4.5 The Komilov Mutiny
17.4.6 The Bolsheviks Take Power
17.4.7 Early Legislation of the New Regime
17.5 The Legacy of the Russian Revolution
17.6 Summary
17.7 Exercises

17.1 INTRODUCTION
This Unit will not focus on the details of the Revolution but on how it influenced
the politics and society in the post-revolution period. The Russian Revolution was
an unprecedented event in the sense that it was the first revolution that was based
on a concrete and explicit theory of revolution. The coming of the revolution, though
not its details, had been both predicted and anticipated. Another crucial aspect of
this Revolution was that it was not projected as a national or a Russian event. Russian
Revolution was visualized as an important step in the coming of the world socialist
revolution. It was for this reason that the Russian Revolution was called, not a national
revolution but a world revolution, by many scholars. This Unit will examine a range
of factors that prepared the Russian society for the revolution. It would then focus
on the major events surrounding the Revolution. Finally it will briefly talk about the
legacy of the Revolution and what it meant to the rest of the world.

17.2 PRELUDE TO REVOLUTION: RUSSIAN

SPECIFICITIES
An important paradox of the Russian Revolution is its self-image as a global
phenomenon and the specificity of Russian conditions that brought it about in Russia.
According to the Marxian theory of revolution, it was to take place first in advance
industrial societies as a result of the maturing of the contradictions of capitalism.
But the Socialist Revolution occurred in a backward industrial country like Russia.
However, the coming of the revolution was nothing short of a storm that had a dramatic
impact on the society and people of Russia. The following quote is an attempt to
capture this impact:
All Russia was learning to read, and reading-politics, economics, history -
236 because the people wanted to know....In every city, in most towns, along the
 front, each political faction had its newspaper — sometimes several. Hundreds Political Revolution: Russia
of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organizations, and
poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for
education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression.
From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons,
car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading
matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified
history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts — but social and
economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Gorky... (From
John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World, 1987 Edition, Moscow, p.37.)
That was Russia in 1917 as described by John Reed, an American journalist, who
had come to Russia to cover the event and who was, in the words of Lenin’s wife,
Krupskaya, “ not an indifferent observer, but a passionate revolutionary....” There
were many others like him, who flocked to the city of St. Petersburg, or Petrograd
as it was called from 1917 onwards, simply because that city symbolized all that
they dared to believe in and hold dear. If the French Revolution symbolized Liberty,
Equality and Fraternity, the Russian Revolution symbolized much more-organized
struggle, clarity of perspective and courage to go against the tide even if it meant
being isolated in the whole world wide.
How did all this happen? Why did Russia and not Germany stage the first socialist
revolution, contrary to the expectations of everyone? How could the working class
of this backward country, with its half-baked capitalism, have the courage to overthrow
the Tsarist autocracy and move, with almost lightning speed from a semi-feudal political
and social order, into a socialist system, bypassing the capitalist phase almost
completely?
The answers lie in the many peculiarities of Russia. It had a weak bourgeoisie and
the industrial development that had taken place in Russia from the 1880s was entirely
at the initiative of the Tsar and financed by foreign capital. While the French companies
invested in the mining and metallurgy sectors, oil was in the hands of the British
concerns and the chemical and electrical engineering industries in the hands of the
Germans. Within Russia, the capital for industrialization was raised largely by taxing
the peasantry even as the agrarian sector continued to remain backward
technologically, the best lands remaining with the nobility.
Industrialization in Russia was limited to certain pockets in the country like
St. Petersburg and Moscow districts, the Donetz and the Dneiper basins. They were,
in the words of Maurice Dobb, no more than industrial islands in a vast agricultural
sea. Yet, these industries gave rise to a powerful working class movement. This
was because the typical Russian factory was a huge industrial unit with a high level
of concentration. All stages of production were housed under one roof. This meant
that workers of all kinds — from the unskilled to the highly skilled — were thrown
together and the task of mobilizing them was correspondingly easier.
The Russian worker was part-peasant, part-worker, with strong roots in the villages.
The fact that Russian industrialization was built, not upon a strong agricultural base
as in the case of England, but on a backward rural sector where many problems
had been unresolved, contributed to the growth of an extremely volatile working
class movement in this country.
The Russian working class was largely concentrated in the textile industries, but
there were substantial numbers of workers in the metallurgical and railway sectors
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Modern World as well. The working class, even while chafing against its abysmal working and living
conditions and threatened with job insecurity, was able to absorb the flood of pamphlets
and books which were being smuggled into the country, defying all attempts at
censorship by the Tsarist authorities. Hence Russia had a peculiar combination of
backwardness and modernization. This was evident not just in the industrial sector.
The Tsarist autocracy was unimaginatively backward even while the intelligentsia
was the most vibrant intelligentsia in the whole of Europe in the nineteenth century.
The autocracy, which originated in the medieval period, was said to have been
influenced by the Mongol tradition. After the break- up of the Mongol Empire, the
power that emerged was that of Muscovy, a principality centered around Moscow.
In Muscovy, the position of the Tsar was one of unique strength-all authority in the
country emanated from him. Until the very end the Tsarist autocracy remained a
top-heavy political structure, in which the individual competence of the Tsar was
of vital importance. Of course, Tsars like Alexander I (1801-1825) drew upon the
talent of officials like M.M. Speranksy, who has been described as the most brilliant
Russian statesman of the nineteenth century. Yet Speranksy himself suffered disgrace
and exile when the Tsar, puffed up with his victory over Napoleon and Russia’s
primacy in the Concert of Europe, retracted on his reformist promises and became
more and more reactionary. The reforms of Tsar Alexander II, remembered as the
man who carried out the Emancipation of the Serfs and instituted the Zemstvos,
were carried out in an authoritarian manner. He brushed aside all suggestions for
popular participation in government even though he had encouraged such expectations.
Gradually, a mood of discontent spread over all of educated Russia. The first
expression of this spirit of revolt was the Decembrist uprising of 1825, known by
this name because the revolt occurred in the month of December. The “Decembrists”,
as those who participated in the revolt came to be known, were patriotic, intelligent
young men of the aristocracy who had served as officers in the Tsar’s army. They
had fought in the Napoleonic Wars and when they travelled abroad they were greatly
influenced by the Western way of life and the ideas of the French Revolution. When
they returned to Russia in 1816, they formed a secret society for constitutional
and judicial reform, for the abolition of serfdom that was still prevalent in Russia
and for — the curbing of foreign influence on the Tsarist state. When Tsar Alexander
I died unexpectedly in 1825, there were some weeks of confusion before the next
Tsar ascended the throne. The Decembrists used this opportunity to make their
point. They tried to prevent several military regiments from taking the oath of allegiance
to the new Tsar unless he committed himself to a constitutional form of government.
Most of the Decembrists were serving officers under the age of thirty. There were
also some senior officers of distinguished lineage. John Keep and Lionel Kochan
have described the Decembrist uprising as “an attempted revolution on the people’s
behalf by a section of the educated elite.”
The Decembrist uprising may have been crushed brutally and news of it blacked
out completely in the press, but it remained in popular memory as a heroic struggle
and inspired several generations thereafter. As the nineteenth century advanced, the
numbers of educated Russians who turned against the Tsarist system grew by leaps
and bounds. There emerged a clearly recognizable class known as the intelligentsia.
In fact, the word “intelligentsia” had its origins in Russia and was first used in this
country in the mid-nineteenth century. The Russian intelligentsia represented a small
crust of well-educated people with a European outlook, who had few links with
Russian society.
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It was the reforms of Tsar Alexander II, which marked the turning point for the Political Revolution: Russia
intelligentsia. He was known as the reforming Tsar and when he announced his
intentions of carrying out reforms, there were great expectations amongst the
intelligentsia. There was hope that he would consult the progressive sections of his
people. But soon there was disappointment. All suggestions for a nationally
representative body or parliament were firmly turned down. So great was the anger
of the intelligentsia against the Tsar that he faced a series of assassination attempts.The
mid-nineteenth Russian intelligentsia was of two kinds. There were the Westernizers
and the Slavophiles. While the former, i.e., the Westernizers, were ashamed of Russia’s
past and believed that the future for Russia lay in imitating the West, the Slavophiles
maintained that Russia’s salvation lay in a return to the true traditions of Russia. It
is important to note that the Slavophiles were also in favour of change. But they
felt that the Western values of rationalism and individualism were disintegrating forces.
The strength of Russia lay in the faith of her people and the sense of community of
which the mir (village community) was the essence. Russia, in fact, should show
the way to the West. This controversy between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles
was but the first of a series of polarizations amongst Russian intellectuals. In the
last quarter of the nineteenth century Russian socialism split into the Populists and
the Marxists and still later, the Russian Marxists split into the Bolsheviks and the
Mensheviks.
In the post-Decembrist period the new intellectual tradition that unfolded was
characterized by an indifference to political reforms. There was a general belief that
it was more important to improve the material conditions of the people than to give
Russia constitutional liberties.
An interesting aspect of the Russian intelligentsia was that many of its members
were creative writers who produced excellent short stories, plays and even novels.
Their works were reflective of the politics of the times in a way which has seldom
been seen in other countries. Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, for instance, while
being an important literary work, was the best account of two generations of Russian
intellectuals — the men of the forties and the men of the sixties, as they were known.
This period of emigrant revolutionary activity was, however, a very productive one.
In the 1880s, even as industrialization was proceeding apace in Russia, the first
Marxist groups began to be formed among Russian intellectuals. The major voice
was that of Plekhanov who, in his pamphlets, ‘Our Differences’ and ‘Socialism and
the Political Struggle’ made the following points:
1) Socialism cannot be based on the peasantry. It has to be based on the industrial
working class.
2) Capitalism was going ahead in Russia and the growth of the working class was
inevitable.
3) The village commune was an anachronism — a mere survival of a pre-capitalist
order.
The fundamental break had been made. Populism continued to survive in Russia,
reincarnated as the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but it was now marginal to Russian
politics. It was now Marxism and Social Democracy which became the mainstream.
Meanwhile, within Russia, the first volume of Karl Marx’s major critique of capitalism
Das Kapital had been published in Russian in 1872. The Tsarist censorship regarded
it as too academic and irrelevant to Russian conditions to be subversive. 239
Modern World Vladimir Ilyanovich Lenin, born in 1870, had been converted to Marxism in 1889.
In 1893 he moved to St. Petersburg to work with the Marxist underground groups.
He also visited Plekhanov and other leaders of the Russian Social Democratic Party
in Switzerland. In 1895 he, along with Martov, founded the St. Petersburg Union
of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class to disseminate Marxist ideas
among the working classes and to prepare leaders for the future revolution. However,
Lenin was soon arrested and he had to spend the next four and a half years in
prison and in exile in Siberia. It was while he was thus incarcerated that he published
his important work ‘The Development of Capitalism in Russia’, which proved
conclusively that capitalism in Russia was an accomplished fact and contained all
the conditions of economic viability. This work was published illegally in Russia in
1899.
Another group of legal Marxists had also come into being around this time. They
were basically a liberal group, consisting largely of sociologists and economists.
They made a powerful contribution to the debate against the Populists. Peter Struve,
for instance, brought out his “Cultural Remarks on the Question of Economic
Development in Russia” in 1894 in which he argued that the advent of capitalism
in Russia should be welcomed since it would, along with its miseries, also bring the
material and spiritual culture of Western Europe to Russia. This included political·
liberty. The Legal Marxists, however rejected the revolutionary aspects of Marxism.
As E.H. Carr has pointed out, by the turn of the century there was a general feeling
among the Marxist groups that the time was ripe for passing from mere lecturing
on Socialist principles to more systematic and political work among the masses.
The time for making the transition from propaganda to agitation had arrived. In 1898,
it was decided to hold a Congress of existing Marxist groups in order to form a
Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. The Russian Social Democratic Party
became a part of the Second International. It may be recalled that the First International
Working Men’s Association had been founded by Marx in 1864 and had existed
until 1871. It symbolized the coming together of working class parties across national
boundaries in the belief that Marxian socialism was essentially international in character
and that all members of the working class shared certain common interests. The
Second International, founded in 1889, was dominated by the German Social
Democratic Party and continued its existence until the First World War. After the
Revolution of 1917, there would be a tussle over who was to lead such an
International-Russia as the first country to carry out a working class revolution, or
other forces in Europe.

17.3 THE 1905 REVOLUTION: A DRESS REHEARSAL

FOR 1917
Russia’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan in the Russo Japanese War made
the Russian people seriously wonder about the strength of their mighty empire. The
workers were in any case agitated about their conditions of work and poor wages.
On 9 January 1905, a huge crowd of workers, led by a priest, Father Gapon,
marched towards the Winter Palace to submit a petition to the Tsar, Nicholas IL
This was intended to be a peaceful procession and the participants had full faith in
the Tsar. They believed that he was surrounded by bad advisers, who kept the
truth about the actual plight of the people away from him. Despite the church icons
and portraits of the Tsar that they carried, the Tsarist Guards received the petitioners
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with a hail of bullets. Over a hundred fell dead, many more were injured. This was Political Revolution: Russia
the last straw. It was also the signal for the revolution. Strikes spread throughout
the country. Revolutionaries assassinated the Grand Duke Sergei, one of the leaders
of the court coterie. Soon, peasant revolts broke out in various parts of the country.
Even the fringes of the Russian Empire were affected. There were armed risings in
Poland and in the Black Sea port of Odessa, the crew of the battleship Potemkin
joined in the revolt.
All this shook the self-confidence of the Tsar and he promised to convene a Duma,
or Representative Assembly, in which, however, the working class would not be
represented. All parties of the opposition, from the Liberals to the Bolsheviks,
protested against this edict. In October 1905 a general strike spread from Moscow
and St. Petersburg throughout the country. The strikers of St. Petersburg elected a
Council of Workers’ Deputies, the St. Petersburg Soviet, which virtually became
the centre of the Revolution. The Soviet called on the country to stop paying taxes
to the Tsar. Its members, along with the chairman, Leon Trotsky, were arrested.
New strikes broke out and the pressure led the Tsar to issue his October Manifesto
of 30 October, in which he promised to extend the franchise to those classes which
had until now been excluded. There was also an assurance that no law would take
effect without the approval of the Duma. The Manifesto split the ranks of the
revolutionaries into those who wanted to withdraw the movement and work the
proposals and others, like the Social Democrats, who wanted a Constituent Assembly.
This split proved to be fatal for the Revolution and slowly the Tsarist forces recovered
their strength. By 1907 the Tsar had regained his self-confidence and begun
withdrawing the semi-liberal concessions which he had been compelled to make in
October 1905.
Yet, 1905 was an important landmark in Russia’s history and things were never
the same thereafter. The revolutionaries could learn from their mistakes in this encounter
and, when the next opportunity came in the First World War, they were able to
plan their strategy with greater maturity. The Soviets, however brief their existence,
were a model for the future.

17.4 THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

But the February Revolution was only the beginning of a long and complicated process,
which ended in the final Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. This revolution
occurred through a series of dramatic political events leading eventually to a capture
of power by the Bolsheviks. This phase of the revolution was completely dominated
by the Bolsheviks. Let us now turn to them.

17.4.1 Who were the Bolsheviks?

The name derives from the Russian term bolshinstvo which means majority. When
the Russian Social Democratic Party held its second Congress in 1903, differences
arose over the way in which the party was to be run and the kind of members that
it should have. Lenin wanted to restrict the membership of the party to hardened
professional revolutionaries, while Martov, another influential leader of the period,
believed in a more broad-based and inclusive formula. The party split and Lenin’s
group managed to obtain a majority, hence the name ‘Bolshevik’. Martov’s group
became the Mensheviks (men’shintvo - minority) but they controlled the party
newspaper the ‘Iskra’. This split weakened the Russian Social Democratic Party,
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Modern World as do all splits within parties. What made this parting of ways all the more unfortunate
was the fact that Russia was then on the brink of its first revolution i.e., the Revolution
of 1905.
Over time, the Mensheviks became more and more like the German Social Democratic
Party whereas the Bolsheviks under Lenin’s leadership made some significant
departures from traditional Marxist formulations.
In July 1905 was published Lenin’s pamphlet ‘Two Tactics of Social Democracy’.
In it he argued that Russia would strike a different path — even though Russia too
would have a bourgeois revolution, going through all the stages of France after 1789,
the leadership would come, not from the bourgeoisie but from working class, in
alliance with the peasantry. This idea, of involving the peasantry in the revolutionary
process, was a relatively new one. Traditionally the Marxists believed that the
peasantry was incapable of creating or supporting a revolution. But Lenin maintained
that, in Russia, the rich and middle peasants could be more dependable allies than
the bourgeoisie. The latter was weak and cowardly and was capable of betraying
the revolution and compromising with the ruling class. The rich and middle peasants,
on the other hand, would be interested in overthrowing the landed class and
confiscating their large estates.
Lenin’s pamphlet also outlined the scenario after the overthrow of Tsarism, as he
visualized it. A “Provisional Government’’, which would be a “revolutionary democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”, would be set up. However, the type
of government that would emerge would be a bourgeois-democratic, not socialist
in nature. For the achievement of socialism, it was necessary for a more advanced
proletariat of some other major industrial country of Europe to create a socialist
revolution. Only then would it be possible for Russia to bypass its bourgeois-
democratic stage and create a socialist revolution.
Thus, in many ways, Lenin was able to anticipate the turn of events in Russia. Where
he, as well as many of his fellow revolutionary leaders, went wrong was in their
expectation that the first socialist revolution would occur in Germany or any other
highly industrialized country of Europe. That was not to happen and it fell to the
lot of Russia to carry out this task.
Leon Trotsky, a charismatic leader who was to play a dynamic role in the St.
Petersburg Soviet, was a Menshevik for a long time even though his views were
quite close to those of Lenin. Where he differed with Lenin was on the question of
the peasantry’s potential. He was skeptical of the peasants and firmly believed that
they had a role, to play in the crushing of the Revolution of 1905.
From February to October
After the February Revolution, the internal contradictions within Russia became
evident and were accentuated over time. The Provisional Government, headed by
Prince Lvov, and representing the moderate forces, was committed to carrying on
the war effort. The more radical forces were concentrated in the Petrograd Soviet.
They were infavour of introducing democratic reforms, confiscation of landed estates
and promulgating an eight-hour day for workers. They also wanted to enter into
negotiations with the proletariat of other countries in order to bring an end to the
war.
Though the Provisional Government was the official regime in the eyes of the world,
within Russia it was unable to take a single important decision unless it was endorsed
242 by the deputies of the Soviet.
17.4.2 Soviets Political Revolution: Russia

What was the Soviet? First constituted in the course of the 1905 Revolution the
St. Petersburg Soviet was a Council of Workers’ Deputies, which, in the words of
Isaac Deutscher, “soon became the most spectacular centre of the revolution.” The
orders and instructions of this Soviet commanded universal obedience. It was the
people’s parliament par excellence and in the absence of any parliamentary institutions,
it was the broadest and most representative body that Russia possessed. In 1917,
a few days after the Tsar’s abdication the St. Petersburg Soviet was reconstituted.
Its members were elected from factories, workshops and later in the barracks of
regiments that were stationed in the capital. They were not elected for any fixed
term – the electorate had the right to replace them by other men at any time. It
was also the de facto executive power in Russia. The writ of the Soviet ran in factory,
railway depot, post office and regiment alike. In fact the Provisional Government
was virtually a prisoner in the hands of the Soviet.
In the months after the February Revolution, Soviets mushroomed all over Russia
— in provincial towns and in villages. Because of the mode of their election, they
did not represent the nobility and the middle classes. By August 1917, there were
600 Soviets in Russia. They had assumed all the responsibilities of government.

17.4.3 Lenin’s April Thesis

IInd April 1917 Lenin arrived in Russia from Finland and issued his ‘April Theses’
in which he set forth the newslogan “All power to the Soviets”. Capitalism had to
be overthrown and the war brought to an end. The bourgeoisie and the Mensheviks
were deceiving the proletariat. The Revolution had entered the socialist phase. Land
and banks should be nationalized, the police and the army abolished. Those who
heard Lenin’s ideas were stunned and thought that he had taken leave of his senses.
It was like an avalanche and some of the proposals sounded completely like flights
of fancy. But slowly, in the following weeks, the ideas seeped in and Lenin was
able to win over many to his views.

17.4.4 Worsening Situation

Meanwhile the Provisional Government was alienating itself from the people
continuously. They wanted peace but the Government had already declared that
all the Tsarist Government’s commitments to the war would be adhered to. In the
face of mounting opposition, the members of the first Provisional Government had
to resign and in May, a new government, still headed by Prince Lvov, but with six
socialist Ministers drawn from the Soviets, was constituted. But this new government
was even less able to tackle the problems of the day. These were internal differences:
while the liberal group wanted to delay certain fundamental reforms until the convening
of a Constituent Assembly, the socialists were anxious to respond to the popular
demands for immediate reform.
The economic situation grew worse. When workers demanded more wages, the
industrialists, unwilling to grant them any increase, began to close down factories.
The Government provided no protection to the workers. To add to the problems
a Russian military offensive in Galicia ended disastrously. The Provisional Government
was unable to handle the wave of popular unrest which was triggered off by the
offensive and Prince Lvov had to resign.
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Modern World Thus, by July 1917, in little more than four months, a third Provisional Government
had been constituted. Clearly these Governments were incapable of providing stability
to Russia and tackling its pressing problems. Sensing their own incompetence, the
Government became more and more defensive. They began directing their anger
against the Bolsheviks, who were the only group among the socialists which had
not joined the Provisional Government.
Orders were issued for the arrest of Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders like Zinoviev
and Kamenev. Lenin and Zinoviev evaded arrest and escaped to Finland while
Kamenev got arrested. It was at this time that Trotsky and several other members
of the Menshevik party decided to join the Bolsheviks. They too were promptly
arrested.
Throughout this period, there was growing unrest in the countryside. Thoroughly
disillusioned with one Provisional Government after another, the peasants decided
to carry out a veritable agrarian revolution on their own. They seized the estates of
the landlords and began cultivating them with the help of local land committees.
Peasant anger also found reflection in the army, as more and more soldiers began
deserting the war front and returning to the villages.

17.4.5 The Kornilov Mutiny

Thereafter, events moved with lightening speed. In August 1917 there was an attempt
at a military coup. General Kornilov, the head of the armed forces, had been invited
by Kerensky to the capital in order to help him crush the Bolshevik forces. But
Komilov exceeded his brief. He thought he could seize this opportunity to wipe
out not just the Bolsheviks but also the Soviets, the moderate Socialists and Kerensky
himself.
The Kerensky government was panic-stricken. It realized that it could not defeat
the forces of Komilov without the help of the Bolsheviks, many of whom were behind
bars. They were released. Trotsky’s services were sought for obtaining the help of
the Kronstadt sailors (Kronstadt was a naval base outside Petrograd), who were
extremely radical and powerful. Trotsky used to address the Kronstadt sailors
frequently. They faithfully followed him, even idolized him.
The Soviets formed a Committee for struggle against Counter-Revolution. Komilov’s
troops deserted him. The railway workers stopped his trains, the telegraph operators
refused to relay his messages.
This aborted military coup clearly showed where the actual power resided. The
Kerensky Government had lost face and credibility. A fifth Provisional Government
was formed on 21 September. It had ten Socialist ministers and six others. The
Bolsheviks continued to steer clear of the government. However, they were steadily
gaining more and more seats in the Soviets.
In October 1917, following a series of defeats in the war, the Provisional Government
planned to shift the capital from Petrograd to Moscow. This was seen by the people
as the final act of betrayal and the Bolsheviks, along with the Soviets, called for a
defence of Petrograd as the capital of the revolution. They managed to get the support
of all the parties and the Provisional Government thereby stood exposed.
Lenin, though still in hiding, had moved closer to the scene of action by this time.
In a short article titled ‘The Crisis is Ripe’, he wrote:”we stand on the threshold of
a worldwide proletarian revolution”. It was important to seize the moment - the
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timing was crucial. Trotsky on the other hand was adamant that any armed insurrection Political Revolution: Russia
must coincide with the convening of the All Russian Congress of Soviets. Lenin
warned that if they were to “let slip the present moment, we shall ruin the revolution”.
On 9 October Lenin came to Petrograd in disguise and on 10 October the Central
Committee of the Bolshevik Party met. By a majority vote of 10 to 2, the Committee
voted infavour of armed insurrection. A ‘political bureau’ consisting of seven members
was to be formed to carry out the task. In the meantime, the Petrograd Soviet had
also formed a Military Revolution Committee (MRC) to make the military preparations
for the coming resolution.
Thereafter the Bolsheviks and the Soviets began acting in unison in the countdown
for the revolution. In any case the Soviet had already assumed the responsibility
for the defence of the capital, thus lifting itself to a new prominence and authority
which would enable it to undo the Provisional Government.

17.4.6 The Bolsheviks Take Power

25 October (7 November according to the English Calendar) was the date fixed
for the revolution. The All Russian Congress of Soviets was to meet in the evening
and the insurrection was to be carried out before that. The final touches were given
on the eve of the revolution. The members of the Bolshevik Central Committee
along with those of the MRC took charge of the different arms of the government
— posts and telegraphs, railway communications, food supplies and even the
Provisional Government itself!
Early on the morning of the 25th, the Bolshevik forces went into action. The key
points in the city were occupied and members of the Provisional Government were
taken into custody. There was virtually no resistance to this takeover. The news
agency, Renters, reported only two causalties whereas in February over 1000 people
had been killed or wounded.
In the afternoon, Lenin announced to a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, the triumph
of the workers’ and the peasants’ revolution. In the evening, the Second All Russian
Congress of Soviets proclaimed the transfer of all power to the Soviets throughout
Russia. It may be mentioned here that when the first All Russian Congress of Soviets
had been convened in June 1917, the Bolsheviks had been treated with disdain.
One of the speakers had challenged the delegates to say whether there was a single
party in Russia that was prepared to shoulder the responsibility for government.
Lenin had got up and said that his party was willing to do so. His words were
drowned in hilarious laughter.
Now Lenin had shown that he meant what he had said. In the confused, ever- changing
scenario that had unfolded from February to October, it was the Bolsheviks alone,
under the leadership of Lenin that had understood the needs of the people and
assessed the true strengths and weaknesses of the various classes in the country. It
had figured out that the capitalist class was a weak one, whereas the peasantry
had revolutionary potential.
It was with this clarity of perspective that, on the day following the revolution, three
Decrees were promulgated: The Decree on Peace, the Decree on Bread and the
Decree on Land. These were the three issues that were uppermost in the minds of
the Russian people: they wanted Russia to pull out of the war immediately; they
wanted an amelioration of the conditions of acute food scarcity; and the redistribution
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there would be no private property in land and all land was to pass into the hands
of the Soviets, it was realized that the small peasants would be unwilling to part
with their lands yet. Hence the Land Decree was only partially implemented.

17.4.7 Early Legislation of the New Regime

The new regime was keen to show that it represented a radically new and different
order. All institutions and customs associated with the autocracy were to be abolished.
All ranks, titles and decorations were to be done away with. Army commanders
as well as judges were to be elected. All agencies of local government were set
aside and replaced by a hierarchy of Soviets. Women were given equal rights with
men. All banks and joint stocks companies were nationalized. Payment of interests
and dividends were prohibited. Safe deposit boxes were opened and all valuables
confiscated, since they were now considered national property. In January 1918,
it was announced that all state foreign and domestic loans would be annulled. This
caused the new regime to become extremely unpopular, especially in the eyes of
those countries which had loaned large sums for Russian’s industrialization.
In the factories, an eight hour day was introduced. For the first time in the world,
workers’ control of industrial enterprises became legal. Universal labour service
was introduced and only those with workers’ books could receive rations. Lenin
explained that his immediate purpose in introducing compulsory labour service was
to fight the forces of counter-revolution.
Many of these policies were to be revised and even reversed later. But the commitment
to ending Russia’s involvement in the war was steadfast and so was that of
redistributing the nobility’s estates amongst the peasants. These were the reasons
for the survival of the Bolsheviks and the spreading of their influence in the crucial
months after the October Revolution.

17.5 THE LEGACY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

The new regime set up by the Bolsheviks survived, no doubt with many changes
and even distortions, for some seventy-odd years, until the 1990s. Though regarded
with apprehension, suspicion and at times with awe, Soviet Russia influenced the
course of events in many parts of the world, sometimes in predictable but more
often in unpredictable ways. Some historians regard the Russian Revolution as the
most significant event ofthetwentieth century and see most ofthe major developments
in the world during this period and even thereafter, as being related to this event in
some way or the other. In the words of E.J.Hobsbawm in his Age of Extremes:
... with the significant exception of the years from 1933 to 1945, the international
politics of the entire Short Twentieth Century since the October revolution can
best be understood as a secular struggle by the forces of the old order against
social revolution, believed to be embodied in, allied with, or dependent on the
fortunes of the Soviet Union and international communism.
The old order was that of capitalism and imperialism. It felt threatened by the onset
of socialism from the very outset. When Russia signed the Treaty of Brest Litovsk
with Germany in March 1918 and pulled out of the First World War, the Allies felt
betrayed. They regarded this action as strengthening the hands of Germany, their
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enemy, even though Soviet Russia had pulled out of the War as much because it Political Revolution: Russia

could no longer sustain the war effort as because of the ideological commitment of
the Bolsheviks to end all imperialist wars. The subsequent surge of confidence amongst
all left-minded groups in Europe and in other parts of the world caused great alarm
to entrenched political systems based on exploitation and maximization of profit. A
revolutionary wave swept Europe in 1918 and 1919, with German revolutionary
sailors carrying the banner of the Soviets through the country. Spanish revolutionaries
experienced anew burst of energy, a short lived socialist republic was proclaimed
in Bavaria in 1918 and another one in Hungary in March 1919. Other parts of the
world were also in ferment. “Soviets” were formed by tobacco workers in Cuba,
revolutionary student movements erupted in Argentina and in China. In Mexico,
the revolutionary forces under Emiliano Zapata now drew inspiration from revolutionary
Russia and in India too, M.N. Roy and later many others were greatly influenced
by communism. Jawaharlal Nehru has explained, in his Auiobiography, what Russia
meant to people like him:
Russia, following the great Lenin, looked into the future and thought only of
what was to be, while other countries lay numbed under the dead hand of the
past and spent their energy in preserving the useless relics of a bygone age.
Yet, there were certain negative aspects too. There was a strong authoritarian streak
in Boshevism which carried over into Communist Russia as well. The spirit of
democracy was often compromised with and individual Communist Parties which
were set up in different countries were too closely tied to the apron strings of the
Comintern (The Communist International, set up by Soviet Russia in 1919 to promote
the world revolution) for them to grow in a healthy, organic fashion. Within Russia
too, especially in the Stalinist years, terror and dictatorial methods became the order
of the day and a bureaucratic machine replaced the Soviets which had caught the
imagination of the world. Though Stalin’s Russia heroically defended itself against
the onslaught of Hitler and was responsible for beating back the forces of Fascism
to a significant extent, in the years that followed the regime turned inwards, drawing
an iron curtain across Europe and cutting itself off from the outside world.
Anti-cosmopolitanism and xenophobia came to replace the internationalism of the
early years and that was the great irony. It negated the very spirit of the Russian
Revolution, which had an ingrained internationalism, which had discarded old divisions
of nationality as obsolete and whose vanguard, the Bolshevik, had once proudly
regarded himself as a citizen of the world.

17.6 SUMMARY
This Unit was a discussion of the Russian Revolution, as an important political
phenomenon of the 20th century, that had global implications. One major feature of
the Russian Revolution was that although the revolution occurred in Russia, it was
not conceived of as a national event but rather as a global event. It was hoped and
anticipated that a series of socialist revolutions in various parts of the world would
cumulatively create a world revolution. The leaders of the revolution actually provided
a theory of the transformation of the world from a capitalist order into a socialist
one. The revolution inspired similar activities in other parts of the world and also
motivated a number of anti-imperialist liberation struggles taking place in Asia, Africa
and Latin America against colonial domination.
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17.7 EXERCISES
1) Why did the Socialist Revolution take place in Russia?
2) Explain the political developments leading to the capture of power by the
Bolsheviks.
3) Write a note on the legacy of the Russian Revolution.

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